See more photos at Wink Fun.With toys, sometimes simple is best: no batteries, no electronics, all kid-powered. Such is Wrecking Ball, the latest addition to SmartLab’s line of award-winning Demolition Lab build-‘em-and-wreck-‘em DE-construction toy sets. Build the five-story school building, then knock it down with the wrecking ball. Simple concept – and that’s where the fun just begins.First you assemble. Punch out the realistically illustrated wall and roof panels and add the plastic stand-up feet. Each panel depicts part of an abandoned schoolhouse, complete with hazard tape warnings, broken windows and bell tower. Also snap together the wrecking ball crane with extension feet and pre-assembled lever mechanism. Colorful stickers add a finishing touch to the wrecking crane.Then build the five-story schoolhouse by stacking the walls and roof panels. The stand-up feet make this easy so even the youngest kid can do it without needing delicate “house of cards” dexterity. Add the bell tower on top to finish.Now for the big moment. Adjust the telescoping arm to aim the wrecking ball so you can strike the building just where you want. Pull back on the handle as the wrecking ball s-l-o-w-l-y swings back and rises up with a dramatic “click-click-click…” Make any last minute fine adjustments, then press the red button to release the wrecking ball. The ball swings down and – kaBLAM!– the panels tumble as the school walls and roof collapse. Classic tension/release play pattern.Simple enough for any kid. But there’s more: suggestions in the instruction propose other challenges. Can you knock the entire structure down in a single blow? Make other structures and designs to demolish. Try to knock out only certain sections with a controlled swing of the wrecking ball while leaving the rest of the structure intact – kind of a kooky Jenga game. Kids will devise their own games and activities, add action figures and vehicles, improvise Rube Goldberg constructions, etc. What’s nice is the control you have by setting the length of the arm and precise amount of backswing: you can deliver just the right amount of force exactly where you want. And, besides, what kid wouldn’t enjoy a little school-wrecking fantasy this time of year?Note: Full disclosure: I’ve done design work for Smart Lab in the past but not on this product line – wish I did!Wrecking Ball Building Kit

https://youtu.be/3AtBE9BOvvkTom Scott built an "full-size, real-life emoji keyboard" from 14 keyboards labeled with 1,000 stickers to cover everything from Unicode 8. "It's a bit ridiculous," Tom says. 👏

