When a delegation from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America went to visit their Congressman, Ralph Norman [R-SC; @RalphNorman; (202) 225-5501; email], he drew a loaded handgun on them and placed it on the table between himself and his voters for "several minutes." (more…)

If you're the sort of person for whom Halloween is an all-year affair, this highly reviewed, $25 poncho may be your jam: it features a slimming and flattering skeleton (with both front- and back-views) and is hemmed with "lace" styled to look like cobwebs -- all that's missing is for it to be waterproof for stylish rainy days, but alas, it's purely about fashion, not dryness. (via Canopy)

A new study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology (Sci-Hub mirror) conducted microbial surveys of the bathrooms at the University of Connecticut (where the study's lead authors are based) to investigate whether hand-dryers were sucking in potentially infectious microbes and then spraying them all over everything, as had been observed in earlier studies. (more…)

If you've been paying attention, you might already know that Molly Ringwald is a brilliant writer with smart things to say about the movies that made her famous. (more…)

It's no mystery that project managers can make a pretty penny helping companies big and small cut costs and boost efficiency. But, despite the demand, you'll have a hard time getting your foot in the door if you're not carrying the appropriate certifications. There are a host of project management methodologies you can get certified in, and among the most popular is Six Sigma. With the Official Six Sigma Training and Certification Bundle, you can train to validate your project management knowledge, and it's on sale for $49.99 in the Boing Boing Store.For the uninitiated, Six Sigma is divided up into three tiers: yellow belt, green belt, and black belt. This three-course collection will familiarize you with the concepts and techniques taught at each level and show you how to eliminate errors in a business process, reduce costs, and ultimately boost revenue. Once you complete the entire training, you'll be ready to sit for each certification exam and move one step closer to a career in project management.Now, you can pick up the Official Six Sigma Training & Certification Bundle on sale for $49.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

Thanks to lousy weather conditions, I've been forced off the road from Texas to Alberta, Canada in an area near Tongue River State Park in Montana. There's no services here, save what we brought with us. The snow's coming down, hard. We'll have to dig our RV out once the roads clear. My wife was bitten by a dog five days ago. The wound's infected. Our engine has a coolant leak that we can't quite track down. Things are going great this week!Fortunately, I can always rely on the joy I find in Irish trad to keep me from losing what's left of my mind. Here's Four Men & a Dog doling out a pair of tunes: Martin Wynn's and Touch Me if You Dare, back in 2010 for Smithsonian Folk Life.The band's one of my favorites: with music that swaggers through Irish trad into American Bluegrass, early rock & roll and jazz, they're a delight to see in concert and, for me at least, deeply easy to listen to over and over again.

Unless you're self employed, like I am, sooner or later you're going to need to talk to someone about a Human Resources issue. There might be someone harassing you in your workplace. Maybe your douche of a boss is stealing your tip money. It might be that your workplace is filled with bigots giving you a hard time for your sexual orientation, the color of your skin or beliefs.Whatever your reasons for doing it, approaching management can suck: while the people in your human resources department are there to address workplace issues that mess with the safety and satisfaction of employees, when it comes down to it, they work for the same company as you do. If it comes down to protecting the company they work for or doing you a good turn, they might not side with you. As such, it's a very good idea to get some professional, unbiased advice on a workplace issue before broaching it with management.Hootsworth is an online service that provides anyone who needs it with free advice from employment lawyers and Human Resources experts. According to TechCrunch, all you need do is hit them up online, ask a question and, within 24 hours, you'll receive a personalized response. In order to help others that may be in the same boat as you, Hootsworth will then anonymize your question so that other users of the service can browse the expert answer to your problem that was given.While it won't help you to muster up the courage to put in a complaint about your working conditions, the service could go along way towards your heading into your next HR meeting armed with the knowledge you need to ensure the outcome that you're looking for.Image via Nick Youngson

TIL two things:1. YouTube is home to the world's only heavy metal-themed talk show. It's called Two Minutes to Late Night.2. Vocalists of all metal subgenres often shriek and squawk like birds. To prove it, the Two Minutes to Late Night host recently asked ornithologist Tom Stephenson of BirdGenie (an app that identifies birds by their sounds), "What Birds Do Metal Singers Sound Like?" He had no problem matching birds to their metal equivalent.For instance, the (most-non-metal) bird expert (ever) identified the Northern Potoo as a close match to the screeching vocals of Converge's 2001 metalcore song "Concubine." Ok, sure.(The Awesomer)

Scott Priutt, an asshole, was Donald Trump's pick to head the EPA. (more…)

Georgia Grainger, a Scottish librarian, began a fascinating Twitter thread earlier this week:

Starting at $14.99/month, you can have a box of "luxury occult items" sent to you by Box Bewitched. You'll pick either The Maiden, The Mother, or The Crone box and each month, they'll send you a curated assortment of healing crystals, incense, spell candles, magickal herbs, oils, pagan jewelry, altar tools, ruins, apparel, and other bewitching goodies. No nose twitching necessary. As a bonus, a portion of the proceeds go to helping homeless cats.Previously: Theme song for Bewitched has lyrics, here's Steve Lawrence singing itThanks, Brittany High!

Well, this is creepy: According to Bloomberg Law, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently shopping for a contractor that can help it compile a list of editors, journalists, and online "media influencers." Additionally, they're looking for goons to help them identify all social media coverage that relates to the agency or events that the agency may be involved in.

This afternoon, Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress and director to whom Dear Leader's lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid hush money weeks before the 2016 election, tweeted the following:

I keep this Tweezerman Mini Hangnail Nipper in my desk drawer and take it with me when I travel. Having a hangnail really bugs me, and this nipper cuts them off to the nub. I haven't come across anything better.

Facebook tried to get hospitals to share "anonymized data" on patients with it, including conditions and prescriptions, for a "research project."(more…)

The corruption and surveillance culture of Facebook is baked in deep and can never be removed; if you doubt it, just peruse a sampling of their patent filings, which are like Black Mirror fanfic written by lawyers. (more…)

Jezebel says it has learned that its recent hire, Cannibal Witch, who often tweets about her propensity for eating children, is in fact a cannibal."We should not have hired Cannibal Witch, an elegant writer and thinker who, we have come to believe, after serious consideration, does indeed eat children," says the site.

In the runup to his execution of Net Neutrality, Trump FCC Chairbeast Ajit Pai released a video on The Daily Caller, a far-right site; as a work of comedy, it was every bit as lame as the sketch he performed for telcoms lobbyists in which he "joked" about being a shill for his former employer, Verion. (more…)

Scotty, who runs the excellent Strange Parts YouTube channel, went to Shenzhen, China to upgrade the memory in his iPhone 6s from 16GB to 128GB. "I've been hearing for several years that this was something the repair shops here in Huaqiangbei could do," he says, "and I'd even seen one do it to a friends phone, so naturally, I had to learn how to do it myself. It was harder than I thought."

Daniel Sheikhan dropped his car off at a dealership for service. He was billed $700 for transmission work, but as his dashcam shows, the mechanics didn't do anything but put the car on a jack for 11 minutes and then take the car to buy ice cream, during which the driver drove over a curb and cracked a rim. The service technician even says on the camera that he didn't read the work order.From his YouTube description:

The Puerto Rican senate has approved Governor Ricardo Rosselló's plan to dismantle the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (PRIS), handing its functions private contractors paid by the Department of Economic Development and Commerce to manage. (more…)

Not surprising, but here's a new study confirming the obvious: couples that help each other with the dishwashing are happier.From The Atlantic:

Last week a gentleman from Kansas broke into his ex-girlfriend's house, hid in her attic for a couple of hours, and then fell through the ceiling. But he got stuck during the fall, until the ex-girlfriend's male friend pulled him out, and then beat him up. The gentleman was arrested and sent to the hospital for injuries, but these consequences weren't enough to prevent 25-year-old Tyler Bergkamp from trying something stupid again.On Tuesday he left the hospital, broke into another woman's house just a few blocks away, went through her clothes, and left her house wearing one of her T-shirts and a pair of Nike tennis-shoes. When the woman came home, she found his hospital gown on her bed.He was arrested again.Via Salina JournalImage: Salina County Jail

In a paper published by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, a group of Harvard and MIT cryptographers demonstrate that even if the government were to backdoor encryption and lock up anyone who used non-backdoored systems, people could still hide undetectable, secure, private messages within the messages sent over the compromised systems. (more…)

