On Monday, the Weather Channel was live-streaming the planned implosion of the Georgia Dome for a full 40 minutes before a bus pulled up in front of their camera, completely blocking their shot at the exact wrong moment. Oops!

Pop culture historian Charles Phoenix, the culinary kitsch king behind the Cherpumple, accidentally created this Astro-Weenie Roast Tom Turkey Dog in his test kitchen a few years back.His space-agey "bird" is made of "turkey meatloaf skewered and studded with turkey wieners, turkey kielbasa, ‘lil turkey smokies and fresh cranberries."He writes, "I didn’t mean to do this, it just happened. I didn’t think about it, I just did it."Previously: 'Addicted to Americana,' Charles Phoenix's new book on 'classic & kitschy American life & style'

What do people most want to know about Stranger Things? Google's search engine's autocomplete will tell us. Here's Stranger Things stars Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo to answer those most-commonly asked questions about their hit show and themselves.It's called the WIRED Autocomplete Interview: Stranger Things is based on a true story, kinda

Never mind, link goes to a crappy version! Yesterday I mentioned how I was enjoying the Penguin Classics translation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristopo. I paid $10.87 for it, which was a good deal for 1200 pages of an epic story. I just found out Amazon is selling it for $0.57. Grab it while you can and enjoy!

What is the world coming to when the most implausible tabloid stories are actually almost true? An Arizona ranch for sale with alien visitors included, an angry parrot whose cries for help brought police running, and a charity Santa Claus arrested high on crack are among this week’s tabloid offerings ripped from the headlines (though you still have to take the ranch owner’s word for it that his home has been repeatedly plagued by aliens).Less plausible are the rags’ big exclusives this week. The “Curse of Diana” is “destroying the Royals!” screams the Globe cover, as if Princess Di was stabbing pins in voodoo dolls before she died in a car crash. “Prince Charles hires witches to remove curse his dying wife put on royal family,” claims its “world exclusive.” Right. Why hire just one witch, when you can rent a whole coven of them?“Trump’s Secret War on Scientology!” is the National Enquirer cover story, claiming that the president is outraged after finding that a cult “spy” has “infiltrated the Department of Justice.” While it’s true that the president has questioned Scientology's tax-free status, and equally true that the Bureau of Justice Assistance director nominee Jon Adler has pushed a highly dubious cult-backed drug detox program, he can hardly be called a “spy," and there’s little evidence that Trump knows what day of the week it is, let alone the religious affiliations of his appointees.The tabloid weight police are gunning this week for singer Aretha Franklin, whose “drastic weight loss is killing her,” reports the Globe, while the Enquirer claims that John Mellencamp has issued an ultimatum to lover Meg Ryan: “Eat or else!” Or else what? Apparently he “won’t wed a rail-thin Ryan.” Meanwhile the Globe claims that Brigitte Bardot is a “bloated bigot crippled by pain,” and the Enquirer claims that Sharon Stone is hiding her liposuction scars. What’s she supposed to do – post lipo scar selfies on Instagram?People magazine devotes its cover to TV’s Property Brothers star Drew Scott and fiancée Linda: “Ready to Wed!” Isn’t that the whole idea of getting engaged? Hardly a shocker. One other small question: Who the heck is Drew Scott, and does anyone care who he marries?With sparkling originality, Us magazine’s cover dubs actress Meghan Markle “The Princess Bride,” predicting her imminent engagement to Britain’s Prince Harry, which is hardly news. Prince Harry will join Meghan and her mother for Thanksgiving in Los Angeles, reveals the magazine, which will be a neat trick since she just flew in to London on Monday to spend time there with the prince.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us to tell us that Karlie Kloss wore it best, but only barely: she was preferred by 35 per cent of the 100 style experts the magazine found wandering the streets of New York, barely beating out Blake Lively’s 33 per cent and Jennifer Lawrence’s 32 per cent. Why isn’t such a close-run race front-page news? Because nobody gives a damn, that’s why. Us also informs us that the former Mrs. Trump, Marla Maples, learned to juggle in middle school, and that TV’s ‘Designated Survivor’ star Maggie Q keeps chunks of amethyst and citrine in her Angela Roi Madison backpack, along with a piece of onyx, “a stone that protects you from bad things people throw at you . . ." It’ll certainly protect you if you throw the onyx back at them. As always, the stars are just like us: they ride bikes, feed parking meters, and pump gas. You almost feel sorry for them.Leave it to the Examiner to tell us about the “Ranch for sale – Aliens included!” Stardust ranch owner John Edmonds in Arizona not only claims that extra-terrestrials repeatedly visit his ranch, but that he has fought and killed 19 of them – with his Samurai sword. So, where are their corpses? They disintegrate on dying, naturally.Santa Claus was found with a crack pipe and empty bags of crack and heroin, not to mention a hypodermic syringe, when police stopped Charles Smith in South Hackensack, New Jersey, reports the Examiner. The drug paraphernalia were resting next to the Santa costume Smith used volunteering for Toys for Tots, where kids doubtlessly bounced happily on his sedated knees. Ho, ho, ho.The Globe uses the parrot who cried wolf (or actually, cried “Help me! Help me!”) for the inexcusable headline: “Murder Most Fowl!” Alerted by a worried deliveryman, police rushed to a home in Clackamas, Oregon, only to find an irate parrot in need of little more than a cracker. This week’s tabloids will hopefully soon be lining the parrot’s cage.Onwards and downwards . . .

John H, a prop sculptor, sells handmade, $83 Alice in Wonderland doorknobs, which can either replace your existing knobs or fit around them. Available with painted details or brass finish. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis realized that a connected sex toy's "email a blowjob" feature had significant security vulnerabilities and has produced an entertaining and delightful Twitter thread explaining how she was able to both fingerprint electronic blowjob description files and disrupt them with code-injection attacks. (more…)

Susan Crawford, one of America's leading scholars of monopolism, competition and the tech industry, has an outstanding article in Wired laying out the principled case for killing the AT&T/Time-Warner merger, which the Trump DoJ has just filed a lawsuit to block. (more…)

This holiday season I've noticed quite a few hipsters sporting an amazing retro-looking hat!Everything old is new again.Deluxe Pilgrim Hat via Amazon

One of my touchstones is the idea that "every pirate wants to be an admiral": that is, everyone is all in favor of disruption, rule-breaking and tearing down the old order when they're a scrappy insurgent, and once they attain power, they change sides and dream of deploying the tactics that kept them at bay for all those long, hard years. (more…)

US Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) told CNN that White House's chief economic adviser Gary Cohn wanted to get off the phone with a long-winded Trump, so Cohn pretended to have a bad connection.The white lie was Carper's idea, who was in a meeting about tax reform with Cohn, members of the administration, and moderate Democrats. He suggested Cohn first slather Trump with a compliment, then say buh-bye."I said, 'Gary, why don't you do this, just take the phone from, you know, your cell phone back and just say, Mr. President, you're brilliant, but we're losing contact, and I think we're going to lose you now, so good-bye," Carper said. "That's what he did, and he hung up, and then we went back to having the kind of conversation where we needed to, where they asked the right kind of questions, looking for consensus and common ground and I think we identified a little bit."But someone in the meeting room (I have a hunch this someone is part of the administration) disagrees with Carper's account.According to CNN:

UCSF researchers have published an important paper in PLOS Biology that draws on internal documents from the US sugar industry lobby that shows that the industry deliberately suppressed research on the link between sucrose and bladder cancer and heart disease, and then deliberately sowed misinformation about the health effects of sugar, using tactics straight out of the tobacco industry's cancer-denial playbook. (more…)

Sarah Sims of Norfolk, West Virginia said school officials did nothing to stop her 9-year-old daughter from being bullied at school. So she put a digital audio recorder in her daughter's backpack to catch the bullying. The school found the recorder and police charged Sims with felony use of device to intercept oral communication and misdemeanor contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She faces five years in prison on the felony charge.From WishTV:

Leo Lech is suing the police in Greenwood, Colorado for storming his house with a 50-person SWAT team because they mistakenly believed that a man who ran into his house (whom Lech didn't know) had shoplifted a shirt and two belts from Walmart; the police engaged in a 19-hour standoff that led to the near-total destruction of Lech's house due to the use of "calculated destruction," a tactic through which explosives are detonated through the house, room by room, to isolate the suspect. (more…)

