Helmet maker HJC offers this fantastic X-Wing fighter pilot's lid.I prefer to ride with a full face helmet, but this one is pretty hard to resist! DOT approved and complete with an orange sunshield, perhaps you can bulls-eye womp rats in your T-16!There is a full face Boba Fett model.HJC IS-5 Star Wars X-Wing Fighter Pilot Helmet via AmazonHJC Bobafett Mens RPHA 11 Pro Street Motorcycle Helmet - M4SF via Amazon

This adorable pup Chewy sadly had to part ways with his owner. Both Chewy and his owner were victimized by an abusive boyfriend, and smartly they ran. Unable to afford a companion ticket for Chewy to fly with her, his owner left him in a bathroom at Las Vegas/McCarran International Airport with a note seeking a better future.

Gabriella Coleman is the hacker anthropologist whose work on the free software movement, Anonymous and the Arab Spring, the politicization of hacking, and the true role of alt-right dank memes in the 2016 elections are critical reading for the 21st century. (more…)

Emily Seilhamer specializes in upcycling everyday things. Here's a ton of amber prescription bottles repurposed as a cool lampshade. It also doubles as the world's worth windchime. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix9xB8p7adoGrotbags; Americans of any age are in for a bizarre treat.

Excel, Microsoft’s venerable spreadsheet program has some seriously powerful capabilities. But unless you know where to look in the maze of menus and toolbars, you probably leave the pivot tables and conditional formatting to your office’s Excel guru. If you want to level up your skills and steal the title from the resident guru, take a look at this Microsoft Excel Specialist Certification Bundle.These two courses comprise 72 lessons that take you on a granular exploration of Excel’s powers. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll move on to advanced functions like managing complex, multi-document workbooks. From there, you'll familiarize yourself with Excel formulas and learn how to generate dynamic visualizations from data. At the end of your training, you’ll be ready to pass the Microsoft Office Excel Specialist exam and start using your skills professionally.You can pick up the Microsoft Excel Specialist Certification Bundle in the Boing Boing Store for $19.

The 2017 Sand Marble circuit (marbles "racing" one another down a carefully-cut path in sand) is underway, and here's the Netherlands leg for your enjoyment.

Sojiro Kamatani just released a an otherworldly CGI rendering for the new single titled Baku by Suiyōbi no Campanella (aka Wednesday Campanella). It's a dizzying, candy-colored confection reminiscent of a coral reef on LSD. (more…)

Photographer Kevin Greene created this amazing timelapse using photographs of illegal Fourth of July fireworks going off in Los Angeles. To get the series of shots, he traveled to Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook seven miles out of town.Wondering why the city in the front doesn't have much action? Kevin explains,"The foreground is Culver City. Culver City Police Department is super strict about fireworks. Those houses are relatively expensive and in Los Angeles the best street fireworks tend to be in the hood."Check out all his cool night shots on his Instagram.

This document has it all: a neat quantization of the qualitative; a tale told in a single bureaucratic leaf that implies a whole hidden universe of night-scurrying morlocks who tend the magic under the harsh glare of floodlights on the third shift; a fine sheet slid in the nearly imperceptible crack between consensus hallucination and objective reality. (via JWZ)

According to a lawsuit (PDF) filed Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice, craft retailer Hobby Lobby illegally imported thousands of Iraqi artifacts, intentionally mislabeled them and lied about their origins.

This is the Beastie Boys and Big Bird mashup we never knew we were waiting for.Thank you, Mylo the Cat aka Adam Schleichkorn, for editing this for our viewing enjoyment.He writes:

This week on HOME: Stories From L.A., a member of the Boing Boing Podcast Network:How will we live in 20 years? Or 50? Or 100? A one-of-a-kind, only-in-LA plot at the very end of Mulholland Highway inspired some of the world's best designers to think hard about the home of the future, in Los Angeles and beyond.This is the first episode of Season 5. You can catch up on the whole series at the iTunes Store... and while you're there, if you get a minute to leave the show a rating and review that'd be much appreciated. It's a small thing that makes a big difference in spreading the word.Subscribe:iTunes | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Shirley Yamauchi paid $1,000 for her 27 month old son's United flight from Houston to Boston, in part because the kid is half her size and in part because it's illegal to fly with kids on your lap once they turn two. (more…)

This handheld illuminated magnifier is a flash deal on Amazon right now. It's $6.45. It's about the size of a credit card and the battery is included.

