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A supposedly odorless, open-air urinal has been set up in the middle of Paris, and some folks are irked. The bright red no-flush urinal – set up so that pissers face tourist boats cruising the Seine river – could pass as a planter, trash can, or some sort of utility box at first. But a sign above it reads "uritrottoir" (pavement urinal).Three other similar urinals were set up in Paris months ago, but this one, on the Ile Saint-Louis, "has met with a more robust response," according to CBS.

It's dangerous to be a candidate for office in Mexico. Forty-eight candidates were murdered and nearly 400 kidnapped during the most recent campaign. The latest victim is 32-year-old Norma Azucena Rodríguez, the former mayor of of Tihuatlán in Veracruz. She won a seat in Congress in the July 1 election, but was kidnapped, likely by a gang that opposed her policies, in a highway ambush in which shots were fired.From The Independent:

https://vimeo.com/285024212Douglas McKee of McAffee presented his research into the security of medical diagnostic equipment at last week's Defcon conference in Las Vegas. (more…)

Joel Gion of Brian Jonestown Massacre posted these images on his Instagram. Coincidence or... something else?Well, David Bowie did help Brian Eno produce Devo's "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" (1978). But apparently illustrator Joe Heiner based the cover art on a photo of golfer Juan "Chi-Chi" Rodríguez mixed with an image Mark Mothersbaugh had "procured from a local newspaper that morphed the faces of U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford."Still, the resemblance here is striking.More on the cover art at Wikipedia.

Helios and Matheson, the company that owns MoviePass, the ailing movie theatre subscription service, posted a $126.6 million loss in the second quarter and its cash reserves have dwindled to $15 million. Share prices, which traded $39 per share, dropped to 8 cents a share in late July. Threatened with being delisted on NASDAQ, Helios and Matheson issued a 1-for-250 reverse split, which meant that shareholders received one share worth about $20 in exchange for 250 shares worth 8 cents a share.But that didn't stop the decline. That $20 share is now worth less than a nickel. Time for another 1-for-250 reverse split, which would be 62,500-for-1 split on the original shares?From CNN:

Who likes socialism and mistrust capitalism? Democrats and young people, who are mostly the same people. (more…)

In the below video, Redondo Beach police officer Kyle Lofstrom pops the weasel and police dog Ammo responds accordingly.

Sarah Sanders told a whopper at yesterday's briefing when she claimed that Trump had so far created over triple the amount of jobs for African-Americans than President Obama did during his time in the White House."This President since he took office, in the year and a half that he's been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. That's 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren't working when this President took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans."Of course she was wrong.First of all, according to CNN, the figure Sanders was trying to push included 140,000 new jobs from November-January of 2016, which is when Obama was still president. It also tried to blame 162,000 lost jobs during November-January of 2008 on Obama, even though George W. Bush was still president during that time.Secondly, CNN points out that Sanders conveniently left out the fact that 3 million new jobs went to "black workers" while President Obama was in office.

This little monkey could certainly jump on the bed without falling off and bumping his head.

A 16 year old girl suffered four broken ribs and punctured lungs after her 18 -year-old friend pushed her on a 60 foot tall bridge into the river at Moulton Falls Pegional Park a couple weeks ago. Now prosecutors are are looking into charging the 18-year-old with criminal offenses.From Inside Edition:

Japanese is a hard language to learn, but one of the easy parts is its generally phonetic consistency. English is also hard language to learn, and it's made harder because letters and letter combinations are pronounced differently depending on the word they are in. An example that illustrates this is "ghoti," a made up word that is pronounced "fish." The "gh" is pronounced like the "f" sound in "tough," the "o" is the "i" sound in "women," "ti" is the "sh" sound in "fiction."Aaron Alon made a video that shows what English would sound like if each vowel had one, and only one, pronunciation. The result sounds like an American pretending to have a weird pan-European accent.

