Regularly priced at $590, Bless Mesh Jeans are on sale for the bargain price of $236."Making use of vintage 501 Levi's, these jeans feature an asymmetrical fold along the fly and a tan mesh panel down the full length of one side."[via Weird Universe]

When Bryant Durrell was in college, he played D&D with an amazing Dungeon Master, Eric, who was obsessed with the moral dimension of the game, constructing thoughtful, elaborate campaigns to get the players to reflect on the nature of good and evil -- the players jokingly called the setting Eric created "Catholic World." (more…)

In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (published in 2016, just out in paperback), Alex Soojung-Kim Pang painstakingly investigates the working lives of the likes of Charles Darwin and finds that history's most productive high-performers were working about four hours a day and slacking off the rest of the time: napping, strolling, having leisurely lunches. (more…)

Sculptor Jud Turner (previously) writes, "Been playing with shiny chrome parts in the studio lately (motorcycle parts, mostly) to conjure up things that are currently scaring me: "Stanislav the Russian Boar" and "Hera the Mud Dauber Wasp." Don't worry, I'm using plenty of ventilation and respirator when welding up this toxic but super-fun material. (more…)

As the US-Canada trade war heats up, Canada finds itself in an asymmetrical battle, vastly overmatched against a country with an order of magnitude population advantage. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBwibPFGfUAlejandro Chavez Zavala was running for mayor of Tareta in the state of Michoacan when he was gunned down following a campaign event. (more…)

In the NYT, a pair of behavioral scientists describe a forthcoming Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes article (Sci-Hub mirror) that studied the effect of mindfulness meditation (a trendy workplace moral-booster) on workers' motivation and performance. (more…)

No, really. You gotta see this. (more…)

Lock him up. Paul Manafort is heading to jail, facing trials for bank fraud and money laundering, among other nefarious things. Today, the judge revoked his bail after being told by lawyers for Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Manafort tried to influence witnesses and obstruct justice in his trials. Said the judge to Manafort today: “This isn’t middle school, I can’t take your phone.” (more…)

GDP and stock market performance are the two metrics that economists (and politicians) use to measure the health of a nation's economy, and by those metrics, Trump is doing a hell of a job. (more…)

This photo, which comes courtesy of the Hamilton Township Fire Department, shows a car parked in front of a fire hydrant. The car's windows were smashed by the firefighters and a large hose threaded through them, so that a nearby fire may be fought.This is what happens when you park in front of a hydrant. This was taken last night at the fire on Norway Avenue in the Bromley section of Hamilton. Reminder, it is against the law to park in front of a fire hydrant.Here's another angle of the Great Humiliation Snake of Hamilton:Most cities will just push the offending vehicle out the way, but this is funnier and less likely to damage a fire truck's bumper.

I often live in places where the only internet connectivity I have comes from tethering to my smartphone (just like I'm doing right now). So, online multiplayer games don't hold a whole lotta joy for me. Thank God that among the announcement for Fallout 76, and the fact that Fortnite is coming to the Nintendo Switch and other broadband gaming delights, CD Projekt Red finally gave us a proper gameplay trailer for their upcoming near future RPG opus Cyberpunk 2077. It's single player, RPG and played in the first-person: everything that I need to keep me happy. If the game plays anywhere as well as Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I will be a very happy lad.

...as imagined and averaged out by 511 American Christians surveyed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.When the researchers averaged out the features on the more commonly-selected pictures, they found that the average view of God is significantly different than how Michelangelo portrayed the Almighty. Instead of a large, old man with a flowing white beard, the averaging image showed a beardless, younger face.God is a Pittsburgh bus driver.