Is there a difference in how you feel after drinking red wine versus hard liquor? I've always thought so (sleepy with wine, invigorated with dirty martinis and tequila shots), and now a study published in British Medical Journal’s BMJ Open suggests that perhaps different types of alcohol really do affect different emotions after drinking them.The study, published on Tuesday, suggests that hard liquor makes people feel confident, energized and "sexy," while red wine makes people feel "relaxed." And spirits seem to take a more negative turn. "Drinking spirits was far more likely to elicit feelings of aggression, illness, restlessness, and tearfulness than wine or beer.and spirits more often make people feel aggressive, weepy, and ill," says Popular Science.According to Popular Science:

Gary Cohn is one of the gators Trump brought in to fill the swamp, a delusional, big-mouthed, ex-Goldman Sachs banker who gets to regulate Goldman Sachs. (more…)

This short interview with Homer Venters from Physicians for Human Rights, recorded in May at the the Right to Protest conference in Buenas Aires, is a succinct and important summary of the lie of "less-lethal" crowd-control weapons that kill and maim protesters, from tear-gas burns on lung-tissue to lethal, point-blank rubber bullet usage. (more…)

https://youtu.be/8BfuwLl5HcAIllustrator Mark Crilley (who has an excellent YouTube drawing tutorial channel) shows you three different ways to shade an egg. It's the most exciting 18-minute video you'll find on YouTube, I guarantee it.

https://youtu.be/yvDNt9UQb9oChris Funk of The Decemberists met with Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, a blind musician from South Central Los Angeles. He is in his 20s and specializes in music of the 1920s and 30s. He plays banjo, piano, harmonica, and other instruments.

Nuclear energy produces less carbon dioxide than any other any source (including solar, wind, and geothermal). But nuclear waste is extremely poisonous, and leaks are inevitable. Wendover productions looks at the problems surrounding what to do with the byproducts of nuclear power plants.

The project of making planes secure from terrorist attacks is an inescapable nonsense: nonsense because there's no way to screen millions of people to prevent a few dedicated ones from bringing down a plane (no, really); inescapable because no lawmaker or policymaker will ever have the courage to remove a measure that has previously been described as "essential for fighting terrorism" even if it was only ever security theater intended to assuage low-information voters. (more…)

Continuing my lead up to Thanksgiving with yet another post displaying the highest in class and culture, today I am pleased to share with you one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in kitchenware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=sH0QjK_lkJIIt’s an egg-white separator and, while its clever design deserves kudos, do we really need to see gobs of seemingly snotty glop pouring out of his nose? Yes, perhaps we do.The company knows exactly what it’s selling:

You've seen it done before. Some soprano sings a high note and it shatters a wine glass. What I didn't know is that most anyone can learn to do it. It seems you need a thin glass next to your face and a long, loud (over 100 decibel) note to start. That's dangerous. This video shares an alternate way using a microphone, amp and a drinking straw. (Holy Kaw!)

You have many choices when it comes to purchasing a calendar for the new year. Now there's another contender: the 2018 New York City Taxi Drivers Calendar.Described as a "comedic take on the traditional pin-up," the calendar features the Big Apple's "most scintillating and good-humored" yellow cab drivers and a portion of its proceeds goes to charity.

David Cassidy, star of The Partridge Family and a successful singer, died today aged 67.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r9UtIhOI8M

Uber's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan and his top aide have both been forced out of the company in an act of penance for the revelation that the company suffered a breach in October 2016 in which hackers stole personal data from 50,000,000 riders and 7,000,000 drivers, including 600,000 drivers' US driving license numbers; Uber says the disgraced employees acted alone when they then paid the hackers who stole the data $100,000 to hush it up. (more…)

Mike of the YouTube channel Useless Duck Company was fed up with birthday cakes for two reasons: 1) Blowing out candles splatters germs all over the cake, which is gross and unsanitary; 2) If it's your birthday, why should you have to work by cutting your own cake?So Mike came up with a new invention that "fixes birthday cakes" – a birthday cake candle made with model rocket engines that blows itself out and cuts the cake so you don't have to. Brilliant!Here's the longer version of the video that shows how he made his rocket-powered birthday cake:https://youtu.be/9CiKvuTPHvI

