Patrick Kennedy

A handy glossary for parents.

As reports continue to roll in estimating the damage that Hurricane Harvey has caused to parts of Texas, the news that Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos reportedly turned down help from our friends in Canada is beyond troubling.

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The 24-year-old will have a medical tonight before completing his move to Anfield.

After his agency announced the completion of the transfer, various club-connected journalists confirmed that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to Liverpool is a done deal for £35 million. The England international will undergo a a medical tonight before completing a transfer to Merseyside’s finest.

The 24-year-old was set for a move to Chelsea after Arsenal accepted £40 million bid from a fierce city rival. However, Oxlade-Chamberlain turned down a move to Chelsea over understandable fears over his playing position and natural desire to link up with Jürgen Klopp.

Arsenal were reluctant to do business with Liverpool, but Oxlade-Chamberlain will become the fifth signing of the summer after Dominic Solanke, Andrew Robertson, Mohamed Salah, and the unique Naby Keïta. Negotiations were conducted swiftly with hopefully more players to come between now and tomorrow’s transfer deadline at 11PM BST/ 6PM EST.

Seán Doran shared some recently processed photos of Jupiter that he worked on with Gerald Eichstädt. The photos were taken by NASA’s Juno probe on a recent pass by the planet. These are like Impressionist paintings…you could spend hours staring at the whirls & whorls and never find your way out. There are more images of Jupiter in Doran’s Flickr album, including this high-resolution shot that you can download for printing.

A fresh hell for the flooded plains of Texas: Yes, That's a Huge Floating Mass of Live Fire Ants in Texas. (Photo: Brant Kelly / CC BY 2.0)

Sarah Zhang:

“Holy crap. I have never, in my entire career as an ant researcher, seen *anything* like this,” tweeted Alex Wild, curator of entomology at University of Texas at Austin, in response to the image below. Of course, Wild told me, it is all perfectly logical. “They actually love floods,” says Wild. “It’s how they get around.” Fire ants displaced by water form rafts; a lot of fire ants displaced by a lot of water will form really big rafts. But still! The sheer size of them is incredible.

https://twitter.com/The_Reliant/status/902536760038711296

Dish soap breaks the surface tension and they sink.

Kalli (@aurelianrabbit on Twitter) understands well the truest and most important quest of humankind: the proper storage of bread. [via laughing squid]

PREVIOUSLY: Sandwich alignment chart

Iowa Cubs catcher Taylor Davis has an innate talent for finding the cameras and staring into the lens until it becomes uncomfortable, so the team celebrated that skill with a two-minute compilation.

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TV Edition marks its console debut

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Joel Osteen, whose giant teeth and vaguely Tim Allen-esque countenance you may have seen asking for money on TV, is Senior Pastor at Lakewood Church, a Houston megachurch that literally used to be a professional sports arena. (It was home to the Houston Rockets from 1975 to 2003, according to the Miami Herald.) The…

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In March, Foreign Policy asked a number of national security experts to estimate the likelihood of a second US civil war in the next 10-15 years. The average estimate was 35%. This was before Charlottesville. Robin Wright of The New Yorker spoke to, Keith Mines, one of the national-security experts that Foreign Policy polled to find out what a new civil war could look like.

Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.

Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.

Image: Roosac/Flickr

Forty years ago this month, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and beyond, into the mysteries of interstellar space. Mounted to each spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, a message to introduce our civilization to extraterrestrials, perhaps billions of years from now. The Voyager Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science. The Voyager Golden Record is a gift from humanity to the cosmos, but it’s also a gift to humanity. It lies at the intersection of science and art to spark the imagination, and delivers a dose of hope that so many of us are jonesing for these days. Two years ago, my friends Timothy Daly, Lawrence Azerrad, and I embarked on a long journey to release the Voyager Golden Record as a box set of vinyl LPs so those on Earth can hear it as it was meant to be played. We were humbled by the incredible support our project received. (You can read about our experience in the project updates here.)

Ten months after our Kickstarter ended, the enthusiasm and excitement around the Voyager anniversary and the golden record continues to increase. We feel very fortunate that the story of this historical artifact resonates with so many people! As promised, we will never reproduce the Kickstarter "40th Anniversary Edition" box set again. Our Kickstarter backers took the journey with us and we are deeply grateful. However, for those who were not able to participate in the Kickstarter, we have decided to repress the Voyager Golden Record in a different edition than the one our Kickstarter backers will receive.

This elegant second edition will include a full-color softcover book, three 140 gram vinyl LPs, metallic gold-printed sleeves, and the Voyager Trajectories turntable slipmat housed in a deluxe metallic gold-printed box. (And based on a surprising number of requests, we're also offering a hardcover book/2xCD version of the Voyager Golden Record.) You can pre-order the vinyl box set and CD/book for delivery before Christmas. Pre-orders of the vinyl box set directly from our label, Ozma Records, will include a free Voyager Diagram Pin.

