Half-ton Rube Goldberg corkscrew

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's spotted this half-ton Rube Goldberg corkscrew by artist Rob Higgs:

Rob Higgs is an artist who makes extraordinarily convoluted machines — or at least one: the "Corkscrew", a self-cast monstrosity for gears and levers which does, unbelievably, actually work as a half-ton corkscrew for a bottle of wine.
I'll take two. (Which may be possible; as part of the One of a Hundred project, they may actually sell these things for lots and lots of money. But probably not.)

The Corkscrew by Rob Higgs Discuss this at Boing Boing Gadgets

More items

Xeni on Rachel Maddow Show: World Wide Web grows wider, more worldly

Update here, with Q&A. Rachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, ... More.

Will the Duggars Inherit the Earth?

In which I am inspired by a snarky comment on another blog. My normal routine involves a fair amount of procrastination, but I tell myself that's OK (really), because sometimes it leads to work ideas. Like, a couple of months ago, when I was browsing through the Onion AV Club and stumbled over th... More.

My son, the nude model

John Schwartz at the New York Times writes about what it's like to have a son in college whose job is to sit around with no clothes on. Hey, from the son's perspective, what's not to love, right? The only job requirement is that you have a body. Snip: As a little boy, Sam once asked me: "Dad, is ... More.

Arthur Goldwag on the queen of the "birther" movement

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. Hello everybody. I'm excited to be guest-blogging for Boing Boing ... More.

ICANN haz cheezburger (Update to "Xeni on Maddow")

[Photo: "Keyboard Cat," by Fluffy Avenger.] On Friday, I joined Rachel Maddow for a segment on the Rachel Maddow Show about news that ICANN will soon begin supporting truly internationalized domain name extensions -- in other words, dot-com, dot-(country name), and the like, typed out non-Lati... More.