[Video Link]. Update: Previously blogged on BB. Here is a link to the "shred of the month" archive.

(via Jon Swaine / spaceghetto)

Angry Birds, indeed! Video of a cool weapon automata from the 19th century, in which a little birdie spins on the top of a gun when you fire it. Video is from Christies, the auction house where this oddity is offered. The intricate mechanics are what make this precious device a win; the narrator is what makes the video win.

(via Submitterator, thanks amok69, via from Tree Climber, the blog of goldsmith David Neale)

[Video Link, from NewGrounds via Jesse Thorn]

Twitter newbie Henry Rollins says, "In 1986, Dave Markey made a documentary of Black Flag's final tour. He just posted it for free viewing. Brutal!"

Watch it: telfezion.com. It's like Nam Jun Paik on vacation in Beirut after dropping acid with a falafel chaser. Created by Nadim Kobeissi, aka @kaepora. He tells Boing Boing how the project came about, below.

Read the rest

My favorite part: they are lining up to take their turn. (Via Illustrateurs)

Yikes. From the insanely weird archives of Mitch O'Connell!

I'm hopping in my Peel P50 and heading over to the Biltmore Motor Hotel to see The Starlighter Quartet tonight. Check out those handmade guitars!

Here's the same photo without the text around it.

John Ptak, proprietor of the JF Ptak Science Bookstore, reviewed a research project report filled with "putrified moral-punk thinking on envisioning American society post nuke holocaust." He says it's one of many "very badly written, deeply obfuscated, sinful research projects" that he's come across, but says this one stands out because "it is the first I can recall that restarts taxes right off the burned-up bat. Quite something, really. "

[T]he authors clearly assume that there will be something approximately preattack life in the post-attack world. Amidst the horror and chaos, we read that

"Businessmen, in particular, but others as well, would experience disturbing and subtle changes in familiar institutions and in such bases of mutual trust as methods of establishing or verifying credit...or estimating delivery dates"--pg 11.

"Disturbing and subtle" changes to delivery, indeed.

We further read of "widespread readjustments of status, status symbols, and values" (page 11) which no doubt would come if all of your possessions were burned up, or lost or destroyed in some way, along with the owner. It is definitely difficult to maintain status relationships in the evidence of no status and no relationships. Of course this whole deal is complicated by the issue that status symbols are also relationships and associations, much of which could also be gone in the same fire cloud.

Monumentally bad writing: recovery from thermonuclear war, loan forgiveness, and taxes (1966)

What can't whiskey cure?

Link. "What is the Grip?," from the April, 22, 1891 edition of the New York Times.

Via Gabriel Snyder of Atlanticwire, originally the subject of this "Found item" post.

(BB headline by Warren Ellis, for whom this item was almost certainly written lo these many years ago.)