She broke the silence, “Jared went in last week.”“Where?” I knew, but I was being difficult.“You know where: the clinic.”“Oh.”Our living room was always small, but today it felt particularly cramped. We sat on opposite sides of the white microfiber couch. I stared at the TV.“Is he good?” I asked.“Yup. Got the dose yesterday. He’s recovering at home.”When we got tested, I watched them take her blood. She was calm; I was a fucking wreck. The one thing our species wants and it comes down to a genetic lottery: if your mitochondria objects, get in line for the grave; if not, you’ve got a lot of living to do.“Good. I hope that he and Gail have a long, happy life together,” I said.She ignored my joke, leaned over the side of the couch, and fished her purse off the dark wooden floor. It rattled. “Turn off the TV. I want to talk to you about something,” she said.I did as commanded. With the light gone from the screen, the room became dark and silent. There was a loud rushing in my ears.She turned on a little lamp, and started looking through her bag. Even with the light, the room was small and cold and the faint marbling in the walls made it even more tomblike. The rushing grew louder.“I went to the hospice-- to the clinic,” she corrected herself, “the other day, for my session with the counselor.” She pulled a small orange bottle from her purse.“The hospice is a fucking waste of time... something we don’t have too much of, remember?” I spat the words.She ignored my tantrum. “Look. We have as much time as we always had, just like before. It’s no one’s fault other people have more.”“More is addition. More is multiplication. More is a few extra years. They don’t have more. They don’t have finite or infinite. They have a number divided by zero. It’s impossible for us to understand. Time doesn’t exist for them anymore. We’re the ones with time. Don’t you see?”I realized how loud I was. Every time she tried to help, I’d go off. “So the counselor?” I asked, softly.She rattled the bottle. “The counselor gave me this prescription. It’s for both of us.”“No. I’m not doing that.” I was shouting again. “I may not outlive the universe, but I’m not gonna-”“It’s not that. That’s only if you take too many. At small doses, it’s the opposite. It’s an in. He said it slowed things down. Time times two. Time times twenty.”“I don’t fucking want time times twenty. I want time forever.”She slammed the pills on the coffee table. “And my great desire is to sit here and watch everyone else stay young and stay perfect, while the two of us get old and broken and fat and diseased and wrinkled, incontinent, blind and fucking useless. You think that’s my choice, you selfish shit?”We sat in silence. The rushing, gone during our argument, roared back. Between the fake marble walls, the thundering quiet, and the overwhelming closeness and whiteness, the room felt more tomblike than ever. I moved to turn on the TV.She spoke, calmly. “We can’t have time forever. At least we can have this...” She grabbed my hand. “We can manage. Together.”Life. Terminal, but manageable. I stared at the marbling, imagining the veins pulse. She continued to stare at me, holding my limp hand.“So the drugs?” I asked, giving her hand a little shake, and pulling mine away.“The counselor said that you can either take them daily, or you can take them when you start getting... when you start feeling it’s all... slipping away.”“What do you mean ‘slipping away’?”“Like when you’re having a good day, and suddenly you realize that the day has just... gone. If you take it while you’re having a good time, it slows everything down. Makes you more aware. Makes you more in-the-now.”I ought to be grateful that both of us didn’t check out. At least the immortals made our lives comfortable. A pension; an apartment. Bribes to make us feel better until old age, decrepitude, and decay stole our teeth, our bones, our skin, our minds. We’d get older and older. They wouldn’t. A small gift to those of us with numbered days, from the host who’d see the sun explode in fifty million of what I still called a lifetime.I tore my eyes off the marble walls and looked at her. She was still watching me.“This is a now I wish I was less in.” I said. “I want to be in everybody else’s now,”“No one said life would be easy.”“Fuck easy. This is unfair.”She sighed. “No one said it’d be fair either.”“You know why can’t I live forever? Two billion years ago, some fucking bacteria crawled into my great-great-whatever-grandmother. He became my mitochondria. That little bastard can’t take the dose. If it had been the bug right next to him, I’d be through the gates of paradise right now. Instead of here.”“You think maybe they made a mistake, that your letter was wrong?” she said, in a patronizing way. “You want to try your luck and take the dose anyway? Go down to Canal. That’s where all the counterfeit shit is. You’ll have your shot in ten minutes. It might be a needle full of saline, gasoline, or amphetamine. Or it might be the real deal. But you better hope that letter was wrong. Otherwise you won’t even get the time you do have left.“You know what else that little bastard of yours gave you? He sealed your place in history. You know who you are? You’re one of the last men. We’re it. We’re the ancients now! We’ll be the heroes of their new stories. There’s your eternity. We’ll be myths.”“I don’t want to be a fucking myth.” I slammed my fist on the couch arm. The impact raised a tiny puff of dust. “I want to be a god.”We sat in silence for a while. She stared at the wall above the TV. The bottle of pills glowed from the cheap lamp light , turning it into a sickly orange star. I picked it up. The label was covered with a half-dozen warning stickers.She broke the quiet. “You know, it’s not going to be easy for them. Think about how quickly they’re going to fill up the planet? Where will we put them all?”“They’re already building colony ships. They’ll see other worlds. They’ll see all the worlds the universe has. I’ll see only this one, until the day I die.”“So what? A forever, floating through emptiness, hoping to find somewhere to land? Some of them will be out there for millions of years. You can’t understand that. No one can. I hope they’re ready for it.”Her sympathy jarred me. Just because our bodies can handle infinity, doesn’t mean our minds can. Still, it’d be a nice trouble to have.