Boing Boing

In June 1980, "Weird Al" Yankovic first performed "Won't Eat Prunes Again" on The Dr. Demento Show. Shortly after, he rocked it live at Cal Poly. Audio evidence above.(via r/ObscureMedia and Weird Al Wiki)That was such a dirty trickBoy, it really made us sickWell it looks like we've been done in by the pruneStill the memory lingers onI been livin' in the john'Cause I've had the runs since Monday afternoon

It'll buff right out.

The 1936 All-American Soap Box Derby is a fascinating look at the ethos and mores from the height of the soap box derby craze. While it's cool to see maker culture valued and celebrated, it's certainly not very inclusive. (more…)

Lauren Ko of LOKOKITCHEN in Seattle bakes up pies and tarts that are so creative that fans might feel bad slicing into them. (more…)

A nearly 132-year-old message-in-a-bottle was found in late January (or was it?). Here's the story: While walking around Wedge Island in Western Australia, beachcomber Tonya Illman discovered the old bottle in the dunes. Inside was a tightly-bundled scroll with a piece of twine around it which Tonya and her husband Kym took home to dry out in their oven. Once the note was dried out enough, they unrolled it and learned the bottle's message, dated June 12, 1886, was in German. Some people believe the find is part of an elaborate marketing hoax staged by Kym, a known "ambush marketer" in Perth. Still, according to BBC News, the couple got the note to an expert who confirmed its authenticity:Dr Ross Anderson, Assistant Curator Maritime Archaeology at the WA Museum, confirmed the find was authentic after consulting with colleagues from Germany and the Netherlands."Incredibly, an archival search in Germany found Paula's original Meteorological Journal and there was an entry for 12 June 1886 made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard. The date and the coordinates correspond exactly with those on the bottle message," Dr Anderson said.The handwriting on the journal, and the message in the bottle, also matched, he added.The bottle was jettisoned in the south-eastern Indian Ocean while the ship was travelling from Cardiff in Wales to Indonesia, and probably washed up on the Australian coast within 12 months, where it was buried under the sand, he wrote in his report.Thousands of bottles were thrown overboard during the 69-year German experiment but to date only 662 messages - and no bottles - had been returned. The last bottle with a note to be found was in Denmark in 1934.The message and its bottle will be on display for two years at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, courtesy of the Illman family.-- Oldest message in a bottle found on Western Australia beach -- Wait, Did F1 Driver Daniel Ricciardo’s Parents Help Fake Finding That 131 Year Old Message In A Bottle?-- Perth businessman Kym Illman says bottle find not ‘shonky-ed up’screenshots via Kym Illman

Woodworker John Malecki created this amazing river table with a massive piece of gnarly claro walnut and a lot of elbow grease. The end result is worth all the effort. (more…)

(more…)

A valiha is a special zither traditionally made in Madagascar from a local type of giant bamboo. It has a lovely sound, and there's a clear throughline from traditional songs played on a valiha to music of the Caribbean. (more…)

Hyperallergic reports that a prankster festooned a Guggenheim Museum toilet with gold yarn, an apparent response to the 2016 gold toilet installation at the same museum (above). (more…)

Actor and contortionist Doug Jones got his start in show business as a mime. His big Hollywood break came in the late 1980s when he got the role of McDonald's moon crooner, Mac Tonight. Thirty-one years later, this career "man behind the mask" earned the honor of being onstage with Guillermo del Toro as he accepted the "Best Picture" Oscar for The Shape of Water. Why? Because Jones played the film's "Amphibian Man." https://twitter.com/actordougjones/status/971523351519797248Great Big Story recently released this (literally-revealing) video portrait of Jones, calling him "the most famous actor you’ve never seen:"You might not know his face, but you’ve seen his work. With over 150 movie and TV credits to his name, Doug Jones has been every creature, monster and villain known to Hollywood. From the Amphibian Man in “The Shape of Water,” the Silver Surfer in “Fantastic Four” to the Thin Clown in “Batman Returns,” Jones has been spicing up your movie-watching experience for the past three decades.And for the earworm, here's Mac Tonight:https://youtu.be/0c4_b5PHWg8

