I am now off work for ... eleven days!

Holy fuck am I going to do nothing.

The Washington area has a long and mostly proud tradition of houses that lend themselves as venues for up-and-coming bands. But in the last few days, some residents of those houses have become guarded after discovering their homes’ names and addresses targeted in online message boards populated by members of the white nationalist movement known as the “alt-right.”

Sites like 4chan and Reddit, along with even more unfiltered corners of the internet, have seen the emergence of threads in which users encourage each other to post addresses of houses that host concerts and other arts programming around the country, and to call local authorities to report safety and building-code violations in hopes of getting the venues shut down. The threads appear to be nominally inspired by a December 2 fire at an Oakland, California, warehouse that killed 36 musicians and concertgoers, but the message-board users also make no attempt to hide their political motivation.

“These places are open hotbeds of liberal radicalism and degeneracy and now YOU can stop them by reporting all such places you may be or may become aware of to the authorities, specifically the local fire marshel [sic],” reads the original post on a 4chan thread that has since been archived. “Watch them and follow them to their hives. Infiltrate social circles, go to parties/events, record evidence, and report it. We’ve got them on the run but now we must crush their nests before they can regroup! MAGA my brothers and happy hunting!”

In 2015, scientist Lida Xing came across a beautiful and curious piece at an amber market in Myitkyina, Myanmar, likely destined to become a piece of jewelery. Trapped inside the yellow piece was a feather that others had overlooked as belonging to a plant. But Xing knew that it could be something more.

And it was.

It was a piece of 99 million-year-old history: a dinosaur feather.

CBC News

Before he became The Piano Man, Billy Joel was half of a Deep Purple-esque proto-metal band called Attila. And they made an album.

You can, if you want to, listen to the whole thing, below.

1. "Wonder Woman" (3:38)
2. "California Flash" (3:32)
3. "Revenge is Sweet" (4:00)
4. "Amplifier Fire (Part I: Godzilla/Part II: March Of The Huns)" (7:39)
5. "Rollin' Home" (4:52)
6. "Tear This Castle Down" (5:49)
7. "Holy Moses" (4:30)
8. "Brain Invasion" (5:41)

I made it through Part I of Amplifier Fire.

That's Joel singing.

The band broke up when Billy Joel ran off with the other guy's wife.

Brain invasion.

Recognizing a fellow human’s face is about more than just identifying a nose or mouth. It’s believed we use something called configural recognition to process the entire facial structure altogether, which is why there’s often a little bit of a lag time when we see a face upside-down (humans have an easier time recognizing other objects, like cars or houses, that have been flipped).

Researchers now believe chimpanzees have something similar to configural recognition. Only they use it to recognize each other’s butts.

Mental Floss

Our growing demand for coconuts has come at the same time stronger-than-usual hurricanes and droughts have destroyed or damaged coconut plantations. A lethal yellowing disease has killed other coconut palms, and in some areas, new trees haven't been planted fast enough. All of this has led to a 17 percent decrease in coconut plantations since 1994, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

“It’s fair to say that at this pace, the Caribbean is running out of coconuts,” Compton Paul, coordinator of a regional coconut program at the Trinidad-based Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, told Bloomberg News.

Uber's latest update allows the ride-hailing app to track user location data even when the application is running in the background. The change in location data gathering is quite apparent — after the update is completed, Uber prompts users to accept the new policy by enabling their phones to make the change.

Previously, Uber only collected data from the user if the rider had the application open. Now, if a rider calls for an Uber and closes the app, Uber says it will continue to collect location data up until five minutes after the ride ends. That means Uber can see where you end up after you leave the car.

Lucky for me, our town is so small that there aren't any Uber drivers in it.

Slow as molasses isn’t just a saying—the byproduct of sugar production is usually sticky and viscous, even at room temperature. So historians and scientists have long been stumped by Boston's 1919 Great Molasses Flood.

...

Though an anarchist terrorist attack was first blamed for the calamity, investigators soon pointed at the holding tank’s shoddy construction. But the question has remained, why did the molasses explode as a wave and not just slowly drip out of the tank? A group of students at Harvard investigated the event and presented their conclusions at recent meeting of the American Physical Society.

Is pretty friggin cool.

After only a couple hours of playing with it, anyway.

This sober-minded and not all paranoid and excitable person:

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event."

She wasn't joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton's people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom," added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

...has now been named by Trump to be the ... wait for it ... Deputy National Security Advisor !