It took Pete Dearing 100 hours to build this rocket ship bunk bed from blueprints he purchased online. His kids love it.From Sarah Vitak's story in Make:

A fellow who goes by the name [c.invent] designed and built this open-source keychain-sized multi-platform emulation console, called the Keymu. It uses an Intel Edison (a computer-on-module). a 1.5-inch OLED display, and 11.7mm speaker, and a 220 mAh lithium battery, all inside a 3D printed clamshell case. You can learn how to make your own at Hackaday.

The Burger King Cheddar and Bacon Grill Dog is the Fyre Festival of specialty hot dogs.[via]

Noah Smith (previously) writes in Bloomberg (!) about the "fleecing" of the Gen-X and Boomer middle class -- a class that is growing continuously smaller and poorer, thanks to "financial deregulation, tax cuts and a lax attitude toward consumer protection and antitrust." (more…)

The New York Times rounds up direct links to several services surveillance opt-out screens, including some I'd never thought to look for (Amazon), as well as instructions for installing tracking blockers and no-script extensions that will limit the data trail you exhaust behind yourself as you traverse the net. (more…)

Redditor/machinist Spdltd was commissioned to create a steampunk, Arduino-powered electromechanical clock that uses a combination of belts, dials and needles arrayed across the wall to tell the time. (more…)

A hacker who appears to have ongoing, continuous access to Australia's electronic health care records is selling access to any full record for 0.0089 bitcoin, or about USD22. (more…)

Not all is wrong with the world. If you don't have 40 seconds to spare, jump straight to the best bit.

Vidangel is the latest attempt (along with services like Clearplay and Sony's own filtering tool) to sell a product that allows cringing, easily triggered evangelicals to skip swear words, sex and blasphemy in the media they watch. (more…)

From Business Insider; mostly unappetizing. Pictured here is the 17th century watermelon, as cropped from Giovanni Stanchi's c. 1650s painting. They look rough, but would have tasted great.

In 112 recent cases of stalking and harassment reviewed by UK police watchdogs, "not a single one was dealt with properly," reports the BBC. The report, "Living in Fear," found that victims of harassment and stalking were widely disregard and left at risk, and often told that the harassment they received was their own fault.One in five women and one in ten men report being stalked in the UK. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (as quoted by the BBC) reports 4.6% of women and 2.7% of men aged 16-59 were victims in 2015-16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrSeCYSnj5YNPR celebrated July 4 by tweeting the Declaration of Independence, one line at a time: when they got to "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people," America's fragile right-wing broflakes went berserk, unhinged by reality's well-known liberal bias. (more…)

One of the most enduring symbols of 2016's UK Brexit referendum was the huge red "battle bus" with its message, "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead. Vote Leave." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mmqah20KmYLouisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins shot video of himself talking about the need for invincible U.S. power—while wandering the gas chamber at Auschwitz.In his five-minute ramble, Higgins explains the horrors that took place at the camp, where some 1.1m people, mostly Jews, where murdered by the Nazis during World War II. And that "this is why Homeland Security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible."People keep talking about President Trump's behavior eroding international respect and trust for America. But he does get a lot of help from his friends.Officials at the museum and memorial denounced him for using it as a stage for his politics, pointing out that there are signs asking for silence throughout the former death camp.https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/882215586616537088Higgins' politics have two sides, and so does his message, here. On one side, he's posing America—and its military power—as the force that overcame Nazi atrocity.On the other, here's what he wants done to radical Muslims.

Here's something you don't see every day: a Hello Kitty earthquake hood. I mean, I know that Sanrio will put Kitty White (her full name) on just about anything but I didn't know that earthquake hoods even existed.

Ever thought to make chewing gum at home? Neither had I. Well, not until I saw this tutorial by gum chef (I made this title up) Clifford Endo. In it, he shares his recipe for making artisanal chewing gum in the microwave.He writes:

Birmingham, England, faced a surprising crisis in 1889: A lion escaped a traveling menagerie and took up residence in the city's sewers, terrifying the local population. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll descend into the tunnels with Frank Bostock, the 21-year-old manager who set out to capture the desperate beast.We'll also revisit a cosmic mystery and puzzle over an incomprehensible language.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, extra comics, lots of fun, and more fun.PLUS for your or your loved ones' summer reading, please consider Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Animator Chad Essley writes, "The new MC Frontalot (previously) nerdcore video is out for the 4th of July! Celebrate our nation’s hostility toward the British crown by listening to Front rap about internet arguments over Free Software!" (more…)

