“What do you do with an old Texas rodeo cowboy when he marries a Jersey girl, he’s up in Jersey, and he has no place to keep a horse in Cranford? You make a mechanical horse!”

Steve Bacque, aka the Crazy Cranford Cowboy, is that Texan and he did indeed make himself an electric horse. Four golf cart batteries power his not-street-legal e-horse, which he calls "Charger."

According to NJ.com,

Charger can do up to 40 miles per hour (though he has a governor to rein him in to about 15 miles per hour) and can handle up to 600 pounds. Charger even has a wheelie bar in the back, which is “not just for show,” Bacque warns. Yes, this motorized horse can pop a (small) wheelie.

Charger turns left and right with the reins and even brakes when you pull back on them. A key turns him on, and a gas pedal sets him in motion.

Bacque first caught attention in town when he rode up on Charger to his bank's drive-thru window:

When Mindy Weiss Affronti pulled up to the bank drive-thru two weeks ago and saw a man atop a robotic horse at the teller window, she did a double take.

Then she took his picture.

The friendly cowboy smiled, happy to oblige, before riding off. Left in the stupor of what she had seen, Affronti did what any other rational person would do: She posted the photo on social media...

After Affronti shared her photo and a video in a neighborhood Facebook group, there were others.

Read the rest

This is one of those genius "I can't believe this hasn't been done already" kind of things.

An architect from Indiana has photoshopped recognizable modernist homes into the overly sentimental, idyllic world of a Thomas Kinkade painting, making for a funny mashup series.

It all started with this tweet from another architect, Donna Sink, where she instigates, "Does anyone do paintings of Modern buildings in the style of Thomas Kincade?"

Does anyone do paintings of Modern buildings in the style of Thomas Kincade?

— Donna Sink, Architect (@DonnaSinkArch) August 18, 2018

Indianapolis-based @robyniko answered her call, writing, "I'm in. Let's start off easy with one of Kahn's beautiful boxes (eg the Fisher house)..."

Then he worked on others, like the Eames house (the wishing well is a nice touch!):

Then someone requested he do architect Philip Johnson's historic Glass House next. He calls his creation "Philip Johnson's Glass Cottage," (emphasis mine) a nod to Kinkade's use of cottages in his paintings:

On this one, he writes, "Ok i really have to stop now. Merry Corbsmas:"

But he didn't stop. He then tackled the Farnsworth House (which I included as the lead image above).

A couple days later he was still at it. On this one, he writes, "Pack your bags for a rocky seaside getaway at the Gehryhaus! You'll love the *squints at copy* homey chain link fence & softly weathered *checks notes* corrugated steel siding while you eat a homemade breakfast in the soft glow of the *deep sigh* aggressively geometric sun room."

You can follow how it all went down in this thread:

Starting a thread of my Thomas Kinkade + Modernism mashups:

— the "schtick" haver (@robyniko) August 19, 2018

(ArchPaper)

images via @robyniko, used with permission Read the rest

Moses Lanham holds the Guinness World Record for "Fastest time to walk 20 m with feet facing backwards." He is known as "Mr. Elastic Man."

"Contortionist Shows How He Can Walk Forward With His Feet Turned Completely Backwards" (Laughing Squid)

Read the rest

What would you say to someone if you were randomly connected to them by phone and had the opportunity to roleplay as their boss? A fun new app allows you to play the Michael Scott, Bill Lumbergh, or whatever boss of your dreams, and help them get stuff done too.

Yesterday I sat down for lunch in San Francisco with Danielle Baskin, the app's co-founder. A mutual friend had recently introduced us in an email, using the subject line, "Rusty / Danielle - I can't believe you two DON'T know each other."

Our conversation was lively and ended up being nearly three hours long. As I sat there chatting with her, I totally got why our mutual friend wanted us to meet. Danielle is a rabid creator of many weird and wonderful things, a true Happy Mutant. (You may remember her Drone Sweaters, for instance, or from her interview last month on the Cool Tools podcast.)

She's got all kinds of neat irons in the fire and many of them seem to teeter on that line between art and something that is actually useful. Her latest project rides that line. It's a collaboration with programmer Max Hawkins and it started blowing up on Product Hunt this week. It's called Your Boss and she describes it as "an app that connects people working on solo projects in a call-based accountability buddy system."

She writes:

My co-founder and I are entrepreneurs and freelancers with many projects. We made an app to automate phone calls between us to keep ourselves on track, because we often work alone (without a boss).

Read the rest

To stave off the cold and boredom of waiting at the train station, Dutch design student George Barratt-Jones made a pedal-powered knitting machine that can whip up a neck scarf in five minutes flat. He writes, "[It] gets you warm by moving, you are making something while you wait and in the end you are left with a free scarf! That you can decide to keep yourself or give to someone who needs it more."

Check out his design notes and photos here:

Cyclo Knitter by George Barratt-Jones

(Colossal) Read the rest

Last Wednesday, soccer champion, equal pay/LGBTQ activist, and badass extraordinaire Abby Wambach delivered the keynote for Barnard College, an all-women's liberal arts college in Manhattan. She shared with the graduating class, who she deemed the "Wolf Pack," the four rules she used to unite her own soccer team "pack," the team which went on to win Olympic gold.

Here's the first rule, "MAKE FAILURE YOUR FUEL":

Here’s something the best athletes understand, but seems like a hard concept for non-athletes to grasp. Non-athletes don’t know what to do with the gift of failure. So they hide it, pretend it never happened, reject it outright—and they end up wasting it.

Listen: Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it's something to be POWERED by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.

When I was on the Youth National Team, only dreaming of playing alongside Mia Hamm. You know her? Good. I had the opportunity to visit the National Team’s locker room. The thing that struck me most wasn’t my heroes' grass-stained cleats or their names and numbers hanging above their lockers—it was a picture. It was a picture that someone had taped next to the door so that It would be the last thing every player saw before she headed out to the training pitch.

You might guess it was a picture of their last big win, of them standing on a podium accepting gold medals—but it wasn’t.

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I met Seattle artist Marcia Wiley through my inbox zine a couple months ago. I had written about the idea of the "positive deviant," basically someone who strays from the norm but brings value rather than pain (akin to the "happy mutant"). The concept really resonated with me and I asked readers to send along names of positive deviants who they were aware of because I wanted to start a list. Marcia rightly offered up her own name, and, in our most recent communication, she shared a project of hers with me: "Miss Direction's Ride Service."

Since 2005, she has been bringing unexpected delight to strangers in a really fun way. Dressed in her alter ego "Miss Direction" driving outfit (below), she gives people waiting at bus stops a free ride to their destination in her Honda SUV. In exchange for the complimentary pickup, passengers share their story with her. It's been a great success.

Now she's looking to start "Miss Direction's Checker Cab Service." A 1967 Checker Cab has already surfaced for the job, but it needs some restoration work before she can take it to the streets. So, she's started a Kickstarter campaign to fund her dream of bringing "everyday magic" to Seattle, a place, she writes, "that is changing so rapidly that people often feel a loss of connection and have a sense that the city is losing its soul and becoming less unique."

This is her vow:

I'm committed to having Miss Direction’s ’67 Marathon Checker Cab on the road by November 11, 2018.

Read the rest

Stephen King once wrote that "a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger" -- that is, sudden, pleasant, mysterious, dangerous and exiting, and the collected short fiction of Jo Walton, contained between covers in the newly published Starlings, is exemplary of the principle. Walton, after all, is one of science fiction's major talents, and despite her protests that she "doesn't really know how to write stories," all the evidence is to the contrary.

MythBusters' Adam Savage whipped up a perfect replica of Chewbacca's bandolier and satchel. Read the rest

L.A.’s infamous Chateau Marmont was the brainchild of famed attorney Fred Horowitz, who built it after returning from a vacation in Europe, where he’d been photographing the gothic castles and chateaus along the Loire Valley River in France. In 1929, The Chateau Marmont opened its doors to the Hollywood elite, billed as “Los Angeles’s newest, finest and most exclusive apartment house superbly situated…” (Google the rest.)

The Chateau was never meant to become a playground for the modern day self-proclaimed Hollywood Antidisestablishmentarianist, otherwise known as Beverly Hills kids with Los Feliz attitudes (which is irony in itself, as Los Feliz has now become the city of lost feelings where the average go to be uniquely average). If I hear one more malnourished, vapid ‘It girl’ say, “Oh my God let’s go to the Chateau! Their Bolognese is like sooooooo good!”, I’m going to poke my fucking eyeballs out with the pointless pen they have tucked behind their ear in hopes that it will provoke someone into asking them if they are a writer. So let me break this down for you.

First of all, the Bolognese is shit. Mediocre at best.

Second, judging form the slender physiques of their patrons, frequent trips to the bathroom, white creamy shit in the corner of their mouths, and their inability to shut the fuck up…NO ONE IS GOING THERE TO EAT!

Third, and finally, the Chateau Marmont is where douchebags go when they need to fill their social inadequacies.

As I write this I am actually at the Chateau wondering, “Am I an L.A. Read the rest

Developed by an 8-year-old maker named Omkar, the O Watch is a 3D printable, programmable, smart watch kit for kids. Omkar has launched a Kickstarter to scale up the O Watch so other kids can use the platform "to learn programming, 3D printing and crafts." Support it! Read the rest

Nathan Pryor (HaHaBird) made this fantastic life-sized illuminated Minecraft block for his son's birthday. It's lit with RGB LEDs so the color can be changed via remote control. Read the rest

Just like Boing Boing, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. To celebrate, I wrote an essay titled "World Wide Weird." It's part of the "The Webby 25 for 25," a series of pieces presented by The Webby Awards, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the World Wide Web Foundation. From my essay:

I’m a collector of unpopular culture.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been attracted to the fringes of art, literature, music, science, and technology. I grew up hanging around alternative record stores, dialing into underground Bulletin Board Systems, trading photocopied ‘zines, scouring used book stores, watching third-generation dupes of psychotronic films, and researching anomalous phenomena at the local library. I am most at home on the fringes of thought, reason, and expression. I delight in the serendipity and synchronicities that reveal themselves during my expeditions into the outré.

The Web amplified my appetite and became a compass on my journeys into high weirdness. Indeed, I saw it as the ultimate card catalog of curiosities.

"The World Wide Weird" Read the rest

UPDATE: Looks like this was probably an April Fools joke! Bummer, great idea anyway!

San Francisco's MUNI system operates electric buses that draw power from overhead wires. A fellow named Jon has brilliantly hacked his Prius with a trolley pole to sip power from the same overhead lines. Sierra Hartman has the story over at The Bold Italic. (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!) Read the rest

Jeff Highsmith made a fantastic "Mission Control Desk" for his young son who has just started school. It's hidden under a regular desktop. Read the rest

K'Nex master Austron is constrcting the world's largest K'Nex ball machine. It's located at Bloomington, Minnesota's The Works museum. Austron says:

The machine stands 23.5 feet tall and 40 feet long, and contains over 100,000 pieces. It has 2 lifts, 3 motors, and 8 paths, including a 20 foot free-fall, an 8 foot tall big-ball-factory spiral, and a 60 foot long path which hangs from the ceiling. It takes 3 and a half minutes for a ball to climb to the top of the tallest tower.

"World's Largest K'nex Ball Machine - Teaser" (via Smithsonian) Read the rest

The Doggie Diner heads, icons of San Francisco's underground culture, are in desperate need of restoration. For twenty years, John Law -- pictured above with the Boing Boing crew and Adam Savage -- has cared for these lovely puppies that are now pushing 50. He and his co-conspirators have tirelessly driven them around the region to the overwhelming delight of young and old. For free. John is now seeking donations to restore them to their former glory. Please support the Doggie Diner Makeover at Kickstarter if you can! Here's what John has to say: Read the rest