Boing Boing, October 28, 2025
Pea-eating ducks, federal agents at Halloween, and the world's most expensive search for a nap
Happy Tuesday! Today’s stories: competitive ducks race to devour peas in under five seconds (yes, there’s a championship bracket), federal agents tear-gassed Chicago families heading to a Halloween parade, and Marin County deployed 40 rescuers to find a drunk camper who’d just passed out in a field. Also: an 18th-century Scottish doctor who thought burying people in dirt could cure everything, a LEGO Game Boy you can actually play, and Elon Musk’s Grokipedia turns out to be Wikipedia rewritten by an algorithm with feelings.
Elon Musk’s cringe-posting addiction cost Tesla over one million car sales
Ellsworth Toohey / 10:26 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Elon Musk spent $300 million buying himself a spot in Trump’s administration and all he got was a loss of over one million Tesla sales.
Yale economists put a number on what everyone already suspected: Musk’s transformation from cringe-humor tech bro to MAGA simp has been catastrophic for the car company he pretends he founded.
As reported by CNN, Tesla’s U.S. sales would have been 67% to 83% higher from October 2022 to April 2025 without what researchers call the “Musk partisan effect.” That’s between 1 million and 1.26 million vehicles that didn’t sell because the CEO couldn’t stop with the edgelord shitposting.
Musk essentially ran the world’s most expensive marketing campaign for every other electric vehicle manufacturer. Democratic buyers — you know, the environmentally minded people who actually wanted electric cars — took their money to Tesla’s competitors instead. Rival EV and hybrid sales jumped 17% to 22%.
Somewhere, every other EV manufacturer is lighting a candle at the altar of whatever compels Musk to keep tweeting.
Why this badly written back pain book has a cult following
Mark Frauenfelder / 10:15 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain has inspired devotion bordering on the religious. A Seattle group dedicated to repetitive strain injuries reportedly disbanded after reading it and concluding their pain was psychosomatic. Larry David called his treatment “the closest thing to a religious experience.” The book’s promise: chronic pain might disappear once you understand it has no physical cause.
As Uri Bram writes in the Atoms vs Bits newsletter, the entire book boils down to three ideas. Physical pain — back, joints, headaches, stomach — might be your body distracting you from emotional problems. Realizing this can make the pain vanish.
Uri acknowledges the book works for many people while calling the writing “bad.” He estimates the core argument takes 100 words, with the rest filled by repetitive anonymized case studies.
[T]his book is 50% composed of: “let me give you an example. A [young/old/milddle-aged] [man/woman/child] came to me with back pain. They had seen many other doctors for many years and had been told their pain was incurable, and that they would never [play tennis / go running / dance the tango in Argentina] again. However, after talking to me and learning about my methods, it turns out that their pain all stems from the trouble in their [work / marriage / torrid affair with an Argentinian tango dancer]. Now they have been pain free for 10 years and they tell me that it’s all thanks to my methods.”
The above is not exaggerated, except for that he never does anything as interesting as the Argentinian tango bit. I swear that not a single example added anything meaningfully different to my understanding than the 100 examples before, all of which are just variants of “this person had anxiety or anger from their work or home life, and their physical pain was actually just trapped emotional pain.”
The book resembles Richard Ferber’s baby sleep training method — both offer counterintuitive solutions that can be summarized in a paragraph, both produce seemingly miraculous results, and both fill hundreds of pages essentially repeating one idea.
Perhaps the repetition serves a purpose: building psychological confidence to follow advice that contradicts instinct. As blogger Jehan suggests: “Keep reading until your back is fixed, then stop.”
BrickBoy turns the LEGO Game Boy into a working handheld
Gail Sherman / 9:48 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Fans of LEGO and Nintendo rejoiced earlier this year when the LEGO Game Boy was released. The model is near perfect, with all the buttons of the original gaming handheld. It also includes two Game Paks and swappable lenticular displays to match the games. The only thing that would make it perfect is if it worked.