AT&T, which has successfully lobbied state governments and the FCC to ban any broadband competition in the markets where it operates, says that its forced arbitration "agreements" aren't really forced, because people in the markets it serves could just not use the internet. (more…)

Florida Governor Rick Scott [R] has signed CS/CS/HB 989: Instructional Materials, sponsored by Rep Byron Donalds [R-Naples, @ByronDonalds, (239) 417-6270], and that means that anyone in Florida, regardless of whether they are the parent of a Florida pupil, can ask for an "unbiased hearing officer" to censor the teaching materials used in Florida classrooms. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYXPWtZNrO4Technology Will Save Us (previously) have fully funded their Dough Universe Kickstarter, maker kits for kids that combine conductive play-doh ("electro-dough") with simple components like motors and switches with apps that make it all programmable. (more…)

...But California keeps green-lighting more natural gas plants, thanks to hydrocarbon industry pressure on state regulators, who operate at cross-purposes to the legislature and its targets for renewables. (more…)

Pippin Barr (previously) created a game that presents itself as a Windows 3-ish desktop from about 25 years ago. Mash away at each task in It Is As If You Were Doing Work until you win promotions and break time, wherein Breakout may be played.

Taking a break from painting portraits on peanuts, artist Steve Casino has created a wooden toy that literally made me laugh out loud when I saw it in his Instagram feed. He calls it a Pocket Pollock and it's fashioned after abstract painter Jackson Pollock. Like its namesake, the toy also makes abstract paintings. How? Well, just watch the video.When you're done with that video, go to Steve's YouTube channel and check out Steve's other wooden toy sculptures. They are so cool and creative!

Over the weekend I took a silkscreening class (at a great DIY-kind of place in Oakland called Grease Diner) and discovered this brilliant design in the rag bin. If you haven't figured it out already, it's a mashup of the comic strip character Cathy and the logo of punk band Black Flag.I posted this same image on Instagram and I was able to figure out the artist through the #Ackflag hashtag. Her name is Kathy K and she sells products with the design in her Etsy shop, Crimson + Clover.

Entertaining bold changes in your career can feel like an abandonment of what you’ve worked for thus far, but this fallacious mindset can cost you a lot more in the long run than the time spent at your current gig. Change is constant, and building new skills outside of your typical wheelhouse will do much more to open up your future options than grinding through a job that you aren’t excited about.The Virtual Training Company offers an online course library for professional development in a wide array of fields. With over 1,000 courses, you can get expert training in everything from 3D animation to project management. With a lifetime subscription, you'll have unlimited access to everything in their current catalog, and can pursue a variety of topics for work or personal enjoyment all on your own time.These courses are available on almost every mobile and desktop platform. You can get a lifetime subscription to Virtual Training Company in the Boing Boing Store for the one-time cost of $79.

The iconic pop surrealist artist Mark Ryden designed the costumes and set for the American Ballet Theater’s Whipped Cream. From an interview with Juxtapoz magazine about the ballet, Ryden stated that “The whole time I worked on it, I had in mind that I would also have an exhibition of my paintings and drawings from the project.” The last showing of the ballet took place yesterday in NYC, but Ryden’s dreamy art from the production will on display at the Paul Kasmin Gallery until July 21st.Images: By Mark Ryden/of Paul Kasmin Gallery.

The sun lights things from above, so our brains are used to seeing shadows appear below convex things and above concave things. It's easy to trick your brain by rotating a map or photo upside down.

XPrize and ANA present a series of short stories "of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies."

This is so cool! San Francisco-based artist Josh Ellingson has posted a detailed tutorial on how to make a 3D illusion effect in Photoshop. This type of 3D art is called an anaglyph and it requires those special red and blue glasses to see its depth. (Interesting side note, Josh recommends wearing a pair of those 3D glasses just to work on the art itself.)He writes:

Russian designer Liliya Gorbach makes delightful and brightly-colored glass boxes, plates, and wall art that could brighten up any room. (more…)

While this CBC Comedy video is complete satire, it still turned my stomach a little.

Sixth-grade teacher Kerstin Westcott held back tears as she explained why she was leaving her dream job at a Green Bay middle school. Police were called to the middle school almost daily in the past school year. (more…)

https://youtu.be/d-flWUK3XtY?t=26sA foolish tourist in Nanchang Zoo, China, climbs into a panda den and approaches one of the enormous bears. Be warned: the predictable results are even more harrowing than the scene from The Revenant where Leonardo diCaprio's character is relentlessly savaged by a grizzly. Fortunately, he's going to survive.