The Latest from Boing Boing

Mexican jumping beans create bomb scare A mailman in Carlsbad, CA was alarmed by a ticking package and reported it to the authorities. Police evacuated several homes in the area and when they opened the box, they discovered it contained Mexican jumping beans. Read the rest... Classic hysterical sermon about threat of widespread public sex A classic sermon from 1969 delivered by the hypnotically charismatic Reverend Jack Van Impe, who warned that "by 1974, John Sinclair, the rock band The MC5, and specifically their song 'Kick Out the Jams' will produce sex on the streets in every major US city." [via] Read the rest... Wonderfully grody, inside-out teddy bears Kent Rogowski's marvellously gory and visceral pictures of inside-out teddy bears were collected in the 2007 book Bears, which is available used starting at $0.49. (via IO9) Read the rest... Incredible "hole punch" cloud This breathtaking and rare "Fallstreak Hole" (aka "hole punch cloud") was observed and photographed Monday by David Barton in Korumburra, Victoria, Australia. Read the rest... WWI trench poetry given gorgeous graphical treatment I’ve always been fascinated by WWI trench art – objets d’art fashioned from bullet and shell casings and other materials found in the trenches and battlefields of that hellish quagmire. Read the rest... Facebook reports government data requests up 24% "During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19% [newsroom.fb.com] Read the rest... STD dating site fined $16.5m A dating site catering to people with sexually transmitted diseases exposed their private information to other dating sites. A jury in California detemined that the operators ofPositiveSingles committed fraud, malice and oppression. Read the rest... EFF asks for the right to revive abandoned online games When the player count fades, online games often end up shuttered by publishers who can no longer pay for the servers and staff to maintain them. Read the rest... EFF leadership change: Cindy Cohn to head organization Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will take over from Shari Steele, who is retiring from EFF after 14 years as Executive Director. Read the rest... Rugs based on satellite imagery Florian Pucher's "Landcarpets" are limited edition area rugs based on satellite images. "The stylized fields are of different height and left LANDCARPET appear like a miniaturized landscape." Above, "Hong Kong - Kowloon West side 1/1." Below, "Africa." Landcarpets (via CityLab) Read the rest... Photos of abandoned discotheques Photographer Antonio La Grotta captures the lost decadence inside abandoned discotheques in Italy. "Discotheques, the symbol of 80s and 90s hedonism, were fake marble temples adorned with Greek statues made of gypsum, futuristic spaces of gigantic size, large enough to contain the dreams of success, money, fun of thousands people," he writes. Read the rest... Buster Keaton narrowly avoids certain death As Millionmovieproject puts it: "Crew members threatened to quit and begged him not to do it, the cameraman looked away while rolling. Read the rest... Rube Goldberg cereal pouring contraption My daughter Jane and I had fun in this video for General Mills and Megabloks about the joy of using cardboard and spare parts to create a Rube Goldberg contraption, as part of their Rev Up the Breakfast Table campaign. Read the rest... Amanda Palmer: why fans choose to pay artists they love To celebrate the release of my new book, Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I've invited some of my favorite creators and thinkers to write about their philosophy on the arts and the Internet. Today, Amanda Palmer, author of the just-published Art of Asking, has granted kind permission to reproduce her introduction to Information Doesn't Want to Be Free. -Cory Read the rest... Dragon that looks like a tree In Chellah, an abandoned city south of Rabat, Morocco, there lives a dragon that resembles a tree. Photo posted by Seiteta on Reddit. (via Laughing Squid) Read the rest... 1980 D&D ad asserts that RPGs are woman-friendly By modern standards, the inclusion of two women in this Dungeons and Dragons ad was a surprisingly bold move -- a kind of sad snapshot of our lost, pre-Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet/Mulroney-era past. (via Seanan McGuire) Read the rest... Buried ET and other Atari cartridges on eBay Atari's legendary stock of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and other cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill since 1983 and recently dug up are now up for auction on eBay. Read the rest... StoryShift is a new storytelling medium. Why hasn’t it caught on? James Renner on the modern answer to classic Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks Read the rest... Cube Quest Imagine Crossbows and Catapults—but with meaningful rules rather than excuses for a demolition session. Jon Seagull reviews Cube Quest. Read the rest... TOM THE DANCING BUG: Christie and Cuomo's Guide to Ebola Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo explain how to tell if someone is possessed by the Ebola. Read the rest... UK launch of In Real Life at Orbital Comics, London, Nov 12 I've just come back to the UK from my US tour for In Real Life, the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Jen Wang and I made; I'll be launching it in London at the incomparable Orbital Comics, near Leicester Square, on the evening of Weds, 12 Nov. Read the rest... EFF asks US Copyright Office for your right to fix your car It's that time again: every three years, the Copyright Office allows the public to ask for exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on "circumvention," which prevents you from unlocking devices you own. Read the rest... Hindus Propose Giant Monkey God Statue On Oklahoma Capitol Grounds I want a giant monkey god statue on every state capital lawn . Read the rest... Chip-and-PIN cards let nearby fraudsters steal $1M at a time Visa's new Paywave chip-and-PIN credit-cards have a $1M limit on foreign-currency transactions that can be verified "in-card," meaning that someone who gets close enough to your UK wallet can simply wave a phone at it and charge a megabuck to it without raising any realtime security alerts. Read the rest... Geared necklace from the geared ring people Brother-and-sister designers Rachel and Glen Liberman, creators of the amazing Kinekt gear-ring, have created a matching stainless steel geared necklace whose chain passes through a set of meshing gears, spinning them round and round. Read the rest... Richard Kadrey's Metrophage back in print in signed special edition Before there was Sandman Slim, there was Richard Kadrey's classic, groundbreaking cyberpunk debut novel Metrophage, a Terry Carr Ace Special (the same line that gave us Neuromancer) -- now it's back in print. Read the rest... Kottke.org tee It's a two-week limited sale of a $38 tee made with "active dye digital printing," featuring the beloved blue gradient. (via Kottke) Read the rest... Rabbitbox: anthropomorphized dioramas on legs, for companionship Roshan writes, "Rabbitbox is the world's first dedicated companionship dispenser. Its sole purpose is to provide the right combination of physical presence and implied sentience to allow the experience of companionship in its purest, literal form." By inducing the minimum amount of anthropomorphism by the end user, Rabbitbox is able to create the experience of being not alone. Read the rest... How I use medical marijuana: vaporizers, science, weed, and cancer A primer on the healing power of weed, and how to vaporize correctly, for cancer patients and others who truly have a medical need for marijuana. Sponsored by Ascent by DaVinci, a vaporizer we think works really well. Read the rest... Mutant Mickey tee: Icky Mouse The Icky Mouse tee, last seen as a Threadless design in 2011, is now for sale at the Neato Shop for $20. Read the rest...