April 2009 Archives

In the 70s, this picture stood for God's children. Now it just stands for boys giving priests a good ol' beej. Yes, this is an actual logo designed in 1973 for the Catholic Church's Archdiocesan Youth Commission. It even won an award from the Art Directors Club of Los Angeles.

Andrea Wachner sent an erotic dancer, named Cricket, to impersonate her at her ten year high school reunion. The dancer wore a hidden ear piece to stay in communication with Wachner. A film crew was on the scene pretending to film a documentary about artists, including Wachner. Of course, they were really documenting Wachner's brilliant prank. When she posted clips to YouTube, some of her classmates weren't too happy they'd been duped. Now Wachner has a manager shopping her story as a reality show or feature film. From ABC News:

Cricket told the reunion attendees that she'd had reconstructive surgery and also suffered from amnesia. It wasn't completely unbelievable, because some had already heard that the real-life Wachner was in an accident after high school -- her car was totaled and she had been injured, but she had never suffered from amnesia.

Most of them had not seen or talked to Wachner since high school, but many found her new profession suspect: Cricket as Andrea said she was working as a stripper to help pay her graduate school tuition.

Daniel Wolowicz, 32, who had been an acquaintance of Wachner's in high school, said he was immediately suspicious.

"She was just so different. You have to understand the community we had come from," he said. "Everyone was questioning who this person was.

"I had asked her a very specific question about seeing her at a bat mitzvah when I was 15 years old," he said. When Cricket answered his question correctly, Wolowicz said he assumed it was Andrea or "someone else who had been given a lot of information."

It would be awhile, however, before he learned the full truth.

As the night progressed the drinks flowed, and Cricket, always outgoing, was getting ready for the climax of the evening: a striptease performed to what Cricket described as "one of the worst songs of the '90s," Lisa Loeb's "Stay."

Designer Mark Pohlkamp's LIT Urban Underglow is a long LED tube that changes color via remote. 16 colors and four preset "light shows" can be yours for $200... Or you could save $44 and book a seat on Virgin from NY to London. Tough call in this economy.

Interested in Soviet era spying by the KGB in the United States? Bummed that you cant get into the KGB archives? Well it turns out that someone copied all the good stuff already, and you can take a peek.
Alexander Vassiliev was a KGB officer who turned to journalism in 1990. From 1993-96 he had access to the KGB archives for the 1930s to early 1950s to write notes for a book project on Soviet spying in the Stalin era. His original notebooks - including extensive verbatim transcriptions - were left behind in Moscow when he moved to London but smuggled out via an elaborate plan.

There are eight notebooks, on the Cold War International History site there are scans, transliterations and translations of each notebook, free for nothing. Vassilev assisted in the transcriptions and transliterations.

The whole story is in Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks: Provenance and Documentation of Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States (pdf). "Since the KGB's archives remain closed, Vassiliev's notebooks are as close as we are likely to get to the actual documents for many years, likely decades"

Similar Images is a Google feature that allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. So you can get images of vaguely similar pigs or somewhat similar houses or egglike shapes or hands or snowflakes.

War of the Roses These are trashy, but fun, 3-8 minute radio segments in which suspected cheaters are tricked into revealing their dirty sinful business over the phone. Typically, the DJ posing as a local flower shop tells a suspect boyfriend he has won a free bouquet of roses; will he send the roses to his girlfriend or to the dreaded Other Woman? The girlfriend waits in silence to ambush him if he gives the wrong answer. Some are sad. Some are infuriating. Most, I'm ashamed to say, are pretty funny.

Build a DIY non destructive book scanner for under $300. An open source OCR package. A gratis ebook creation tool. An open source ebook library management tool and reader. An open-source Linux distribution for eink-based devices. And many, many ebook readers.

Depression is not a sign of weakness or a negative personality. It is a major public health problem and a treatable medical condition. It's natural to feel down sometimes, but if that low mood lingers day after day, it could signal depression.

Seasonal Depression

If your mood matches the weather - sunny in the summer, gloomy in the winter - you may have a form of depression called seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The onset of SAD usually occurs in the late fall and early winter, as the daylight hours grow shorter. Experts say SAD affects up to 3% of the U.S. population, or about 9 million people, mainly in the northern part of the country.

Depression: What Is It?

By high school, her name was cool to many. "They were like, 'Oh yeah. Man, I wish I had your name. I love that. I'm going to name my kid after you.' I hear that so much and I go, Lord, please don't do that to that child." --Marijuana Pepsi Jackson

After a push from the NDP, the Canadian government's put voting records of every Canadian MP online.

It's about time, but what a lame execution: To view an MP's record, head to the website and click on the Members of Parliament link to find your member of the House of Commons. Your MP's site will will have a tab for votes that takes you to a list showing whether they voted yea, nea, or didn't vote at all on any given bill.

It's time for some civic-minded Canadian hackers to slurp out all that data and reformat in a way that gives you real insight into what your elected representative is up to and how she compares to all the other politicos on the Hill.