During yesterday's game at Wrigley Field, one of the coaches tossed a ball to a young boy sitting in the front row. But when it slipped through his hands and rolled under his seat, a fully grown gentleman sitting behind him snatched it up and handed it to a woman he was sitting with.

What would happen if a Play-Doh Fun Factory could exert thousands of pounds of pressure? Watch and learn. (more…)

I saw a plain-looking white vending machine inside Obuko Station in Shinjuku. It was selling a variety of small works of art, including a series of white animals vomiting colorful streams of food. They were 200 yen each (about $2). How could I resist? I don't know who the artist is, or anything else about them other than the fact that they are awesome. I need one more to complete the set - a tiger. But they are "blind boxed" which means I don't know what I'm getting until I open the box.

The 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. Less than 100 were made. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Cameron's father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love. It is his passion... It is actually a Modena GT Spyder, and it's currently being put up for auction in California:From Mecum Auctions:

Eyes on Cinema posted a newly discovered 1980 interview with Stanley Kubrick in which he explains the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.Here's what he told journalist Junichi Yaoi:

Twitter appears to have made a cautious, nearly inconsequential step towards deprecating search results for alt-right conspiracy theorists. From Gizmodo:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning people about Del Monte Fresh Produce Vegetable Trays, which are responsible for a multistate outbreak of Cyclospora cayetanensis, a "single-celled parasite that causes an intestinal infection."From the FDA:Most people infected with Cyclospora develop diarrhea, with frequent, sometimes explosive, bowel movements. Other common symptoms include loss of appetite, weight loss, stomach cramps/pain, bloating, increased gas, nausea, and fatigue. Vomiting, body aches, headache, fever, and other flu-like symptoms may be noted. Some people who are infected with Cyclospora do not have any symptoms. If not treated, the illness may last from a few days to a month or longer. Symptoms may seem to go away and then return one or more times (relapse).Washing the vegetables is not enough to prevent getting sick from the parasite.

“TRUTH about his 25-year marriage!” screams the magazine notorious for tearing apart the private lives of public figures with innuendo, speculation and fabrication.Is the ‘Globe’ poised to reveal the sordid truth behind the Fox News pundit's secret dealings as Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s “third client”?Are they lifting the lid on last year's allegation that he sexually harassed a Fox News guest, never having her on his show again after she refused to go back to his hotel room?Will they expose the hypocrisy of the man who secretly used a group of shell companies to buy more than 870 homes across America with the help of HUD funds, while on air attacking President Obama for supporting those funds?Dream on.There’s no mention of Cohen or the sex harassment allegation in the “Special Report” from the tabloid which serves as an unofficial mouthpiece for President Trump, and until recently used Michael Cohen as its conduit between Trump and its pages.The “truth” about Hannity’s marriage? He’s “a family man, who’d rather spend his off-hours with wife Jill Rhodes and their kids . . . "Truly shocking.Not that the ‘Globe’ is afraid to take on the scandal of Hannity’s real estate dealings.“Sean is proud of the fact that he has put his money in areas that badly need investment,” says an unnamed source.If that isn’t holding the rich and powerful accountable, I don’t know what is.The ‘Globe’ sheds its investigative mantle so thoroughly that its cover brazenly hails Hannity as the “Most Powerful Man in America!” explaining in the story that “He has Trump’s ear in a way that few others do.”It’s true, the president and the pundit are known to chat regularly, a level of influence that might rightly spark concern and investigative journalism, rather than this sycophantic whitewash seemingly designed to curry favor with both its subject and the White House.The ‘Globe’ even helpfully explains Fox News’ poster boy’s success: “Hannity hit it big by bashing lamebrained liberal losers."Well, that certainly seems fair and balanced.As is the ‘National Enquirer’ cover which carries a warning from a relative of the newest member of the British Royal Family: “Meghan Will Be Murdered Like Diana!” As so often happens, once we open the rag, the story inside takes a less alarming, and more pleading tone: “Markle Family Warns Queen: Don’t Kill Meghan Like Diana!”The story plunges down several tabloid rabbit holes at once, beginning with the assumption that Princess Diana was murdered by the British Royal Family because of her relationship with Muslim millionaire Dodi Fayed, and then assuming that Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr., has written a letter to Her Majesty the Queen saying it would be “sad to see Meg’s dreams broken if she were to fail in her new position and disappear from the Royal family.”Not exactly a plea to the Queen not to kill his half-sister, but then Mr. Markle Jr. helpfully explains to the ‘Enquirer,' in language that bears the heavy thumbprint of a tabloid editor, “We fear this can only end in heartbreak and disaster - just like Diana!”It’s a story concocted from thin air, and it seems highly likely that money may have exchanged hands for the ‘Enquirer’ to receive a copy of the hand-written letter to the Queen. Did Her Majesty send them the letter? Of course not. It was most likely written for the benefit of the ‘Enquirer,’ and perhaps mailed to Buckingham Palace as an after-thought.Scientology comes in for a double-dose of attack from this week’s ‘Enquirer,’ and though the cult makes for a large and easy target, the tabloid stretches the limits of credulity from force of habit.In its story about church follower Tom Cruise, under the headline "Cult Plans to Bring Tom Back From Dead,” the ‘Enquirer claims that his entourage includes a “Scientology shaman who can zap him back to life with the touch of a finger in case he croaks!”That’s the claim of “church sources and a well-placed mole.” Right.The ‘Enquirer’ fares little better with its two-page spread on “Scientology’s Secret Attack on U.S. Government!” The story claims that the cult infiltrated government agencies and amassed an arsenal of weapons to raid government offices.This “Exclusive FBI Bombshell” under the banner of “News” might be more impressive if it wasn’t lifted from FBI files exposed 41 years ago, reporting on seizures back in 1977. Isn’t news supposed to be, well . . . new?The ‘National Examiner’ revisits its favorite well-worn trope with a cover story about celebrities’ “Sad Last Days!” This week’s lucky winners are Tom Selleck, Joan Collins, Julie Andrews, Sidney Poitier and Carol Channing, all of whom seem to have committed the offense of living long lives, and therefore must be within moments of kicking the bucket. Without shame, the ‘Examiner’ includes in the list 101-year-old Kirk Douglas, which is like shooting fish in a barrel, even though he has topped these lists for the past 25 years, and shows no sign of stopping.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at ‘Us’ magazine to tell us that Rachel Bilson wore it best, that actress Sanaa Lathan puts Raisinets in her popcorn, that Katie Stevens carries Advil, Zyrtec and a St Anthony pendant in her Status Anxiety backpack, and that the stars are just like us: they eat, drink, carry packages and dress casually for flights. Without this valuable weekly pictorial, how would we ever know?Onwards and downwards . . .

The only thing worse than a horrific tragedy is a horrific tragedy from which nothing decent is salvaged. Florida's youth voter registration is up 41% since the Parkland shooting and the ensuing Republican Party indifference to mass-murder and open contempt for young gun-control advocates. Florida is the nation's largest swing state. 2018 is an election year. (via Naked Capitalism)

The Aurora Award Bundle 4 includes ten books that were finalists for, or won, Canada's Aurora Award for excellence in science fiction and fantasy, including the outstanding Napier's Bones and Sean Stewart's monumental Resurrection Man. (Thanks, Derryl!)

Last week, I linked to a critique of Google's new "confidential mode" for Gmail and Google Docs, which purports to allow you to send people documents without letting them print, copy or forward them. (more…)

Yeochang Yun makes lots of remarkable handmade leather items, but this colorful steampunk piece with cogs and locks is especially impressive. Below are a few other examples: (more…)

I'm writing this on a 2015 MacBook Pro. It's an i5 with 8GB of RAM. It's adequate for most of what I do, but, as I've mentioned in the past, it's been kind of a lemon since I picked it up. It's out of Apple Care now, and that's a concern. I am not made of money. Sooner or later, I'll wind up buying a new laptop. For the past year, I've been considering moving entirely over to Windows as Apple's been doing some weird stuff: keyboards that break down if you get dust in them, processors that are antiques even when the Macs they're in are brand new. Oh, and dongles, so many dongles. When I saw that they were doing something about the keyboards baked into their MacBooks and have begun to spring hardware with the latest chip sets in them, I was hopeful: I've used Macs for close to two decades. I have so much cash sunk into software, I don't want to switch platforms if I can help it. Then I saw that the high end iterations of this year's MacBooks are being throttled--slowed down--because they can't handle the heat generated by their gloriously speedy internals.Sigh.From Apple Insider:

When it gets too hot outside, make like Mako the Husky dog and climb into the ice machine to cool down. Chill out, the machine's owners now use ice from the fridge instead: A few weeks after the original video was shot, Mako's human companions caught this footage of him getting into the ice machine: https://youtu.be/48UbhvYQvtYThanks, Steve!

This $10 dongle is letting me charge my iPhone while also listening to music on wired headphones.I have been carrying wired headphones ever since I got a Nintendo Switch to play Fortnite on while I travel. The Switch hates bluetooth headphones and I'd rather not carry two pairs.This dongle works great and sounds just fine. It costs a lot more at the airport, so order one on Amazon.Lighting Headphone Jack Adapter Dongle for iPhone 7/7Plus 8/8Plus X 10 Aux Audio to 3.5mm Lightning Splitter Adaptor Charge+Earphone+Volume Converter via Amazon

Both Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and their Bogus Journey are well worth rewatching. I'm looking forward to the next installment. (more…)

A new report from the Institute For the Future on "state-sponsored trolling" documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats. (more…)

Once upon a time, online services differentiated themselves from competitors by promising not to lock their users in (memorably, Flickr offered an API that would let you export all your photos, your social graph and the comments and other metadata to any other service that had a similar API), but as slumbering antitrust regulators allowed wave after wave of mergers and acquisitions, so tech become Big Tech, walled gardens made a roaring comeback, with services quietly shelving the ability to move between them. (more…)

As Facebook users drift away from the platform, the company is becoming increasingly desperate to lure them back, doubling down on its obnoxious tactic of spamming users whose activity has fallen off with notifications intended to pique their interest in using the service again. (more…)

We're all becoming redundant. I'll be replaced by an algorithm that mimics an embittered hobo that moonlights as a journalist, one day. Your gig? They're trying to sort out ways to have a robot do that, too. It's happened to thatchers, coopers and fletchers. It's the way of things. But that doesn't mean you have to go quietly.

Attacks by paramilitary forces against civilians continue in Nicaragua, for the third consecutive month. Dictator Daniel Ortega blames a “murderous, coup-mongering satanic sect” for the months-long popular uprising against his government. (more…)

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The latest edition of the Civil Service Quarterly from Her Majesty's Government accidentally included a satirical poster from Scarfolk, the nightmarish alternate reality of a perpetually renewed decade of Thatcher/Cthulhu crossovers. (more…)

Feed 19 repetitions of the word "dog" to Google Translate and ask it for a Maori conversion and you get this: "Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve. We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return." (more…)

A spokeswoman for UK Prime Minister Theresa May has gone to the House of Lords to defend the government's practice of recruiting "child spies," some of them under the age of 15, to gather intelligence "against terrorists, gangs and drug dealers." (more…)

Google has rolled out a "Confidential Mode" for Gmail and Google Docs attachments, promising users that they'll be able to send emails to their contacts that can't be shared, printed or copied. (more…)

Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. (more…)

Online services increasingly rely on SMS messages for two-factor authentication, which means on the one hand that it's really hard to rip you off without first somehow stealing your phone number, but on the other hand, once someone diverts your SMS messages, they can plunder everything (more…)

The viral hoax video purporting to show child-snatchers kidnapping Indian children continues to fuel lynchmobs, whose death toll has climbed to more than two dozen victims. (more…)

Longtime Donald Trump fixer-lawyer Michael Cohen “secretly recorded a conversation” with Mr. Trump 2 months before the presidential election in which Trump and Cohen “discussed payments” to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims she had an affair with Trump-- according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording who spoke to the New York Times.(more…)

It's fascinating to read Dan King writing in The American Conservative to decry "Dickensian debtors' prisons" in the USA -- the practice of judges locking up poor people who can't pay fines for petty infractions like traffic tickets. (more…)

The Financial Times kicked off its "How To Spend It" section in 1967 as a single page in the Saturday issue (then called "A guide to good living"); the section grew to its own glossy magazine over the years, weathering lean years and good ones, and has found its niche half a century later, in an era of mass inequality as a weekly catalog of things that the super rich should buy to demonstrate their dominance over everyone else. (more…)

Smirking pharma-bro Martin Shkreli first came to public attention when he hiked the price of a drug used by people with HIV from $13.50/pill to $750/pill. (more…)

Running a retroarcade sounds like a lot of fun, and the same games that used to get the kids pumping quarters then are still the most popular. Which means that 32-year old OutRun cabinets tend to break down often.

On Monday's Today Show, Cher spilled the news that she's recorded an entire album of ABBA covers. "After I did 'Fernando,' I thought it would be really fun to an album of ABBA songs, so I did!" she said in the interview. "It's not how you think of ABBA songs because I did it my way."She recorded "Fernando" for the new film, Mamma Mia! 2 Here We Go Again, in which she has a role:https://youtu.be/gXmaZCm7fqs

This past Friday, the citizens of Nicaragua declared a national strike in protest of their president, Daniel Ortega, and his oh-so corrupt government. In the city of Managua, pro-government paramilitaries and the police cornered roughly 200 protesters in a church and opened fire on the building. During the siege, the pro-Ortega forces murdered two of the unarmed protesters trapped inside of the church and wounded several others. The Pro government El 19 called the protestors “terrorists” and “thieves”: in effect, they declared the people, brave enough to demand that a dictator return their country to them, an enemy of the people. This labelling of Nicaraguans who would dare to speak out against their government as terrorists, is kind of a thing now. According to El Nuevo Diario, Roger Martinez, a respected psychologist with a practice in the Nicaraguan city of Granada, has been given the same label. He was picked up, along with 23 others by, you guessed it, police and paramilitaries, during a national “cleanup operation.” At the time that this post was written, Martinez was still in prison. Yesterday, Dr. Blanca Cajina and Dr. Irvin Escobar, were whisked away from their lives as well. They’re the latest in the growing number of professionals and intellectuals and community leaders, to be accused of terrorism by the Ortega government. As this handy guide from the U.S. Holocaust Museum notes, cracking down on a nation's intellectuals is one of the signs that your nation is well on its way to being controlled by a fascist regime. In his book, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, author Timothy Snyder warns:

Wow! I'm quite aflutter.

We've all heard of staging a home for sale but this is outrageous.

There are three drawbridges within walking distance of my home here in Alameda, California. I have often wondered if anyone has ignored the warning gates and tried to go over the bridge.In Wisconsin, one cyclist did just that. And it was caught by the state's Department of Transportation surveillance camera. On the Fourth of July, on the Racine Street Bridge in Menasha, a 37-year-old woman maneuvered around the flashing barriers. She soon fell, bike and all, into the crack where the road and bridge meet. It's pretty freaky to watch. It made me gasp!Thankfully, she didn't get crushed by the bridge. According to reports, she only sustained minor facial injuries. She has been cited for failure to obey a traffic signal, according to KRON.(Likecool)

11 people drowned Thursday after a duck boat on Table Rock Lake in Missouri sank with 31 aboard.

Inspired by the fruit stickers of the Instagram account @fruit_stickers comes the Fruit Stickers tee (a sheet of fruit stickers ships with every order). Available until August 1 for $32.75. (Foodiggity)

After watching this video of the gazillion stages it takes to make wood ash cement, not to mention all of the hand-made tools required to do it, I'll never complain about having to stir up a bag of instant cement from Home Depot again.

This isn't a review, but I'd regret not giving you a heads up about Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's first feature film. It's an absurd black sci-fi satire shot in Oakland and it's the off-the-wall dystopian summer indie flick we all deserve. At the last minute last Friday, I put my hands on some tickets for its sold-out nationwide opening night at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland. And wow, am I glad I did. It was a real happening. People cheered and laughed. Plus, the movie was simply fantastic. After the show, folks with tickets for the late show (which had the bonus of an after-show Q&A with Boots himself) were already lining up. Lots of people posed with the shitty Tercel featured in the film, which was parked right in front of the theatre.Hilariously, you can buy that shitty Tercel for a mere $23,999.40 on the STBU website: (I got my eye on that Mr. Bobo collectible plate myself.)If you want to read what reviewers are saying, here's a good start:Review: ‘Sorry to Bother You,’ but Can I Interest You in a Wild Dystopian Satire? by A.O. Scott of The New York Times:

If you are in LA later this month through September, I recommend checking out "The New Romantics" group show at Corey Helford Gallery opening July 28. There's a great line up of artists.

I travel with a small bluetooth speaker similar to this one. It's great for watching movies on my laptop and for listening to music and podcasts. Amazon is selling it for $5, when you use IPSLZEP5.

Zeigeisty-ist auction ever: Marie Antoinette’s Jewelry to Be Auctioned in Geneva This November. (Image: Mosiac36, CC-BY) (Thanks, Peter!)

British Airways was outed by security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam for telling passengers they couldn't help with delays and other problems unless they posted their personal information publicly to Twitter, in order "to comply with the GDPR." (more…)

Michael Scheuer says its about time to kill American citizens who oppose Trump. Scheuer is a former senior CIA official and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Imperial Hubris. In a now-deleted blog post (cached version here) Scheuer singles out "Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Page, and Rosenstein; worshipers of tyranny, like the Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, the FBI, and the Obamas; apparent traitors like Brennan, Hayden, and Clapper; all of the mainstream media; and the tens of thousands of government-admitted-and-protected, violent, criminal, and illegal immigrants." He looks forward to the "sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic."

It's an accomplishment to find and photograph a lynx: they want little to do with humans and make an effort to keep themselves to themselves. It's an even bigger accomplishment to not only find a lynx to photograph, but to also spend enough time with it that it comes to see you as a hunting buddy.

Aarran Lee Wright, 36, a married man and father of two young children, says his sex-robot can be switched to "family mode," for G-rated playtime with the kids.From the NY Post: