How to sing polyphonic overtones. A project for the weekend. // Potato toys. // Wooden watches. // Wooden cars. // Watch out for the switched-on kids. // Screenshot, 1983. // Chess set or choking hazard? // Balloon festivals. // I think it’s broken. // Northerners of yore. // New York’s feral cats. // An Arizona monsoon. // Screw the fish, admire the plants. // Swing riot. It’s the Sharks and the Jets all over again. // Dominoes of note. // Doorbell cam. // On the ageing of dogs. // Maximum dadliness. // “Atomic gardening” was a thing, apparently. // Passenger. // This. // And finally, I denounce the cultural appropriation.

202 people. 7,000 feet. 

Via Laughing Squid. 

The in-store music of K-Mart, 1989-1992. // Caffeinated peanut butter. // Build your own robot head. The wife will be thrilled. // Build your own overhead control panel. // On the crap that used to be advertised in 1970s comic books. // A museum of tiny film sets. // The hero’s journey. // Che or Hitler? // Los Angeles time-lapsed. // Leonard Nimoy reads The War of the Worlds (1976). // The lights of Moscow underground. // On greed. // How to skin a sex doll. // Arthur Conan Doyle’s favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. // On Stalin’s rise to power. Part 2. // Tree stump house, 1930s. // Enormous, very slow laundry-folding robot. // The Red Drum Getaway. // “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1.” // And why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 15. 

I’m heading out of town for the weekend, a long one, for a wedding, so I’m afraid you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links in the comments. Oh, come on. How hard can it be? I’ll set the ball rolling with these: a good deed of note, why you can never tune a piano, and a close encounter with some trees. 

Phone signal permitting, and festivities permitting, I may check in on you at some point. So play nicely. And don’t get any stains on the upholstery. 

Battleship probability calculator. // Cat eggs for breakfast. // Caffeinated shaving cream. // Cashless money box. // A brief history of modern art. // Nutcracker of note. // “How well do you know your toes?” // A global map of racial tolerance. // Enterprise-D VR headgear tour demo. Do the crew quarters have curtains? // Invisibility cloak. Hides particles, not people. // Raccoon earns her keep. // Donkey in a hammock. // Land’s End, from the makers of Monument Valley. // The lost tunnels of Liverpool. // Supersonic shock waves. // McDonald’s straws. // Speed chess. // Walther PPK rubber band gun. // Peek-a-boo fence. // Giant wooden megaphones “amplify the sounds of nature.” // And finally, cheerily, an interactive chart showing how many years you have left to live, probably.

In which I steer you to a fashion pictorial:

It was an era of football haute couture, representing a flamboyant and carefree culture, liberating itself from the dress of prior generations, and which reigned on university campuses across the country during the Jazz Age.

Full-length, pimp-style raccoon fur coats.

Via Ace. 

These guys are way more flexible than you. // Moroccan tree goats, obviously. // Top end kitchen knives made from molten meteorite. // A calendar of tiny dramas. // “It was designed to be an enjoyable ride.” // Only rub the underside. // Bias in social psychology. // Test your ear for pitch. // Candlestick. // “The global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate.” // Meanwhile, in exploding toilet news. //“No lumps, no waste, no mess.” // Lots of Lithuanian garage doors. // Designing hideous clothes is now even easier. // The Fallout Shelter Handbook, 1962. (h/t, Things) // The earliest known fuck. // And finally, as my dear old grey-haired gran used to say, “When walking past a monkey, don’t ever give it the finger.” 

The sounds made by a man playing with his nut sack. Lasts an hour. Headphones recommended. // The secret underground garage you’ve always wanted. // How to walk through walls. Do let me know how it goes. (h/t, Damian.) // Wood skins. // Books, stones and glass. // Bicycle-riding robot. // Taj Mahal made of balloons. // Hefty bells. // Free Hitchock. // Tea bag holder of note. // Bone conduction headphones. // Mozart, the hard way. // Smoke angel. // Earth View. // I think he’s being punished for not eating his vegetables. // BBC election coverage, 1955. // Hippie tree house village, 1969. Warning: hippie nudity. // The science of penis preference. // Fluid dynamics. // How to be James Bond. // And finally, via PegLeg, Yoko Ono performs the theme to The Good Life.

Marc Chacksfield steers us to this Guardian review of the film Legend, which the reviewer, Benjamin Lee, describes as “overflowing with bad dialogue,” “disappointingly shallow” and suffering from “a major lack of atmosphere and an overwhelming stench of inauthenticity.”

Oh dear.

However, as Mr Chacksfield points out, the film’s marketing team has done what it can with this somewhat unflattering two-star review.

Via Mr Eugenides. 

Mortified cow. (h/t, Damian) // Impromptu kitten rescue. // How to make squid piglets. // Ants encounter monolith. // When a first-stage engine nozzle lands in your living room. // Satlapse. // One scene, three Lecters. // Layers of paper. // That paper polygon gorilla head you’ve always wanted. // Thirteen-year-old boy is pleased to discover Portal-themed bedroom. // A short film about a ballet shoe factory. // Underwater belly rub. // Beatboxing saxophonist plays Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. // Motoring over Ben Nevis, 1911. // Drone versus ram. (h/t, Julia) // I see a straw monster. // Commuting sociably in the pre-smartphone era. // For the agoraphobic and antisocial, an app for avoiding crowds. // Gif of note. // And finally, tastily, a leech that feeds exclusively on hippo rectums.