The City of Austin is renaming the Solid Waste Services Department and they’re asking for the help of the public in coming up with a new name.

Unless there’s a huge come-from-behind surge from Austin Feces Brigade, the winner is going to be The Fred Durst Society Of The Humanities And Arts.

I love living in Austin for many reasons. One is it’s a city with a sense of humor. Our town slogan is “keep Austin weird” and we are.

I wonder if Fred Durst will be attending the christening ceremony?

The City of Austin is renaming the Solid Waste Services Department to better reflect all of the services the Department provides, including recycling, garbage collection, yard trimmings pick-up, street sweeping, litter abatement and litter control, household hazardous waste disposal, storm debris clean-up, Zero Waste initiatives and community outreach & education. We would like your input on the three new department name ideas below. You can cast a total of three votes, and as many as three votes for a particular name. Just click ‘vote’ to the left of the name to cast your vote. You can also provide comments on any of the items or suggest a new name of your own. The deadline to vote and comment is Thursday, February 10 at midnight. Thanks for your input! Stay tuned: the new department name will be announced in late April 2011.

Click here to place your vote. You can also suggest a name.

Among my favorites are: Ministry Of Filth, Taco Bell, Austin Feces Brigade, George Bush Memorial Shit Pile, Zombie Disposal Services and Austin Dept. Of Are You Gonna Eat That?
 
Via The High Definite

 
“Wherever you are, you’re turned on by nature… a high in itself, or add to any other kind of high.”
 
(via Cake Walk New Orleans )

 
Cairo-based British journalist Sara Carr continues to bring some fantastic street-level photojournalism from her adopted home city, including some shots of the spray-paint agitprop going on in the capitol.

Carr and some others have just assembled a Cairo offshoot from the Occupied London site, reporting on the ground, and along with Democracy Now, it’s proven a great item to add to your Egyptian Revolution RSS. They’ve already posted twice on today’s ruthless and unsurprising pro-Mubarak raid on Tahrir Square.
 

“No to Mubarak, no to Nazif, no to Sorour”
(Refers to Ahmed Nazif, Prime Minister for past 7 years until yesterday, and Ahmad Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People’s Assembly since 1991 and first in the official line of succession as President after Mubarak)
 

“Down with the regime” with inverted “Eagle of Saladin” coat of arms from the Egyptian flag.
 

Stencil of Mubarak; underneath, the Arabic word “Irhal”, meaning “Leave”.

 
Philip Marlowe and James Bond are two of the greatest fictional characters of the 20th century, and this is what happened when their authors, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming met for a BBC radio program in July 1958.

Fleming and Chandler talk about protagonists James Bond and Philip Marlowe in this conversation between two masters of their genre. They discuss heroes and villains, the relationship between author and character and the differences between the English and American thriller. Fleming contrasts the domestic “tea and muffins” school of detective story with the American private eye tradition and Chandler guides Fleming through the modus operandi of a mafia hit while marvelling at the speed with which his fellow author turns out the latest Bond adventure.

Chandler sounds slightly squiffy. Fleming breathless. Even so, it is a moment of literary history, as both men, wary at first, reveal some slender truths about their lives and work.

“…You can write a very lousy, long historical novel full of sex and it can be a best seller and be treated respectfully but a very good thriller writer who writes far far better …there’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.”

“[Philip Marlowe] is always confused… he’s like me.”

 
Previously on DM

Driven by Demons: Robert Shaw, James Bond and The Man in the Glass Booth

 
12ozProphet, “the largest graffiti, street art and pop culture community online”, collaborated with film maker Justin Hogan in the creation of this short documentary on graffiti legend and pop culture icon Futura 2000.

Leonard (Futura) talks about the early days of being a street art pioneer, his experiences with The Clash, Madonna, life in Brooklyn and his current projects.
 

 
I can’t tell if this vintage ad is from the 70s or early-80s. Either way it is “Superbly sculptured by a European artist, it’s a masterpiece of lightweight, micro-processor technology.” I’m sold. 

Nipples and lady bits not included.

(via Uncle Sid)

VHS 2005 Foam
 
Humorous artistic tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable cinematic masterpiece created in 2005 by David Herbert. What I’m more interested in is seeing the VCR that can handle this gargantuan tape.
 

 

 
(via Booooooom!)

 
Just watch.

(via Cynical-C)

 
(via KFMW)

 
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Campion wrote this morning to alert me to something going on right outside his own apartment window today: More than 2500 German police officers are evicting the tenants of a former (now legal) squat in the Liebig 14 tenement block in the east Berlin district of Friedrichshain.

So there are 2500 cops. Guess how many residents there are? 25! Still, about a thousand protestors turned up to support the (legal) tenants. The most amazing thing about this is that the German police are apparently being used to enforce the will of a private landlord. Just imagine the cost of that little operation!

From The Guardian:

Demonstrations and publicity stunts are planned across Berlin throughout the day. Already, protesters claim to have paintballed the famous department store KaDeWe, Berlin’s answer to Harrod’s, along with the town hall in the district of Schöneberg, where John F Kennedy gave his"Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.

The building, which has 25 bedrooms, four kitchens and five bathrooms, was first squatted in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After Berlin’s housing board took ownership of the house in 1992, the squatters signed a lease making them the legal residents.

After it was sold to private developers, the lease was passed on to the current occupiers, who range from 19 to 40 years old and hail from around the world. One British resident, a 24-year-old PhD student, gave her name as Sarah.

“We were told we have to leave because the landlord wants to renovate the house and divide it up into expensive flats, which is what has already happened to other alternative housing projects like ours,” she said.

“People with not much money are being forced out of Berlin city centre. This is not just about 25 people losing their home, it’s a protest against the gentrification of the city and ordinary people all over being priced out of their local housing market.”

Sarah refused to say how much rent she paid, but it is widely believed to be a token amount. German media has reported that the rent is still set at 1992 levels, which equates to just €1 (85p) per square metre per month.

The district mayor, Franz Schulz, criticised the eviction. “It is not a good day. We’re losing an important alternative project,” he told Inforadio.

Most of today’s protesters were in their 20s or 30s, but standing by the police line on the south side of Liebigstrasse were an older couple from Munster, who looked on with concern.

“Our daughter is one of the residents,” said the 60-year-old university professor, who did not want to be named.

“She has lived there for 10 years now. We come and visit every month or two. It’s almost like our second home. I know many of her housemates and they are nice, peaceful people. It’s crazy that the city of Berlin is allowing this to happen.”

Crazy and tragic.