Coca-Cola will soon be offering a canned cocktail, a "Chu-Hi," to its Japanese market. The Coca-Cola Chu-Hi will be the first beverage in the brand's 130-year history made with alcohol, a popular distilled shochu in this case. SoraNews24 reports:Chu-his (also called “sours”) are so popular that they’re sold in cans, regularly bought by customers looking for something sweeter (and also generally cheaper) than beer, while still delivering a similar 4-to-8-percent dose of alcohol. It’s not all that unusual for pubs in Japan to offer “coke-his” on their menus, either, which mix shochu with cola, either Coke or one of its competitors’ substitute products.Likewise, even in the West Coca-Cola has long been used in cocktails. Still, it’s going to be a little startling to be able to buy official, from-the-factory alcoholic Coca-Cola, which might be why only Japan is going to be graced with the canned adult drinks. “This is [a] modest experiment for a specific slice of our market,” Coca-Cola Japan president Jorge Garduno said in regards to the new venture, which indicates that the Coca-Cola chu-hi probably won’t see release in the rest of the world.photo by Mike Mozart, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Economist and maths communicator Tim Harford (previously) presents a riff on Harold Pollack's aphorism that "The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card," and comes up with a complete set of rules for statistical literacy that fits on a postcard. (more…)

This 3-ounce Bluetooth speaker is highly rated on Amazon (and Fakespot gives the reviews an A grade for authenticity). It also comes with a built in mic so you can use it as a speakerphone. It's normally $13 but if you use the promo code Y98TGMLD at checkout it is only $7.

A group of CMU researchers have created a generalizable approach to converting the model files generated by 3D design packages into knitting patterns that can be fed into a variety of computerized knitting machines, which then "print" the solid by knitting it. (more…)

This week Victorville, California police arrested a 14-year-old boy who dressed up in a sheriff's uniform, put emergency lights on his grandfather's car, and drove around "responding" to various crimes. After the real police pulled him over, they searched his room and found "counterfeit money, simulation firearms, ballistic vests and other law enforcement related items." No word on whether the youngster had cultivated cop speak. From the Merced Sun-Star:Police also realized the teen had a busy night before he was pulled over: He had pulled over a woman in a fake traffic stop, and asked for her identification, police said. The teen let her off with a warning.During a separate incident that day, the juvenile turned on his emergency lights, drawing a 16-year-old out of a home. The dressed-up teen told the 16-year-old he was responding to a domestic disturbance call. But when the imposter was told no one had made such a call, he left the scene, police said.

I prefer to think that the name and description for the "Podcast Co-Host Sleeveless Top in Fog" was written by a neural net:Even a late night in the studio deserves your best style effort. Show you agree by sporting this black top to record your next episode! Boasting a notched neckline and deep blue trim down the center, this loose 'n' flowy ModCloth namesake label top makes your outfit just as clever as the insights you share with your digital audience.[via]

Tickets just went on sale for Burger Boogaloo, Total Trash Productions' annual rockin' two-day music festival. This year's lineup is impressive with DEVO headlining on day one and The Damned on day two. John Waters serves as the fest's host for its fourth consecutive year.The show takes place June 30 and July 1 at Oakland's Mosswood Park. Ticket prices range from $99 to $269. If you go, be sure to check out Francis Lau on Saturday. He's a young musician from the 3 O’Clock Rock kids' music program.https://youtu.be/zxr_EDgcD5Q

