Shades of Death Road is a real two-lane road in Warren County, New Jersey, running 6.7 miles through forest and swamp. According to Weird NJ, residents have gone "so far as to smear the pole holding the street sign" with grease to stop people from stealing it. — Read the rest

The post New Jersey has a road called Shades of Death and residents grease the sign to stop theft appeared first on Boing Boing.

By the summer of 1858, three million Londoners were flushing their sewage into the Thames through an aging system that emptied directly into the river. Temperatures hit 48 °C (118 °F) in the sun. The water level dropped. Raw effluent sat on the banks. — Read the rest

The post In 1858 the Thames smelled so bad that Parliament fled and Disraeli called it a 'Stygian pool' appeared first on Boing Boing.

From July to September 2001, heavy downpours of red-colored rain fell across the southern Indian state of Kerala, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain also appeared. Each milliliter of rain water contained about 9 million red particles. Scientists estimated that 50,000 kilograms of them fell in total. — Read the rest

The post Blood-red rain fell on India for two months and some physicists blamed a comet appeared first on Boing Boing.

In August 2008, German developer Armin Heinrich released I Am Rich on the App Store for $999.99 — the maximum price Apple allowed. The app displayed a glowing red gem. Press the gem and it showed a mantra: "I am rich / I deserv [sic] it / I am good, healthy & successful." — Read the rest

The post The $999.99 iPhone app that did absolutely nothing sold 8 copies before Apple killed it appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1847, a young Crow hunting party killed the wife of John Garrison Johnston, a former Navy deserter turned mountain man in Montana Territory. According to historian Andrew Mehane Southerland, "He supposedly killed and scalped more than 300 Crow Indians and then devoured their livers" to avenge her death, and "as his reputation and collection of scalps grew, Johnson became an object of fear." — Read the rest

The post A mountain man spent 25 years eating the livers of the people who killed his wife appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Leica SL3-P is its new full-frame mirrorless camera, landing in the middle of the L-mount SL line with a 44-megapixel sensor, plain black controls and no red dot. As discreet as a $7k-ish camera might be, then, it's aimed at working photogs in need of multishot frame-stacking, 14 stops of dynamic range, 8K open-gate video, and 5-axis stabilisation. — Read the rest

The post Leica's SL3-P loses the dot, gets 8K open-gate video appeared first on Boing Boing.

A while ago, we talked about the fact that Meta's employees were upset that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to watch them use their computers while they were on the clock. It's irony so delicious you wanna eat it with a ladle. 1,600 of Meta's minions signed a petition against being treated the same way that Meta has been treating Facebook users for years. — Read the rest

The post Facebook employee data exposed in Meta's own surveillance program appeared first on Boing Boing.

During Grandpa Puddin' Brain's first term, he declared that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal. He asserted that he wouldn't close the country down for a flu, so COVID wasn't gonna lock the doors either. He scoffed at how dangerous the coronavirus was at the time, downplaying the danger that the pandemic represented and said that it would simply "go away." — Read the rest

The post CDC buried this COVID vaccine study, so scientists published it anyway appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: The certified refurbished HP EliteBook 840 G8 packs a Core i5 processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro for $274.97 (reg. $899.98) during Deal Days.

The laptop industry would prefer that you replace your computer every few years. — Read the rest

The post Deal Days knocks this HP EliteBook workhorse down to $275 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace's newly renovated Reflecting Pool turned green, peeled apart, and became a national monument to contractor-grade grift, so naturally, Trump has identified the real villain: an alleged Hillary-Biden-ActBlue pool saboteur.

This is the thing Donholio does when reality is too small for him. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains pens backstory for nefarious Reflecting Pool vandal appeared first on Boing Boing.

8BitDo's Arcade Controller Pro is a Hit Box-style device that trades the arcade stick for a button-only layout. The new model tightens the cluster and adds a fifth programmable button while keeping the slim profile of last year's original. A wee LCD display is the fanciest upgrade, showing live inputs, battery level, and settings normally buried in the app. — Read the rest

The post 8BitDo's button-only arcade controller gets a tiny screen appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Babbel's lifetime plan gives you access to 14 languages, 10,000+ hours of lessons, AI conversation practice, and courses created by 100+ linguists—all for a one-time $134.99 payment during Deal Days.

Learning a new language is one of those goals that tends to sit on a to-do list for years. — Read the rest

The post Learn 14 languages from 100+ linguists while this Deal Days Babbel offer is still valid appeared first on Boing Boing.

Carlos Castaneda's 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan recounted his apprenticeship to a peyote-dosing Yaqui shaman named don Juan. The University of California Press published it as anthropology; it became an international bestseller and drew fans from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to George Lucas and Octavio Paz. — Read the rest

The post Carlos Castaneda faked an anthropology classic, then built a cult appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1916, a bearded Long Island showman named Louis Enricht gathered reporters on his lawn and offered them a gasoline substitute that would "sell for a penny a gallon" — wartime alchemy, with gas running short on Europe's battlefields. He had them inspect a small car's empty tank, fill a bucket with garden-hose water, then tip in two ounces of a greenish, almond-smelling fluid. — Read the rest

The post In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford appeared first on Boing Boing.

Writer John Biggs wanted no part of psychedelics, he writes in his newsletter — he pictured being "trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs and listened to techno." But he was in a bad way after his father's death: drinking, gaining weight, and stuck on the antidepressant Pristiq, which he calls "a numbing pill" that gave "painful zaps" whenever he tried to quit. — Read the rest

The post Mushrooms got him off antidepressants, so he built TripSitter appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.

This was not an unknowable mystery. Basic training is basically a respiratory virus theme park: recruits sleep close together, train close together, shower close together, and spend weeks exhausted in a giant human cough terrarium. — Read the rest

The post Whiskey Pete discovers viruses do not respect vaccine freedom speeches appeared first on Boing Boing.

The artificial intelligence revolution has reached the point where management begs employees to stop feeding PDFs into the robot so it can burp out PowerPoint decks nobody wanted in the first place.

The entire AI bubble is built on the idea that someday, somehow, customers will pay for the insane costs of using AI. — Read the rest

The post Companies discover AI is expensive when employees actually use it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Yet again, the President of the United States, at an official-looking manufacturing/economy event, performed microphone goblin theater while everyone pretended this was normal governance.

This is the central mystery of late-stage Trumpism: not that he does these things, but that hundreds of adults stand around afterward and describe them using words like "remarks," "agenda," and "message." — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains visits a truck factory, makes haunted chew toy noises appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kevin Mitnick, the legendary hacker, once tried to social-engineer his way into Novell's network by phoning a network admin named Shawn Nunley late at night, posing as an employee who needed "direct inbound modem access" for a top-secret project.

Nunley smelled a rat, played along, and asked the caller to leave a voicemail — which he recorded onto a cassette recorder. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Mitnick left the man who helped jail him enough for a Porsche 911 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Please Remain Seated, Permanezca Sentados Por Favor!

A 13-year-old boy at Disneyland climbed out of his Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride vehicle before the end of the attraction and then received a brief, terrifying seminar in why Disney repeatedly, and in multiple languages, tells you to stay in your seat. — Read the rest

The post Teen exits Disneyland ride, learns why you keep your arms, legs, and body inside the boat appeared first on Boing Boing.

Radio-frequency chips — the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals — have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as CPUs and GPUs got designed by algorithm. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Princeton's Kaushik Sengupta describes teaching AI to design these RFICs from scratch, with no human templates — and the results look nothing like human work. — Read the rest

The post AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's 250th birthday celebration has reached the "FBI director's girlfriend is available" stage of event planning, which is the sort of sentence that makes the Founders look smart for dying early.

To be fair, America has always relied on volunteers in moments of crisis. — Read the rest

The post What luck, America! Kash Patel's girlfriend joins Trump's talent-fleeing Freedom 250 event appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's no secret that AI is frigging terrible for us. The experts building it scarcely understand what they've created; the technology is a threat to the environment, and if handed the reins of war machines or infrastructure like hospitals or the power grid, it could cost lives. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft CEO wants people to shut up about AI being bad for us appeared first on Boing Boing.

We need to de-normalize punching down at trans people during your comedy sets and start normalizing turning them into weird social experiments. Aaron Westberry has become one of my favorite comics for this precise reason, injecting his open mic appearances with one weird twist after another. — Read the rest

The post Comedian guilt-trips audience into laughing appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you have even the slightest interest in peering behind the curtain into the world of game design, I cannot possibly recommend /noclip enough. No, not the console command, the documentary team covering the triumphs and pitfalls and huge feats of coordination that go into bringing any project home. — Read the rest

The post What is the Jedi problem, and why does every game designer fear it? appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm truly, genuinely sorry to everyone who was looking forward to helping Gabe Newell buy a hundredth yacht, but it's just an unavoidable truth: the Steam Machine is kind of a bad deal, guys. Valve's overpriced, underpowered little cube is just the latest victim of soaring component prices driven by investment in AI, because who cares if you can't afford a computer as long as the most racist person you know can make his virtual girlfriend say a slur. — Read the rest

The post Building a better PC than the Steam Machine for cheaper: is it possible? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sporothrix brasiliensis is a fungus that gives cats oozing skin ulcers, can spread through their whole body, and jumps to the people around them. Since it emerged in Brazil in the 1990s it has sickened thousands of cats and more than 11,000 people across South America, and the CDC's Shawn Lockhart told Science News it's "just a matter of time" before it reaches the US — "We're waiting." — Read the rest

The post A cat-borne fungus infected 11,000 people; the US is next, CDC says appeared first on Boing Boing.

A standard office printer, a paper cutter, and a book binder — that's the "printing press" the FBI logged when it raided Elizabeth and Ines Soto's Texas home. That, plus their membership in a leftist reading group called the Emma Goldman book club, became part of the government's case that the couple provided "material support to terrorists." — Read the rest

The post Zine publisher sentenced to 50 years in prison for "material support to terrorists" appeared first on Boing Boing.

On Monday, the Miami Marlins hosted a "Bark at the Park" night for their game against the Texas Rangers. This and similar 'take your doggo to the ballpark' days are, by far, the very best part of Major League Baseball, in my humble opinion. — Read the rest

The post Miami Marlins searching for this sad hotdog-less doggo, to treat him to a Dream Day at the ballpark appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals, in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

-> Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it's published anywhere. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: Elon Musk and His DOGE Pals, in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" appeared first on Boing Boing.