Patrick Kennedy

I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called "Disaster Capitalism," and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. [via mutantspace, via Janie]

On July 30, 2011, Alex Schaefer set up an easel across the road from a Chase bank and began painting the building in flames. However, before he had finished the police arrived, asked him for his information and if he was planning on actually carrying out an arson attack on the building. Ridiculous. Later they turned up on his doorstep asking about his artwork and looking for any signs that he was going to carry through an anarcho – terrorist plot based on his paintings. If this wasn’t bad enough a year later he was arrested for drawing the word ‘crime’ with a Chase logo in front of an LA bank.

theydidthemath is a fun subreddit. In this post a fellow named Nym figured out how many lentils a recording artist can can buy each time someone plays one of their songs. The assumption is that one Spotify play is worth a half cent, and lentils cost $1.50 a pound.

"It can emulate everything up to and including N64/PS1/Dreamcast, with a built-in wireless XBOX controller receiver for multiplayer parties!, he writes. "It also has a digital tuner inside to watch actual television, using the original knob for channel switching."

I'd love to do this to a JVC Videosphere!

"I turned an old portable TV into a dedicated retro gaming system!" (Imgur)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu4SaxqlHVo

Designer Creates a Hilarious Event Poster for His Client Using the Original Text Message They Sent

Felix Semper paid tribute to the Notorious B.I.G. in the only way he knew how: by sculpting a slinky-esque coil of flexible paper into a remakably lifelike work of art. (more…)

Good catch by Gizmodo's Matt Novak.

Matt doesn't care for the new uniforms ("mandatory gray-on-gray with a dash of black is pretty much universally recognized as the standard uniform for bleakest of futures"), but I want to replace my current wardrobe with them.

Starting in 1938, San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel began washing all of the change that flowed through the business. Hotelier Dan London initiated the process to prevent grimy coins from dirtying the fancy white gloves worn by women visiting the establishment. These days, the responsibility belongs to one Rob Holsen. From a 2010 SFGATE article:

The process begins when the general cashier sends racks of rolled coins to Holsen, who empties the change into a repurposed silver burnisher.

Along with the coins, the burnisher is filled with water, bird shot to knock the dirt off, and a healthy pour of 20 Mule Team Borax soap. After three hours of swishing the coins around, Holsen uses a metal ice scoop to pour the loot into a perforated roast pan that sifts out the bird shot.

The wet coins are then spread out on a table beneath heat lamps.

This is where once-rusted copper pennies turn into shimmering bronze coins. Quarters look like sparkling silver bits. It's also where Holsen gives the money a quick quality inspection...

Once he's satisfied, he feeds the polished money into a counter, which shoots the change into paper rolls to be distributed to the hotel's cash registers.

(via Neatorama)

There’s finally a good reason to not feel bad about missing San Diego Comic-Con last week. The team at Tested, working with Frank Ippolito, a special effects makeup artist, wondered what a Lego Minifig would look like if it were human. The results, as it turns out, will have you terrified of even looking at Lego from this day on.

Read more...

To celebrate Bicycle Day on April 19th, the date of Albert Hofmann’s — and the world’s first LSD trip in 1943, we are publishing this excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Michael Horowitz — the third installment of the Acid Bodhisattva series, coming soon to Timothy Leary Archives.

Images: from Lysergic World (April, 1993): Albert Hofmann in 1977 (above), and the route of his famous bicycle ride on LSD through Basel, Switzerland on April 19, 1943, from Sandoz Laboratories to his house.

Below, Leary's archivist Michael Horowitz reminisces about a car ride with Albert Hofmann and Timothy Leary in February 1972.

"Tim and I took the train to Basel where Albert picked us up in his car. He drove, Tim sat in the passenger seat and me in back, trying to manage a super 8mm movie camera with one hand and a tape recorder with the other. Albert told us that we were driving the route of his first LSD trip in 1943, when he bicycled home with his Sandoz lab assistant after testing 250 micrograms. Tim cracked up when I asked Albert if he still had the bicycle. I knew it was gauche of me, but I couldn't resist. A short time later Albert pulled over."

Here is an excerpt of the conversation between Albert and Tim, after they picked us up at the train station. On the way to Albert's estate we passed by his 1943 home.

Albert: That house is where we lived at the time. I never thought I would get home that day. My assistant who had ridden with me at my request asked permission to leave. I told her fine, but in fact I was in a panic. My wife and children were away. It was just me. I barely managed to crawl to my bed.

It was the first bad trip, too. There was no precedent. You must have thought you'd poisoned yourself.

Albert: But in the end it was good. In the morning it was fantastic.

An 8-year-old boy in Ohio had a craving for a Big Mac. Only problem was that it was 8pm and his parents were already asleep. So the resourceful lad went onto YouTube, spent five minutes learning how to operate a car, and then invited his 4-year-old sister to take a spin with him for a meal at McDonald's.

Miraculously, he maneuvered the mile-and-a-half drive within the speed limit and didn't hit anything along the way. He then pulled into the drive-thru window, where the McDonald's employees thought it was a joke.

According to New York Post:

McDonald’s workers said they thought they were being pranked when he drove up to order a cheeseburger with money from his piggy bank.

“The workers thought that the parents were in the back, but obviously they weren’t,” Koehler said.

Police said the 8-year-old burst into tears when he learned that he did something wrong. He told officers that it was his first time behind the wheel.

The boy and his sister were able to enjoy their meal while they waited for their grandparents to pick them up. No charges were filed.

Photo by Danielk2

CNN is reporting that President Trump is now implementing the “bomb the shit out of them” portion of his campaign promises.

(more…)

This video gets more and more fun as it goes on. Passengers on the Bakerloo line on a London tube train were privy to a pop-up rave Monday night. At first, drum'n'bass MC Harry Shotta acts like an unsuspecting passenger, sitting behind a newspaper on a seat. He looks up in surprise as music suddenly blasts through a sound system and lights begin to flash. Then it turns into a full-on rave. Another DJ calls up Shotta and asks what his name is. When he answers "Harry Shotta" the passengers cheer, and then they are rewarded with a great show. Never has a subway ride looked so exciting.

Unfortunately, after about 4 minutes in, police officers come on board to break up the fun. The passengers boo. But the train won't budge until the party is cleared. The police are civil (one officer even looks like he'd like to join) and the ravers are good sports. I wish I would have been there. More from The Guardian:

The stunt was concocted by YouTube prank channel Trollstation, and featured a performance by DJ Discoboy and the aforementioned Shotta, an award-winning MC who at first pretended to be an unsuspecting member of the general public before he got on to the mic...

Organiser Discoboy told the Press Association: “There was a great atmosphere. The police shut it down, but they were cool about it.”

The Kentucky Coal Museum in Benham, KY, spends $2,100 a month on electricity; to save money, they're putting in 80 solar panels, which will save them $8,000/year. (more…)

Records of when the cherry blossoms appear in Kyoto date back 1200 years. (Let’s boggle at this fact for a sec…) But as this chart of peak-bloom dates shows, since the most recent peak in 1829, the cherry blossoms have been arriving earlier and earlier in the year.

From its most recent peak in 1829, when full bloom could be expected to come on April 18th, the typical full-flowering date has drifted earlier and earlier. Since 1970, it has usually landed on April 7th. The cause is little mystery. In deciding when to show their shoots, cherry trees rely on temperatures in February and March. Yasuyuki Aono and Keiko Kazui, two Japanese scientists, have demonstrated that the full-blossom date for Kyoto’s cherry trees can predict March temperatures to within 0.1°C. A warmer planet makes for warmer Marches.

Temperature and carbon-related charts like this one are clear portraits of the Industrial Revolution, right up there with oil paintings of the time. I also enjoyed the correction at the bottom of the piece:

An earlier version of this chart depicted cherry blossoms with six petals rather than five. This has been amended. Forgive us this botanical sin.

Gotta remember that flower petals are very often numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence.

Are you high right now? Why not? Does your company drug test? (If your company drug tests, that really sucks, sorry about that.) You know who doesn’t have to worry about drug testing? Dogs. Yes, unlike everything you’ve been taught to believe about dogs from hard-hitting exposés like A Dog’s Purpose, Cats & Dogs, and The Truth About Cats And Dogs (we’re just going off titles here, but surely you wouldn’t call your movie that without delivering some raw truth bombs about those animals, right?), it turns out dogs just like getting high and chilling out, the same way you do. The recent wave of proof about canine proclivity for hitting the couch and bingeing, like, an eight-hour Star Trek: TNG marathon or something was kicked off by Twitter user @smack_that, who posted evidence of her dog Oscar’s appreciation for the mellower things in ...

It’s timed for the new season of AMC’s ‘Better Call Saul’ that starts April 10

Keep an eye on Eater LA tomorrow for details on Los Pollos Hermanos, a two-day pop-up of the infamous Albuquerque restaurant in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul: It’s making its way to New York on Sunday, April 9 and 10 only, at 243 Pearl St. — in a partnership with Citizens Parking.

New York will be the third stop for the pop-up, having debuted in Austin during SXSW. The backstory on Los Pollos Hermanos is that it was founded by Gustavo Fring and Max Arciniega, with 14 locations throughout the southwest and is the source for money laundering and meth-related activities.

The pop-ups are timed in conjunction with new season of the Breaking Bad prequel that starts April 10 on AMC and serves as a continuation of a January teaser, reports Entertainment Weekly:

The stunt is tied to the return of Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), who will appear in season 3 of the Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul. Fring’s return was announced in mid-January with the release of a Los Pollos Hermanos commercial. A few days after the news broke, Esposito made a surprise appearance at a Better Call Saul panel during the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in Pasadena and handed out boxes of Los Pollos Hermanos chicken.

The Austin menu displays rancheros plates, breakfast tacos, burritos, burgers, and more. Although fried chicken wasn’t listed, “the pop-up served bags of curly fries, a cup of water, and three dipping sauces.”

The Breaking Bad restaurant is a follow-up to Walter’s Coffee Roastery pop-up in Bushwick in September.

Pop-up hours will be April 9th from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and April 10 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Rayna is a small child who thinks this hot water heater looks like a robot and she is determined to say hi to it and tell it that she loves it. THIS IS THE CUTEST THING OF ALL TIME THAT IS NOT THAT PHOTO OF OTTERS HOLDING HANDS SO THEY DON’T DRIFT AWAY FROM EACH OTHER WHILE SLEEPING. In the future, when humanity is on trial for the mistreatment of machines, our randomly assigned legal algorithm will introduce this video as Exhibit A in our defense. I like our chances.

Artist & writer James Bridle has shared a video and photos of his new work-in-progress, Autonomous Trap 001. It’s a trap for self-driving cars.

Looooooovvve this. (via @robinsloan)

This is Olly, a rescue dog, and Olly is very eager to compete in the agility competition at Crufts, the U.K.’s biggest dog show. But eagerness does not always translate to competence.

Read more...

It’s been a while since I watched rasslin, but that looks like a textbook Stinger Splash by a counter-protestor to break through the tape and snatch down a Confederate battle flag being waved by members of South Carolina Secessionist Party. The whole thing was caught on live TV, and it’s very satisfying.

Read more...

Today NASA announced the discovery of seven planets “that could harbor life” around a dwarf star called Trappist-1.

The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light years, or about 235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail.

One or more of the exoplanets - planets around stars other than the sun - in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star.

“This is the first time so many planets of this kind are found around the same star,” said Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and the leader of an international team that has been observing Trappist-1.

Here’s the paper published in Nature.

Actor Michael K. Williams — who played Omar Little in The Wire and Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire — has a conversation with himself, musing if he’s been typecast for a certain type of role.

Face it, we from a certain type a people that come from a type a place that look a type a way. You know what that make us?

For a promotional video (for The Atlantic), that was unexpectedly poignant.

We’re the last member of the internet viral content economy to discover and post this video of a 15-year-old softball pitcher absolutely annihilating her teammates in a friendly game, but damn, it’s too good not to.

Read more...

Let’s do a brain-building exercise.

Remember how Highlights magazine would run puzzles where your main objective was to spot what’s off? They’d give you, say, a scene of a beach with the directions, “Spot the five things that are wrong in this picture.” Sometimes it would be obvious (that palm tree has pizza slices instead of leaves!), but other times it would be a little tougher to track down (that lifeguard’s goggles are missing a lens!). Sometimes they’d really stump you with one of the details, and you’d have to wait until they printed the answers in the next issue to figure out what you had missed.

I bring all of this up because the Washington Post’s Express free daily paper did a tweet this morning that is essentially one of those puzzles. Two things are wrong with it, and one of them might be easier to spot than the other:

Can you detect the problems? One is spelling-related, so you might notice it off the bat. But the other is semiotics-related and may take a second or two. Pause to consider the tweet for as long as you’d like, because I’m about to solve the puzzle for you.

Ready?

It’s : 1) “today’a” and, 2) the male gender symbol in an illustration about the women’s march on Washington. One is what happens when you’re about to leave the office and just need to schedule one more tweet really quickly, the other is what happens when you are an illustrator and make a mistake and then none of your editors notice the mistake and it gets printed onto a bunch of newspapers.

The paper has since deleted the original tweet and shared new cover art with the announcement that they are “very embarrassed,” but tbh I am thankful. That was a fun brain exercise. Keep us on our toes, Express.

What’s Wrong With This Tweet? was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

BBC One’s Spy in the Wild series embeds animatronic spy animals out in nature with their real life animal counterparts to see what life is really like in the wild. The robot creatures can look a little bit creepy with their eyeball cameras, but the animals often embrace them as one of their own. Sometimes the…

Read more...

If you point a video camera at a projection of the video camera’s output — and if the conditions are just so — you get some interesting patterns that look almost biological. It’s fascinating that video feedback strongly resembles the patterns on brain coral. There must be an underlying emergent process for filling space that links the two patterns together. The video was made by Ethan Turpin…you can see more of his work here. (via @sleeptest)