The Disconnect is a literary magazine published on the web with a fun wrinkle: You can only read it if your wifi is off.You can load the magazine by going to its URL, but once you're there, it displays a message telling you "Please Disconnect from the Internet".I duly turned off my wifi, started reading the first issue, and got to the note from the editor and founder, Chris Bolin:This magazine started with a simple thought experiment: what if a piece of the internet made you leave the rest behind?We created The Disconnect to embrace positive aspects of the internet—ease of dissemination and access—while pushing against some of its nefarious features, like ubiquitous distractions.The theme of this issue is straightforward: humans and our technology. Every piece in this issue describes an encounter with technology, whether it’s intentional or inconsequential, constructive or devastating. You’ll find a poem about a conflicted hunger for silence, a tale of monetizing the dead, and an exposition of the future of digital divides.This is not a Luddite rallying cry against modernity. Technology is ingrained in our lives for good and for ill. This is nothing new: humans have altered their reality with technology for millennia, from spoken language to the written word, from agriculture to electricity. We believe that the way to a better life is forward, not backwards. Let’s thoughtfully critique our world, not naively eschew it.It's a very fun concept! It's part of a whole pile of recent design experiments that tweak our relationship to the always-on interwebs and the casinofied psychologies of social media, ranging from Rob's txt.fyi (which I wrote about here) to Ben Grosser's experiments in "demetricating" Facebook and Twitter, or tools for removing retweets by Andre Torrez and Robin Sloan.As for the writing itself in The Disconnect, I've only started reading the first issue, but I've really enjoyed the opening piece, "Rescue" -- a bleak and moving sci-fi short story by Brian Mihok.(A tip of the hat to Brian Bennett for pointing this out to me)

Today's video games are technological marvels, boasting life-like graphics and immense open worlds. But, there's still something to be said about the games we played when we were younger, like Tetris and Snake. While not nearly as advanced as today's triple-A titles, nostalgia alone makes them a treat to play every now and again, and it's in this same retro spirit that the Wanle Gamers Console For iPhone was created.https://player.vimeo.com/video/252978627This iPhone case turns your smartphone into an old-school gaming handheld, with ten classic games like Tetris, Tank, Snake, Formula One Racing, and more pre-installed. Its ultra-slim design cuts down on bulk, while the raised buttons make gaming more accessible and help protect against bumps and falls in combination with its hard plastic construction.The Wanle Gamers Console For iPhone is available in the Boing Boing Store today for $33.99.

I am having too much fun reading A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1788 to provide definitions of the sort of vile, unmannerly slang employed by 18th-century streetfolk.It was created by William Grose, and as The Public Domain Review notes, Grose's goal was to craft a dictionary of all the naughty words that Samuel Johnson deemed too grody for his famous dictionary a few decades earlier. As they continue ...While a good deal of the slang has survived into the present day — to screw is to copulate; to kick the bucket is to die — much would likely have been lost had Grose not recorded it. Some of the more obscure metaphors include a butcher’s dog, meaning someone who “lies by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men”; to box the Jesuit, meaning “to masturbate; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society”; and to polish meaning to be in jail, in the sense of “polishing the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows, by looking through the iron grated windows”. Given this was the era of William Hogarth’s famous painting Gin Lane (1751), it’s not surprising to find the dictionary soaked through with colourful epithets for the juniper-based liquor: blue ruin, cobblers punch, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, moonshine, strip me naked. The Grose dictionary also contains hundreds of great insults, like bottle-headed, meaning void of wit, something you can’t say about its author.The whole dictionary has been beautifully scanned here by the Internet Archive.

Oculus Rift headset users were unceremoniously dumped out of virtual worlds and back into the real one, yesterday, and it was all because of an "expired certificate". The workaround, until they fixed it: setting the clock back.Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell promised a quick fix on Reddit, which was released late last night. Rift is back online as of ~12am. This was a mistake on our end, and we apologize. Folks impacted by today's downtime will be provided with an Oculus store credit. More details to follow soon. Thanks again for everyone's patience as we worked through this one.

