While Victor Huang was trying out his shiny new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT2 in Wahine Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand, he attempted to get video of a large wild octopus. The octopus snatched the camera from his hands and swam away with it while still recording — subsequently filming a chase for the camera that lasted several minutes.

“While trying to get video of a wild octopus, it suddenly dashed towards me and rips my shiny new camera from out of my hands, then swims off, all while the camera is recording! he swam away very quickly like a naughty shoplifter. after a 5 minute chase, I placed my speargun underneath him and he quickly and curiously grabbed hold of the gun as well, giving me enough time to reach in and grab the camera from out of his mouth. I didn’t feel threatened at all during the whole ordeal. he seemed to be fixated on the shiny metallic blue digital camera. the only confusing behavior was how he dashed off with it like a thief haha. cheeky octopus.”

The above video is the chase, with the following credits: Music by Vincent Gillioz (Car Chase) and Dalmatian Rex and the Eigentones (Octopus I Love You). First unit camera: Victor Huang. First unit director and second unit camera: Cheeky Octopus.

via Metafilter

We’re excited to see The Quotidian met the Mission Street Food Project; while both are local to San Francisco, each do something on a cultural level that we’d love to see replicated in other major cities — and both are getting national attention. The Quotidian is a San Francisco phenomenon; they are a ongoing online video documentary project “that highlights how everyday people and actions can have a larger effect on the world”. They recently examined another SF phenom, Mission Street Food Project, which scores killer local chefs to bring high-end San Francisco food to the people and creating happening events (and hot date destinations) in the process, all while giving proceeds to charitable organizations. Their next event is this Thursday, April 1st, and all dining events are cash only. Quotidian did a fabulous documentary on MSF (above) explaining,

The success of these nights has also transformed Mission Street Food into a serious charitable business, as more than $17,000 was donated to local charities during the part-time restaurant’s first 10 months of operation. Mission Burger, a lunchtime burger stand that Myint started inside the Duc Loi Supermarket a couple doors down from Mission Street Food, has also generated more than $2,500 in donations during its first three months of operation.

While the idea of donating sales proceeds to charitable causes isn’t necessarily new, what’s impressive about Mission Street Food is that it’s taken place in the dining world, where profit margins are notoriously hard to come by even with the most established restaurants and competition is cutthroat. Mission Street Food has succeeded as a foodie destination and business in spite of (or perhaps because of) its charitable roots, proving that it’s possible to be a successful small local business with a great product while giving back directly to the community in a real, meaningful way.

via Kai Hsing

It’s a very interesting time for books, perhaps the most pivotal in history (though not the most tempestuous), and conversations about the future of books sound a lot like… past conversations about the future of the written word. Those of us who fancy the early days of printing and publishing in San Francisco, or at the very least have an affinity for Deadwood-era ink stories, will be delighted to know that The American Bookbinders Museum, in all its dusty glory, resides here in San Francisco. Reader Shalaco was surprised to discover it himself, writing,

Last Saturday I was biking home along Harrison when I saw a peculiar sandwich board, “Bookbinders Museum open today 12-4″ Having nothing better to do and a natural affinity towards books and the book making process I decided to take some time out of my day to find out about this oddity.

Tim James is a commercial bookbinder who is fascinated by the bookbinder and the bookbinding process. This process has undergone a complete transformation since the mid 1800′s when every step in the process was done by hand and only the rich could afford books.

But the Bookbinders Museum isn’t just about books; it’s about machines. “It is the goal of the American Bookbinders Museum to amass a collection of working machines used for each part of the printing process.” And don’t forget the Bookbinder’s Bowling Club! You can visit, you can tour, or you can help them find equipment for their collection. Tours are free and on Saturday 12-4 — or by request: call Tim James and if he can he will run over from his print shop to give a tour.

The American Bookbinders Museum is at 2736 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Phone: (415) 671-2233 | (415) 710-9369

The animated gif is an artifact of bygone eras in web design, though many of us gnash our teeth when coming across the pesky relics and kvetch that they should be banned as avatar icons on sites such as Twitter, where the jangly movement almost feels like a nonconsensual affront. Not everyone looks at a gif and thinks that 1998 called and wants its HTML back. Maybe that’s just us. Artist Jamie Martinez sees the gif as a medium that deserves an artist’s exploration (arguing that until now, no artist has had anything to do with animated gifs, at least in public). In his 2009 animated gif series, Martinez takes the gif to a place somewhere between retro photography and old 3-D postcards, with a collection that is contemplative, moody, wistful and strangely provocative.

After years of resting our weary blogger heads on keyboards and netbooks, with visions of icons dancing through our heads, now we rejoice to see that finally a pillow suitable for the workspace has been created. Also, we can finally take out our frustration at Facebook with a few square punches without actually striking a monitor; we can also literally fling Gmail at someone who needs to get smacked upside the head with our unread thoughts — and no one actually gets hurt. Thank goodness for the Social Networking Pillows by Craftsquatch on Etsy. Now our cats can do what comes naturally and simultaneously act out our private impulses against MySpace all in one smooth movement.

via Switched On Set

image of Poker Face cookies by fadedlines6

You don’t have to be a fan of Lady Gaga’s taste in apparel to appreciate the way she looks as a frosted gingerbread cookie — yummy — but if you’re like us and you enjoy her entertaining styles, you’ll appreciate the care, creativity and attention to detail that fans have been pouring into homemade confections bearing tribute to the Lady. First up are the gingerbreads by Matt Meyer and Devonne Ditinick, painstakingly re-creating over a dozen outfits spanning many of Gaga’s character manifestations in high-end couture.

Next are Gaga cupcakes, captured by Cupcakes Take The Cake. One set is Lady Gaga busts in cupcake form, another set is the monogram “G” cupcakes custom made for Gaga’s “Paparrazi” video. The artist uploaded her final masterpieces to DeviantArt, with commentary.

A number of Lady Gaga cakes have been baked, but this one by The LadygloomThe Ladygloom was presented to Lady Gaga and is as far-out of an interpretation of a cake as is Gaga’s own brand of fashion.

cookies via Fashionindie

While we’re certain that if the When Do They Sleep? algorithm were to actually be applied to some of our friends, it would surely snap in two out of frustration, it’s still an amusing toy. The concept is to enter a Twitter username into the form, and SleepingTime coughs up a rough estimate of when it thinks said user is “sleeping” or is most predictably inactive on Twitter. Three sample lists give us snapshots, and “Tech Superstars” is a bit bizarre in selection if not interesting to browse and imagine that some of our friends actually ever sleep.

image via Pyongyang Traffic Girls

North Korean traffic girls, in their uniforms deigned by the Great Leader, with their unfailingly robotic movements and riveting focus, are becoming figures of cult status. Instead of traffic lights to control the stop and go flow of an intersection, women dressed in perfectly crisp and identical outfits stand alone in the middle of intersections in a small circle (or on a platform with an umbrella for shade). They are only allowed to turn counter-clockwise, directing traffic with forceful, halting movements. They have wonderful uniform variations for rain and winter. They’ve been the subject of photographic study since at least the 1970s, have the website Pyongyang Traffic Girls dedicated to them (with Traffic Girl of the Month; here’s March), a growing catalog of user submitted YouTube videos, and at least one Flickr photo pool. Are they sexy? Strangely, yes. Are they efficient? Frightfully so. Do we have our Halloween costume now? Most certainly.

via SuperPunch

First of all, we think it’s just incredibly cool that there is such a thing as a real artificial lightning generator, and we’re just a little bit jealous that people can experiment with it (leave it to Japan to take sci-fi into reality). Were it up to us, we’d probably try and do things like roast marshmallows, cook hot dogs, and see what we could make unnecessarily explode, like Peeps or something. Lucky kids: to see what would happen to a fluorescent tube, the crew of Tobidase! Kagaku-kun (“Leap Out! Science Boy”) visited CRIEPI, an astounding 12-million-volt artificial lightning generator at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan. The video shows exactly what happens in slow motion, with a helpful stunt crew member emerging unscathed.

via Pink Tentacle

New York artist David Livingston is taking the concept of actually being a big dick to extremes; perhaps to him, these are necessary extremes for the times we live in. In an ongoing absurdist art performance, Livingston walks into a public spaces around NYC and performs a simple action (such as buying a pastry) with a six foot long, flaccid, stuffed penis and testicles held to the front of his body. He does not confront, but his big dick does all the silent accusation needed when people stare and laugh. “Silent Bob” indeed. Yet because the onlookers are New Yorkers, they generally try to pretend they are unfazed, and the result is impossible not to smile at. Plus, we just think it’s fun to say that a big dick read the newspaper, or that we saw a big dick walk past the stock exchange. Well played, Livingston.

Something that makes a great film into legend is when time reveals layers of entertaining stories behind the filmmaking, which is one of the reason Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds has legs. Contributing to Batserds’ growing aura of cult status is the above DVD special feature comprised of Italian clapboard operator Geraldine Brezca who does hilarious, foul-mouthed, and wonderfully sharp scene calls just before clapping for “action.”

Typically when a scene number is called the clapboard operator will follow the English alphabet, and each film set will have their own variation such as using names in alphabetic order, or the International Radio Operator Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.). Not Brezca, “the Clapper Loader and Tarantino’s Camera Angel.” She’s been working with Tarantino over the course of several films and has her own style — which as you’ll see, tends to either shock or compel the actors, or both. After the second viewing, we think there is a method to her madness, even if you think that shouting “Dario Argento” or “Scene 34 Blowjob!” at actors seems random.

via The Establishing Shot

image by Jeremy Benning, National Geographic

We really wish we could have been a fly on the wall when “Sizing Up Sperm” — a human re-enactment of fertilization — was pitched in the esteemed offices at National Geographic. Regardless of how the idea was hatched, the results are stunning and the program airs this Sunday, March 14. In it, people dressed in all white literally act out the role of sperm in the race to become one with the egg, running through valleys, squeezing through spirals, battling Leukocytes and much more. The impressive undertaking was completed with helicopter-mounted cameras, world-renowned scientists, CGI and over-the-top reconstruction of the sperm’s journey played out in real life by humans.

National Geographic’s Sizing Up Sperm page has video, photos, facts and “The Great Sperm Race” game, whose designers we’re certain are tired of all those “first person shooter” jokes. Or their friends endlessly playing Every Sperm Is Sacred over and over while they were trying to work. It just so happens that Slate also got in on the ejaculation meme, and delivered the riveting article on a story of sperm donors and DNA tracing in Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore? It’s a great pairing with the NatGeo feature, and will make any guy think twice before donating sperm, most especially when over a dozen of your children find each other, and start racing to find… you.

via Lori Dorn

image by foCuseD-Photography for The Zentai Project

Zentai is the practice of wearing a full body suit (typically Lycra, though other materials fall into Zentai labels) for private enjoyment or exhibitionism. The suits can be colorful, animal themes or even sinister looking, and personal use ranges from sexual enjoyment to wearing the suits in public for fun and amusement — as seen at The Zentai Project.

While Zentai has been a staple of blog fodder for years as the prime example of far-out fetishes one can find with the click of a mouse, the fetish has had little thoughtful examination, nor has anyone bothered to talk to practitioners to hear the story from their side of the Spandex. At The Daily Beast, Will Doig did just that in his article “Men Who Love Lycra”. While the writeup is dressed with the sensationalism you might expect to someone who’s never encountered zentai (which is not always a sexual fetish), Doig’s piece by far the most in depth and titillating piece on the subject to date. It comes with its own shiny gallery, too.

photo by Scott Beale

In a wonderfully detailed, video-rich post, Lifehacker goes Lady Gaga for Ladyada and our friend Phillip Torrone guestblogs on what makes Limor Fried Lifehacker’s MacGyver of the Day. It’s impossible not to be impressed and awed; after reading the post we think Fried is a tenacious and prolific genius who’s cut a powerful swath for women engineers, designers and makers. Watch only half the videos in which mastermind Fried explains from her secret underground laboratory the many ways you can create your own doomsday devices life simplifying gadgets, and you’ll see why we think she’s more like the woman MacGyver would run crying to for help like a little girl should he actually be caught in a tough spot and needed to, say, make a cell phone jammer. Limor (Adafruit Industries) is quoted saying,

“In contemporary Western society, electronic devices are becoming so prevalent that many people find themselves surrounded by technologies they find frustrating or annoying. The electronics industry has little incentive to address this complaint (…) By building functional prototypes that reflect equal consideration of technical and social issues, I identify three attributes of Noir products: Personal empowerment, participation in a critical discourse, and subversion.”

