Patrick Macias has a couple of rare photographs of the original Godzilla, circa 1954/55, at a photo shoot at Toho Studios in Tokyo.

Link

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Waterproof cameras are no big deal these days, but in the 1930s, Bruce Mozert was the only person in the world who had one. Mozert pioneered underwater photography in Silver Springs, Florida. He had stopped there en route to a shoot in Miami in 1938 when he'd heard that his favorite actor, Johnny Weissmuller, was filming Tarzan there; he ended up staying for the rest of his life (he still lives nearby). Mozert wanted the world to know how amazingly clear the water in Silver Springs was. So he built a giant waterproof housing for his camera, put on some scuba gear, and—for the next 45 years—created memorable underwater scenes of everyday American life. He did fun things like use dry ice to make bubbles and cans of condensed milk to create smoke.

Silver Springs: The Underwater Photography of Bruce Mozert (Amazon)
The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert (The Smithsonian)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

All hail Tiana Walton, the schoolgirl who set the record for most snails on her face at once, coming in at 25 of the little beggars:

Her previous personal best was just nine.

The rules state that competitors have just one minute to put the snails on their face before tipping their head forward for 10 seconds.

Tiana, of Alvanley, Cheshire, said: "I am not squeamish. It is relaxing but it feels a bit cold. They are quite smelly and you can see their big long eyes facing you. I think my friends at school will say 'urgh'."

Schoolgirl smashes the world record as she lets 25 snails slide across her face

The London Science Museum's image gallery sports this beautiful trio of nested Klein bottles (a Klein bottle is like a Moebius strip extruded into one more dimension): "This is one of a series of glass Klein bottles made by Alan Bennett in Bedford, United Kingdom for the Science Museum, London. It consists of three Klein bottles, one inside another. A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions. In the series Alan Bennett made Klein bottles analogous to Mobius strips with odd numbers of twists greater than one." Klein bottle, 1995-1996. (via Neatorama)

I snapped this photo of a passive millimeter wave scan machine set up in the main entrance hall at Denver International Airport on Friday evening. The machine was swiveling back and forth, searching people who didn't even know they were being scanned. I'm sure some of the people scanned weren't passengers; they were simply coming to pick up or drop off friends and relatives.

I wanted to see if they would scan my 11-year-old daughter as she walked by so I walked over to the desk with the computer monitor on it. I got a peek at the monitor for a second or two before one of the bald guys to the left of the TSA agent jumped in front of me and said I wasn't allowed to look. I couldn't tell which person was undressed on the monitor.

If federal agents set up this system at a shopping mall, would people care?

The TSA's blog states that the scanner's monitor be placed in a "remote location":

A couple of bloggers have advocated for the officer viewing the image to be out in the public area. We specifically require the remote location to protect the privacy of passengers using the machine. We just don’t think it’s appropriate for other passengers, airport, airline employees or just anybody walking by to see the images, much less snap a photo with a camera phone or anything else and post that image to TMZ.com or who knows where. That’s also why officers are not allowed to bring anything, including phones, bags or other items into the remote viewing location.

Wolfenflickr is a Flash-based implementation of Castle Wolfenstein that decorates the castle's walls with random images pulled from any Flickr stream (or any Flickr tag). Shooting Nazis and looking at snapshots: two great tastes that taste great together. Wolfenflickr (via Wonderland)

Shorpy, a photo-blog devoted to super-high-rez images from a century (or so) ago, like this magnificent 1924 shot of "clerks calculating the 'soldiers' bonus' for the War Department." Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog (Thanks, Mitch!)

Troy Paiva's Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is a stunning collection of "light-painted" night photography from a variety of modern ruins: ghost towns, abandoned mass-transit stations, an airplane graveyard and others. Paiva places dramatic colored lights in the scene to bring out its essential spookiness, something that is often missing from photos of glorious old ruins. The book includes an intro from BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and copious notes on the different sites ("TOADS" -- temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces) that Paiva and his fellow urban explorers visited (Paiva also includes colorful, curmudgeonly grumps about the damned film location and set people who sex up his ruins by adding extra graffiti and so on). You can see more of Paiva's work on his site, Lost America, which chronicles his serious nighttime infiltration habit. Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration

See also: Book: Night Visions: The Art of Urban Exploration

The photos of this steroid abuser's violent chest-acne (and the subsequent scarring) ought to be posted in the changing room at every gym in the world. Before you complain about how gross the photos on the click-through below are, just be thankful they didn't photograph his shrivelled, damaged testicles, too.

He was a constant user of anabolic-androgenic steroids, of which acne is a side effect -- as is damaged sperm and shrunken testicles, both of which he also possessed.

Doctors ordered the patient to quit steroids and start taking antibiotics. Two months later, the acne was gone. So was the muscle. Only gruesome scarring remained -- and as his doctors wrote last week in the Lancet, that "is likely to remain with the young man for the rest of his life."

