The tabloids’ loose relationship with facts grows even more tenuous this week, and sometimes even their fake news is phony.Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle “Won’t Last 5 Years!” claims “Prince’s Own Aunt” on the cover of the Globe. Except that the “prince’s aunt,” Ann Ukrainetz, is actually a 74-year-old from Escondido, California, who 18 years ago claimed to have found a note from her mother scribbled in the margin of a dusty theatre playbill claiming that Princess Diana’s grandfather, Lord Fermoy, was her real father. It’s hardly DNA evidence, and almost two decades later it’s still just an unsubstantiated claim, but the Globe is happy for Ukrainetz to pontificate.Yet she actually never says that the Royal marriage “won’t last 5 years.” “Harry & Meghan’s Marriage is D.O.A.!” screams the headline across two pages, but the worst that Ukrainetz can conjure up is that Markle may face Royal “backstabbing” and “issues of race and prejudice.”Even more dubious is the National Enquirer “world exclusive,” claiming that “Prince Charles drops wedding bombshell – I’m Not Your Real Father, Harry!” It’s a rehash of old discredited allegations that Harry is the love child of his Royal mentor Mark Dyer, but the idea that on the eve of Harry's wedding Charles told him: “I am not your father!” is as risible as the idea that the Enquirer has a “Buckingham Palace insider” who could have a) eavesdropped on such a private conversation and b) would tell the Enquirer while the massed army of the Fleet Street Royal press corps remain unaware. It simply never happened.“Exhume JonBenet’s Body NOW!” says murdered infant beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey’s father John on the cover of the Enquirer. Except John Ramsey said nothing of the sort. Colorado’s Boulder County has formed a special task force to investigate cold cases, including JonBenet’s murder 21 years ago, but the grieving father absolutely did not call for her immediate disinterment. “It would still be difficult for me,” he said of a possible exhumation, “but if it was a compelling argument, I would consider it.” He’d “consider it” – which to the Enquirer translates into “Exhume JonBenet Now!” No wonder they call it a “world exclusive” – who else would write such trash?The Globe team of psychic reporters trained for years in carnival midway guess-your-weight booths strike again, declaring that Michelle Obama has gained precisely 57 pounds and now weighs in at 263 pounds, and that singer Joni Mitchell “has packed on 60 pounds” and “crushes the scale at a deadly 180 pounds.” Michelle is reportedly “Eating Herself to Death!” due to “stress over the wild antics of her two girls,” while Mitchell is “bloated and crippled after brain damage.” Because any well-trained journalist can make a medical diagnosis based on a paparazzi photo.The National Examiner cover promises us “The Judy Garland Nobody Knew!” which turns out to be tidbits about the Judy Garland that two people knew very well: her daughters Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft. “She was funny and warm,” says Luft. “She ensured my happiness as a kid,” says Minnelli. It’s revelatory insights like this that make the Examiner a must-read, along with its ads for a motorized wheelchair, a pain-relieving cushion, an erectile dysfunction pill, and live phone psychics.Us magazine boasts its own Royal wedding story about Meghan Markle: “I’ll Be More Than a Wife!” Implicit in this is the antediluvian concept that most women who wed become just a wife. Surely all women who marry are “more than a wife?” Us reports that Markle “is an accomplished actress and philanthropist” who is “plugged into global affairs” and “has come in with her vision and the changes that she can make in the world.” That’s ignoring the fact that for decades pretty much the major role of British royalty has been in support of charitable and civic works: delivering speeches, ribbon-cutting, hand-shaking and handing armfuls of bouquets from grateful citizens over to ladies-in-waiting. That’s the job Markle’s signing up for, whether she wants it or not.Fortunately we have Us magazine’s crack investigative team to tell us that Kerry Washington wore it best (doesn’t she always?), that Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander’s boxer dog Harley “loves to cuddle,” that Real Housewives of New York City star Luann de Lesseps carries lipstick, a clear crystal “for good energy” and matches to ignite flatulence “when you’re a guest at somebody’s house” in her Michael Kors crossbody purse, and that the stars are just like us: they take taxis, pump gas and drink coffee – just like they do every damn week in this enervating pictorial feature.The Examiner offers a public service with its story titled: “How to tell a con artist is calling.” Watch out for "strangers touting odd deals," "salespeople who prey on your fears," and "never judge a person’s integrity by how they sound.” They forget to mention the biggest clue that a con artist is calling: When you answer the phone, they say: “Hello – I’m a tabloid reporter . . . “Onwards and downwards . . .

https://youtu.be/r-3iathMo7oUnbox Therapy built this intense gaming cockpit around a Xidax PC, LG 42.5" monitors, the Imperator Workstation Game Chair with massage features, and other components totaling around $30,000. I especially appreciate the "snack cart."

