Hasta La Gadget!

Would you like to sit on top of a bunch of thick and jagged poles? Normally I wouldn’t, but if I knew it was furniture made by Annie Evelyn, then I probably would.

You see, Annie is a master of disguise when it comes to her creations. They still look like furniture, of course, but what she hides so well is the comfort that her pieces can provide.

Annie ‘upholstered’ her chairs with rigid-looking materials on top of foam to give them the illusion of discomfort. Those who take the risk and take a seat will find the experience to be surprisingly pleasant.

The entire process is pretty painstaking. Annie first reclaims the frames of the wooden chairs. She then lines the back and seat with foam before cutting small pieces of rigid materials and covering the foam with these pieces.

This technique lets Annie create chairs that look like they’ve got cracked cement, tiles, and wood tiles covering the seats. However, the foam underneath makes them actually conform to your body when you sit on the chairs. Clever, no?

[via Dornob]

Weather apps are a dime a dozen, but accurate weather apps are a little more rare. For most of them, you’d be better off tossing a coin to try to figure out if it’s actually going to rain or not. And that’s where SkyMotion shines—down to the minute.

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Sesame Street is no stranger to controversy. From divorce to AIDS to Bert and Ernie’s sexual ambiguity, the show has famously pushed the limits on what preschoolers should know.

Sesame Street’s latest hot topic — incarceration — debuted this week as an educational kit titled “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration.” The package, which consists of stories, tips and activities for caregivers and kids, is designed to act as “an educational outreach initiative for families with children (ages 3 – 8) who are coping with a parent’s incarceration,” the Sesame Workshop website explains.

As The Atlantic’s J.K. Trotter notes, the package has so far elicited pretty polarized reactions:

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House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa put on a clinic in rudeness Tuesday, releasing a letter to ranking member Elijah Cummings that’s essentially a three-page insult, calling Cummings “reckless,” “irresponsible” and “obstructionist” for releasing the transcript of an interview in which an IRS manager said there was no evidence the White House was involved in Tea Party targeting, and telling CNN’s Candy Crowley that “the case is solved.”

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Buyers poured a record $4.65 billion in cash into Southern California’s housing market during May, driving the biggest price gain in nine years and putting sales at a seven-year high, a research firm said Tuesday.

Last month, cash down payments and home purchases jumped 19.5 percent from $3.89 billion the year before and increased 1.8 percent from $4.57 million in April, the prior record, said La Jolla-based DataQuick.

The median price paid for all new and resale houses and condos in the six-county region increased 24.7 percent in May to $368,000 from $295,000 a year earlier and it was up 3.1 percent from $357,000 in April.

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