Graphic Evidence Against Steroid Abuse

Top: The Riviera lobby in 1957, Bottom: The same view in 2007

Peter Moruzzi sent me a copy of his gorgeous new book, called Havana Before Castro. It's loaded with photos of the beautiful mid-century architecture of Havana's resorts, casinos, and restaurants. On his website for the book, Moruzzi has added some “then and now” images to his Havana site.

Chris Nichols says: "It’s really the most freakish time machine place I’ve ever seen. I mean...the art! the chairs! The silverware! It’s all still there. So weird and wonderful."

Havana before Castro

I love DangerRanger's "mugshots" of people from the The Black Rock City Department of Public Works at Burning Man. DangerRanger's DPW Mug Shots (via Laughing Squid)

Last weekend, I was one of the guests of honor at 3PiCon in Springfield, MA, along with Randall "XKCD" Munroe, who once infamously depicted me as blogging from a hot-air balloon in cape and goggles. This has become a motif for me, so that wherever I go, people give me capes and/or goggles. I brought along a set and wore them to our final panel together on Sunday, and Dan Noe, the Pi-Con photographer, got some nice shots of the event. 3Pi-Con (Thanks, Dan!)

Jay Lake sez, "Yesterday I visited an abandoned 1901 hydroelectric plant down in the bottom of a canyon in the Oregon highlands east of Mount Hood. The photo series might be of interest to Boing Boing readers, especially those interested in lost technology, abandoned places, anacrotech and Big Engineering." White River Falls Power Plant (Thanks, Jay!)

Photographer Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131 is a beautiful photo essay depicting the everyday lives of young women in the Israeli army. Papo herself was born in Ohio and raised in Israel. She served two years in the Israeli Air Force starting when she was eighteen before returning to the US. The project is named after her own ID number during service.

Serial No. 3817131

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Wired's got a fabulous gallery of comic-inspired tattoos from ComicCon up today -- love this shot of old-school DC art. Geek Ink: Comics Fans Show Off Tattoos

(Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Matt sez, "One of my favorite writers, Caitlin R. Kiernan, was the subject of verbal abuse, profanity and homophobic remarks from some sort of security guard when she and her companion went to visit H.P. Lovecraft's grave. The guard attempted to make them delete all of the photographs they had taken, despite the absence of any policy forbidding it. Are cameras like catnip for abusive, power-mad rent-a-cops now?"

Basic story: Caitlin and her friend have been visiting the grave for a decade or so, paying respects quietly, as do many people. It's one of the most photographed stones in the world. The graveyard's policies, listed on its website, do not prohibit photos. The security was incredibly abusive and jerky. Just another skirmish in the war against photography, as the brave security guards of the world prevent the theft of photons from our poor, helpless inanimate objects.

As Spooky was getting into the car, I finally looked him in the eye and said the only thing I said during the entire encounter (which elapsed over the space of maybe three or four minutes, start to finish, at the most). I pointed a finger at the man and, very quietly, I said, "You will be reported." He screamed, "You do that, you piece of shit!." This is the only time I got a clear look at the man. He was white, late middle-aged, seemed to have about three-days worth of beard (salt and pepper), and spoke with a heavy regional accent (don't ask which one). I am fairly certain that he had been drinking, and he may have been intoxicated. He certainly acted like a belligerent drunkard.

"...stains on the carpet and stains on the scenery..." (Thanks, Matt!)

(Image: H.P. Lovecraft's grave a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike photo from StrangeInterlude's Flickr stream)

Flickr user Brittnybadger has a drop-dead gorgeous set of disassembled household appliances, saying, "this was my senior thesis project at the hartford art school this past year...i took apart used cooking/cleaning appliances, and arranged their interior parts very systematically on a white sheet of bristol board. my intention was to explore the hidden "brains" of these appliances; allowing us to view these everyday objects from a new perspective." disassembled household appliances (via Kottke)

Marilyn sez, "Pual Nicklen's amazing underwater photos of sailfish are a stunning series of seriously bizarre-looking sailfish attacking a school of sardines as big as an elephant." In the Whirl (Thanks, Marilyn!)

My kids were as amused as I was to see the image created by two posters that were taped back-to-back on a window at a supermarket.

Murilee Martin's come back from the Monterey Historic Automobile Races with a sweet gallery of the automobile emblems and ornaments of yesteryear, when cars were wonderful. Not Just Engines At Monterey: Emblems, Chrome, And Shiny Baubles! (Thanks, Murilee!)

UPDATE: Bigfoot Corpse is Hoax? A Boing Boing reader says: "This site has also been making the rounds - it appears that the person behind the whole thing is a known hoaxer. And the corpse is a simple bought costume. Not too sure about credibility, but seems more reasonable than being the real deal."

Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo writes about the Bigfoot body purported to be discovered in the woods in Northern Georgia. The guys who claim to have discovered it are holding a press conference in Palo Alto on Friday.

Is it real? It certainly looks like the real deal, and with a surprising variety of features.

The hominoid (please note, not hominid) body, found in the Georgia woods, is now in a secure location, under armed guard, and set to be examined by a battery of academic scholars, skeptical scientists, Bigfoot researchers, and debunking writers.

Who is to say the discovery of Bigfoot won’t happen this way?

With offers of millions of dollars, just for the photographs of the body, Loren Coleman and Cryptomundo was given one copy of the first image to share with you, our readers.

The body doesn’t look exactly like people thought it would, because the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot has been the model in our minds. However, this looks as if it is an actual apelike primate. Indeed, the gorilla-like facial features, the robust lack of canines, and the grinding surfaces shown in the teeth suggest a bulky vegetarian with a mixture of higher primate characteristics.

Will further tests and the proposed live capture of others prove beyond a doubt that Bigfoot is a new species? Stay tuned.

Georgia Gorilla: Bigfoot Body’s First Photo! (Cryptomundo)

From Google Maps, here's an obviously manipulated photo of some trees next to a golf course in the Netherlands. Is it common for the company that licenses its satellite photos to Google to alter images this way? The discussion in Photoshop Disasters offers up some theories. Google Maps: Unusually Similar Trees = Black Helicopters (Photoshop Disasters)

Documentary film maker Errol Morris has a fascinating piece in the New York Times about "Photography as a Weapon." In it, he interviews Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and expert on digital photographic fraud.

Errol Morris: [D]octored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another. Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003.

Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment. Morris's mockery of the sweeping interpretations made in Powell's photographs.

There is a larger point. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.

Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on.

Photography as a Weapon (New York Times)

Tstamps sez,

I was in Spring Hill, Florida visiting my grandparents, who have all the family pictures of great grandparents and great-great grandparents. Doing the good familial thing, I decided to take the albums and scan the photos so that the rest of the family could see them. I only had one day to do this, and the only place near them was Wal-Mart (the Supercenter by highway 19). So I take the (sometimes) 100 year old photos to Wal-Mart and begin scanning them on their machine.

After a while, a Wal-Mart employee accosts me and tells me that I can't do that because those images are "Copyright to the studios that took them." I look down at my pictures. The picture she is pointing to is one of my great grandmother, taken about 1925. She has been dead since 1998. The photography studio (assuming it was taken by a studio) is not marked, and is long out of business, and the person who took the photo is long dead, as are, likely, his children and all of his business associates. The only known copy of the photo is the one I'm holding, which is owned by my grandparents, who gave it to me to copy.

In disbelief, I point out that the photo is almost 100 years old and the people are all dead. Undeterred, the Wal-Mart employee informs me that "Copyright lasts forever. It's the law." My scans up to that point are deleted and I'm free to leave the store with my old photos unscanned. I guess I should be thankful they didn't have a portable shredder on hand to seize my photos and do away with them right then and there. Is that in the next set of magic federal laws?

100 years old

On Kevin Kelly's Street Use blog, a review of an amazing-sounding photo book about technological improvisation in Thailand, called "Thailand -- Same Same But Different": "No cliches here. No lovely maids, palm beaches or grand temples. Instead Kalak captures odd moments of street use. Plastic chairs in alleys; traffic cone patterns. Even the locals are blind to their off-center beauty. Kalak has a keen eye for the way folks improvise. I think of this work as improv zen." Thailand – Same same, but different! (book) Improvisation in Thailand (review) (via Make)

David sez, "NOAA has an amazing gallery of photos from their work studying coral reef ecosystems. Coral reefs are extremely imperiled all over the world due to climate change, overfishing and pollution. Boing Boing readers might want to see these before many of the reefs depicted are gone." Welcome to "The Coral Kingdom."

Big Happy Funhouse posts scans of old photos it comes across. I especially like this one.

Robbo sez, "Thomas Hawk was forcibly removed from the San Francisco MOMA by two security guards at the direction of the over-zealous Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations. How ironic is that? Why? Taking photos in the atrium. SF MOMA policy on this? Their own web site specifically allows photography in the atrium. Hawk had also previously confirmed this personally with Thea Stein in the Marketing and Communications Department of the museum. Didn't matter to Simon Blint who, according to Hawk, went all aggressive and power-trip happy, even trying to eject his companion."

If the museum has a photography allowed policy in their atrium as explicitly expressed on their website and someone identifies themselves as a photographer, artist and paying and supporting member of museum I would expect less hostility, aggression and harassment. Photography is an art and those of us who choose to practice the great art of street photography ought not be targeted by bullies like Blint. Many of the great artists, artists being shown in the SF MOMA itself were practitioners of street photography. It is ironic that the great Cartier-Bresson, who took thousands of photographs of unsuspecting people in his work, hangs in the museum while a photographer practicing the same type of work gets ejected by a power-trippy asshole. It's hypocritical and disappointing.

Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations at the SF MOMA, Yeah You Asshole, Photography is Not a Crime (Thanks, Robbo!)

Jwilly's "Rich People Rooftops NYC" Flickr set collects images of posh, elaborate rooftop gardens over the penthouses of New York. Rich People Rooftops NYC (via Kottke)