Historically, being an elected prosecutor was a sweet gig: operating with "unchecked power and no transparency," you generally got to run unopposed for re-election, and on the rare instances in which someone did dare to run against the incumbent, the incumbent usually won. (more…)

I dote on fidget gadgets -- soothing gizmos intended to give your hands something to keep busy with, like modern worry-beads -- and while you can't buy Chris Bathgate's amazing machined sliders, and the Fidget Cube Kickstarter just closed, there's still Thinkgeek's new Jumbo Noah Fidget Toy, which looks like a lot of fun and "features two interlocking rings that are also connected together with five links on each ring. The center link is larger and has a colored rubber band that rolls back and forth like a treadmill." (more…)

Join the Emperor's Bridge folks for a short adventure and a fun celebration! Help celebrate Emperor Norton's bridge's birthday!

The stolen emails recently published by WikiLeaks reveal that President Barack Obama's email address during the presidential transition at the end of the 2008 campaign was bobama@ameritech.net.(more…)

If the Zap Comix collective hung out in Gary Larson's basement rolling numbers on psychedelic record covers while giggling about those motivational calendars where you tear off one earnest aphorism each day, and the internal awkwardness that all of us experience, the comix that emerge would likely fit into I'm Bored, the surreal and wonderful new book by illustrator Jess Rotter with a foreword by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. Below are a few pages for your pleasure. You likely recognize Jess's art from her inspired illustrations for vinyl and apparel projects from Rodriguez, the Grateful Dead, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Best Coast, Light in the Attic Records, and her bimonthly "Songbird Stories" column for Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter. I'm Bored is Jess's first book and I'm already ready for the next trip.Visit Hat & Beard Press to order the hardback of I'm Bored, a special lenticular-cover edition, or bundles including a variety of delightful patches, postcards, and apparel.

This die cast Hot Wheels Retro Entertainment collection Batmobile brings me a ton of joy.I also have the Mystery Machine.

In 1943, fed up with modernist poetry, two Australian army officers invented a fake poet and submitted a collection of deliberately senseless verses to a Melbourne arts magazine. To their delight, the poems were published and their author was hailed as "one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures of this country." In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Ern Malley hoax, its perpetrators, and its surprising legacy in Australian literature.We'll also hear a mechanized Radiohead and puzzle over a railroad standstill.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

HOME: Stories From L.A., a member of the Boing Boing Podcast Network, is back for its fourth season. This week:What happens to a utopia that never got off the ground? Bits and pieces of one, an experiment in postwar living for the masses, are hiding in plain sight in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. Architect and author Cory Buckner talks about Crestwood Hills, a Modernist vision for a cooperative future that never quite arrived.A note from the producer: If you'd like to help HOME get off to a good seasonal start, drop by the iTunes Store and subscribe. And if you have a minute to leave a rating and/or review, that helps stir the algorithmic stew that gets shows noticed. Thanks for listening.Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia and friends created this surreal edit of the third 2016 presidential debate, which took place last night and creeped everyone out big league.(more…)

Tesla released a video of a commute from home to office, including parking as a demonstration of its fully self-driving hardware. "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."(more…)

This is a boiled egg shell cracker. It works like a charm every other time you use it.[via]

Four-year-old Bella speaks 7 languages and does improvisational dancing at the same time.

Remix of the 3rd un-presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from with a hip-hop "Hail To The Chief" backing track, by Eclectic Method.

Gaia is an interactive 3D map of the galaxy, coded by Charley Hoey and sourced from the eponymous mapping satellite's data: click, drag and scroll/pinch to change the viewpoint. It took a long time to load even on my desktop PC, but the results speak overwhelmingly for themselves.

District Judge John McKeon sentenced an unnamed man to 60 days in prison plus a suspended 30-year prison sentence (which he will avoid if he completes a sex-offender treatment program and other parole conditions) after the man pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping his own daughter, who was 12 years old at the time. (more…)

Skyler Johnson created an interactive infographic that charts the use of magic in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. The spells are organized by count or time, with instances color-coded by the book they appear in. Hover over each use and you even get the quote, for context! [via Tor and Metafilter]Emily Asher-Perrin writes:

Here's a fun interactive map of global shipping. ShipMap allows users to selected color coding for ship types: container, dry bulk, tanker, gas bulk, and vehicles. It even lets you select animated ships on their routes. (more…)

The scandal-haunted bank has been de-accredited by the Better Business Bureau, a punishment meted out to companies that violate the BBB Standards of Trust, which include "tell the truth," "build trust," "honor promises" and "embody integrity." (via Reddit)

At the third presidential debate last night, Donald Trump indicated he will refuse to accept the election results, ranted about ninth-month abortions, and generally went full conspiracy-theorist. But the punchline to his freakshow performance was muttering "she's such a nasty woman" as Clinton talked of raising taxes on the richest Americans. The t-shirt is already yours to buy, with half the proceeds going to charity.New York Magazine:

Austrian artist Martin Roth created an installation of grass sprouted in worn Persian rugs at the UK's Korean Cultural Centre; the grass sprouts, dies, and ruins the rugs. In between, the room looks and (apparently) smells amazing. (more…)