I do most of my reading on a Kindle Paperwhite. I'm currently reading the Penguin Classics translation of The Count of Monte Cristo (much better than the Project Gutenberg version I read years ago) and the Kindle's X-Ray feature, which lets me find out about the many characters and their relatives who pop in and out of the novel, helps me remember what the hell is going on. The Kindle is also a lot easier to hold than the 1200 page paperback version, which my daughter is reading.The Paperwhite rarely needs recharging, even when the backlight. Unlike a phone or tablet, there's no glare, making it the best way to read outdoors. I have at least a hundred books on it, and haven't gotten a "memory almost full" warning (text doesn't use a lot of storage, like audiobooks do). If I don't have my reading glasses, I can make the text as large as I need to. At $80 for a refurbished model, it's a good deal.

Starchitect-designed Tianjin Binhai Library is a viral sensation; the Dutch firm MVRDV incorporated a soaring, six-storey spherical atrium with undulating floor-to-ceiling shelves served by striking, irregular white stairs. (more…)

The assignment: draw seven perpendiculars red lines, some with with green ink and transparent link. A classic comedy sketch of a typical corporate design meeting.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto had a strong message for Trump last night, ending with the line, "Last time I checked, you are the president of the United States. Why don’t you act like it?”Cavuto was fed up with Trump after this week's twitter tantrums about LaVar Ball and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Cavuto says it's not about players or senators."This is about you and respect shown to you. Constant praise shown to you, and gratitude bordering on groveling shown to you. As president of the The United States, doesn't that already come with the territory?"When Fox News starts to call Trump out for what he really is (or isn't), you know things aren't looking pretty for POTUS.

Beijing's subway system now includes some experimental cars decorated to look like fanciful, book-lined rooms; scan the QR codes and you get free audiobook downloads for popular Chinese novels. (more…)

Synology's DS718+ NAS DiskStation (Amazon) is $400 data storage box. For me, it replaces very two annoying things: a monthly subscription to Dropbox, and a drawerful of USB drives used to back up a houseful of computers.But file syncing and backups are just two things a modern NAS can do.In fact, the first thing you'll notice after setting it up is that it's really a fully-featured computer that happens to be set up with storage in mind. The web-based control panel replicates a desktop user environment, complete with windows, folders, icons and drop-down menus.There are pros and cons to this. One one hand, you'll not only get rid of cloud subscriptions, recover your data privacy and have less gear lying around, but find yourself with a hundred other interesting applications to fool around with. Want a basic web-development box? There's one-click setups for Apache, nginx, common databases and popular platforms such as Wordpress, Discourse and Node. Want to use it as a 4K media player? It's small and inconspicuous enough to sit right by the TV set and has a HDMI port. Want a fancy-pants router? It has dual gigabit ethernet.On the other hand, it's more complicated than the things it replaces. I just wanted to get out of the cloud and get rid of all these damned backup drives, but now I'm a sysadmin. (There are less fancy options such as WD's My Cloud devices, but they're almost as expensive (Amazon) when the cost of drives is factored in)And I'll admit that I enjoyed experimenting with Synology's add-ons. If you live in the future, you can automate your house with it. If you live in the past, you can serve your own e-mail. See the full list. Setup was easy, about as hard as a networked printer. Adding app packages worked without fail—I've never had such an easy time getting a basic LAMP stack up and running.For computers and phones, Synology puts out a panoply of single-purpose applications that each hooks into a specific NAS feature. There's the drop-in Dropbox client replacement, Cloud Station Drive. There's an incrementing file backup app (though I just used Time Machine and File History). There's a media player app. There are so many Synology apps that it can be hard to tell exactly which one you need for any given purpose, but I prefer this discrete approach to the thought of there being one giant bloated "Synology iTunes", especially on mobiles.You can set up an account with Synology to access a NAS remotely; the alternative is configuring port forwarding rules in your router. Synology's service trades privacy and speed (transfers are routed via their own servers) for user-friendliness. Not my cup of tea, but if you're getting grandma a NAS for Christmas, likely essential.My biggest problem was something I'm sure wasn't its fault: initial full-system backups are excruciatingly slow over WiFi, and it's multiplied by the number of laptops you're hooking up to it. After that's done, though, the regular incremental backups (using Time Machine) roll by fast enough not to be noticed and have never failed.The model tested has two bays for redundancy, 2GB of RAM and 1.5 Ghz CPU. Single-drive Synology models start at about $200, if you like living dangerously and slowly.For dumb consumers like me, servers and services should be unseen things that you never get bothered by or even have to think about after initial setup. And that's exactly what I got with the perfectly boring and capable Synology NAS — at least so long as I don't think about all those features and that remote desktop thinger and the notifications bar in it bleating about updates. Bye bye Dropbox! Bye bye dangling backup drives! Hello modicum of privacy in the fading light of civilization's dusk before the annihilation begins!DS718+ NAS DiskStation [Amazon]

