Mark Kaufman has created a creepy illustration of his interpretation of The 2008 Republican Party Platform. I think this is the scariest thing I’ve seen all Halloween!

via LCSV4

Andrew Mayne of iTricks has been having fun turning himself into a ghost using iChat with Leopard and the HoloGit quartz filter. He shows you how you can do it as well.

via Cult of Mac

GOOD Magazine commissioned Alejandro Cardenas (director) and Daniel Cardenas (animator) to create a really cool animated video about “The Business of Death”.

Throughout the developed world the business surrounding death has often been an uneasy topic of discussion. Originating in the mid-19th Century, the modern funeral has evolved into an economic and cultural monster, with a vast network of supporting industries and myriad options for your earthly remains.

via Drawn!

“The Costume” by SPF7. Happy Halloween!

Bike Kill V, the annual chaotic bicycle Olympics event organized by Black Label Bicycle Club, took place in Bed-Stuy, Booklyn last Saturday. There are a bunch of great photos of it from Angela Coppola (above photos) and Konstantin Sergeyev.

Sylvenya has some video of the event here, here & here

Thanks to Chris Person for the tip!

The Irving Norman retrospective “Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism” will be on display at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC, as part of the ” ART of CONFRONTation: AU Exploring Human Rights through Art” series of exhibitions, which also includes “Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib” and “Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators”. The exhibition opens with a reception on Tuesday, November 6th from 6-9pm and runs through January 27th. There were be a gallery talk with Katzen director and curator Jack Rasmussen on Saturday, December 1st.

Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Realism presents visions of urban hell by a West Coast artist (1906-1989) who used his art to enact social reforms. Born Isaac Noachowitz in Vilnius, Lithuania, Norman drew on his experience fighting fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War to create highly detailed, monumental works that critique the inhumanity of war, the inequity of capitalism and the tyranny of the elite. Produced on the occasion of what would have been Irving Norman’s 100th birthday, the exhibit features paintings that remain as poignant and relevant today as when they were first created. Meticulously patterned and vividly medieval, Norman’s colossal paintings depict Big Brother worlds of swarming, clone-like figures encountering claustrophobic streets, jam-packed rush hours, random violence and abject poverty—urban panoramas that call to mind Los Angeles or Tokyo gone haywire. The show is curated by Scott Shieldsis and on tour from the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.

See Previously:

- Irving Norman at the Pasadena Museum of California Art
- Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism
- Irving Norman Retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum

Our friends over at Tiki Bar TV are now selling their very own custom designed Tiki mug, the enchanted green glaze “Charooba”, made by the folks at Tiki Farm.

via Tiki Talk

Our friends Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf, over at JETSET have just re-launched their video blog as the all-new Epic-Fu, where they will be covering the constantly mutating world of new popular culture. Bravo guys, it looks great!

Master the new pop culture! The new popular culture is about the influence of web culture on the mainstream. EPIC-FU is a new way of thinking about popular culture — it’s about conversation and interaction. Entertainment is a two-way street now.

ThinkGeek is selling a really cool Wi-Fi Detector T-Shirt with a graphic that produces an glowing animation showing the signal strength of local wi-fi networks.

Here at ThinkGeek we’re pretty lazy when it comes to technology. We expect our gadgets to do all the busywork while we focus on the high level important tasks like reading blogs. That’s why we hate to have to crack open our laptops just to see if there is any wi-fi internet access about… and keychain wi-fi detectors, we would have to actually remove them from our pockets to look at them. But now thanks to the ingenious ThinkGeek robot monkeys you can display the current wi-fi signal strength to yourself and everyone around you with this stylish Wi-Fi Detector Shirt. The glowing bars on the front of the shirt dynamically change as the surrounding wi-fi signal strength fluctuates. Finally you can get the attention you deserve as others bow to you as their reverential wi-fi god, while geeky chicks swoon at your presence. You can thank us later.

Our good friend Veronica Belmont (who previously was the co-host of CNET’s Buzz Out Loud) recently went to work for Mahalo, a human-powered search engine started by Jason Calacanis, to produce a daily video about various Mahalo topics. The show, “Mahalo Daily” will be launching on November 5th and in anticipation of it’s debut, Veronica has created a trailer for the show, where per Jason’s various suggestions, she pays tribute to several popular video blogs.

The West Memphis Three, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, have been in prison for 12 years as the result of a controversial trial in 1993 where they were falsely convicted for the murder of three young children in West Memphis, Arkansas. WM3.org has just posted an update to their website announcing that the DNA testing has been completed, showing no link to the evidence in the case and proving that the three were innocent all along. It turns out that the DNA evidence has been linked to Terry Hobbs, the step father of one of the children killed.

Just hours ago, our attorneys filed a Second Amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus proving that three innocent men were wrongfully convicted of murder in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. Citing DNA testing and evidence from several witnesses and leading experts, the nearly 200-page writ asks the Court to order a new trial for my husband, Damien Echols, or release him.

In short, DNA testing has been conducted on dozens of pieces of evidence. The DNA results show no link whatsoever to Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley or Jason Baldwin – and all of the experts agree that, under the prosecution theory of how the crime was committed, their DNA would be present at the crime scene if they were guilty. Instead, the DNA results match Terry Hobbs, the step-father of one of the victims. Our new filing also includes strong evidence from Pam Hobbs (the ex-wife of Terry Hobbs and the mother of one of the victims) implicating her former husband in the murders.

