The LA Weekly has a piece out this week by Barry Isaacson about the discovery earlier this year of a number of letters sent by a Jonestown resident to her parents, who lived in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood.

Phyllis and her family were dead for more than a decade by the time her elderly parents moved out of their house in Silver Lake in 1992. Architectural real estate agents had to bring the exquisite midcentury modern on Micheltorena Street back from the brink of decrepitude before selling it to my wife, Jenny, and me. Handing over the keys, they told us that, according to neighborhood folklore, the Alexanders might have left behind a concealed suitcase containing correspondence from their long-dead daughter and grandchildren. We looked but found nothing, and having been made aware of the circumstances of this family’s demise, we felt reluctant to intrude on an almost unimaginable grief.

But this past February, 10 years after we started to raise a family of our own where the Alexanders had raised theirs, a handyman working on our house emerged from the basement carrying a dusty vinyl briefcase. Inside was an extensive collection of press clippings, evidence of an almost obsessive attempt by the Alexanders to make sense of their daughter’s fatal acts of bad judgment.

In a separate envelope were letters written by Phyllis from San Francisco and later from Jonestown, Guyana, where she and her husband had moved with their children in 1975. There were fond letters to their grandparents from Gail and David. The most moving document in the cache was a carbon copy of a painful valediction from Dr. Alexander to Phyllis, written on an old manual typewriter on September 21, 1977. Tenderly, but with eloquent firmness, he reprimands her, perplexed and offended by her embrace of Jim Jones, the deviant cuckoo who had flown into the Alexanders’ nest and whom Phyllis and her fellow Peoples Temple members called “Dad.”

From Silver Lake to Suicide (LA Weekly). Here's a related slideshow in the LA Weekly.

See also this related section of the SDSU Jonestown document archives, "The Chaikin/Alexander Letters," with PDFs of the original documents.

Shmuck Alert is a blog that reports on accounts of people hassling reporters.

Above: Officer Friendly from the Oakland School District Police threatens to "stuff" Oakland Tribune photojournalist Jane Tyska into his cruiser and jail her. If you don't like profanity, cover your ears.

Remind us to watch our elbows next time we're in Oakland! That seems to be all it takes to make the local School District Police Chief go postal! The cop in question is seen hurling invectives and otherwise being a total ass to Oakland Tribune photojournalist Jane Tyska. According to him, the female photog struck his patrol car with her elbow, setting off an on-camera tirade in which he curses her up (and down!), threatens to 'stuff her' in the back of his (fatally-crippled) cruiser and accuses her of trying to incite a riot. Hey occifer, how about a steaming hot cup of 'CHILL THE #&$@% OUT!'? I've seen calmer reactions at school bus collisions...

Schmuck Alert - Potty Mouth Cop (Thanks, Michael!)

Thirty years ago this week, nearly a thousand adults and children lost their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. The settlement was also known as "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", and was formed by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.

Today, some refer to the mass deaths as suicide, others murder. We still don't really know all the facts of what happened -- autopsies were botched, records and forensic evidence were mis-handled, and many of the US government's documents remain classified, out of reach of FOIA requests.

But we understand that most of the people who died on November 18, 1978 drank fruit-flavored Flavor-Aid laced with a variety of intoxicants and poisons: Valium, chloral hydrate, and cyanide. The victims included hundreds of children. Many of the corpses had wounds indicating that they received cyanide injections.

Jones' followers had moved from their Northern California base to the South American jungle the year before. The promise: they'd build a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, a welcoming nation with a Socialist goverment at the time. Jonestown was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God.

In the past 30 years, many documentaries, books, and written reports have been produced about Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. I'll be blogging pointers to some of them today.

I want to start with the one I've returned to again and again -- a radio documentary from 1981 that for me, also defines the lasting power of what radio journalism can achieve. "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," was co-written by my NPR colleague Noah Adams. Here's a snip from the original introduction on npr.org:

In the months preceding the tragedy, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers recorded their tho ughts, their problems and their aspirations. The hundreds of hours of audio tape form the basis of [this] NPR documentary (...) written by James Reston, Jr and Noah Adams, and produced by Deborah Amos. It was based on the tapes Reston acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, and won most major broadcast awards including the Dupont Col umbia Award, the National Headliner Award and the Prix Italia.

Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown recaptures the final months for the People’s Temple cult. After problems arose for the group in San Francisco, they moved to the South American jungle during the 1970's. In 1978, reports of an increasingly hostile and controlling atmosphere by Jones led to a Congressional fact-finding mission into the cult. As the group, led by Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), was preparing to leave they were ambushed. Ryan, three American journalists and a Peoples Temple defector were killed. A dozen other people were injured. The incident was just hours prior to the deaths of the cult members.

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Here's the web page for Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, with audio links. Here is the direct *.ram link for the complete 90 minute program (requires Real Audio). The website for this related NPR feature, produced in 2003, also includes 3 direct audio urls for "Father Cares," broken into 45 minute chunks (requires Real Audio or Windows Media Player). Another powerful, related NPR piece: Noah Adams talks with Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple.

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Here is more on producer Deborah Amos. Here is James Reston's website.

You may also want to obtain a copy of Reston's book, for which this radio work was, in part, preparatory research: Our Father, Who Art In Hell.

I stayed up all night last Saturday listening to Father Cares in entirety. I really hope you listen to it, too -- it's amazing. It captures the souls of those who died, and those who survived, with a sense of lasting respect and sorrow.

Thirty years ago yesterday, 900 people living on a commune in Guyana under the religious guidance of Jim Jones killed themselves, or were murdered. The story of Jonestown is an amazingly twisted tale involving faith, trust, charisma, control, and politics. In my opinion, that story has never been synthesized better than in Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People, just republished this week. Tim Reiterman, the main author of the 1982 book and former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, was investigating the cult for more than a year before the suicides. During a fact-finding mission to Guyana with Congressman leo Ryan, Reiterman was shot by Peoples Temple gunmen. He was injured, but Ryan and several others were killed. That's when all hell broke loose.

As Reiterman points out in his preface to the book, Jones had a sign hanging above his throne with this phrase painted on it: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Indeed. There are still stories from Jonestown waiting to be remembered, and lessons to learn from those stories. Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People is a good place to start. Also, Xeni will be posting a number of Jonestown related items today so please stay tuned.
Buy Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People (Amazon), Interview with Reiterman (TIME)

Watch carefully -- this information in this infomercial will "magically" pull us out of the Great Depression II.

Last week, we announced an Obfuscated code contest with a geektastic prize provided by our sponsor, Safari Books Online, who also offered BB readers one month free online access to any of the following books: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Learning Perl, and Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. The goal was to write a wonderfully obfuscated code snippet that prints out the phrase "Boing Boing." The prize: one year of access to the complete Safari Books Online Library, a digital library of technical books from the likes of O'Reilly, Apress, and Addison-Wesley.

We were absolutely amazed by the entries. There are some incredible bits of code in there. But we had to pick one, so we did. Or rather Joel Johnson did, because this whole thing was his idea to begin with. So we are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural Boing Boing/Safari Books Online: MCD. The entry was pithy, clever, and got the job done (see above). Congratulations, MCD! And thanks to Safari Books Online for sponsoring the contest!

In the comments section about the Pagan Love Song video, Haineux pointed to this fantabulous video of "Alvino Rey playing his pedal steel guitar in an early talk-box-like situation, with an anthropomorphic guitar puppet and a guy in a really odd hat." Truly, what more could you want?

Pygmy tarsiers, long believed extinct, have been found in Indonesia, according to a story in The Globe and Mail. In August, researchers from Texas A&M, led by Sharon Gursky-Doyen, trapped two males and a female in moutain-top mist nets on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. With distinctive eyes, the pygmy tarsiers are primates; they are"about the size of a small mouse;" they have claws instead of nails, which is a distinguishing feature.

Here's a short video from the researchers showing the pygmy tarsier running up a tree.

link to Texas A&M article.

Jack Imel playing the marimbas and tap dancing to "Pagan Love Song." (Via Filled with Chocolate Pudding!)

Michael Minelli is suing Simon & Schuster because he does not think his photograph belongs in the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags.

