cheesebikini?

Zimbabwe democracy and human rights advocacy group Sokwanele built a compelling Google maps hack that visualizes news reports of the election-related human rights violations in Zimbabwe.


Such a high-bandwidth service won’t enjoy much viewership in Zimbabwe, where mobile phones and SMS are the new political technologies of choice.


But the Sokwanele map is a powerful way to reach international audiences. In one glance it conveys the larger patterns of what’s going on, and it lets people zoom in and link off for more detail about individual events.


(”Sokwanele” means “Enough is enough.”)

I’m an optimist, so I’m going to assume this Dunkin’ Donuts photo is a coincidence – unlike the Bush product-endorsement shots.

Congratulations to Peter Bober, who was just elected mayor of Hollywood, Florida.

Pete was my college roommate in Austin and one of my best friends going back to high school days in Florida. Best of all, he unseated Mara Giulianti – a notorious mudslinging, scandal-plagued mayor who sold out to shady condo developers and other unsavory interests.

Giulianti spent nearly four times more than Pete on the campaign, but the underdog toppled the 20-year incumbent.

I’ve got to respect a business whose motto and mission statement is:
“Everything should taste like bacon.”

And it’s kosher.

baconsalt.com

Within five minutes I learned two astounding things:

Crackers broke into Earthlink Web servers this morning and replaced the front pages of many (all?) of their customers’ Web sites with this message:

One of my clients is hosted by Earthlink and was compromised. I’ve got everything back up and running, but the tech support folks at Earthlink seem completely confused and can’t tell me what’s happened, beyond the fact that many customers were affected, so I’m not confident the breach has been fixed.

If you know anyone hosted at Earthlink, tell them to check their Web site to be sure they’ve not been owned. And hails out to the W32-Gen crew for pointing out those security holes.

For several weeks it seemed the Shaker thang going down around here was just another flash-in-the-pan San Francisco quirk:

But now our correspondents are chiming in about similar happenings from the sidewalks of Milan:

…to the boutiques of Shibuya:

Now the pattern is clear. For Spring 2007, woodcut is the new black. You heard it here first.

Vogue announces: police brutality is sexy. The new black is black-and-blue.

And here I was, hoping it was passe.

Lilia Manguy busted arse with three teammates for nine months to create a cleverly-designed, well-implemented tool that won an award for outstanding final Masters’ project this year at my alma mater, Berkeley’s iSchool.

What they built has the potential for plenty of social good. The software’s called “iBuyRight” [Web site, Master’s project report] and it helps people make purchases aligned with their personal values. When you’re out shopping, you can scan a product’s UPC code using your camera phone, and iBuyRight will display on your phone’s screen information about the product and the firms behind it, how they treat their workers, associated environmental and health concerns, etc.

Now Lilia claims that Dara O’Rourke, a Berkeley assistant professor who suggested that the team implement this idea, is attempting to remove Lilia from the project and take it over. Lilia says O’Rourke’s core justification for this is that he came up with the idea behind the project. She says that, months into the students’ work building iBuyRight, he filed a draft patent application listing himself as sole inventor.

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Today David at Boingboing pointed out this series of Garfield comic strips from 1989. It’s remarkable for a Garfield story because it’s dark and depressing, and it’s not trying to be funny.

Here’s why this strip blew me away: Jim Davis clearly took the idea from one of my favorite cartoons, an obscure and magnificent Italian short from 1977 called “Feline Fantasies.” There are just way too many strong similarities. (It’s just 7 minutes long and I highly recommend viewing it: see the YouTube box at the bottom of this post.)

In the cartoon a cat awakens to find himself abandoned in his vacant, dilapidated ruin of a house. The starving feline sees visions of the people he loved offering him food, but the hallucinations disappear whenever he approaches them. That’s precisely what happens to Garfield, and Davis uses the same visual past/present layering technique used in the 1977 cartoon. (”Feline Fantasies” appears in Bruno Bozzetto’s film “Allegro Non Troppo“, a decidedly un-Disney homage to Disney’s “Fantasia.”)

This is not the darkest Garfield story. When I was little I found what are still two of the most disturbing comic strips I’ve ever read. They appear in the 1984 book “Garfield: His 9 Lives” which tells stories of Garfield’s past and future. In “Primal Self,” Garfield appears to viciously murder a doddering old lady. The other is a photorealistic strip entitled “Lab Animal.” (I wish I still had this book! If you know where I can find these strips online please point me to them.)