For those of you with a big appetite, we’ve got a special sweet hidden away. Check out this great little recitation of Poe’s “The Red Death” — also read by William S. Burroughs — at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

Read and watch more at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia

Everyone has at least one funny person they follow on Twitter just for the lulz, but sometimes the things they say would be even more laughable if they weren’t constantly spewing from the same avatar.

Peanutweeter changes that. The @Peanutweeter Tumblr blog and Twitter feed fulfill a very simple idea: Matching somewhat random Twitter posts with less-random Peanuts comics. The results are hilarious.

“The site arose from the concept that the amusing and sometimes outrageous tweets out there would be even funnier or sometimes darker if they came from someone that everyone could identify with,” site creator T. Jason Agnello told Wired.com by e-mail.

More on WIRED’s Underwire

There’s nothing funny about Palin or her influence on our democracy, but together we can use satire to make an impact and undermine her aura of authenticity and altruism. Satire is an effective tool to take the conservative opposition’s perceived strengths and use it against them, which is what we’re doing here with Palin’s movie.

Submit what you think Palin has left out at palinundefeated.com and you could win her bobblehead.

The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making “illegal streaming” of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.

In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix “deficiencies that could hinder enforcement” of intellectual property laws.

The report was prepared by Victoria Espinel, the first Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator who received Senate confirmation in December 2009, and represents a broad tightening of many forms of intellectual property law including ones that deal with counterfeit pharmaceuticals and overseas royalties for copyright holders. (See CNET’s report last month previewing today’s white paper.)

Some of the highlights:

• The White House is concerned that “illegal streaming of content” may not be covered by criminal law, saying “questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works.” To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to “clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances.”

• Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move “would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses.”

• Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s generally illegal to distribute hardware or software–such as the DVD-decoding software Handbrake available from a server in France–that can “circumvent” copy protection technology. The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to “inform rightholders,” “provide samples of such devices,” and assist “them in bringing civil actions.”

The term “fair use” does not appear anywhere in the report. But it does mention Web sites like The Pirate Bay, which is hosted in Sweden, when warning that “foreign-based and foreign-controlled Web sites and Web services raise particular concerns for U.S. enforcement efforts.” (See previous coverage of a congressional hearing on overseas sites.)

The usual copyright hawks, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the paper, which grew out of a so-called joint strategic plan that Vice President Biden and Espinel announced in June 2010…

[continues at CNET]

Spotted via io9.com, thanks to Cyriaque Lamar for the post.

Earlier this week, we decided that the only way to deal with the exploding celebrity Death Star that is Charlie Sheen was to take his spectacularly hubristic comments and put them in the mouths of superheroes, with the help of Chris Haley and Curt Franklin of the webcomic Let’s Be Friends Again.

You, the readers, told us that the six measly pieces of original art where your favorite Marvel and DC characters reiterate the philosophical jewels of the only celebrity whose veins pump pure tiger blood was simply not enough, and we have heard your demands.

Update: Actually Sheen may be trying to use his new-found superpower for good, the Hollywood Reporter is claiming he’s going to Haiti with Sean Penn.

Read More on Comics Alliance

Robert Blankenheim and Derek Johnson Productions have created a trailer for ET-X: Extinction, an unnecessarily gritty and violent sequel to Steven Spielberg’s family-friendly blockbuster.

In this preview, grown-up footage of Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore is spliced with generic disaster flick scenes (starring an authoritative Morgan Freeman, natch) and new animation of the red-eyed, cobra-necked extraterrestrials:

Gregg Gillis a/k/a Girl Talk. Photo: Tom Purves (CC)

Profiled in 2009’s disinformation documentary Rip: A Remix Manifesto, Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, is getting the “next big thing” treatment in the New York Times Magazine (incidentally, his new album is slamming and *free* at Illegal-art.net):

Imagine old, bald Pete Townshend shuffling gingerly onstage as a synth burbles up behind him — “Let My Love Open the Door.” Now imagine the rapper Pimp C already on that stage, in a white fur suit and hat, holding up four fingers to show off his bling. A kick line of girls in black minishorts walks it out for DJ Unk, who’s rapping about a kick line of girls, then Levon Helm appears on a drum riser to chirp out “The Weight.” Also onstage: Jay-Z, Black Sabbath, Rick Springfield, Kesha, Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, the Ramones and Tupac and Biggie Smalls (both back from the dead) and hundreds more. In the audience are a few thousand fans jammed together beneath a blinding light show, waving their arms as rolls of toilet paper and explosions of confetti fall around them. You sense they’re feeling the same freedom, daring and camaraderie that they might at a house party when someone’s parents are away. This is pretty much the state of affairs at a Girl Talk show these days.

Girl Talk is the stage name of the 29-year-old Pittsburgh native Gregg Gillis.

In November, Gillis and his label, Illegal Art, released the fifth Girl Talk album, “All Day,” as a free download. Within 24 hours, several sites had posted annotations of “All Day,” cataloging the samples on the album —there are 373 of them. Download traffic was so heavy that MTV News ran the headline “Girl Talk Apologizes for Breaking the Internet” — hyperbole, but not far from the truth. Illegal-art.net reports that “All Day” was downloaded so often that the servers crashed. In Girl Talk’s honor, Pittsburgh declared Dec. 7, 2010, “Gregg Gillis Day.”