In the book, Louis noted that Minelli's "popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables--Douche Nine." At the time he was photographed by Louis, Minelli was working the door at the popular "Rehab" party at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. As first reported by Courthouse News Service, Minelli's Clark County District Court lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and legal fees. Last month, three New Jersey women sued Louis and his publisher over their appearance in "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," which they claimed was "vulgar" and presented them as "females who date dubious men."

Alleged "Douchebag" sues author

While on the trail to the falls in Johnston Canyon, which is a wonderful walk off a road that runs between Banff and Lake Louise, we came across this beautiful snow-made creation that declares a couple's love for each other. The snow-made man and woman were starting to melt but here's good wishes to their anonymous creators.

Lidija Davis on ReadWriteWeb summarizes current VC advice for startups and entrepreneurs:

Go back to the garage. That's the message venture capitalists at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA today, are offering to entrepreneurs and startups.

In the midst of one of the worst economic crises the world has seen, investors are in the main optimistic, and agree that to weather this storm and come out on top, today's entrepreneur's need to change their mindset and go back to basics: go back to the garage, and success will follow.

Expect to hear startups saying "yeah, we've gone into 'garage-mode,'" modeling after the term "stealth-mode." The only trouble is what to do with all the boxes?

image source.

Brian Francis Slattery's novel Liberation is a magical, riveting poetic story of a post-economic America where the dollar has vanished and slavery has sprung up in the resulting economic chaos. It concerns the adventures of the Slick Six, a gang of fun-loving super-criminals whose unbeatable fighter, Marco, is at sea on a prison-ship when the nation falters. The guards on the ship kill the warden, begin to trade prisoners to slavers for food and fuel, and Marco kills them all, sets the ship free, sails the world, and comes back to what's left of America.

America has dissolved. New York is now the barony of The Aardvark, the crimelord who put Marco away in the first place, as punishment for the Slick Six's incursions against his territories. The Aardvark presides over the capitalization and enforcement of slave-farms across America, and he hunts all of the Slick Six with a mindless, unwavering determination to wreak perfect vengeance.

Marco resolves to find and reunite the Slick Six and to use them as a spearhead in a war on the institution of slavery and on The Aardvark, who reaps a fortune from it. And therein begins the tale, a road-novel that tears back and forth across America, told from the point of view of The Vibe, or fate, which guides the hands of all the dozens of remarkable characters in the story.

Slattery's prose style is complex, poetic, visionary and reeling, a cross between Kerouac and Bradbury, salted with Steinbeck. His people are all magic -- a tribe of stoners called the Americoids, a resurgent Sioux nation led by a visionary war-chief, a hive-like murderous circus, a free-state in Asheville presided over by an American Brahmin-turned-mayor, the prisoners on the liberated ship.

In Marco, we meet one of the great tortured heroes of fiction: an unstoppable badass who is haunted by his past as a child-soldier and who hunts now for peace with his past and a future he can be proud of. There is action and dashing in the story and true love and music and cooking and acrobatics and commerce and economics and crime and nobility. It's a heady stew, a road novel shot through with mysticism and a love of freedom that soars over the pages.

In case it's not clear, I loved this book. I can't wait to read more (I've just ordered Spaceman Blues, Slattery's first novel). This is a book to fall in love with.

Liberation on Amazon

Michael Holloway from the UK Open Rights Group sez,

Today we're proud to release ORG’s annual Review of Activities. It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the UK’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. Thanks to generous support from the ORG community, we’ve been there giving an informed perspective on the issues to the natonal press, working with policymakers behind the scenes and mobilising the grassroots into effective action.

Threats to our digital liberties continue to menace us. 2009 will see new challenges, such as the Government’s proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme. That’s why, as we celebrate ORG’s third birthday, we’re also asking the community to renew their support for ORG. The ORG-GRO campaign is delivering excellent results (huge thanks to all the people who have contributed so far). But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you.

ORG review of activities, Join ORG (Thanks, Michael!)

(Disclosure: I co-founded ORG and am proud to serve on its advisory board)

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we took Google's new iPhone voice search app for a spin, and reflected on the nostalgic smell of old NES cart sleeves, as well as the analog fluttering of old clocks.

