Several readers have steered my attention to the new Fake Charities website. It’s a directory of consultants, lobby groups and quangos that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments, and thus from thee and me. One featured charity is Alcohol Concern, which, according to its 2007/08 accounts, received £515,000 from the Department of Health. It received just £4,991 in public donations. This dependence on state subsidy, as opposed to public donations, raises the question of just how independent such organisations are, and whether “charity” is the word we should be using.

Anna thinks some of you may be interested in a gallery of rolling papers and smoking paraphernalia, which includes products by Rizla, Abadie and numerous other brands.   

And, thanks to Candice, I’ve discovered a compendium of superpowers with somewhat limited applications. Among them: the ability to levitate the left side of your body, ultra short-range teleportation, and an imperviousness to helium. 

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

It’s been such a long time since we’ve had a noisy condom gag. Behold Superfad’s advert for Durex:

There are, of course, behind-the-scenes outtakes.

Related: Indecent balloons. I told you this place was classy.

I’m not sure how long this will remain available online, but here’s Suzie Templeton’s 2006 stop-motion retelling of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The detail, sets and character design are pretty marvellous and the film’s 29 minutes pass quickly. However, those of you familiar with the original story may raise an eyebrow at the reimagined ending, in which the wolf is released back into the wild – no doubt to resume his predatory ways – and the witless duck is presumably digested.

Part 1: 

Speaking of coffee, this morning I had my first cup of Kopi Luwak, which is, apparently, the most expensive coffee in the world. Around 500 kilos are produced each year and a standard 250g bag retails at around £20. Some enthusiasts have been known to fork out $50 for a single cup. What makes the coffee unusual, and ridiculously expensive, is its partial fermentation in the gut of the wild Indonesian civet cat or Luwak, which looks not unlike a raccoon.

In its post-cat, pre-retail phase, Kopi Luwak looks like this:

It isn’t entirely clear whether the coffee is indeed superior or just a masterful marketing gimmick, but Massimo Marcone, author of Composition and Properties of Indonesian Palm Civet Coffee and Ethiopian Civet Coffee, offers the following explanation:  

During the night, the civet uses its eyesight and smell to seek out and eat only the ripest coffee cherries. The coffee cherry fruit is completely digested by the Luwak, but the beans are excreted in their faeces. The changes in the beans show that during transit through the civet’s gastro-intestinal track, various digestive biochemicals are actually penetrating the outer coffee cherry and reaching the actual bean surface, where a chemical colour change takes place… The civet beans are lower in total protein, indicating that during digestion, proteins are being broken down and are also leached out of the bean. Since proteins are what make coffee bitter during the roasting process, the lower levels of proteins decrease the bitterness of Kopi Luwak coffee. When coffee cherries are processed through the digestive track, they actually undergo a type of wet processing due to acidification in the stomach and fermentation due to the natural intestinal microflora. Lactic acid bacteria are preferred in wet processing systems. Lactic acid bacteria happen to be major colonizing bacteria in the civet’s digestive track.

So how does it taste? Well, it’s rich and smooth and it does have a distinct hint of caramel. Quite pleasant, in fact, and thankfully without even a whiff of feline anus. Though once this bag has been consumed, I think I’ll revert to the sharper caffeine kick of Taylor’s Hot Lava Java. 

Absinthe lollipops. (h/t, Coudal) // Soap and coffee, together at last. // Nifty cup stacking. // Exercise wheel for dogs. // Behold the Emperor workstation. Because your buttocks deserve no less. // Car of tomorrow not quite what it seems. // Joe Shuster’s filthy secret. // A pencil that squeals. // All together now: “Death to, er…” // Bird sounds. // International pronunciation guide. // Visual dyslexia. (h/t, Things) // Assorted flash preloaders. // Rain-powered umbrella. // Docks de Paris. // Nosferatu. (1922) // The National Museum of Funeral History. // A whole heap of tilt-shift. // World’s largest piñata. // And, via The Thin Man, Valaida Snow gets primitive.