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (previously) is planning to make good on his promise to kill net neutrality this weekend, under cover of the holidays, ushering in an era in which the largest telcoms corporations can extract bribes from the largest internet corporations to shut small, innovative and competitive internet services from connecting to you. (more…)

Friction took a holiday in Vladivostok on Friday as cars slid and collided on the ice-covered streets. Vl.ru news has a collection of 19 videos highlighting the hazardous conditions.

Oumuamua is the first observed interstellar asteroid. It was discovered on October 19 and is about 800 meters long. Oumuamua is simply paying our solar system a visit as it continues its journey across the Milky Way.From CNN

This excellent video (from the early 50s or late 40s, I'm going to guess) shows how a mechanical watch keeps time. It reminds me of the video that shows how a car's differential gear works.Here's a modern animated version:https://youtu.be/uGcoIue1Bs8

Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls on TV's Little House on the Prairie, tells Andy Cohen about the time she auditioned for the part of Pamela Courson for Oliver Stone's The Doors movie – and left in tears. She says Oliver Stone humiliated her."I had auditioned, and then he said, ‘I’ve written this special scene for you. I’d like you to do it with the actor. I want to see the chemistry with the two of you.’ The whole scene was just my character on her hands and knees saying, ‘Do me, baby.’ Really dirty, horrible...Then he said, 'I'd like you to stage it for me.'”Gilbert says Stone did this to her because she had once embarrassed him in public.

Paul Ryan says his tax plan will be great for the poorest and most vulnerable people in America, and he tweeted a hypothetical to help you understand how that works: "Meet Cindy: a single mom, making $30,000 per year, who hopes to one day get beyond living paycheck to paycheck. With a $700 increase in her tax refund each year under our tax bill, Cindy can start saving for her future." (more…)

If your fingers aren’t dextrous enough for flimsy rolling papers, or you’re just fed up with the gross, laborious process of cleaning your pipe, check out the Twisty Glass Mini, available in the Boing Boing Store.This smoking accessory fits up to a half gram of plant material at a time. Inside its glass body, it features an innovative corkscrew mechanism that lets you easily eject ash and reload with a twist. Its clever design provides a slower burn with a smaller cherry, as well as five open chambers for extra-smooth hits.To keep your Twisty Glass Mini safe when not in use, it comes with a pocketable carrying case that has plenty of room for cleaning tools and a lighter. Right now you can pick one up for $39.99 in the Boing Boing Store — and take an extra 15% off when you use coupon code GIFTSHOP15 at checkout.

Here are six new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I’ve watched a lot of British TV in my day, but never have I seen anything like Mrs. Brown’s Boys. I’ve about pissed me self laughin’! This award-winning situation comedy is about an Irish family and stars Brendan O’Carroll, a gent, cross-dressing as the rude and rowdy old lady Mrs. Agnes Brown. The show is noted for its unrelenting crude humor and is hugely popular in the United Kingdom. I’m not going to tell you anything else except to watch these clips (be prepared to laugh heartily, unless you’re a prude or burdened with good taste, in which case you should most definitely not watch them at all).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjJc8xLYhakhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIEZCRjR_AAnd the whole series is available on DVD at amazon.