All this excitement is focused on a performer whose instrument is a laptop. Girl Talk songs are mash-ups: chunks of other people’s songs combined into new ones: the Rolling Stones and the rapper Wiz Khalifa, Ice Cube and Devo. The mash-ups sound ironic to the ironically inclined and like pure joy to the joyfully inclined, and for both camps they’re fun to dance to. These are not just a collection of other people’s hooks; Girl Talk has created a new kind of hook that encompasses 50 years of the revolving trends of pop music. Sometimes cynicism is a hook, sometimes the hook is humor, angst, irony, aggression, sex or sincerity. Girl Talk’s music asserts all these things at once…

[continues in the New York Times Magazine]

Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years).

The arc of “A Klingon Christmas Carol” follows the familiar Dickens script: An old miser is visited on a hallowed night by three ghosts who shepherd him through a voyage of self-discovery. The narrative has been rejiggered to match the Klingon world view.

For starters, since there is neither a messiah nor a celebration of his birth on the Klingon planet of Kronos, the action is pegged to the Klingon Feast of the Long Night. Carols and trees are replaced with drinking, fighting and mating rituals. And because Klingons are more concerned with bravery than kindness, the main character’s quest is for courage.

Read More in the Wall Street Journal

There’s two Christmas classics — a 1935 version of A Christmas Carol and Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe — plus Orson Welles’ “The Stranger,” and four Alfred Hitchcock movies. And you can also watch William Shatner’s legendary anti-racism film for Roger Corman, several Vincent Price classics and the original “Night of the Living Dead.”

These aren’t video clips, but entire movies, including one about a bank robbery that stars Johnny Cash. And if you want something even more offbeat, try the 1970s TV movie “Rescue from Gilligan’s Island” or — for Christmas — “Santa Conquers the Martians.”

Less than a month after South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were forced to apologize for lifting material for a spoof of Inception from the website CollegeHumor, the show is again facing accusations of content theft. The producers of the animated hit, including Viacom and Comedy Central, are being sued for allegedly ripping off a copyrighted music video for the viral phenomenon What What (In the Butt).

The video was produced by Brownmark Films based on a song by Samwell. Released in 2007, it became a massive hit and was featured on PerezHilton.com and VH1’s Best Week Ever, and has been downloaded over 33 million times on YouTube. According to the site, it’s one of the most watched music videos of all time…

U.S. copyright law allows people narrowly limited rights to use copyrighted works without permission under what is known as “fair use,” and parody is an established fair use. (For those interested in learning more about fair use exceptions to copyright, Standford University has a useful guide.) So what do you think? The original and the South Park parody are both shown below. Comments welcome!

Writes Michael Paulus:

Animation was the format of choice for children’s television in the 1960s, a decade in which children’s programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.These Icons are usually grotesquely distorted from the human form from which they derive.

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

These characters have become conventions that are set, defined, and well-known personas in our culture. Being that they are so commonplace and accepted as existing I thought I would dissect them like science does to all living objects — trying to come to an understanding as to their origins and true physiological make up. Possibly to better understand them and see them in a new light for what they are in the most basic of terms.

Art Czar: Tell me about “Duck and Cover”

MacDowell: “Duck and Cover” was painted for a group show at Crewest Gallery in LA. I wanted an urban graffiti vibe to fit with the gallery, so I constructed the spray can out of cardboard and glued it to the canvas. The theme comments on human nature’s natural ability to lift up heros, only to knock them down. How anyone who has an original thought or idea outside of the status quo, usually gets silenced and sacrificed. People in power fear the power of the people.

Amen.

Check out more great posts from the Art Czar!

(Beware of the dark side.)

The next time your good times are more boring than blaring, why not introduce an Exquisite Corpse?

Wikipedia explains:

Exquisite corpse (also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.

Here are the ground rules my tong has adopted for our diabolical creations:

1. Open your third eye and seek out a nearby text. Any book, magazine, flyer, poster, website — perhaps this luminous scroll? — will do.

2. Find a random passage and copy a found sentence onto a piece of paper.

3. Pass the paper from comrade to comrade in any way that seems to fit the mood.

4. Each person generally writes one sentence. Feel free to write sentence fragments, letting your co-conspirators finish your thoughts.

Read more here…

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism…

[continues in the New York Times]

Many news outlets are confused exactly what is the point of this video (deal with the ’80s Nintendo video game sounds at your own risk).

I have tried to figure what the hell this is about, the site Know Your Meme did an exemplar job of why the internet media is even talking about this now, and Matt Zoller Setiz on Salon made a good connection where some of the video was sourced from:

Hope you like what you read, for more about me, please check out my blog at www.mickeyz.net.

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If you were to open your mouth and belt out the words “this land is your land,” you could rest assured that someone nearby would add: “this land is my land.” The chorus to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 classic is common knowledge … as are the first couple of verses.

But it isn’t until you get to the later verses — the verses often omitted from official versions — that you start comprehendin’ what good ol’ Woody (1912–1967) had in mind:

As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me

In the squares of the city / In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me

Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned the song in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless
America.” Let’s also not forget the words he scrawled on his guitar:

“This machine kills fascists.”

Woody said: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ’cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their lyrics to challenge the saccharine platitudes of pop music. From Bob Dylan in the 1960s to Ani DiFranco today, American folk singers have provided a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.

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Above: Photo by Al Aumuller, courtesy of the United States Library of Congress

The above is a chapter from  50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed To Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism. For more about the author, please check out www.mickeyz.net.

Greenpeace UK held a rebranding contest to generate fresh new redesigns of the BP logo.

That plain green flower was introduced in 2000, and ten years later … it’s time for an update.

One of my favorites is to the right.

500+ results are included in a Flickr set. Enjoy.