Now, thanks to Substance Labs, the set can be modded into BrickBoy, a playable LEGO Game Boy, with a backlit screen, and a functional speaker and buttons. Freeware games are included, and additional ROMs can be added. The creators claim the entire upgrade process only takes five minutes.
The Kickstarter offers three versions of BrickBoy. The basic version is the Essentials Kit, which runs on batteries that create a bump-out at the back of the unit. The Gamer Kit, which plays games from all Game Boy versions and has a rechargeable battery. The Collector’s Edition adds an always-on mode so that the Brick Boy can run a demo while on display. An issue that earlier prevented US backers from selecting the Gamer Kit has been resolved.
The early bird prices range from €99 to €129, or about $116 to $186. The Gamer Kit price will rise to €189 48 hours after launch, so grab it now. Shipping costs to the United States will sting a bit. The project will likely have reached its €116,600 goal by the time you read this.
New online logic game where criminals tell the truth
Ellsworth Toohey / 9:45 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Clues by Sam is a daily logic puzzle that requires deduction rather than guessing. You work through a 4×5 grid of named characters, determining who is innocent and who is criminal based on clues provided by the suspects themselves. Every clue is truthful, even those given by criminals.
The game operates on pure logic. As creator Sam explains in the instructions, “You cannot guess! Just like in real life, you can’t convict someone based on a 50/50 hunch. There is always a logical next choice, even when you think there isn’t.” Wrong guesses are tracked, but the game allows players to work through problems systematically until they solve the puzzle.
New puzzles are released daily at midnight Eastern Time. The game works on mobile devices, too.
Here’s a good video tutorial.
Federal agents gas Chicago kids on their way to Halloween parade
Jason Weisberger / 9:42 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Halloween came early for one Chicago neighborhood when federal agents decided the only thing scarier than ghosts was government. ICE and Border Patrol units reportedly stormed Old Irving Park just as parents and children were heading to a Halloween parade, filling the air with tear gas in defiance of a federal judge’s order. The kids wore masks for fun. The agents wore them for anonymity.
“So you had folks who were literally out on the street taking their kids to this Halloween parade when this happened,” he said. “I didn’t see anybody make physical contact with these agents. I didn’t see anybody do anything that justified, for instance, taking my 70-year-old neighbor to the ground.”
The agents left the neighborhood after about 30 minutes, and the Halloween parade proceeded—but with many families opting to stay home.
Kolp told CBS News he retrieved a tear gas canister from his yard.
“I knew that piece of evidence would be critical for the judge to understand what the facts are,” he said.
Witnesses say the chaos started when agents tackled a man on a front lawn and escalated until families were coughing and crying in their costumes. It’s unclear who ICE thought they were protecting Chicago from, but Spider-Man and Elsa definitely weren’t on the threat list. Video here.
Your brain is addicted to stories — and it’s killing your reality
Ellsworth Toohey / 9:30 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
A seventeen-year Zen practitioner argues that storytelling isn’t just how we communicate – it’s the technology that hijacked human consciousness itself. In Arrow: The Power and Poison of Story, released today, William Gadea traces how we became “Story Animals,” creatures who experience life through an endless stream of internal narratives.
Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and Buddhist thought, Gadea shows how separate mental abilities — consciousness, memory, language — fused into something unprecedented: the power to create and inhabit stories. This capability transformed humans into beings who live inside linear tales of origin, identity and destiny that can feel more real than direct experience. The book’s title references a Buddhist parable about a monk struck by a poisoned arrow, which Gadea uses to explore narrative as both medicine and toxin.
The Peruvian-American filmmaker brings an unusual perspective as both storyteller and meditation practitioner. “I didn’t want to write a book that other people could write better than me,” Gadea explains. “What came out was something quite idiosyncratic: a mixture of neuroscience, evolutionary studies, Buddhist tales, history, myth, all mixed with memoir and personal reflections.”
Rather than arguing we should abandon narrative entirely, Gadea points toward a different relationship with our stories. “The stories we don’t pay enough attention to are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” he says. “My practice isn’t about losing those stories – it’s about constantly remembering that they are just stories.”
Marin County unleashes search party for drunk guy napping in field
Jason Weisberger / 9:25 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Forty rescuers, dogs, e-bikes, and a drone scoured Marin County’s forests this weekend to save a man who didn’t actually need saving. The camper had wandered away from the Olema Ranch Campground while “potentially severely intoxicated,” sparking an overnight search. Hours later, he stumbled back to camp, unharmed, tho potentially hungover, reporting that he’d passed out in a field.
The Marin County Search and Rescue team received a call from the camper’s friends just before midnight on Saturday. They said the man had walked away from the Olema Ranch Campground while “potentially severely intoxicated.”
By 3 a.m. on Sunday, dozens of search and rescue personnel were deployed, including K-9 and e-bike teams. The search and rescue team even used an unmanned drone to search for the man from above.
Rachelle Wilmot, a deputy with the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, said the team had assembled so quickly to “make sure that we located this person as quickly as possible.” The group was looking in a heavily wooded area for about an hour when the man reappeared.
“The subject walked back to his campsite and reported that he had been passed out in a field about half mile away,” officials from the Marin County Search and Rescue said in a post on Facebook.
Officials took it in stride, politely reminding the public to use the buddy system and not wander off drunk in the woods. They stopped short of suggesting that maybe the next emergency should involve less bourbon and more boundaries.
Hegseth’s new shaving policy will force out thousands of Black troops
Ellsworth Toohey / 9:20 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
The Pentagon has found an efficient way to purge Black service members from the military without saying that’s what they’re doing. As reported by Military Times, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that troops requiring medical shaving waivers for more than 12 months will face administrative separation—discharged through non-criminal processes. It’s being kicked out, just not for committing a crime. The medical condition is pseudofolliculitis barbae, painful, scarring bumps that occur when curly hair grows back into the skin after shaving. Between 45 and 83 percent of Black men experience this condition, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology. White men with straight hair? Rarely affected.
The only effective treatment is to stop shaving closely. But the military demands clean-shaven faces, even though beards don’t impair combat effectiveness. Thousands of service members—disproportionately Black—have used medical waivers to serve without destroying their skin. Now those waivers are being eliminated. Soldiers can pursue treatment plans that dermatologists confirm don’t work, or they can leave. The American Osteopathic College of Dermatology states what medical professionals have known for decades: you can’t cure pseudofolliculitis barbae by shaving more aggressively.
The military acknowledges PFB as the primary reason for shaving waivers. They know who this policy targets. It ends careers, terminates benefits, and forces out experienced service members—all without calling it punishment. The military frames it as an inability to meet standards, but the result is the same: people lose their jobs because their genetics make shaving dangerous to their health.
When Waymo kills someone, it’ll be ok
Jason Weisberger / 9:13 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana says we should all just relax when the first robotaxi kills someone. It will be fine, they promise, because math will make it moral. The future of transportation apparently comes with a body count, but don’t worry, the algorithm has feelings about it.
The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?”
“I think that society will,” Mawakana answered, slowly, before positioning the question as an industrywide issue. “I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to.”
She said that companies should be transparent about their records by publishing data about how many crashes they’re involved in, and she pointed to the “hub“ of safety information on Waymo’s website. Self-driving cars will dramatically reduce crashes, Mawakana said, but not by 100%: “We have to be in this open and honest dialogue about the fact that we know it’s not perfection.”
Company leaders say society will learn to accept an autonomous death the same way it ignores the thousands caused by human drivers every year. The logic is elegant if you ignore the screaming. Tech’s idea of progress has always been simple: break things, disrupt norms, and then ask for your empathy once the machine finally runs someone over. After all, what’s one casualty in the race to make traffic jams more efficient and death a subscription service?
