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.

SPONSOR

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?

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.

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.

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.

SPONSOR

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.

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.

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.

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.

SPONSOR

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’.

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.

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?

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.

SPONSOR

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.

Ah, ok. A group of Chinese dog owners are demonstrating their newfound fondness for the canine by dying their pets to make them look more like the exotic animals they will never, ever have. Oh well, each to their own(er). [photos via China Foto Press]

Yes, we agree, life would be so much easier if those simple misunderstandings weren’t so commonplace. The Manslater may well be the saviour for men the world over. We’ll take five of them, please. In a range of sporty colours.

If getting up in the morning is a problem for you, we have a simple, albeit potentially pricey, solution: the Cash Shredding Alarm Clock takes your hard earned and starts chewing it up for as long as it takes for you to get active and turn the damn thing off. That’s a nice wad of change to pay for a few extra Zs.

SPONSOR

Forget hurling sneakers at George Bush. That’s a waste. He’ll only duck them anyway. Think twice about chucking your kicks at John Howard. He’s too quick for us. Now you can toss a virtual shoe at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and take your frustrations out on the world without being hauled off in cuffs.

Designed in 1989 by architect Charles Jencks, and open to the public for only one day a year, the eye-poppingly original Garden of Cosmic Speculation features gardens, bridges, sculptures, and architectural works, and was inspired by mathematics and science. [Photos below by Paulus Maximus]

We’re big fans of the music of Montreal producer Miracle Fortress (aka Graham Van Pelt), whose deep electronic sound has received critical acclaim from SPIN, Paper, XLR8R and KEXP, among others. Check out the awesome Pantha du Prince remix of his first single, Raw Spectacle, below.