The post is like a “best of” Ladyada’s most effective and slightly subversive designs, explained in step-by-step DIY terms and gifted to any and all as open source projects. In addition, the videos featuring Fried and Torrone creating and experimenting with the edgy electronics are nerdy and subtly hilarious, making them fun to watch even if you can’t solder your way out of a paper bag. However, if you did want to learn how, we’re pretty sure they’ve got a humorous video tutorial. Don’t miss her fantastic weekly “ask an engineer” show.

image by sergeydolya

Everyone knows how delicious the food is on airplanes, yet no one ever tries to cook like this at home. Perhaps it’s because for years, the culinary arts of airlines have been shrouded in secrecy and tradition, much like the rich mastery only found in the rarefied air of prison kitchens. In English Russia’s post Airport As A Tomato Sees It we now have the first glimpses into how airline food is prepared and stuffed into those appetite-whetting little blue carts; oddly the photo journey is revealed through the eyes of a tomato as is passes through a five-story mechanized kitchen which cooks for flights taking off at the Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport. Perhaps even more strangely, the food products are described with the type of affection typically reserved for things that people might actually want to eat while offering up vaguely unsettling tidbits about how hot food is heated and then “shock frozen” prior to flight.

via KumiMonster

Mobile music platform Myxer has been in the entertainment content delivery game since 2005, and they’ve got over 32 million registered users so they have an interesting slice of phone data to play with. They recently published what is going to be a quarterly report on Android use. They’ve made it freely available in a .pdf, but we think the main highlights are fascinatingly broken down in Android vs. iPhone use by US state and Android handset use by male-female gender. We especially liked the US state graphic that colorfully shows phone domination by state, and if you click through you’ll get more data when you roll over each state.

Wrong Side of The Art has many cool and lurid exploitation posters, but the Honky Tonk Girl posters that warn us she’s “Forbidden to live with decent society” are showstoppers.

If your passion was, say, body modification, and you could win a chance to go around the world as an intern for the world’s foremost body mod website… You might resemble our guestblogger Ed Hunsinger. Okay, maybe only Ed looks like Ed. But when BME (Body Modification Ezine) announced their BME World Tour Internship Contest, our Ed entered with hopes to win faster than anyone around here could say “septum piercing.” To everyone’s delight, Ed made it into the #9 spot and was given an “extra credit assignment” to create a ‘day in the life’ video about himself. We knew Ed’s video would be cool and fun, but what we didn’t expect was that it would be its own documentary about Bay Area life within the large-scale, underground machine arts culture — including a first-person tour of life at industrial art space NIMBY and a full demonstration of Interpretive Arson‘s astounding interactive project 2pir. And it’s full of fire. We like fire.

Ed’s post features his entry video, photos from a remarkable day, and the call to vote for him includes,

When I got word that I was in the top ten finalists, my heart skipped another beat. Closer and closer to a trip around the world. I could feel my passport tugging on my sleeve, “can we go!? can we go!? please please please!”, but I calmly explained to my anthropomorphized government document that the decision was not up to me. I still had one more assignment to prove I was worthy of such a trip: a blog entry, video, and photos of a day in my life. Luckily the next day had potential to be interesting enough to share with the Internet.

