On Sunday, workers at a Safeway supermarket in King County, Washington found 48 pounds of cocaine hidden inside banana boxes stacked in the stockroom.

"This is an ongoing investigation as detectives try to determine where the bananas came from," the King Country Sheriff posted to Facebook. "Cocaine was also found inside similar produce containers in Safeway stores in Bellingham, and Federal Way."

Once they peel back the layers, I'm sure they'll find that a smuggler really slipped up. I bet the buyer will be pissed when the sellers can't produce the goods. Man, I really crack myself up.

(UPI) Read the rest

From the far-out folks at Flavor Paper comes Cannabliss, a subtly psychedelic scratch-and-sniff wallpaper that smells like weed. They write:

We have nailed a very pleasant yet dank scent that is made from true flowering hemp terpenes to ensure we’re keeping it real. CBD for your eyes and ol factory. Dope.

As Alex writes at Weird Universe, "Most of the people who will buy this already have rooms that smell like marijuana." Read the rest

One of the greatest cartoon series of recent years, Adventure Time ran for ten seasons on Cartoon Network. Created by Pendleton Ward, the original short above was produced for Frederator Studios' Random! Cartoons show and aired on the Nicktoons network on January 11, 2007. Finn was named Pen.

More at the Adventure Time Wiki.

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The Sentinelese are one of the world's last "uncontacted" indigenous peoples, a hunter-gatherer tribe who live on the remote North Sentinel Island in India's Andaman Islands chain. You may recall that last November, a missionary named John Allen Chau, 26, obsessed with trying to convert the tribe to Christianity, paid local fishermen to help him get near the island. As soon as he illegally landed his canoe on the shore and started preaching, the Sentinelese fired arrows. He escaped with injuries but returned twice later and was eventually killed. In a long and fascinating GQ feature, Doug Bock Clark tells the whole tale. From GQ:

From his kayak, Chau yelled in English: “My name is John. I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.” Then, offering a tuna most likely caught by the fishermen on the journey to the island, Chau declared: “Here is some fish!” In response, the Sentinelese socketed bamboo arrows onto bark-fiber bowstrings. Chau panicked. He flung the gift into the bay. As the tribesmen gathered it, he turned and paddled “like I never have in my life, back to the boat.”

By the time he reached safety, though, his fear was already turning to disappointment. He swore to himself that he would return later that day. He had, after all, been planning for this moment since high school. It was his divine calling, he believed, to save the lost souls of North Sentinel Island.

And from GQ's summary of the article:

The tribe had for centuries lived in isolation there free of disease, modern technology, and Western religion, ideals, and systems.

Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose pic.twitter.com/aYOZGAY6kP

— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) August 18, 2019

His name is Mischief.

(CNN) Read the rest

Peregrine falcons are the dive bombers of the natural world, flying at speeds over 200 mph to snag their prey. Read the rest

In Derry, New Hampshire, a time capsule from 1969 was finally opened on its 50th anniversary yet it was completely empty. Read the rest

Apparently, July 20, 2019 was that fellow's lucky day. Read the rest

Last week, Jimmy Kimmel joked about running for mayor of Dildo, a tiny unincorporated town in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and even built a Hollywood-style sign on a nearby hill. Then, sex toy company Our Pleasure ran a promotional video featuring their dildos in front of Dildo landmarks. Enough is enough, say residents. Townspeople have started a petition urging Our Pleasure to cease and desist. From UPI:

"If they had just casually mentioned the name on their site and didn't go to that extreme, we wouldn't have had a problem, but they went too far with this," (Dildo local service district committee member Andrew Pretty) said. "That's not what the town is about at all."

Pretty said some residents have tried reaching out to Our Pleasure, but their concerns were dismissed. He said people are particularly upset that the company was taking photos of sex toys outdoors in daylight hours...

Cathy Daniels, owner of Our Pleasure, said the company was careful to make sure no one was around when the photos were taken.

"In our industry, we're very sex-positive. But still, it's still a very taboo topic to talk about it," she said. "So, for us, for Dildo to be [in the media], although they were talking about the community, they were also talking about the object."

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From Etudes.ru (Google translation):

More than 40 years ago in 1968 ... A team led by Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov creates a mathematical model of the motion of the animal (cat). The BESM-4 machine, executing a written program for solving ordinary (in the mathematical sense of the word) differential equations, draws a cartoon "Kitty" containing even by modern standards an amazing animation of cat movements created by a computer.

(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

In Hackettstown, New Jersey, a McDonald's drive-through customer reportedly paid with a "smoldering" dollar bill that burned the employee's hand. From NJ.com:

After taking the money, the employee realized the dollar was still smoldering and she was burned on the palm of her left hand, police said. The employee refused medical treatment.

Police are investigating the incident and said no further information would be released at this time.

Obviously the customer has money to burn. Read the rest

Founded in 1623 in Turkey and now based in Norwell, Massachusetts, Zildjian has manufactured cymbals continuously for almost 400 years. This is how they do it now.

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In 1994, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong fired up the San Francisco FogCam. For 25 years, it kept a constant vigil on the San Francisco State University campus, making the FogCam the longest operating webcam in history. (The first webcam, the Trojan Room coffee pot cam, went online in 1991 and shut down in 2001.) At the end of the month, Schwartz and Wong will turn off the FogCam. From SF Gate:

"Our webcam is a throwback to the early days of the Internet when anyone could do anything," Schwartz said.

The webcam will be switched off on August 30, but Schwartz says the website itself will be kept up "for sake of posterity."

"The sponsors said it was going to be three days of peace and music. It was that alright, and much more." Read the rest

NASA announced today that the agency is moving ahead with a planned mission to Jupiter's moon Europa. In this next phase, engineers will complete the final design, construction, and testing of the Europa Clipper spacecraft for a launch as soon as 2023. Why the icy moon Europa? From NASA:

NASA's Europa Clipper mission will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter's moon Europa to see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. The mission will carry a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft that will perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter.

The payload of selected science instruments includes cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of Europa's surface and determine its composition. An ice penetrating radar will determine the thickness of the moon's icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar to those beneath Antarctica. The mission also will carry a magnetometer to measure strength and direction of the moon's magnetic field, which will allow scientists to determine the depth and salinity of its ocean.

"This is a giant step in our search for oases that could support life in our own celestial backyard," says Europa program scientist Curt Niebur.

That's all well and good, assuming we attempt no landing there.

image: NASA/JPL-Caltech Read the rest

President Barack Obama opened his summer reading list post with encouragement to read or re-read Toni Morrison and then suggested ten other titles including the following:

• Sometimes difficult to swallow, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is a necessary read, detailing the way Jim Crow and mass incarceration tore apart lives and wrought consequences that ripple into today.

• Exhalation by Ted Chiang is a collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human. The best kind of science fiction.

• Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women examines what happens to characters without important women in their lives; it'll move you and confuse you and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers.

See the rest of President Obama's picks here.

image: President Barack Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia shop for books at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., on Small Business Saturday, Nov. 29, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Read the rest

Agent King is an adult animated series about Elvis Presley as a government spy. Priscilla Presley and rock singer John Eddie created the show for Sony and Netflix with Archer's Mike Arnold as writer and showrunner. John Varvatos is designing Elvis's animated outfits. From Spin:

Agent King... imagines Elvis Presley trading his white jumpsuit for a jet pack as he’s inducted into a secret government spy program to help battle dark forces that threaten the country he loves — all while holding down his day job as the most famous rock ‘n’ roll star on the planet...

“From the time Elvis was a young boy he always dreamed of being the superhero fighting crime and saving the world!” said Priscilla Presley, who was married to Elvis from 1967-73.