Our tentacles are tingling with excitement as we introduce the latest addition to the Laughing Squid family:

squid.us or simply “Squid”

It’s our new WordPress blog for all things “squid”. Both real squid news and other squid related items. What better time to launch then today, as news spreads about London’s Natural History Museum’s new exhibit of a massive giant squid named “Archie”.

For years people have been sending us squid info. We’ve never really had a place to put all of that stuff…until now.

Special thanks to those amazing teuthidaholics over at Mule Design Studio for creating such a wonderful squid header graphic for the blog. They do squid right.

Tiki News and Baby Doe Productions present, Tiki Oasis 6, which takes place May 4th through 7th in San Diego. It features three nights and two days of Tiki events, Exotica performers and Tiki artifacts.

Imagine hanging out by the pool with dozens of fellow Tiki lovers (bring your pool toys and squirt guns). As the evening approaches follow the Tiki torches to the Islands restaurant where you can dine beside an indoor waterfall and lagoon surrounded by Polynesian artifacts and hanging fish floats. After sampling a Pirate Grog served in a skull mug, stumble back to your room. On your way take a detour into the secluded Tiki atrium and listen to the soft waterfall serenade. Off in the distance you here the exciting sounds of a room party in one of the Tower Suites. Grab a bottle of rum, bucket of ice or a can of pineapple juice and c’mon in - its Tiki Oasis time!

Back in December Jonathan Coulton wrote a touching tribute song about our beloved Flickr. Here’s the music video.

Special thanks to Rick “Reads MetaFilter So Scott Doesn’t Have To” Abruzzo for the tip, via MetaFilter, of course.

It’s the meme that just keeps giving. Looks like Portland is the next destination for a Pillow Fight. Pillow Fighters are requested to meet at Pioneer Square this Friday, March 3rd starting at 7pm.

Here at Laughing Squid, we are committed to bringing you all of the latest Pillow Fight news from around the globe, that is at least until we get tired on reporting on all of this silliness.

An interesting side note, there has been a raging battle on Wikipedia about Pillow Fight. First there was a call for deletion. Now they have decided to change the name from “Pillow Fight Club” to “Pillow Fight Flash Mob”. First rule of Pillow Fight: don’t talk argue it on Wikipedia!

12th Annual Urban Iditarod takes place this Saturday, March 4th in the streets of San Francisco. The “dogs” and their “sleds” will meet up at 12 noon and mushing will begin promptly at 1pm. Here’s more info on registration.

In the Alaskan Iditarod, more than sixty dog sled teams race across the frozen tundra from Anchorage to Nome. In our urban version, teams of “dogs” lead by a musher will pull their sleds (shopping carts) through some of San Francisco’s most touristed areas. These teams of barking humans must negotiate through the unrelenting and unforgiving dangers of San Francisco’s urban frontier. As an incentive to run, dogs and mushers alike will have several “rest stops” to replenish lost fluids and discuss tales of mayhem. The course is over three miles, so dogs and mushers alike need to be ready and able to run their tails off.

Joe Reifer shot some great photos at last year’s Urban Iditarod 2005.

UPDATE: Here are some photos from Urban Iditarod 2006.

Now that’s a lot of Firefox Extensions. Here’s the full-size screenshot.

From Splasho:

Yesterday I decided to undertake an experiment. My favourite browser, Firefox, allows its users to add extensions. Currently 1148 extensions are available at Mozilla update. I decided to install 100 of the most popular extensions at the same time, trying to avoid those that duplicated others functionality. Cruelly, the hundredth was the XPI delay remover.

It was really extraordinarily stable. The work of hundreds of programmers who had no idea their code would be used together, coexisting happily in the browser.

Special thanks to Rick Abruzzo for the tip, via MetaFilter.

“Rapid Eye Movement” is a new group show at Varnish Fine Art featuring Attaboy, Sean Christopher, Dave Chung, Chris Mars, Kevin Peterson, & KRK Ryden. The show opens this Thursday, March 2nd from 7pm-11pm and runs through April 15th.

Dedicated to edgy toys, cartoon-y views of reality, mongrelized pop culture, and grotesque expressionism, these 6 artists specialize in tapping into and then manifesting their childhood and adolescent selves into work that is sometimes epitomized by smoking bunnies and three-legged girls, or more often by depictions of gleeful rebellion.

“AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man” is a new book edited by longtime Burning Man participants/contributors Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen. It was published last August by University of New Mexico Press and features an engaging collection of nine Burning Man essays that explore the sociological and cultural aspects of the event. AfterBurn can be ordered directly through Amazon.com.

AfterBurn contributor Erik Davis writes:

Ironic and blasphemous, intoxicated and lewd, Burning Man’s ADD theater of the absurd might even be said to embody the slap-happy nihilism of postmodern culture itself.

Both Lee and Mark were featured last month on KQED’s Forum, hosted by Michael Krasny. You can listen to the show online from KQED’s Archives.

Last night I attended the annual Mad Hatter’s Tea Party at the Cracktory in the lovely Bayview district of San Francisco. It was a really cool “Alice In Wonderland” themed event (from the chapter of the book called “A Mad Tea Party”) and of course a great place to shot photos. It also served as a going away party for my good friend and amazing photographer, Jacob Appelbaum, who is moving to Toronto in a few days.

Photos from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

So I’m doing the double whammy web geek conference thing next month. First it will be the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) in San Diego from March 6th through 9th and then I jet over to SXSW Interactive in Austin from March 10th through 14th. Here’s my write-up and photos from last year’s SXSW.

Speaking of SXSW, San Franciso’s own Craig Newmark of Craigslist will be one of the featured keynote speakers.

If you are planning on going to either ETech or SXSW, maybe I’ll see you there. I’ll be the guy with the PowerBook wearing the geek t-shirt.

This just in. Zombie March San Francisco, Round 2, takes place tonight (Friday, February 24th) starting in Union Square at 9pm.

Rumor has it that the Live Journal zombies are going to join forces with the MySpace zombies and take over the living. OMFG did you see those people running for their lives. WTF, like I’d eat your brains. ROTFL!

PS. Dear zombies, please keep away from BrainJams, those are not the brains you are looking for.

Special thanks to Niall Kennedy (current mood: brains) for the tip!

Burners Without Borders is a group of Burning Man participants who help out in various communities throughout the year. Most recently they have been working on a Katrina Disaster Relief Effort, with help from members of the Black Rock City DPW. You can follow along on their blog, donate to the project and even volunteer.

Burners Without Borders was featured this week in the San Francisco Bay Guardian with stories by Steven T. Jones (Scribe) and Tom Price.

For one week out of the year Burning Man participants (aka “Burners”) join together in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada to re-engage with our community, and to celebrate shared values of radical self-expression and self-reliance. We celebrate the power of community, honor the importance of art, and enjoy the immediacy of experience. Then we leave - without a trace of our having been there.

Burners Without Borders is a manifestation of what can happen when those values get off the playa and out into the rest of the world.

via: Jack Rabbit Speaks & Danger Ranger

The amazing Los Angeles artist Mark Ryden will be featured in (and on the cover of) volume 3 of Hi Fructose magazine (coming out this summer). This issue will also feature Chris Ware, Jim Woodring and a bunch of other great stuff, plus it is shipping with a special Viewmaster Photo Reel featuring photos from Brian McCarty. More info over on the Hi Fructose blog.

Hi Fructose Vol. 2 is already sold out, so subscribe now because this one will go even quicker.

A couple of weeks ago at Northern Voice, right after Robert Scoble’s demo of Windows Vista, Chris Pirillo showed off his ThinkPad that was running Apple Mac OS X 10.4.4, duel booting with Windows! It seemed to run really well. Here are some photos.

Phillip Torrone wrote this up on the Make Blog as well.

On a related note, Yahoo! News reports that Apple has embedded the following poem in OS X to discourage people from cracking their software:

Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he’d do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don’t steal Mac OS!/Really, that’s way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

So Apple thinks that poetry is a better defense against software piracy than a rap video? What’s next hacker haikus?

Thanks to Lori Dorn for the Apple poem tip!

Technorati just released a cool new feature called Favorites. It’s a special page where you can add up to 50 blogs and their posts will be displayed in order of most recently updated. There is even a blog search just for Favorites. Once you have setup your Favorites, you can then add code to your blog that will show the last three updates from your Favorites page. Here’s my Favorites page. Hopefully they will increase the number of blogs that it tracks, since I follow more than 50 (all I can say is that the unread count in my feed reader is now 5 digits, I’m a bit behind).

It’s really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you’ll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!