Ryan Scott Miller outdid himself with this terrific wheelchair costume that Jeremy will be sporting this Halloween: "This year we put it to a vote and our friends choose the Ghostbusters Ecto-1!" Well-played, sir! (more…)

Technically, cloth is a "deforming non-rigid surface," so projecting a stable image onto clothes is a big technological challenge. To solve it, Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory combined two new techniques that allow stable projection of an image onto clothes even as they move. (more…)

When the Crown pardoned codebreaking war-hero and computer science pioneer Alan Turing in 2013, we noted that 50,000 other British men who were also convicted of "sodomy" remained criminals in the eyes of the law. (more…)

All lies lead to the truth. For over 20 years, Snopes.com has been the Web's primary bullshit detector and debunker, from death by Pop Rocks to political lies. We need Snopes more than ever. For a Webby Awards exclusive feature, I commissioned talented journalist Rob Walker to explore the history of Snopes and founder David Mikkelson's relentless obsession with, of all things, the truth. From the article:

A series of recent, influential design books and articles have convinced the web's designers to go for grey-on-white type, despite the fact that many people can't read low-contrast type (and it's even worse on mobile devices, which are often read in very bright sun, on screens that have been dimmed to save battery) (more…)

I have four USB powered external hard drives, which I keep plugged into my iMac all the time. My old USB hub was not able to reliably supply power to all of the drive. I got the Plugable 7-Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Hub. It's $30 on Amazon. It has a 25W power adapter and has no problem keeping all four drives running, and charging my iPhone and a USB portable charger at the same time (two of the ports support the Battery Charging Standard). All seven ports are USB 3.0 (backwards compatible to USB 2.0 and 1.1) so file transfer is speedy. It includes a 6-foot A cord and a 3-foot USB 3.0 Cable.

The music book we've all been waiting for: Black Sabbath For Ukulelehttps://youtu.be/03rpV07S68MYoutuber seesocovers is pretty amazing!Black Sabbath For Ukulele via Amazon(Thanks, Peter!)

Yekutiel Sherman invented a selfie stick that collapses into a smartphone case. He launched the project on Kickstater. Chinese manufacturers were selling it on Ali Express before Sherman's funding window closed.From Quartz:

Wow! Maybe tighten down those bolts next time?(Thanks, Tim!)

I’m going to be upfront here: this book made me cry. As a woman, mother to a daughter, and formerly outspoken little girl in a time and place where “feminism” was was an anachronistic term for bra-burning rather than the badge of pride and call to action it is today, this book made me grateful and proud. I was already an RBG fan – it’s pretty hard not to be – but I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark hammered home all of the reasons why it’s easy to admire the influential Supreme Court Justice through a beautiful, illustrated biography that stresses the importance of standing up for what’s right.Debbie Levy frames RBG’s story with objections, beginning with her mother, Celia Amster Bader, who sets the tone for the book and for her daughter’s trajectory by encouraging little Ruth to strive for more in life than finding a husband. “Ruth’s mother disagreed,” is the first of many hand-lettered, marquee-like pronouncements that tie together Levy’s text and Elizabeth Baddeley’s visual storytelling. This bold dissention (“Then she protested.” “She resisted. And persisted.” “Ruth really, really disagreed with this!”) in the face of prejudice and sexism allows readers to feel the weight of injustice and the power of speaking up as they straighten their shoulders, square their feet, and shout with Ruth, “I dissent!”I learned a lot through this book. Who knew that RBG and Antonin Scalia were friends? Or that Justice Ginsburg’s mother was such a driving force in her life? There is also a section for further reading after the story ends, including photos of RBG, information on cases referenced in the story, and a selected bibliography, which serves as a great resource for curious readers who want to learn more.See sample pages from this book at Wink.I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark

Remember Joey Salads, the "social experiment" guy who made a candid camera style video that showed him at a bar, sneakily dropping pills into women's drinks? He said he did it as a public service, but he came across as a self-aggrandizing creep who enjoys butting into other people's lives.Well, Mr. Salads is back in the news, this time for getting caught shooting a staged video that shows a group of black men vandalizing a car with Donald Trump stickers on it. Mr. Salads, an ardent Trump supporter, posted the video on his popular YouTube channel, concluding, "As you can see from this video, the black community is very violent towards Trump and his supporters." Subscribers on his YouTube channel and on his Twitter account went nuts, posting racist comments about the "vandals."Here's the staged video:https://youtu.be/nQtHx5GY164Unbeknownst to Mr. Salads, someone shot video of of Mr. Salads staging upthe incident, and posted it to Twitter, exposing Mr. Salads as a fraud. The "vandals" were accomplices following Mr. Salads' instructions to damage the car (which had been parked in a "black neighborhood" by Mr. Salads).After it became clear to Mr. Salads that his sham had been exposed, he posted a smarmy, excuse-filled, laughably insincere, sorry-I-was-caught, bullshit apology:https://youtu.be/ruVxRS4yPrAMr. Salads gets bonus points for running ads on the fauxpology video. He gets double bonus points for ending the video by declaring his intention to commit voter fraud by voting three times in the upcoming election.Here's H3H3 Production's take on Mr. Salads, which calls into question the veracity of all of the many racist "social experiment" videos that Mr. Salads has made:https://youtu.be/UkvwKDTS3Bo

The Atmos R2 may be bigger than the brand's previously-released vapes, but we argue that in this case it's definitely a good thing.A bigger heating chamber means more room for packing it full. And the bigger battery means longer, more fulfilling vape sessions. In fact, you can use the Atmos R2 for up to about 25 minutes without recharging.It also now comes packing a reengineered anodized chamber, plus new ceramic heating disk tech: meaning you get an even smoother, cleaner pull every time you light up. And as far as using dry herbs vs. oils? You can take your pick, because the Atmos R2 works with both.The reason this is an especially great deal is that it also includes some useful accessories for much less than the price of just the vaporizer itself. You'll get a packing tool, both the original anodized chamber with coil and the new advanced ceramic disc heating chamber, and more.We highly recommend the Atmos R2, and it’s currently on sale for 40% off retail.Also explore the Best-Sellers on our network right now:

Oregonian Jason Owens wanted a snowmobile and had a little over a pound and a half of marijuana. Craigslist seems the obvious path to success, right? Sadly, the craigslist seller Mr. Owens contacted was a cop.Recreational marijuana is legal in Oregon, but must be sold, especially in these amounts, via a dispensary. Mr. Owens was charged with adult possession of marijuana, adult delivery of marijuana and driving with a suspended license.Via KIRO7 Seattle:

In this wonderful animation, billionaire Russian physicist and investor Yuri Milner explains his effort to launch tiny probes, powered by 12 foot solar sails, on an interstellar mission to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, within two decades. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are on the board of Milner's group, called Breakthrough Initiatives. The project builds on decades of work by scientists Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray who pioneered solar sail technology through the Planetary Society, the fantastic citizen-funded space advocacy and research organization they co-founded in 1980. Indeed, Friedman is an advisor to Milner's Starshot effort.For more on solar sailing, check out the Planetary Society's LightSail project and their blog post earlier this year about Milner's far out project.

European Digital Rights has created a free, CC-licensed kids' booklet about privacy called Digital Defenders. (more…)

The New York Times' presidential forecast has millionaire Republican Donald Trump at his lowest ebb of the campaign, with only an 8 percent chance of winning the Nov. 8 general election.

Adam Curtis' latest mind-blowing project just dropped a trailer, and it's a doozy. HyperNormalisation uses a tale of two cities (New York City and Damascus) to trace how we got to Trump, among other post-truths. He goes in on everybody, with a special focus on bankers. (more…)

When 60 Minutes profiled child math whiz Jacob Barnett, he demonstrated how he imagined numbers as shapes. Numberphile's Simon Pampena analyzed Jacob's thought process. (more…)

Wanting to see some new animal reaction pics? Swing by The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards and be inspired by some of 2016's best. Something for every occasion. (more…)

Today sees the publication of Bonnie Burton's (previously) long-awaited new book, Crafting with Feminism: 25 Girl-Powered Projects to Smash the Patriarchy. (more…)

Researcher Yarden Katz scraped the database of Intellectual Ventures, a giant business that buys up patents, but produces nothing but lawsuits (previously), and discovered that IV claims ownership of nearly 500 patents that were created at public expense by researchers employed by public universities, and another 100 or so patents filed by the US Navy. (more…)

The Ecuadoran Embassy in London has confirmed Wikileaks' accusation that it terminated Julian Assange's access to its wifi network because it disapproved of Assange and Wikileaks' "intervention in the affairs of other states" by publishing material pertaining to the impending US election. (more…)

A Gambler's Anatomy is the latest novel from Copyfighting certified genius Jonathan Lethem (previously) -- a book about an international backgammon hustler who believes he is psychic -- and who sports a huge tumor growing from his face. (more…)

Shearer's $125 million lawsuit against Studio Canal and Vivendi enumerates a parade of horribles that the entertainment companies have visited upon him, from ripping him off with crazy, corrupt accounting practices to allowing the Spinal Tap trademarks to lapse but still charging him royalties to perform as his character from Tap. (more…)

In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg defends his company's ongoing association with Peter Thiel -- Facebook investor/board member and major donor to white-supremacist/pro-rape presidential candidate Donald Trump. (more…)

Vogue today endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the first ever female president of the United States of America, and ran this gorgeous portrait of our future POTUS by photographer Annie Leibovitz for Vogue, in December 1993.(more…)

A kitten interpretation of the Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear, from the David Lynch movie masterpiece “Dune,” based on the great Frank Herbert science fiction novel.(more…)

Filmmaker Michael Moore has an “October surprise” for America: A stealthily and quickly made movie about the presidential campaign of GOP nominee and accused serial sexual predator Donald Trump.(more…)

“One in two American adults is in a law enforcement face recognition network.”“The Perpetual Lineup” report out today from a Georgetown University thinktank makes a compelling case for greater oversight of police facial-recognition software that “makes the images of more than 117 million Americans — a disproportionate number of whom are black — searchable by law enforcement agencies across the nation,” as the New York Times account reads.(more…)