This week on HOME: Stories From L.A., a member of the Boing Boing Podcast Network:

Vladimir Putin’s "American love slave tells all,” President Trump “can foil Mueller’s dark mission," and “sex romps rock White House,” in this week’s fact-challenged tabloids.Politics has always been show-business with consequences, and this week’s tabloids are no exception.The ‘National Enquirer,’ which brings us its “Political Sex Scandal Hall of Shame” - All Stars include Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and the irrepressible Anthony Weiner - reports that “President Donald Trump has been rocked by a sleazy sex scandal after a top aide was caught cheating on his wife - with a hottie younger than his own daughters!”While trying to fathom how the term “hottie” was exhumed from 1950s porn magazines, what’s most remarkable is that the Trump-loving ‘Enquirer’ would expend an ounce of ink criticizing their beloved Commander in Chief. But of course, that’s not what they’re doing. This “shocking revelation” is allegedly about former election campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who Trump is desperately trying to put in his rear view mirror, having been exposed for links to Russia, and attending Donald Trump Jr's infamous meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, hoping to find dirt on Hillary Clinton. It’s clearly another indication of how Trump can turn on his former aides, that Manafort’s alleged infidelity “romping with his 33-year-old mistress in the bedroom he shares with his wife” can become fodder for celebrity-hungry ‘Enquirer’ readers.‘Enquirer’ political columnist Dick Morris claims that special counselor Robert Mueller “has shown he is determined to bring Trump down, and will stop at nothing.” No hyperbole there, Dick? Just the facts? “Originally hired to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to fix the U.S. election, he is now using his unlimited power, money and staff to go far back into the president’s past to find grounds for impeachment.” And why is that a problem, Dick?“More is at stake than party politics here,” he explains. “The ability of the people to select their president and the office of the president itself are in play.” Oh, right.Meanwhile the ‘Globe’ sticks it to Russia's Vladimir Putin with a dubiously-sourced and unverifiable report claiming to interview his former mistress. Allegedly rendered flaccid by German beer, Putin would pop Viagra and “the pills would turn him insatiable,” says the “36-year-old blond bombshell,” who claims she “was the kinky Kremlin kingpin’s playmate from 2012 to 2014,” enjoying trysts in Paris, Moscow, and across Europe.The ‘Globe’ does not reveal her identity, but allegedly tracked her down "with the help of a CIA informant." Not a CIA agent, but an informant. How hard would it be for any unscrupulous individual to contact the ‘Globe’ claiming to be a CIA informant, offering an unidentified blond for interview purporting to be Putin’s alleged lover? And would the ‘Globe’ scrupulously verify her story before publishing? That seems unlikely, which is why this story is on page 44, and not on the cover. And why is she called Putin’s “love slave?” Why not just his lover?Back in the (un)real world, the ‘Globe’ reports that Prince William and wife Kate are “taking charge” of the British Royal Family (they aren’t); that serial killer Ted Bundy was “a sociopathic monster” (shocker!); and that a haunted mansion ghost has been “caught on camera” (or it’s a hazy white smudge on the lens.)The ‘Enquirer’ reports that John Travolta piloted a “gay orgy jet” (or maybe he just flew ten male friends to Africa); that Princess Diana’s grave in Althorp Park is empty and she was secretly buried in nearby St Mary’s Church (a well-worn conspiracy theory trotted out for the approaching 20th anniversary of her death); and morning TV show host Kelly Ripa says: “I Quit!” (according to the cover, though the story inside claims to the contrary that she hasn’t resigned, but “she’s ready to walk” if Ryan Seacrest is treated as the star of her show.)‘Us’ magazine tells us that it’s “wedding bells” for country singer Miranda Lambert, while ‘People’ magazine devotes its cover to Lauren Conrad telling “How Love Changed Me,” and I honestly couldn't care less about either.Fortunately we have the crack investigative squad at ‘Us’ magazine to tell us that Leighton Meester wore it best, designer Betsy Johnson’s “favorite animal is the ostrich,” ‘Sharknado 5: Global Swarming’ actress Cassie Scarbo carries a “little guardian angel stone,” headphones and concealer in her Fjallråven Kånken handbag, and that the stars are just like us: they eat at McDonald’s drive-throughs, go through airport security, and sip on Starbucks. Fascinating, as ever.The ‘Examiner’ once again offers the most accurate yet unlikely news: “A research project to implant microchips in people’s heads has been approved for the federal government - to allow telepathic communication.” While another word for “telepathic” might be “wireless” via wi-fi or bluetooth, the story about DARPA’s Neural Engineering Systems Design wing is broadly correct: research is underway on brain implants to interface with neurons governing sight and sound. The research hopes to gain greater understanding of the neurology of brain function, but there’s always the hope that an interface could in years to come be used therapeutically, and perhaps eventually for communication between the brain and an outside source. Who wouldn’t want the entire content of the ‘National Examiner’ beamed directly into their brain?Onwards and downwards . . .

Welp. This doesn't sound good, from what appears to be an official Russian state Twitter account.(more…)

In yet another display of zero competence or situational awareness, President Trump issued new unhinged commentary in his "Statement by President Donald J. Trump on Signing the 'Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.'"

Decades before the term "world music" became common parlance, Charles Duvelle was traveling the globe recording the sounds and sights of indigenous people around the world. The material that Duvelle collected, and his design sensibilities, avant-garde for the time, were communicated to the public through Disques Ocora, the record label founded in 1958 by musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer. Duvelle was an intrepid musicologist and explorer, living for long periods as a researcher in West Africa, Central Africa, Indian Ocean, Pacific Islands, and Southeast Asia. Tragically, many of the incredible cultures that Duvelle introduced to the world are on the verge of extinction.To enable us see the world through Duvelle's eyes, Sublime Frequencies' Hisham Mayet in collaboration with Duvelle have released The Photographs Of Charles Duvelle - Disques OCORA And Collection PROPHET, a lavish tome contains field photographs from 1959-1978, an interview, complete discography including Duvelle's post-Ocora label Collection Prophet, a report he prepared for Unesco in 1978, and two CDs of music. Of course my favorite track on the compilation is "Cengunmé," a recording of Mahi musicians in Benin that was included on the Voyager golden records launched into space forty years ago this month. (The track has always been misidentified in title and location in writings about the Voyager record but Duvelle provided me with the accurate information for inclusion in the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition that I co-produced.)The Photographs Of Charles Duvelle - Disques OCORA And Collection PROPHET is not only a magnificent monograph but also an important one. We are honored to share the following images and audio sampler from this provocative and inspiring book.

Researchers at University of Pennsylvania tested a commercial brain-training program called Lumosity, and found it had "no effect on decision-making" and "no effect on cognitive function beyond practice effects on the training tasks."From Penn Medicine News:

My dog Zuul, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, has a frizzy coat. I've been feeding her salmon oil to help make it more manageable. (more…)

There have been many scenarios post the fall of the second temple for a young Jewish boy to try and get out of studying for his Bar Mitzvah, but in his debut book, my friend Lou Cove tells a story that seems almost as big of a fiction as the bible itself. The book is called Man of the Year, and it's a memoir about 12-year-old Louis’ swapping Hebrew study to spend time on a campaign to help his father’s friend become Playgirl’s playmate of the year in 1979, all while living in provincial Salem, Mass. And what is more, the candidate, Howie Gordon, not only wins but goes on to become one of the great male adult film stars during the golden age of pornography.Lou went on to raise millions of dollars for non-profit organizations, using this experience as a formative guidepost.For those of you unfamiliar with Playgirl, think about Playboy magazine, but for women and filled with photos of guys showing their junk. When Howie Gordon posed for the magazine, he was the first to break the erection-barrier…posing fully-masted in his Mr. November 1978 pictorial. By the time he and his wife came to Salem, he already had bigger (harder?) ambitions of winning the competition for Playgirl Man of the Year. All he needed was a campaign manager.And while Howie’s story is so very compelling, Man Of The Year is definitely Lou’s story. He shares his experience of moving with his family from exciting New York to a seemingly more-boring Salem, how his father’s friend Howie and new bride Carly moved in with them and shared with the family (at the Thanksgiving table) Howie’s Playmate ambitions, Lou’s excitement of having Howie take on the role as XXX Mary Poppins (with his more modern take on spoonfuls of sugar), hand watching his parent’s marriage collapse as he hit the campaign trail to help Howie.Man of the Year is a story of tensions. It tackles a very racy subject matter while refusing to be an exploitation piece. Lou’s parents wrestle with a their more open dialogue around personal freedoms and the lifestyle of a dear friend that pushes their comfort zone. And while Howie brings this new, taboo ideology of free love and expression to Lou’s family, his openness is in direct tension to Lou’s parents’ attempt at hiding the Truth of their falling out of love and out of their pact at keeping their nuclear family together.Lou lives right in the middle of these narratives. He is a young person dealing with very adult issues, while still being so very juvenile. Lou decides not to study for his Bar Mitzvah, an act that is discussed during the course of the book, and yet this idea of living in both the world of the adult and of the child is so quintessentially the Bar Mitzvah experience. He idolizes Howie. He feeds off of Howie's zest for life and his charisma. Howie, who takes him on the campaign trail and flies him out to visit after he moves back to Berkeley, accepts him. But when confronted with his parents’ divorce and the reality that Howie is not the savior who will ultimately be the replacement for a broken family, he is left in tears, afraid, alone.Man of the Year is an excellent document of a family existing during a groovy time in America’s history, during the post-hippie-pre-AIDS era, when the Vietnam war over and the country was finding itself. It lightly handles big ideas all from the eyes of a twelve year old, and Lou does it very convincingly. This is SO not the story of the everyman, which makes it so strange that the reader can identify so much with the main character’s experiences….except maybe when that main character is a pre-teen trying to convince a liquor store owner to hang a flier in his store about making a naked man famous.Man of the Year by Lou Cove (Amazon)

A moving campaign ad. I hope we see Lt. Colonel McGrath in congress!

Hollis Bulleit publicly accused her own family, makers of a popular brand of bourbon whiskey, of homophobia.(more…)

To combat what Trump perceives as "fake news" in the mainstream media, he's launched his own propaganda, er, I mean "news" show on his Facebook page. Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law who is married to his son Eric, plays the part of news anchor."This is a president who is putting America before himself," she says in her first "newscast.""I bet you haven't heard about all the accomplishments the president had this week because there's so much fake news out there," she said. "The economy is booming, ladies and gentlemen."According to Buzzfeed:

The hollow-face illusion is put to good effect here.From Wikipedia:

MixBin Electronics is recalling approximately 275,000 iPhone cases of various styles that all contain glitter suspended in liquid. According to the company, "The cases are being recalled due to the risk of skin irritation, blisters or burns if the liquid contained in the phone case leaks and comes into contact with the skin due to breakage or cracking of the case." From CNN:

Jules Yap takes to Ikeahackers to describe how you can use four Knuff magazine boxes to form a storage-top for a small-apartment-sized coffee table, using an Ikea stool for your base. (more…)

In the New Yorker, Patti Smith wrote a lovely tribute to her friend, Sam Shepard, experimental theater pioneer, actor, and Pulitzer-winning playwright who died on Thursday. The two artists became close during the early 1970s as they both made the scene in New York City's avant-garde downtown. From the New Yorker:

Omorobo's Dorodorobos are robots that "sprinkle mud from their heads, face them all around, and dirty them." (via JWZ)

In Unexpected Gains: Being Overweight Buffers Asian Americans From Prejudice Against Foreigners (Sci-Hub mirror), a paper published in Psychological Science, a group of social scientists from UK and US universities as well as Microsoft evaluated the role that weight plays in the perceptions of people of Asian descent in the USA. (more…)

NASA has a rare job opening for a new "Planetary Protection Office." Responsibilities do not include defending Earth from an impending alien invasion. From the job listing:

Members of the Norwegian Facebook group "Fedrelandet viktigst" ("Fatherland first") mistook a photo of an empty bus whose seats had been draped with black covers for a bus full of women in burkhas and went Brevik-bananas, decrying the rampant Islamification of Norway and generally being easily frightened, fragile Aryans. (more…)

In their Defcon 25 presentation, "Dark Data", journalist Svea Eckert and data scientist Andreas Dewes described how easy it was to get a massive trove of "anonymized" browsing habits (collected by browser plugins) and then re-identify the people in the data-set, discovering (among other things), the porn-browsing habits of a German judge and the medication regime of a German MP. (more…)

The workers at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi are attempting to organize under the United Auto Workers, but Nissan is fighting the "nastiest anti-union campaign" in modern history, breaking the law so egregiously that even Trump's National Labor Relations Board has filed a series of complaints against the company. (more…)

It seems someone at the Wall Street Journal wasn't happy with how its interview with President Trump came out, because the raw transcript—revealing plenty of "meat left on the proverbial carcass"—ended up being published at a different venue.

I've built several computers in my life and the interior results are invariably a tangled nest of cabling left for years unseen, opened only for rare upgrades that expose the forlorn insect civilizations that grew and died in the warm nylon-braided lint maze which they surely worshipped.This guy, though, he knows what he's doing.

Syrian Creative Commons lead Bassel Khartabil disappeared in 2012, snatched off the Damascus streets by Syrian authorities; in 2015, he was secretly executed by the Assad regime, a fact that has only just come to light. (more…)

Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast has apologised to local parishioners who took offense at the brief presence of a giant robotic spider on the cathedral roof, placed there by the La Machine theatre troupe, who stage massive street productions involving robots and puppets (like the Sultan's Elephant and this amazing Jules Verne-inspired show). (more…)

In 1815 an American ship ran aground in northwestern Africa, and its crew were enslaved by merciless nomads. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the desperate efforts of Captain James Riley to find a way to cross the Sahara and beg for help from Western officials in Morocco.We'll also wade through more molasses and puzzle over a prospective guitar thief.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has demanded that online services stop using working cryptography in their products, and instead leave all your communications vulnerable to interception by criminals, governments, businesses and spies. (more…)

First they came for the drumming jobs, now the robots are honing in on our ice cream serving gigs, as evidenced by this video by MrEricSir.Outside of Bi-Rite Creamery on Sunday, a mysterious headless robot torso with no (known) name was found scooping up free ice cream.MrEricSir writes:

Hitting the base of a large piece of inexpensive crystal with some LED lights gives a remarkable and lovely effect in this howto video by DIYPerks. (more…)

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This tiny little hedgehog appears to be sitting on a piece of bread.(more…)

When cats hear the sound of an opening can, something magical happens.(more…)

Fifty-six retired U.S. generals, admirals and other senior officers today voiced opposition to President Donald Trump's proposed ban on transgender military service. Trump attempted to justify his bigotry on the bogus grounds it would be disruptive and harm readiness.(more…)

After firing James Comey for the crime of "showboating," Trump chose Christopher Wray to be the new FBI director. A Senate committee approved the nomination. This is the lawyer who collected over $600 thousand from New Jersey taxpayers for personally representing Chris Christie in the Bridgegate scandal.(more…)

A wireless water bottle/virtual pet with a built-in display.Is this a real product or a teaser for one of Jing-Yang's inventions in Season 5 of Silicon Valley?

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci went from losing his job to losing his life yesterday, although lucky for him the latter was just a mistake. Harvard Law School, where Scaramucci earned a degree, accidentally – unless it was a prank (to which they won't comment) – marked him as dead in their updated alumni directory.According to The Washington Post:The blink-and-you-missed-him former White House communications director is listed as deceased in the new Harvard Law School alumni directory, which arrived in alums’ mailboxes the very week that “The Mooch” became the most talked-about guy in politics. An asterisk by the 1989 graduate’s name indicates that he was reported dead since the last directory, which was published in 2011.“Regrettably, there is an error in the Harvard Law School alumni directory in the listing for Anthony Scaramucci. We offer our sincere apologies to Mr. Scaramucci. The error will be corrected in subsequent editions,” a Harvard spokesperson told The Washington Post.Needless to say, it's been a very bad week for The Mooch.Image: Urs Jaudas/World Economic Forum

A lot of websites including Amazon and eBay are selling dark lensed glasses designed to directly observe the solar eclipse that will pass over parts of the US on August 21.(more…)

The StormHeaded ever southeast across the vast desert, the Strange Bird thought the world below looked so very old and so very worn, and only when she climbed to the right altitude could she pretend that it was beautiful.The Strange Bird tried not to think of her dreams as she flew, for she could make no sense of them, hardly knew what a dream was, for it did not fit her internal lexicon and she had trouble holding in her head the idea of real and not-real.Any more than did the prowling holograms that swirled up across the dead desert surface from time to time, performing subroutines from times so remote that nothing about them could be said to contain sense. Human figures welled up to walk, yet were composed of nothing but light. Sometimes they wore special contamination suits or astronaut suits. They trudged or they ran across the sands as if real, and then dissipated, and then came back into existence in the position where they had started, to again trudge or run, over and over.Yet in watching this, the Strange Bird was reminded of the dream, and also of how detritus fell from her to the desert floor. Tiny bits of herself she did not need, and that she did not understand, for the way in which this material left her was too regular to be an accident, and she knew the compass inside her guided its distribution. Each time she regenerated the microscopic part that was lost so she could lose it once more. Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird: A Borne Story is available from Amazon.In the laboratory, the scientists had taken samples from her weekly. She had lost something of herself every day. It was worse when they added something on, and then the Strange Bird had felt awkward, as if adjusting to an extra weight, and lurched off-balance on her perch, flapped her wings for hours until she felt settled again.On the fifth day, just as the Strange Bird had become comfortable with this process—and the sun, the holograms, the cities, the higher elevations where the wind was so cold—a cloud blotted out the edge of the world, coming fast at her. She had not encountered a storm yet, but knew of storms, something inside of her programmed for evasion. But the cloud came at her too swift, too all-encompassing, and only at the last second did she see why: for it wasn’t a cloud at all but a swarm of emerald beetles, and the chittering sound they made as they flew scared her.She tried to dive for ground cover but misjudged the distance, and the swarm overtook her like a wall, and she slammed into it, lost control of her wings, fell through a thick squall of beetles, progress slowed by their carapaces, righted herself in time to—head down like a battering ram and eyes shut—push through them even as they tore at her feathers and ripped along her belly.Breaking free of them on the other side meant a lightness that surprised, and she rose more quickly than expected, caught in a tidal pool of air created by their passage. Thought herself free—only to spy just ahead the reason for the beetles’ panic: a real storm, spanning the horizon, and closing fast.Emergency systems not triggered by the beetles switched on. A transparent sheath slid over her eyes and echolocation switched off so that she might rely on tracers and infrared in the midst of maelstrom.Then the storm hit and she had nowhere to hide, no plan, no defenses, just the compass pulsing inside of her, and a body pummeled by winds gusting in all directions, trying only not to crash or be ripped to pieces.The Strange Bird’s strength failed her, and she tumbled, rose and fell only because the wind willed it. Perhaps she called out before something dark with weight spun toward her out of the maelstrom. Perhaps she made a sound that was a person’s name as it struck her broadside, smashed her into a well of turbulence, knocked the consciousness from her. The Strange Bird could not remember later.But whom could she have called for help? There was no one to help her, was there?The PrisonWhen the Strange Bird regained consciousness, head ringing, she found herself in a converted prison cell in a building buried in the sand. Only the narrowest foot-long slit of window at the top near the ceiling revealed the presence of the sun. All was dark and all was hard—the bench set into the wall like a long, wide treasure chest was hard. The walls were hard. The black bars, reinforced with wire and planks of wood, so she could not slip out, were hard. No soft surface for relief. No hint of green or of any life to reassure her.The smell that came to the Strange Bird was of death and decay and untold years of suffering, and the dim-lit view that spread out before her beyond the bars was of a long, low room filled with odd furniture. At the far end an arched doorway led into still more darkness.The Strange Bird panicked, felt a formless dread. She was back in the laboratory. She could not find her way out. She would never truly see the sky again. Thrashed her wings and screeched and fell off the bench and onto the bare dirt floor and lay there beak open, wings spread out, trying to appear large and fearsome.Then a light turned on and the gloom lifted and the Strange Bird saw her captor. The one she would come to think of as the Old Man.He sat atop an overturned bucket next to a rotting desk and watched her, the rest of the long room still murky behind him.“Beautiful,” the Old Man said. “It is nice to have something beautiful here, in this place.”The Strange Bird remained silent, for she did not want her captor to know that she understood, nor that she could, when she wished, form human words, even if she did not understand all of those words. Instead, she squawked like a bird and flapped her wings like a bird, while the Old Man admired her. In all ways, she decided to be a bird in front of him. But always, too, she watched him.The Old Man had become folded in on himself over time. He had brown skin but pink-white splotches on his arms and face, as if something had burned him long ago, tried to strip him away from himself. He had but one eye and this was why when he stared it was with such purpose and intensity. His beard had turned white and so he looked always as if drowning, a froth of sea foam roiling across his chin, and with flecks of white across his burned nose and gaunt cheekbones. He wore thin robes or rags—who could tell which—and a belt to cinch from which hung tools and a long, flat rusted knife.