But many celebrities appear at these events not solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to line their pockets.

"Stars know they can literally steal from charity," said Steven Fox, a Monterey businessman who worked with Tonken on a 1995 fundraiser for the Tommy Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation, named after the baseball legend's late son. "Otherwise, they don't perform. They don't appear."

Actor David Schwimmer, who has made many millions of dollars starring in NBC's "Friends," received a pair of Rolex watches worth $26,413 in advance of a 1997 charity gala that had among its intended beneficiaries the John Wayne Cancer Institute.

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"I've had every part of me groped beyond belief...(I was) shocked more than anything, disbelief, total sense of disbelief, humiliated," she told Australia's Channel Nine. Smethurst was detained under a new reading of the law that lets tourists in on a 90-day waiver of the visa rules, but not working journalists.

Apparently, foreign journalists are percieved to be a threat to U.S. interests.

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BoingBoing reader George Perdicaris points us to the work of photographer Yuri Dojc. His "Amorous Nature" series reveals hidden eroticism in the world of plants. Link

Check out this page at Gizmodo.com pointing to video clips of the Hallucigenia 01 at FuRo, the Future Robot Technology Research Center of the Chiba Institute of Technology:

"ZDNet Japan has some video clips of the Hallucigenia 01, the futuristic eight-wheeled car/transportation robot with wheels that can rotate independently of the others, and it can move up hills while the body of the car remains level."

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A November interim report issued by a panel of government and industry off...

I love what Nicolas Clauss does with Flash Shockwave. Always imaginative, elegant, understated, and in this case, vertigo-inducing.

"interactive sound paintings,a work on pixel as texture, a nods at the cd-rom Alphabet. Four years after dropping the brushes,a virtual come back to painting."

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When I was a child, my father hauled an abandoned antique printing press into our house one afternoon. He was an artist and writer who had a habit of falling in love with discarded tools, the same way I became routinely obsessed with broken dogs and fallen birds. But this thing weighed over a ton. He'd become enamored with the way words from the press felt in his hands, divided into chunks of lead characters. Sentences formed like spines strung from vertebrae. I remember exactly how the blocks of type felt when he placed them in my small hands -- they were palm-sized then, but cold; sharp enough along the corners to puncture skin. Heavier than the wooden alphabet building-blocks I played with upstairs.

I remember the acrid smell of black ink, and the slapping sounds of my father spreading each blob into a thin film that coated wide plates of assembled text. Gears made metallic groans when he heaved his giant body into the wheel that set the press into motion, a wheel as tall as he was, a wheel that smashed wet steel plates into paper to form printed words.

The press was an elderly oddity: a fat, shut-in houseguest who consumed two rooms, accompanied by floor-to-ceiling cabinets of paper and type trays. Homes didn't have PCs in 1974, but there were many more efficient ways to speak to the world. My father wrote on a typewriter, and words were published in books, newspapers, and magazines. But words that came out of this press had a scent. A personality you could feel with your fingers. Whatever my father's words were, when they were printed this way they had history, as if he had squeezed them through a time machine on their way to the sheets of vellum extra-bright white.

The following specific issues were reported:

SQL injection issues exist in the 'banners.php' script. Supplying malic...

Much is being made lately of the FBI's phone call to the Whitney Museum in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks requesting access to Mark Lombardi's drawing BCCI, ICIC & FAB (1996-2000). This piece, the last work the artist made before he was found dead in his studio in March 2000, an apparent suicide at age 49, represents the tangled web of power and influence that comprised the largest banking scandal in history—in which an impenetrable network of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, and banks-within-banks laundered billions of dollars while supporting terrorism, arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution. The names of Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush, among many other high- and low-profile world figures, are connected by a network of delicate, yet potently insinuating, pencil lines. The FBI agent who called was informed that the work was on view in the museum's galleries, where he was welcome to see it during it during regular museum hours. A visit to the current Mark Lombardi exhibition at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, through December 18) by an affiliate of the Homeland Security Agency has also raised eyebrows in the art world.

In cyberspace, the architectural parallel to Lombardi's work is not to be found in the utilitarian, "drill-down" salt mine of the Defense Department's TIA, but in the burgeoning blackberry-bush tangle of Friendster.com. For the one or two of you who still don't know, Friendster is an online network in which members can connect to friends, as well as to friends' friends, friends' friends' friends, and so on. As a result of having 32 friends in my immediate network, I am automatically linked to a larger network of 441,710 individuals. I can search this database by gender, age, locale, and interest. Unlike some more purposeful sites, such as the business network LinkedIn, or any of the many cruising spots online, Friendster is notably open-ended. In addition to identifying oneself as looking for a "friend," or a "serious relationship," one can also present oneself as "just here to help." It is in part this indirectness that suggests a parallel to Lombardi's indeterminate fields of "influence."

I love what Nicolas Clauss does with Flash Shockwave. Always imaginative, elegant, understated, and in this case, vertigo-inducing.

"interactive sound paintings,a work on pixel as texture, a nods at the cd-rom Alphabet. Four years after dropping the brushes,a virtual come back to painting."

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Net censorship in Iran has been intensified lately by the government, using expensive filtering software that they've just bought. There are also reports that the TCI (Telecommunication Company of Iran) has blocked Google Cache to stop people accessing the filtered websites. At the same time, Iran has sent a big delegate to the World Summit on information Societies in Geneva.

It was a matter of mathematics. Outside, 100 men were waiting. She could hear them laughing, and hooting, and pounding on the door. Inside, one of her was waiting. She was down on her knees on the cement floor of a soundstage in Porn Valley. Soon, the men would come in and form an unknown number of concentric circles around her. With her eyes closed, she would count them, as they came forward to her, one-by-one. For the next 120 minutes, she would think about the things in her life that were of value to her. Her boyfriend who was back at home. The sunset where she grew up near the Mojave Desert. The sight of a dozen Maple Glaze Donuts at Krispy Kreme. Eventually, it would all come to an end. The P.A. with one hand would help her to her feet. The men would walk out the back door, where they would be given $50. She would walk out the front door, where she would be given $500.

From televised presidential aircraft carrier visits to the glut of unreal reality TV shows, "American culture is becoming a culture of pageants," says David Byrne. "We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place." To examine how the medium shapes the message, the former Talking Head uses Microsoft PowerPoint -- the ubiquitous presentation software -- as a creative tool.

His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.

Cdwrite creates files in the temporary directory in an insecure manner. As a result, a local attacker may l...

As c...

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(Thanks, Micah!)

Tommy and his girlfriend have spent the past two years driving America's highways, taking pictures of signs for taco joints. Here is the gallery of their work.

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(Thanks, Tommy!)

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(via Kottke)

The "Mushroom House" is a hippie house in Whistler, BC, built in the style of a Led-Zeppelin-album-cover Hobbit House.

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(Thanks, Glen!)

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6.3MB WMV Link

In answer to the long held question, can a TiBook with one Wifi card act as a repeater and relay access to everyone else in the room without them having to pay, the answer it turns out is yes. How do we do this? Well, first turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OSX machine that is online. Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment). Turn Apache back on. Go to network prefs, and find out your assigned IP address. Write it on a piece of paper, and pass it around the room, telling them to set it as their web proxy.

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