Brownlee wrote a post in morse code about a morse code watch, and admired an ad-hoc iPhone number pad for MacBooks. Meanwhile, Joel flustered about Apple's crappy hardware DRM and made an Arrested Development connection in regards to a busted philanderer's dirty iPhone pics, which he swears are a firmware "glitch."

Guest blogger Tony Hightower gave us the scoop on organic motion: motion capture without the suit. A carbon-fiber acoustic guitar was attractively lute-like. Covert gamers cram old GameBoys into their graphing calculators. Joel deeply inhaled the miasmic retch of a Stitch himidifier.

Also in the day, Joel invited readers to goatse his new picture frame (email 2062270093 DERP tmomail.net if you'd like to get in on the fun). Brownlee wanted to play his complete Tiny Tim collection on a horrifyingly surreal SpongeBob SquarePants dock. We took a Tesla for a spin by proxy, and made a call on our banana phones.

Otherwise, Beschizza ripped apart a Boeing 788 in a stress test. and discovered a surprisingly cheap MacBook Air prototype that may not be all it seems. And Dan Lyons, aka "The Real Steve Jobs", is now being censored by Newsweek for doing exactly what he was hired for.

Oh, also. The Zune? Prepare for its imminent release.

Link

Here's Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay talking about the importance of "procedural content generation" for massive online games -- basically, using software to create worlds that had previously been hand-built by artists. It makes a lot of sense, but what fascinates me is the narrative possibilities for fiction about games: these procedural systems have or will shortly attain a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict their outcomes. It's the Halting Problem -- worlds where software off the rails could generate impossible situations, upside-down worlds, treasure heaps, cowardly monsters and brave grass. I'm thinking especially of abandonware worlds where only a few players remain and the gamemasters have stopped paying close attention. What odd maps might be drawn as the die-hards explore the outermost reaches of these worlds?

"Another big benefit [of procedural content creation] is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn't do otherwise," Guay continued. "It opens up innovation fields. If you're creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you're doing, and you can bake in some limitations."

"Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree," he said by way of example. "It's actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices."

Creating those tools allowed artists to define trees based on characteristics gleaned from extensive photo reference, more than to create a number of discrete tree variants based on those references...

When a team member made a seemingly minor after-hours change to the ecosystem, it ended up increasing the asset density of the game world by 25 percent -- resulting in more than a few headaches.

"If I'm tweaking a jungle procedurally, maybe I'll just tweak it in my test map," Guay said. "But when I integrate it into the game, somewhere in the 50 square kilometer game world, maybe in just three small areas, it might cause problems, and we won't find those problems until QA uncovers them."

MIGS: Far Cry 2's Guay On The Importance Of Procedural Content (via /.)

Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds-- Werbach belongs to not one but *two* WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. Agreeing with his guildmaster Joi Ito, Werbach's also a big supporter of WoW as a model for the future of work and software development."

“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.”

Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.)

Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-chair a WoW Player

See also: Net Neutrality fighters to head Obama's FCC transition team

Hurrah! This Friday marks the return of The IT Crowd, my favorite sitcom/nerd media EVAR, back for a triumphant third season!

Although Reynholm jumped out of a high window in the last series, his playboy son Douglas (Matt Berry) shows every sign of carrying on the family name (plundering the pension fund, putting flakes of gold in the drinking water, etc) and more or less takes over tonight's very funny opening episode. That leaves our IT-department trio of geeky Moss, lazy Roy and uptight Jen slightly overshadowed. But the sweet scene where Moss and Roy try some role-play to help Moss deal with park bullies just about makes up for it.

The IT Crowd (Thanks, Alan!)

LIFE and Google have teamed up to put 10,000,000 historic images online -- about 20 percent of the images are live now. The Disneyland images are great -- here's the old Submarine Ride. LIFE photo archive hosted by Google (Thanks, Neil and Slashdot!)

This week, Boing Boing tv is debuting regular product reviews produced with Joel and the crew, and we'll blog 'em here on Gadgets first. What better way to kick the series off than a lulz-filled analysis of the Lippi Selk Bag, a sleeping bag with arms and legs that makes our Joel look like a bespectacled Gumby? The funky-chunky "sleepwear system" ranges in price from $169 to $399. I imagine they'd really come in handy at one of those outdoor all-nighter raves, unless you get lucky -- interpersonal intra-bag intercourse might be logistically difficult in these.