A 38-year-old Florida man was killed in his bedroom when his vape pen exploded and shot two pieces into his head. The explosion also burned 80 percent of his body and lit his house on fire.(more…)

The Senate Judiciary Committee believes NRA leadership were likely tools evil enough to have been a channel for funneling illegal foreign money into Trump's 2016 campaign.More interesting to me: are Americans who maintain 'gun ownership is insurance against the US Government' now unwitting Russian insurgents?Via the Daily Beast:

Securus is the widely abused location-tracking tool that exploits a loophole in privacy law to allow police to extract realtime and historical cellphone location data without a warrant or any accountability. (more…)

According to researcher Kaeli Swift of the University of Washington's Avian Conservation Laboratory, crows hold "funerals." When they see a corpse of their own kind they gather together and squawk loudly. To determine what they may be doing, Swift displayed a taxidermied dead crow to other crows. On some days though, she wore a creepy mask and wig. After multiple experiments with and without her disguise or the dead bird, the crows appeared to remember "the experience with the mask and dead crow and now connected the area with danger." From Deep Look:

Nurses picketed The Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital And Trauma Center (AKA "Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital") and covered up Zuckerberg's name on the hospital sign, citing concerns that patients would not trust a hospital that was associated with someone with such a long rap-sheet for privacy violations. (more…)

The Passport Index features beautiful high-resolution images of the covers of all the world's passports, with interactive features ranking passports by how much visa-free travel they entitle their bearers to, and the ability to assemble grids of the places your passport(s) permit entry to. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

Today, Senate Democrats will force a vote on whether to rescue Net Neutrality from the depredations of Vichy nerd Ajit Pai; the debate is streaming now and will continue until 3PM Eastern/12PM Pacific, when the Senate will vote. (more…)

Andrew Rice's long profile of neutracidal FCC chairman Ajit Pai paints a portrait of a genuine nerd who really loves the ways the internet let him escape his small-town life, who really dotes on memes and Star Wars, and who threw fun parties when he was a young man -- and who is a textbook bootlicker, convinced that corporations will save America from the tyranny of government overreach, and who decided that if Trump was the way to get there, he would carry water for Trump. (more…)

In Transient: Extended and Unused Footage, Dustin Farrell shares some of the great shots of weather events that got trimmed or omitted from his beautiful film Transient. (more…)

If you move into a new place and start service from Comcast -- increasingly the only way to get internet service in many places -- the company will often charge you a $90 installation fee, even if the previous occupants had already installed Comcast service, and even if you buy and set up your own modem. (more…)

In the 2000s, Saran changed their formula to be less sticky: more convenient for most people, but also less useful to those adept in the mystic arts of cling-wrapping things. And where Saran goes, the clingwrap industry follows.The switch was for a good reason, though: the stickiness was due to using PVDC, a chloride-containing polymer that's bad for the environment and in all likelihood not something you want near hot food. Delicious!

Ocado robots zip around simultaneously filling orders without bumping into each other in this fascinating look at a modern warehouse. (more…)

Wherein a contractor buys a house and the next-door neighbor objects to him entering the house, insults him, and calls the police: "This is what we go through, young black men trying to do what's right."The cops turn up and check his paperwork. Some other neighbors emerge to see what all the fuss is about. Then everyone starts chatting amicably. This further angers the racist lady.

A Snellen chart (below) may just look like random letters in different sizes, but they were carefully designed to measure visual acuity. This piece on testing the limits of human vision brings it all into focus. (more…)

Oops.On Friday, a painting by Pablo Picasso was damaged by Christie's auction house and has been withdrawn from their May 15 sale.The painting, Le Marin (The Sailor), was created by Picasso as a self-portrait in 1943. It was sent to auction by its owner, accused rapist Steve Wynn.The New York Times reports:

Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

There's an art and craft to building fanless computers that can do fancy things (like play games), but the one Tim made is housed in the attractive Streacom DB4 and makes no noise at all. Zero decibels. Tim had to research motherboard clearances to the fraction of a millimeter to make sure he picked the right one to work with its heatpipe kit.

