Burger King in Thailand has introduced its new "Real Cheeseburger" which consists of a bun with 20 slices of American cheese, no meat. It was introduced at price of just 109 Thai baht ($3.1) but will normally sell for 380 baht ($10.9). — Read the rest
Turns out Etsy still has stuff worth paying for on it, such as the biblically accurate Furby. Lazarus Quinn will customize one for you for £226 and up ($270).
Modeled after the original Confetti Amadeus! Prices include ordering the highest quality furby, preferably new or working, I can find (snowball or champagne) + supplies, so I will have to ship supplies to my house before I can start on the project itself.
In this extensive interview with Okay Player, Lupe Fiasco discusses his most recent album, Drill Music in Zion, the criminalization of HipHop, technology, science, and the humanities, and his relationship with other rappers.
One of the projects Fiasco is preparing for is a university class he will teach as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. — Read the rest
A federal wild horse facility about 100 miles south of Denver has gone under quarantine after 67 horses died from an "unknown yet highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease," reports CNN.
The horses started getting sick on April 23. Veterinarians are trying to diagnose and treat the horses. — Read the rest
With the cost of gas, greenhouse emissions, and all sorts of other concerns, it's one of those transportation issues you seldom consider. But for environmentally friendly commuters and weekend adventurers alike, the question remains: how the heck do I store this big bicycle? — Read the rest
New York Times: “TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After @TeamTrump tweeted asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.”
“The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same, as CNN reported on Tuesday.”
“Thousands of other users posted similar tweets and videos to TikTok that racked up millions of views.”
I say fire up the boilers, weigh anchor and let’s set sail!
Hashima Island or more commonly Gunkanjima (meaning battleship island) is 9 miles from Nagasaki in Japan. It is one of 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture. Wow, lots to explore here.
Low rent district
The island’s most notable features are its abandoned concrete buildings, undisturbed except by nature, and the surrounding sea wall. While the island is a symbol of the rapid industrialization of Japan, it is also a reminder of err…a dig-till-you-drop-dead prison.
So what the heck were they up to here? Turns out this island was atop a massive undersea coal deposit and since 1887 dig they must. Today we think of coal as what other people in other times fooled around with but it is near an all time high production level and is still being mined around the world on land and sea. Ugh!
Coal is not so dead
In the 1930s the island was a hard knocks work camp for captured Chinese prisoners. It’s one more thing the Chinese are still miffed about when it comes to Japan. The Japanese are a very thoughtful and kind people with a genetic disposition to be apologetic about everything…except The War. They like to pretend it didn’t really happen so much. I’ve been to the National Museum in Tokyo and WWII gets a tiny room with about 10 photos so they know it happened, but hey…
The Germans, on the other hand, never stop apologizing for Hitler. You know, the more I hear about this Hitler guy the less I like him. He did have one endearing achievement though. He’s the guy who killed Hitler! That’s a plus, yes? I find it unfathomable that we were at war with the Germans and the Japanese and…the Italians, all terrific, lovely people. How nuts is that?! Russia, China—allies. The others—the enemies. Ah, well.
The island shut down in 1974 when the coal petered out and the island was officially off limits but hey—rules, right? Adventurers and party animals were illegally visiting and falling through the rotting roofs and floors with regularity. But in 2009 you could visit and legally fall through the roofs and floors. This link is of the guy who filmed the island for Google Street View.
You've probably seen a biosphere ecosystem before. It's a glass orb filled with water, some aquatic plants, and some small animals like freshwater shrimp. The only input to the otherwise closed system is sunlight, and the goal is to keep the lifeforms inside the glass sphere going as long as possible. When I was at Make magazine we made a biosphere and it remained healthy for over five years.
Orb Farm is a web-based biosphere simulator. You are given an empty glass sphere, and you can fill it with glass, sand, stone, wood, water, algae, Daphnia, grass, bacteria, fish, goldfish, and, er, donuts. The game was created by Max Bittker.
A Kansas gentleman has asked a court in Iowa for a legal sword fight – or trial by combat – with his ex-wife. According to the Des Moines Register, 40-year-old David Ostrom claims that she has legally destroyed him, and after hearing that duals have never actually been banned in the United States, thought it would be a good way to settle things once and for all.
"To this day, trial by combat has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States," he told the court. But he made it clear he would need 12 weeks "lead time" to get the Japanese katanas he has in mind. He also kindly invited his wife's attorney Matthew Hudson to the dual, who could either be a spectator or stand in for the lady.