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Tell Joel what you think of his Gumby impersonation in the Boing Boing Gadgets comment thread for this video. And here is a direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable video to the Flash embed above.

I'm doing my guestblogging assignment this week while in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. I came here to give a talk about Make and makers at Digitel (Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning), by invitation of Mike Eisenberg of University of Colorado at Boulder's Craft Technology Lab. After my talk, my wife and I went for a hike to see some of the magnificent mountains that surround Banff. The first real snow of the season came last Sunday. I took this photo below of Mount Rundle with the Bow River making a loop in the Banff valley. The town is out of the picture to the right.

Tonight I've bought a book about the geology of Banff. Mount Rundle is on the cover. It's called How Old is that Mountain? by Chris Yorath. I want to learn more about this part of the Canadian Rockies and what they're made of.

Following our successful lift off, today on Offworld we saw the community start to extend the life of 2D Boy's brilliant indie puzzler World of Goo, and saw reason to be hopeful for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 karaoke game Lips, despite entering a post-Rock Band, post-SingStar environment.

We also heard good news about continued development on Citizen Siege, the darkly political game from the developers of the Oddworld series, nearly convinced David to take a Holiday In Cambodia, and found that one of the next games that could very well suck up the majority of our time could come from... Neopets?

Link

ACCRC is in desperate straits. The Bay Area electronics recycler is going through tough times with an emergency re-org and a lack of funds to pay taxes and healthcare for its employees. Its own internal problems are compounded by a sudden drop in the price of scrap metal. ACCRC has been a friend to Make and Maker Faire, and generally anyone in the Bay Area who uses computers and electronics and wants to make sure they are recycled properly.

Alex Handy, a member of a small team stepping up to see what they can do to help, told me that "the business has always been profitable because the recovery of the metals in circuit boards, combined with the California SB-20 bounty on monitors, have always been lucrative. When copper and other scrap metal prices were through the roof two years ago, things were great. We could make enough money off of electronic recycling to fill in the gap left after monitor recycling. But copper, like oil and every other commodity of late, has bottomed out. It's not as scarce as people were anticipating because many factories worldwide aren't ordering more, or as much, thanks to the economic slow-down."

ACCRC has cut-back staff and sold off items in its inventory that still had some value. Still, ACCRC needs to raise money, and there's a Donate button on the ACCRC website. The team is trying to keep the organization afloat and survive long enough for scrap market to recover and put the organization back together. Please help if you can.

The release of the Dead Kennedys pack for Rock Band may lead to my first videogame console purchase since the Atari 5200. Dead Kennedys for Rock Band (Boing Boing Offworld)

Cool videos using a video camera mounted to a Coke bottle. Video mounted to Coke bottle

The best science fiction short video ever, only it's real. (Via Mt. Holly Mayor's Office)

BB pal Vann Hall turned me on to Europa Film Treasures, featuring, as he says, "tons of historical footage in a well-annotated website. (And downloadable with the right tools!) Seen above, a still from Jön az öcsém (1919), directed by Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame; and John MacFadyen (1970), a Scottish animation featuring credits painted right on the film stock. And here are the most popular films on the site right now:

1. The Apple-Knockers and the Coke (1948)
2. Das Sandbad (1906)
3. Farfale (1907)
4. Das eitle Stubenmädchen (1908)
5. Gordon Highlanders (1899)

Europa Film Treasures

In 2004, ex-con Charles Manning, 61, was infected in prison by a flesh-eating bacteria that ate away at his groin. Prison doctors first thought he was just having an allergic reaction. He sued and the Washington Department of Corrections settled by giving him $300,000. From the Associated Press:

By the time he was taken to a hospital, Manning had an internal abscess that required doctors to remove several pounds of flesh from his pelvic region.

Surgeons made a replacement penis with skin from his thigh.

"Wash. prisons, inmate settle disfigured groin case" (Thanks, Scott Compton!)

I haven't played Spore yet, but I find this image of appendages in the latest Spore patch to be just the kind of Wunderkammer-esque collection that I appreciate. Brandon Boyer has more over at our new Boing Boing Offworld games blog! "EA tosses new parts into Spore patch"