Laughing Squid guest blogger Burstein makes a cameo in Ed’s video.

photo by Peter Kun Frary

At first pass, the image above looks like an oversaturated painting. But it’s not: this is a photograph of a woman carefully made up to look like painting outside of a MAC cosmetics store at Ala Moana outdoor shopping center in Hawaii two weeks ago. Another photo and large sizes are here if you’re like us and you just can’t believe it’s not Photoshop; it’s part of MAC makeup’s artist creations where (makeup) life imitates art. Last Halloween in the same vein, MAC makeup artist Karin Stone created the incredible Lichtenstein Girl, and MAC posted 21 face charts showing how to create comic book looks on their Facebook page.

In their demo video, we get glimpses of the Lichtenstein Girl being painted:

via Urlesque and illusion 360

photo by TrustoCorp

Oh, how we long to see razor-witted signs like those from the enigmatic TrustoCorp improving the streets of San Francisco, raining truth and dark hilarity on hipsters and Marina Barbies alike. Well, if whispers around street art blogs are true, we might get a chance to be blanketed with TrustoCorp’s special brand of illustrative street signs, as rumors suggest that after runs in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Miami and LA, they are taking their wayfinding improvements national. Beautifully executed in brilliant handpainted, altered street signage, they feature bold images and even bolder messages such as “Broke Is The New Black” and “NO SNITCHING – Keep Our Streets Honest: Obedience Is Un-American.” See more in the Flickr TrustoCorp pool.

photo by TrustoCorp

via Urban Prankster

image via Jason Scott

Back in November Jason Scott discovered “Nursery Cat” — a 1929 advertisement for “A Genuine Photograph of The Laughing Cat” complete with pre-internet LOL-era caption “Ha, Ha, Ha, It must be so!” Sadly, this excerpt from Parents Magazine is not the Original LOL, though it is an instructional marker in the history of Felines That Watch. In this case, we learn that Prohibition-era LOLcats are not only in ur nursery watchin’ ur infants, but that they LOL’d with a jaunty Jean-Luc Picard mastery of the situation.

via Mental Floss

We hear about them often; there is visibility in our culture when it comes to soldier casualties in Iraq, but civilian casualties remain largely invisible — in the media at least, but not in life. Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal is planning to literally turn his body into a permanent work that will have him making these casualties painfully visible, and he will carry the legacy of civilian deaths in Iraq with him the rest of his life. In effect, Bilal already does this, having lost his brother to a checkpoint missile in 2004. Starting at 8pm on March 8th at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC, Bilal will begin the first 24 hours of …and Counting, where he will get tattooed for each American and Iraqi civilian casualty, film the process, and is endeavoring to livestream the performance. Bilal’s artist statement reads:

…and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance — into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.

Also, Bilal is asking each visitor to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Based on official numbers of casualties, one dollar for each would mean $105,000 in scholarship money.

When: 8pm March 8 to 8pm March 9, 2010
Where: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
Blackburn 20/20
323 W39th Street 5th Floor NY, NY 10018

via We Make Money Not Art

While the US is being seriously dusted with snow, the UK might still be digging itself out of an igloo, and the conditions at the Olympics are being called dangerous, images surfacing from the Sapporo Snow Festival 2010 in Japan (which ended February 11) make the seasonal chill look almost… inviting. Or, at least the sculptures are entertaining enough to get our minds off the heating bills.

photos by tmaeda_japan

via Pink Tentacle

photo by Erik Wilson

The title on this photo by Erik Wilson reads “If This House is a Rocket, Don’t Bother to Knock It” but we like to think that the owner of this San Francisco Richmond District house has a bumper sticker on the rocket facade that reads, “My other apartment is the Endeavour.” Google Street View searches for this on 3rd and Geary found no evidence of landings in the San Francisco neighborhood, and with its lovely faux-NASA logo we can only hope that Ames hasn’t confiscated the space-worthy Victorian for research purposes.

via sfhaps

We can’t decide what we love more about Certified Virgin. Maybe it’s that we can use the service to retroactively restore virginity on our unsuspecting friends who had a really hard time losing it in the first place. Or perhaps it’s Certified Virgin’s disclaimer — because everything about virginity should have a disclaimer:

“I know that this certificate is for humor purposes only. It does not certify that I am a real virgin.”

Indeed. Purity rings are expensive; Certifiable Virginity only costs a dollar.

via About: Blank