With today's passage of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill, the Parliament of New Zealand has banned nonresidents from buying most residential property in the country, in an effort to end the skyrocketing housing expenses (Auckland is one of the world's least-affordable cities) by freezing out overseas speculators, though these account for less than 3% of total real-estate transactions, with the majority coming from China. (more…)

Giving generously to an important cause is cool. Y’all know what’s cooler? Giving generously to an important cause and, as a result, becoming the proud owner of a gorgeous piece of comic book art. Cat Staggs — the co-creator of Crosswind and an artist on Wonder Woman ‘77 — was approached at a recent comic book convention and was commissioned by a fan, Danielle Van Lier, to throw together a gorgeous drawing of Wonder Woman. It was a sketch with a mission: to raise as much coin as possible for Immigrant Families Together. It’s a charity that focuses its efforts on improving the lives of families separated at America’s southern borders in the following areas: • Raising funds through coordinated crowdfunding and individual giving in order to post bond for parents separated from their children• Paying bonds and providing pro bono legal representation to fulfill all legal responsibilities while awaiting trial so that they may be with their children• Arranging safe transportation from state of detention to the city where children are currently in foster care • When needed, finding long-term housing in the destination city while they await trial• Connecting parents with resources in order to sustain them during the process of being unified with their children • Working with local organizations and government to expedite the process of achieving full custody of their children while they await trialGiven the shitty way that the Trump administration has been treating families seeking safe harbor from the dangers of their homes, this is vital work. Perhaps more importantly, it’s vital work that you can support. If you’re a comic book fan, pop art aficionado, love someone who is, or simply want to contribute to a stellar cause, you can place a bid on Catt’s sketch, here. 100% of the auction’s proceeds will be handed over to the charity. Just don’t wait too long to do so: the auction closes on Friday, August 17th. Artwork provided by Cat Skaggs and Amanda Diebert. Used with permission.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard a lot about the so-called Islamic State. Since the "defeat" of ISIS in Iraq and the majority of Syria, much of the focus in the war-torn regions of the Middle East has been on: the ongoing pissing match between the United States, Russia and Turkey in Syria, what will become of the civilians whose lives were shattered during the Syrian Civil War, hostilities between Iran and damn near everyone, Palestinian rights, and what the Israelis have cooking in regards to Gaza and the protection of their populace from a variety of aggressors. Would you be surprised to learn that ISIS is still kind of a big deal? Because it sort of sounds like the United Nations was. According to the CBC, a report from U.N. Terrorism experts says that ISIS is still doing fine, thank you very much, boasting as many as 30,000 members stationed in Syria and Iraq. However, after multiple ass-kickings at the hands of professional and volunteer military forces across the Middle East, they’ve decided to tone things down a bit. That overt, "we're gonna build a freaking caliphate" look of theirs? SO last year. Currently, ISIS is playing it cool by conducting covert operations in its bases of operation while the terrorist group regroups and rebuilds. From The CBC:

Daniel Mallory Ortberg:

We've all used Excel at some point in our careers, but chances are most of us have only scratched the surface of what this ubiquitous program can do. From automating simple tasks to presenting data through beautiful charts and PivotTables, Excel brings a ton of utility to the table that can make a huge impact in virtually any workspace. The Essential Microsoft Excel Lifetime Bundle can show you the ropes, and it's on sale for $9.99 in the Boing Boing store.Comprised of three critical courses, this collection takes you from the Excel basics to more advanced concepts, like data analysis and visualizing information with PivotTables. You'll start by learning how to work more efficiently with keyboard shortcuts and quick editing tools. Then you'll explore Excel's analytics potential as you sort, analyze, and present data more efficiently with PivotTables.The Essential Microsoft Excel Lifetime Bundle retails for $541, but it's on sale in the Boing Boing store for $9.99 today.

Alex Jones is temporarily suspended from Twitter, but is openly boasting about simply switching to his other account to personally evade the weeklong ban—having called upon his supporters to arm themselves with "battle rifles."

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here.Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.—RESIST!! The temptation to not join Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE!More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Tierra Whack created an album where each song's video can be published as an Instagram post. Watch Whack World in its entirety here. (more…)

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders won't deny the existence of a tape of Trump using the worst racial slur. Trump's former aide Omarosa Manigault had released a recording of another aide plainly discussing the fact of its existence.Sanders:

Plastic Jesus, the Los Angeles-based street artist behind the "Future Internment Camp" signs and other cool stunts, is back with a new piece. For his latest work, he's droplifted specially-tagged bulletproof vests in the kids' back-to-school section of three Target stores and one Macy’s in Los Angeles. He writes:

The last time former Journey frontman Steve Perry released a solo album, Bill Clinton was President, True Lies was #1 at the box office and Major League Baseball was a month away from going on strike. After 24 long years, the wait is over. Perry announced his new album, Traces, on his new website and explained the reason for his return.

