Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: this half-head of a statue on display in the British Museum. Link

The threatening message received by a US Navy ship in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a notorious radio troll known to seasoned skippers as the "Filipino Monkey."

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted...

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Update:Check out this awesome comment from Om -- lots of juicy detail on the Monkey and his imitator.

Over at Blogging.la, Ruth Waytz writes:

With a heavy heart I deliver the sad news that our friend Maila Nurmi, famous for her portrayal of Vampira, has passed at age 86. Maila passed away peacefully in her sleep at home. Funeral arrangements are pending legal steps as Maila had no relatives. Her friends are trying to get her a spot at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and will likely plan some sort of hearse procession for her.

Link.

Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog writes,

It's not completely surprising that the Army wants to hire a band to tour its bases jn Afghanistan and Kuwait.  The armed services get all kinds of folks, to entertain the troops.  "But it's the way that they solicit for rock bands that makes the whole thing hilarious," Stephen Trimble notes. 

First, a summary of what the Army is seeking:

Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band, group not to exceed seven people for tour of FOB's [forward operating bases] in Kuwait and Afghanistan for February 4-13 2008. The band should be an active rock band, with a music genre consisting of Southern Rock, Pop Rock, Post-Grunge and Hard Rock. At least one member of the band should be recognizable as a professional celebrity. Protective military equipment, such as kevlar, body armour, eye and ear protection will be provided when the group is travelling on military rotary or fixed wing aircraft.

Oh, and it gets better. Link.

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CC-licensed image from Flickr user c h e e s e roc's photostream: Link.

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Snip from an article on AllAfrica.com:

"It is the Kenyan People Who Have Lost the Election," headlined Pambazuka News in its special Kenya election edition on January 3.

"But the real tragedy of Kenya," the editorial continued, is that the political conflict is not about alternative political programmes that could address ... landlessness, low wages, unemployment, lack of shelter, inadequate incomes, homelessness, etc. ... [instead] it boils down to a fight over who has access to the honey pot that is the state. ...[citizens] are reduced to being just being fodder for the pigs fighting over the trough."

Commentaries of particular interest from the U.S.include an op-ed in the Washington Post by Caroline Elkins, "What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," a statement by Africa Action stating that U.S.-Kenya policy should support "robust democratic processes" rather than be defined by "a narrow agenda of the war on terror and international business", and a statement by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars highlighting "the role of the U.S. government -- far from a neutral player -- both before and after the elections" and the danger that U.S. involvement will be biased by its close military relations with the Kenyan government..

More on current events in Kenya at AllAfrica.com: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3. (via Ned Sublette)

A special event for the release of the terrifically entertaining new Feral House book, The Hollywood Hellfire Club (with a beautiful cover by Drew Friedman), will be held on January 15 at The Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles at 8pm.

They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama’s boy, and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts. They were “The Bundy Drive Boys,” and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts.

The last thing one might expect from the tony street north of Sunset Blvd. in Brentwood’s Bundy Drive would be a clan of obstreperous dipsomaniacs, but this was the '30s and '40s, when cocktail hour was a patriotic imperative, and the studio system was an autocratic lunacy to rebel against. (Well, some things never change.) This evening we’re celebrating the release of Feral House’s Hollywood’s Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and ‘The Bundy Drive Boys’ by screening the amazing early talkie Svengali starring John Barrymore as the piercing-eyed hypnotic music master and Marian Marsh as the mesmerized underage beauty Trilby.

Also showing: W.C. Fields’ dirty short "The Dentist" and rare clips from Barrymore and Errol Flynn home movies. We’ll also be displaying original art by John Decker, the man who collaborated on a West Hollywood art gallery with Errol Flynn, drew the notorious Barrymore Death Bed Sketch, and whose forgeries now hang in museums across the country, including Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Authors Gregory William Mank, Charles Heard and Bill Nelson will be available to sign copies of their celebrated book. Tickets - $10

Link

Sample chapter 1 | Sample chapter 2

Dan sez, "Since you liked Chu Enoki's garbage city, you might like Chris Harvey's Mandala of Perfect Happiness, a sculpture made entirely from cheap plastic objects, many of them from 99 cent stores. Here are some pictures of it in my Flickr." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

SimCity has just been released as free software under the GPL version 3 license (though the name has been changed to Micropolis for trademark reasons; it was the original working title). This was precipitated by the inclusion of SimCity on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines, but no reason the kids should have all the fun. Can't wait to see the SimCity hacks that emerge now:

The "MicropolisCore" project includes the latest Micropolis (SimCity) source code, cleaned up and recast into C++ classes, integrated into Python, using the wonderful SWIG interface generator tool. It also includes a Cairo based TileEngine, and a cellular automata machine CellEngine, which are independent but can be plugged together, so the tile engine can display cellular automata cells as well as SimCity tiles, or any other application's tiles.

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some "creative" programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it's just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it's content sure is interesting to see.

In any case, it's out there for you to grab and have fun with. It was originally written in C and of course is old (created before 1983 which is ancient in Internet time). Don spent a lot of time cleaning the code up (including ANSIfying it, reformatting it, optimizing, and bullet-proofing it) as best he could. Don ported the Mac version of SimCity to SunOS Unix running the NeWS window system about 15 years ago, writing the user interface in PostScript. A year or so later he ported it to various versions of Unix running X-Windows, using the TCL/Tk scripting language and gui toolkit. Several years later when Linux became viable, it was fairly straightforward to port that code to Linux, and then to port that to the OLPC.

Link (via /.)