Happy Summer Solstice everybody! A day earlier than usual this year, casting doubt on God's credentials as a clockmaker 
Happy invoicing!
- Sunk - "The script called for an epic battle. In the movie’s third act, the forces of the Eight Faery Kingdoms defend their aquatic empires from annihilation by the evil Demon Mage and his spectral legions. Five hundred extras would play the opposing armies… When Jonathan Lawrence, the director of Empires of the Deep, showed up for the shoot, in Qinyu, a resort town in coastal China, he saw only about 20 extras, mostly ornery Russians complaining that they hadn’t been paid in weeks." The bizarre and drawn-out making of Chinese billionaire Jon Jiang’s movie project Empires of the Deep.
- REVEALED: There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones - Peter Farquhar tracks down the truth about a mysterious figure in the background of several scenes: ”I know every catchphrase, every moment of extreme violence, and every answer to all the University Challenge questions. But in 33 years of rarely missing a late-night replay, I have never seen this person before.”
- Five Improved Bicycles: A Patent Trawl - David Malki, creator of Wondermark, looks at a number of improvements to the velocipede that have been patented over the years: ”Most of the bikes we see day-to-day are very similar. Bicycle design has seemed to reach a general consensus culture-wide… But what radical improvements in whole-bike design have yet to catch hold with the world at large?”
- Medieval graffiti - "Graffiti on the walls of Europe’s old churches reveals the real Middle Ages – a world far removed from knights and damsels.” Matthew Champion on what we can learn about daily life in medieval times from new developments in imaging church graffiti.
- ATM Insert Skimmers In Action - Brain Krebs on new card-skimming hardware that fits inside the cash machine card slot: ”These skimmers can hook into little nooks inside the mechanized card acceptance slot, which is a generally quite a bit wider than the width of an ATM card.”
- The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife - "A hotly contested, supposedly ancient manuscript suggests Christ was married. But believing its origin story—a real-life Da Vinci Code, involving a Harvard professor, a onetime Florida pornographer, and an escape from East Germany—requires a big leap of faith."
- The Combat Ration Collectors Who Eat Decades-Old Military Meals - "Even if they’ve been baked to perfection and stored in an airtight tin, cookies just don’t taste so scrumptious when they’re 71 years old… he opened a tin of Canadian army rations that had been packaged in 1945. “Oh, man. Those smell awful,” he said, as he unwrapped the foil surrounding a dozen cookies. He tasted one.” Yum
- The best advice on Twitter trolls was written by al-Ghazali in the 11th century - Sarah Kendzior discovers advice on dealing with trolls from a Sufi philosopher: ”Al-Ghazali anticipated our social media problems by 1000 years.”
- 'I was in trouble': Beer can and bears save mushroom picker from hungry wolf - "What's the best way to fend off a wolf that's stalking you? Bait it with a bear cub, of course. It sounds incredible, but that's exactly what Joanne Barnaby did when she got into a terrifying situation while out picking morel mushrooms near Fort Smith, N.W.T."
- The Italian hill made entirely of 53 million Roman olive oil jars - "Monte Testaccio or also known as Monte dei Cocci (literally meaning “Mount of Shards”) artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of testae, fragments of broken amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire… It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 220,000 sq ft at its base and with a volume of approximately 760,000 cu yd, containing the remains of an estimated 53 million amphorae.”
Happy invoicing!
) it and let me watch it as a nine year old, as parents rightly said no. 
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