Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #929 by Adam Koford

See Previously: Laughing Squid Lucky 13 Poster by Adam Koford

illustration by Adam Koford

Chris Randall created a new sound track for “Just Imagine”, a stop-motion industrial film that he found in the Prelinger Archives that shows a 1940’s telephone being assembled. The result is the wonderful Assemblage #1 by Micronaut.

via jwz

San Francisco artist and EFF designer Hugh D’Andrade was recently invited to do a live painting of a mural at the Mission Cultural Center. The subject of the mural was “The Secret Room” where the NSA conducted warrantless wiretapping at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, resulting in EFF suing AT&T.

EFF’s Chris Contolini and Richard Esguerra made a time lapse video of Huge painting the mural, featuring the song “Master of Skandal” by Skandalo Publico.

See Hugh’s write-up on the mural for more background on “The Secret Room”.

photo by Tom Erikson

PleaseDressMe is a new t-shirt search engine where you can find t-shirts based on tags, color & price. The service was launched by AJ Vaynerchuk, Gary Vaynerchuk and Joe Stump, the product of their newly formed side projects company 24736five.

PleaseDressMe is a classic example of scratching ones own itch. AJ, Gary, and Joe love finding great new tees, but finding said tees wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Rather than sifting through multiple websites we figured why not just go to one website that makes searching t-shirts easy? Once we came to that conclusion, Joe went right to coding and after a few calculated keystrokes we brought in Chris to make it pretty. The result is the simple, concise tshirt search engine you see before you.

Lebowski Fest San Francisco 2008 kicks off with an Opening Party and Movie Screening at Mezzanine on Friday, September 5th and a Bowling Party at Classic Bowling Center in Daly City on Saturday, September 6th. Jeff Dowd, the real live inspiration for “The Dude”, will be appearing at Lebowski Fest.

Lebowski Fest is an annual celebration of the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski with events taking place around the country throughout the year.

UPDATE: The Opening Party and Movie Screening is sold out.

poster by Bill Green

Don LaFontaine, who’s familiar voiceover work was featured in over 5,000 movie trailers and 750,000 television spots, died at age 68 on August 22, 2008.

Don LaFontaine was famous for his movie trailer intros which started with the phrase “In a world…” as parodied in this GEICO ad.

Adam Savage of MythBusters gave a great talk at The Last Hope on his obsession with recreating unique items like a Dodo Bird skeleton and replicas of the Maltese Falcon.

Here is Adam’s series of Maltese Falcon replicas on display at Maker Faire 2008.

via MetaFliter

photo by Scott Beale

Google has just announced their new open source browser Chrome. The announcement came in the form of a web comic by Scott McCloud.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

Google Blogoscoped has posted some screenshots of Google Chrome browser.

UPDATE 1: The beta release of the Chrome browser now available for download. Currently Chrome is only available for Windows Vista/XP.

UPDATE 2: Google has posted some Chrome tutorial videos on YouTube.

See Previously: Understanding Comics - The Books Of Scott McCloud

Brilliantly absurd comedian Will Franken is making his return to the theater world this Wednesday, September 3rd with the performance of his hit one man show “Grandpa It’s Not Fitting” at Ars Nova in New York City as part of their Tragedy Tomorrow comedy series.

Will Franken’s outrageous wit will drive you to the brink of hysteria in his latest solo show. Tackling topics from the sacrosanct to the obscure, this is Franken doing what he does best: inhabiting a myriad of characters at lightning speed like a demented, one-man Monty Python. Praised by the New York Times for his “erudite wit and highly developed sense of the absurd” and recently dubbed San Francisco’s “Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs,” Franken hits the Ars Nova stage for one night only.

Here are some sources of online information and resources on Hurricane Gustav, a category 3 hurricane that is approaching the Gulf Coast, prompting a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. Gustav is expected to make landfall as early as Monday.

Gustav Information & Resources

- Gustav Information Center

- Hurricane Gustav Wiki

- Gustav Alerts via Twitter

- Gustav Coverage on Twitter

- FEMA: Hurricane Gustav

- National Hurricane Center (NOAA)

- NOAAWatch Hurricane Gustav

- Red Cross Online Newsroom for Gustav

- Hurricane Gustav Digital Support Brigade (Facebook)

Hurricane Tracing

- Stormpulse Hurricane Gustav Tracking Map

- MSNBC Hurricane Tracker

- Tracking Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth

- HAMweather Hurricane Gustav Track/Projected Path

Communications

- Interdictor (IRC & police scanner monitoring)

- Gustav Mobile Resource Guide (iphone & cell)

- The Hurricane Watch Net (amateur radio)

Local Coverage

- New Orleans Metblogs

- Hurricane Gustave on NowPublic

Evacuee Resources

- Red Cross Safe and Well List

- Voices of Gustav (displaced evacuees)

- Gustav Pets (animal rescue resources)

Gustav Links

- Boing Boing Gustav Online Resources

- Metblogs Gustav Resources Online

- Hurricane Gustav Aggregator

Red Cross Hurricane PDF

images via American Red Cross

Here’s a creepy display of animatronic John McCain and Barack Obama presidential dolls, plus a defunct Hillary Clinton close out model, I found at a local Walgreens.

photo by Scott Beale

The Big Picture is featuring some amazing night photos of London shot by Jason Hawkes as he was flying above the city in a helicopter.

photo by Jason Hawkes

Matt Koval has unearthed a rare video of a pre-web version of YouTube from 1985.

via Google Blogoscoped

Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman demonstrate the difference between CPU and GPU by painting the Mona Lisa in 275 milliseconds using a 1100 barrel paint ball gun earlier this week at NVIDIA’s NVISION 08 show.

via TG Daily & CrunchGear

Proof that every vote makes a difference, red won by just two votes in our poll for the next Laughing Squid sticker color. We will be printing these soon through Sticker Giant, adding it to existing our line-up of stickers.

Robbie shot 3038 photos with his Canon 5D over a period of 3 days of his life in and around Boston. He then created a video of all of the photos played at hi-speed in the order they were shot, set to the song “Dry Lips” by Lightspeed Champion.

via Cartoon Brew

guest post by Simone Davalos

Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, wanted to make his marriage proposal to his girlfriend Leslie really, really memorable, so he did what an self-respecting Googleplex geek would so, he put his proposal up on Google Street View.

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My name is Michael Weiss-Malik, and I work for Google. I don’t work on the Street View team, but I interact with them pretty regularly. They decided to coordinate a pre-announced Street View run outside Google’s Mountain View offices, with the idea that Googlers could line up along the street and appear in the imagery. So I put together my “Proposal 2.0″ billboard and showed up, hoping that it’d be readily visible. And it was![snip]

But my original proposal was quiet and low-key. It was just some simple heart-felt words exchanged during a quiet night at home. And while Proposal 1.0 had plenty of sentiment, it was lacking in pizazz. So I did what any Silicon Valley geek would do: I decided to upgrade to “Proposal 2.0,” a new improved online version. I proposed to Leslie from inside a Google Street View panorama. I dare say that it’s the first time anyone in the history of mankind has proposed marriage in quite this way, and it went live on Google Maps on August 5, 2008.

Visit Marry Me Leslie to see some history, learn how he did it, and tell Leslie whether or not to say “yes”.

via TechDigest

Nikon has announced their new D90 camera, a 12.3-megapixel DSLR that retails for $999.95 and includes the ability to shoot 24fps 720p HD video.

Commercial photographer Chase Jarvis had a chance to try out the camera in advance, making a video as he and his crew tested out several D90’s.

In related news, Canon announced their new 50D DSLR.

Check out the D90 write-ups by Thomas Hawk and David Pouge (New York Times).

UPDATE 1: DP Review has a hands-on preview of the D90.

UPDATE 2: Nikon has posted some D-Movie sample videos from the D90.

The UnConvention and ad agency Campbell Mithun have joined forces on the campaign “Make an Effort” to help residents of Minneapolis-Saint Paul to find unconventional ways to welcome their visitors as they arrive next week for the Republican National Convention.

See Previously: My Yard Our Message, Non-Partisan Political Yard Signs

via AdFreak

Backtype is a new web service that just launched that helps you track and search your friends comments from multiple sources. You can also claim accounts associated with your domains. TechCrunch is referring to it as the “Twitter For Comments”.

BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet.

Here’s the Laughing Squid account on Backtype.