Die-hard fans of the Japanese band Kamen Joshi have a treat in store. The Tokyo-based chain of Tenka Torimasu fried chicken restaurants is offering sauce "designed to replicate the 'refreshing' sweat" of the band members.From Rocket News 24:

A Federal Appeals courts says Davino Watson, a U.S. citizen, has no right to damages awarded to him by a lower court after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) imprisoned for over 3 years as a deportable alien then dumped him without explanation in Alabama, leaving him with no means to get home to New York.From NPR:

Robert Szucs' is a Geographer and GIS Analyst who likes to "combine my work with a lifelong passion for beautiful maps." He created these stunning maps on his Etsy site with Geographic Information System and image editing software, and they show the river basins of the world as veins of a living creature.

Sadly, it's already sold out, but Trump tweets toilet paper is perhaps the gift of 2017. While you're waiting for stock to replenish, you can instead wipe your arse on his face.

Trump's Secret Service detail's command-post is no longer leasing high-priced office-space in Trump Tower; now they operate out of a portable trailer on the sidewalk somewhere nearby, having vacated after a dispute over the high rents levied by the Trump Organization. (more…)

The New Yorker is running the audio of the phone call between its Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and Anthony Scaramucci, who was the White House's brand spanking new communications director. In the call, Scaramucci asked Lizza to reveal the name of the person who told him the names of people in attendance at a dinner with Trump. He also called Reince Priebus “a paranoid schizophrenic,” and said Steve Bannon sucks his own dick. Scaramucci "resigned" days later.Photo of Anthony Scaramucci: Jdarsie11

These tiny screw cameras are about $20 on Amazon (or $15 on eBay), with versions that plug into CCTV systems, composite inputs, and USB ports. There's also the bare camera, minus the fake screwhead. [via OPSEC]The Amazon listing includes a photo of it installed in a public toilet door. Naturally, there are some customer questions:

With pre-orders open for the graphic novel collecting William Gibson's amazing comic book Archangel, and a linked novel on the way that ties the 2016 election to the world of The Peripheral, William Gibson has conducted a fascinating interview with Vulture on the surge in popularity in dystopian literature. (more…)

A cannabis products producer bought the town of Nipton, California (pop. 20) for $5 million, with the intention of turning into a weed "destination."From BBC:

Here's a 30-minute keynote that Bruce Sterling gave in 1994 to the ICA's "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future" VR conference in London. You should watch it, if only for the insight it gives into the early years of today's most contested technology questions. (more…)

Dan Hom (perfecting earlier work by Tom Taylor) trained an AI on the vast corpus of British place names, then set it loose. The results are amazing, illustrative of an uncannily human humor seemingly at work, something you'd never get from the standard syllable-randomizing place name generators of yore."There aren’t as many cocks as you’d think," he writes.My favorites: Brotters Common, Boll of Binclestead, Farton Green Pear End, Weston Parpenham, Sutsy Compton, Stoke of Inch, Kinindworthorpe Marmile, Rastan-on-croan, Fuckley, Fapton, Waterwitherwell.See also Hom's AI trained to generate Ask Metafilter post titles.Surely neural-net-generated Liffs are next.

Monsanto is facing over 100 lawsuits in a Federal district court in San Francisco brought by people who attribute their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to exposure to glyphosate in Monsanto's Roundup weed-killer, and as part of the discovery process, it submitted internal documents to the court that detailed shenanigans in the company's internal science and its dealings with regulators and the press. (more…)

The campaign ad for Retired Marine Lt. Col. Amy McGrath's run for Congress in Kentucky is inspiring: a woman who beat all the odds and covered herself in glory, standing against the cowardly Mitch McConnell's hand-picked wormtongue in a state where the GOP stands ready to snatch away health-care from thousands of voters. (more…)

Once big data systems agglomerate enough data about you to predict whether you are likely to get sick or badly injured, insurers will be able to deny coverage (or charge so much for it that it amounts to the same thing) to anyone who is likely to get sick, forcing everyone who might ever need insurance into medical bankruptcy, and turning Medicaid into a giant "high-risk pool" that taxpayers foot the bill for. (more…)

Yours for €2099, Love Hultén's limited-edition Datorbox comes in green or orange and looks like something from another age. Well-specced and tiny, you'll have the challenge of finding pretty peripherals to go with it.

