Boing Boing

I've been using these steel taco holders for a few years now and they are a big hit with the family. They hold tacos upright, making it easy to add fillings. And when you serve them, the fillings don't fall out. Plus, they are just fun to use. Amazon has them for the sale price of Read the rest

There's a rule of thumb that says if a cat can get its head through a hole, its body will also squeeze through it. To test the rule, Maru and Hana's owners built a doorway barrier with a series of increasingly narrower gaps. I don't think they learned much from the experiment, but the video is entertaining.[via Neatorama] Read the rest

It costs $13 million per year to house each of the 40 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention camp, according to The New York Times. The US military stations 45 troops per prisoner there.The estimated annual cost of $540 million covers the 12-month period that ended last Sept. 30 and does not include expenses that have remained classified, presumably including a continued C.I.A. presence. But the figures show that running the range of facilities built up over the years has grown increasingly expensive even as the number of prisoners has declined.Image: Sgt. Cassandra Monroe - https://www.dvidshub.net/image/991485, Public Domain, Link Read the rest

How much money does a YouTuber make from 1,000,000 views? Anywhere between $500 - $10,000, but the average is $2,000. This is according Shelby Church, who has 1.3M subscribers. This particular video has over 4 million views.Her advice for making more money on YouTube? Make videos that are over 10 minutes long (because you can include more ads).[via Doobybrain]Image: Shelby Church/YouTube Read the rest

Absolutely do not scroll down if you are afraid of heights, falling, or the idea of zooming off a cliff into the water freaks you out. Don't go any further.Okay.Have you seen this video? It's astonishing. I can't believe the guy survived, but I'm glad he did.While motorcycling in Colorado, Rich Hogge survived a fall off of a cliff into water below. It was all captured on a camera attached to his helmet, which was shooting footage the whole time. So glad he's okay, wow.Here's an excerpt from the footage, in GIF form.More at Coloradoan and USA Today, which has the uncut video. IMGUR has a duplicate here.Motorcyclist falls off colorado cliff,splashes into water and survives[via IMGUR] Read the rest

Scroll down, now you have!This is amazing.Ever seen a cicada hatch, I'm 37 yrs old 1st time for me.All photos and video by IMGURian D28martin. Read the rest

These four notes from a 13th-century funeral song can be heard during emotional scenes in countless movies.From Vox:Think back to some of the most dramatic scenes in film history — from The Lion King, The Shining, It’s a Wonderful Life. Besides being sad or scary, they have something else in common: the dies irae. “Dies irae” translates from Latin to “Day of Wrath” — it’s a 13th-century Gregorian chant describing the day Catholics believe God will judge the living and the dead and send them to heaven or hell. And it was sung during one specific mass: funerals.As Catholicism permeated world culture, the melody of the chant was repurposed into classical music, where it was used to convey a deathly, eerie tone. From there it worked its way into films — and if you don’t already know it, you’ve almost certainly heard it before: It’s played over and over in our scariest and most dramatic cinematic moments. Image: Vox/YouTube Read the rest

The world can be a loud, scary, chaotic place. You may need this.Haburu and their owner are delightful. This video, “Meowsage,” was first published on Apr 27, 2019. It's making the viral rounds again this week, and any time is a great time to discover Haburu anyway.They're on Facebook and YouTube.My hands were extremely tired this timeSome of Haburu's most favorite songs:- The best lullaby for cat (Meowssage)- Proud of MEOW- Brahms' Lullaby for Meow- Always with MEOW- Masterpiece Mashup for MEOW- Piano sheet Read the rest

Indianans are allowed to smoke rope, despite a state ban against smokable hemp products (which contains only a trace of THC), ruled a federal judge.Via Hemp Industry Daily:Smokable hemp flower is one of the most in-demand hemp products in the industry. But law enforcement officials in several states have complained that smokable hemp looks and smells too much like marijuana to adequately enforce.Law enforcement’s confusion over hemp versus marijuana doesn’t mean states can consider some forms of hemp a controlled substance, wrote U.S. District Judge Sarah Evan Barker.“The fact that local law enforcement may need to adjust tactics and training in response to changes in federal law is not a sufficient basis for enacting unconstitutional legislation,” she wrote.She granted an immediate injunction blocking the law, saying the companies shouldn’t have to wait to find out how much a smokable-hemp ban would cost them and then sue later.Image: Photo by GRAS GRÜN on Unsplash Read the rest

“My dad built a bee vacuum!”We've featured The Bush Bee Man, an awesome wild beekeeper from Australia, before.This clip is from a web series this beekeeping dad and his son make about the dad's journey into beekeeping.IMBURian JohnDeCaux4 says, of this wonderful video: “[It' a] custom made Bee Vacuum for collecting wild beehives. This allows them to be rehoused and fewer bees are left behind.”My dad built a bee vacuum! Custom made Bee Vacuum for collecting wild beehives. This allows them to be rehoused and fewer bees are left behind. Read the rest

Gears of War 5 is absolutely the 5th game in the Gears of War series.I loved the first Gears of War game. The story was interesting and the commercial for it remains my favorite video game commercial of all time -- even better than the live action Halo stuff. However, everything great about this game series was in that first commercial.Gears of War is beyond repetitive. You basically run on a track around a map, hiding and ducking behind things, popping up to take shots, and occasionally throwing a hand grenade. There isn't a lot of playing the game and it feels a lot like button mashing to me! This gameplay was fun when the story was fresh and interesting. Doing the same thing 5 games later, with the same story being played basically over and over again? Dull.The graphics are beautiful. The game runs so smoothly on my Xbox One X it makes me wonder why other games do not. The game itself is OK to play through with friends but is limited by a campaign mode that stops at 3 people. Fortnite lets very large groups of players play together. Fortnite is also more fun.I do like Gears, but this is getting tired. Read the rest

Days since last Facebook scandal: Zero.

It's Donald's first time visiting Silicon Valley since 2016. Who's going?

In Neverseen Shannon Messenger continues to torture young Sophie Foster like I've never seen.Sophie Foster is a very confused teen and some sort of Elven genetic experiment to create a Messiah gone-marginally awry, but maybe she is still the Messiah! Everything bad that can happy to Sophie does. The Elves who claim to be her family and biggest supporters are total sociopaths. Living lives of lies within lies, I am constantly entertained to see what horrible thing the author will do next.Book Four does not disappoint!Twice Sophie almost tells a boy she has romantic feelings for them inappropriate of a 12-year-old, and in both instances the boy nearly dies. Imagine having just stopped short of telling your big crush you like him, then watching a giant beetle pierce his heart with a horn?That is Sophie's life.Sophie copes with it while also stretching her rebellious wings and only sort of gets permission for some of her pre-teen schemes to save all life on Earth.While coping with constant lies, deception, and betrayal Sophie does meet one person who both loves her and tells her the truth. That person is removed from her life by the end of the book.I am already well into Book 5 and HOLY SMOKES does it start off with some baffling stuff!Neverseen (Keeper of the Lost Cities Book 4) Read the rest

There's been an explosion and fire at the Russian State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology (Vector), a facility near Novosibirsk in Siberia that happens to hold live samples of smallpox. Vector officials say there's currently no risk of contamination. Vector and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are the only two approved labs known to hold live samples of smallpox. The World Health Organization certified the eradication of smallpox in 1980 thanks to a global immunization effort. However, concern remains that the deadly virus could still be used as a bioweapon. From CNN:In its statement, Vector said that no biohazard material was being stored in the room where the explosion took place. The city's mayor also insisted that the incident does not pose any biological or any other threat to the local population, according to TASS...Dr. Joseph Kam, Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the Stanley Ho Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID) told CNN that rules for storing viruses are very strict and highly dangerous diseases such as Ebola and smallpox would be stored in the highest "Level 4" laboratory.Access to the samples would be limited, special containers are used and the storage mechanism is different from other laboratories, Kam said.He added that while fire would be hot enough to destroy viruses, an explosion could risk spreading the virus and there would be a danger of infecting those in the room or contaminating the immediate area. Read the rest

Enjoy this beautiful song "Everyone Hides" from Wilco's forthcoming 11th album, Ode To Joy, out on October 4.The album is also available in a limited-edition vinyl box set designed by my Grammy-winning pal Lawrence Azerrad who co-produced the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition with Tim Daly and me. Check out the specs on this extravagant and exquisite objet d' art:Exclusively available through the Wilco store, the Ode to Joy Deluxe Vinyl Box Set features a limited edition hand-numbered slipcased pop-up art book which includes: • Ode To Joy LP on 180 gram vinyl• LP jacket and inserts exclusive to this edition• A 22-page clothbound hardcover embossed book printed on 100 point archival paper. The book features collages and unique hand assembled paper constructions that animate and reveal album lyrics including pages engineered with pull out die cut pockets, spinning wheels, paper doors, and unfolding gatefold spreads.• Autographed by the band.Produced in Chicago, IL with six color printing, metallic inks and collages designed by Wilco’s long-time collaborator Lawrence Azerrad, the limited edition Ode To Joy art book is a rare archive of this work. Read the rest

In 2012, James Cameron went in a submarine down to the floor of the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest parts of the world's oceans. He says he dove down 10,908 meters. Last May, Victor Vescovo went down into the Trench -- and reached 10,924, precisely 16 meters deeper.But as Matt Simon writes in Wired, precision is incredibly hard to measure in waters that deep -- so there's still quite an argument about who went deeper.Why is it hard to measure things down that far? Well ...... if you wanted, you could drop a 11,000-meter-long cable down into the Challenger Deep and measure depth that way, but the thing will be buffeted by 7 miles of currents, obliterating any pursuit of accuracy.Instead, scientists and explorers typically rely on sound or pressure to measure depth, or both. Pressure, of course, increases as you go deeper. “Pressure is probably the best way to get an absolute measure of depth,” says Mark Zumberge, a research geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. But that alone won’t suffice, because water pressure can fluctuate as you descend—it depends in part on the water’s density, which changes up and down the water column based on temperature and salinity.“To convert pressure to depth, you need to know the water density over the full water column and also the local value of gravity, which varies by about half a percent over the surface of the Earth,” Zumberge says. And if you’re trying to be really precise, it’s worth noting that gravity “even varies by a couple hundredths of a percent from the sea surface to the bottom of the ocean.”The other way to measure depth is using sonar, but that comes with its own complications. Read the rest

On average, you consume between 74,000 and 121,000 microscopic pieces of plastic every year. Probably much more. Where does it come from? According to new research from Penn State Behrend chemist Sherri Mason, 60 percent of the microplastics in our freshwater comes from laundry lint making its way from your washing machine through wastewater treatment plants. From American Scientist:As we clean our clothing, sheets, and towels, tiny threads—commonly called microfibers—break off and wash away. To better understand how microbeads and microfibers—collectively making up microplastics—move through the Great Lakes and other freshwater systems, we wanted to understand whether they are removed at wastewater treatment plants.After collecting and analyzing 90 samples taken from 17 different facilities across the United States, we confirmed that microplastics travel through wastewater treatment plants. On average, each wastewater treatment facility was releasing more than four million pieces of microplastic into U.S. waterways every day: 60 percent fibers, 34 percent beads, and 6 percent films and foams. With 15,000 such facilities in continual operation around the United States, billions of microplastic particles are finding a pathway through our wastewater from our homes to the fresh water we rely on.(via Scientific American)image: Amy/Bunnyfrogs (Flickr) Read the rest

I was perfectly satisfied with the OG Battlestar series. The 1st remake's pilot and first season or two were great!Verge:NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, will launch next April with a substantial number of fan favorites and original series, including a reboot of Battlestar Galactica from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail.This isn’t a remake of Ronald D. Moore’s Syfy version of Battlestar Galactica that drew in a dedicated fan base in the early 2000s. Still, Esmail’s version of the show will be inspired by Moore’s, according to The Hollywood Reporter, not Glen A. Larson’s original 1978 series. The new series is supposed to have a more modern focus, but details on the reboot are being kept under wraps. Read the rest

In 1987, Arleen Sorkin played a bizarre dream jester on the classic soap opera Days of our Lives. Watch above. Several years later, that curious character became the inspiration for Harley Quinn on Batman: The Animated Series. Naturally, Sorkin voiced Ms. Quinn. From Vulture:In 1987, Sorkin was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, playing the show’s comic relief: the ditzy, leggy, Noo Yawk–accented Calliope Jones. But unlike her flighty character, Sorkin was a skilled and experienced comedy writer. “I could never just come in and run my lines,” she told Vulture. “I was forever suggesting stuff, probably out of boredom!” So when she went to a screening of the faux-medieval The Princess Bride, an idea struck her: Why not do a fairy-tale dream sequence on Days? The producers were into it and aired an episode in which Calliope acts as a court jester, roller-skating into a throne room and doing some hackneyed borscht belt gags for a royal family.(Writer Paul) Dini and Sorkin were college friends, and one day, she gave him a VHS tape of her favorite Days moments — including her jester bit. The tape sat idle for years. But in mid 1991, Dini was sick as a dog and popped the tape into his VCR. He was a budding television writer at the time, cranking out freelance scripts for the as-yet-unaired Batman: The Animated Series. He’d been struggling to come up with a female character to use as a one-off in an episode about Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker. Read the rest

St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota found bedbugs infesting iPads issued to students. As of now, only a few of iPads were found to be buggy. From WCCO:...The district encouraged students to take their tablets out of their cases to thoroughly clean the case and keyboard with a window cleaner to kill any bacteria...In a statement to WCCO a spokesperson for St Paul Public Schools said in part:“There is no indication of the presence of any additional pests in any other iPads. However, as the health and safety of our students are our highest priorities, we felt it was responsible and prudent to ask families to maintain the cleanliness of the devices.”(via Fark)image: Piotr Naskrecki (public domain) Read the rest

TIL: In general, props are the items actors touch/handle, everything else is part of the set decoration and not the responsibility of the property master. Vulture has a fun piece that talks with veterans of the trade about their semis full of hoards, how they source items, and the most challenging props they've created in their career. A few highlights:Robin L. Miller, creator of Wilson the volleyball for Cast Away (2000): "I needed the “Wilson” only on one side of the ball. I needed to do a face on the other side. Apparently they were made in China. They had to do a special run of them. She would only give me 20. I went, “20? I’m going to Fiji with these things!” And I needed as many as I could get, because things happen to props all the time... She only could make me 20. And we made do with that..."Steven Levine, Airplane! (1980) and Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985):"...Peter Graves, who was the pilot, ate the fish — they did an insert of his plate showing a skeleton. Like, he picked it clean, right? So I wound up contacting a museum. I paid, I dunno, $350 or something for this fish skeleton. And it looked great! Well, this assistant director found out how much I spent, and then he started passing around, “You know how much Levine spent on that fish? All he had to do was …” It wasn’t even his business! Fuck you!...""It was a weekend. Read the rest

Click to embiggen imageDesigner Jose Garcia at Zoca Studio Inc. used a familiar Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map to showcase the Fillmore's 50 upcoming fall concerts. Ironically, you can't take BART directly to this historic San Francisco music venue. Still, it's a really neat design.Here's the real BART System Map for comparison:Speaking of Fillmore and its posters, if a show sells out ahead of time, they'll hand you a cool, artist-created poster for free on the way out as a gift. These posters are uniquely sized, usually at 13" X 19", and stores carry special frames to display them. My first one was from 1995 for the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood show. It was my first introduction to the work of mosaic pop artist, Jason Mecier, who created the original art in pasta and beans. images via The Fillmore and BART Read the rest

Richard Stallman resigned Monday from his positions at MIT and the Free Software Foundation, following controvery over his remarks suggeting victims of Jeffrey Epstein were willing participants.Last week it emerged that Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein’s victims. In an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that “the most plausible scenario” was that Epstein’s victim “presented herself to [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing.”"Stallman cast doubt over the use of the term “sexual assault”"Stallman also described the distinction between a 17 or 18 year old victim as a “minor” detail, and suggested that it was an “injustice” to refer to it as a “sexual assault.” The emails first came to light after MIT alum Selam Jie Gano posted about them on Medium, and she said they would have been seen by undergraduates who are themselves 17 or 18. Financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein killed himself last month while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges, amid speculation about his extensive contacts with America's scientific and political elites. Stallman, who founded the FSF in 1985, said that headlines casting his remarks as a defense of Epstein were a mischaracterization. But they also drew attention to Stallman's long history of jocular sexism and now-repudiated past arguments in favor of permitting child pornography.MIT's own entaglements with Epstein, and its apparent efforts to conceal them, recently led to the resignation of MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. Read the rest

Macabre artist and crafter, Christine McConnell, has a new YouTube series, From The Mind Of Christine McConnell. I felt robbed when her Netflix series, The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell, was given the axe after only one six-episode season. I loved this quirky, bizarre genre-buster which mixed equal parts The Addam's Family, Martha Stewart, and The Muppets, with a little Dita von Teese mixed in. Literally. Dita, a friend of Christine's, appeared as a ghost living in Christine's bedroom mirror who dispensed fashion advice.I have always had a special fondness for offbeat, weird, and tongue-in-cheek crafting shows, like Brini Maxwell, At Home with Amy Sedaris, and Making It with Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman. McConnell's work is a goth-y twist on such offerings and "From The Mind Of Christine McConnell" is no different. She has posted two episodes to YouTube so far, one where she converts a musty old pull-out couch into an ornate Edwardian sofa-bed, and one where she constructs a jaw-dropping ginger bread replica of the Winchester Mystery House using a quarter-ton of ginger bread.Christine has also created a Patreon page to help support her channel. I, for one, will be signing on. Read the rest

British cops have an (unearned?) reputation for restraint. So it's always wild to see them do things that even the rootin'-tootin' murderers of America's thin blue line would balk at. Here's one simply ramming a suspect with his cruiser, on foot: "There's a myth that if they take their helmet off or take to the pavement, we won't pursue them," says officer lawnmower.Met police use "tactical contact" to take down a moped rider who escaped by riding at speed through a park and down pavements. Officers also sprayed DNA identification spray in the incident in case the offender escaped and then potentially could be identified later. Rider arrested for failing to stop for police, theft of motor vehicle, possession of Class-A drug with intent to supply, failing a road-side drug test, and dangerous driving.Police have gotten in trouble for 'tactical contact', but the sands are shifting underfoot thanks to Brexit rage, the normalizing effect of documentaries such as this one, and of course to posts like this one, inevitably experienced as facile entertainment irrespective of any sentiment or framing I might apply to it."We recovered your stolen scooter, sir! What's that, sir? No, actually you'd best come get it in your car." Read the rest

Crocfest posted this video of baby crocodiles in a tub. Incredible video of complex social behavior from yearling Cuban crocodiles upon seeing their caretaker, Brad Valle, at Dragonwood Conservancy in Florida. We understand that Brad had to dress up like a crocodile only once!!On Twitter, @xFREESKIMASK45x pointed out they "sound like a game of Galaga." Read the rest

"I'm a comedian who pushes boundaries," tweeted Shane Gillis after Saturday Night Live announced he'd been fired just a few days after he landed a prestigious writing job for the 45-year-old show. Gillis' idea of "pushing boundaries" was to say stuff like “Let the fucking ch-nks live there,” when discussing New York’s Chinatown, and observing that a Chinese restaurant was “full of fucking Chinee.” Cutting edge stuff, indeed. It’s not risky to be racist. It’s boring. The material wasn’t even funny. Apologize for that.— roxane gay (@rgay) September 13, 2019 From Buzzfeed:"After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL," a spokesperson on behalf of SNL creator Lorne Michaels said. "We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition for SNL."The spokesperson added, "We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard."Amid celebration that Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang were joining the show last week, the moment was soured when attention turned to off-color remarks Gillis made on his podcast, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, in 2018.Image: Twitter Read the rest

At just The Fire 7 is a nice little tablet. I've had one for couple of years and it's great for watching Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu, etc. It's a bit heavier than a Kindle, but I find it to be a really good ebook reader, too. This new model has twice the storage as the previous version (16GB vs 8GB, and a 32GB version is available, too). It also has a faster processor than the previous version, as well as hands-free Alexa. Read the rest

Alex Gendler of TED-Ed challenges you to figure out where the recipe for a top-secret sauce recipe is located. Below: All the information in one screenshot. Read the rest

Ben Shapiro, the conservative "cool kids' philosopher" of The New York Times' reckoning, wants to know what Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh's penis looks like. Kavanaugh's been accused of sexual misconduct as a young man, acts that prominently involved the display of his genitals. So it is only reasonable that one's thoughts would settle upon the most critical and salient form of evidence: detailed descriptions of a presumptively-normal penis, forty years ago.Ben Shapiro dismisses allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh with "Nobody has yet described Kavanaugh's [genitalia]" pic.twitter.com/j7HiXsB5zb— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) September 16, 2019 Read the rest

This Emergency Meal Transport Box marked "HUMAN ORGAN FOR TRANSPLANT" is surely just convincing enough to scandalize boomers. Even better, though, is pulling a wet slimy liver from a plastic box with a picture of Voltron on it and flapping it about while yelling "Prep for surgery!". [Amazon] Read the rest

This is the machine ballet of Lego minifigures being molded and assembled at a factory in Kladno, Czech Republic. Below, the molds behind a minifig.(New Elementary) Read the rest

Texanne McBride-Teahan of the St. Louis suburb Creve Coeur, is fighting in court to keep her emotional support animals: a black-capped capuchin monkey named Paula, a patas monkey named Zoey, and a bonnet macaque named Kalie Anna. Shortly after McBride-Teahan moved in to her home, neighbors apparently complained. From CNN:Monkeys are considered an "inherently dangerous animal" along with alligators, lions and pythons and are thus prohibited in residential areas, according to the City of Creve Coeur...McBride-Teahan considers the monkeys emotional support animals and has a doctor's letter and registration cards for them, she told CNN through Facebook. The animals help her cope with post-traumatic stress disorder related to an incident when she was a teenager, McBride-Teahan added..."Monkeys are little. Less than 9 pounds. Pictures show they aren't dangerous. To me they are life savers for my PTSD. We just want to live in peace," McBride-Teahan told CNN.After all this, the monkeys may need emotional support humans. Read the rest

Recently-deceased Joseph A. Heller, Jr., an 82-year-old dad from Connecticut, was known for being a prankster. So it makes sense that his family would take the opportunity to send him off with an obituary worthy of his twisted sense of humor. Some highlights:Joe Heller made his last undignified and largely irreverent gesture on September 8, 2019, signing off on a life, in his words, “generally well-lived and with few regrets.” When the doctors confronted his daughters with the news last week that “your father is a very sick man,” in unison they replied, “you have no idea.”...Being born during the depression shaped Joe’s formative years and resulted in a lifetime of frugality, hoarding and cheap mischief, often at the expense of others. Being the eldest was a dubious task but he was up for the challenge and led and tortured his siblings through a childhood of obnoxious pranks, with his brother, Bob, generally serving as his wingman. Pat, Dick and Kathy were often on the receiving end of such lessons as “Ding Dong, Dogsh*t” and thwarting lunch thieves with laxative-laced chocolate cake and excrement meatloaf sandwiches. His mother was not immune to his pranks as he named his first dog, “Fart,” so she would have to scream his name to come home if he wandered off...There he met the love of his life, Irene, who was hoodwinked into thinking he was a charming individual with decorum. Boy, was she ever wrong. Joe embarrassed her daily with his mouth and choice of clothing. Read the rest

It is perhaps in the spirit of our anxious, rickety age that antique tool, machinery, and toy restoration videos are becoming increasingly popular. There is something oddly comforting and therapeutic about seeing the old, the forgotten, the previously reliable (now seized with rust and neglect) being lovingly restored to life. These videos are simple, quiet (usually with no spoken narrative), and most of the restoration process is carefully shown, from disassembly to cleaning, sanding, repainting to re-assembly and testing. This is a world in which time, Evapo-Rust, a wire wheel, and some rattle-cans of enamel paint can repair the past to near show room luster. I can't get enough. And for makers, there are lots of great repair and restoration tips embedded in these videos. Here are a few of my favorite channels. Read the rest

Provocateur Milo Yiannopolous was once the new darling of right-wing media. But after his equivocal opinions on pedophilia were publicized—and then the extent of his interactions with white supremacists—he saw his platforms disappear one by one. A week after excoriating the marginal social networks he's still on for not providing enough reach, the furries are supposedly casting him out too. [Milo] registered for Midwest FurFest, a convention “to celebrate the furry fandom” hosted in the suburbs on Chicago this December. “Furries,” as they’re often called, are groups of people who have interest in animal personas with human characteristics; people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters via art and costumes. Yiannopoulos also claimed on Telegram that he had submitted a form to suggest he host a panel called “The Politics of Fur.” He asked his followers who plan to attend Midwest FurFest to message him to arrange “dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.”After numerous complaints online, Midwest FurFest put out a statement on Twitter: “We have received a number of mentions and support tickets today – we assure all attendees that your safety is of the utmost importance and is not being ignored. We are investigating all concerns being relayed to us.”Among furs is a surprisingly large far-right contingent: virtually unsocialized men taking advantage of a social milieu that's vulnerable to exploitation and trolling. Furry fandom is a freebase microcosm of all that the internet dissolves and binds, and so here comes Milo, tearing for a last redoubt. Read the rest

Mindbending work by Portugal-based graffiti artist Rodrigo Miguel Sepúlveda Nunes, aka Vile. See more at his Instagram feed, vile_graffiti.(via Kottke) View this post on Instagram A post shared by 💥VILE💥 (@vile_graffiti) on Aug 15, 2019 at 9:59am PDT Read the rest

Times were simpler: a commercial about how much fun it is to deliver water. Read the rest

The Beverly Hills 90210 reboot is everything a fan could hope for.I avoided watching BH90210 for about as long as I could. I have been disappointed too many times by things like Gremlins 2, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and AfterMASH. I do not count on entertainers being able to reliably recreate their magic (Star Wars prequels.)The Wild Wild West movie adaptation????These days even the most popular shows can't get to the end of their series.I watched Beverly Hills 90210 through my teens and 20s.In high school, I remember my sister torturing me because I had a crush on Shannen Doherty.My very first night with my terrible bad back was spent on flexoril, wine and watching Kelly and Matt irresponsibly snort coke.During my start-up days, during the boom of dotcom, folks marveled at how my Tivo was nothing but 90210 and The Wild Wild West.I keep the series on my media RAID array and often rewatch seasons. The College years are likely my favorite.I used to drive a 1955 Speedster.I had the fear and didn't want to watch this new reboot. I was scared it'd ruin the old show. Then I heard about the wacky reality tv-esque thing they were attempting and I was really reluctant to watch.BH90210 is a scripted 'reality' view of the cast coming back together to try and reboot the show. Each actor plays a dramatized version of themself. Based loosely on their actual lives but embued with the essence of their character: each actor is now a caricature. Read the rest

Listen to the wonderful outsider musician Daniel Johnston, who died last week, cover The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows." The cover was included on the 2006 compilation "Do It Again: A Tribute to Pet Sounds."(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

Jenna Evans had a dream that she and her fiancé were on a train when bad guys appeared. To protect her new 2.4 carat engagement ring, she swallowed it. In the dream. And in reality."I popped that sucker off, put it in my mouth and swallowed it with a glass of water," she wrote on Facebook.From NBC:"When I woke up in the morning, there was no ring on my finger," Evans told "Today." "I couldn't help but laugh at it, and then I had to wake my fiance up and tell him that I had swallowed my engagement ring."Evans went to an urgent care clinic where doctors decided against letting the ring pass naturally through the 29-year-old's system, and instead referred her to a gastroenterologist...Doctors found the engagement ring in Evans' intestines, just beyond her stomach. Evans said her fiancé returned the ring to her on Thursday. Read the rest

Simon Niklaus et al devised a method to convincingly add a 3D Ken Burns zoom effect to 2D photographs. Their code works as well as a decent graphic designer, at least in the sample videos. Better than simple cut-outs slapped into an After Effects stage, but I still get that slightly uncanny "2.5D" Viewmaster effect.The Ken Burns effect allows animating still images with a virtual camera scan and zoom. Adding parallax, which results in the 3D Ken Burns effect, enables significantly more compelling results. Creating such effects manually is time-consuming and demands sophisticated editing skills. Existing automatic methods, however, require multiple input images from varying viewpoints. In this paper, we introduce a framework that synthesizes the 3D Ken Burns effect from a single image, supporting both a fully automatic mode and an interactive mode with the user controlling the camera. Our framework first leverages a depth prediction pipeline, which estimates scene depth that is suitable for view synthesis tasks. To address the limitations of existing depth estimation methods such as geometric distortions, semantic distortions, and inaccurate depth boundaries, we develop a semantic-aware neural network for depth prediction, couple its estimate with a segmentation-based depth adjustment process, and employ a refinement neural network that facilitates accurate depth predictions at object boundaries. According to this depth estimate, our framework then maps the input image to a point cloud and synthesizes the resulting video frames by rendering the point cloud from the corresponding camera positions. To address disocclusions while maintaining geometrically and temporally coherent synthesis results, we utilize context-aware color- and depth-inpainting to fill in the missing information in the extreme views of the camera path, thus extending the scene geometry of the point cloud. Read the rest

TIL that the physical rigors of competitive chess are so hard that grandmasters have begun to train like soccer players.The exertions of chess are intense. The mental effort burns ferocious amounts of calories; the rigors of sitting for hours wreak havoc on the body. The upshot is that grandmasters can be a total wreck after a tournament, as this fascinating story in ESPN documents:In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess -- or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience."Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times. Read the rest

James Stangroom has set out on a quest to find the Stormtrooper who banged his head inside Death Star 1.You can tell this trailer is a parody as it doesn't give away the whole thing. Read the rest

Billy Mitchell long held the high-score record for the arcade classic Donkey Kong, but his reputation suffered after his best times were shown to have been made using emulators rather than arcade hardware. Now he's threatening to sue one of the top scorekeeping websites, which struck his scores from the record, and the publishers of The Guinness Book of Records, which cites it as a source.Owen S. Good:This week, lawyers for Mitchell sent a letter to Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records demanding that both “retract their claims against Billy Mitchell” and restore the scores to their world record leaderboards, where Mitchell had been a fixture since the early 1980s. Attorneys made the same demand of Guinness World Records, which uses Twin Galaxies as its source for the video game high score records it recognizes.At issue is the April 12, 2018 finding by Twin Galaxies, after a three-month investigation and deliberative process, that the gameplay in two million-point scores Mitchell claimed for Donkey Kong were not produced by original, unmodified arcade hardware. The implication in that finding is that Mitchell used an emulator running the game to produce the scores, and emulators allow different control schemes, display setups, and even the means to cheat or manipulate a score or performance.Here's the letter. An excerpt:its investigation did not provide Billy Mitchell fair opportunity toprovide evidence to prove his innocence. Throughout the investigation, Twin Galaxies had adouble standard. Specific evidence against Mitchell was accepted, while evidence of equalstature was rejected. Read the rest

In 1962, a 19-year old Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., in an effort to get to know more about the minorities who occupied the mean streets of Wilmington, Delaware took a job as a lifeguard at a local public pool. It was at that very pool when Joe ran afoul of a member of the Romans gang by the name of Corn Pop. Soon, straight razors, chain, and Esther Williams became involved. Here's Joe, back at the scene of the crime in 2017 when the pool was renamed in his honor. I'll let him tell you the story. Joe and Corn Pop's misadventures are getting renewed attention after The Root's Michael Harriot called bullshit on Twitter.You can read the rest of the 19-tweet thread here.So, because it's silly season, I'm sure someone will be offering a reward for information on Corn Pop's whereabouts. Only 141 more days until the Iowa caucuses. Stay strong. (Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP) Read the rest

Aren't we all, really, involved in a search party that's desperately hunting to locate ourselves?I've seen this one making the rounds on Twitter, but The Poke transcribed the news story, in case it's hard to read in the photo above:Missing woman mystery solvedA group of tourists spent hours Saturday night looking for a missing woman near Iceland’s Eldgja canyon, only to find her among the search party.The group was travelling through Iceland on a tour bus and stopped near a volcanic canyon.Soon, there was word of a missing passenger. The woman, who had changed clothes, didn’t recognise the description of herself and joined in the search.But the search was called off at about 3am when it became clear the missing woman was, in fact, accounted for and searching for herself. Read the rest

Faber-Castell's been making pencils since 1761 and wants to show-not-tell you about them. Wordless cinematography and a epic soundtrack right out of Hollywood. Producing 2.3 billion pencils a year and being in the business for over 257 years, Faber-Castell has a sound know-how of how quality pencils are made. Have a look behind the scenes of our manufacturing.The beauty of this video is the tension between two advertising concepts: "make the industrial process look artisanal" vs "glorify the scale of the industrial process." So you end up with intimately-recorded pencil-scatching noises played comically loud, fighting for attention against Logic Pro's orchestal sample library.Previously• Epic glove ad explains benefits of gloves• Epic chains ad explains benefits of chains Read the rest

The Mr. Creosote sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life went viral this weekend after director Quentin Tarantino was alleged to have said it's the only scene in film he was ever disturbed by. Watching it, it struck me that I'd never actually seen the whole thing, and that you might not have, either.I read somewhere, perhaps Michael Palin's autobiography, that under the hot studio lights and the long, technical takes, the food matter on the set began to reek and one of the extras vomited for real. Read the rest