Trump 2.0 turns immigration enforcement into a traveling terror show
Jason Weisberger / 9:03 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Convicted felon Donald Trump is turning immigration enforcement into performance art for authoritarians. The last officials inside ICE who believed in restraint are being replaced with Border Patrol hardliners whose idea of law enforcement involves little law and is heavy on enforcement. What used to be a bureaucracy of cold efficiency is becoming a stage for overweight swaggering masked agents snatching people in parking lots and calling it patriotism.
National Immigration Center fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick describes the changes in ICE leadership as a hard step towards more terror tactics. Apparently, Border Patrol leadership is even less accountable and less likely to care about the law than the former ICE guys.
“Generally speaking, ICE typically conducts very targeted operations, largely going after criminal illegal aliens or those with deportation orders, but almost always knowing who they are targeting for arrest, often conducting surveillance to learn their schedules before and waiting hours before arresting them if needed,” he wrote. By contrast, “Border Patrol, under Trump 2.0 … has been extremely aggressive and has been at the forefront of some of the most controversial immigration enforcement operations we’ve seen so far, carrying out roving patrols in Los Angeles, Chicago, etc, often at Home Depot, car washes, flea markets etc, leading to a handful of federal judges around the country issuing injunctions against them.”
This shift is not lost on Reichlin-Melnick, who has a grim assessment of what this means.
“HUGE moment. ICE leadership is being purged tonight,” he wrote. “The old guard, which prioritized targeted enforcement operations aimed at people with criminal records, is being replaced with Border Patrol and Greg Bovino’s ‘Midway Blitz’ style.”
“Think things are bad now? It’ll get worse,” he added.
The purge reportedly comes from Corey Lewandowski, who has never held a badge but has rage issues. ICE field chiefs are being swapped out for Border Patrol commanders like Greg Bovino, whose “Midway Blitz” raids have already drawn injunctions from judges for being reckless and unconstitutional. The people who once managed enforcement are being replaced by the people who treat it like a game. Trump’s vision of order looks a lot like chaos in a Hugo Boss-inspired uniform.
MAGA Mike risks Trump’s displeasure
Jason Weisberger / 8:50 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Admitting that the United States Constitution strictly prohibits Donald Trump from serving a third term as President, MAGA Mike Johnson has said something that suggests he isn’t always 100% subservient and in lock step with the Orange Menace.
“It’s been a great run, but I think the president knows, and he and I’ve talked about the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many American people lament that, the Trump 2028 cap is one of the most popular that’s ever been produced, and he has a good time with that, trolling the Democrats, whose hair is on fire about the very prospect,” he continued. “But I do believe that we’ve got three extraordinary years ahead of us, and the two years of the Trump administration are going to be an incredible thing.”
Johnson noted that it would be difficult to amend the Constitution before the 2028 election.
“It takes about 10 years to do that, as you all know, to allow all the states to ratify what two-thirds of the House and three-fourths of the states would approve,” he explained. “So I don’t see the path for that, but I can tell you that we are not going to take our foot off the gas pedal.”
Trump has been clearly trying to clear the runways to run for another term. This week, he suggested he could run for Vice-President and then have his chosen President simply disappear, allowing him to move back into the White House. Sycophantic hobo Steve Bannon claims there is a plan to get Trump back in, in 2028. Gavin Newsom has been warning about this, as it is clear he’d rather run against someone with a less-cultist following, but lo and behold, it is Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike, who is throwing cold water on Donald’s dream.
New book documents the golden age of zine publishing from 1982 – 1998
Ellsworth Toohey / 8:43 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Zinelandia collects cover art from 115 zines published between 1982 and 1998, documenting the visual evolution of underground publishing during the Factsheet Five era. The 125-page full-color book has zines from 15 countries, tracing the shift from stolen office photocopies to home laser printing as zines connected artists, punks, and Mail Art practitioners across an international network.
Factsheet Five began as editor Mike Gunderloy’s solution to a correspondence problem. In a 1989 interview with Maximum Rocknroll, he explained: “I found that I was repeating myself in letters, telling people to check out the few zines I knew. So one day, I hauled out an old ditto machine, typed up everything I knew about zines at the time (two pages of unreduced type), and made 50 copies to send to people.”
The review publication grew into a vast directory that nurtured self-publishing communities from 1982 to 1998.
HHS rolls out new performance metric: loyalty to Dear Leader
Jason Weisberger / 8:42 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Public service is getting a new definition at the Department of Health and Human Services. Employees are being told that loyalty to Donald Trump is now a critical element in their performance. Forget data, deadlines, or disease prevention. The objective metric is how low you bow. It is less civil service and more revival tent as the disgusting fascists continue their slow rolling conversion of our beloved Constitutional Republic into a vicious clown show.
Tens of thousands of HHS employees have to fulfill four “critical elements” for their annual performance reviews, which take place at the end of the fiscal year. One of those elements, “Faithful Support of Administration of the Law and the President’s Policies,” lays out how workers now have to essentially prove their loyalty to Trump’s policies.
“This is the most critical element for reviewing the job performance of someone who serves under the elected President,” reads this requirement.
“Faithful administration of one’s role in the Executive Branch requires commitment to the principles of the Founding, including equality under the law and democratic self-government,” it continues. “All Senior Professionals must clearly and demonstrably support implementation of the President’s policy priorities through specific results that align with and advance the President’s specific policy agenda.”
Internal emails show that supervisors were instructed to “consider loyalty” when evaluating federal employees, as if public health were a reality show and the pink slip a rose. Career officials are calling it a return to the spoils system, where qualifications end and flattery begins. The department’s mission used to be protecting Americans’ health. Now it’s protecting Trump’s fragile ego.
D.C.’s 88-year-old congressional delegate scammed at home
Rob Beschizza / 8:08 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington D.C.’s nonvoting representative in the U.S. House, was scammed out of $4,400 by a fake cleaning crew at her home.
An internal police report obtained by NBC4 Washington details how suspects were able to enter Norton’s home on Thursday and access her credit card before someone, whom her office called a house manager and friend, was able to put a stop to it.
A D.C. police report described Norton, 88, as having the “early stages of dementia,” and said Norton has a caretaker with power of attorney. Norton’s office pushed back against that claim.
The crime is being treated as felony fraud, NBC News reports, and no arrests were immediately made. “Her public appearances and speeches have been sparse during a crucial time for the District of Columbia,” adds NBC News, “as President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress move to seize power from D.C. voters by revoking local laws and threatening a “complete and total” federal takeover of the liberal city.” The Washington Post described her in its latest endorsement as “D.C’s first line of defense.“
88 years old, suffering from dementia, shuffled around by a phalanx of staffers, one of which has her power of attorney, and when her “caretaker” is out she’s easy prey for door-to-door con artists. What do you call your act? The Democrats.
Texas Supreme Court: judges who refuse to marry gays don’t violate state rules
Rob Beschizza / 7:38 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Texas judges who refuse to marry gays because of “sincerely held religious beliefs” do not violate state rules on judicial impartiality, according to the state Supreme Court. The court added a comment to Texas’s judicial conduct code Friday, reports Kera News.
The high court’s comment on Oct. 24, effective immediately, could have statewide implications for gay marriage and potentially play a role in a federal lawsuit attempting to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage.
The ruling is a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage nationally and required judges and justices to the peace to officiate weddings without discrimination. The Texas case concerns Waco Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley, who has refused to comply since 2016.
Once the judicial conduct commission learned of this, it launched an inquiry into Hensley’s policy in 2018 and issued the public warning the next year.
Hensley did not appeal the reprimand but instead sued, arguing for protections under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which states the government can’t make restrictions that substantially burden someone’s freedom of religion.
The Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act states the government can’t make restrictions that substantially burden someone’s freedom of religion. The problem is that this creates religious exemptions from the law to allow racial discrimination, sexism and homophobia.
Here’s the rest of that Adam Ellis comic, often relevant lately.
Charges for cop suspected of shooting self and filing false report
Rob Beschizza / 7:07 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Austin Bradburn, a sheriff’s deputy in Towns County, Georgia, was charged Monday with filing a false report and violating his oath of office. Bradburn claimed that he had been shot, but his injuries were determined to be self-inflicted. A grand jury is also considering an indictment of the Sheriff, Kenneth Henderson, whose belligerent behavior afterwards alarmed colleagues and led to his suspension.
After Bradburn was injured in the december 2024 incident, Henderson accosted a third officer, José Carvajal with the Hiawassee Police Department, who was the first responder to the scene.
According to body camera video obtained exclusively by Atlanta News First Investigates, Carvajal used his military training to direct the use of a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and called in a description of the suspect. The confrontation began when Henderson arrived at the scene and questioned Carvajal about handling Bradburn’s gun. In the chaos of providing aid, Carvajal picked up Bradburn’s weapon instead of his own. Carvajal can be seen on video putting the gun back in the holster, but other emergency personnel on scene told him to take the gun. … When Carvajal said he wouldn’t touch the gun again until the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrived, Henderson became increasingly agitated
Henderson was restrained by his own officers and is the subject of an investigation—all information discovered by Atlanta News First through the freedom of information act requests.
The Georgia Sheriffs’ Association sent a letter to Kemp, requesting the governor appoint a committee “of two sheriffs and the Attorney General to investigate” Henderson’s “apparent misconduct,” a “high degree of unprofessionalism and possible criminal behavior which occurred in December of 2024.”
Interesting how the “deputy shot himself and lied“ story turns out to be an amuse-bouche before a dish of “meathead sheriff loses his shit” and we haven’t even gotten to the main course of finding out what it was all about in the first place.
Here’s the original report after Bradburn claimed to have been shot:
And here’s the bodycam footage of Sheriff Henderson after he arrived on the scene:
Artist transforms acorns, pumpkins, and flowers into tiny characters
Jennifer Sandlin / 6:00 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
In the past, we’ve featured Rhode Island-based artist, photographer, toy designer, and storyteller David M. Bird’s wonderful and whimsical “Becorns” creations — those adorable little people that Bird makes out of acorns and then beautifully photographs. The Becorns — and the stories the Bird creates around the creatures — are absolutely delightful and bring such joy into this world.
While the Becorn acorn people are what Bird is best known for, his other creations are equally delightful. Bird posted a video telling the story of how a new character, Lady Gourdelia, recently sprang to life from the remnants of a pumpkin creature he made last year, Lord Gourdon. In this video, Bird recounts how he created Lord Gourdon last fall. The royal gentleman didn’t last very long, though, because, as all pumpkins do, Lord Gourdon decomposed and faded away, leaving only sticks behind. A year later, Bird noticed a beautiful flower on a pumpkin vine growing where he had discarded what was left of Lord Gourdon. From that flower, he crafted Lord Gourdon’s daughter, Lady Gourdelia. She’s simply adorable and has the same cute smile and gentle presence as her father!
Bird also recently posted a video describing his experiences building flower people. In the video, aptly named, “Building with Flowers is Hard,” Bird discusses many of the challenges he encounters when trying to create characters from flowers. Because flowers are fragile and wilt quickly, you have to gather materials, build the figures, and photograph them quickly before they fall apart. He explains that it’s also hard to connect the various pieces of the flower characters in ways that allow them to hold a pose or carry their own weight. Despite these challenges, Bird has managed to create some gorgeous flower people and to capture them in some beautiful photographs. In the video he discusses one project where he wanted to create a “Queen of Spring” that a Becorn might encounter after surviving a cold winter. Bird walks us through the process of creating four iterations of the flower character before finally perfecting her. The photographs he captured of a Becorn kneeling in awe to present a gift to the Queen of Spring — a drop of precious water — are just stunning.
If you need some uplifting content today, look no further than this eight-minute video of the birth of the “Queen of Spring.” And see more of David M. Bird’s wonderful work on Instagram, YouTube, or his website.
Earth-bathing: the 18th-century doctor who believed burying yourself in dirt could heal the body
Popkin / 4:44 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
In the late eighteenth century, Scottish physician James Graham (1745–1794) promoted an unconventional therapy he called “earth-bathing.” He claimed that burying the body in freshly dug soil could heal everything from nervous disorders to rheumatism. For Graham, the Earth was a “great, huge Animal” whose energy could renew human health when people reconnected with it directly.
Graham believed that just as the planet’s systems stayed in balance, so could the body’s “microclimates” be restored through contact with clean, vital soil. He preferred light, reddish soil from hillsides, taken in the morning, and thought that singing while buried helped circulate the body. Before his dirt-based cures, Graham had already attracted attention for his spectacular Temple of Health and Temple of Hymen in London, where he combined electricity, magnetism, and showmanship in over-the-top medical displays.
Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) captured this absurdity perfectly in his print “Dr Graham’s Bathing Establishment,” depicting an indoor room crowded with nude figures luxuriating in soil—many still sporting fancy hats, because apparently one doesn’t abandon fashion entirely for therapeutic dirt.
Though many saw him as a quack, his work reflected Enlightenment-era curiosity about the body’s connection to the natural world and the mysterious vitality of the Earth itself. Earth bathing sounds fun, regardless of any alleged health benefits. As long as there are no giant centipedes, rabid groundhogs, or a hidden cavern of worms, then I’m in.
See also: A deep dive into Tolkien’s iconic Middle-earth map
“What do you live for?” Share your answer on this website
Popkin / 4:12 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
On Collect The Reasons, strangers answer one of life’s biggest questions: what do you live for? The site is overflowing with heartfelt responses, plus a few humorous ones, like “I live in a pineapple under the sea.” Some reasons are universal, like the idea that life is a gift, while others are deeply personal to the person who wrote them.
Contributing your own reason is simple. Just type it in the text field at the top of the page. You can engage with posts you like by clicking the plus sign, and popular submissions get featured under the “selected” category.
It’s an inspiring experience that offers genuine insight into strangers’ lives. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, spending time with these responses can remind you what truly matters. The character limit works beautifully, too; it keeps each reason distilled to its essence.
See also: California will collect public records for all police use of force, using open source software
Discover the retro electric cars hidden in an Arizona Powerhouse
Popkin / 4:02 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
The Route 66 Electric Vehicle Museum in Kingman, Arizona, is housed in a historic powerhouse and showcases a collection spanning over a century of electric vehicle design. Owner Roderick Wilde has assembled everything from everyday modern electric vehicles to a record-breaking electric race car. The museum proves that electric cars aren’t a recent invention, they’re a forgotten chapter of automotive history.
Electric vehicles thrived in the early 1900s before gasoline cars dominated the market. Atlas Obscura says, “Electric vehicles aren’t a 21st-century innovation; they date back to the 19th century. For a brief time in the early 1900s, they even competed with gasoline cars, before cheap fuel and limited battery technology rendered them impractical.”
A single admission ticket grants access to the Electric Vehicle Museum plus three additional Kingman attractions: the Arizona Route 66 Museum, the Mohave Museum of History and Arts, and the Bonelli House.
See also: Electric vehicle resale values crash worldwide in 2025
Ducks compete in the wildest pea-eating contest ever
Jennifer Sandlin / 3:53 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
My new favorite competitive sport is “Pea Madness,” featuring the ducks of Cheese and Quackers Homestead. It happens most Sundays (and occasionally on Mondays) and features ducks like Popcorn, Dippin’ Dot, Peanut, Mango, Almond, Anchovy, and more, racing to see who can eat peas the fastest. Each competition has several rounds, and in each match up, whichever duck can gobble up twenty peas that are sitting in a bowl of water in the fewest seconds is the winner and proceeds to the next round. The timer starts when the duck’s bill first hits the water, and stops when the last pea is consumed. The duck (or ducks, when they are competing as teams) who wins the entire competition each week gets the grand prize: a giant bucket full of scrumptious peas!
It’s really fun watching the ducks snarfle the peas. They’re adorable, and truly seem to love, love, LOVE eating peas. I’m actually surprised at how exciting I find the matchups, given my general lack of interest in most sports. But, somehow, this is a sport I can truly get behind. The ducks are amazingly quick — some can eat a bowl of peas in under five seconds! A few ducks in particular, like Anchovy and Almond, are fierce competitors and are absolute standouts. I’d hate to go head-to-head with either of them in a pea-eating contest, that’s for sure.
Check out the action of Pea Madness here. And if you want to see more of the Cheese and Quackers gang, here’s a six-minute ASMR video of a bunch of them slurping up peas and quacking in delight. Enjoy!
Cheese and Quackers Homestead is a small homestead in New York that primarily works with waterfowl. See more of the ducks who live there on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook.
New retro Bluetooth speakers from Ikea
Rob Beschizza / 3:51 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Ikea has a knack for offering good gadgets at a great price (Exhibit A: the Teenage Engineering collabs) and I wish it’d get a little more ambitious. But the Blomprakt is a typical offering from the Swedish retailer: a bluetooth lamp-speaker combo, ostentatiously minimal in white, black or pale blue plastic. [via Notebook Check]
This versatile speaker can be placed at different angles to suit your needs – the dual cord slots underneath make it easy to reposition while maintaining its sleek look.
Allows you to always listen to your favorite music or podcast – all you need is your phone, computer or other Bluetooth device.
With a simple press and hold, you can seamlessly dim the light and create a perfect atmosphere for any occasion and activity.
It was designed by Jon Eliason and in stores now for $60.
The $50 Nattbad speaker, also in store now, doesn’t have a lamp. But I love the muted matte yellow (it also comes in black and a beigey pink) and the timeless styling. You can set them up as a stereo pair, too, or more:
This Bluetooth speaker is easy to use and has a clear and powerful sound that can easily be enhanced by adding more NATTBAD speakers.
Allows you to always listen to your favorite music or podcast – all you need is your phone, computer or other Bluetooth device.
Sound can change your mood, the atmosphere at home and bring people together as you listen to podcasts and audiobooks with your family – or enjoy music when having friends over for dinner.
Slopaganda: articles in Elon Musk’s Grokipedia “almost identical” to Wikipedia
Rob Beschizza / 3:29 am PT Tue Oct 28, 2025
Elon Musk launched Grokipedia as an alternative to “woke” Wikipedia. The billionaire so dislikes Wikipedia that he recently promised to make sure his own chatbot, Grok, doesn’t link to it in giving answers to queries. But it surprises no-one to find that Grokipedia itself is significantly derived from Wikipedia, with hot-button articles rewritten to fit Musk’s right-wing preferences. Jay Peters:
At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.
“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson’s full statement in full at the end of this article.
A reasonable assumption would be that Grokipedia is simply Wikipedia edited by Grok, and Grok is leaving a lot of it in there. There’s nothing wrong with re-using Wikipedia content—it’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, after all—but you’d think conservatives smart enough to care about online encyclopedias would realize they’re looking at slopaganda generated to reinforce their feelings, not inform them.
Here’s the rest of Dickinson’s statement:
We’re still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.
Since 2001, Wikipedia has been the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it remains the only top website in the world run by a nonprofit. Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.
Wikipedia’s knowledge is – and always will be – human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding – one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.
Wikipedia’s nonprofit independence — with no ads and no data-selling — also sets it apart from for-profit alternatives. All of these strengths have kept Wikipedia a top trusted resource for more than two decades.
Many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn’t interfere with our work or mission. As we approach Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, Wikipedia will continue focusing on providing free, trustworthy knowledge built by its dedicated volunteer community. For more information about how Wikipedia works, visit our website and new blog series.
Conservapedia still appears in search results, but was down when I checked this morning.