Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky are guest bloggers! Well, they were.

I've been fascinated by these for quite a while, and I'm gathering information on them for a future book project: "These" and "them" are Thai Edan trucks– possibly the only cottage-industry motor vehicles in the world.

My tour of blogging duty is wrapping up here, but I wanted to put up some photos I had set aside here for possible blogging use. Here we go:

Fender has had a program where they're finding up-and-coming artists to paint guitars; my friend Lysa Provincio has done a few of these, and they look pretty great. In addition to this one, there's more on her site. Enjoy!

For those of you in the greater Los Angeles area who are either interested in the book Carrie and I wrote/edited, or if anyone just wants to berate me for any of the posts I've put up here these past two weeks, then come on out to Book Soup in West Hollywood where I'll be doing a reading from the book, answering questions, and maybe some small appliance repair. Hope to see you there, internet!

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her… Read the rest of the article: Download Stay Free issue #21 (psychology)

It being a summer night in North Carolina, and Galen's basement being cool and relatively mosquito-free, we stayed to watch the films. I don't think any of us were really prepared for what we saw.

Eat it, mid 19th-century noted rare book collectors!

Last Saturday, the day of no rules, I posted a video made by my old comedy group, the Van Gogh-Goghs that took the old Knight Rider conceit and added a colostomy bag. This week, we're taking the Spiderman story and replacing the spider with a pack of radioactive bears, who do something worse than biting.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her… Read the rest of the article: How to avoid ads in Gmail (or not)

Recently, a study showed that people tended to prefer cars with "angry" faces. Auto designers have known this for a while, as the vast majority of cars available today have "faces" (you know, the front end arrangement of headlights, grille, and shapes that we tend to read like a face) that are at least aggressive, and at most absolutely freaking livid. This is across the board, too– from entry-level cars to minivans to expensive sports sedans– they all look like pissed-off turtle robots. There are exceptions, of course, but many of the most notable ones (New Beetle, Mini) are modern updates of vintage designs.

Before computers became small, cheap, and reliable enough for this purpose, people still had the desire to stand in front of armoire-sized cabinets, stare into a glass panel, and pretend to do things they normally didn't do, like kill aliens, drive like a madman, or work in a junkyard. The way they did these things was with wonderful, complicated electromechanical arcade games.

This article at National Geographic gives a good gist of what's going on: apparently, regular old blue food coloring, like the stuff you find in Gatorade or M&Ms, has been found to reduce spinal cord trauma and inflammation, leading to at least a partial reversal of paralysis, at least in some mice. And, unlike other treatments, there's no toxic effects.

1. If you were designing your own superhero costume, how would you accessorize?
a. Cape
b. Scarf
c. Sidekick
d. Gun
e. Stack of fliers saying you are a superhero

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her… Read the rest of the article: Awesome jump blues/swing duo doing "Nagasaki"

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her… Read the rest of the article: Here's an index for our book, Ad Nauseam

If you're one of the most likely imaginary people that have been following my posts religiously, you might remember when I posted about the Black Widow turbine-powered Beetle a few days ago. Now, I have some scans from Turbonique's Hot Rotor magazine, which is jam-packed with great pictures of truly bonkers jet-powered vehicles, and jam-unpacked with words.

By nature, I'm not a guy particularly interested in safety concerns, but when I saw these massive wheel spikes on this big rig on the 5 freeway the other day, I couldn't help but wonder if having something normally associated with a brutal chariot race is such a hot idea.

To a certain group of dedicated dorks, videogame controllers and their history is fiercely interesting, even to the point of having dedicated T-shirts. It's to those folks I present this discovery: this looks like it may be the first product (image from a 1977 ad) with a joypad-like device, used for user input (enlargement mine):

This is a building in downtown Los Angeles. It's a pretty straightforward classic-style building, what with doubled Ionic columns and all the usual classic Greek/Roman detailing one expects out of these sorts of buildings. But, at some point in the building's life, it was renovated, and whoever was in charge decided the best typeface to use on the pediment there would be something that made the building look like a backdrop in a bad 80s scifi movie. Like that really should say "Terran Space Senate Headquarters" or something.