Boing Boing is on fire today, with some truly cool links by our own Cory Doctorow. He directs us to:

Underground press reproductions from 1965-75;

Quinn Norton’s Etech talk on body hacking;

When London became truly Orwellian;

Darth Gargoyle; and

A time lapse video of cheese ageing.

He also gives us the lowdown on Windows Vista, and points us to a Morse Code RSS feed. Good stuff!

Go thou, and sample the delights.

As LDA speculated, in the comments following this post, we and our cats have indeed been Borged already.

Not by intelligent machines, but by Toxoplasma Gondii. One quarter to one half of the human population is infested with this parasite.

Toxoplasma absolutely loves to be inside cats. That’s the only place that it can reproduce sexually. However, its life-cycle takes it outside the cat and into hundreds of mammals, including humans.

For instance, a rat eats the cat’s feces and ingests Toxoplasma, which encapsulates itself inside cell walls, thus preventing the rat’s immune response from triggering and killing it. Unless the rat, or other host organism, has a damaged immune system, Toxoplasma doesn’t harm it physically. It spreads thoughout the rat’s system. Including the brain.

And, here — it does something subtle and cunning. It wants to return home, into the cat.

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Current Hugo and Nebula nominee Paul Melko interviewed.

In 1989, Finnish film-maker Aki Kaurismaki recruited a local band named the Sleepy Sleepers to star in his new film “Leningrad Cowboys Go America’.

After the movie, the musicians liked being the Leningrad Cowboys so much that they kept performing as them.

One night in a bar, they got into some heavy drinking with a couple of members of the Russian Red Army Ensemble. The RRAE was composed of men who had actually been in the real Soviet Army band, and were now making their way as a commercial enterprise in the brave new world, performing traditional Russian songs.

The details of the ensuing brilliant idea and hook-up are fuzzy, dissolved in various esters of alcohol.

Together, they became something that neither could have been alone. The symbiotic parternship was extravagantly successful, in both creative and career-enhancing ways.

Needless to say, I encourage you to search out their other vids on YouTube. They can seriously rock. I posted this one because it was the most melancholically joyous one I found. In its own way, it’s the Blues.

Here’s ‘You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul‘ from their latest album, ‘Zombies Paradise’. It’s a teensy bit more punk than the other vid.

:

          Bradley Denton, Steven Gould Announce Engagement

                                   Rory Harper Crushed

(photo credit: Keith Stokes, The MidAmerican Fan Photo Archive)

. . . watched a program on Spaghetti Trees.

The report that it is a product grown on trees was first produced as an April Fools’ Day joke by the BBC TV programme Panorama in 1957, reporting on the bumper spaghetti harvest in Ticino, Switzerland due to the mild winter and “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.” The report was given additional gravitas by the voiceover by respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. It was considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. It was partly filmed at the (now closed) Pasta Foods factory on London Road, St Albans in Hertfordshire, and also at a hotel in Switzerland.

Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the report due to his remembering how he had been ridiculed by a teacher while he was at school, for being stupid enough to believe that spaghetti grew on trees.

An estimated 8 million people watched the programme on April 1, and hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story, or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The BBC reportedly told them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.

I was two at the time. I probably would have thought it a very reasonable thing.