Boing Boing reader lokayukta says, “India is going through its ‘Egypt moment,’ and for our version of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, we have the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, where a 72 year old social acitivist named Anna Hazare is fasting ’til death’ to force the government to pass a comprehensive anti-corruption legislation, the Jan Lokpal Bill. The movement has already caught fire in hundreds of cities around India.”
Category Archives: Make a
Egyptian activists’ protest plan, translated to English
As I publish this blog post, we’re just a few hours away from the planned start time of mass protests in Egypt, possibly the largest yet in a week of historically large gatherings calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down from some 30 years in power. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic tells Boing Boing,
A Twitter follower stepped up to translate excerpts from the Egyptian protest plan that’s been floating around (the one that said don’t use Twitter or Facebook). We’re only publishing excerpts — i.e. this is more general information and demands, not tactical stuff — but they are amazing.
How the Bandit, Coors and a bunch of Makers changed the course of booze history
So last night, while attempting to explain the plot of Smokey and the Bandit to my husband, it occurred to me that I didn’t really understand the back story that spawned this, one of my favorite childhood films. Why did Bandit and Snowman (and Fred) have a long way to go and a short time to get there? There was beer in most parts of Georgia by the 1970s. And even if you were trying to get booze to a dry county, why start in Texas and only give yourself 28 hours?
Thanks to Wikipedia and the very helpful Stephan Zielinski, I discovered the awful truth—Smokey and the Bandit is centered around America’s brief love affair with Coors Banquet Beer.
All that work, for Coors? It’s true. Wikipedia explained that the beer wasn’t available East of Oklahoma at the time. But I didn’t get the full extent of what was really going on until I read a 1974 Time magazine article sent to me by Zielinski. If, like me, you didn’t begin drinking until the late 1990s, this is going to come as a shock, but, once upon a time, Coors was apparently the best American breweries had to offer.
CycLAvia attracts over 100,000 cyclists to car-free Los Angeles streets
If you’d told me a year ago that the City of Los Angeles would close off almost 8 miles of primary city streets to let cyclists have free rein for a day I never would have believed it. If I hadn’t seen it actually happen with my own eyes yesterday, I’d still be suspicious. But it’s true: thanks to the amazing efforts of the die-hard volunteers behind the project, yesterday the first ever CycLAvia (a riff on the South American Ciclovía idea) took place and some 100,000 residents took to their bikes and got a glimpse of what the city might be like if at least some parts of it were car-free. As an avid cyclist living in LA, I’ve long said this is an amazing city to bike in and that it takes on a whole new life when you see it from a bicycle. But most often the reaction I get from non-cyclists is that I must be crazy to ride a bike in LA. I’m not, and judging by the photos on flickr and reactions on twitter a ton of people now see the city a little differently. With any luck this is just the first of many upcoming bike-friendly events in the city. I know I can’t wait to see where this leads! (Follow @Cyclavia for future details)
Photos by Tara Brown and Jory Felice
Under Surveillance: comic on digital civil rights in Europe
European Digital Rights (EDRi) has released the digital comic Under Surveillance as an information and awareness tool for young adults.
In an unspecified European city, a group of young people works, studies, travels, publishes on forums and blogs, exchanges on social networks and meets at concerts… A “difficult” situation in the life of a young photo-journalist and his friends’ mobilization to help him out of this situation illustrate the breaches of personal data protection facilitated by the use of new technologies. The comic book underlines the consequences but also possible remedies. A glossary and links to useful websites come with the comic book. The comic book “Under surveillance” is available in Catalan, Czech, English and French. Online versions are made available on the project partners’ websites. 20,000 hard copies are available in each language and are disseminated for free.
Project Einstein: rural kids in Guatemala photograph their lives
The youth photo training group Project Einstein got its start with group of young people living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. One of the participants came up with the name because “Einstein was a refugee but could still do great things.”
Here’s a collection of images taken by Q´eqchi´ Maya kids and teens in a rural part of Guatemala known as Zona Reyne, where the project is currently working in partnership with this state development group.
Read more about Project Einstein in Guatemala.
(thanks, Renata Avila!)
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EU “three-strikes” rule set to pass this Weds — call your MEP now!
French copyfighter Jérémie Zimmermann sez,
The negotiations on the Telecoms Package may come to a close this Wednesday. The Council of the European Union is still pushing for ‘three strikes”‘ policies in Europe but is also attempting to allow private corporations to restrict citizens’ Internet access. Will the European Parliament continue to hide behind a disputable legal argumentation provided by the rapporteur Catherine Trautmann, and accept the unacceptable for the future of Internet access in Europe?A campaign page has been set up to allow everyone to contact Members of the European Parliament and urge them to refuse any proposal from the Council allowing “three strikes” policies in Europe, and to explicitly protect EU citizens’ freedom to access the Net.
The new version of the compromise amendment presented by the Council of the EU still allows for restrictions of Internet access such as “three strikes” policies in Europe. Moreover, contrarily to the Parliament’s version, the Council’s proposal also permits private corporations to restrict Internet access, notably enabling entertainment industries to pressure Internet service providers in order to police the Net.
(Thanks, Jérémie!)
After the Game: What Happens to the Losing Team’s Swag?
Somebody is going to lose the World Series. It’s true. I have heard this is how these things work. But, when the inevitable happens, where do all their commemorative hats, T-shirts, shoelaces, giant foam hands, etc. go? After all, nobody knows which team will win. To meet the instant, post-game demand, manufacturers have all that championship memorabilia–for both teams–made up and sitting in a warehouse before the final game is even a twinkle in an announcer’s eye.
If you guessed that it ends up in a dump, you’d be wrong. Mental_floss investigated and found the World Vision, an international Christian charity, gets the losing gear from baseball, football and basketball.
The merchandise doesn’t go to waste, people living in poverty receive new, clean clothes, and the clothing makers recoup some of their losses–they get tax credits for the charitable donations. Why don’t the clothes go to needy families in the United States? Overseas donation is part of the agreement between World Vision and the leagues. The farther away the clothing is, the less likely it is to offend a losing player (or heartbroken Buffalo Bills fan).
In fact, fear of fan alienation used to keep the MLB from donating. Up until two years ago, they required all inaccurate championship clothing be destroyed.
A Doctor’s Advice On How To Read Health News (And Know Whether It’s Full of Crap)
Building a bit off the “conflusion” (Bravo, btw, insert) post from yesterday, I’m going to launch right into something near and dear to my heart: The way biased and badly done health journalism can really mess up the people who read it.
Biased and badly done are two very different things. I don’t have data on this, but I think it’s fair to say that, when the main-stream media (which, BoingBoing aside, includes me) gets a health story wrong, it usually isn’t trying to be intentionally wack. Trouble is, whatever the intent, it leaves you–the reader–in the same place. Conflused.
Luckily, there are people working to help you. Like, for instance, the good folks at Behind the Headlines, a project of the British National Health System that does Q&A;, myth busting and in-depth explanations on the science behind top health news. I first found out about this from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog, which is, in itself, a great site everybody ought to be reading.
Dr. Alicia White, one of the aforementioned “folks” behind Behind the Headlines, has a wonderful primer on the questions you should be asking yourself every time you read health news. Until we police ourselves into doing a consistently better job, sorting the wheat from the chaff is (unfortunately) up to you. This will help. Plus, it’s a fun read:
If you’ve just read a health-related headline that’s caused you to spit out your morning coffee (“Coffee causes cancer” usually does the trick) it’s always best to follow the Blitz slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. On reading further you’ll often find the headline has left out something important, like “Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumours eventually. (Study funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)”.
Typhoon, Floods in the Philippines: first-person BB report from Audrey N. Carpio of The Philippine Star
Photos, above and after the jump, shared with Boing Boing by Audrey N. Carpio of The Philippine Star. Her first-person account from the ongoing disaster follows, and includes recommendations on how you can help the victims. She shot the photos in this post two days after the typhoon, on a relief drive in a town called Tumana. Link to Flickr set.
Typhoon Ondoy by Audrey Carpio
Typhoon Ondoy, aka Tropical Storm Ketsana dumped 40 cm of rain on the Philippines last Saturday before he/she left to wreak watery havoc upon Vietnam and Cambodia. But Manila and its surrounding environs are still in various states of calamity, with many parts of the city still submerged under dirty brown water and others, while drying out, caked in leptospirosis-inducing mud. The government and its presidentiables have been slow to act upon what could’ve been their Hurricane Katrina-hero moment but quick to seize upon relief efforts for electioneering. Instead, it is thanks to the generosity and ingenuity of the Filipino people who mobilized themselves through Twitter and Facebook that hundreds of thousands of victims have been fed, clothed and sheltered.
As early as Saturday evening, when people began to realize that floods have flashed rather quickly and videos of drowning trucks emerged on YouTube, relief plans grew almost organically on the networks. Tweets encouraging people to gather food, blankets, and clothing for donations were some of the earliest; by the next day there was an updatable and sharable Google spreadsheet on all the drop-off and volunteer centers; by Monday, almost all status updates and tweets had to do with emergency hotline numbers, relatives of friends who were stranded on a rooftop, and traffic advisories warning which roads were impassable. A Google map of people in need of rescuing was uploaded, although its usefulness is questionable, considering the general low-techness of the National Disaster Coordinating Council’s rescue squads they only had 13 rubber boats with which to deploy to the affected barangays †or villages (to put it into perspective, 1.9 million people were inundated with flood water, nearly 380,000 have been evacuated into schools, churches and other emergency shelters, and 246 people have died.
