"America's #1 lubricant brand" K-Y has a new look. Intentionally designed to represent a vulva, the brand's new logo is described as follows by its creator, Design Bridge New York:

A strong symbol of female sexual power was placed right at the heart of the new brand identity – the ruby. Framed perfectly by the newly crafted K & Y, the ruby is a celebration of the vulva and a symbol of uncompromising passion and enjoyment. This new, unapologetic distinctive asset transforms across touchpoints to talk to the different forms of sexual pleasure that the brand wants to encourage.

Claire Parker, Executive Creative Director at Design Bridge New York, explained, “We’ve unleashed a distinctive brand asset that was always there, it just never had any strength or purpose. By making it intentional, we’ve loaded it with meaning and brought a sensuality and confidence to the brand that was lacking before. An enormous step for a brand that was previously at best asexual, at worst clinical.”

The Design Bridge team came up with the simple yet powerful creative idea of “Let’s talk about sex”, and were inspired by the brand’s curious and sensual, yet uncompromising and expert new personality. With the vulva now so clearly celebrated at the heart of the brand, the surrounding brand world and assets were developed to further normalize female pleasure and build confidence between the sheets.

On pack, bespoke typography and iconography bring this creative idea and personality to life through playful, conversational messaging about each product, which in turn helps women to find the right product for them.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/vulva-emphasized-in-new-k-y-lu.html

The Social Network. X-Men Origins: Wolverine. 300. No Country for Old Men.

Other than the fact that these were all giant movies with either massive critical or box office appeal, these films don’t appear to have a lot in common on the surface.

But once you scratch that surface, you’ll find that all four, as well as hundreds of other major motion pictures, were entirely cut and edited using Final Cut Pro. In fact, two of those films actually received Academy Awards for their editing work (we’ll let you try to figure out which ones).

Final Cut Pro has been and remains a Hollywood staple for everyone from students to award-winning professionals. Now, we don’t expect you to win an Oscar for your work, but The Complete Final Cut Pro X Course - Beginner to Intermediate can give even first-time editors the experience needed to use this vastly power software to its ultimate potential.

The training starts from the absolute beginning as new editors get familiar with importing footage, timelines, hotkeys, and all the basics to start assembling a video. However, it won’t take long before new users are skilled enough to start adding transitions, basic visual effects, music and a host of other artistic touches to start making your film look and feel like a professional production.

From there, learners can begin to really elevate their game, using some of the same advanced Final Cut Pro X functions that those multi-million dollar blockbusters use. Training in color grading, exposures, masks and even how to build your own key-frame animation can help you replicate virtually any tone you want to create for your video. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/learn-how-to-master-final-cut.html

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning attempted suicide while in jail today, say her lawyers. She is recovering in a hospital

From Axios:

Manning is still scheduled to appear on Friday for a previously calendared hearing, her lawyers said. "Judge Anthony Trenga will rule on a motion to terminate the civil contempt sanctions stemming from her May 2019 refusal to give testimony before a grand jury investigating the publication of her 2010 disclosures," [the statement] added. "In spite of those sanctions — which have so far included over a year of so-called 'coercive' incarceration and nearly half a million dollars in threatened fines — she remains unwavering in her refusal to participate in a secret grand jury process that she sees as highly susceptible to abuse. ... Ms. Manning has previously indicated that she will not betray her principles, even at risk of grave harm to herself."

After serving seven years in prison for providing documents to Wikileaks, Manning was released in 2017 by then President Obama. In May she was jailed again for refusing to comply with a grand jury subpoena. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/u-s-army-whistleblower-chelse.html

Frissons and solid information about coronavirus at the same time. What more could you ask for? Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/enjoy-this-asmr-video-testin.html

The fellers who posted this video wrote: "The 4 wheeler was rolled over the day previous and the steering shaft had bent. In the video, we were trying to straighten the steering shaft by pulling it straight with the tree. The throttle ended up sticking and the steering shaft bent a little too far..."

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/an-attempt-was-made-to-fix-a-b.html

If you think it is possible for consecrated bread or wine to give you an infectious disease, you are a blasphemer, according to the Church of Cyprus, which issued the following announcement:

"Regarding the offering of the Holy Communion, the position of the Church is known. The Holy Communion does not symbolize but it is the Body and Blood of Christ. It would be blasphemous to think that Christ’s Body and Blood could transmit any disease or virus."

That settles the matter!

[via Orthodox Times] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/church-of-cypress-says-it-is-i.html

Manisha Bharade (47) of New Jersey was arrested this week on charges of endangering the welfare of a child and deceptive business practices. Bharade, owner of a 7-Eleven, is accused of selling a homemade spray sanitizer  from her convenience store that caused skin burns on four children who used her product.

From RLS Media:

The ensuing investigation revealed that Bharade had mixed commercially available foaming sanitizer, which was not meant for resale, with water and packaged it in aftermarket bottles to be sold at the 7-Eleven on Rivervale Road.

An apparent chemical reaction from the mixture caused the burns. Fourteen bottles in total were sold at the 7- 11.Police say five bottles were turned over to the River Vale Police Department and nine bottles are unaccounted for at this time.

Further analysis will be performed to determine the exact make-up of the chemical mixture.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/owner-of-a-7-eleven-arrested-f.html

Spotify and Warner Bros are in trouble over ads for It: Chapter Two that played between songs on a childrens' lullaby playlist curated by the streaming audio company.

The advert for the film It: Chapter Two featured the voice of killer clown Pennywise talking and giggling over scary music. ... "For 27 years, I dreamt of you. I craved you. Oh, I missed you," he says, before a siren, drums and other discordant sound effects are played.

The regulator said that it believed this was likely to distress young audiences.

The BBC reports that Spotify claimed that the playlist wasn't for children, despite including "Children's Music", music "For Children" and "English Nursery Tunes". Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/spotify-ran-ads-for-evil-clown.html

Another day, another data breach affecting thousands, another giant international company apologizing and wondering publicly about what went wrong with their cybersecurity.

The latest victim: Virgin Media, who saw someone illegally access user information for about 900,000 Virgin customers. There was no evidence of hacking or compromised financial information here, but every company fears to leave vital customer data vulnerable to theft.

Cybersecurity experts make six-figure salaries for a reason. They are the front line and best defense against the ultimate betrayal of customer loyalty and they’re paid handsomely for their talents. You can start constructing your own career in IT protection with The Cybersecurity Expert Certification Training Bundle. 

This collection of four prep courses is training with a purpose. Across almost four dozen lectures, this training in all aspects of cybersecurity and web-connected systems is geared toward earning you five prime IT security certifications. Those qualifications can be a major resume item to help get you employed as a well-paid cyber defense expert.

Your certification training starts with the responsibilities of a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), entrusted with monitoring and guiding enterprise IT and doing effective security audits to guarantee a well-protected network.

Meanwhile, Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) training elevates those skills as you dig deeper into the management, design, and oversight of an entire interconnected IT system. Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification covers all areas of IT security, while the PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP) training hones in on identifying and eliminating project risk. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/get-over-100-hours-of-expert-c.html

The tiny skull, about the size of a thumbnail, trapped in amber may belong to the smallest dinosaur scientists have ever discovered. Paleontologist Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences spotted the skull in a 99-million-year-old chunk of amber from northern Myanmar. From the New York Times:

[Xing, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor, and their colleagues] called the bird Oculudentavis khaungraae — a name that comes from the Latin words for eye, teeth and bird. The dinosaur’s skull is only 14.25 millimeters, or a little more than half an inch, from its beak to the end of its skull. The animal had bulbous eyes that looked out from the sides of its head, rather than straight ahead like the eyes of an owl or a human.

“We were able to show that this skull is even smaller than that of a bee hummingbird, which is the smallest dinosaur of all time — also the smallest bird,” O’Connor said. “This is a tiny skull, and it’s just preserved absolutely pristinely"....

Most scientists now believe that birds are theropods, dinosaurs of a group that included tyrannosaurus and spinosaurus, but that birds were on their own evolutionary branch from a common ancestor. Paleontologists have long assumed that as birds evolved away from other dinosaurs, having teeth was a trait that was in the process of disappearing altogether. “But this specimen strongly shows that evolution’s really going in all different directions,” Dr. O’Connor said.

More at Nature: "Tiny bird fossil might be the world’s smallest dinosaur"

image: Lida Xing Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/this-tiny-skull-trapped-in-amb.html

Washington College anthropologist Bill Schindler who specializes in "primitive technologies":

"Even though you may never find yourself in a survival situation, I firmly believe that learning and practicing these primitive skills are an essential part of connecting to your past, your environment, and everything it means to be human."

(Wired) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/how-to-start-a-fire-with-your.html

With unfortunate frequency, elderly patients go to the hospital for a surgery or other treatment and quickly become confused, bewildered, and sometimes agitated or totally disoriented. This is called delirium and while it apparently affects between 10 and 50 percent of patients over 65, it's only recently been studied in depth. Sharon K. Inouye, director of Harvard's Aging Brain Center, is leading the charge to understand delirium, its impact on patients' longterm cognitive faculties, and how to prevent it. From Scientific American:

[Delirium] is the phenomenon, sadly familiar to many families, of Grandpa never being quite the same after an operation...

The consequences of delirium, if it lasts more than a few days and especially if it is followed by cognitive decline, are enormous. “It’s a house of cards,” Inouye says. “Patients start getting treated with medications for agitation or disruptive behavior, and those medications lead to complications. Or they are very sedated, and that leads to complications.” Delirious patients may choke on their food or pills and die of aspiration pneumonia. They may wind up in bed for long periods and suffer fatal blood clots. Once up, they are prone to falling. It’s a downward spiral and a costly one. Delirium adds more than $183 billion a year to U.S. health care costs, outstripping congestive heart failure.

Fortunately, basic steps can be taken to prevent delirium or shorten its course, such as making sure the patient is well hydrated, has access to eyeglasses and hearing aids if he or she uses them, gets out of bed and walks as soon as possible, has adequate sleep, and is socially engaged by hospital staff and loved ones.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/delirium-is-real-and-a-huge-ri.html

Every so often I have to return to this wonderful performance of the Chairman of the Bored on the 4/24/1979 episode of Old Grey Whistle Test. The band (Iggy, Scott Thurston, Glen Matlock, Jackie Clark, Klaus Kruger) played four tracks that night: The Fortune Teller, New Values, I'm Bored, and I Wanna Be Your Dog.

An iconic Iggy moment with an amazing band line-up from the New Values period.

Bonus track: Here's Iggy last week, doing a tribute duet to Serge Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin (Gainsbourg's former collaborator and partner) on The Tonight Show. What can we say, the man has serious staying power and range.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/iggy-pop-on-the-old-grey-whist.html

Donald Trump loves to test the waters about abolishing Presidential term limits. As much as he might fantasize about becoming dictator-in-chief, it would take a lot to actually make it happen, so I wouldn't hold my breath worrying about it.

That being said, Vladimir Putin just found a sneaky way to lock himself into power until at least 2036: tacking a rider onto another, humongous bill, just hours before the Parliament votes on it.

In the past, Mr. Putin proceeded cautiously, seeking to preserve a veneer of legitimacy. Confronting term limits in 2008, Mr. Putin opted for a four-year hiatus as prime minister while his prot'eg'e, Dmitri A. Medvedev, became the caretaker president.

In January he proposed some nebulous constitutional changes that analysts said pointed to his intention to stay beyond the end of his current term.

But with his proposal on Tuesday, Mr. Putin seemed to prefer something bolder, saying he supported the legislation for the good of the country. The president is the guarantor “of the security of our state, of its internal stability — its internal, evolutionary stability,” Mr. Putin said. “And I mean evolutionary. We’ve had enough revolutions.”

[…]

“No one is saying” Mr. Putin will run again in 2024, one lawmaker, Aleksandr Khinshtein, said in a televised interview. “But the possibility of doing so must exist for the head of state in order to maintain stability in society.”

I guess bad faith arguments for implausible deniability are totally fine when your country is run for decades by a famously guileful spymaster. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/putin-just-demonstrated-how-a.html

In this video, posted by Kentfield Kennels Labrador Retrievers, a number of puppies are observed to coalesce within a single medium-sized bucket.

Though it appears the puppies are becoming more organized over time, the outcome in fact reflects the lowest energy state for the puppies. If too much energy (flops, boops, snoots, mlems) were introduced to the local system, the puppies would continue to bounce around randomly. Their coming to rest in parallel and orthogonal repose within the bucket, though apparently a complex and ordered result, in fact represents increased entropy within the available thermodynamic envelope and its approach to a maximum value at equilibrium.

PREVIOUSLY: How to organize nails. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/puppies-in-a-bucket.html

Not for much longer, sure, but here's a map of American counties whose residents enjoy a life expectancy of more than eighty years. It was drafted by Spooderman89 on Reddit using mapchart.com.

I believe the only states with not a single long-lived county are Mississippi and Delaware. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/u-s-counties-with-a-life-expe.html

As part of the content for "Ordinary Man," Ozzy Obsourne's most recent record (released January 21, 2020), last night saw the release of this video for the title track. It features Osbourne sitting in a home theater watching a biographical video of his life flashing before him. And we watch Ozzy reacting.

The video is unflinching, showing the good, the bad, and the ugly of Osbourne's life and career. We see images of his Birmingham boyhood, lots of Sabbath and solo career stage and publicity shots, moments of sadness (The Osbournes reality TV lows), tragedy and death (band members' plane crash), and out-of-control drinking and drugging. Throughout, Ozzy watches. And smiles, grimaces, smirks, and cries.

It's hard not to listen to this song, and watch this video, and not think of Bowie's "Where Are We Now?" from The Next Day and Johnny Cash's "Hurt" video. "Ordinary Man" (the song and video) definitely has that life-arc swan song quality to it. As one YouTube viewer commented, this video is us watching Ozzy reacting to something that might be played at his own funeral. Some might find this morose. I found it moving and sweet. YMMV.

The track "Ordinary Man" features Elton John on piano and vocals and Slash on guitar. Guns & Roses bassist, Duff McKagan, plays throughout the record and co-wrote many of its songs.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/ozzy-osbourne-releases-touchin.html

HD. 4K. LED. Smart sets. It really is a new age for those in the market for a new TV. I mean, could you even have imagined you could affordably bring home a screen over seven feet across even just a few years ago? No, you were probably too busy trying to eke a few more years out of that 24-incher with the rabbit ears.

Well then, it’s well past time to step up your game. And the good news is with all the competition in the TV market, you can buy some truly stellar TV models loaded with cool features at a lot less than you’d probably think. On top of that, we’ve also pulled together five TVs with discounts from $40 to $850.

Clear off the entire living room wall, because this behemoth is truly massive. Despite this 86-inch monster screen offering a movie theater-esque experience in your home, it’s actually less than 4 inches thick. With 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) and HDR support, you’ll get epic picture quality here. It’s also sporting LG’s own AI ThinQ system with built-in Google Assistant, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa features, so you can also use your voice to control compatible smart home devices.

Meanwhile, VIZIO has four models on sale, all sized to fit your space with each offering full HD and 4K resolution.

First, both the 75-inch and 60-inch VIZIO SmartCast E-Series Ultra HDR Home Theater Display come equipped with VIZIO’s SmartCast system, which allows you to browse and launch top apps like Netflix and Hulu right off your big screen so you’ll never be at a loss for something to watch. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/these-lg-and-vizio-tvs-will-ch.html

The Second Amendment is perhaps the most controversial part of the U.S. Bill of Rights. But that's not just because of our grander cultural debate around gun rights and gun violence — it's 'cause the damn thing is such a grammatical clusterfuck.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

27 words in 4 dependent clauses with no clear anything to link them. It's not clear if the thing that shall not be infringed is the well-regulated militia, or the right of the people to keep and bear arms, or if it's all dependent upon what is or is not necessary to the security of a free State. And anyone can make any one of those arguments, and have evidence to back it up that can't be definitively refuted, either.

Over at The Atlantic, James C. Phillips, a Fellow with the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University, and Josh Blackman, a Constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, discuss a novel approach to figuring out what, exactly, the Founding Fathers were actually trying to say: by creating and scanning through a massive database full of more than a billion words culled from formal American and British texts from 1475 to 1800. They specifically searched for instances where phrases such as "bear arms" and "keep arms" were used, and noted the context, the context, and adjacent language that accompanied the phrases to better understand how these terms were actually being used in their historical context. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/a-fascinating-computer-analysi.html

Pictures of Earth by Planetary Spacecraft is, as you have perhaps already surmised, a collection of photos of our homeworld not taken by human beings.

The image above comes from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Earth is the little dot to the top left of Saturn, shining through the rings. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/photos-of-planet-earth.html