I’m taking a week off from producing a full podcast, and am instead presenting what I hope will be a fun Thanksgiving road-trip accompaniment.It’s an audibobook excerpt. But since it’s the very start of that audiobook – and as it’s read by the flat-out brilliant comedian/actor John Hodgman - there’s no need to hear the rest of the thing to enjoy this standalone hour-plus of playfulness. In other words, this is truly not intended as an advert for a long-ago book! But if you find the nature of the content awkward, by all means skip it. Otherwise, you can hear it by searching “After On” in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:The excerpt is from my novel Year Zero. Which was, of course, a literary exercise. But it was also a sort of primal scream therapy – intended to purge the demons still haunting me after years of imploring the music industry to allow me to launch the Rhapsody music service, which was the main product of a company I founded called Listen.com.For those who don’t go back that far, Rhapsody was the first online music service to get full-catalog licenses from all of the major labels, as well as hundreds of indies (before even Apple). We were also the forerunner to Spotify, in that we were the world’s first unlimited on-demand streaming music service. Eventually, RealNetworks bought us out, then later sold half of the service to MTV. More recently, in a strange, ironic twist, Rhapsody was renamed … Napster.For those interested in the birth of online music, and/or in copyright-related lunacy, I discuss those matters in a brief intro and longer outro to the excerpt. Or you can skip that, and just listen to the tale of a vast, alien civilization. One so into American pop music that they accidentally commit the biggest copyright infringement since the dawn of time - thereby bankrupting the entire universe. Yup. That is seriously the premise my first novel. And here’s a fun little trailer that we put together back when it debuted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfVtpYrddMThough it’s (obviously) a highly playful story, Year Zero is also a serious critique of things that I deem badly broken about intellectual property law. For some context, I discussed a particularly odious law, which also features in the book, in this TED talk a few years back (it’s brief and will hopefully make you laugh).https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod/up-nextIf you enjoy listening to Hodgman tackle this madness a tenth as much as I do, this episode should be an hour-and-change well spent. Enjoy!

Every fall, New York City's Society of Illustrators puts on this hidden-in-plain-sight gem of an exhibit. The Original Art Exhibit displays original illustrations from a selection of the best picture books of the year.Not only do you get to view the original paintings, drawings, and even sculptures that were used to illustrate these books, but the books themselves are on display so you can see how they appear in the finished product.As an adult who loves art and kids' books, this is a blast for me. But it's just about the best art exhibit you can take a kid to. Because paintings in an art museum can seem abstract to a kid, but these pictures are used to tell amazing, exciting, and/or funny stories, in a format they're intimately familiar with.And kids get a sense of how picture books are made. They don't sprout up on library and bookstore shelves fully formed; they are made by real people's imaginations and hands, using tools just like the ones kids use to make art.My kids loved (and my nieces currently love) to find the books and the pages that match the original artwork on the wall. And we'll make a list of their favorites and I'll order them from the library -- in a couple of weeks we have a stack of great picture books they have a personal connection to.This year's exhibit is great once again, and runs through December 30.Above is the contribution of the great Adam Rex, who painted the covers of my two kids' books (so far), the EMU Club Adventures series.

If an entire 3x3 Rubik's Cube is too much, but a 2x2 one too plainly insulting, try this 2x3 one that you can get for about a fiver at Amazon. That's four ninths of a real Rubik's Cube for nine tenths of the price!The product page assures you in its first bullet point that this puzzle contains "no fabrics." SOLD.

The Medieval city generator does just that, with the right balance of abstraction and detail to give your imagination space to put it to good use. (previously)

Scientific American consulted biomechencial engineers on how to win the wishbone wish fair and square and also by cheating.

In 1987, Jim Henson produced and directed this pitch reel for Inner Tube (aka IN-TV), a cyberpunk, culture-jamming series that just wasn't meant to be but did inform The Jim Henson Hour's MuppeTelevision segments. From Jim Henson: The Biography:

Illustrator Albert Kallis, co-founder of International House of Pancakes, painted the movie poster art of Invasion of the Saucer Men in 1957. It sold for over $100,000 over the weekend at a Heritage Auctions event.

Timm Woods, 30, is one of New York City's most popular Dungeons & Dragons dungeon masters-for-hire. He's also working on his PhD dissertation, titled "Anything Can Be Attempted: Table-Top Role Playing Games as Learning and Pedagogy." From Brian Raftery's profile of Woods in Wired: