Boing Boing

Evan Vucci's incredible photo from last night's Trump rally in Evansville, Indiana, shows the moment one of his volunteers "blocks the lens of a photographer trying to take a photo of a demonstrator." Evan is the AP's chief photographer in Washington, and you can follow him at @evanvucci. Here's the Instagram embed:https://www.instagram.com/p/BnH8WvzHxMv/?taken-by=evanvucci

In Japan when I see the name Blendy, I imagine coffee. Usually I think instant coffee, or some kind of stick thats contents can be stirred into hot water to make a cup of joe in various flavors. Normal flavors like latte, espresso, or farm latte (there really is a farm latte.)Farm latte aside, when I think Blendy, I usually don’t think about anything too outside the box. That changed when the other day a new product caught my eye. Black Lemon Coffee. The catch copy reads: “Ice coffee with a new sensation”. Indeed.Before trying it, I read around the hashtags on Twitter, and it looks like the new bottled beverage has a lot of converts, with some fans saying it’s a cross between coffee and herbal tea, others exclaiming it’s their new summer obsession. Then I tried it. Me? I’m afraid I’m a nope. The taste of Blendy’s Black Limone coffee was exactly how I’d imagined a cup of cold sweet coffee would taste if someone snuck up and squirted lemon in it. Give me coffee or give me tea. Please, don’t give me lemon in my coffee.Photo: Rich Pav

(more…)

A couple of years back, the Most Reverend Patrick J. McGrath, Bishop of the Diocese of San Jose, California, wrote an impassioned missive. In his letter, Bishop McGrath acknowledged the Catholic charities working to better the lives of the less fortunate. He emphasized how important it was that Catholics "vote their consciences" on Measure A: a proposal that would see affordable housing in an effort to end homelessness in the area and give struggling families a much-needed helping hand. From The Valley Catholic:

Multiple deaths and many people with serious injuries are reported in a Greyhound bus crash on a freeway in New Mexico, police say. (more…)

Bloomberg:

“I view it as an illegal investigation,” President Donald Trump said today, referring to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. (more…)

I have posted a couple times about my DIY Peloton indoor exercise bike. I recently added weights for the arm and chest exercises. I like them. (more…)

“America is at stage two Islamic Cancer,” says the founder of ACT for America. Why exactly is Thomas Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), speaking at their upcoming event in Washington, D.C.? And he only retired in June. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkKjkCBCGFsJason Boek swerved his truck in front of an Uber driver at 2 a.m., forced him to pull over, then approached his vehicle while claiming to have a pistol and threatening to shoot. Boek was stalking a woman and under the mistaken impression she was a passenger in the vehicle. The Uber driver, Robert Westlake, pulled his own gun and shot Boek once, killing him.Given the violent threat and the dangerous circumstances, no-one's in trouble: Westlake even performed CPR and called 911, to no avail. But here's the local sheriff to put the unique stamp of Florida on it all:

Did you know that Canadian music icon Neil Young and American mermaid-patch-eyed-movie-psychopath icon Daryl Hannah have been dating since 2014? If not, you'll raise an eyebrow over the fact that all points lead to the fact that the pair recently tied the knot. From The Guardian:

Justin Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister, has released a wide-ranging mandate letter asking Canada's Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction, Bill Blair, to "[L]ead an examination of a full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada, while not impeding the lawful use of firearms by Canadians."This work would be in support of Canada's upcoming Firearms bill, Bill C-71, and is supported by the city councils of two of Canada's largest cities: Toronto and Montreal, who have recently both passed resolutions asking for an outright ban on handguns.

People make mistakes. They commit crimes. Sometimes they pull their erect dick out and start masturbating in front of female colleagues. Louis C.K. recently performed for the first time since confirming he did exactly that to a number of women over a period of years. Was his return to the stage, as they say in comedy, “too soon?” Outside of legal recourse, how do we deal with perpetrators of sexual misdeeds, abuse, harassment, and assault in the long haul?As the news of his return broke, I could almost hear women across the country face-palming themselves over the fact that he appeared unannounced and unexpectedly in front of an unsuspecting audience who had not given their consent. Social media became a biopsy of the strange cultural crossroads the #MeToo stories have brought us to. But this time there was more of a split across gender lines. The backlash about Louis’ comeback were mostly female voices. The support for him, feeling he’d already paid a fair price, were mostly male voices.Comedian Michael Ian Black tweeted a message addressing the friction to his almost two million followers:"The #MeToo movement is incredibly powerful and important and vital. One next step, among many steps, has to be figuring out a way for the men who are caught up in it to find redemption.”

Trump repeating conspiracy theories does not make them true, Fox NEWS has to repeat them 30 more times.Via Ars Technica:

New York City was vandalized in OpenStreetMap, and as a result renamed as "Jewtropolis" in Snapchat and other applications that ultimately depend on the service for mapping.

Yeah... maybe hold on to your suitcase when you're riding an escalator. Or, better yet, take an elevator if you can.

Last week, New Hanover County Sheriff Ed McMahon boasted of making “one of the largest seizures in the state” after hauling 12 pounds of "fentanyl" from a drug bust. Sadly for McMahon, the state crime lab says it is sugar.

Here's something unusual: a hummingbird feeder that clips onto the brim of a baseball cap.Jeff Driscoll of Dubuque, Iowa makes and sells all kinds of other strange hummingbird feeders, including this one for $13.95. You can see them all over at his Etsy shop, Coppervine Feeders.He writes:

Yesterday, "Weird Al" Yankovic (finally!) got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. During his acceptance speech at the ceremony, he had one small, completely reasonable request:

Come November 2, you will have the opportunity to see Orson Welles' final film on Netflix and in select theatres, a work titled The Other Side of the Wind. Netflix purchased the footage in March 2017, nearly 50 years after this "notoriously unfinished" feature began production.

Here's something that might make H. P. Lovecraft proud (or just really, really confused): a watermelon carved to look like Cthulhu.In this very dramatic timelapse video from 2014, Italian sculptor Valeriano Fatica offers a tutorial on how to carve the monstrous entity into an ordinary summertime favorite. It's called a tutorial, but good luck trying to match this guy's mad skills. He writes on his site, "Watermelon is the most difficult material I’ve tried so far. I studied for years the right method to carve it best."(Geeks are Sexy)

“What do you do with an old Texas rodeo cowboy when he marries a Jersey girl, he’s up in Jersey, and he has no place to keep a horse in Cranford? You make a mechanical horse!”Steve Bacque, aka the Crazy Cranford Cowboy, is that Texan and he did indeed make himself an electric horse. Four golf cart batteries power his not-street-legal e-horse, which he calls "Charger."According to NJ.com,

(more…)

Netflix has a new magic six-part series called Magic For Humans. The show's star, magician Justin Willman, worked with an audience to help him pull off the trick in this clip. Working together, they make two guys believe they've become invisible, and they really, really do believe they can't be seen. (I was a little worried about the second guy. I think "being invisible" broke his brain.)

The primary debate between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon got pretty intense. (more…)

They served in the Army, Border Patrol and as police. They have legitimate U.S. birth certificates. But Trump's government is denying their passport applications and telling them they aren't U.S. citizens. (more…)

Susan Greene, the editor of the Colorado Independent, was handcuffed and detained by Denver police while attempting to film them near the Colorado State Capitol building. When she points out to officer James Brooks that what she's doing is protected by the First Amendment, he claims that it does not supercede other laws, cuffs her, and orders her to "act like a lady."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Ih5abBptgFilming police officers in public is legal, and attempts to prevent it are oftentimes a warning that police feel they have something to hide. Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. District Attorney Beth McCann "last week called Greene to inform her that the D.A.’s office would not be pressing charges against the officers."Here's the photo Denver cops didn't want Ms. Greene taking, which she published in a post about the incident.

I enjoy flying with Air Canada. I did not, however, enjoy the email I received from them this morning warning me they'd been hacked. (more…)

For nearly two months now, the people of Poland have been captivated by the tale of a missing 16-foot python that is believed to be slithering around Warsaw still. (more…)

Picular is a simple, very nicely-done search engine for colors. Above is is puce, french for "flea", the color of laundered but still-bloodstained fabric. The green swatch is legit, as it has a second meaning of uncertain etymology (perhaps "puke") attached to it.I think it's doing some kind of "distinctive color detection" trick on Google image results:

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Susan Greene responds. “Act like a lady?”“There you go,” the police officer says. “Now you can go to jail.” (more…)

On Monday I posted a video of a young cow enjoying a rotating brush called the Happycow. I wrote, "I think my cats would go for a Happycat." It turns out there is something similar - the Self Groomer Cat Toy ($5). I bought one and it arrived today. It's a plastic brush that you fill with a pinch of catnip (included) then attach to a corner with double sided adhesive tape (also included). I tested it out on our cat. She was sleeping in another room, and I carried her over to it and set her down in front of it. She ignored it and started to wander away, so I picked her up and rubbed her cheek against the plastic bristles. She immediately caught on and started rubbing her head against it and purring like crazy. She kept at it for a good three minutes. I caught about a minute of it on video.

When we were in Tokyo earlier this month I went with my family along with David and his kid to teamLab's Borderless interactive exhibition at the Mori Building digital Art Museum in Tokyo. To say we were blown away is almost an understatement. The 10,000 square meter space has about a dozen very large experiential spaces, each of which would have been worth the price of admission. The different spaces combined light, sound, and 3D design to create pocket universes that either stunned people into blissed out silence or made them run around gleefully. I wasn't expecting it to be as magical as it was.teamLab, the creator of the exhibit, was founded in 2001, and it describes itself as "an art collective, an interdisciplinary group of ultratechnologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world." They succeeded with Borderless!The exhibit closes on September 30, and many of the days are already sold out. You can buy tickets here.

So little goes on at a baseball game the announcers have time to pick on the crowd for being bored.

A couple of weeks ago Carla and I went to the newly opened Japan House in Hollywood to see a presentation about prototyping of robots. Japan House is a combination gallery, shop, event venue, and restaurant at Hollywood and Highland that "seeks to foster awareness and appreciation for Japan around the world by showcasing the very best of Japanese art, design, gastronomy, innovation, technology, and more."The current exhibition at Japan House focuses on the work of professor Shunji Yamanaka, who leads the Yamanaka Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Visitors can pick up and inspect 3D printed prototypes of lifelike robotic creatures that look like insects, lizards, and otherworldly animals. Many of the robots are outfitted with motors and they move in lifelike ways.Professor Yamanaka gave a presentation of his work that evening. I learned that he was the inventor of the card-activated gate that's used by millions of Japanese every day when they ride the rail system. I used these gates dozens of times when I was in Japan this summer to ride the subway, activating the gates with a stored value card called SUICA. (You can also open the gates with a smart watch, like the Apple Watch.)Professor Yamanaka also co-created, along with Takayuki Furuta of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, a robot called the CanguRo (Spanish for kangaroo). The robot can be ridden like a motorized scooter or it can roll alongside you and carry heavy items. Here's a video of it in action:https://youtu.be/BVobmBB0f58“Prototyping in Tokyo” runs until 10 October 2018, Monday - Saturday from 10 am - 8 pm and Sunday from 10 am – 7pm. Admission is free.

This is a chair? The contraption looks straight out of Robocop. Acer has announced, and Tom's Hardware Guide has tested, the PREDATOR THRONOS. This is a robotic, tilting, rumbling, video game chair that is absolutely heavier, and may be faster, than my motorcycle.They do not show a lot of real in-game use of the Predator Thronos because, lets face it, it isn't that exciting.A reader suggests it may be a rebranded "Imperator" already available on Amazon for $3500.

The whiner-in-chief frequently turns to Twitter to complain about how he is mistreated and misunderstood. While his relatively small coterie of lickspittle sycophants lap it up, people with more than two neurons to rub together have no trouble recognizing his hypocrisy, lies, and ignorance. Someecards has collected "15 of the internet’s best clapbacks at Trump that we really, really hope he saw." Here are a few of my favorites:1. Hypocrisy

A handsome stallion is introduced to an inanimate denizen of the Uncanny Valley. You can almost hear it thinking, "What eldritch horror has been loosed upon the earth?"Image: YouTube screengrab

Ron DeSantis, who won the GOP nomination in Florida's gubernatorial race, went on Fox News to issue a dire warning not to "monkey this up" by voting for Andrew Gillum, the black mayor of Tallahassee who is running against DeSantis.

Donut County is a new video game in which you play a hole in the ground that tries to swallow up everything. The more the hole eats, the bigger it gets. It reminds me a bit of Katamari Damacy, the game where you roll an adhesive ball around to get objects to stick to it.

Kids today. They understand a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, symbol when they see one.Via CBS News:

Further proof that Anatidae are the meanest of birds.

San Diego Republican Congressperson Duncan Hunter threw his wife under the bus over his indictment for gross financial abuses. Speaking to a women's group of volunteers, Hunter is now all about family.Talking Points Memo:

This is my daily wear Apple Watch band.Apple Watch is a fantastic fitness tracker, but its ability to switch bands in mere seconds is a pretty great feature as well. I have bands dress up, and bands for getting sweaty, but mostly I wear this leather cuff.My father used to wear his watch on a big ugly leather "Hercules" cuff, or so I called it as a tyke back in the 70s. I found that watch, and put it on a nice band sometime in my 20s, but it was later stolen from my home. When I was searching for bands for my Apple Watch I came across this one, and it reminded me of his, but the white stitching gives it more style than my father could likely handle.The leather is a very nice quality, and has both the look and feel I expect of those 1970s leather bracelets. It has worn and scuffed just enough to look pretty legit, and is super comfortable. I have even taken to wearing it to bed, as I've added a sleep tracking app to the watch as well.This band should fit most everyone out of the box. My wrists are on the thin side, of the seven holes for fitment I use the 2nd. At my largest I'll never need more than the 3rd. I'd assume most men and women can wear this band, and if you have an awl you'll be just fine. There is lots of room to add smaller and larger holes. I wear this watchband as a tribute to my father, the Inspector Clouseau of fashion.LoveBlue Compatible Apple Watch Band 42mm, iwatch Band Apple Watch Genuine Leather Band Replacement Strap with Stainless Steel Clasp for Series 3/2/ 1 (42mm-Crazy Horse Leather Coffe) via Amazon

Last year in Yemen, cholera ran rampant. In a single week, the United Nations reported 50,000 new cases of the diarrhea and vomit-inducing illness. In 2018, thanks to computer modeling, the number of individuals that have succumb to the virus have dropped to an average of 2,500 cases over a seven-day period. From The BBC:

For more than a decade, Connecticut public schools have banned the sale of sodas to students as part of a health initiative. But at West Haven High School, sodas could still be purchased if you knew which door to knock on: the office of the school's two police officers. From WTNH:

Applestone Meat Co. has installed meat vending machines at their Stone Ridge, NY shop with plans to deploy 24-hour meat machines in Hudson, Scarsdale, and Manhattan. From Bloomberg:

In Indonesian culture, Pacu Jawi, or cow racing, is kind of a big deal. Used by famrers to pass the time after they've harvested their crops and, more recently to attract tourists to rural areas and festivals, Pacu Jawi racers prefer to do their thing in rice paddies, as the wet, muddy conditions make it easy for those jokeying their team of cows to skid along as the bovine bullets advance.

InstantSunrise on Twitter embarked upon a Twitter epic: dragging every single U.S. president in chronological order. [via Kottke]

It's getting more difficult with every passing day to keep from being spied upon by nefarious tools interested in getting their hands on your personal information, creeping on what you're browsing with on your laptop or phone and, if you've not bothered to cover up that webcam, keep tabs on your life as they stream images of your day-to-day doings across the Internet. Thanks to a group of computer-savvy scientists, it looks like there may soon be one more monitoring method that we'll have to watch out for.From Ars Technica: