https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/coronavirus-crash-the-dow-had.html

Let’s face it — Microsoft has held a hammerlock on the presentation software market for years. In fact, rough guesses estimate PowerPoint has been used for about 95 percent of all digital presentations ever since the late 90s. 

So to say upstarts like SlideHeap are fighting their way upstream is a colossal understatement. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not a trip worth taking, because sometimes it takes a challenger like SlideHeap to challenge that dominance and raise the presentation game. You can check all that SlideHeap Slide Templates are bringing to the table right now at over 90 percent off for a professional plan at just $29.99.

SlideHeap wants to shave hours off the prep time you spend putting a digital presentation together with unlimited access to over 600 attractive, professional-grade infographics and other design elements that can be customized to just your specifications.

These templates all fit into 25 different categories, so whether you’re doing a sales pitch, an organizational breakdown, a SWOT analysis or just trying to impart the right information, SlideHeap gives you a full graphics set tailored to just your needs. In case you don’t have the artistic chops to craft your own stylistic flourishes of a particular graphic, SlideHeap still has you covered with more than 1,000 different icons, images and more to give every graphic just the right professional touch.

And once you’ve got those slides just the way you want them, you probably won’t have to think twice about how to present them either. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/get-access-to-600-designer-ap.html

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) won the California Democratic Primary, multiple news organizations are now projecting based on incoming results. Yes, it really did take this long to count all those California primary votes.

Of all 50 U.S. states, California is the one with the largest number of delegates.

Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden are scheduled to debate on Sunday, and the location of that debate was today changed to Washington, DC instead of Arizona because of the coronavirus outbreak.

It's possible that by Sunday, the event will be canceled altogether. The pandemic situation is worsening quickly.

Some observations and early news tweets, below.

BREAKING: Sen. Sanders wins California Democratic Primary, @NBCNews projects. pic.twitter.com/KeB9TsGbMX

 MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 12, 2020

BREAKING: Sen. Sanders wins California Democratic Primary, @NBCNews projects. https://t.co/EOqBWxksL1 pic.twitter.com/idAwuzOvga

 NBC News (@NBCNews) March 12, 2020

NBC News projects Bernie Sanders wins the California Democratic Primaryhttps://t.co/S5pOP7CfS3

 Beth Fouhy (@bfouhy) March 12, 2020

NEW: NBC News projects that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wins the Democratic primary in California, the state with the largest amount of Super Tuesday delegates.

https://t.co/Zacq1j7IRC

 Gary Grumbach (@GaryGrumbach) March 12, 2020

Bernie Sanders has won the California Democratic primary, @ABC News can now project. (Yes, it's taken this long for enough votes to be in.)

 Rick Klein (@rickklein) March 12, 2020

I wouldn't be surprised to see Sanders suspend his campaign between Sunday's debate and the next round of primaries on Tuesday. His chances at the nomination are already fading, and he's expected to have a monumentally bad night in the Florida primary.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/bernie-sanders-wins-california.html

The death toll in Italy's coronavirus outbreak today passed 1,000.

Schools throughout Italy are completely shut down, which is reportedly driving a surge in internet traffic as bored kids forced to stay indoors turn to online games.

From Bloomberg News:

With schools, shops and restaurants closed in an attempt to limit Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreak, the amount of data passing through Telecom Italia SpA’s national network has surged by more than two-thirds in the past two weeks, the company said.

A lot of that extra activity is due to online games such as ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Call of Duty,’ which can involve multiple players and take up more bandwidth than the business programs and conference call apps used by adults working from home.

Gaming traffic can spike even higher when the games are refreshed and millions of kids download the latest 25-gigabyte update at once.

“We reported an increase of more than 70% of Internet traffic over our landline network, with a big contribution from online gaming such as Fortnite,” Telecom Italia Chief Executive Officer Luigi Gubitosi said Wednesday on a call with analysts.

“All the big players in the video conferencing market have asked for bandwidth upgrades in the last 10 days and some are asking for a fivefold increase,” said the VP of Sweden's Telia Carrier, which is also cited in the article as seeing a big uptick in internet use due to the pandemic.

“If no one is able to fly, they will need a huge amount of additional bandwidth.” Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/coronavirus-telecom-italia-sa.html

Now you can drink your way directly to diabetes with a newly announced line of Hostess brand bottled iced lattes -- yes, that means they're flavored like snack cakes. Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Honey Bun, and Sno Balls to be exact.

Bevnet:

Twinkies Iced Latte bottles up the magic of the classic golden sponge cake flavor combined with creamy notes. Ding Dongs Iced Latte is full of rich chocolate flavors with wonderful vanilla tones. Honey Bun Iced Latte has a delightful honey flavor, finished with hints of glazed icing. Sno Balls Iced Latte combines flavors of coconut and sweet chocolate cake.

"This partnership checks all the boxes in our continued efforts to innovate for our beloved core brands, as well as bring consumers more ways to enjoy our products," said Chad Lusk, Chief Marketing Officer, Hostess Brands. "Whether one's 2pm-slump antidote is a sweet snack or a coffee run, they no longer need to choose."

These will appear in the market come April but their similarly flavored "single serve brew cups" are available now.

(Oddity Mall) image via Oddity Mall Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/new-hostess-iced-lattes-flavor.html

If you want to be able to open and close your garage door from your phone, and receive alerts on your phone when the door is opened or closed, this Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener is a good choice. It's about the size of a bar of soap, and attaches to terminals on your garage door motor. (It requires wi-fi reception in your garage, obviously!)

I paid full price for it in November but Amazon currently has it on double discount: a checkbox coupon on the product page and a promo code: ZLUINGM5. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/i-installed-this-smart-wi-fi-g.html

I had this Old Maid deck when I was a kid. I liked the oversize cards and the Paul Coker Jr-esque illustrations, but I share Steve Banes dread of Thermo Thelma, who "is looking at me with that over-sized rectal thermometer in her cruel clutches!" Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/thermo-thelma-in-this-deck.html

Ad agency Ogilvy Hong Kong teamed up with Ikea and Pizza Hut to create a life-size table, the S"ava, that looks just like the little plastic "tables" inside pizza boxes. (Those little tables are officially called "pizza savers.") From Hypebeast:

Each table arrives in a humorous package that resembles a pizza box and, like other products, comes with details on how to assemble the product. IKEA illustrates a step-by-step process on unpacking the different parts, assembling the legs, calling Pizza Hut, receiving the pizza and placing it on the perfectly-sized table.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/ikea-makes-pizza-table-that-lo.html

This lengthy New York Times piece by Jon Mooallem is subtitled, "The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 surprised everyone by showing that natural disasters can bring out more kindness than selfishness." The piece is worth reading just for the stunning photos of the devastation that occurred in Anchorage on the evening of March 27, 1964 when the state was struck by "the most powerful earthquake in American history, and the second most powerful ever measured in the world."

Mooallem's piece packs a powerful punch, too. In the aftermath of the earthquake, Alaskans were sharing and cooperative, and it turns out that unselfish behavior during a disaster is the rule rather than the exception:

In the 56 years since the Great Alaska Earthquake, an entire field of sociology, disaster studies, blossomed around the Disaster Research Center, with sociologists parachuting into scores of other communities after natural disasters around the world, and it’s stunning to look back and recognize how much of the resilience, levelheadedness, kindness and cooperation those sociologists saw in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of disasters everywhere.

The one thing that interferes with the tendency towards altruism in a disaster is something scholars call "elite panic."

Many of our ugliest assumptions about human behavior have been refuted by their observations of how actual humans behave — though we seem tragically slow to shed those old myths. (In some cases, disaster studies teaches us, those in power are so overcome with worry about mass panic and looting that they overreact and clamp down on a public that isn’t actually panicked at all.

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/nyt-in-times-of-global-shock.html

Over and over and over again my friend... Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/1965s-eve-of-destruction.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/disco-diva-gloria-gaynor-posts.html

This is the way to get a Baby Yoda minifig.

The 1000+ piece LEGO Razor Crest can be ordered in advance of its September debut.

Baby Yoda!

LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian The Razor Crest 75292 Building Kit, New 2020, Amazon Exclusive (1,023 Pieces) via Amazon Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/a-baby-yoda-minifig-comes-with.html

The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading shortly after opening today as markets fell hard and fast over the European travel ban announced last night by President Donald Trump. The Dow Jones fell 1700 points (7%), a drop matched by the S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes.

US stocks sold off sharply for the second straight day after President Donald Trump banned European travel to the United States. Wall Street investors are worried about the scale of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences. ...

Trading is halted for 15 minutes when when the index hits first two circuit breakers: a drop of 7% and again when it falls 13%. A circuit breaker can be triggered only once per day, so if the S&P drops 7% upon the re-open, the market doesn't close again.

If the index falls 20%, trading is suspended for the rest of the day.

Trump announced the 30-day ban on travel from Europe in a televised address to the nation as a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but he seems to have been confused on some of the details and exemptions as described in the formal announcement. Chaos reigns.

Let this sink in.

During a worldwide pandemic creating ongoing economic shock Trump ACCIDENTALLY ANNOUNCED A BAN OF CARGO SHIPMENTS FROM EUROPE

This is an absolute circus.https://t.co/syU1XhJHYf

 Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 12, 2020

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/stocks-plunge-after-trump-trav.html

Kaci the Homicidal Homemaker made this deliciously sinister cake inspired by the carpet at the Overlook Hotel. [via Marshall Julius]

Also, Hellraiser brownies:

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/come-eat-cake-with-us-danny.html

Spring may not officially start for a few more days in the northern hemisphere, but Microsoft has been getting a jump on spring cleaning in recent weeks. The tech giant has been blowing out truckloads of factory recertified products at big discounts off their regular price, so it’s a great way to bolster your device arsenal while keeping more dollars in your pocket.

This time around, Seattle’s own is offering up a true gem, a fully certified Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet that’s actually even got enough juice to potentially replace your trusty old laptop. And at $912.99, it’s almost 50 percent off its retail price of $1,699.99.

TechRadar just called the Surface Pro 4 an influential device that, despite its elder statesmen status in the Surface family, is still an “excellent device” when placed shoulder-to-shoulder with Microsoft’s latest releases and “a brilliant first choice for creative professionals on the go.”

A look at the specs makes that claim understandable, with a powerful 6th gen Intel Core i7 processor that’s more than capable of sizzling through projects even with multiple apps in use.

Probably the Surface Pro 4’s most distinctive feature is its crystal clear 12.3-inch PixelSense display offering ultra HD resolution and a super-responsive touch screen that still blows away many newer tablets. Couple that screen with the stereo front-firing speakers and it’s a fabulous alternative for those who love to devour movies and other web content for hours.

With a spacious 512GB hard drive and up to 9 hours of battery life, this is a top-quality tablet-laptop hybrid that will have you looking pretty smart, especially if someone knows how much you paid. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/get-a-factory-recertified-micr.html

Amid the virus outbreak, the very wealthy are "self-isolating" in well-equipped doomsday bunkers, some in far-off places such as New Zealand.

The world’s richest people are chartering private jets to set off for holiday homes or specially prepared disaster bunkers in countries that, so far, appear to have avoided the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Many are understood to be taking personal doctors or nurses on their flights to treat them and their families in the event that they become infected. The wealthy are also besieging doctors in private clinics in Harley Street, London, and across the world, demanding private coronavirus tests.

They're also being grifted raw:

Ali said his clinic was also offering the worried wealthy an intravenous infusion of vitamins and minerals to boost their immune systems. “We know that 90% of adults have a deficiency in vitamins – what better to improve that than an IV immune boost? An intravenous infusion ensures instant and optimal delivery of these nutrients to the body’s cells and the nutrients should include vitamins such as vitamin C, vitamin B12 complex, glutathione, zinc and essential amino acids such as arginine, taurine, lysine and citrulline.” The treatment costs lb350.

One billionaire will be staying put, though, as the death toll climbs into the hundreds: Elon Musk, twitter epidemiologist.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/super-rich-head-off-to-their-d.html

British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb created their "The Quiz" sketch format years ago, depicting a dilapidated and miserable TV game show broadcast in the wake of an apocalyptic "event" that means you really should stay indoors. Prophetic!

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/post-apocalypse-game-show-h.html

The release of All of Me is Illustrated, Stories by Ray Bradury, celebrates the author’s Centennial with the stories, “The Illustrated Man,” and “The Illustrated Woman,” published together in a 272-page hardcover book featuring over 100 contemporary photographs of illustrated bodies by some of the leading tattoo artists of the 21^st Century.

“Bradbury’s tattooed-person tales embedded within this glorious parade of contemporary inked bodies breathes new life into his notions about how tattoo meanings can change, how the viewer of a tattoo can see something different from what the owner might have intended, and how psychology intersects with the desire to permanently inscribe one’s skin.” —from the Introduction by tattoo historian Anna Felicity Friedman

This is not merely a pairing of Bradbury stories sandwiched between a collection of garden variety tattoo photography. Photographer Peter Roessler invites an atypical intimacy between his subjects—or "collectors” as they’re referenced in the book—and their viewers. The collectors featured among these pages are revealing more than the body; they’re sharing the stories those bodies have to tell. As Friedman states in her introduction, it’s the intersection of psychology and the desire to permanently inscribe not just one’s skin, but in these cases the entire body, that ultimately makes this book so compelling.

All of Me is Illustrated is published by RosettaBooks in cooperation with Inked magazine. Featured artists include Paul Booth, Steve Butcher, Jessa Bigelow, Ryan Ashley Malarkey, Yomico Moreno, Andy Pho, TeeJ Poole, Duke Riley, DJ Tambe, Tatu Baby, Carlos Torres, Dmitry Troshin, Jess Yen and Popo Zhang, with photography by Peter Roessler. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/all-of-me-is-illustrated-celeb.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/trumps-coronavirus-address-t.html

In this Sky News clip, British chancellor Rishi Sunak's binder is seen to change color from burgundy to green. Theories about fancy iridescent leather were floated, but the consensus seems to be that it's an impossible change and an ill-conceived attempt at editorial humor by Sky News to reflect the "green" aspects of his newly-announced budget. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/in-news-footage-british-chanc.html