“Champagne problems,” I said, with mock disdain, waving my hand. “Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, right?”I laughed. She laughed too. This was a moment worth having. As soon as I thought it, the moment slipped away.“This is what those pills were made for, right?”“Yup. Capture time. Slow it down. Get every detail.”“Time times two.” I said, wondering.“Time times twenty.” She smiled, dropped my hand, and turned on the TV.I looked at her, imagining her growing old, hair greying, skin mottling, eyes dulling. I wondered which of us would die first and what saying goodbye would be like. That letter was a constant reminder of our mortality. If you checked out, and got the dose, you had to surrender it. But despite that bureaucratic certificate assuring me of my own doom, I still thought of the moment like a scene out of a movie... unreal.“Come here,” she commanded. I obeyed and put my head in her lap. The TV kept playing, but all I thought about were her warm, soft thighs. The rushing in my head was gone. I was calm.When I woke, my legs were so stiff that it was clear I’d been asleep for a long time. Another reminder of my impending collapse. She’d gone off to the bedroom. The TV and lamp were off. I filled the kettle and, next to the jar of loose tea, found the orange bottle of pills. She knew where to leave them so they’d be the first thing I saw when I woke up. Very clever. The clock above the range told me it was a little before seven. I sat back down on the couch, in the darkness, with my cup. There was no way I’d get back to sleep now. Time to start another day.Six weeks ago I came home and found her sitting on the couch, with the two letters in her hands. The sight of those envelopes, bright white against her olive skin, made me feel like I was going to shit myself. She had suggested that I open hers, and she open mine. I said that all men die alone and took my fate from her hands.I didn’t want to see her letter in case both of us didn’t have the same results. I tore mine open before she had a chance to open hers. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.‘We’re sorry...’I felt... nothing. All my fear and uncertainty disappeared and my bowels stopped gurgling. I felt exactly like I had, moments earlier, before I opened the door and saw what was in her lap. Nothing had changed. I managed a quiet “Damn.”I saw her face as she looked at me after opening hers. I knew what it said. Nature duck-duck-goosed right past both of us in the game of immortality.The anger came later.“Of course it’s unfair,” she’d said. “Life is unfair. It’s always been unfair and it will continue being unfair long after we’ve rotted away back to starstuff and the people on the street are thirty million years old.”It was the first time I’d heard her be bitter about anything. She was always so level. I guess even the steadiest of people have their limits.We didn’t talk much that night. Just sat on the white couch, eyes on the wall, watching TV.I thought about what she’d said last night, about her sympathy for the immortals. They had their future. They’d scatter like dandelion puffs across the universe. They’d be subject to rules she and I would never have to deal with. New forms of government. New ethics. New aesthetics. And there’s very little that the right mitochondria can do for you if your colony ship plunges into a sun. Their certainty was one of uncertainty.I had a certainty. I will die. That gave me time. The immortals didn’t have time; they had a coordinate for locating things in the past and the future. I... we... had a finite resource. And we could use it however we wanted. Who’s going to tell a dying man what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to read, think, or feel? Our time was freedom.For a little while at least.I finally understood why I’d felt nothing when I opened my letter. I had felt nothing, because nothing had changed.I was still the same man I was the moment before I opened that letter, with exactly as much time left. My life was still my life.I was wasting it being selfish.Time to live, to share the life we’d dreamed of, been excited about, before. We’d experience life, aging, dying, and death, together. Almost nobody else would have that. I wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Let’s make the sun chase us.I looked out the window. The sun was coming up. I hadn’t realized it, but the trees were bare, and there was a trace of snow on the sidewalk. When had it become winter? All down the street, in the little apartment windows, lights were coming on. A car drove by, illuminating the small snow drifts that were blowing about. It looked cheery and cold outside. I liked that.I turned on the lights. She’d be up soon. For the first time in months I was excited.There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge. We were meant to take it over to Jared and Gail’s to celebrate, but this seemed much more important. I popped it open, and poured into two small stemless glasses. I sipped mine. It tasted mineral and sharp: perfect for the morning. I shook two pills out of the bottle and placed them beside each glass.Time for a grand gesture. Something poetic and symbolic and beautiful to toast the rest of our lives.I went over to the bookshelf and started scanning. The poem was her favorite, but I could never stand the damn thing. She could consider this a peace offering. My finger stopped. Andrew Marvell. The book was well-thumbed enough that I opened straight to it. Sometimes you need to hear words aloud.“‘Had we but world enough, and time...’” I said to the empty living room.A letter slipped from the back pages of the book, landing on the floor. It had the letterhead that almost everyone on the planet loved. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.‘We’re happy...’What was it the counselor said? Time times two. Time times twenty.I think if I take the whole bottle, I can give her time forever.• Leo Vladimirsky writes commercial truths and science fictions in New York City. You can find more of his work at leovladimirsky.com.

https://youtu.be/0s9FOSUiMVMXiao Jiguo is a successful Chinese Obama impersonator. In this interview he explains that his English skills are poor, and demonstrates the fake English he uses when performing.

Michael Baxter, 52, holds the Guinness World Record for the "most tattoos of characters from a single animated series." Jade Baxter Smith of Twisted By Design in Victoria, Australia did the ink."I wanted to get something which was unique, which nobody else had or would even think of getting...," Baxter says. "I'm a huge fan of the show. I love the tattoo, and I know lots of other people, including my grandchildren, do too.”Interestingly, the Guinness World Record for "most tattoos of the same cartoon character tattooed on the body" was set by another Simpsons fan, Lee Weir, 27, of New Zealand. He has 41 tattoos of Homer on his arm, seen below.

https://youtu.be/a1lMrma1EjoThis was a close call. A man saunters out of a building, pauses to inspect the bottom of his shoe, and is nearly guillotined by a falling sheet of glass. After the incident, which knocks off his headwear, he gets up and walks briskly in the opposite direction.

https://youtu.be/IEIzuJZj03UYoann Hervo's "Weird Simpsons VHS" is just that. (YouTube)

https://youtu.be/m-Qae4hY32cIf you don't have the patience to learn lockpicking, and a bolt cutter isn't dramatic enough, you might try shooting at the lock. Achieving success is more difficult than movies would have you believe though. (Demolition Ranch)

https://youtu.be/I1hAvTkEvPUBoing Boing's Weekend of Wonder in association with Baby Tattoo was tremendously fun. One of the many highlights of the 3-day event was a tricked-out coffee station that we set up on Saturday morning. I brought my Rancilio Silvia espresso machine with a retro-fitted PID temperature control system and pulled about 75 shots in on hour. John Edgar Park brought a device that carbonates beverages and used it to make fizzy cold brew coffee. He also brought a little sack of xanthan gum (a food thickening agent), which he mixed into coffee using an immersion blender. It was really good!Above, a video from ChefSteps with the recipe for a xanthan gum latte.

A well-known software developer pulled his wildly successful ad-blocking utility just two days after releasing it on Apple's App Store. Marco Arment, who co-founded Tumblr and created Instapaper and Overcast, says he felt guilty about selling the ad-blocker, called Peace, because it "just doesn’t feel good." Arment explained why he pulled the app in a post on his blog (which runs ads served by The Deck):

Chris Poole sold the sprawling image boards to their own inspiration, reports the New York Times.

Canadian locksport supplier Sparrows makes some of the best advanced picks in the world, but they're also the rank beginner's best friend.Sparrows sent me a set of their practice locks to play with. This is a set of four locks, with 2, 3, 4 and 5 pins, that you progress through as you practice different pick techniques. I kept them in my pockets over a week of intense travel with a lot of standing in line and attending meetings, and used them to keep my hands busy.First I worked through the whole set with a rake, then a pick, and then a half-diamond. The locks stood up to my hamfisted clunking admirably, and were cheap enough ($30 for a set of four) that I didn't worry too much about all the times I dropped them. There's lots of practice-sets on the market, but as with everything from Sparrows, these were reliable, and thoughtfully well-made.

https://youtu.be/IEIzuJZj03UYoann Hervo's tribute to the (too) long-running show also happens to contain the best couch gag ever.

Scott Lattin of Whitney, TX received over six thousand dollars on a GoFundMe account to repair his vandalized truck. But his donors might want their money back after the news came out that Lattin had admitted to police that he vandalized his own truck. Lattin claimed that his truck, which was emblazoned with a pro-police message, was spray-painted by anti-police vandals with the words, "Black Lives Matter." When police investigated, they came to the conclusion that Lattin had lied to them. He was arrested and charged with making a false police report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyga8VMWXKgThis old-timey UK film about marbled book covers has a peculiar quality to it, like a particularly sleepy episode of Look Around You or the video to some spooky electronica. It's "A Bedfordshire County Council Film" from "1970" and a completely wonderful how-to guide to a beautiful art form. [via r/videos.]

The triumphant return of Bloom County is a reminder of the glory days of newspaper funnies, but this weekend's color strip was a hell of a reminder of how far we've come since the newspapers were the home of our daily chuckle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj-Ht19_qisEric Strong's kid wanted "the most awesome bed ever," but buying a traditionally-awesome bed was not in the kids' bedroom budget. By hacking the $209 Ikea Kura, though, Strong made something more awesome than anything money could buy.

Photographer Sam Kaplan organized candy, cookies, sandwiches, and other tasty snacks into astounding architectural forms and wondrous wormholes of food. The series is titled "Pits & Pyramids." (via Laughing Squid)

The German automaker's shares have lost almost a quarter of their value after it admitted using its DRM'd computer system to hide how much pollution its engines emit.

Two alleged jewelry thieves were busted after attempting to swipe $86,000 worth of diamond rings in Sycamore Township, Ohio. Police found the store's door smashed and heard noise coming from elevator. They called the fire department who opened the faulty elevator, revealing Leroy Bridgman, 57, and Marcie Young, 61, stuck inside. According to police, they had stashed the goods, along with "criminal tools" in the ceiling of the lift.“Sometimes karma makes sure things work out how they should," Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Neil told WCPO.(Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

We live our lives online, and owe it to ourselves to back up our data in a secure and reliable manner. Not only does SkyHub safely house your data now and forever, but it grants you access to your information on any device. With no hidden red tape, SkyHub is simply the best complete and affordable solution for all your data needs.“Online file storage excellence.” Wall Street Journal

https://youtu.be/65cypPYgKIw"Nano Niagara Falls" by Joerg Daiber. (LittleBigWorld)