The sushi-making scene is one of many standout scenes in Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Read the rest

Hokkaido is the northernmost of Japan's major islands. It's here that the practice of racing giant draft horses is being kept alive. The horses race against each other by dragging heavy sleds (weighing between 900 pounds and 2000 pounds). The horses are fed four times a day and race once every two weeks.

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“If the Crown Prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes,” Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said after a closed-door Senate briefing with CIA Director Gina Haspel. In other words, Corker and his fellow Senators were convinced by the evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In a rare instance of opposition against Trump, GOP senators are calling for an end to arms sales to the Saudis.

From the Washington Post:

In some of their strongest accusations to date, lawmakers said evidence presented by the U.S. spy agency overwhelmingly pointed to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the assassination.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said while there was no smoking gun, there was a “smoking saw,” referring to the bone saw that investigators have said was used to dismember Khashoggi after he was killed by a team of agents from Saudi Arabia in that country’s consulate in Istanbul in October.

Graham made clear that business as usual with the Saudis had come to end, and said the United States should come down on the government in Riyahd like “a ton of bricks,” adding that he could no longer support arms sales to the Saudis as long as Mohammed was in charge.

Image: Defense Secretary James N. Mattis meets with Saudi Arabia's First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., by Navy Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Kathryn E. Read the rest

"It’s aggressively tangy, like Kool-Aid made from pine cones." That's how The Atlantic's Olga Khazan describes the smell of the men's body wash she used during a recent shower (it was her boyfriend's body wash; she'd run out of her own lavender-scented liquid soap).

Curious as to why almost all men's fragrances have a similar smell, Khazan reached out to Ann Gottlieb, a scent designer for Axe, to find out what the deal is. In short, floral/fruity scents are stereotypically considered more feminine, and woodsy/minty smells are considered more masculine. (See video below.)

In any fragrance, she explained, there are what are called top, middle, and bottom notes. The top notes diffuse right away and hit the nose first. The middle notes make up the majority of the fragrance and give it its character. The bottom notes are heavier and help the scent stay on the skin. “It all comes together in a magical concoction,” Gottlieb says.

A scent relies on a perfumer expertly mixing 75 to 200 ingredients, most of them synthetic. In a women’s fragrance, there’s a large middle section filled with floral and fruity notes, and a bottom section that’s more vanilla-y. Men’s fragrances, meanwhile, are extremely “fresh” smelling, which is what gives men’s products that sharp bite. Men’s scents have notes of mint or “sea” or “fresh air” on top, followed by less prominent notes of leaves and flowers, all underpinned by woodsy bottom notes. According to Gottlieb, the most traditional male fragrances are in a category called fougère, after the French word for “fern.” They’re, well, kind of grassy.

Tim of Grand Illusions demonstrates a neat little trick, called the Magic Sword, in which a piece of solid metal seems to pass through another piece of metal.

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Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women's movement about sexual assault — and a decade before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and U.S. Olympic gymnastic doctor Larry Nassar — there was Jeffrey Edward Epstein. #PerversionofJustice pic.twitter.com/z3rIvzQWE9

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) November 28, 2018

If you're a registered sex offender it helps to have millions of dollars to make the problem go away. Financier Jeffrey Epstein, well-connected with the Washington power elite, was able to spend a small fraction of his vast fortune in 2017 to avoid a life sentence in prison for molesting and abusing kids (thanks to a secret deal he made with servile federal prosecutors).

From Sputnik News:

Epstein's teen sex trafficking ring worked like a pyramid scheme, according to victims, who say they were paid to give massages to Epstein, paid extra for sex acts and paid even more to recruit more girls between the ages of 13 and 16 into the ring. The girls were also, at times, allegedly offered up to Epstein's powerful friends.

Today Epstein spent another pittance to prevent his young victims from revealing in court how he'd sexually abused them. Epstein settled a lawsuit that he'd filed against attorney Bradley Edwards, who is representing several of Epstein's teen molestation victims in a civil suit against Epstein. By settling the suit, Epstein was able to stop his victims from telling the court just what a kind of person he is. Epstein didn't even have to apologize to Edwards face-to-face, instead he paid his lawyer to read an apology for him. Read the rest

Peter Brown was born in Philly, but he made the mistake of visiting Jamaica for one day, years ago on a cruise. But that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Sheriff of Monroe County, Florida a good enough reason to detain Brown and attempt to deport him to Jamaica, even though he has never lived there and doesn't know a single person there.

From Mr Brown's lawsuit, as reported in CNN:

"Despite his repeated protests to multiple jail officers, his offer to produce proof, and the jail's own records, the Sheriff's Office held Mr. Brown so that ICE could deport him to Jamaica — a country where he has never lived and knows no one," the lawsuit says.

The Sheriff's Office ignored all the indications that it was illegally detaining Mr. Brown. It did nothing to investigate his citizenship. It did not contact ICE to pass along this urgent information, or ask for a review of Mr. Brown's files. It did not seek any further information from Mr. Brown or anyone else. It simply held Mr. Brown, in violation of his constitutional rights and after he was entitled to release under state law, so that he could be picked up by ICE and deported from the country."

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office and ICE couldn't be bothered to comment on the case. They are probably too busy rounding up people born in Cleveland and shipping them off to Haiti.

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When Tod Kurt of ThingM recommended these reversible Micro USB cables, I bought a 3-pack on Amazon. They really do work. Both the USB male plug and the micro plug can be inserted without regard to the orientation, like a USB C plug. There is no "right side up."

Why aren't all USB cables made this way? Read the rest

Since 1991, Canadian sculptor Gillian Genser has used shells to make her artwork. The mussel shells she grinded released dust filled with heavy metals, which got into her body and poisoned her. Now she is permanently disabled. Let this serve as a warning to people who say natural materials are always better.

From Toronto Life:

The symptoms worsened. After a few hours of grinding mussel shells, I would become immobilized. My muscles ached. My hands would cramp when I held my tools. I became combative and fatalistic, declaring that my life was over. My husband was afraid to the leave the house, worried he’d come home and find me hanging from the chandelier. He found friends to babysit me. These symptoms continued, on and off, for 15 years.

One day in 2013, I cleaned out my ventilation system, which had trapped years of fine dust. As I swept out the particles, I suddenly felt weak and unable to stand. For the next week, I lay in bed, my mind in a fog. I couldn’t string full sentences together, and my speech was slurred. My whole body was in excruciating, paralyzing pain—my neck, abdomen, arms—and I had suddenly lost all hearing in my left ear.

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Oil and water don't normally mix, unless you emulsify it with something, like soap, egg yolk, or mustard. But there is a way to mix oil and water without using an emulsifier, and in this video, the Action Lab Man shows how to do it. The secret is to remove the dissolved air from water by using a vacuum chamber. This means you can use degassed water alone to remove grease from clothes. Read the rest

Raspberry Pi is a line of inexpensive ($5 - $35) single board Linux computers. The latest model is the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, which costs $25 and is quite a bit smaller than the 3 Model B+. This episode of ExplainingComputers takes a look at this new edition to family. Read the rest

Ryan Jewell is a professional watchmaker in New York. In this episode of Wired's Deconstructed series, Jewell (good last name for a watchmaker) takes apart two Carpenter watches, one with a Swiss movement (~$825) and one with a Japanese movement (~$595). It's interesting to see the different tools he uses to take the watches apart without damaging the tiny delicate components. Read the rest

It doesn't matter if you're an Onlie or a grup, these colorful textured plastic balls are fun to hold and squeeze. If moisture enters the small holes in the balls and results in black mold, they can be admired under a bell jar filled with an inert gas, preferably xenon. Read the rest

This marble run is at a playground called Monkey Town in the Netherlands. The creator says it has "4 tipping containers which can release up to 10,000 marbles in one go! If the biggest 2 containers (with 1000 and 10,000 marbles) are tipping at the same time, it creates a flood of 11,000 marbles!"

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Did you know that Rusty Blazenhoff, who writes for us here at Boing Boing, has a wonderful newsletter called Rusty's Electric Dreams? You can subscribe to it here. The current issue of the newsletter (which is guest edited by Doctor Popular) has a link to a hand-soldering guide from NASA. The photos are excellent. Here's the (large) PDF. Read the rest

Last year the New York Times ran Nazi sympathizer sympathizer article titled, A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland ("He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key..."). To make well-deserved fun of the Times, IntrepidFox produced a pitch perfect Times video parody, "A Voice of Hate on America's Internet," that sympathizes with Internet trolls. Read the rest

Here's how to open a Master Lock: 1) Buy an iPad. 2) Remove the iPad's stiff plastic protective wrapper. 3) Throw away the iPad. 4) Follow Bosnian Bill's instructions for making a lockpicking rake from the plastic wrapper.

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