Artist Marija Tiurina created this tasty backgammon set by repurposing a fancy Jaques London set to look like meat: (more…)

Truth bears little relation to this week’s big tabloid exclusives, which give fake news a bad name.“Surrounded by traitors!” screams the National Enquirer cover. “Donald & Melania Fight Back!” No, they don’t. The official magazine of the Oval Office complains at length about the “backstabbers” attacking Trump, but then offers no instance of Trump or Melania hitting back. It’s just a paranoid rant that sounds like it could have been dictated by Trump himself.“Prince Harry’s love child wrecks wedding!” proclaims the Globe cover, and it’s true that an illegitimate child could throw a spanner in the works of Harry and Meghan Markle’s coming nuptials. But this soufflé of a story cites an unnamed woman and her unnamed child and their unnamed lawyer supposedly writing privately to Kensington Palace. Despite the appalling lack of detail, the rag manages to include a photo of a red-haired four-year-old “chip off the old block,” without actually stating the obvious: that it’s a random red-haired child, and not Harry’s. Yet another story conjured out of thin air that somehow eluded the massed Royal press pack in London.Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher is “homeless” and “living in van!” states the Enquirer, with photographic evidence of the actress sitting outside her vehicle sipping tea and reaching for a book by the beach in Malibu. The Enquirer tries to duck the minor detail that this “homeless” actress still owns her $7 million Los Angeles mansion, and maybe just enjoys hanging in her retro VW van at the beach for a few hours. In related news, I’m homeless and living on a stool inside a Starbucks in Los Angeles.In a “world exclusive,” the Globe reveals that “two new witnesses” heard Natalie Wood’s “dying screams!” The witnesses turn out to be the same ones who told their story in publications worldwide back in 2011. I suppose the Globe can call it a “world exclusive,” because no other publication is about to rehash such old news.More in the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it column from the Enquirer: Jennifer Aniston asks Brad Pitt to be her baby daddy (as if); Prince Charles orders a $100,000 facelift for wife Camilla (too little, too late); Branch Davidian leader David Koresh is alive, having left a dead imposter behind and escaped the cult's conflagration (presumably by slipping past hundreds of FBI and ATF agents and 400 reporters, and having a body double given the same dental work as himself); and child beauty pageant poppet JonBenet Ramsey was killed by two men (says the rag that previously claimed she was killed variously by her parents and brother).“Oswald didn’t kill JFK!” screams the National Examiner, which reports that a “hi-tech study of bullet fingerprints shows he really was a patsy!” This is a typical wishful-thinking tabloid story, inspired by the merest sliver of fact: a British company, West Technology Forensics, announced in late February that it has developed a technique for pulling latent prints off old bullet casings. Though the technique has never been used successfully on any evidence more than 20 years old, MailOnline.com reported that the forensic technique could be used to solve old crimes which “might include the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.” Well, that’s good enough for the Examiner, which in the space of a week decided that the FBI dug out the shell casings left behind by Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, ran tests and found his fingerprints were not on the casings. Yet scientists admit the new test only works 68 percent of the time, so the absence of Oswald’s prints proves nothing other than the flights of fancy to which the Examiner can rise.People magazine brings us the Parkland school shooting survivors who “have to speak for those who died,” tells the coming out story of a collection of LGBTQ athletes, actors and others, and relates the dramatic story of a prep school sex assault victim. But just when you’re about to mistake it for a serious magazine, People devotes its cover to “The Bachelor Betrayal!” (just the same as the last Bachelor betrayal) as walking cardboard Arie Luyendyk admits “I made a huge mistake . . .” Then the mag devotes a staggering 34 pages to Oscar coverage of gowns, jewelry, and Hollywood vacuousness.Fortunately we have Us magazine’s crack team of investigative reporters to tell us that Keira Knightley wore it best (and still ended up looking like a waiter at the Ritz), that Christina Hendricks loves knitting, “especially cable-knit sweaters,” that TV’s former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay carries Advil, lipstick and keys in her YSL purse, and that the stars are just like us: they take taxis, shop for food, and hit the makeup counter. Revelatory, as usual.The most useless story of the week appears in the Enquirer, under the headline: “How to Save Yourself from Dementia!” It suggests that readers get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly, eat fish and avoid artificial sweeteners. But the reality is, if you’re reading the Enquirer, you’re probably already well on your way to dementia anyway.Onwards and downwards . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnhgWkcsQ4In Packets, Please, you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP; your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities -- you can boost Trump's tweets, disconnect political dissidents, and throttle rival video-on-demand services, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users. (more…)