Echols’ legal defense team is planning a live webcast of the press conference at 8am PDT/11am EDT on Thursday, November 1st. They still have a long way to go before being released and are seeking donations for their legal fund.

Here’s more background information on this well publicized case, which was the subject of two documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” (1996) and “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations” (2000).

Thanks to Ron Turner for the tip!

SF0 player Herbie Hatman is organizing a formal Pie Fight which will take place at 5pm this Friday, November 2nd at tourist infested Powell Street Cable Car Turnaround in San Francisco, where Powell almost meets Market. Here’s more info:

Anyone care to participate in a pie fight?

Powell Cable Car Turnaround is a charming locale. Tourists. Local working class. Shoppers. Business people going home for the weekend. Folks coming in from BART for the evening. The unending stream of people give the sense of a busy city which San Francisco has to provide.

To appreciate this group’s sense of sensibility, formal wear is encouraged.

Punctuality shows not only proper etiquette but also keen ability to follow through with exemplary fashion. Thusly, we will be meeting at Friday ( 11.02) 5 O’clock PM Sharp.

It will surely be a spectacle. I hope to hear from you all soon.

Best Regards,
Herbie Hatman

PS: Shaving Cream is much more pleasant than whipped cream. I assure you.

UPDATE: Here are some photos of the pie fight.

Thanks to cheesebikini? for the tip!

Hi-Fructose Magazine is organizing “Bitters and Sweets”, an art show at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, featuring past, present and future artists from the pages of Hi-Fructose Magazine. The show opens on Tuesday, November 6th with a reception from 7-10pm and runs through November 30th.

Naoto Hattori is just one of the many amazing artists whose work will be on display at the show. Hi-Fructose has posted a couple of previews of the show here and here.

UPDATE: Artwork from the show is now up on the Bitters and Sweets & Hi-Fructose blogs.

I hate social network messaging systems. Do you know what would be great? An autoresponder service for all of my various social networks. At the very least it would help if the emails from these services provided the content of the message as well as a real email address so you can reply directly. Regardless, I know that it’s never going to happen, because forcing you to login to their services helps inflate their pageview counts.

So my solution is to manually insert my own autoresponder text, which I’m starting to use for services like Facebook, MySpace and so on. Here’s what I have so far:

Social Network Autoresponder:

If you are trying to reach me, please use email instead. There are several very good reasons for this:

1) I would prefer to maintain just one inbox, rather than a separate one for each social network.

2) I check my email frequently, increasing the chances that you will receive an actual response from me.

3) I can reply directly to your message, instead of having to log into a separate service.

4) I will have a history or our conversation that is easily accessible and can be searched locally.

5) Social networking mail systems generally have terrible editors, I prefer to use my own mail client.

6) Email will outlive what ever social networking system that you are using to message me.

Don’t have my email address? No problem, it’s been listed on the contact page of laughingsquid.com for over a decade. When it doubt, you can always find it there.

Anything else I should add to the list? Also, please feel free to spread this idea around and use this text as a basis for your own manual autoresponder. I’ll be updating it over time and as suggestions come in.

One inbox to rule them all!

UPDATE: Ok, it looks like the autoresponder is no longer necessary. Facebook fixed the problem by including the text of the message to the emails it sends out, along with adding the sender’s email address as the reply-to. Problem solved.

I recently started using Snitter, a desktop app for Twitter that works on both a Mac or PC. It is powered by Adobe AIR and was built by Ottawa web developer Jonathan Snook. It’s a really well designed application and has been great way to keep track my ever-increasing Twitter overload. It comes bunch of built-in themes and gives you full access to all of your Twitter information (Tweets, Arcive, Replies, Direct Messages, etc.) which can be toggled by keyboard shortcuts. Jonathan explains why he developed Snitter:

I built Snitter for a couple reasons. First off, I wanted to take AIR out for a spin and see what it could do. Secondly, I find using the Twitter web site frustrating at times because it doesn’t offer up features that I’ve always felt could be easily added. So, I’ve gone ahead and built an app with the features that I’ve always wanted.

Here’s a list of Snitter’s features:

* auto-updates tweet list
* highlights messages sent to you via @ syntax (and makes a chirp)
* clear current list of tweets
* refresh list of tweets
* displays last time it tried to request an update
* view 20 most recent items in your timeline
* view 20 most recent replies
* view 20 most recent direct messages
* view and filter friends list by name and screen name
* view and filter followers
* links to easily @reply and Direct message users
* keyboard shortcuts to access each panel (t=tweets, a=archives, r=replies, d=direct messages, f=favourites, i=friends, o=followers, u=updates)
* add favorites tab and allow tweets to be set as a favorite
* will notify you of new versions of Snitter
* audible notification of new tweets
* will remember previous window size and location
* will minimize to system tray
* auto-login

Previously I had used Twitterrific, which is also a great Twitter app, but it would often have problems updating, so I decided to give Snitter a try. Also Snitter has a minimize option (some reason Twitterrific did not have one) which is super useful when you need to get some work done.