Spliced with footage of him skating in his youth, here's a video of skate legend Tony Hawk showing what he can still do at age 50. A lot, as it turns out.He writes:

Watching the interplay of liquids used to make these beautiful calligraphic letters looks like geothermal vents opening and releasing gases and lava into the air. (more…)

There was more to Anne Frank's diary than we once thought. Two pages, which were previously covered in a brown masking paper, have been revealed by researchers at Dutch museums. The pages contained "four risque jokes and candid explanations of sex, contraception and prostitution" written by the Jewish teen, according to The Guardian.The Anne Frank Museum, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands used digital technology to show the writing on the pages.

In a real life case of "We can pickle that," New York City's Lucky Pickle Dumpling Co. has pickled... ice cream. Well, sort of, they made pickle-flavored soft serve.https://www.instagram.com/p/BirrbVBh8WW/?taken-at=229903824229501It sells for $5/serving.Previously: Pickle juice slushies are coming to Sonic Drive-In this summer(Food and Wine)pickle image via Wikipedia

There must have been one helluva marketing meeting to come up with this PR stunt."No one believes electric vehicles have pulling power!""Let's prove they do!""With a 287,000 pound plane!"Silence.Six months later...

Federal investigators believe a man who once worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for last year's massive leak of Top Secret CIA hacking tools, court documents reveal.(more…)

Daiki Suzuki's menswear brand Engineered Garments took the iconic Dr. Martens 1461 shoe and made them into grandpa shoes by adding velcro straps.They're available in five colors at End. Clothing for $229/pair.Previously: William Blake Doc Martens and Turn your shoes into roller skates(The Awesomer)

The psyopsing worked.Gina Haspel now appears to have secured enough votes to be confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, after two additional Senate Democrats today announced they will vote for her.(more…)

Ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft have now both stated that they will no longer force victims of sexual assault into non-binding arbitration, as has been the practice of both firms until today.(more…)

The Washington Post reports that the Trump Administration is laying the necessary groundwork to warehouse the children of migrants who enter the United States illegally on military bases in Texas and Arkansas. The bases will be used to contain anyone under the age of 18 who crosses the border illegally with their parents or on their own.In a leaked email sent to Pentagon personnel, it was disclosed that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be making visits to four military installations in the coming weeks to evaluate whether they contain infrastructure suitable for sheltering children.From the Washington Post:

Johanna Giselhäll Sandström of Kyrkhult, Sweden paid to have her arm tattooed with her two children's names: Nova and Kevin. Problem is, he accidentally inked her with "Kelvin." The tattooist refunded her money and suggested she go to a tattoo removal clinic. Instead, she and her husband settled on an easier, less expensive, and pain-free solution: They changed Kevin's name to Kelvin which they claim to prefer anyway. From The Local:

Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks America about the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM even for legal reasons, and America gets to answer with requests for exemptions to this rule. (more…)

New analysis of old data gathered by NASA's Galileo orbiter suggests that Jupiter's moon Europa is likely shooting water into space from geysers on its icy surface. Europa is considered to be the most likely candidate in our solar system to support extraterrestrial life and the plumes may make it easier for scientists to find evidence of oceanic ETs below the moon's frozen shell. Nadia Drake writes about this far out news over at National Geographic:

Evidence of the octopus evolution show it would have happened too quickly to have begun here on Earth. Published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology Journal, 33 scientists have declared the invertebrate sea-dweller an alien whose eggs landed from space.Via Express:

Google's "Project Maven" is supplying machine-learning tools to the Pentagon to support drone strikes; the project has been hugely divisive within Google, with employees pointing out that the company is wildly profitable and doesn't need to compromise on its ethics to keep its doors open; that the drone program is a system of extrajudicial killing far from the battlefield; and that the firm's long-term health depends on its ability to win and retain the trust of users around the world, which will be harder if Google becomes a de facto wing of the US military. (more…)

The long-awaited biopic Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen's incredible story from their formation in 1970 to their outstanding Live Aid performance in 1985 just a few years before Mercury died due to complications from AIDS.Hitting theaters November 2, the film stars Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury with Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, and Lucy Boynton. Bryan Singer directed much of the principal photography before he was fired, apparently for repeatedly not showing up to work, and replaced by Dexter Fletcher who completed the movie.

Matthias Schlubeck is considered one of the world's greatest players of the pan pipes (aka pan flute.). Zamfir's got nothing on Schlubek who was born without hands. From Dust to Digital's Instagram:

I have been enjoying Bluewave's GET, a $129 bluetooth receiver, DAC and amp for using 3.5mm jack-style headphones with my IOS and Android devices.The Bluewave GET beats the pants off my $22 Ribbon, at least when used with my old set of Westones. I love these old in-ear buds and didn't want to lose them. The audio quality when playing music is just light years ahead of even my favorite bluetooth headphone set, the B&O HP5.The highest end audio protocols these guys offer APT-X variants are not Apple kosher, which is sadly where most of my music lives. Using AAC from my iPhone, and playing the same several songs over the same set of headphones, shows the GET simply pushes a lot more power to the earphones than the Ribbon. Giving them more juice opens them up a lot and everything gets far more detailed. The sound stage widens waaaay the heck up and the sound is simply better across the board. For any time I am earbud listening, the GET wins over the Ribbon hands down.The GET + Westones are just better sounding headphones than the B&O H5. I like the B&O a lot, but they are less comfortable and do not sound nearly as good. Bluewave is supposed to release an app for the GET that will allow the same EQ-like tuning that the H5's app allows. I do enjoy being able to switch things up between podcasts and music. Battery life on the GET is 2x that of the B&O (10 hrs vs 5.)My only complaint about the GET is that I find the volume wheel to be jumpy and I hurt my ears when I am not careful.The GET has replaced an RSA Emmeline The Shadow as my on-airplane headphone amp.Portable wireless hi-fi headphone amplifier with integrated microphone GET by Bluewave audio via AmazonImage via Boing Boing

Shawn Woods was able to catch seven mice in one night with a large bowl and some food-grade oil. (more…)

Just when you think you've seen everything, a cat in Bootle, England has been captured on camera using a door knocker to be let inside. The 26-year-old man who got the footage, Daniel Richardson, had pulled over to the side of the road when he saw the cat.He told the Liverpool Echo Saturday:

Legacy Woodworking Machinery has a great series of videos on how they program CNC machines to cut a hollow spiral candlestick. (more…)

Back in 2014, a patent trolled called Personal Audio LLC embarked on a campaign to shake down podcasters large and small for millions, but then they made the mistake of tangling with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (more…)

Square Off is a crowdfunded chess board that uses a computer and magnets to move pieces physically while playing a human opponent. YouTuber What's Inside? does a teardown to see how it works. (more…)

London -- ground zero for financial shenanigans, money-laundering, and the conversion of housing from a human necessity to an asset-class -- has spent decades converting itself to an inert, open-air vault full of status-displaying safe-deposit boxes owned by offshore criminals and oligarchs who "improve" their empty properties with absurd fripperies to make them more flippable come the day that their local warlord purges them and they need the ready cash. (more…)

It's Nice That surveyed an eclectic group of artists, designers, and thinkers on the outsize impact of 2001 since its premiere 50 years ago this month. (more…)

The Cutting Room Floor is a wiki collecting programming secrets from old games: messages hidden in the code, levels and characters that never show up in-game, and anything else unused or left on the editing room floor. Unused Zelda cutscenes. An impossible-to-find spell in Planescape: Torment. Some too-secret levels in Bionic Commando. The unusued Duke Nukem 3D sample "DUKE_PASSWIND".

Programming legend John Carmack shares stories of working with Steve Jobs. Jobs, Carmack writes, disliked computer games and their early prominence on the Mac platform — “Steve doesn’t like blood” — and yet...

With 5400 balls, YouTuber penguinz0 made his dog "the happiest dog in the world."Previously in Ball Pits: "Tumblr convention" a total disaster

San Francisco's Computer Museum boasts a state-of-the-art virtual reality pool program that feels so real that the tester, snooker champ Ronnie O'Sullivan, falls over after trying to lean on the VR table. (more…)

Carving soap bars into tiny cubes is apparently so satisfying visually and aurally that there's a whole series of videos depicting its many pleasures. (more…)