Alice Potts engages in what she calls "human body design," creating bioplastics by soaking materials in body fluids to embed them with crystals. (more…)

Steve Roe is a street photographer who specializes in stylized shots of Asian cities at night. He's been experimenting with some crowdfunded fractal lenses that add neat effects. (more…)

In January 2015 Alex Jones said on a video that "Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit."In December 2014, Jones claimed that the mass shooting was "a giant hoax."Today, Alex Jones posted a threat to the parents of Sandy Hook who dare to repeat what Jones has said: "At a certain point," he says, "do cease and desist letters have to go out? With a letter and videos and everything so it's all on record? ... You see, *I'm* the one whose under assault, *I'm* the one whose being misrepresented."

Little Pyongyang made the festival rounds and his been picked up by The Guardian. It tells the story of how one soldier made his way to Europe's largest community of North Korean nationals after escaping the brutal regime.

NYPD officer Michael Reynolds is under investigation after allegedly breaking into a Nashville home and drunkenly terrorizing its occupants, threatening youngsters and shouting racial slurs. He thought it was his AirBnB, supposedly.

Disney is being sued by the Michael Jackson estate for using fair-use clips in a biopic called "The Last Days of Michael Jackson" -- in its brief, the company decries "overzealous copyright holders" whose unwillingness to consider fair use harms "the right of free speech under the First Amendment." (more…)

Qanon (previously) is an eye-wateringly stupid far-right conspiracy theory whose proponents spend hours trying to decode alleged ciphertexts created by the cult's leader or leaders. (more…)

Dan Gillmor (previously) writes that journalism is at a crisis point, as authoritarian politicians (including, but not limited to, Trump) step up their attacks on the free press, even assassinating their sharpest critics. (more…)

For dinner, the Varchetti family ordered a pepperoni pizza from Hungry Howie’s.When the 18 year old delivery man arrived at their home, he gave them the pizza, saw the piano in the foyer, and asked if he could play it.For the next ninety seconds, he played the third movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata from memory.

Mariano Pascual has created a delightful nod to classic desktop layouts for his new site, but it's updated with all kinds of colorful bells, whistles, and Easter eggs. (more…)

Brush pens are fun for drawing and lettering because you can vary the line thickness. And unlike a brush, which requires frequent dipping into an inkwell, a brush pen is always loaded with ink (until the barrel runs out, that it.) This Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen includes one hard tip and one soft tip. I bought them last year for $7 but they are on sale on Amazon right now for just $4 for both pens. My set is still good but at this price I bought another.

When scammers get inside of the networks of financial institutions, they sometimes stage "cashouts" where they recruit confederates around the world to all hit ATMs at the same time with cards tied to hacked accounts and withdraw the maximum the ATMs will allow; but the wilier criminals first disable the anti-fraud and withdrawal maximum features in the banks' systems, enabling confederates to drain ATMs of all the cash they contain. This is called an "unlimited cashout." (more…)

T.K. of the AskAKorean Twitter account says: "Genius at work. E-mart in Korea is now selling the 'One a Day Banana' pack, containing several bananas of different ripeness so that you can eat them over several days.

Dinner parties used to be where you avoided politics. Now talking about politics at dinner parties is the norm.Years ago, we avoided politics because we assumed the people at our table had diverse political identities, and we didn’t want to introduce a topic that might lead to an argument. Today, we assume our guests share a single identity, after all, why else would we have invited them?Something has changed in the United States, and for many of us, it’s only at Thanksgiving dinner, a gathering where we don’t get to sort ourselves by political tribe, that we must face people who see the world differently than ourselves.In this episode, we spend time with political scientist Lilliana Mason who discusses this in her new book, Uncivil Agreement, in which she says we actually agree about most things, and strangely, “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion.”As Mason explains, “Our opinions can be very fluid, so fluid that if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way. We can’t come to a compromise because our identities are making us want to take positions as far away from the other side as possible. What that means is that we are trying to look like we disagree in order to defend our identity and our sense of difference from other people.”As an example, Mason says that six months ago 99 percent of Americans would have said that, of course, children should not be separated from their parents. Now that the issue is politicized, people claim to feel differently, but in reality, it’s only tribal signaling at play. If their party were to ask them to express their true feelings, they would. They’ve become trapped by tribe.“Our actual opinions, our levels of agreement, are different than what we are willing to accept our government to do because we don’t want to feel like our party is losing,” explains Mason in the show.Lilliana Mason is professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland where she researches partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.Her book outlines how we’ve moved away from issue-based polarization and entered a new realm of identity-based polarization. As long as the identity divide is maintained, we will behave more like warring tribes than a unified nation of people who have different values and ideas about what policies should be enacted.According to Mason, “Right now, we’re telling ourselves a story about a war that’s going on in our country, and it’s only making the war worse.”Links and SourcesTranscript – Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesLilliana Mason on TwitterPapers mentioned:

Kensuke Koike demonstrates a cool visual trick involving an evenly-punched hard copy of an image turned into a regognizable avatar. (more…)

Get the popcorn.The Trump campaign organization has filed for arbitration against Omarosa Manigault-Newman, claiming she violated a 2016 non-disclosure agreement. The former reality show contestant/White House staffer has been blanketing the media with secret recordings she made during the 2016 campaign and while she worked in the Oval Office.From The Washington Examiner:

Inside the Fake Science Factory (German/English subtitles) documents Svea Eckert and team's years of investigation into predatory journals and the criminals behind them. (more…)

Vomit fraud is when a Lyft or Uber driver fraudulently charges a passenger $100 or more to clean up puke (or other body fluids). Lyft and Uber have a low burden of proof a driver -- they only require a photo of the vomit, which is easily faked with some kind of gloppy food.WDAY AM radio in North Dakota has a story about a man who was scammed by a vomit fraud Lyft driver and how his wife did some amateur sleuthing to prove the driver was crooked.Ricky Marquart took a 13-minute Lyft ride home early one morning. The bill was for $9.01, plus $150 for "Lyft Damage." There was no other explanation. Marquart assured his wife, Tiffany, that he didn't cause any damage to the car. She contacted Lyft, which sent her three photos of what the driver claimed was vomit.She told WDAY: "I looked at the pictures closely and said, 'That looks like nacho cheese sauce on the outside and puff popcorn and something else on the inside,'"Tiffany said. "I asked Ricky again, 'Are you sure you didn't eat anything on the ride home?' He said he didn't."Tiffany studied the photos and recognized the part of town where the photos were taken. It was a Holiday Stationstore. She called the manager and asked if he could view the security video at 2:50 a.m. Sunday morning, and tell her what he saw. The manager told WDAY what he saw on the video:

Look, I'm as delighted as you are to see Alex Jones' ability to spread hatred curtailed -- because in a world where all the important speech takes place online, and where online speech is owned by four or five companies, being kicked off of Big Tech's services is likely to be an extinction-level event. (more…)

Carving and reshaping coins, often called hobo nickels, is a classic art form that is getting an update by Russian artisan Roman Booteen. Some even have mechanisms added: (more…)

https://youtu.be/W2PMQOk7oDUAndy from How to Make Everything is on a mission to make a photograph from scratch. What that means is that he is going to make a camera and a photographic plate from raw materials (like wood, minerals, and ore) that he's gathered. In this video, Andy extracts five grams of silver from ore he collected, which can be used as the light-sensitive coating for a photographic plate.

Bulgarian-Canadian actress Nina Dobrev, who was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and moved to Canada at age two, stars in the most recent episode of Vanity Fair's Slang School video series.

Good God. We should have listened to Dave Foley. He knew the score for YEARS before election tampering and a compromised government were even glints in Vladimir Putin's eye. Aside from the fact that the Russians are no longer Communists? Dead. On.I guess that means we should start preparing for a killer bee attack.

Gavin Chait is an "economist, engineer, data scientist and author" who created a website called Pikhaya where UK entrepreneurs can get lists of vacant commercial properties, their advertised rents, and the history of the businesses that had previously been located in those spaces -- whether they thrived, grew and moved on, or went bust (maybe because they had a terrible location). (more…)

Can we please have paper ballots nationwide?Last week at DEFCON 26 in Las Vegas, eleven-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida's state election site and changed the voting results. That's scary enough. What's even scarier is that it took him less than ten minutes. An eleven-year-old girl was able to hack into the same site in about fifteen minutes. And more than THIRTY kids were able to hack into replicas of other states' sites in less than half an hour. That is straight up alarming and you'd think the folks in charge of our state and federal elections would be concerned about this and want to take immediate action. That would be the normal reaction. But we're a long way from normal.

Why bother? "Breaking: Paul Manafort's team will not present a case nor call any witnesses in his defense. The defense rested at 11:53 am"https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1029396756180750337

Artist and designer Rus Khasanov (previously) has created a bright and highly-detailed montage of colors colliding. What really sets this apart is the beautiful music by Dmitry Evgrafov. (more…)

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