“I rescued you from the sands. You were buried there—just your head above. The storm had smashed you out of the sky. You are lucky I found you. The foxes and the weasels would have gotten to you. You would be in something’s belly by now. A special meal.”The Old Man did not resemble a lab scientist to the Strange Bird and did not talk like a scientist, and his home was no laboratory the more she saw of it. She settled down, relaxed enough to search for injury, discovered soreness and strain but no broken bones. Feathers that had been lost but would grow back. She preened, checked for parasites, split two against the edge of her beak, while the man talked.“My name is Abidugun. I was a carpenter like my father before me and his father. But now I have been many things. Now I am also a writer.” He gestured to a typewriter, ancient, atop the rickety desk. To the Strange Bird it resembled a metal tortoise with its insides on the outside. “Now I am trying to get it all down. Everything must be put down on the paper. Everything. No exceptions.”The Old Man stared at the Strange Bird as if expecting a response but she had no response.“I sleep in the cell when I don’t have guests,” the Old Man said. “The prison is all around us and below us—many levels. I was once a prisoner here, long ago, so I know. But that is ancient history. You don’t want to know about that. No one does.”Although the prison was vast and the wind echoed through its many chambers during sandstorms, the Strange Bird would learn that all the Old Man’s possessions existed in this long room, for it was where he chose to live and the rest was nothing but hauntings to him.“I am the only one here,” the Old Man said, “and I like it that way. But sometimes having guests is a good idea. You are my guest. Someday I will show you around the grounds here, if you are good. There are rules to being good that I will share.”Yet he never shared the rules, and the Strange Bird had already seen the three crosses that stood in the sand outside, which she thought were perches for other birds now long dead. She had seen the tiny garden and well next to the crosses, for she turned echolocation back on and cast out her senses like a dark net across a glittering sea to capture whatever lay outside her cell. The well and garden were both a risk, even disguised as abandoned, derelict, overgrown.“I am Abidugun,” he said again. “You I will call Isadora, for you are the most dazzling bird I have ever seen and you need a dazzling name.”So, for a time, the Strange Bird became Isadora and responded to the name as best she could—when the Old Man fed her scraps, when he decided to read her stories from books, tales incomprehensible to her. She decided that even as she plotted to escape, she would pretend to be a good pet.But in the lab, the scientists had kept her in a special sort of light that mimicked sunlight and fed her in its way, and now that she had only the barest hint of any light, she felt the lack.“You should eat more,” the Old Man said, but the kind of food he brought often disgusted her.“Life is difficult,” the Old Man said. “Everyone says it is. But death is worse.”And he would laugh, for this was a common refrain, and the Strange Bird believed someone had said it to him and now he was under the spell of those words. Death is worse. Except she did not know anything of death but what she had seen in the laboratory. So she did not know if death was worse. She wished only that she might be that remote from the Earth and the humans who lived upon it. To glide above, to go where she wished without fear because she was too high up. To reduce humans again to the size she preferred: distant ghosts trudging and winking out to reappear again, looped and unimportant.Beyond the dune that hid the Old Man lay a ruined city, vast and confusing and dangerous. Within that city moved the ghostly outlines of monstrous figures the Strange Bird could not interpret from afar, some that lived below the surface and some that strode across the broken places and still others that flew above.Closer by, etched in the crosshairs of her extra perception . . . a fox, atop the dune, curious and compact and almost like a sentry watching the Old Man’s position. Soon, others joined the fox and she glimpsed the edges of their intent and, intrigued, she would follow them using echolocation whenever she sensed them near, when there was nothing else to do, and for the first time she experienced the sensation of boredom, a word that had meant nothing in the laboratory for there had been nothing to test boredom against. But now she had the blue limitless sky to test it against, and she was already restless.Her senses also quested down the many tunnels and levels of the prison when the Old Man went hunting, so she might test the bars, the planks of the wood, the wire in his absence. The Old Man often disappeared into the maze down below, with his machete, and hunted long, black weasel-like creatures that lived there. She listened to the distant squeals as he found them and murdered them, and she saw in her mind the bubbles and burrows that were their lives become smaller and smaller until they were not there at all.How in their evasion and their chittering one to another did the Old Man not realize their intelligence? On the mornings when the Strange Bird woke to find the thin, limp bodies of the black weasels lying half-in, half-out of a massive pot on a table halfway across the room, she felt a sense of loss the Old Man could not share.The Strange Bird knew, too, that the Old Man might find her beautiful, but should he ever be starving, he would murder her and pluck her dazzling feathers and cook her and eat her, like he would any animal.She would lie half-in, half-out of the pot, limp and thoughtless, and she would no longer be Isadora but just a strange dead bird.Excerpted from The Strange Bird: A Borne Story by Jeff VanderMeere-book original to be published by MCD x FSG on August 1, 2017

Members of a far-right Norwegian Facebook group confused a photo of empty seats on a bus for women in burkas. From TheNewArab:

Picasso never fell into a rut. His changing style reflected his never ending quest to explore and push boundaries. Josh Jones of Open Culture looks at the way Picasso painted himself from ages 15 to 90.

Lego makes cute little engine blocks with cylinders and pistons and crankshafts. You can operate them with a small DC motor, but what happens when you attach them to a motor that can spin them much faster than the designers intended? These guys wanted to find out.

Relatively interesting has three good optical illusions in this post. My favorite is the Coffer Illusion, which was a Top 10 finalist in the 2006 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, but is new to me. Do to see all 16 circles? For me, it took a while.

As a nervous slider myself, I really empathize with the two timid women who are having trouble moving down the slide, which is at a waterpark in Mexico. And then along comes a human torpedo. Ouch!

Fusion's film crew decided to buy cocaine in the streets of Guatemala City. Wearing a hidden camera, a guy starts asking for a gram of coke. First, he drives up to a prostitute, who tells him to look for a guy standing outside the pharmacy. They he finds a guy who looks like he is 16 years old, wearing a three-piece suit. The kid tells him a gram is $16 and asks if he wants change.The video is part of a series on the rise of organized crime in Guatemala.

Some krafty inmates at Walker County Jail in Jasper, Alabama came up with a clever trick that got them out of jail. They "painted" a number with peanut butter over an outside door, making it look like an inside cell door, and then fooled an inexperienced jail guard into unlocking it for them. The 12 men then skippy'ed out in a jif, using blankets to help them climb over the razor wire fence and scutter in all different directions.According to Time:

A longtime Fox News contributor, Rod Wheeler, has filed a lawsuit against Fox News for manufacturing quotes attributed to him in a now-discredited Fox News story about a conspiracy to murder Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, last year. The lawsuit alleges that Ed Butowsky, a wealthy businessman, worked with Fox News, Wheeler, and the White House to create a fake news story about an FBI investigation into Rich's link to Wikileaks. Wheeler says Butowsky invented a conspiracy theory about Rich's death to distract attention from news coverage of the Trump administration's ties to Russia.NPR's David Folkenflik has an in-depth article about the events leading up to the lawsuit.

Amazon has a ton of listings for "fish antibiotics" whose reviews reveal that the people who buy them are self-medicating because they can't afford a doctor's visit because they are uninsured or can't afford their insurance's co-payment. (more…)

David Lynch, Chuck Close, Susan Orlean, and a sampling of others describe the mysteries of inspiration that generate their ideas in this short but sweet film by Andrew Norton. (more…)

The Push is a short, taut psychological horror film about how a woman's life unravels after she witnesses a stranger get pushed off a subway platform onto the tracks. (more…)