The Democratic Republic of Congo continues to fight off the worst Ebola outbreak in years. Butembo, a major regional hub of 1 million people, has now had a confirmed death.The World Health Organization is worried, and recommends you worry too.Via HuffPo:

Susan Collins is one of the few pro-choice Republican senators in Congress. It's entirely possible that her vote could decide the fate of Roe v. Wade foe Brett Kavanaugh. To help her make up her mind, over 17,000 people have contributed nearly $500,000 to fund her future opponent if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh as the next Supreme Court Justice.From Crowdpac:

In six days, the EU will debate and vote on a pair of copyright regulations that constitute an extinction-level event for the internet: "censorship machines" (Article 13, forcing all user-generated text, video, photos, code, etc through copyright filters that anyone can add anything to; anything judged to be a copyrighted work is automatically censored) and "the link tax" (users are banned from linking to news stories unless the site they're linking to has sold a "linking license" to the platform the users are on). (more…)

If you bake, or diet, this $10 food scale is super helpful to have around.There was a crepe recipe I really wanted to try, but everything was all in measured grams. I am far too lazy to bother converting the 3 or 4 ingredients from grams to ounces, even with the help of Alexa in my kitchen. Luckily, I had this cheap food scale sitting around.The included batteries were dead by the time I got around to trying this out, but everything else about the scale is exactly as ordered. You can turn this scale on. You may also zero this scale out. If desired you may easily swap from metric to imperial measurements. The scale turns off automatically, if you forget to do so yourself.I have been told that baking-by-weight is far superior to baking-by-feel.Etekcity Digital Kitchen Scale Multifunction Food Scale, 11lb 5kg, Silver, Stainless Steel (Batteries Included) via Amazon

https://youtu.be/78Kh-OUtx2cJapan was struck with a magnitude 6.7 earthquake at 3:08am local time in Hokkaido, causing several landslides that swallowed a number of houses.According to The Japan Times:

Dolores O'Riordan drowned in the bathtub after drinking too much and was in "good spirits" before her death, according to an inquest held in London.

Ryan Zinke (previously) is one of Trump's most notoriously scandal-haunted cabinet members; as Secretary of the Interior he presided over the catastrophic failure of the federal government to intervene in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (he did, however, award a $300,000,000 grid-repair contract to a two-man shop from his hometown where his son had been given a cushy job). (more…)

Contraltos banking with Santander are advised to avoid the faculty of speech: they might freeze your account. This is what happened to Sophia Reis, a 46-year old trans woman from Nottingham who was told she could not access her money because she sounded like a man.

If you've ever stood in the camping section of a big box store and wondered how you could snag one of those miniature display tents for your pet, wonder no longer. Enter Cat Camp, an Australian company that has created teeny tiny tents for indoor cats. Their Cat Tents ($59.95) pitch like a human-sized tent but, to be clear, these are for inside the house, not the great outdoors.

Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as an overbearing Israeli antiterrorism expert, scanned Republican politician Roy Moore with a "pedophile detector" during a comical interview shot for his series Who Is America? Moore, who was accused of molesting teenage girls and was once reportedly banned from an Alabama mall for doing so in public, is now suing the British comedian over the fake gadget, which beeped loudly in proximity to the disgraced judge.

Earth shares a cool phenomenon with Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn: all have observable auroras. NASA created a lovely animation of Saturn's, as well as some cool still images. (more…)

From enhanced memory to better decision-making skills, learning a new language delivers a trove of benefits beyond not sounding like a tourist when you travel abroad. But, amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life, who has the time or money to attend a class or hire a tutor? Therein lies the value of an app like uTalk. Designed for quick, on-the-go language learning, uTalk helps you squeeze a lesson in anywhere, and lifetime subscriptions are on sale starting at $29.99.uTalk lets you overcome the language barrier with lessons that focus on real, practical vocabulary and are accessible right on your smartphone. The app uses independently verified translations and native voice actors to ensure you're learning to speak like a true local, and it even features speaking games to make the experience more enjoyable.For $29.99, uTalk lets you learn any 6 languages from its library of more than 130. You don't need to choose all six languages at once, and you can learn at any time you like. Kickstart your language education today with a lifetime subscription to uTalk, starting at $29.99.

India's Supreme Court ruled Thursday that gay sex is not a criminal offense.

You thought those single color jigsaw puzzles were difficult? Try putting together one where the pieces change colors! That's just what the latest offering from artist Clemens Habicht does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttT5zXq3DgIBernie Sanders has introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (STOP BEZOS) Act, which will force any corporation with more than 500 employees to reimburse the government for any workers whose wages are so low that they end up on food stamps, national school lunch/breakfast programs, Section 8 housing or Medicaid. (more…)

Eleven of Europe's largest scientific research funders, responsible for €7.6B in annual grants, have announced "Plan S," whereby scientists will only be able to get research grants if they promise to first publish all their work in open access, no-cost journals. (more…)

There was just one problem when I asked artists to contribute to The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses, the new adult-creativity book that I edited: some of them had no idea what an Exquisite Corpse was. I soon discovered that a lot of them knew it, but had never heard the name: it was just "that game I play with my family where we fold up a piece of paper and draw a picture on sections of it, not knowing what the other people drew until we unfold the paper and see the results of our collaboration."On the other end of the spectrum, some of the contributors got competitive about showing off their Exquisite Corpse expertise. Actor Stephen Fry had played André Breton--the French surrealist artist who concocted the Exquisite Corpse game back in 1925--in the movie Surrealismo, and so he was eager to try out one of Breton's inventions in real life. The musician Moby, however, not only knew the history of surrealism in detail, but could quote the French sentence produced by the first Exquisite Corpse word exercise that gave the game its name: "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau," or "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine."As that sentence indicates, Exquisite Corpses come in many flavors, both visual and verbal. For The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses, we mostly went with drawn pictures, although there's also some storytelling games. There's 110 contributors in the book, each of whom got to have their way with one perforated piece of paper: you can rip that page out of that book and jump into a long-distance collaboration with Grace Slick or Chuck Klosterman.I wanted The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses to be a book full of joy and unexpected possibilities. But before I started work on it I didn't realize how every day that a new piece of art arrived on my porch or in my email, I would be getting the jolt of consciousness-altering surprises. In surreal times, it turns out, surrealism itself can be the best solution.I wanted to involve as many types of artists as possible in the book: cartoonists, tattoo artists, animators, graphic designers, doodlers. (Not to mention rock stars and novelists with secret visual skills.) Costume designers render their visions on paper before they become actual garments, so I figured Paul Tazewell (who won the Tony for Hamilton) would come up with something genius.I grew up on Mark Alan Stamaty's comic strips in The Village Voice (especially MacDoodle St. and Washingtoon), where his panels were crammed full of details where a duck might turn into a horse and an Elvis Presley impersonator would ride that duck-horse into the sunset. I knew he'd be perfect for the book: he's a one-man perpetual Exquisite Corpse machine.The canonical three-panel Exquisite Corpse takes the form of a body, with one person drawing a head in the top panel, another person drawing a torso in the middle panel, and a third person drawing the legs and feet in the bottom panel. Dylan Horrocks (of Hicksville fame) had the epiphany that the torso could be Fay Wray's.In a similar vein, this floating penguin by Ali Spagnola is adorable, but I love it for formal reasons: the connection to the top panel is a balloon string, while the connection to the bottom panel is a background cloud.Greg Pak is an old pal and the writer of many excellent comic books (like Planet Hulk and Mech Cadet Yu). Last year, he mentioned a mildly awkward interaction he gets at comics conventions: people who say "I love your art!" His professional purview is words, not pictures, but he assumed they dug the end result. I reasoned that the people wanted him to show off his visual chops.The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses has contributors living in countries ranging from Italy to New Zealand, but Sheila Alvarado (the Peruvian cocreator of City of Clowns) was the only artist I didn't share a language with. Google Translate was essential in our correspondence--and now that the book is published, I miss getting dispatches from Lima.The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses is available from Penguin Books.

Cory Councill writes, "Musician, inventor, and visionary Raymond Scott (1908-1994) (previously) will be feted on September 8 at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, CA. As influential today as he ever has been, Scott’s musical and technological achievements have become more widely known over the past 20 years." (more…)

We have just a week until the European Parliament debates and votes on the new Copyright Directive, including the dreaded censorship machines (every website has to censor anything that appears to be a copyrighted work and link tax (no linking to news articles unless the platform you're using has negotiated a license with the site you're linking to). (more…)

Ady Barkan's Be a Hero campaign is taking pledges of cash to go to the Democratic challenger for Maine Senator Susan Collins if she breaks her word and votes to confirm Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. (more…)

Shelan Faith has an internet-enabled home "security" system from Vivint Home Security; it includes cameras that spy on the interior and exterior of her home, as well as sensors that report on things like when her doors and garage are open or closed. (more…)

James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn't stay up -- Youtube's Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds' worth of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for 300 years. (more…)

In just one week, Members of the European Parliament will debate and vote on the new EU Copyright Directive, which contains two of the worst, most dangerous internet proposals in living memory. (more…)

A good shop tip is a meme in the original sense of the word (an idea so useful that it quickly spreads from one nervous system to another). My friend Gareth Branwyn has been collecting shop tips for many years, and he has assembled them into a new book called Tips and Tales From the Workshop, which is filled with hundreds of truly useful tips organized by topic. You'll learn about smart ways to keep track of small parts, plan projects, glue things, mark things, cut things, drill things, and paint things. The tips on 3D printing have greatly reduced my frustration level. Even if you don't have a workshop many of the tips here can save you time.Here are a few sample pages:

I've been on a keto diet for the past month and change. I love it! I can eat all the meat, dairy and nuts I want to! I snack on beef jerky, cured meats and nuts when I'm hungry. I can still enjoy a lot of the vegetables I love! I can--oh shit.From Popular Science:

Creative studio Hello Velocity's Brand New Roman is "the most corporate Corporate Font ever created!"(via Laughing Squid)

The tabloid worm has turned. After three years of deifying Donald Trump and lauding his every utterance, there is no clearer indication of the tabloids turning against Trump than the Globe magazine’s cover tribute to “American hero” John McCain.Trump famously said in 2015 that the Arizona senator was “not a war hero,” and the Globe dutifully obliged with the headline: “Trump Is Right: McCain is NOT a War Hero.” They followed up with the story of a dying McCain “sending tender goodbyes to his secret love” actress Connie Stevens.But since Globe and National Enquirer chief David Pecker’s recent agreement to cooperate with federal prosecutors in the Trump investigation, the tabloids are no longer slavishly following the ranter-in-chief’s party line.“John McCain FAREWELL!” screams the Globe cover, touting “his inspiring final words” (“Always believe in the promise and greatness of America”) and his “surprising last regret” (“He lost his bid to become president” – hardly a surprising regret, you’d think).It’s a clear slap in the face to the president, and possibly a harbinger of things to come from the tabloids that are believed to have a secret trove of damaging Trump stories locked away in their vaults.Free from cult-like devotion to Trump’s warped world vision, the tabloids are returning to their own warped version of reality.And what could be more important than the loving reunion of former husband and wife Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, both finally free of their subsequent spouses? “Brad & Jen’s Romantic Italian Dinner Date!” screams the Enquirer headline over an “Enquirer Exclusive” photo of the couple sharing a cozy dinner: Pitt in a black peaked cap, Aniston in large sunglasses. You have to search hard for the small print hidden in a corner: “Photo Re-Creation.” Yes, it’s a fake photo of a reunion that may never have happened. So good to have the tabloids back doing what they do best.Equally edifying is the Enquirer two-page spread under the banner: “Death Yacht Skipper Solves Natalie Mystery!” The Enquirer returns yet again to its favorite celebrity death, with boat captain Dennis Davern having “broken his silence” to reveal why Robert Wagner allegedly killed wife Natalie Wood aboard the Splendor 37 years ago. Except that Davern has never been silent: he’s spoken repeatedly to anyone who would listen, offering wild speculation that never rises to the level of evidence or proof.How does Captain Davern “solve” the mystery of Wood’s death? He says (as he has said many, many times before) that she was afraid of water and would “never, never, never” set off alone at night in the small dinghy from which she apparently fell and drowned. Therefore she must have been murdered. Inspector Clouseau couldn’t have said it better. Murder mystery solved!“George & Amal Clooney Named Royal Godparents!” declares the Globe headline above a story about Prince Harry and Meghan’s choice for “their newly adopted baby girl.” The Globe again runs a photo of Harry holding a baby boy taken in Barbados in 2010, with Markle Photoshopped into the image in place of a hospital nurse. It’s a fantasy built on wild imaginings. Next week can we expect to read about the Royal couple’s heartache as Angelina Jolie steps forward to adopt the baby that Harry and Meghan had set their heart on?As actress Jennifer Garner takes estranged husband Ben Affleck to rehab (yet again), Us magazine’s cover asks: “Why Jen Can’t Let Go . . . Is it for LOVE or the CHILDREN!” The answer? "That unwavering loyalty is for the sake of their kids . . ." says an unnamed “insider.” So why tease with the equivocal cover? Maybe Us readers enjoy being manipulated?People mag devotes its cover to Michelle LeClair’s “Escape From Scientology.” You might reasonably ask: Michelle who . . ? She’s the millionaire founder of a life insurance company, and while her tales of exploitation and abuse by the cult are horrifying, it’s hard not to feel that we’ve heard this all before many times.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us mag to tell us that Victoria Justice wore it best, that Chrissy Metz is “double jointed in my fingers,” that actress Serayah carries Beats headphones, Trophy Wife highlighter and fake lashes in her Yves Saint Lauren tote, and that the stars are just like us: they buy street food, hail taxis, and play ball. It’s breaking news like this that keeps real journalism alive in these parlous times.For real hard-hitting journalism, you can't beat the National Examiner story under the headline: “Senior Cat Holds Mailman Captive – Until He Gives Her a Hug!” Aging feline Bijou in McKinleyville, California, reportedly “commandeers the local mailman’s delivery truck each time she sees him, and won’t budge until he gives her some serious cuddling!” Woodward and Bernstein, eat your heart out.Onwards and downwards . . .

9to5 Mac reports that the new flagship iPhone is "likely" to be named iPhone Xs Max.

Laurie Strode: Was that the boogeyman?

Orange Julius is at it again. Check out his latest, totally batshit Mainstream Media Accountability Survey.Full of double negatives and odd rewinds, this survey from the Trump campaign puts in the usual half-effort of twisting words to try and get the response they want.Fill it out! Have some fun!Please list Boing Boing as a source of news that you trust. I sure did.(h/t Fark)

On this day in 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. (It followed the launch of Voyager 2 a few weeks earlier.)Attached to each of these probes is a beautiful golden record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it. This enchanting artifact, officially called the Voyager Interstellar Record, may be the last vestige of our civilization after we are gone forever.Curated by a committee led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth’s greatest music from myriad peoples and eras, from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Benin percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Natural sounds—birds, a train, a baby’s cry, a kiss—are collaged into a lovely audio poem called "Sounds of Earth." There are spoken greetings in dozens of human languages—and one whale language—and more than 100 images encoded in analog that depict who, and what, we are.Two years ago, my friends Timothy Daly, Lawrence Azerrad, and I released the Voyager Record to the public on vinyl for the first time as a lavish box set. Our project's resonance with the public, and the Grammy that we were honored to receive for it, are really a testament to the majesty of the original record and the entire Voyager mission. As the original Golden Record's producer, Timothy Ferris, wrote in the liner notes for our box set, the Voyagers are on a journey not just through space but also through time. The record is a time capsule but it is also timeless. It sparks the imagination. It provokes us to think about the future and our civilization's place in it. It exudes a sense of hope for a better tomorrow.As of this writing, Voyager 1 is more than 21 billion kilometers away from Earth. Speeding along at 17 kilometers per second, it will take another 40,000 years before the spacecraft passes within 1.6 light-years of a star in the constellation Camelopardalis. Yet it still phones home every day, transmitting new scientific data about cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and the solar wind.In a decade or so, Voyager 1 will run out of power and go silent. But it will still continue its journey, drifting among the stars in orbit within our Milky Way essentially forever or until it's intercepted, an unlikely but certainly possible event.We may never know whether an extraterrestrial civilization ever listens to the Golden Record. It was a gift from humanity to the cosmos. But it is also a gift to humanity. The record embodies a sense of possibility. The Golden Record, and the Voyagers carrying the disks, are a reminder of what we can achieve when we are at our best -- and that our future really is up to all of us.The Voyager Golden Record 3xLP Vinyl Box Set and 2xCD-Book edition is now available from Ozma Records.

Photo: Shutterstock.Theranos, the $1bn Silicon Valley fraud that made fools or corpses of everyone who trusted it, is finally to meet its doom. The Wall Street Journal reports that its dissolution was announced Tuesday in an email sent to the shareholders.Despite a series of journalistic exposés covering both the company's sham technology and its cultlike corporate culture, lawsuits, and regulatory sanctions, founder Elizabeth Holmes somehow clung on until finally being charged with fraud a few weeks ago.

Things got heated outside a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about social media today when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones touched the person of Sen. Marco Rubio in a successful attempt to get him into a deranged discussion about social media.

"There's no money left," says the attorney for a woman and her boyfriend who launched a GoFundMe account for a homeless man who gave his last $20 to the woman so she could put gas in her car. $400,000 had been raised in the crowdfunded effort, but the couple, Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico, only gave a portion of the funds to the homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr. They said they were withholding the remaining funds from Bobbitt because they were concerned he would use it to buy drugs. In the meantime, D'Amico admits using some of the money himself to gamble, but he says he paid it back.Bobbitt is suing the couple to get the rest of his money, and the question that no one is able or willing to answer is, "Where did all the money go?" To help get to the bottom of things, GoFundMe has given Bobbit $20,000 and is working with authorities.A New Jersey ABC news station has investigated the online spending habits of McClure (a secretary who makes $43,000 a year) and D'Amico (a carpenter) since they launched the fund for Bobbit and found that they embarked on a lavish lifestyle of travel, a helicopter ride, shopping, and front row tickets to a Broadway show.

It's been predicted for years without much proof to show for it, but new data from Pew Research finally serves the pudding: young people are leaving Facebook for good.From Pew:

The web was a lot less slick in the mid-90s. Font choices were limited and designers were trying to figure out how best to use the new medium. The Web Design Museum has screenshots of 1990s and early 2000s versions of Amazon, eBay, CNN, Disney, and other sites that look like they were designed by an enthusiastic 13-year-old with a GeoCities account.

Fox News 4 in Dallas reports that a man crashed his truck into the side of its building at least twice "then got out and started ranting." https://twitter.com/FOX4/status/1037309502687772672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

A few months back we bought a Nintendo Switch. The portable console gets shared between a 46 year-old dad and an 11 year-old daughter. The Switch sees a lot of playtime. (more…)

https://youtu.be/Pb8_uPWhCngI saw Molly Lewis perform "Pantsuit Sasquatch" on stage at the JoCo Cruise earlier this year and it was one of the highlights of the cruise. She just released the video.

On Amazon, a bag of 70 Halls Black Cherry Sugar Free Cough Drops costs $3.84. If you want 70 of the exact same cough drops that have been individually repackaged by Safecor Health of Columbus OH, the hospital will charge you $700. Lesson: if you have to go to the hospital, bring your fucking cough drops with you.

"You're most likely not going to lose a finger making soap," says John Hanson of Longfellow Soap in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That's reassuring! In this video, John shows you how to make bar soap at home. He says it takes about two hours to make a batch. The ingredients include olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, lye (drain opener), and some kind of scented oil, like lemongrass. I had no idea that you needed to cure soap for about 3 weeks after you pour it into the mold. The process looks pretty easy and a lot of fun. I want to give this a try.

In this video my friend and former Make colleague, Becky Stern, shows how she organized her workspace. She says she threw away a bunch of unwanted stuff but also found interesting tools and components that she forgot she had.

The principal of Xinshahui kindergarten in Shenzhen, China was fired after bringing pole dancers to perform for the students during back-to-school celebrations. From CNN:

Enjoy Tycho's sunrise DJ set from the Dusty Rhino at Burning Man, August 30, 2018. Track list below the audio embed.

It's no secret that coding is one of the most employable skills today, but not all of us had the foresight to major in computer science during college. That's not to say it's too late to get your coding stripes, though. While going back to school is certainly an option, there exists a much faster, economical way to learn the coding tools of the trade: the 2019 Complete Computer Science Bundle.Packed with 100+ hours of training and 11 coding courses, this collection exposes you to the languages, frameworks, and tools used by today's programming gurus. You'll start with an easy introduction to Python, covering loops, data structures, and functions and learning how to solve basic programming problems. Then, you'll advance to more nuanced topics, like web development with Angular and creating chatbots with DialogFlow. Make your way through the entire collection, and you'll have a solid programming foundation to kick off your job hunt.The 2019 Complete Computer Science Bundle is available in the Boing Boing shop today for $39.

David Pogue writes that Fitbit has 150 billion hours of anonymized heart data from its users, not to mention their ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns—a treasure trove of information about human health.

I know, I know, we shouldn't be talking about the holidays just yet. But, keep clam, Archie McPhee went ahead and released Clamdy Canes -- yes, candy canes that taste like clams -- and I couldn't resist sharing the news with you.

To make his fish look fresher, a Kuwaiti fishmonger glued googly eyes on his stock. The Kuwaiti Commerce Ministry reportedly forced him to close shop after a Facebook video showing the infraction went viral. As one Twitter user wrote, "Never judge the freshness of fish by the googliness of their eyes." Truer words, truer words...https://www.facebook.com/Ayman.Mat.News/videos/1475870085847456/

Today, CNN photographer Khalil Abdallah captured this photo of God's anger at the White House. (via @matthoyeCNN)