Ad astra!

Pre-order the Voyager Golden Record (Ozma Records)

Amazon has a ton of listings for "fish antibiotics" whose reviews reveal that the people who buy them are self-medicating because they can't afford a doctor's visit because they are uninsured or can't afford their insurance's co-payment. (more…)

It didn’t take days for the president of North and South Dakota to issue a stern statement against the terrorist attacks in Barcelona, Spain, which killed 13 people and left several dozen injured. Donald Trump didn’t need to get all the facts before he tweeted out his condemnation of the Islamic State group, often…

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Researchers from the Antarctic Heritage Trust turned up this 100-year-old fruitcake in a Cape Adare hut. From their report:

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According to Google Trends, search traffic about the upcoming solar eclipse mirrors the path of totality. And according to XKCD, pre-eclipse search traffic for “eclipse” is outpacing pre-election search traffic for “election”.

A controversial bill that would have protected drivers who plow into crowds of protesters will most likely fade away from the North Carolina legislature, a decision most certainly reached after the horrifying vehicle attack on a group of people counter-protesting Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia over the…

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There’s no need to make a big deal about leaving every gathering you attend. Just leave—it’s fine.

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[via Crappy Off Brands]

#HurricaneHarvey could hit landfall late Friday night along the Texas coast as a Category 3 hurricane.

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Tattoo artist: What you want?
Trucker: Combine my love of trucking and Cartesian mind-body dualism.
Tattoo artist: Say no more.
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Over a period of two years, skateboarder Christian Flores fell down thousands of times, broke boards, went to the hospital twice, and cracked a rib trying to do a laser flip down a triple set of stairs.

Even if you don’t care about skateboarding, watching Flores try and fail over and over and over and over (and over) again should be familiar to anyone who has ever attempted to master something difficult.

Psst, wanna buy a lighthouse? As more and more are decommissioned thanks to GPS, the market has seen an influx of lighthouses for sale. (more…)

The XStat 30, a sponge-filled syringe that can plug deep and narrow wounds from gunshots or stabbings in seconds, has received approval from the U.S. for use in the arm and leg. The FDA also gave RevMedx, the Oregon-based company that makes the device, approval to market a smaller version, the XStat 12, which is designed to treat smaller … Continue reading “The FDA cleared this syringe for quickly plugging gunshot wounds in the arms and legs”

The XStat 30, a sponge-filled syringe that can plug deep and narrow wounds from gunshots or stabbings in seconds, has received approval from the U.S. for use in the arm and leg.

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HB 214 signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott [R], bans abortion coverage from all public and private health insurance plans, and mandates that abortion insurance be sold as a separate product to women who are concerned that they'll need an abortion in future due to risks to their lives, unplanned pregnancies, unviable pregnancies, or rape-related pregnancies. (more…)

Parents of students enrolled in Lawton Chiles Middle Academy in Polk County, Florida got an orientation package offering their kids the right to skip to the front of the lunch line in exchange for a $100 donation to the Parent-Teacher-Student Alliance. (more…)

On one side is Americans. On the other side is Nazis. Trump told reporters there were "very fine people on both sides" at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.

More coverage from the same event here.

If you're going to burgle a home, be careful what leaves your behind.

Andrew David Jensen apparently left a deuce in a toilet during an Oct. 7, 2016 burglary in Thousand Oaks, CA. Tests of DNA extracted from the fecal matter linked the crime to Mr. Jensen through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System. He has been charged with first degree residential burglary.

As prescient now as it ever was, the following sketch succinctly crystallises what televised football has become – an endless, mindless assault of HUGE gladiatorial matches abutted by HUGE honking opinions, regardless of the fact that you’re actually sat watching Tony Cascarino stumble his way through Norwich City’s goalless draw with Preston.

It’s tough to spoof something that is already beyond parody, but Mitchell & Webb just about managed to pull it off when they went to town on Sky Sports’ particular brand of idiotic bombast…

Mitchell & Webb’s take (filmed at Loftus Road, for the record) is over seven years old and it hasn’t dated a day, demonstrating just how stale and one-note Sky Sports’ coverage has been in the prevailing years.

No matter how much money you chuck at it and to what lengths you dress it up, football is not guaranteed big-budget entertainment.

It is a competitive sport played amongst human beings and is therefore liable to be a bit naff most of the time.

Sometimes, the excess elevated decibels are wholly uncalled for.

More Football Comedy Classics on Pies…

‘The Footie Song’ – Adam & Joe

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