Any California resident with current identification may obtain a Los Angeles Public Library card in moments.

After reading this fantastic list of benefits associated with an LA Library card I immediately pre-registered online. A few minutes later I walked into my local branch and the Librarian was very easily able to finish the process and hand me a card.

LAist:

Here are a few extra-awesome highlights:

Free or discounted admission to L.A. cultural institutions like The Broad, the Autry Museum of the American West, Kidspace Children's Museum and more. Most put a limit on how many free passes you can get per month or per year. In most cases, you must make a reservation and print out a pass to show when you arrive. Find a full list of participating places at the library's Discover & Go site.

The New York Times and The Washington Post: Free access to both newspapers' digital sites. The access only lasts 24 hours, but you can log back on immediately. If the logging in and out doesn't bother you, this is a serious money-saver.

Octavia Lab, a new space at the Central Library in DTLA that is full of all kinds of technology and gadgets to help users create. The lab is 3,000 square feet, and includes a 3D printing machine, virtual reality gear, a laser cutter, Final Cut Pro, Logic and much more.

Language learning apps, including the popular Mango. By entering your library card number and PIN, you can log in and start learning at no charge.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7nHXC2CQ-oU/getting-a-library-card-in-los.html

You've seriously gotta unmute this.

Donkeys must think the sound of these humans playing the violin sounds like other donkeys, because the donkeys in these videos appear to be really enjoying it.

Here's another video of the same situation with a totally different donkey, and completely different humans playing a different violin.

Cracks me up so hard every time. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/RcdK-_SoQ_E/donkey-tries-to-sing-along-to.html

Salt, bae.

There is only one proper way to salt the roads when the weather gets icy and it snows.

Source: @mickyo25 Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/qr2mKvj5vEw/when-the-road-gets-icy-you-kn.html

On this week's Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE's gulags, a failed, high-cost initiative to curb violence at Rikers Island that used falsified data to secure ongoing funding -- a company whose internal documents compare management consultants to "the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits" and whose government contracts bill out freshly hired, inexperienced junior consultants at $3m/year.

McKinsey has played a role in many of capitalism's greatest hits, from the Enron collapse to the Saudi purge of dissidents that culminated in the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Scahill speaks to a variety of guests about how McKinsey grew to a global, multibillion-dollar enabler of despots, crooks, and murderers, including the health insurance whistleblower Wendell Potter (previously), whose must-read Twitter thread on Mayor Pete's "Medicare for Some" proposal is brutal and brilliant.

Scahill also talks with Propublica's Ian MacDougall (previously, the lawyer/journalist whose coverage of McKinsey has put the firm on its back foot.

As a bonus, the opening audio montage for this week's episode is stellar, even by Intercepted's high standards: it mashes up Trump with Dr Seuss, to startlingly good effect.

Capitalism’s Consigliere: McKinsey’s Work for Insurance Companies, ICE, Drug Manufacturers, and Despots [Intercepted/The Intercept]' Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8-3jZIUHICg/spreadsheets-and-powerpoints.html

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/YtYBlQ0gicQ/tekashi-6ix9ine-sentenced-to-2.html

Set and setting, people.

A substitute teacher in Massachusetts shocked students and high school staff, authorities say, by lighting up some marijuana in class and inviting students to join in a discussion about cannabis.

The unnamed teacher was fired on Monday from their job at North Attleborough High School, after students reported the incident to adults, said Principal Peter Haviland.

He said the students who turned the teacher in showed maturity and courage, and that the experience was “unfortunate and unprecedented.”

“It was their quick decisions to report the concerns which allowed our school to immediately intervene and remove the individual who created the unsafe environment,” Haviland said in a statement shared with news reporters.

The teacher's name was not released, but they are banned from the school. Whether criminal charges will be filed is not yet clear.

“School administrators wouldn't go into detail about the amount of time the substitute has been working in the school system.”

Substitute teacher fired for allegedly smoking marijuana in classroom [turnto10.com]

[WJAR-TV via AP] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8A65teeuMgg/best-substitute-teacher-ever-f.html

Ah, Riverside, California. Don't ever change.

Police say a gentleman in Riverside stuffed no fewer than 30 bags of frozen shrimp down his pants in a series of thefts targeting a Southern California grocery store.

The total value of the theft is estimated at $500, but we're talking Vons shrimp here, so IDK.

Questions. I have them.

From AP:

The man took the shrimp from a Vons market in the city of Riverside by entering the store three times in a span of 15 minutes on Dec. 14.

Each time he went to the frozen food section and concealed the shrimp in his pants, Riverside police said in a statement.

The Riverside Police Department posted surveillance video on their Facebook page.

[screengrabs from facebook.com/RiversidePD video] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/KPK_rMk95F4/shrimp-pants.html

Last year, artist Jason Stieva completed work on "Leviathan – Ark of the Apocalypse," a spectacular, 7-foot-long, 8-foot-high sculpture of a ghostly pirate ship. Steiva is an assemblage sculptor and tattoo artist from Whitby, ON who spent 15 months on the ship, which is populated by a variety of readymade Warcraft miniatures and other findings.

He called it his "most daunting project" and it ended up with a tattoo customer (Stieva tattooed a ship on his chest) who is also an "avid collector."

Stieva's other work is equally spectacular.

Members of the That's Insane subreddit compared the ship to the CGI "ghost ship" from the opening credits of Black Sails and there are certainly some similarities, but Stieva's work is, if anything, far more impressive, both as an accomplishment and as a work of art.

“Overall it was the most daunting project I’ve ever worked on and will probably ever create,” he shares. “There is a lot of extremely tedious detail from front to back, top to bottom. Just severing the army heads alone and sanding the back of each to be certain they would sit flush once applied with tweezers took weeks. Sourcing all the characters took quite a while. Redesigning, taking apart, rebuilding, and making the ark structurally sound long before any sculpting began took quite a while.”

Artist Spends 15 Months Constructing Ghostly Pirate Ship With Ordinary Found Materials [Jessica Stewart/My Modern Met]

(via /r/ThatsInsane)

(Images: @shallowgravestudios/Jason Stieva)

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dJVmwTsWPo8/beyond-black-sails.html

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/muDQg6K1QtY/illinois-marijuana-dispensarie.html

With a couple of family members going on a long plane flight soon, I bought a couple of these wireless active-noise canceling headphones on sale for a really low price using code LBAKMMEL. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/D9KExj4XVzk/great-deal-on-noise-canceling.html

In this experiment, aluminum foil is spread out on the floor of a hallway. The only way for this cat to walk down the hallway is by walking on top of the foil, something cats are known to dislike. What will happen???

Image: YouTube

[via Neatorama] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7UK14tqCUQY/will-a-cat-walk-on-aluminum-fo.html

New Jersey's Democrat governor today signed legislation to clear the state criminal records of low-level marijuana offenders, and he approved restoring the voting rights of more than 80,000 convicts.

Phil Murphy's signature today amounts to another big step toward legalization, and a positive move to increase the number of 2020 voters -- notable, because right now, other GOP-controlled U.S. states are passing laws to restrict how many people have the right to vote.

The marijuana law signed Wednesday allows low-level convicts to petition for expungement so long as they have stayed free of criminal offenses for at least 10 years. The records of future minor offenders will be sealed upon the case’s disposition.

Another law signed Wednesday, to take effect in 90 days, will allow voting by more than 80,000 New Jerseyans who are on probation or parole. At least 16 states have similar laws, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

“Our administration is deeply committed to transforming our criminal justice system, and today we are taking a historic step to give residents impacted by that system a second chance,” Murphy, 62, said in a statement. He called the marijuana legislation “one of the most progressive expungement laws in the nation.”

More at Bloomberg: N.J. Lets Some Pot Convictions Go in Step Toward Legalization Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/yyO1psEKJtQ/nj-to-expunge-criminal-records.html

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the ninth and concluding episode of the Star Wars saga, opens this week. Critics are mauling it, by and large, leaving it with the worst average rating of the series: 54, according to review tracking-site Metacritic. Even Solo got a better reception.

Good news at Rotten Tomatoes, though. Star Wars: Phantom Menace beats it to the not-so-coveted worst spot.

In the spirit of avoiding spoilers, I'll just leave you with the BBC's conclusion: "The main feeling it instils in the viewer is a renewed respect for the imagination of Lucas" Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/avFVvDtnTMo/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalk.html

Stephen Colbert is my favorite Trump impressionist. He captures Trump's ever-present pouty whine perfectly Here he is giving a dramatic reading of Trump's six-page temper tantrum about his impeachment. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/9fkk3y0jekk/colbert-delivers-a-dramatic-re.html

Casey Neistat rode on the Etihad A380 The Residence, and made a video about it. The $27,000 ticket (which was comped) is basically a small apartment, which a private bathroom and shower (with a 10-minute meter, as if he was on Arrakis), a living room, and a private bedroom.

I like to imagine a rich person flying this way and being miserable because they can't afford a private jet. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/KKPQRIY2TcI/this-27000-airplane-seat.html

Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German hackers working for the Soviet Union, using his servers as a staging point to infiltrate US military networks.

The book is superbly written and fascinating, and it inspired a generation of cybersecurity practitioners (I referenced it in my 2008 novella The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away). Stoll himself is charming and curmudgeonly, the author of early tech-skeptic titles like 1995's Silicon Snake Oil, and he is the proprietor of the Acme Klein Bottle company, which sells the hand-blown Klein bottles (basically a Mobius Strip extruded into the third dimension) that he makes (he also makes ones you can drink out of, called "Klein Steins"). I've given Acme Klein Bottles to friends and family as gifts and they're always well-received.

I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Stoll this year at Atlseccon in Halifax, and he was every bit as funny and interesting in person as you could have asked for.

Writing in Wired, Andy Greenberg offers a candid, personal profile of Stoll at his home in Oakland, whose cellar is filled with boxes of Klein bottles that Stoll retrieves with a homemade robotic fork-lift.

Stoll's work in the Cuckoo's Egg affair presaged many of the common tools used by security pros today, like the ubiquitous "intrusion detection system," as well as "honeypots." Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/XG9BluV3YPo/cuckoos-egg.html

This is very sad. Kalley Heiligenthal is a popular worship singer who has over 200,000 followers on Instagram, according to the Daily Dot. She and her husband recently and tragically lost their baby daughter. Now the couple is asking for prayers to implore Jesus to bring their daughter back to life:

From Heiligenthal's Instagram:

We’re asking for prayer. We believe in a Jesus who died and conclusively defeated every grave, holding the keys to resurrection power. We need it for our little Olive Alayne, who stopped breathing yesterday and has been pronounced dead by doctors. We are asking for bold, unified prayers from the global church to stand with us in belief that He will raise this little girl back to life. Her time here is not done, and it is our time to believe boldly, and with confidence wield what King Jesus paid for

A fundraiser has been launched to help the familu with expenses. With a goal of $100,000, it has so far received almost $40,000. Many of the people who donated to the fund say they believe the girl will be brought back to life. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/MPfhX4EJEtA/christian-influencer-couple-wa.html

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/I9tQifs8Gcw/kathryn-spiers-i-was-fired.html

The historical excuse for pharma monopolists who conspired to rig prices on insulin was that hardly anyone paid full price -- everyone got their life-saving, non-optional medicine through health plans that negotiated a knock-down price.

That was the line between 2012 and 2016, as median per-patient insulin costs rose 99%, to $5,705/year.

But now prices are even higher -- and more and more people are paying full cost, as the monopolized health insurance sector has reduced benefits to insured people. The average insured person with diabetes is paying 60% more than they were in 2012 (and the rest of the increase is being borne by Medicare and employers).

People with diabetes are increasingly rationing their insulin, a practice that can be lethal.

Today, there are three insulin manufacturers: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. The manufacturers make the drug, set the price and negotiate with pharmacy benefit managers, the companies hired by health insurers to manage prescription-drug benefits for beneficiaries.

“It comes down to pure greed,” Patterson said. “They are lining their pockets. They are making a profit.”

When questioned about their costs, the insulin manufacturers told The Dispatch that the majority of patients don’t pay the list price for the drug.

'It comes down to pure greed': Insulin prices double, causing many people with diabetes to turn to extremes [Megan Henry/The Columbus Dispatch]

(via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Melissa Johnson , CC BY, modified) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/E-nqdcjuANw/shkrelism.html

When Gerry Cotten, founder of the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange, died mysteriously in India at the age of 30 he left behind an encrypted laptop with up to $250 million of customer deposits locked up on it. Without a password, those funds are irretrievable (at least until quantum supremacy becomes a real thing). Now, according to Ars Technica, those customers want proof Cotten is really dead -- and not sipping piscines on the deck of a yacht anchored in Gustavia Harbor -- by having his body exhumed and positively identified.

From the article:

Lawyers representing exchange clients on Friday asked Canadian law enforcement officials to exhume his body and conduct an autopsy "to confirm both its identity and the cause of death," the NYT said. The letter cited "the questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotten's death and the significant losses" suffered in the incident. The letter went on to ask that the exhumation and autopsy be completed no later than "spring of 2020, given decomposition concerns."

Quadriga didn't disclose Cotten's death until January 14, in a Facebook post, more than a month after it was said to have occurred. The QuadrigaCX platform went down on January 28, leaving users with no way to withdraw funds they had deposited with the exchange. Clients have taken to social media ever since to claim the death and loss of the password were staged in an attempt to abscond with their digital coin.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/2Gc0gM44qms/creditors-of-dead-cryptocurren.html