When Donald Trump announced that he would "drain the swamp" by filling his cabinet with lobbyists, billionaires, and political operators, we all braced for an onslaught of rules that benefited the fattest of cats at the expense of everyone else, but Gary Cohn outdid himself. (more…)

Grey Heron is a new cyber-arms dealer offering to sell hacking tools to governments; it is fronted by Eric Rabe, who previously represented the disgraced, hacked Italian malware company Hacking Team, notorious for selling spy tools to governments that used them to target dissidents who were tortured and murdered after they were outed. (more…)

The Anker PowerCore is on sale on Amazon for $40 today, and you can get it for $35 if you click the link that says "3 Applicable promotions" to the right of the product photo. This is the one I use when I'm walking around an unfamiliar city all day and need to use my phone's map to help me get around. I keep it in my daypack with a charging cord dangling out. With 20000mAH it'll last for a very long time without having to recharge it.

If you have a dashcam, you don't need to worry about scammers pretending you hurt them in an accident, as demonstrated by this driver who encounters a spectacularly unconvincing scammer who jumps on the car's hood and throws himself on the ground. The driver takes it in stride and keeps going as if nothing happened, because nothing happened.If this strikes your fancy, here's a compilation of car insurance scam fails:https://youtu.be/09MK6qLPWOg

Apparently officials at San Francisco International airport are size queens. When selecting vendors for the terminals, SFO uses gross revenue as an indicator a business can handle their scale.Evidently an Oakland area sex shop is too small.Via ABC7:Nenna Joiner owns Feelmore Adult Gallery in Oakland. She says she wouldn't offer products banned by the TSA, like handcuffs and ropes but thinks some customers would like sex toys and lubricants. When airport officials opened the new, luxurious Terminal 3 in January 2014, then Airport Director, John Martin, promised passengers "a uniquely San Francisco, SFO experience."As part of that plan they offered local small businesses year long leases for pop ups. Joiner hasn't applied because the airport requires retailers have $250,000 in revenue, too much for some the program is designed to help. Joiner has asked the Airport Commission to lower the threshold to $150,000. "It's not to say I'm not looking for a handout, but it's also looking for evening the playing field," she said.In a statement, Grier Mathews, the Marketing Manager for SFO says the purpose of the $250,000 level is, "Ensuring that the retailer has a sufficient level of business activity and can operate in a high-volume airport environment."

This Saturday (3/10) from 5pm-7pm, my friends at San Francisco's Tunnel Records + Beach Goods are kindly hosting a Voyager Golden Record Party with complimentary beverages! I'll be there to talk about the iconic message for extraterrestrials launched into space on a phonograph record 40 years ago. My friends Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad and I co-produced the first ever vinyl release of the Voyager Record this year and we were honored with a 2018 Grammy award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package. Tunnel Records will have the Voyager Golden Record 3xLP Box Sets and 2xCD-Book edition available for sale. Can't make it? You can also order directly from our label Ozma Records.

"Use a material for what it's capable of doing," Samia Halaby says. "You don't make something out of wood that should be made out of Iron."She's not dinking around in Duluxe Paint either like that hamfisted hack from Pittsburgh did back in the 80s. Halaby is coding generative, animated art in AmigaBasic!The Guru Meditation: "Samia Halaby is a world renowned painter who purchased a Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985 at the tender age of 50 years old. She taught herself the BASIC and C programming languages to create "kinetic paintings" with the Amiga and has been using the Amiga ever since. Samia has exhibited in prestigious venues such as The Guggenheim Museum, The British Museum, Lincoln Center, The Chicago Institute of Art, Arab World Institute, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Sakakini Art Center, and Ayyam Gallery just to name a few."

Stormy Daniels' new lawsuit against Donald Trump says their "hush agreement" is invalid because 'David Dennison' (the president's sex pseudonym) never signed it.Donald Trump never signed the nondisclosure agreement that his lawyer Michael Cohen arranged with porn performer Stormy Daniels, according to a lawsuit filed by Daniels today in Los Angeles and later obtained by NBC News. (more…)

EFF-Austin's Jon Lebkowsky writes: "Every year while thousands flock to a certain large festival that temporarily colonizes Austin, EFF-Austin throws a honking big geek soiree. Keynote speakers are this year are Caroline Old Coyote and Michael Running Wolf, Native American VR/AR activists who are using technology to preserve their culture and heritage. Additional speakers include EFF Investigative Researcher David Maass discussing police surveillance, government transparency, and legislation in California, former EFF-Austin president Jon Lebkowsky, Carly Rose Jackson with Texans For Voter Choice, and Vikki Goodwin, Democratic candidate for Texas House District 47. Also music by Michael Garfield, Pilgrimess, and UBA, plus custom video game consoles, lockpicking, and cosplay." (more…)

Retina-X sold a bunch of spyware apps (PhoneSheriff, TeenShield, SniperSpy and Mobile Spy) that they advised parents to sneak onto their kids' devices, jealous men to sneak onto their girlfriends' devices, and bosses to sneak onto their employees' devices, in order to covertly track their location data, steal their photos and videos, and spy on calls, keystrokes and texts. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV1sAxPuL0All new cars are equipped with "Connected Vehicle" signaling technology, which allows them to send messages to other cars and to traffic lights and other fixed road infrastructure to help improve road signaling and, eventually, guide self-driving cars. (more…)

It's pretty clear that whoever designed the four teaser posters for Disney's Solo: A Star Wars Story, drew a great deal of inspiration from the 2015 album covers designed by Hachim Bahous for Sony Music France’s Legacy Recordings. From Quartz:Imitation is an inevitability, says graphic design historian Steven Heller. “If something is good, it will knocked off,” he says. “Look at I ❤ NY. Look at Coke and Pepsi. Look at the ripoffs around the world for Starbucks.”Heller says there appears to be enough visual similarities between Balhous design and Disney’s posters to make it seem like a copy: the condensed fonts, the weathered, textured background, the color palette, and the photo treatment of characters from the movie displayed inside the letters.But of course, Balhous isn't the first designer to fill letters with images. Quartz offers the following examples of prior art:[caption id="attachment_578018" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Saul Bass’s rejected poster for “The Shining” (1980); Philip Castle’s poster for “Clockwork Orange,” (1972); Saul Bass’s poster for “The Cardinal” (1963)[/caption]Bahous wants credit and compensation from Disney, but if he takes it to court it will be an uphill fight. From Quartz:Designers need to satisfy two criteria to win a court case: They need to show “substantial similarities” (which Bahous arguably does in his Facebook post), and they need to prove that the designers had access to the original design work (in this case, his Sony CD covers). This could involve asking the Star Wars poster designers to show their inspiration boards or unpack their conceptual process at the trial. An added complication is the fact that Bahous is in France and there’s is no “international copyright” standard followed by all countries, as the US Copyright Office explains.

p>I spent about 7 weeks in New Zealand and a couple of weeks in Australia in the early 2000s. People in both countries told me something along the lines of "If Australia is the United States, then New Zealand is Canada." This is not really accurate, of course, but it is true that Kiwis and Aussies are frequently compared and contrasted by their own citizens, and by others. Here's a Kiwi who is eager to set the record straight.

Rhett and Link invite Sofie Dossi, the "human pretzel," to fold herself into suitcases, drum cases, aquarium tanks, and suitcases.

California is the United States agricultural juggernaut. Produce from California feeds the world and drives one of the largest economies on the planet. A side-effect of Trump's beloved, family destroying ICE raids is a massive labor shortage.Fruit rots on the vine. Children lose their parents.Via Bloomberg:Their absence threatens segments of the largest state economy, including retailers, restaurants and the Central Valley’s $47 billion agricultural industry, which provides more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables in the country. That broad, 450-mile swath of California yields an eighth of the country’s agricultural output.The farm industry is already struggling to find workers like Maria’s husband. More than 55 percent of 762 farmers and ranchers surveyed in a California Farm Bureau Federation report from October 2017 said half of their land continues to go unattended because of an ongoing labor shortage directly related to U.S. immigration policy.Of the state’s more than 2 million farm laborers, 1.5 million are undocumented, according to Tom Nassif, President of the Western Growers Association, a 92-year-old industry group representing farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Although Nassif and the association have supported Trump since the early days of his campaign, he says the raids and decades-old immigration policy for farm workers are harming the industry and state economy.

I found out about Shit Ghost from this Reddit thread: "My seemingly normal project manager abruptly quit his nice paying job a couple years ago for unknown reasons. I facebooked him today out of curiosity to discover he is now dresses up in costume as a character he calls "Shit Ghost" and makes really obscure music and art."Here's more about Shit Ghost:The anonymous weirdo known as Shit Ghost has been tweaking Seattle audiences for a couple years now, performing in a white Spandex mask, white turtleneck and Archie McPhee costume glasses while stretching time—and his vocals—like saltwater taffy in ten-minute-long, ambient rock excursions. Like his on-stage persona, Shit Ghost’s music is both soothing and discomforting, gentle and gently maddening. You won’t notice you’re being lulled into a dissociative fever dream until you’re already there, and by then it’s too late, and you’re fine with it.I just had a vision of a bored, deskbound copro-eidolic entity upping and shouting to its colleagues, "That's it! I'm becoming a project manager!" and floating angrily off.

File under No Thank You: The Screenholder:Watch, play with or listen to your phone or tablet in the shower. 100% waterproof. Even use your camera. Features multiple phone and tablet sized pockets on outside to hold your device. Different height levels for everyone from tall adults to children. Touch interaction from the inside of the shower or bath, change songs, play games, scroll through the news.[via Shitty Future]

According to Engadget, America's futurist military think tank, DARPA, wants to figure out the means to slow down the biological functions of the human body to provide more time for medics and doctors to treat their wounded patients.If the notion of biostasis sounds like the stuff of science fiction to you, that's because it totally is – at least for now. While some creatures are able to regulate the cells in their body to the point where they can survive long-term freezing or dehydration, humans are, comparatively, delicate little snowflakes. We bleed out, we die. By finding a way to slow down or freeze the functions of our bodies, combat-injured soldiers could have more time to make it to life-saving treatments away from the front lines. Were DARPA to find a way to do this for soldiers, the rest of us could likely wind up benefiting too. In the past, other medical technologies, antihemorrhagic compounds, like those found in QuikClot bandages, found their start on the battlefield, but have made their way into the civilian market.If you're interested in seeing how DARPA's biostasis program pans out, you'd best get comfortable. DARPA won't even start answering the questions from companies looking to throw science at the problem until later this month.Image via Military.com

Storm Emma, a massive weather system that brought bitter cold and snow to the U.K. this past week did a lot of damage to power grids, forced the closure of schools and caused havoc for anyone looking to travel anywhere in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland (the Republic of Ireland took its share of knocks, too.) Perhaps worst of all, was the destructive effect the drastic drop in temperature had on sea life in the water surrounding the United Kingdom. This YouTube video shot at Ramsgate Beach in Kent, illustrates what a change in temperature can do to a delicate species of animal--if this isn't a prime example of why climate change is such an important issue, I don't know what is.

London product designer Dani Clode has created a prosthetic thumb, not to replace a missing digit, but simply to offer people an extra thumb, and therefore add to the human experience. She calls it the Third Thumb Project. Clode uses bluetooth controllers in her shoes, which are connected to pressure sensors underneath her toes, to manipulate the thumb. "It extends the wearer's ability. It extends the wearer's self. It's an addition to the body," she says in the video. The extra thumb allows you to easily do things like crack eggs, swipe an iPhone, and squeeze a lemon with only one hand instead of two. Now Clode is working on the Alternative Limb Project at the University College London with neuroscientists in a brain plasticity lab to design a prosthetic arm.

It has no teeth, a 2-foot long tongue, and a stick-like head. The giant anteater has lived on earth for 25 million years. But because of overhunting, its existence is being threatened.Image: Great Big Story

Researchers have found the world's oldest known tattoos -- a bull and a goat-like animal -- on a 5,200-year-old Egyptian mummy in the British Museum. From The Independent:Along with a Copper Age European of almost identical vintage, found preserved in an Alpine glacier, the ancient Egyptian is the oldest tattooed individual ever discovered.However, the Alpine mummy – often dubbed the Iceman – only had seemingly abstract groups of dots tattooed on him. The Egyptian, on the other hand, bears the earliest known example of tattoos in figurative art form.Examination of the art suggests they were made with a carbon-based pigment, probably soot.

Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was an ethnobotanist, psychedelic pioneer, philosopher, and shamanic scholar who boldly explored the mysteries of consciousness and the fringes of reason with rigor, wit, and generosity. Now, Kevin Whitesides with support of fellow travelers like BB pal Erik Davis are working hard "to collect, digitize, transcribe, store, and preserve the imprint of Terence McKenna's presence" in all media for the ages. You can help! Support the Terrence MckKenna Archives GoFundMe campaign! The incentives you can receive for participating are quite mind-blowing.There are five major sub-projects at present, all under the banner of The Terence McKenna Archives:1) A Collection Project: to find, collect, store, and preserve, either physical (or at least digital) copies of any material related to Terence McKenna. A full list of the physical & digital holdings are available at terencemckennaarchives.com.2) A Transcription Project: to transcribe all of Terence McKenna's 500+ hours of audio/video material that is freely available on the web into a searchable database. This crowdsourced, volunteer-based project is already ongoing and incredibly successful and can currently be found at terencemckenna.wikispaces.com. If you would like to help contribute by transcribing Terence's talks, please join the effort there and on The Terence McKenna Transcription Project Facebook Page.3) An Interview Project: to interview any family member, friend, colleague, acquaintances, workshop attendee, correspondent, interviewer, critic, collaborator, or any person suitably inspired or influenced by Terence McKenna.4) TerenceMcKenna.com: Terence's son owns this domain and it currently houses the Terence McKenna Bibliography, but we need resources and talent in order to build into the online McKenna hub that it can ideally be, eventually hosting the searchable transcription database, an online digital archive, and much more.5) I should mention, as a fifth, long-term, goal, that there is a lot of potential for future publications, including a comprehensive biography based on the collected archives and extended research, a volume of interviews about Terence, unpublished or out-of-print writing and interviews, etc. But, these projects will require some further development and time.The Terence McKenna Archives (GoFundMe)(photo above by Chip Simons)https://vimeo.com/256172421

Giant Pockets rounds up the options for owning an ultraportable, ultra-light computer that run an easily-accessible distribution: The World of Linux Handhelds in 2018. Thanks for Android, this is more niche than it ever was, but there's a surprisingly large number of options either already out or coming soon. Freedom is fun! So are games...I have somewhat mixed feelings about where these devices go. First, I am really glad to see a lot more activity and official support of Linux on more and more hardware, because more choice means more competition and likely better options altogether for several types of users. However, I am quite concerned with the overall trend to make such devices more and more premium, price-wise.The Gemini is very my cup of tea, and should ship imminently.

United employees who helped the airline hit key goals got a $300 bonus -- until now. (more…)