Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Home
Podcast
Notes
Archive
About
Watch the first season of Stranger Things in full 1980s pan-and-scan VHS glory
To celebrate what is somehow the tenth anniversary of Stranger Things, Netflix is turning up the nostalgia to 11 with Stranger Things: VHS special…
 • Gail P Sherman
A clever trick to keep loose zip ties from turning into a tangle
A bag of loose zip ties always seems to collapse into the same knotted ball at the bottom of a drawer.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Account of an accidental mushroom trip
Amanita muscaria — the red-and-white toadstool of fairy tales and Mario games — is poisonous raw, but boiling breaks down enough of its toxins that…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Six of the tsars’ jeweled Fabergé eggs have never been found
Between 1885 and 1917, the House of Fabergé built 50 jeweled Easter eggs for the Russian tsars — lavish confections of gold, enamel, and gems, each…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
The blurry sonar blob tabloids turned into a sunken UFO
In June 2011, a Swedish treasure-hunting team called OceanX returned from the Gulf of Bothnia with a blurry sonar image of something on the seafloor: a…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
An airline exec turned a jet around over nuts in a bag
On December 5, 2014, Korean Air Flight 086 was taxiing toward takeoff at JFK when it turned around and rolled back to the gate.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
American habits that baffle the French
Kimberly Wheeler moved her family from California to Aix-en-Provence three years ago, and she keeps getting the same small reaction from French…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Scientists baked sourdough with yeast from a 5,300-year-old mummy
Ötzi the Iceman died in the Alps roughly 5,300 years ago, and researchers have now used yeast recovered from his frozen body to bake sourdough bread.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
The keystroke that hid your game behind a fake spreadsheet
Before multitasking made it easy to control-tab away from a goofing-off page (and when people work in offices with other people), PC games shipped with…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
The NY Times’ crossword editor kept building puzzles from his hospital bed
Four years ago, New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz had a stroke.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
The time Spike Milligan refused to pay a parking fine: “send me to prison”
Spike Milligan — the manic force behind BBC radio’s anarchic The Goon Show and a founding influence on modern British comedy — was also one of history’s…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
When six people in a Kansas thrift store elected their own pope
In July 1990, six people — a would-be priest, his parents, and three others — gathered in the family thrift store in Belvue, Kansas and held what they…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
© 2026 Happy Mutants LLC · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture