The Future is Now. (1955) “What do you wear to answer the phone?” // Leather masks. For balls, banquets or fighting crime. // Cautious Twins. (1959) And a town teeming with predators. // Zounds! Youth rock ministry. “The rocking power of awesome music. Totally radical salvation for today’s totally radical kids!” // Adam Gault’s Lantern Fishes. // RISE CD player. // Bang & Olufsen BeoLab-3 speakers. // The museum of retro technology. Monowheels, gyrocars and speaking tubes. // What to do if ET phones back. // Single atom data storage? (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Mandelbot. Self-assembly paper robot. Fold and glue for quality time. // Hod Lipson on self-aware robots. // Perry de Havilland on self-ownership and the state. // Carolyn Porco on Saturn and its moons. // Mel Blanc on David Letterman. (1981) // The Wii light sabre. // In case you missed it, bizarro Star Wars. // Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. A sentimental journey with strange intonation. // 5000 years of religion in 90 seconds. (h/t, BoingBoing.) // Uniqlock. Slightly baffling global timepiece. // Via Coudal, the world directory of pasta shapes. // Something pointless and hugely irritating. // Berkeley’s “anti-war” crowd postures outside marine recruitment centre. Captain Richard Lund replies. // And finally, hepcats, it’s Dizzy.

A short film by Luis Nieto. If you laugh at this you’re a very bad person.

More.

Eggs with decorative holes. Made with a very small electric drill. (H/T, Coudal.) // One man, one parachute, one very large catapult. (H/T, The Thin Man.) // Shaft soundtrack rehearsal. // Oh. Dear. Lord. // Cigarettes and magic. // Green movement demands greatest sacrifice yet. “Even among very green households the family cloth creates controversy.” // George Monbiot bemoans jet skis and diamond saucepans; prays for recession in the interests of equality. // Chinese cave dwelling. “It’s a matter of tradition and sheer common sense.” (H/T, Chastity Darling.) // Population density as art. London, Cairo, Mexico City. People per square kilometre. // Good news, everyone. Che Guevara still dead. // Fabian Tassano on Terry Eagleton. // Mick Hartley on Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth and the staggering bollocks written about it. “An artwork that provokes us to question the very foundations of our ways of thought.” Or maybe not. // Via 1+1=3, old signs exposed. // An abundance of nudity. // How to iron a shirt. // Via Coudal, how to cook lasagne in a dishwasher. // “Few critters make for better eating than feral hog.” (H/T, Maggie’s Farm.) // The social lives of baboons. “Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behaviour of women in so many 19th-century novels.” // Synthetic genomics. “The successful completion of this research will allow us to realize the ultimate goal of creating a synthetic organism.” // Custom creature taxidermy. Winged kitten, vampire squirrel, two-headed rat. // Greyhounds doped with cocaine. (H/T, Metrolander.) // Cross-dressing cartoon rabbit. (H/T, Savage Popcorn.) // Bloody Cartoons. // Artist has third ear grafted on forearm. “He hopes to have a microphone implanted to allow others to listen to what his extra ear picks up.” (H/T, Dr Westerhaus.) // This is Tengu! // And, via The Thin Man, this is Vera.

How to deal with telemarketing calls. (H/T, Dr Westerhaus.) // Reposted by request: BT courtesy call goes horribly, horribly wrong. “Do you comprehend?” // Faces in places. // BBC TV idents. From the Fifties to the modern day. // Further to this, behold the future of re-entry. In emergencies. // Running countdown to fictional future events. Some overdue. (H/T, Grow-a-brain.) // World freedom atlas. Scan the world for freedom of expression, freedom of belief and individual rights. // Robert Spencer casts a critical eye over the “Islam is peace” PR campaign. // What does ‘jihad’ mean? “The 199 references in the most standard collection of Hadith all assume that jihad means warfare.” // The pearl of Allah. // Islamic comic book heroes. “Questions have been raised about the clothing the heroes wear.” // Nuns disagree. Things turn ugly. // A gallery of ejector seats. // How missiles work. // Exchanging Greetings and Introductions. (1960) How Earthlings greet. // Kavel Rafferty’s vintage record sleeves. (H/T, Coudal.) // Lava lamp packaging. The classic Century 102. // The American Package Museum. Gum, cocoa. tinned marshmallows. // The Birotron. Retro-electronica. It didn’t catch on. More. // Via Grow-a-brain, the, um, magnificent Belinda Bedeković. Video. Warning: it seems not to end. // And, via The Thin Man, Kathy Kirby gets groovy and bombastic.

Government clamps down firmly on a growing problem. (H/T, Mick Hartley.) // The Supreme Instruments Corporation. Imposing gadgets of a bygone age. (H/T, The Cartoonist.) // The thrill of electromechanical relays. (H/T, Coudal.) // French vision of the future. (1910) Automated ablutions, flying policemen, the warm glow of radium. // Stephen Petranek ponders the end of the world (and how to avoid it). Boredom, solar flares, scientific mishaps. // Filaments of space-time. Large scale density simulations. Very large scale. (H/T, Pruned.) // The Mystery of Time. (1957) // Great big holes. // Devil’s Kitchen on the wisdom of Harriet Harman. // Camille Paglia on scholarship, dogma and semen. // “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems.” // Ten years of Encounter magazine. (H/T, Dr Dawg.) // “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.” No homosexuality, no Holocaust, no plans for nuclear weapons. Related. // The two faces of Al Qaeda. // Dalrymple on Islam as modern day Marxism. From Baader-Meinhof to Caliphate fantasies. // Death and probability. Lightning, earthquakes, bee stings. (H/T, Grow-a-brain.) // Biography of a Bee. (1965) // Via Coudal, the sci-fi paper model gallery. Parts and blueprints. Colour printer required. // Make your very own David Hasselhoff. Comes with microphone, choice of heads and removable chest hair carpet. // Tim Rudder’s photos of Tokyo. More. // 1966 Hulk cartoon. Toad men, tremors, theme tune from hell. // Missile base for sale. 57 acres, own silos. $1.5 million. // Tree houses. // Hey kids, it’s the magic wheel. “New cool urban product!” // Or, try Oryx. “It’s from the future.” // Johnny has his own psychobilly mo-chine.