This instantly viral video has all the hallmarks of a well-choreographed hit. Cute older couple, old guy snoring, gold chains, hairy chest, and the Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee megahit 'Despacito.'(more…)

"Stun-gun-wielding rabbi kidnappers fail to convince court they were just practicing their faith." The story describes the religious freedom defense of Rabbi Mendel Epstein and a group of rabbis who were "caught up in a government sting" involving kidnapping and torturing men with electric cattle prods to encourage them to sign marriage dissolution documents.From the article:

It sure looks like Baltimore Police Officer Richard Pinheiro planted drugs at a crime scene and if he did, I'm sure it was the first time it's ever happened and he's very sorry if anyone was offended by the mistake that was made.From Buzzfeed:

The U.S. government's ban on laptops and other large electronic devices in the cabins of flights from Saudi Arabia to the United States has been lifted, Saudi Arabian Airlines confirmed today.(more…)

The reason it's hard to open jar lids is because the vacuum seal is pulling the lid tightly against the jar. Once in awhile, the vacuum seal is so strong that I can't open it. That's when I grab my Jarkey, a $5 plastic lever that effortlessly breaks the seal, making it easy to open. I always try to open jars with my bare hands, then use the Jarkey as a backup. My wife goes straight for the Jarkey, because she's smarter than I am.

They don't even bother to try and hide their affair anymore.(more…)

Toot toot! If you see Trump playing truck driver while sitting in a big shiny truck, you can bet a Republican healthcare bill has just failed. It's happened twice so far.According to the A.V. Club:

When I was becoming a British citizen, the one thing everyone knew was that the Life in the UK citizenship test was full of weird, arbitrary questions that most Britons couldn't answer, but next to Switzerland, the British process seems downright sane.(more…)

Alice and Bob are the hypothetical communicants in every cryptographic example or explainer, two people trying to talk with one another without being thwarted or overheard by Eve, Mallory and their legion of nefarious friends. (more…)

Martin Shkreli is the smirking, remorseless poster child for trumpism: a serial fraudster who leavened his ponzi schemes by presiding over pharmaceutical price-gouging. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

The late great Kurt Vonnegut was known for creating doodles of his, uh, backdoor. Now, a rendition of his asterisk-anus is on a t-shirt.(more…)

It's the 50th anniversary of San Francisco's "Summer of Love" and the city is blooming with ways to celebrate.(more…)

Most people who follow Trump on Twitter will either cheer him on, shout back at him, or run the other way. But SNL writer Josh Patten responds to Trump's tweets as if Trump had texted them directly to Patten, and Patten's casual, breezy responses had me laughing out loud.(more…)

A few months ago my artist pal Mitch O'Connell launched a crowdfunded plan to pay tribute to the cult classic movie They Live, about a race of space creatures who secretly take over Earth by brainwashing people into supporting policies that are bad for them. He got enough money to erect a billboard in Mexico City!(more…)

Saudi Arabians can sleep easy tonight, safe in the knowledge that police have tracked down and arrested a woman for wearing a miniskirt and crop top in direct violation of their dress code for women.The brazen criminal was seen in a video posted online It created an uproar in a country where women need a "guardian's" permission to travel, work, open a bank account, or take classes.The above image is from the Saudi news site Okaz, which blurred the woman's exposed skin.

Ketamine is a short-acting dissociative anesthetic commonly used on animals and sometimes people. Of course it's also beloved by many psychonauts for its unusual dreamlike or "out of body" psychedelic effects. While Ketamine has been shown for years to help treat depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder in adults, researchers at Yale School of Medicine now report that it has great promise as a fast-acting intervention for children in crisis. From Scientific American:

Watch our longtime Boing Boing TV collaborator Eric Mittleman's short film, 'Legacy.'It's free to screen online at YouTube and Vimeo, and has been running on-board Virgin America flights, where Eric and I produce the Boing Boing channel full of wonderful videos. About 'Legacy,' Eric tells us,(more…)

Before the streets were taken over by cars and taxis, pedestrians ruled.This photo of old New York was colorized by Sanna Dullaway.

Arduino is on open-source electronics prototyping platform that lets you make interactive stuff without having a degree in electrical engineering.For about $25 you can buy a credit card sized circuit board that has input connections (for buttons, knobs, light sensors, microphones, humidity sensors, fart detectors, Internet signals, etc) and output connections (for servo motors, LEDs, buzzers, speakers, stepper motors, vibrators, etc). You write programs on your computer to tell the Arduino how to process the input signals and how to activate the output components. This program is uploaded to the Arduino's microprocessor, making it self-contained. (more…)

Zero-knowledge proofs are one of the most important concepts in cryptography: they're a way to "validate a computation on private data by allowing a prover to generate a cryptographic proof that asserts to the correctness of the computed output" -- in other words, a way to prove that something is true without learning the details. (more…)

Private student loans are the worst of a bad bunch, with incredibly high interest rates and penalties on funds used to finance educations at the kinds of "universities" who later get their accreditations yanked for academic malpractice and deceptive advertising -- universities that target the most naive kids from the least educated backgrounds, load them up with debt, waste four years of their lives, and pop them out the door with a useless "degree." (more…)

Retroworks' $18 decoder rings don't have much by way of cryptographic robustness (they compare disfavorably to the cipher-wheel wedding rings my wife and I wear!), but they're not a bad way to introduce the littlies in your life to the idea of habitual secrecy. (via Red Ferret)

The GOP's 7-year promise to "repeal and replace Obamacare" ends in a flaming pile of fail. (more…)

United States citizens' grandparents from six Muslim-majority countries will once again be eligible to receive U.S. visas, according to a State Department memo Reuters got a hold of that reflects the latest court smackdown of President Donald Trump's utterly stupid and racist Muslim travel ban.(more…)

A weed store in Seattle called Leira makes pricey cannabis cigars.From The Potlander:

Warped Perception ignited an Estes D12-5 model rocket engine in a glass tank of water.(more…)

MIT Media Lab spinoff company mPath has developed a wristwatch-like wearable that measures changes in skin conductance tied to stress, frustration, disinterest, or boredom. Combined with other data, the device is meant to help companies with "emotyping," the process of "undersand(ing) customers’ emotional needs or wants" during market research and product development," according to CEO Elliot Hedman. Their clients range from LEGO to Google to Best Buy. Most recently, they started working with the Boys and Girls Clubs in Denver that could lead to new ways to encourage reading. From MIT News:

Rio Celeste is a gorgeous Costa Rican river with a length that's famous for its unusual turquoise waters. After decades of guessing, scientists finally determined the cause was aluminosilicate: (more…)

More than $1 million in marijuana was found hidden inside brand new Ford Fusions at dealerships in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The automobiles were manufactured at plants in Mexico and somewhere along the way, the spare tire wheel wells were packed with pot. Talk about a dealer incentive!"We're aware of the situation and are taking it very seriously," a Ford Motor Company spokesman said Saturday. "We are working with the FBI and Customs on an extensive investigation. We have confirmed that this is not happening at our plant or at our internal shipping yards."(CNN)

Trying to open the emergency exit door of an airplane while still in flight is obviously a stupid idea. First of all, you might get a wine bottle smashed over your head. And you most certainly will get arrested. But what would actually happen to everyone inside the plane if someone succeeded in prying the door open mid-flight?According to Travel and Leisure, there would be a "catastrophic explosive decompression."

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions is the respected global body representing libraries all over the world; in an open letter to the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization says the recent decision to standardize DRM for the web has undermined the web's openness and the ability of libraries and other public institutions to fulfill their important social role. (more…)

California says that non-compete agreements are unenforceable, and that's been a huge factor in the state's growth -- in particular, it's the most likely reason that California's tech economy zoomed past the Route 128 tech economy of Massachusetts -- the land where talent goes to die. (more…)

Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck has paired up with the Russian eyewear company FakbyFak to create fashion videos for the release of his new eyewear line “Toy Glasses.” The three videos are named Brutal Love, Total Liquidity, and Self Destruction. Out Magazine explains that the films are “a demonstration of what would likely happen to our Sims if they were left to their own devices in an artsy sex dungeon with a bunch of acid...Beirendonck's videos employ the talents of performance artists Maria Forque, Salvia and Liza Keane, and are styled in 3D animations created by visual artists Claudia Maté, Ines Alpha and Jennifer Mehigan. They're influenced by a combination of '70s punk subcultures, Alice In Wonderland and bizarre makeup techniques”.Wonderfully strange and psychedelic, Beirendonck’s films warp the viewer's reality and urge them to question the nature of their own perception. From Out:

Epcot Center (now "Epcot") is a weird stepchild among Disney themeparks; it started as a kind of ghastly parody of Walt Disney's plan to build a totally controlled domed company town on the enormous tract of central Florida land that is Walt Disney World, and became a cash-cow-oriented park whose radical break with themepark design norms was a blessing and a curse. (more…)

Galaxy was one of the first pulps to explicitly bill itself as a magazine for "adults," in 1950 under founding editor HL Gold. (more…)

A cable subscription is the most straightforward way to watch live TV, and it’s typically the only way to get access to streaming content from cable networks. But you never get to choose which channels you actually want, and having to use all of their separate streaming services is a pain. Ultimately, you're paying a premium for stuff you just don't really use.Instead of trying to figure out which online service has the biggest cross-section of your favorite shows, SelectTV offers up the largest content library in the world, aggregating over 300,000 TV episodes, 200,000 movies, along with 2,000 curated live TV channels so you can access whatever you want to watch. This deal also includes trial access to streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video. Plus, the included HDTV antenna lets you watch live local channels so you don't have to sacrifice network TV when you cut the cord.SelectTV has apps for all major mobile and desktop platforms, and offers an extensive amount of free and paid content that will ultimately help you save big on the content bill. The Ultimate Cord Cutting Kit lets you get the content you want at a price that works for you. Plans start at $19.99 for one year of access in the Boing Boing Store.

Jonk Photography captured the remarkable work of dozens of street artists given weeks to create whatever they want inside a school that's about to be renovated. (more…)

The Kaihōgyō is a quest to become a living Buddha through 1000 days of gruelling rituals. Ivan Olita was granted rare access to a temple near Kyoto to film The Seven Year Pilgrimage to Enlightenment.(more…)

This is huge, awesome news. In early 2018, experiential entertainment company Two Bit Circus will open the country's first micro-amusement park in downtown Los Angeles. The company's founders Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman will house the high-tech park (that will have an old school carnival feel) inside of a former power plant in Lincoln Heights. The entrepreneurial duo are hoping it will be the first in a chain of such parks that will use technology to bring people together to play.(more…)

Ribbonesia specializes in gathering, twisting, and tying ribbon into vibrant animals, plants, and other sculpted forms. Some are complex like this dragon and peacock.(more…)

Snap a picture of a key and Key Me will turn it into a working metal key: just a reminder that locks probably aren't as secure you imagine. (via Schneier)

https://vimeo.com/151972138Arnold Drake World is a talented paper artist who sits at a communal table at the cafe in Portland's legendary Powell's City of Books and turns paper napkins and towels into "botanically correct flowers" with many flourishes and grace-notes. (more…)

This old Mental Floss post collects salesmans' miniatures from the 1930s, including mausoleums, swimming pools, Persian rugs, and more -- but the gem is this gorgeous neon sample-case. (more…)

Donald Trump is running a national-scale voter-suppression effort, billed as a "Voter Fraud Commission," whose first act was to illegally demand that state election officials dox every registered voter by sending their lifelong voter records to the White House. (more…)

The core advice for minimizing wait time at Disneyland is to focus on off-peak hours (in the morning right after "rope-drop," in the evening before the park closes), but within that envelope, how should you prioritize your riding? (more…)

In the office or in transit, sometimes you just want a little alone time with your music. These Active Noise Cancelling Bluetooth headphones oblige, providing up to 97% active noise cancellation, so you can jam out in peace without being distracted by the world around you.Unlike many wireless headphones, these have an over-ear design, which contributes to the noise cancellation capabilities, but also allows for a more impressive battery life and superior audio. With 40mm drivers and playback time that comes in around 12 hours, you'll be able to enjoy excellent sound quality for the entirety of your commute, or on long plane rides.It's Bluetooth flexibility without sacrificing the sound. These headphones are currently 59% off in the Boing Boing Store, available for $79.99.

Some people carry Swiss Army knives for their convenience and the solutions they offer to everyday problems. However, when you're doing that, you're still carrying a knife, and it's one extra thing to keep track of when you're going about your business. An alternative suggestion is these wallet sized multi-tools, available now in the Boing Boing Store.The size of a credit card, one of these tools fits conveniently in your wallet, providing you with eleven simple tools on one durable stainless steel sheet. It can function as a can opener, knife, screwdriver, ruler, bottle opener, 2-position wrench, saw blade, 4-size wrench, directional auxiliary wrench, keychain hole, and a butterfly screw wrench. While you almost definitely will not need all of those tools on the same day, it doesn't hurt to have them.You can get a two-pack of the multi-tools, plus protective cases for each, for $9.99 in the Boing Boing Store now.

The Awakening by Henry Mayer is considered one of the finest pieces of political art of the 20th-century and is often mentioned as the most beautiful of the "suffrage maps." American women earned the vote from west to east before the right became federal law. (more…)