techyum ::

In Oakland, they must resort to coming up with very creative ways to combat the problems of hookers and their customers using their streets as biohazard disposal sites: I think the sign says it all. Nice! The entire set (including the yuckiness the hos and Johns leave behind) is in this Hooker Tracks Flickr set. (via Evil Sign Post)

Um, what was I saying earlier about Swarovski-encrusted… um, things? I can’t remember now that I’m basking in the glow of these sparkly, sweetly cheesy USB drives. Everyone knows that if you ain’t got that bling you ain’t got a thing, and these drives — available up to 2G (approx. $155) — would certainly show the world you’ve got some ice, ice, baby. With ten of these around my neck, I’d be the baddest bitch on the block. Of course, I live in the Castro, so it’s not like I’d be the *only* bitch on the block.
Swarovski crystals adorn USB flash drive; link to Japanese Rakuten store item page with custom orders (ubergizmo.com, via Shiny Shiny)

Like a surprising number of my friends, I’m lactose-intolerant, so dairy products make me ill in a variety of unsexy ways — this started about the time I turned 18. Earlier today I saw Boing Boing linked to a BBC article about the lactose gene, which helps humans break down the sugars in milk; the article suggests that milk drinking is an “advantageous evolution trait”. However, in reading the in-depth piece “Not Milk?” at Scientific American, it seems to be a gene variant that developed for a specific portion of the population and SA tells us “that the ability to digest the milk sugar probably resulted from the advent of dairy farming.” Adaptive evolution traits as a response to commerce culture? Interesting stuff. But what’s left out of yesterday’s BBC piece that I find most fascinating is in this Scientific American snip, “About 80 percent of the people in southern Europe now are lactose intolerant, which means that there was a relatively small window for the gene variant to have come into prevalence in northern Europe.” I am *so* going to start the Lactard Liberation Front.
Not Milk? Neolithic Europeans Couldn’t Stomach the Stuff (sciam.com)
Milk tolerance gene emerged recently (boingboing.net)

I’ve always known that if I were somehow suddenly caught up in a web of international intrigue and had to single-handedly save a busload of schoolchildren I could defuse any time bomb with a candy wrapper, a length of garden hose, the heel of a stiletto boot and the hastily cannibalized innards of my favorite travel vibrator. Afterward, I’d be given medals, which I would of course, refuse (but I’d accept the lifetime supply of free vibrators). I know this is all true because it always is in the movies, but now Xan Brooks over at the Guardian Unlimited’s blogs has to go and piss in my Cheerios (or actually, in my pool of flameball-ready, bad-guys killing gasoline) and start a post about debunking movie lies — like that a cigarette tossed into gas won’t blow up like in MI3. Tom Cruise will get you, Brooks.
Expose the reel lies (blogs.guardian.co.uk)

We Make Money Not Art recently visited the Georg Kolbe Museum to see the exhibition, The Power of the Tangible – Sculpture Today! and it’s a veritable macabre bestiary of taxidermied animals in compelling Bosch-like tableaus — it’s like totally Goth. Check out the post and WMMNA’s Flickr tag of the Frankenstinian creations, and stuffed animals made out of… animals. Unlike the Edie pics, the source is most reputable.
Update: Bonus! Make Magazine tells us how to do this at home with mice in Mouse taxidermy @ home, a la local (San Francisco) curio shop Paxton Gate. Ew! Neat!

While Factory Girl is still in theaters, check out this intriguing collection of Edie Sedgwick photos found via Bedazzled.
Update: I think someone was being naughty — the photos are now gone. Hmmmm….

Speaking of my favorite East Coast city, Gridskipper has a great post about Overstated’s helpful San Francisco-New York neighborhood translation tool, where those of us who totally get that Marina is a bad word can learn to navigate NYC by our own prejudices about people who populate neighborhoods wearing shirts with foreign phrases like “phi beta” on them and when slumming it in the Mission, act as though they excrete swarovski-encrusted turds that smell like parfum. Oh, snap!
New Francity? San FranYorksco? (gridskipper.com)

Friend and colleague Scott Beale recently visited New York and shot his usual, trademark incredible photos of his visit to Ground Zero. If you want to see what the site looks like in its present incarnation — or like me, you’ve never seen it and only get glimpses from mainstream media and hunger for real perspectives — don’t miss his photo set.
World Trade Center Ground Zero Re-Visited (laughingsquid.com; photo credit Scott Beale)

Or, fetishists who need a really incredible flashlight. But seriously, I’ve noticed that people into flashlights are *really* into them, and not in the “I slipped in the shower and somehow it got stuck there” kind of way. The GatLight also looks to be an engineer’s and machinist’s wet dream, and plus it’s really pretty, which is all that matters when I’m trying to find where the Techyum minions have hidden the riding crop and I’m perfecting my Joan Crawford rage for the next “no more Macally mini mice!” tirade.
Lumencraft Gatlight V3 LED Flashlight, a Hoity Toity Precision-Machined Jewel (info, link to product page + video, gizmodo.com)

Crooks and Liars has a nice video slice of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show earnestly trying to understand Laura Bush’s statements about why we just can’t feel sunny and optimistic about that war on TV in Iraq. Short, compressed and loads fast in a couple formats, and worth that bitingly ironic laugh Stewart is oh-so-good at, er, detonating.
The Daily Show on Laura Bush’s Media Excuse (crooksandliars.com)