The Steam Magi at Crabfu have struck again, this one sure to please all of the treadheads in the audience. The wizards of ‘Fu cobbled together a spiffy treaded tank, using a Jensen Turbine engine and a Cheddar/Plover boiler. The chassis is a Kyosho Nitro Blizzard R/C ATV nabbed off of eBay.
The Jensen Turbine is a real beaut. You’re likely familiar with Jensen if you lusted after those desktop steam engine kits advertised in magazines and catalogs when you were a kid. The company has been around for 75 years.
The Moleskine journal craze may have officially jumped the shark with 
Okay, we might not be blogging about it if it were in a nameless black book. So, maybe the memetic value is worth the extra scoots. And we have to admit, the icon he made for his desktop is just too damn sweet. 
That latter bit of “spacial, temporal and cultural resonance of events” was driven home when the Virgina Tech killings happened two days after the show’s opening. Ominously, the local canvas is colored red. Overwhelmed by data traffic on that day, it squeezed out two guillotine-like triangles, dripping gore. Perhaps a happier “accident” can be found on the blue, national, panel where its proximity to the gallery’s air conditioning vent has made all of the paint deposits shiver nervously on their way down. 
This is a strange, but nifty combination of robotech. BEAMbots are frequently analog-only and 
Unlike Bennett”s work, which is all themed around robots, Halleux does a lot of people, pets, and other curious creatures. Much of it cyborganic in nature, existing in an interzone between man and machine, all rendered in a decidedly retro-futuristic flava. Too bad the site’s all in French, although the work pretty much speaks for itself. 
If you’re a Tap fan, you’ll likely get as big a kick out of this as I did. Wonder who the drummer will be at Live Earth? Too bad Mick Fleetwood has thus far defied the band’s drummer curse. He’s still with us (as far as anyone can tell), but no word if he’ll mount the exploding drum stool for the upcoming shows. 
You may have seen Mark’s item on Boing Boing about the 
Have you noticed the subject of TV news’s latest demonization of the Web? It’s [cue the killkillkillkill slasher music]: Webkinz. Webkinz is a sort of Beanie Babies meets The Sims. Little Timmy buys a plushy at Sweatshops R Us, enters a code found on it, and it unlocks a trippy-ass online world for him and his plushy’s virtual persona to play in. While the company apparently takes great pains to keep it kid-only, and everything is contained within the Webkinz domain, the media has been doing that great conflation thing they thrive on: because it’s on the Internet, it’s right there alongside the predators and the porno malls and the dens of identity thieves (which’d sorta be like warning you not to let your kid talk to grandma on the phone ’cause the phone system is used for phone sex and planning terrorist attacks). Anyhoo… now Barbie, that little synthetic crumpet, wants in on some of that Webkinz bank.