Our friends over at the Huffington Post compiled an awesome collection of retro products that, for one reason or a hundred, never quite caught on. Hmmm, the Egg Cuber, Beef-flavored water for your dog, a Solitude Tank for the beach, Yogurt shampoo … I just can’t see why they weren’t popular. [via The Huffington Post]

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Is this taking the whole concept of shocking cover images too far? This Time Magazine image shows 26 year old mum, Jamie Lynne Grume, breastfeeding her 3 year old son with the headline: ‘Are you mom enough?’. The story tackles the complex issue of child attachment, in the most blunt of ways. Anything for free publicity, I guess. And yes, we feel into the trap as well. Well, you know what they say about a sucker …

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Ok, so this is a good reminder why one night stands don’t always pay off, especially when one half of the stand reads too much into the previous evening’s, erm, activities. Out of the USA comes this bizarre, one-sided text correspondence from a girl directed at the guy who bedded her, then discreetly sent her on her way. It’s painful to read, especially as the texts were all unleashed over a period of, wait for it, a day. Check out the full stream of messages at Buzzfeed.

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Our friends at Retronaut published these devastatingly beautiful portrait shots of the late, great Marilyn Monroe, which were taken by Edward Clarke in 1950, when she was around 24 years old. The photos are courtesy of the wonderful Life.com archive.

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Only in China. No, wait, only in Shanghai would you find a Marriage Market at People’s Park, which operates every weekend and attracts, literally, hundreds of people all in the united quest of finding the perfect match for their child, their sibling, or occasionally, themselves. So how does it work? Simple. Parents post basic bios of their unwed children on the fences. Interested parties peruse the bios and make their selections. And the rest is in the hands of fate.

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These images off How To Be A Retronaut were taken by Lewis Hine back in the 1900s and have been recently released by the National Child Labor Committee Collection at the Library of Congress. How far we’ve come, at least in some parts of the world, that this industry is no longer able to exploit children in this way.

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From the ‘what were you thinking’ file comes this news report of a man in Fort Lauderdale accused of drug trafficking who turned up to court for his trial wearing a jacket with a cartoon recipe for cooking crack cocaine. Yes, smart indeed.

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Banksy has struck again, this time offending the Catholic Church with a bold artwork that critiques their stance on ongoing child abuse scandals. Banksy has taken a replica of a bust of an eighteenth century member of the Catholic hierarchy and added multi-coloured tiles to the face — pixelating it — as a comment on what he considers to be the Church’s cover-up. ‘I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one’, Banksy noted. And who are we to disagree?

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Oh boy, this is so bizarre it could only be true. Apparently a Dayton, Ohio, tattoo artist has been slapped with a $100,000 lawsuit by his ex-girlfriend for tattooing an image of, erm, excrement with flies on her back rather than the scene from Narnia that she had requested. The reason? He’d recently found out that she had been cheating on him with one of his buddies. Damn! And here we were thinking this was the hot new look for trailer park trash crowd.

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For anyone who didn’t see the disgraceful incident at Davis, watch on, then you’ll appreciate the searing irony of these images on the awesome Pepper Spraying Cop tumblr. ‘Little did we know that Pepper Spraying Cop has cracked down on so many famous moments in history!’ Indeed.

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These incredible photos of the northern lights over Troms, Norway were taken by photographers Tommy Eliassen, Fredrik Broms, Justin Dernier, and Patrick Pleul, and featured on the always inspiring Lightbox section of Time Magazine online.

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Chinese Democracy famously took Guns n Roses 7 years to complete, full-time. Much has been said of Axel Rose’s obsessive, dictatorial nature, and his collaborators’ unwillingness to work under a despot. But its wasn’t a bizzarro-fascist recording environment which hampered Soul Delay. [download the album via this link]

The Mischief Engine’s debut album took almost as long to produce: six years elapsed between the first sessions and the final mastering. The difference is that its production was sporadic. Whereas Mr Rose could create and frustrate all hours, The Mischief Engine’s key players had record labels to run, TV commercials to direct, movies to appear in, and Michael Buble tribute shows to star in. They squeezed in an hour here and there, until every cymbal, sample and syllable was perfectly placed.

I’ve just downloaded Soul Delay (Business Class), having tasted their wares on Economy Class. It’s a truly remarkable work. Just as The Beatles discarded genre classification on their later albums, The Mischief Engine refuse to be neatly boxed. Blink rocks out like The Prodigy, My Oh My is a lullaby so sweet you could eat it off a stick, and Firegirl begins as a jazzy bubblegum ditty, only to knock you sideways with the phattest guitar this side of Biohazard.

Soul Delay (Business Class) is a concept album. But unlike the epic scale of The Dark SIde of the Moon, American Idiot or Tommy, this tells a more intimate tale. It’s about a dorky guy who falls for a girl online, then traverses the globe to meet her. The key creative force behind The Mischief Engine is Stuart McBratney, also a writer/director, and his penchant for comedy shines through. Take You Never Know My Name. It’s a track about the lead character’s failings as a pick-up artist, and could easily be a scene from a Woody Allen picture.

Maybe all bands should take the time to let music evolve. Maybe the downfall of record labels will allow more artists to create at their own pace, without the pressure of deadlines and sales figures. Maybe The Mischief Engine will encourage others to forgo genre expectations, and make whatever the hell tickles their fancy. Whether they’d arrive at something as inspired and beautiful as Soul Delay is a different matter.

In The Big Lebowski, the stranger says, “It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners.” It’s good to know that The Mischief Engine are out there, taken’ ‘er easy, allowing their ideas to mature, their melodies to evolve, and their production to reach perfection. But unlike Chinese Democracy, Soul Delay is well worth the wait.

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Directed by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, this electric video is for the new S.C.U.M single, Whitechapel, which comes from their forthcoming album, Again Into Eyes.

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Confession: before they become too firmly wedged into the mainstream, I was a big Coldplay fan. This new single off the forthcoming Mylo Xyloto album sounds like a studio cut from their debut release, which can only be a good thing.

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Oh wow, I think my face just melted. This video for the Wolfgang Gartner track is about the craziest, dopest, most politically charged thing I’ve seen in a long time.

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Photographer Anton Kusters spent several years documenting the Japanese Yakuza subculture for his series, 893-Yakuza: a personal visual account of the life inside an inaccessible subculture, a traditional Japanese crime family that controls the streets of Kabukicho, in the heart of Tokyo, Japan’.

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Somewhere out there in that vast expanse of space, there just had to be a planet made from bling. What’s more, it’s in our own Milky Way galaxy. That’s right, practically within reaching distance. A team of researchers have discovered a giant crystal space rock, measuring some 60,000km in diameter (five times the size of earth) and orbiting at a distance of 600,000km. All of which should be more than enough to lock down the ring for Beyonce’s next wedding.

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Only in New York! I encountered this guy, and his friendly, well-balanced cat Nicholas, yesterday at the intersection of Houston and Broadway where he was only too happy to pose for a photo in exchange for a crisp dollar bill. Wonder if Nicholas got to spend any of it?

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By their own admission, designers Anielle James and Erin Kauffman of Axe To Grind create ‘jewelry that is drunk tested sober approved’. But who really cares? We’d dig it drunk, we’d dig it sober. It’s rad. Albeit, aptly named.

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Whoever designed this Afro-themed cookie packaging, take a bow. And make it a long one. Let’s hope the cookie tastes as fine as the plastic it comes in.

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