KB at the 40% Keyboards blog created nunchaku from two keyboard number rows and a dual-headed USB cord.

I'm glad to hear that the licensing department at Chia Pet headquarters is on top of giving the people what they really, really want. Case in point, they've made a Chia Pet fashioned after Joy of Painting host Bob Ross!His signature 'fro will just grow and grow... "happy little trees," of course.Btw, I was going use "All Hail the Bob Ross Chia Pet" as the headline but accidentally typed "Hair." I decided the typo was too perfect to change.The Bob Ross Chia Pet is available for $19.99. (In fact, it's the #1 best-selling "Plant Germination Kit" on Amazon.)(Dangerous Minds)

According to Rolling Stone, Motörhead performed David Bowie's 'Heroes' "live only one time, in June 2015, as an encore at Germany's Aftershock festival." Fortunately for us, it was recorded.The footage, along with some candid shots of (the late-great) Lemmy Kilmister and the band, make up the song's music video:

This morning, Twitter covered Ken "Popehat" White's profile page in balloons to celebrate his birthday. This afternoon, it suspended his account for posting screenshots of threats he'd received from another user.The ranting missive, from a far-right lawyer in Texas whose threatening Twitter postings White had earlier mocked, promises such hatred and cruelty that White will want to kill himself or flee to "escape my wrath."But it was White's response that fell afoul of Twitter's mysterious rules on posting personally identifying information—even when such information is disclosed and widely publicized.

Which squares fill first with fluid?(more…)

Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) says “no one could really believe that Mexicans were going to pay for a wall" and that Trump obviously used "wall" as a “metaphor for border security.” And now that the matter is settled, "it’s time to move on."But before we move on, please clear up something I'm confused about. I thought this was the joke administration. Trump and his team have made it clear that they are telling funny jokes, like endorsing police brutality, and saying fellow staffers are fucking paranoid schizophrenics and autofellators. I was still trying to figure out why those jokes were so funny, but now they're pivoting towards a metaphorical administration, and I'm trying to understand how you attach solar panels to a metaphorical wall.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia's cyberwar on America's elections and Trump's possible collusion, has impaneled a grand jury in Washington. The Wall Street Journal was first to report this news on Thursday. (more…)

My guest on the Cool Tools Show Podcast this week is Rich Roat, co-founder of the graphic design firm, House Industries. I've been following their work since the early 1990s and love everything they do, from font design to ceramics. Rich is also co-author of a stunning new book House Industries: The Process is the Inspiration with Andy Cruz and Ken Barber.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:

This LED clip-on light plugs into a supplied USB charger. It has an adjustable arm and has variable color and brightness settings. It looks great for illuminating your workbench. It's on sale on Amazon today for $16. Amazon reviewers give it 4.5 stars and it has an A rating on Fakespot.

Honolula has become the first major US city to ban texting while walking across the street, reports Christian Britschgi for Reason. The mere act of "looking in the direction of the screen of a mobile device" can earn you a ticket between $15 to $99.Interestingly, Honolulu does not have a serious problem with pedestrian deaths. "In Smart Growth America's ranking of 104 cities on their Pedestrian Death Index, Honolulu came in well below average at 82nd, with 1.76 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 residents," says Britschgi. So why did the City of Honolulu think it was important to pass such a law? It could be that the City wants yet another weapon in its ongoing campaign against Honolulu's homeless population.Snip:

Mary and Clyde Antrim are a married couple from Pueblo Colorado in their 80s. Mary and Clyde were upset when their car was stolen. Mary and Clyde were happy when Colorado Springs police found their stolen car. Mary and Clyde were unhappy when the police said they wouldn't give it back to them because it was being held for evidence. Mary and Clyde were mad a month later when they read online that the police were going to auction their car. Mary and Clyde were perplexed when the police department said it told them to come get the car, because the police never told them. Mary and Clyde were upset when they found out they had to pay they police $178 to get their car back even though charging crime victims is against Colorado Springs Police Department policy. Mary and Clyde were relieved when a local TV news station helped them get their car back. Mary and Clyde will be happy when the police department apologizes.From KOAA:

Since 1934, the National Firearms Act has limited ownership of "any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger" (AKA, "machine guns"), but with the AutoGlove, a kind of exoskeletal automation system for your finger, you can get around the limits by having your roboticized hand squeeze the trigger so fast that you reach machine-gun-like rates of fire. (more…)

Update: Here is the indictment. Hutchins is accused of making and selling a keylogger called the "Kronos banking trojan."Marcus Hutchins is the 23 year old security researcher behind the @MalwareTechBlog Twitter account; he's the guy who figured out that the Wannacry worm had an accidental killswitch built in and then triggered it, stopping the ransomware epidemic in its tracks. (more…)

In 2015 Cody Weiss got a ticket for parking longer than the posted time limit. He says the ticket was wrongfully issued, and decided to contest the ticket. He learned that the City of LA doesn't directly review tickets; it outsources the job to a private company. That didn't sit well with Weiss, so he sued the city and won. Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council approved a $650,000 payout.From the LA Times:

I'm always exhausted after ordering at Starbucks. Not only are there a million different ways to make a coffee over there, but you need to know all of their code words to get the exact coffee you want. Tall (which means "small"). Venti. Trenta. Frappuccino. Americano. Flat white. Skinny. Dry. Bone dry. Etc etc. And now there's more to add to the list: Pepper Nitro with a Jerky Twist.Decoded, a Pepper Nitro with a Jerky Twist consists of: "Congo coffee, slow-steeped as cold brew and served on draft through a nitro tap, then infused with a sweet and savory malted fennel black pepper syrup. The beverage is topped with a layer of honey cold foam and finished with a sprinkling of cracked pink peppercorn and a bamboo skewer of natural beef jerky made with grass-fed beef," according to Starbucks.But the drink, which sounds more like a tasty dinner appetizer, is only offered at the Seattle Reserve Roastery, and as a specialty cold drink, it might not be around for long.Image: Starbucks

Over 8,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico has been turned into a dead zone, thanks to manure and chemical runoff from massive meat processing factories spilling into the Mississippi River delta. (more…)

"But the fact is we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall – I have to.” -- Trump to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on a January 27, 2017 phone call.(more…)

I've always hated Bic's cheap Cristal ballpoint pens as much as I've wanted to love them. An iconic example of 20th-century design genius, they are unreliable, ubiquitous, and produce a nasty debossed line even when they work. But look, everyone: they fixed it. Bic's Cristal Smooth and Xtra Bold ballpoints look exactly like the standard ones, still cost mere pennies, but produce far superior, fluid, fluent lines. They live dead center in the Venn giagram of cheap, good and minimal.I'd picked one up unawares from someone else's desk and gotten about three sentences in before I paused and thought "Hey, this is weird. This a nice pen." I sat in quiet cognitive dissonance for a while, staring mutely at what appeared to be a standard crappy Bic Cristal. Writing more words, this time with a deliberate, eyes-narrowed scrutiny, my first impression was confirmed, just as my skeptical devil piped up with "but I bet it's at least a dollar for each one."No! 18 cents! Those bold ones are my favorite, you should go buy a box right now. [Amazon]P.S. They taste exactly the same as the original Bic Crystal, but I haven't tried drinking the ink yet.

Papa-to-be and Serena Williams' sweetie Alexis Ohanian shared his favorite post from Reddit, the site he co-founded, on Tuesday night's Jimmy Kimmel Live.Nope, it's not the one that shows the dog that looks like William H. Macy (though that's impressive).It's a heartwarming one about a man whose vehicle broke down and, well, watch the clip.Previously: Reddit co-founder breaks down net neutrality for Snoop Dogg

The Wannacry worm burned through the world's unpatched IT systems, hitting more than 80 countries in 24 hours, taking down hospitals, airlines, banks and logistics companies, until a hidden killswitch was able to halt its spread. (more…)

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, describes the foolishness of enacting further tax cuts for the wealthy in America, and the structural impediments that stand in the way of Trump's pursuit of this foolish goal. (more…)

Ghosts of the Arctic is a collaboration by Untitled Film World that captures some remarkably intimate images of wildlife in the coldest and most remote corners of the world. (more…)

In 1962, the Mercury program sought to find out if humans could eat in space. This interesting 1966 film captures some of the early trial and error. (more…)

Watching this video of Janis Joplin and Tom Jones singing "Raise Your Hand" and dancing together on stage makes me so incredibly happy. What a joy to see them both doing their thing... together. Groovy, baby!This footage is from an episode of Jones' show This is Tom Jones which aired on December 4, 1969, just 10 short months before her death.On the same episode, Joplin sang this "Little Girl Blue" solo:https://youtu.be/FVpDOIPx_sY(ILCR)Thanks, Eric Harvey Brown!

Back to the Future Java is a Java Virtual Machine planed down until it fits on 8-bit computers (i.e. the Commodore 64). It's based on a port of Java made for Lego Mindstorms, lacks a few key features of the language (such as garbage collection), but is quite an astounding feat. Previously: Java on a Sega Genesis; Java on Apple II.

The "50-cent army" is an insanely prolific cadre of government workers whose extra duty is to post hundreds of millions of messages to social media, flooding all available channels with feel-good messages about the accomplishments of Chinese sports teams and the high standard of living in China. (more…)

Mozilla's send.firefox.com lets you send an encrypted file privately to anyone else, providing an automatically-expiring link.Jacob Kastrenakes:

It's always a great creative exercise to stick to a daily goal for a set period of time, as Gregory Darroll shows in A Month Of Motion, a collection of short animations he did once daily in June. (more…)

The good folks at YouCar took a tour of a wood shop that makes dashboard panels for Bentleys, and it's a real pleasure to watch such fine work being produced. (more…)

Four-time Grammy-nominated country singer Joe Nichols has been covering Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" in concert for years now. He recently decided to put his honky-tonk version of the 25-year old rap song on his new album, Never Gets Old. And then he decided to make a music video for it, co-starring the itty-bitty-waist lover himself.Turns out Sir Mix-a-lot was already a fan.https://www.instagram.com/p/BXO0FoClKcP/?taken-by=therealsirmixalotPreviously: Songs mangled by Google Translate, as sung by Idris Elba and Jimmy Fallon

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that millennials have learned how to get free TV with a simple antenna, for a one-time cost of about $20. Us old-schoolers have known of this ancient wisdom since, well, forever but have neglected to pass down to the young'uns.But the crazy thing is that it's not just young folks, the Journal consulted an industry group who estimate about a third of all Americans don't realize that local channels are free:

You only need to read the Table of Contents to know the ACLU of West Virginia's Amicus Brief on the case where coal company CEO Robert Murray, of Murray Energy, is suing John Oliver for defamation is gonna be special.I am especially looking forward to section III.

President Donald Trump's nominee to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, Sam Clovis, wrote a personal blog for years on which he accused progressives of "enslaving" minorities, described black political figures as "race traders," and said then-President Obama was a "Maoist" with "communist" roots.(more…)

A real life doodle by LOLNEIN.(more…)

On Sunday I saw the screening of Brillo Box (3¢ Off) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 40-minute documentary was written/directed by Lisanne Skyler and will air on HBO on August 7th. The film tells the story of an Andy Warhol “Brillo Box (3¢ Off)” sculpture that Skyler’s parents bought in 1969 for only $1000, and traded shortly after for another piece of art. The same Brillo Box recently sold for 3 million dollars. When Skyler was a child, her father enclosed the sculpture in Plexiglas and her family basically used it as a coffee table.In Skyler’s director’s statement, she talks about the drastic change in value of the sculpture: “I was fascinated by this stunning turn of events and wondered about all of the personal decisions that had shaped its journey. What was the role it played in other lives, and what secrets did it hold about my own family?” Skyler’s questions about the box are answered in the film through footage of the Warhol Factory scene, interviews with her parents who spent their lives buying and trading art, and a look into the rapidly changing art world that Skyler witnessed first hand as she grew up.