According the Des Moines Register, "Hudson argued that because a duel could end in death, such ramifications likely outweigh those of property tax and custody issues."
Some supporters of Marianne Williamson have organized an “occult task force” to help her campaign, the Washington Post reports.
The person organizing the task force said that a group of 13 chaos magicians, witches and energy workers were doing synchronized “gestures” to help their candidate gain more visibility during last night’s Democratic debate.
If there was ever collective schadenfreude to be had, it was when we learned that a bunch of young, privileged rich kids got swindled by the promoters of the 2017 Fyre Festival and were left to fend for themselves on a remote island. On January 18, Netflix is releasing a documentary about the dumpster Fyre.
Here's its teaser trailer:
Get your exclusive first look at FYRE — a revealing new doc about the insanity and rapid unraveling of Fyre Festival: the greatest party that never happened. Premieres January 18. #NetflixNewsWeekpic.twitter.com/B4iaR3UJwM
:loudly banging pots together: THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA
“West Virginia is about to take a leap of faith in voting technology — but it could put people’s ballots at risk,” Politico reports.
“Next month, it will become the first state to deploy a smartphone app in a general election, allowing hundreds of overseas residents and members of the military stationed abroad to cast their ballots remotely. And the app will rely on blockchain, the same buzzy technology that underpins Bitcoin, in yet another Election Day first.”
I know, I know, we shouldn't be talking about the holidays just yet. But, keep clam, Archie McPhee went ahead and released Clamdy Canes -- yes, candy canes that taste like clams -- and I couldn't resist sharing the news with you.
ONE SHELL OF A CANDY
From the personified clam on the package to the clam taste, you’ll wonder how Christmas existed without Clamdy Canes. They’re a candy clamity! We all celebrate holidays in our own way and if your holiday tastes like the sea, this is for you. Add a little sand for extra clam realness. If anyone complains, just tell them to clam up. Each candy cane is 5-1/4" tall with gray and white stripes.
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…)
This is the moment Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), a 28-year-old running her first campaign, discovered she had ousted veteran Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) in New York’s 14th congressional district.
I've lived in British Columbia and Nova Scotia. This is, hands down, the best story I've ever read that involves both coasts.
According to The Times Colonist, 17 years ago, Nick Burchill, a naval reservist from Nova Scotia, was in Victoria, British Columbia for a work-related conference. He chose to stay at the Fairmont Empress Hotel: a high-falootin' luxury joint that's been a fixture on the city's downtown waterfront for decades. When Burchill came from the east coast, he knew that he'd be meeting with friends from the navy when time allowed for it. He brought them a gift: Chris Brothers Pepperoni sticks: a much-loved Nova Scotian delicacy. Not wanting anyone to feel left out, he brought, well, a lot. To keep the meat cool and edible until he could hand it over to his pals, Burchill cracked the window in his hotel room and laid the pepperoni out on the windowsill. He figured that the cool spring air would be enough to refrigerate the food. What happened next is the stuff of legend:
He spread the packages of pepperoni out on a table and along the window sill, then went for a leisurely four or five hour walk.
“I remember walking down the long hall and opening the door to my room to find an entire flock of seagulls in my room,” Burchill wrote. “I didn’t have time to count, but there must have been 40 of them and they had been in my room, eating pepperoni for a long time.”
Burchill discovered that spicy pepperoni does not agree with a seagull’s digestive system. The room was covered in guano.
Burchill’s unexpected entry startled the birds.
The birds, losing their shit over their being a human in the room, began to literally lose their shit, everywhere they flew in the room, spreading poop over everything. As they took to the air, the seagulls knocked over lamps, decorations and anything else that wasn't bolted down. As Burchill put it, the resulting chaos was "...a tornado of seagull excrement, feathers, pepperoni chunks and fairly large birds whipping around the room." Fighting his way through the flock, Burchill managed to open the rest of the windows in his suite so that the birds could escape. As one of the birds tried to re-enter the room in search of more food, Burchill threw his shoe at it. The shoe ended up on the front lawn of the hotel, narrowly missing a group of vistors.
Burchill has been, understandably, banned from staying at the Empress for the past 17 years. This past week, his lifetime ban was lifted by the hotel's management after he wrote them a passionate letter explaining his part in the pepperoni-and-seagull related disaster.
That Burchill included a pound of Chris Brothers pepperoni with the letter as a peace offering may have had something to do with it too.
A Cat Thing combined feline love for cardboard boxes with an architect's eye for modular prefab housing to create a series of max-and-match cat houses. (more…)
Is there a difference in how you feel after drinking red wine versus hard liquor? I've always thought so (sleepy with wine, invigorated with dirty martinis and tequila shots), and now a study published in British Medical Journal’s BMJ Open suggests that perhaps different types of alcohol really do affect different emotions after drinking them.
The study, published on Tuesday, suggests that hard liquor makes people feel confident, energized and "sexy," while red wine makes people feel "relaxed." And spirits seem to take a more negative turn. "Drinking spirits was far more likely to elicit feelings of aggression, illness, restlessness, and tearfulness than wine or beer.and spirits more often make people feel aggressive, weepy, and ill," says Popular Science.
According to Popular Science:
Some of the study’s findings—which draw from around 30,000 individuals aged 18-34 who completed the Global Drug Survey, an online anonymous questionnaire promoted in 2015—aren’t exactly shocking. For example, 53 percent of respondents reported that red wine made them feel relaxed. There’s a physiological explanation for this; red wine contains high levels of melatonin, the hormone that tells our brains it’s time to go to bed. A solid 50 percent of subjects reported that beer relaxed them, but the carbohydrates therein also have a reputation for making folks drowsy. Only around 20 percent of drinkers said spirits had the same effect.
When it came to other positive emotions—feeling energized, confident, relaxed, and sexy—hard liquors really kicked the competition to the curb. Over 58 percent of responders reported feeling energized after a drink of spirits, 59 percent reported confidence, and 42 percent felt sexy. Beer proved to be the least sexy drink (bloat, anyone?) with just 19 percent of survey-takers reporting such an effect. But with 45 percent reporting a confidence boost, 25 percent feeling energized, and 50 percent enjoying a relaxing buzz, beer belly doesn’t sound too bad. Red and white wine both hovered around 28 percent and 25 percent for confidence and sexiness, respectively, but while 15 percent of white wine drinkers felt energized, only half as many red wine drinkers reported the same. And white wine had just a third of drinkers relaxed, compared to red wine’s half.
Your sick and twisted dreams of hosting a ranch dressing holiday kegger are about to be realized. Now you can buy five-liter mini-kegs of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing for 50 bucks each online.
They say it's a "year's supply," but c'mon. Five liters is like "Tuesday" for a superfan of Ranch.
Short Trip is a scenic tram simulator made by Alexander Perrin. Every detail is hand-drawn, it takes only a few minutes to enjoy the ride (controls: right arrow), and it's the most perfect thing on the web today. You can even pick up and drop off passengers at the stations along the way.
https://twitter.com/alexanderperrin/status/911789253746503680
I never want anything to do with this thing other than to read the insane heist movie antics that fall out of it every 9 months or so.
EVE Online is infamous for its scammers, pirates, and ne’er-do-wells, but this week all their scams were put to shame. A member of the game’s Council of Stellar Management and head diplomat of the Circle of Two alliance named The Judge stole all of the holdings of the 4,000-person alliance for himself. He took their…
Politico: “Obama strategist David Axelrod has had several conversations with Patrick about running, and eagerly rattles off the early primary map logic: small-town campaign experience from his 2006 gubernatorial run that will jive perfectly with Iowa, neighbor-state advantage in New Hampshire and the immediate bloc of votes he’d have as an African-American heading into South Carolina.”
“Obama himself—who is personally close to Patrick, and counts him among the very small group of people whom he thinks has actual political talent—has privately encouraged him to think about it, among others.”
Jupiter has at least 69 natural moons, reports Scientific American, with the latest distant dots of joy uncovered via images taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft.
Until recently the cataloged satellites totaled 67 in number. But only the innermost 15 of these orbit Jupiter in a prograde sense (in the direction of the planet's spin). The rest are retrograde, and are likely captured objects - other pieces of the solar system's solid inventory that strayed into Jupiter's gravitational grasp.
That population of outer moons is mostly small stuff, only a few are 20-60 kilometers in diameter, most are barely 1-2 kilometers in size, and increasingly difficult to spot.
Now astronomers Scott Sheppard, David Tholen, and Chadwick Trujillo have added two more; bringing Jupiter's moon count to 69.
Perfect for your pirate base/villain lair/secret Space CIA prison/unsettling scientific experiments lab/taco stand.
