The country's faltering economy? Piracy at high seas? Concerns about terrorism? Nay, the biggest story in Washington DC these past couple of days revolve around a dog. But not just any dog: he's Bo, the cute Obama dog!

The identity of the first puppy -- the one that the Washington press corps has been yelping about for months, the one President Obama has seemed to delight in dropping hints about -- leaked out Saturday.

The little guy is a six-month-old Portuguese water dog given to the Obama girls as a gift by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Malia and Sasha named it Bo. [...]

A secret get-acquainted session with the family occurred at the White House a few weeks ago. The visit, known around the White House as "The Meeting," was a surprise for the girls. Bo charmed the first family, a source who was there said. He sat when the girls sat, stood when the girls stood. He made no toilet errors and did not gnaw on the furniture. Bo has, after all, been receiving lessons in good behavior from the Kennedys' dog trainers. These lessons have been taking place at a secret, undisclosed location outside Washington.

Link (Photo: Pete Souza / White House)

Insurance fraud is not new, but this one is unusual: "necro-phonies" Faye Shilling and Jane Crump will be arraigned on charges of staging fake funerals for fake people to defraud insurance companies!

When staging the funerals, Shilling, a phlebotomist, and Crump, an employee at a now-defunct Long Beach mortuary, allegedly filled caskets with various materials to make it appear they contained actual corpses, documents show.

After the funerals, the women and their associates filed bogus documents with the county saying the remains had been cremated and scattered at sea, prosecutors said.

The insurance policies were worth $50,000 to $450,000, and the women had already collected on some as large as $250,000, officials said.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Women-Accused-of-Faking-Funerals-for-Undead-Fake-People.html

Can't ... resist ... posting ... about these Star Trek groaners compiled by our very own Miss C:

Question: How many ears does Picard have?
Answer: Three. A right ear. A left ear. And a final front ear.

Question: What did the blonde Klingon say?
Answer: "It was a good day to dye."

Question: What is Thomas Riker's dating philosophy?
Answer: "If at first you don't succeed, try Troi again."

More here: Link | If you like that, you should visit the Shaggy Dog Story Archive

Forget those cutesy bento boxes! Here's Ichi the Killer bento box by Sakurako Kitsa:

This is my obent-ode to Ichi the Killer, one of the most awesome, extreme movies in the history of ever. My rendition didn't do Tadanobu Asano the slightest bit of justice (you try making him out of turkey and mustard), but I think it came out okay.

This is from the very memorable part of the movie where he inhales deeply on his cigarette and blows the smoke out the slits in his cheeks.

Link - via Rue the Day

John Hawkins of Right Wing News blog wrote about 50 things that every 18-year-old should know. I wish I knew these two when I was younger, it would've saved me a lot of grief:

When men have a problem and they tell you about it, they want to know how to fix it. When women have a problem and they tell you about it, they just want you to listen.

If you get into a business deal with someone who goes to unusual lengths to convince you of how honest or Christian they are, watch your wallet and make sure you have an iron clad contract. They "doth protest too much."

http://rightwingnews.com/mt331/2009/04/50_things_every_18yearold_shou.php - via The Zeray Gazette

What else would you add to the list?

Last month, our very own Stacy (who just survived a freaky accident involving a downed power line - glad you're ok, Stacy!) wrote a very neat post over at mental_floss about the background stories of 10 classic toys.

Take, for instance, Slinky:

Slinky was invented by Naval engineer Richard James. He knocked a spring off of a shelf when he was working to develop springs that could keep ship instruments stable in choppy waters. The spring did what a Slinky does… it stepped down to a stack of books, then to the table, and then to the floor, where it righted itself into a cylinder. James knew it would be a great toy, and tests by neighborhood kids proved him right.

Link - via i met a possum

Long before the "series of tubes" become a web parlance (thanks to former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens), there was a real tubes technology: the pneumatic tube system.

WebUrbanist takes a look at this fantastic retro-technology that until recently was still used in my local Costco to move around money:

Long before the Internet was a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, a different series of tubes helped shuttle messages from one place to another, seemingly by magic. These pneumatic tube systems, many of which are still operating, are a marvel of not-so-modern technology and although they blow, they most definitely do not blow.

Link

Super Punch blog has a neat post about Papershapers, a paper art exhibition as sponsored by Scion Space and curated by Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot.

The art exhibit features the artwork of Shin Tanaka, Polly Verity, Annie Vought, Ryohei Tanaka, Hunter Stabler, Richard Sweeney, Peter Callesen, Brian Dettmer, Ana Serrano, and Mu Pan.

The image to the left is called The Sharp-Beaked Hound of Zeus, a marvelous papercraft by artist Polly Verity.

Link

Nearly two years after it was introduced to the world, Osaka University's CB2 robot (which stands for "Child-robot with Biomimetic Body") has been developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, just like a human baby would:

Below the soft silicon skin of one of Japan's most sophisticated robots, processors record and evaluate information. The 130-cm (four-foot, four-inch) humanoid is designed to learn just like a human infant.

"Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more," said Osaka University professor Minoru Asada, as his team's 33 kilogram (73 pound) invention kept its eyes glued to him.

The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother's countless facial expressions and "clusters" them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j1F1VEHktMpXSaXrLUgr4coIDfPg - via Pink Tentacle

This is very cool: Paper Forest blog has a YouTube clip of a spinning papercraft. The original design is by Ramin Razani, as noted by Jeffrey Rutzky in his book Kirigami (more photos here on his Flickr acct).

Link [embedded YouTube clip] - via Make

If you'd like to make your own, here's a similar template.

And so it has begun: Honda has developed a new brain-machine interface technology that allows humans to control the Asimo robot simply by thinking:

The BMI system, which Honda developed along with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation, consists of a sensor-laden helmet that measures the user’s brain activity and a computer that analyzes the thought patterns and relays them as wireless commands to the robot.

When the user simply thinks about moving his or her right hand, the pre-programmed Asimo responds several seconds later by raising its right arm. Likewise, Asimo lifts its left arm when the person thinks about moving their left hand, it begins to walk when the person thinks about moving their legs, and it holds its hand up in front of its mouth when the person thinks about moving their tongue.

Pink Tentacle blog has more: Link (with video clip)

To protect public propriety, Saudi Arabia has recently banned license plates whose Arabic characters spell out lewd words:

Saudi plates normally have three Arabic characters and three numbers, but the growing fashion is for auto owners also to display a version using the Latin alphabet and some buyers of personalised "vanity plates" deliberately choose Arabic letters which turn into words like "SEX", "ASS" and "NUT".

The authorities in charge of issuing vanity plates have released a list of nine prohibited three-letter combinations, and ordered all branches to stop renewing plates that include them, according to Watan.

Link (Photo from The Geekiest License Plates at Geek24 - lots of fun stuff there!)

In other news, a Saudi judge reiterated his decision that the marriage of an 8-year-old to a 47-year-old man is valid and refused to annul the marriage:

The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom recently. While rights groups have been petitioning the government to enact laws that would protect children from this type of marriage, the kingdom's top cleric has said that it's OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.

"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in remarks last January quoted in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."

Al-Sheikh reportedly made the remarks when he was asked during a lecture about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.

"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Sharia law has not brought injustice to women."

Link

Photo: NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane et al.

Actually, it's the image of a nebula surrounding a young pulsar known as PSR B1509-58, as taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy blog explains:

If you look at the wrist of the hand, you’ll see a brighter swirl of gas. In the center of that blob is a tiny object, a neutron star called B1509: an incredibly dense sphere of subatomic particles, leftover when a massive star goes supernova. While the outer layers of the star explode outwards, the core of the star collapses, cramming twice the mass of the Sun into a ball only a few kilometers across. This newly born neutron star — called that because the pressure is so great in the collapsed object that electrons and protons are rammed together to form neutrons — is basically the definition of the word incredible: it spins several times per second, has a surface gravity millions of times that of the Earth (if you were on the surface you’d be crushed flatter than a good science fiction program’s chances to be renewed on Fox), and has a magnetic field 30 trillion times that of the Earth’s.

Link | Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Mel Milton's workspace, more at Melmade The Blog

It's always fascinating to get an inside glimpse into how art is made. Parka Blogs has a neat post about the creative workspaces and home offices of artists. This one above is the workspace of Disney Interactive animator Mel Milton. I spotted an empty table space to the right that will probably be occupied with toys soon!

Link - via Drawn!

Fred Baier said that his furniture are inspired by "industrial imagery," but we're pretty darn certain that the deks above, nondescriptly titled Dual Quad, is some sort of a hidden robot that will rise and quash humanity for not using coasters when setting down their drinks on the lacquered birch countertop.

If you'd like one, it'll set you back £11,000: Link via Gizmodo