Like father, like son. Happy Father's Day. Read the rest

Yesterday, we shared the insane movie-style trailer President Trump used to convince North Korea's dictator to buddy up. The New York Times, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert offer their takes on this historic video.

Read the rest

Epic Games' fantastic Fortnite Battle Royale has launched, as anticipated, on the Nintendo Switch. Now you can dance the L on every major gaming platform but one: PC, Xbox, PS4, IOS and Switch. Android is up next.

I've been enthusiastic about the Switch for a while and wondered if it'd replace my aged Xbox One. Fortnite ensures the unit will get a lot of use, even if every other game is a dud.

I alternate between the FunkOps skin, and the Leviathan, whom I lovingly refer to as "Bob Fishman."

Nintendo Switch with Neon Blue and Red Joy-Con bundle via Amazon Read the rest

Yesterday marked Dean Martin's 101st birthday. Happy birthday to the King of Cool.

Fabled performer Dean Martin was born on June 7, 1917. Mr. Martin passed away on December 25th, 1995. I've never enjoyed Christmas. Read the rest

A gentleman turned his SUV into a battering ram, repeatedly bashing another car. Eventually exiting his vehicle to climb atop the target of his anger, the rage filled driver slips and is apprehended.

Via CBS:

"The initial call was that someone was behind a driver and upset for some reason after a disturbance on the freeway," said Sgt. Vance Chandler with the Sacramento Police Department.

The suspect ended up on 5th and X streets, where police say he rammed the car he was allegedly following on Business 80. From there, officers say the suspect became fixated on the Honda CR-V.

"This person was in a crisis, obviously," Chandler said.

Police stood back, waiting for the clearly agitated suspect to calm down.

"They were unable to get him to cooperate or speak to them," Chandler added.

The video shows the suspect eventually falling from the top of the CR-V, and officers quickly moving in to detain him.

Officers say they're waiting for the suspect to be medically cleared from the hospital before he's booked into the Sacramento County Jail on charges of vandalism and felony assault.

Wherein a motorcyclist strikes a vehicle in Canada. Polite apologies and handshakes ensue. Read the rest

Sealing wax is fun to play with. This weekend my daughter and I had a blast learning to use my signet ring to seal envelopes.

We ordered this 230 bead sealing wax kit last week, to fancy up some letters I had to send the kid at summer camp. The kit also came with a spoon and some tea candles. Unsurprisingly, there is not much more to sealing an envelope than that. Heat up the wax over a little tea candle, pour it on to the surface you want it affixed to, then seal away!

I found that waiting until the wax is just melted, when you can still see a bit of unmelted shape at the top of the puddle, was the right time to pour. I would then give the wax a five count or so before squishing in my ring. A count to ten and the ring would remove cleanly, without ruining the seal.

Two beads is the right amount of wax for my ring.

Mixing colors is really cool.

Hestya 230 Pieces Octagon Sealing Wax Beads Sticks with 2 Pieces Tea Candles and 1 Piece Wax Melting Spoon for Wax Stamp Sealing (12 Colors) via Amazom Read the rest

I was looking for a pair of Duluth Trading Company fire hose pants. They are awesome. They are made of the same heavy canvas a fire hose outer insulation is. They are soft, but massively over stitched and have a popular with the nuggets 'crotch gusset.'

None of these things should have led to Zmart Men's Sexy Collared Bow Tie Bodysuit/Thong/Butler Teddy Costume Underwear showing up in my recommendations.

The Duluth Trading Company has a number of styles of pant. I wear the regular firehose pant over my Bohn spandex armor when motorcycling around my home county or into the awful dodge'em game that is San Francisco. I ordered a pair of the Ultimate, because more is better when covering motorcycle armor.

The Zmart option looks like it offers minimal abrasion resistance, and will not cover the leg armor to my satisfaction.

Zmart Men's Sexy Collared Bow Tie Bodysuit Thong Butler Teddy Costume Underwear via Amazon Read the rest

This video footage released by Entertainment Tonight is certainly telling. They cut to the chase around 1:25 seconds in. Read the rest

These compostable sacks for poo are better than the ones I was previously using. They are made .

Walking my dogs, and general yard clean-up at home, tends to consume 2-4 dog poop bags a day! Ever since supermarkets started charging for bags, I have been buying my own. I started to wonder about how much plastic I was sending to the dump. Quick reading online suggested that cornstarch based bags was the way to go. Internet forums are the one source of truth.

These work for picking up poop. They are not terribly hard to open once ripped off the roll and poop stays in them until I have dropped the whole load in the trash. The bags meet US and European compostable standards: ASTM D6400 and EN13432, so they'll breakdown. You do not want to throw these into your home compost pile, however, as dog poo doesn't do well there.

PET N PET Compostable Poop Bags Dog Waste Bags Pet Clean up Bags Green Eco-Friendly, Certified By US BPI And EUR VINCOTTE.Meet ASTM 6400, EN13432, 240 Counts Certified via Amazon Read the rest

One of my favorite TV shows as a kid had a rockin' 80s style theme, 3-2-1 Contact made science exciting.

The very first episode opens with the making of this fantastic track, but they re-cut it several times over the life of the show.

I have a hard time picking a favorite. Which is yours?

I also loved the Villa Allegre theme. Read the rest

ABC cancelled "Roseanne" after Roseanne, once again, went off on a racist tear.

Via Variety:

ABC has pulled the plug on “Roseanne.”

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.

UPDATE*** ABC cancelled Roseanne

Disney and subsidiary ABC are standing by quietly while vicious racist Roseanne Barr erupts with Islamophobic and anti-gay remarks.

via HuffPo:

Roseanne Barr has said another racist thing.

On Tuesday, the actress and creator of “Roseanne” ― the show recently rebooted on ABC and already wading into racist waters ― attacked former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett via Twitter.

“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr tweeted, referring to Jarrett, who is black and originally from Iran.

In another series of tweets that morning, Barr also attacked liberal billionaire George Soros and former first daughter Chelsea Clinton.

Underoos were always treated more as pajama than underwear, but occasionally some Super Kid would wear them to school and the jokes would fly!

Sometimes that kid was me.

I had the Spiderman Underoos. Thank Moses they didn't make Hong Kong Fooey Underoos, I still have a permanent divot in my head from diving into a filing cabinet as a child.

Underoos are still for sale, but seems to have lost whatever charm they had.

Read the rest

Riunite. On ice. Who were they trying to sell this wine? These ads had me cracking up as a child. Were yodelers, robots, and folks with made-up but pretty racist accents really lacking the right choice in pink wine?

Wine on ice is a thing I rarely see, but when I do the people drinking it are generally on an airplane and headed to a good time. The 1980s jingle is the one that seems to come to mind with my contemporaries.

Evidently the Box Wine Revolution did not kill Riunite. They have a website and show some fairly recent awards from San Diego! San Diego is a city revered for their ComicCon, large warships, and proximity to Tijuana, Mexico! So, lets drink up! Read the rest

Without question the 1976 BMW R90s is the high watermark of motorcycle design and engineering. I absolutely love mine. Listening to Peter Egan, a legendary motorcycle journalist, talk about his and some other bike he compares it to, is a lot of fun.

If Egan had a Daytona Orange model no one would have noticed the other bike. Daytona Orange is not only faster, it handles better. Read the rest

The pretty far reaching study we blogged last week, about Octopi coming from outer space, is really most likely, probably, near certainly not true.

Via Space.com

For evidence of the panspermia hypothesis, the authors wrote in their new paper, skeptics need only look to the octopus.

Octopuses have complex nervous systems, camera-like eyes and a capacity for camouflage that evolved suddenly and without precedent in their family tree, according to the study authors. The genes for these adaptations, the authors wrote, do not seem to have come from octopus ancestors, but "it is plausible then to suggest [these traits] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."

In one theory laid out in the paper, the authors posit that fertilized octopus eggs crashed into the sea aboard an icy comet at the onset of the Cambrian explosion. Another explanation, they propose, could be that an extraterrestrial virus infected a population of early squid, causing them to evolve rapidly into octopuses as we know them today.

Other researchers were not quick to embrace this theory. "There's no question, early biology is fascinating — but I think this, if anything, is counterproductive," Ken Stedman, a virologist and professor of biology at Portland State University, told Live Science. "Many of the claims in this paper are beyond speculative, and not even really looking at the literature."

For example, Stedman said, the octopus genome was mapped in 2015. While it indeed contained many surprises, one relevant finding was that octopus nervous system genes split from the squid's only around 135 million years ago — long after the Cambrian explosion.