Sooner or later, I'll have posted everything on the web and CUK will transmogrify into Google. But we're not there yet, so here goes for another year 
Happy invoicing!
- What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year? - Barry Petchesky’s annual roundup of things extracted from various areas of the human body: ”USING A VIBRATOR LAST NIGHT, THOUGHT WAS INSERTING IN VAGINA, INTERRUPTED BY MOM & SAT UP QUICKLY, INSERTED IN RECTUM, CAN’T REMOVE”
- Forget your faddy diet plans – how I dropped three stone and kept boozing - The inimitable Mitten d’Amour presents a weight loss regime that even a greedy lazy drunkard like you can follow: ”There’s a myth when attempting to shift a bunch of weight and boosting your fitness that you need to throw lots of money at a gym and a personal trainer and the purveyors of hi-tech sporting apparel and floppy-haired pillocks who lob spinach at frying pans while shouting “BOSH”. I’d rather spend my money on nights out with friends and shoes, personally. My exercise regime started out with just my phone and nothing else.”
- Furiosa’s Cat Feeder - Quinn Dunki bought an automated cat feeder. Then the cat hacked it, and a battle of wits began: ”Sprocket then learned she could climb on to the stringers of the table to get high ground above the machine, then grab the top edge with her little mouth. She could then lift it and drop it, causing pieces to fall out… Well, here at Blondihacks Labs, we know that there is no problem that can’t be solved with a lot of steel plate. Yes, it was time to go Full Furiosa on this cat feeding robot. I pulled a bunch of 1/8″ steel plate off the junk pile and got to work.”
- Punch A Hole In The Sky: An Oral History Of The Right Stuff - ”Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff to the big screen in 1983, onscreen astronauts were little more than alien quarry or asteroid bait. In Kaufman's hands, however, spaceflight became a far more human pursuit—a story not of external threats but inner resolve." Alex French and Howie Kahn get the story of the making of the film from those who did it.
- A shortest-possible walking tour through the pubs of the United Kingdom - A team of mathematicians have spent two years doing God’s work: ”Nearly everyone in the UK knows by heart the best path to take them over to their favorite public house. But what about jotting down the shortest route to visit every pub in the country and return home safely? That is what we set out to do.”
- From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers) - Sarah Jeong on the wretched state of long-term data storage a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: ”It’s become clear to me that that the galaxy is crippled by an abundance of disk formats, with all of the accompanying interoperability issues that we see on our own planet… The climax of Rogue One takes place inside an incredibly poorly-designed Imperial archive.”
- The Murder of Rasputin, 100 Years Later - Last Friday was the centenary of the murder of the infamous “monk”, but many myths still surround the man and his death: ”His daughter Maria, who fled Russia after the Revolution and became a circus lion tamer billed as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world," wrote her own book in 1929 that condemned Yussupov’s actions and questioned the veracity of his account… Yussupov transformed the murder into an epic struggle of good versus evil to sell books and bolster his own reputation.”
- Why Procrastinators Procrastinate, How to Beat Procrastination, The Procrastination Matrix - I know it’s hard, but try to find the time to read Tim Urban’s excellent articles on putting things off for now: ”No, ‘avoid procrastination’ is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, ‘I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!’ The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, ‘Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.’ The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do.”
- Baby Jesus Was Kind of a Dick - Mark Hay looks at some long-forgotten traditional tales about Jesus’ childhood: ”In some of these tales, young Jesus is a real mensch… But almost as often, Jesus comes off as a dangerous ******.”
- Agencies share rejected Remain posters post-Brexit - HT to barrydidit for this collection of rejected designs and tales of the difficulty of dealing with the politicians involved.
Happy invoicing!
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