The Management & Training Corporation operates two federal prisons and 20 more state/local prisons around America; previously, it has been censured by Arizona for its role in deadly prison riots; now, the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center are suing the state of Mississippi over the violence, neglect, and rampant human rights abuses at Management & Training's East Mississippi Correctional Facility, near Meridian in Lauderdale County.(more…)

You know what works better than giving tax-credits to property developers, or mandating a few poor-door accessible affordable housing units in a new luxury high rise? Just building affordable housing on public land that's publicly managed. (more…)

The "Turkey City Lexicon" is a widely used -- if controversial -- set of critiquing terms for use in science fiction writing workshops, created by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling for use in the Turkey City Writing Workshop; Sterling describes SF workshops as being "like a bad rock band" in that a workshop "can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty enthusiasts with nothing better to occupy their time. No one has a copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm." (more…)

A new Florida law redefines the reach of beachfront property owners' claims to "the land above the mean high-tide level." This seemingly innocuous change means that private property owners -- and their patrolling rent-a-cops -- will have vastly expanded powers to kick members of the public off of public beaches. (more…)

Rapper Win Nevaluze (along with Jay Lava aka ScatterBrains News) rhymed Dr. Seuss' There's a Wocket in My Pocket! over the beat of Migos' and Drake's “Walk It, Talk It”.How fun!(Neatorama)

Andy from How To Make Everything went out in the Utah desert, gathered up volcanic glass, then through trial and error learned how to make an Aztec-style edge weapon.The episode includes an interesting history lesson from anthropologist Gilbert Tostevin at University of Minnesota, who shows Andy how Aztecs used a haft embedded with smaller obsidian pieces to make formidable weapons.• Turning Volcanic Rock into a Blade that's Sharper than Steel (YouTube / How To Make Everything)

In an age where net neutrality is far from a guarantee, VPNs have become a staple for users looking to make sure their online activity stays private. However, one of the biggest complaints about these services is that they slow your browsing speed to a crawl while keeping your online activity under the radar. HideMyAss! VPN is one of the few services out there that lets you surf the Web incognito and unhindered, and two-year subscriptions are on sale in the Boing Boing Store.Named one of PC Mag's Best VPN Services of 2018, HideMyAss! VPN hides your ass (browsing activity) from hackers, government entities, and advertisers while letting you surf at blazing speeds on up to two devices at once. Simply choose a virtual location from over 660 VPN servers in over 320 locations in over 190 countries, and you can browse previously blocked content as if you were a local.You can sign up for a two-year subscription to HideMyAss! VPN for $54.99, saving 80% off the usual price.

Reactionaries of every stripe have latched onto "academic freedom" for self-promotion as speakers on college campuses, but Wellesley College's Koch-funded Freedom Project came under scrutiny thanks to student activists and journalists. Now the program's head is taking a year off to teach "elsewhere." (more…)

This commentary titled Never Just A Car is a nice montage of iconic cars in films, making it fun to guess the film as each car whizzes by. (more…)

If you like sweary Canadians with lots of knowledge about building materials and construction, Arduino versus Evil has the most interesting armchair analysis of what caused the Florida International University bridge collapse. (more…)

YouTuber Mr. Puzzle demonstrates Revomaze, a maze puzzle hidden inside a metal cylinder. (more…)

Last year, in celebration of International Tabletop Day, the British Museum did several videos of Merlin the Magician, er... Irving Finkel, the Assistant Curator of Ancient Mesopotamian script, talking about and playing The Royal Game of Ur, an over 4-millennium-old game from Mesopotamia.Finkel has spent the lion's share of his life trying to decipher the history and rules of this ancient, 2-person racing game. The museum had a copy of the board (which Finkel made a replica of as a child), but had no idea which rules set went with it. Fortuitously, among the museum's 3500 clay tablets, Finkel eventually managed to uncover an analysis of the game, written by a Mesopotamian astronomer, and from there was able to reverse engineer the rules (and matched the rules to the mysterious gameboard artifact in the museum's collection).https://youtu.be/WZskjLq040IThere are some interesting mechanics here, including using 4-sided dice that have two white tips. An upright white tip counts as a 1. The Royal Game of Ur looks really fun, and surprisingly exciting to play. Finkel points out that it's the kind of game that, when one player falls behind the other, it actually gives them a momentary advantage and that creates a kind of back and forth, quickly changing fortunes dynamic that makes for a tense game. Finkel also points out that the original board had a built-in drawer to house the dice and playing pieces, a design that's still used in chess and other boards over 4,000 years later.https://youtu.be/wHjznvH54Cwhttps://youtu.be/wFoWj7BAMo8International Tabletop Day 2018 is coming on April 28th. See the orgs website for more info.

Ototo's Flying Spaghetti Monster pasta strainer is a houseware, a religious artefact and a novelty item, all rolled into one $17 package! (via Geeks Are Sexy) (more…)

Once upon a time, The Atlantic hired Kevin Williamson, a conservative columnist who likened a black child to a primate, wrote that transwomen were effigies, and tweeted that women who have abortions should be hanged. The Atlantic said this was OK, because that was just a bad tweet. Then it transpired it wasn't just a bad tweet after all. Then The Atlantic fired Kevin Williamson. And everyone lived... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg:

Two months ago, dozens of train cars filled with ten million pounds of human shit from waste disposal plants in New York and New Jersey came to rest outside the town of Parrish, Alabama, population 982. (more…)

In this quirky Japanese series of Sakeru Gumi ads, a young couple has a cute thing they share between them - they enthusiastically enjoy their little gummy candies when they get together. Until, that is, the girl notices Long Man off in the distance, seductively enjoying his longer 15.7-inch stretchy gummy. Soon, all she can do is think of Long Man and how long his, er, candy is. Will she stay with her boy or choose Long Man? Get ready to laugh out loud.

Raz85's Instructable for a Cardboard Spider Quadruped offers a nice demonstration of the surprisingly durable material properties of humble cardboard, replacing the more familiar milled metal or plastic limbs for a quadruped robot with scrap cardboard. (more…)

A huge crane at a construction site in St. Petersburg, Florida came crashing down towards workers today. You can see them running for their lives as the crane smashes into the ground, just missing a man. Luckily no one was hurt.Via AP

David French served as squadron judge advocate for the Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Diyala Province, Iraq; he walked patrol with other soldiers, during which he and his colleagues confronted routine armed aggression from insurgents out of uniform, who used IEDs as well as firearms in their fights with US soldiers. (more…)

For Trump to be impeached, 67 Senators would have to vote in favor of impeachment; assuming no Democrats voted against impeachment, the only way Trump could be impeached is if every single 2018 Senate election was won by a Democrat, and nine Republican Senators voted in favor of impeachment. (more…)

America's "red states" are often thought of as homogeneous nests of parochial reactionary voters; it's more accurate to say that their places that have been cruelly dominated by Republican lawmakers who owe their seats to gerrymandering and voter suppression that disenfranchises progressives. (more…)

During a sumo tournament yesterday, Mayor Ryozo Tatami of Maizuro in the Kyoto prefecture was making a speech in the sumo ring when he suddenly collapsed from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Women and men from the spectator seats rushed to help, and in the video below it looks like it was a woman who was giving him CPR.But then an announcement over the loudspeaker by a referee said, "Ladies, please leave the dohyo." Apparently, the ladies were in the sumo ring, of which they are barred from entering. Even saving a man's life wasn't a good enough reason to let the inferior sex into the sacred space.According to The Asahi Shimbun:

This edition of Asian Boss asks residents of Shanghai what they think about China's new national reputation system, a mass surveillance tool that uses big data analysis to rewards and punish people based on their social and and financial behavior.

Baxter Street in Echo Park, East Los Angeles, is the fifth-steepest hill in America; it's so steep that inexperienced drivers struggle with it, spinning out and crashing, especially in the rain. (more…)

Tired of waiting for city services to patch Portland's winter-wrecked streets, and also tired of state authority and the global structures of late capitalism that support it, anarchists are filling potholes.

Teac briefly sold a standard tape cassette that opened to allow the listener to swap out its tiny little reels. This made for an ultracompact music collection--dozens of albums in a pocketable pouch--but it didn't take off.