By BY MEGAN SPECIA writing for Mashable.com MANCHESTER, N.H. — Meet Vermin Supreme. The Gandalf-esque staple of the New Hampshire political scene sports a long grey beard, a half dozen wild neckties and a leopard print cape. He also just placed fourth in the New Hampshire Democratic primary Supreme, who carried a 3-foot-tall toothbrush with him as he […]

BY  Hadley Malcolm, USA TODAY With Burger King’s advent of a hamburger dressed up as a burrito and Pepsi’s revival of its eerily clear cola, it seems like fast-food purveyors and soda bottlers are spending more time creating crazy new mash-ups in laboratories than fresh recipes in kitchens. Hoping to break through the marketing clutter, bizarre combinations of otherwise familiar foods are coming […]

By Charles Bramesco writing for Rolling Stone The most important person in Hollywood circa 2016 is not a movie star or a studio head. The new ruler of the American film industry is the common fan, once ridiculed as a basement-dwelling outcast, now recognized as a force to be reckoned with. That “nerds” have inherited the […]

By: CHRISTOPHER MIMS Whether you’re a Twitter pro or a complete novice, odds are the best way to get the most out of Twitter is to avoid it as much as possible. Delete the app off your phone. Stay away from its website and desktop client apps. Just log out. Understanding why this is the case […]

By Joe Rao, SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist The Perseids, the most widely observed and dependable of the annual meteor displays, will peak during the overnight hours of Thursday, Aug. 11 into the morning of Friday, Aug. 12, and this year has all the earmarks of being a spectacular show. First, there is the situation regarding the […]

by ADAM HOWARD, NBC News In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s likely that you’ve at least seen or heard some of the hype surrounding the Summer Olympic Games in Rio. Unfortunately for the Brazilian city, much of the buzz leading up to the games has been negative: Zika. Doping. Pollution. Poverty. Yet […]

From Political BlindSpot.com The real “Lone Ranger,” it turns out, was an African American man named Bass Reeves, who the legend was based upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, many aspects of his life were written out of the story, including his ethnicity. The basics remained the same: a lawman hunting bad guys, accompanied by a Native […]

From PrivacySense.net Nowadays, it is far more convenient to pay at gas stations with a speedpass, use Paypal for online purchases, and pay with plastic rather than holding wads of cash and pockets of loose change. But instead of now worrying about being mugged for cash, there is a technique to defraud you of your […]

By Ethan Trex writing for Mental Floss As soon as an actor in a movie or TV show starts rattling off a phone number, every viewer knows what the first three digits will be: 5-5-5. How did “555” become the convention for fake phone numbers, and are there any real 555 numbers? Let’s dial up some answers. […]

By Nico Hines writing for The Daily Beast. Brazil is suffering pre-Games fears, delays—and Zika—but Rio probably won’t be among the all-time most disastrous Olympics. Here are the top five worst ever. With the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse apparently saddled up and riding toward Rio, it’s been claimed that Brazilian organizers are making preparations […]