In the US, states and cities have their own minimum wages, keyed to the local cost of living -- but every one of these minimum wages is insufficient to provide that most basic of needs: a roof over your head. (more…)

When Yeonmi Park was just 13 years old, after suffering inhumanely under the North Korean regime, she and her family escaped to China (and eventually to South Korea). She is now 24 years old and has become a vocal advocate for human rights in the country she once fled from. In this New York Times video, this brave young defector describes the terrible conditions for people in her home country and asks Trump to hold its dictator Kim Jong-un accountable for these human rights violations. You may remember Park from a few years ago when she told her story at the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland:https://youtu.be/ufhKWfPSQOwIf her story interests you, give her powerful and inspiring 2016 memoir, In Order To Live, A North Korean Girl’s Journey To Freedom, a read: Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since.Park knew the journey would be difficult, but could not have imagined the extent of the hardship to come. Those years in China cost Park her childhood, and nearly her life. By the time she and her mother made their way to South Korea two years later, her father was dead and her sister was still missing. Before now, only her mother knew what really happened between the time they crossed the Yalu river into China and when they followed the stars through the frigid Gobi Desert to freedom. As she writes, “I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest.”In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom.

Inspired by the 50th anniversary this month of the release of Rosemary's Baby, my friend Peg Kay Aloi has written a piece on Crooked Marque on how the iconic occult horror film helped set the stage for the Satanic panic that was to follow.And therein lies an unusual irony: The clear message of Rosemary’s Baby was that the devil-worshiping witches live right next door, on the other side of the wall of your charming flat on Central Park West. They’re like family: They act as surrogate parents by giving you healthy herbal drinks and silver pendants to protect you, but they’re actually planning to consecrate your baby to the devil. Even your doctor is in on it; heck, your own husband signed his firstborn over to Beelzebub so he could get a juicy part on Broadway! You try to convince people of the plot you’ve uncovered, but they just cluck their tongues (poor thing, you’re just exhausted) and tranquilize you. Even when you’re proven right, that they were there all along, the witches next door who contrived to make you give birth to Satan’s spawn, no one helps you.Despite overwhelming evidence that most acts of violence against children are perpetrated by family members, the tendency is to look beyond the home, to suspect a shadowy outsider, someone with a taste for heavy metal music and black T-shirts, or a penchant for goddess worship and tarot cards. Rosemary’s Baby masterfully other-ized the evil that lies within (and without), making us hide our children away from any and all possible dangers, including public schools, the internet, the outdoors. It seems clear: Another wave of panic looms on the horizon.Read the full piece.

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here. Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.--JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE right now.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kocQvvKoyg4If your kid gets fined for running an unlicensed lemonade stand this summer, or has to pay to get a license to operate a stand, Country Time will pay the first $300 in expenses, to a maximum of $60,000 in fines between now and Aug 31 (sorry, Labor Day parade lemonade stands, you're SOL). It's a genius promotion, which is not something I say often. (via Kottke)

Epic Games' fantastic Fortnite Battle Royale has launched, as anticipated, on the Nintendo Switch. Now you can dance the L on every major gaming platform but one: PC, Xbox, PS4, IOS and Switch. Android is up next.I've been enthusiastic about the Switch for a while and wondered if it'd replace my aged Xbox One. Fortnite ensures the unit will get a lot of use, even if every other game is a dud.I alternate between the FunkOps skin, and the Leviathan, whom I lovingly refer to as "Bob Fishman." Nintendo Switch with Neon Blue and Red Joy-Con bundle via Amazon

Cameron Esposito's one-hour long comedy special is free to stream on her site -- the perfect knife-edge balance of laughs and rage, and she's soliciting donation for RAINN, "the United States’ largest anti-sexual violence organization." (via Waxy)

Jason Crane's Congress Tracker is a Glitch app that automatically collects statements (official and otherwise) made by U.S. congresspersons. The initial focus is on gun control but it could be forked to target any issue.Here's a little thing I made to help keep track of what our representatives in Congress are doing and saying about guns (with help from @ProPublica's Congress API and @glitch):

Spain's got a stiffy for football, or soccer, if you must.When a football match is on, just about everyone in the country loses their minds. TVs are gathered round, siestas are forgone, and team songs, in any bar you chance, will be full of scarf-swinging loons banging on tables and screaming for every goal. It’s loud, chaotic and lovely. For many Spaniards, catching a game while on the go involves downloading a smartphone app fronted by Spain’s national football league, Liga de Fútbol Profesional. Available for iOS and Android handsets, the La Liga app is not only licensed to stream football games, but also lets users keep track of the stats for their favorite teams and players.Oh, it also tracks your every move and taps your smartphone's microphone, supposedly in the name of helping to root out unauthorized match broadcasts in bars, restaurants and cafes.From El Dario, via Google Translate:The Liga de Fútbol Profesional, the body that runs the most important sports competition in Spain, is using mobile phones of football fans to spy on bars and other public establishments that put matches for their clients. Millions of people in Spain have this application on their phone, which accumulates more than 10 million downloads, according to data from Google and Apple.All of these people can become undercover informants for La Liga and the owners of football television broadcasting rights. If they give their consent for the app to use the device's microphone (which is common in many applications), they are actually giving permission for La Liga to remotely activate the phone's microphone and try to detect if what it sounds like is a bar or public establishment where a football match is being projected without paying the fee established by the chains that own the broadcasting rights. In addition, use the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where that establishment is located.But hey, good news! Where most developers would try to downplay user surveillance, La Liga is totally up front with the fact that they see their app's users are nothing but meatbags with GPS antennas. In a statement made to El Dario, the Liga de Fútbol Profesional assured them their app only collects data "without storing any recording or content," and only works inside of Spain. Also, the data collected by the app will be used "only against the piracy of public places.”Cool, cool, cool.Image via Pixabay

In Portugal, there are two 18th century libraries where colonies of bats are invited to roam free. Why? They eat the insects that would otherwise munch on the pages of the books shelved there. From Smithsonian:In Coimbra, a colony of Common pipistrelle bats makes their home behind the bookshelves of the university’s Joanina Library, emerging at nightfall to consume flies and gnats and other pests before swooping out the library windows and across the hilltop college town in search of water....Whether the flittermice took up residence here 300 years ago, when the library was built, or more recently is unknown. Librarians do know they’ve been here since at least the 19th century; they still use fabric made from animal skin, imported from Imperial Russia, to cover the original 18th-century tables, protecting them from scat left by the library’s flying residents. And every morning, just as their forebears did, the librarians remove the skins and clean the library floors.

Ben Wallach is Theresa May's security minister; he has proposed that the UK follow China's example and require that any place providing internet access use bank-account verification to affirmatively identify all the people who use the internet so they can be punished for bullying. (more…)

Boat designer Kurth Hughes designed and built this far out home on the Columbia River in central Washington. It's just 250-square-feet but contains a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and dining nook with a table fashioned from Hughes's first sailboat. The geodesic dome skylight provides plenty of sunlight and a glorious view of the starry night. (Zillow)

Under normal circumstances, Tardigrades (previously) live a couple of years. But when they go into cryptobiosis in response to environmental adversity, they can wait it out for decades. McInnes once defrosted a moss sample from a former experiment and found it contained live tardigrades. She deduced that the organisms had survived, frozen, for at least eight years. In 2016, a paper published in the journal Cryobiology made waves when it showed that a handful of tardigrades, frozen in another Antarctic moss sample back in 1983, had survived in this frigid state for 30 years until they were revived in 2014. It's thought that the tardigrade's talent for self-preservation comes down, in part, to its production of unique proteins that can lock fragile cell components into position.

There's a surreal quality to Trombonist John Sipher's use of a loop pedal, as performed for Colorado Public Radio, complete with beatboxing and layered brassy arpeggios.

The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is literally the worst idea anyone in Europe ever had about the internet, ever. (more…)

My nation, Canada, is a land of endless bounty. Yesterday, it provided us with a feral peacock infestation. Today? A case of pinkeye allegedly caused by poo raining down from the sky.Susan Allen of Kelowna, BC (it’s absolutely lovely in the summertime – you should visit!) was driving home with her son after enjoying a pleasant lunch with her mother in the lakeside district of Peachland. It was a beautiful day, spent in a beautiful place. On the way home, Allen opened her car’s sunroof to enjoy a bit of fresh air and, apparently, got hammered by shit falling from the sky.From the The Star:The feces appeared to have fallen from a plane that she saw when they were stopped at a red light with another car that was also hit, Allan said, adding she and the other driver went to a car wash and sprayed themselves off before she called the Kelowna airport.She said an administrator told her Transport Canada would be investigating and the department has confirmed it is looking into the possibility of frozen lavatory waste, called “blue ice,” falling from an aircraft.But wait, there’s more! As a result of her forced fecal frolics, Allen ended up with conjunctivitis in both of her eyes – that’s pinkeye y’all – and had to be placed on a run of medication to deal with the affliction.While talking to the press about her shitty weekend, Allen stated that “All we want people to know is that it was quite devastating to be covered in poop and I hope it never happens to anybody else.”Transport Canada is investigating the incident. It’s believed that, if the poop did come from an airplane passing overhead, it may have been due to a faulty blackwater holding tank valve.Image: Sergey Kustov - provided via email, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

You know what's better than a Nerf blaster that can whip out 100 rounds of fun in rapid succession? One that can handle 1,000 rounds! In his latest One Day Build for Tested, Adam Savage shows you how to build the Nerf gun of the Apocalypse. With the right tools and materials, you can do it too.

Oregonians love their weed. So much so that it has 564 recreational dispensaries, over twice the number of liquor stores in the state (266). The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, overwhelmed with license applications for new cannabis dispensaries, announced it is delaying reviews until it has caught up issuing license renewals for existing shops and farms. "The halt comes at a time when fierce competition has driven the price of pot to record lows — and it keeps falling" says Katie Shepherd of Willamette Week. "Small shops are struggling to turn a profit while out-of-state investors flood chain stores with cash to buy up competitors.Image: Shutterstock/Roxana Gonzalez

Rachael Talibart's breathtaking "Sirens" photo series pareidolically reveals the fantastic mythical beasts hidden in the ocean waves. From Tailbart's gallery page at the Sony World Photography Awards in which she was shortlisted:‘Sirens’ is an ongoing portfolio of storm waves captured on the UK’s south coast. A childhood afloat and a love of maritime mythology have come together in these portraits of monstrous waves named after mythological creatures. These images are from 2017 and were captured at Newhaven, in East Sussex, but the photographs are intended to transcend time and place. Thus, in naming them, I have shamelessly plundered myths and legends from all cultures and eras. On the days I make these photographs, the sea is beautiful but also terrifying. I feel utterly insignificant, yet completely enriched by these encounters with wildness, and that is what I have tried to communicate in the photographs.Above, "Loki." Below, "Poseidon Rising" and "Nanook."See more: Rachael Talibart "Sirens"(via PetaPixel)

At first I was disappointed that the Mystery Machine and Knight 2000 weren't invited but then I realized they were probably on a separate TV star car field trip.All of these iconic autos and many more are available for rental from Movie Cars Central in France.(via r/pics)

Microsoft has submerged an entire data center 100 feet below the surface of the ocean near the UK’s Orkney islands. It is powered by wind, solar, and tidal sources, and will be keep cool by using the frigid ocean water as a heat sink.From Quartz:The logic is sound: Bringing data centers close to hubs of computing power benefits customers, enabling smoother web surfing or game playing by cutting down the back-and-forth between users and servers. Microsoft says nearly half the world’s population lives within 150 km (120 miles) of the ocean. And because oceans are uniformly cool below a certain depth, keeping the machines under the sea would cut down the cooling costs that make up a large chunk of the operating budget of data centers.The Project Natick data center is made up of 864 servers packed in a 40 foot container that now sits about 22 km (14 miles) from the coast. That’s a tiny fraction of some of the huge servers—covering hundreds of thousands of square feet—that tech companies like Microsoft operate. But it may be enough to do a pilot test, and prove that the server could be deployed at commercial scale.For this pilot project, Microsoft says it will operate the data center for 12 months. First it’ll put the servers through a battery of tests to check on power consumption, humidity levels, noise creation, and temperatures. Then the company will let some customers use the data center. If successful, Microsoft will keep operating the servers, and allow its customers to use it to run their own computations. Currently, Project Natick sits on sea bottom owned by the Scottish government, but the data center is designed such that it could fit into standard shipping containers and delivered where it’s most wanted.Image: YouTube/Microsoft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sISince its first stirrings in 2015, the Chinese social credit schemes have sprouted a confusing and frightening garden of strange growths, from spraying and shaming jaywalkers to blacklisting millions from flying or using high-speed rail, including journalists and other critics of the Chinese state. (more…)

Texas tip: when you decapitate a snake with a shovel, wait a while before picking up the head. A snake's bite reflex can be triggered up to several hours after it has died. Ms Sutcliffe told KIII-TV her husband immediately began to have seizures.He was airlifted from his home near Corpus Christi to hospital where he was treated with the anti-venom CroFab.More than a week after the incident, the man is reportedly in stable condition, with some weakened kidney function.

An unusual set of tweets from the official IHOP account suggests that the pancake house chain is going to be changing their name to IHOb. They haven't revealed what the "b" stands for but will on Monday, June 11, the day the name change is supposed to go into effect. USA Today quotes IHOP’s executive director of communications, Stephanie Peterson, as saying, "We're serious about the quality of food and our menu, and this name change really reflects that."Ok then.https://twitter.com/IHOP/status/1003682801042915328https://twitter.com/IHOP/status/1004093182227959809https://twitter.com/IHOP/status/1004452873948676096 photo by Mike MozartThanks, Evan!

Even if you live in an area where keeping a raccoon as a pet is totally cool, a raccoon is a wild animal that shouldn't be kept as a pet. They've got needs, habits and instincts which, even if you were to raise it from a kit, you won't be able to rid it of. Still interested in claiming one of the fuzzy buggers as your own? Then you'll want to watch this video of this gent who, after a year of raccoon ownership, has a solid, informed opinion on whether a raccoon makes a good pet.

In 2017, Leila asked Stack Exchange for suggestions for counterintuitive probability riddles for a course on probability; the assembled list is a brain-aching adventure in Monty Hall problems, neighbors' daughters, Sleeping Beauty epistemology, colored lottery balls and birthday paradoxes. (more…)

Vpnfilter is the malicious software that targets home routers, thought to be the work of Russian state-affiliated hacker group Fancy Bear, that raised alarm last month on the revelation that it had infected half a million home routers around the world. (more…)

https://youtu.be/YFj9pFfmI1MThere’s a video that’s been hanging around on the internet for the last few years and it popped up on my Facebook feed not long ago. I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s intriguing because it subverts expectations. Take a look.The video is only 17 seconds, but it’s more effective than many 120-minute horror films. Why?Because even though there’s no dialogue, there is a moment that is pure misdirection—almost exactly what magicians do when constructing an illusion. The first time you watch it, it’s almost too obvious that the guy under the sheet walks into the table, looks down, then continues around it—but that moment is what makes you think there’s a person under the sheet. Think about it. If Mr. Ghost had made a genuine mistake, they simply would have shot the video a second time without him accidentally bumping into the table. But if he didn’t bump the table, you wouldn’t assume it was some yutz under a sheet.Now you want to know how it’s done. Could it be CGI? No, because it looks like someone made this for about 10 cents. Then what is it? A magic trick that depends upon a secret that is 150 years old. But since it’s not presented as an illusion by a magician, it has fooled everyone. And that’s its best secret.

The Forty Swords arrive at night and, under the cover of darkness, murder an entire village. Only two people survive the slaughter: the infant Elsbeth and her grief-stricken father, Dag​, who slips into a ten year coma. He awakens to find that not only has his daughter grown up alone, she's thrived​ despite him. (more…)

Embattled EPA Director Scott Pruitt went on national TV to announce on behalf of the US government that "I would not agree [CO2 is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see... There’s a tremendous disagreement about the degree of the impact [of] human activity on the climate." (more…)

Some people are more committed to a cause than others. Ben Lecomte? He’s one of those. In an effort to highlight the stunning amount of damage humanity is doing to the world’s oceans and generate awareness about plastic pollution, the 50-year old adventurer plans on swimming through 1,600km of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Lecomte started his swim this morning in Japan. Provided everything goes according to plan, he’ll finish his aquatic ramblings in 180 days, in San Fransisco. This isn’t his first open water rodeo: according to The Guardian, Lecomte swam across the whole damn Atlantic Ocean back in 1998.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUK0oBI_s4From The Guardian:The Great Pacific garbage patch, according to the latest March estimate, is twice the size of France and contains nearly 80,000 tonnes of plastic.Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, the patch is caused by the North Pacific gyre – a circle of currents that keep plastic, waste and other pollution trapped.According to scientists, the patch has been growing “exponentially” in recent years. The March estimate found it was 16 times larger than previously expected.As Lecomte makes his way through the garbage patch, he and his support team plan on taking water samples and catching fish to test for plastic pollutants and illustrate how plastics have been infiltrating the food chain. This might sound like a a goofy publicity stunt, but if you take a peek at the endeavor's website, you'll see that Lecomte's efforts have the support of some big scientific guns, including NASA, CMER, the Argonne National Labratory and the University of Montana, just to name a few.If you'd like to keep tabs on the progress that Lecomte and his team are making in their trek across the Pacific Ocean or learn more about how badly we've screwed up our oceans, you'll want to check out The Longest Swim.

YouTuber Ryan Higa admits that he can't dance. When one of his viewers asked if he could dance without moving, he put together this amazing stop-motion video with his friends. This is how it was made:https://youtu.be/6e7wxqOo7ps(Neatorama)

A horse named Bofa Deez Nutz won its first victory on Friday at Oklahoma City's Remington Park. You'll note that the race caller is a master at his craft. Meanwhile, as the horse crossed the finish line, its owner could be heard exclaiming "GOT EEEEM!" (In my imagination anyway.)(Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Intel and Chinese tech firm Ehang UAV have been locked in a battle over the world record for largest drone lightshow, and Ehang recently took the lead with 1,374 drones as voxels.Here's a behind-the-scenes of Intel's worthy entry at PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCd6P7Ya160• EHang Egret’s 1374 drones dancing over the City Wall of Xi’an, achieving the Guinness World Records (YouTube / EHANG)

With Father's Day around the corner, the folks behind A.1. Sauce have rolled out (what they consider to be) the greatest gift for dad's ever: meat-scented candles. The three "meat scents" are Burger, Backyard BBQ, and Original Meat (which they write, "pairs well with dad jokes"). Each candle costs $14.99. (bookofjoe)

Solo: A Star Wars Story, the latest Star Wars feature film and Disney's fourth, offers something new even as it stays connected to the old. I have a few gripes, but Solo is a nice side chapter to the ongoing Star Wars mythos.Set roughly a decade before A New Hope, the original Star Wars film, Solo chronicles the journey of a 20-something Han Solo from an orphan looking for a brighter future to the swaggering but lovable scoundrel originally portrayed by Harrison Ford.Standard backstory fare includes Solo meeting the Wookiee Chewbacca and fellow miscreant Lando Calrissian. We find out where he grew up and how he came by his surname. He acquires the Millenium Falcon and his biggest claim to fame: making the Kessel Run in a record-breaking twelve parsecs. Solo brims with action and humor—I think it's a great stand-alone film.(more…)

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's class of 2018 got a surprise visit from late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon on Sunday. He took the stage at their graduation ceremony to deliver a humorous and heartfelt commencement speech.When you think of commencement speakers, you think of people who are inspirational, people who are eloquent, people who've changed the world. When you think of high school students, you think of people who are immature, slightly awkward, still learning to be an adult.Welcome to "Opposite Day."The Parkland, Florida students were the survivors of the shooting that happened nearly four months ago on their campus. Seventeen of their classmates and school staff died in the tragedy on February 14, 2018.Fallon said he and his wife and two young girls to the ceremony because "we wanted them to see what hope and light looks like."Watch his full speech in the video above.https://twitter.com/jimmyfallon/status/1003371562194653184