6-yo boy Falcon Heene—who allegedly was flying uncontrollably inside a homemade spaceship-shaped helium balloon, now landed—has not been found yet. Colorado police are searching for him now. [Update: Boy was safe, hiding at home. ]

Authorities are trying to rescue the balloon but there’s no much they can do about it, as the UFO is flying without control over northeastern Colorado, pushed by 15 to 20mph southwest wind. According to Eloise Campanella, Larimer County Sheriff’s Officer spokeswoman, “the device could rise to 10,000 feet.” At that altitude, temperature is very low and there’s little air to breathe.

The balloon was made with helium balloons and tinfoil by his father, Richard Heene (who is quite a weird character, as you can see in the video of him trying to prove life in Mars). Hopefully things won’t end dramatically this time, and we will see a happy ending so the people at Pixar can make a follow up to Up!.

Update 1: The flying saucer is down. The boy is OK, but it’s not clear yet if he was in the balloon or not. MSNBC is saying now that the kid wasn’t on the balloon after they said he was, but CBS just said he was.

Update 2: Boy is not in the balloon. County sheriff is saying that the Colorado emergency office and various sheriff offices are organizing a search and rescue operation.

Update 3: They are evaluating areas for the search.

Update 4: The Heene family is one weird bunch. Once upon a time, they participated in ABC’s WifeSwap:

The Heene family from Colorado live life on the edge. Wife Mayumi (43) and storm scientist Richard (45) take their three kids, Bradford (8), Ryo (7) and Falcon (5), out of school to go on storm chasing missions to prove Richard’s theories about magnetic fields and gravity. If conditions are right, Mayumi wakes her family by shouting “Storm Approaching, Storm Approaching!” into a bullhorn. The family sleep in their clothes so they can leap out of bed and into the storm-mobile. Richard calls Mayumi his ‘ninja wife’; she maintains equipment, drives the storm-mobile, films tornadoes and waits with the kids while Richard jumps on his motorbike, heads into the eye of the storm and launches rockets to measure magnetic forces. At home the family are as chaotic as a twister: the kids have no table manners and throw themselves around the house, and while Richard devotes every moment to his research, he expects Mayumi to cook, clean and run the house without any help.

Meanwhile on a quiet street in Connecticut, the Martel family — wife Karen (43), husband Jay (50) and their two kids, Max (11) and Dean (10) — live a life of calm and safety. Dad is so committed to safety that he runs a child-proofing business devoted to identifying dangers and risks and making sure kids stay out of harm’s way. With all the precautions taken to keep them safe, Max and Dean seem to be afraid of everything…”you can fall down the stairs, get cancer from the microwave, get tapeworms from sushi, and the lava lamp could explode…” The Martels conduct safety fire drills, make sure the kids wear protective gear on their bikes and pogo-sticks and never let the boys out of their sight. The atmosphere in the house is calm and serene, and Karen and Jay are equal partners.

Now, enjoy this “rap video” with the three kids.

Update 5: I’m not surprised the father picked an UFO theme for the helium balloon. Check him proving life on Mars on iReport:

Update 6: One of the siblings says he saw Falcon getting into the UFO. Police are looking now for an object—presumably a box—that was seen dropping from the balloon.

Update 7: The boy was actually at home.

The Fleshlight Motion is like an ottoman with a fake vagina on the side. You have sex with it. I did the deed with an inanimate object so you don’t have to, and these are my results. I feel dirty.

I’m actually reviewing two different products from Fleshlight: the Fleshlight Motion ($90-$150) and the Sex in a Can ($40). But they’re both just different versions of the same rubber vagina. The Sex in a Can puts that fake vagina in a big fake beer can, while the aforementioned Fleshlight Motion gives you a leather-encased box to hold on to while you do your thing.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with using an object to help out your solo stimulation. After all, ladies have all sorts of fun toys that they use, and it’s pretty acceptable. But the male sex toy has never really caught on. Now that I’ve used one, I can see why.

What You’re Getting Yourself Into, Literally

When it gets down to it, these things just don’t feel right. They’re made of a rubbery material that feels absolutely nothing like anything resembling a human body part. They try to make up for that by instructing you to soak them in warm water first and then using a shitload of lube, but really, you’re still fucking a piece of rubber, and there’s nothing you can do to trick your body into thinking otherwise.

And do you seriously want to go through the process of soaking a fake vagina in water, lubing it up and then going to town on it? And have you thought about what happens when you’re done? This is no kleenex cleanup, my friends. You need to go to a sink and rinse out your rubber vagina and its plastic case. Imagine doing that, and imagine how you’d feel about yourself at that moment. Got that picture in mind? It’s worse than that. Trust me.

Surviving the Shame

If you were really interested in these things, however, I can see how the Sex in a Can could be justified. It’s pretty discreet, and it’s one of those things that could easily be hidden in the back of a sock drawer. And far be it from me to tell you what feels good and what doesn’t. But the Fleshlight Motion, well, that’s just too much.

Seriously, where are you supposed to put this thing? The best you could do to hide it would be to put it in a closet, and even then it would take up a ton of room. A gigantic leather sex toy is the ultimate dealbreaker if a potential mate comes over. I mean, how can you really justify a huge box with a vagina? At least if you have a creepy sex room with all sorts of wedges and swings it shows that you’re into having sex with another person. This just shows an extreme dedication to a party where only you and your penis are invited.

And if you’re able to stay aroused when you look down and see this thing beneath you, you’re a better man than I. Seriously, there’s nothing that kills a boner faster than the self-awareness that comes from being balls deep in a piece of furniture.

At the end of the day, these Fleshlights just made me appreciate the classic standby of jerking off with your hand. I mean, it’s so perfect. It fits well, you can adjust the tightness, it’s always at human-body temperature, it’s free and there’s no need to hide it. You just can’t improve on that. [Fleshlight]

Will never turn you down


Certainly a different sensation than you’re used to


Feels like you’re having sex with a CPR doll


Extremely embarrassing if discovered by friends, family or potential mates


Really gross to clean up

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit chef Wylie Dufresne at his restaurant wd~50, and he showed me his toys and the food that he makes with said toys.

Wylie Dufresne is one of the preeminent experimental chefs in America. He deconstructs the food that we’re familiar with and then, using tools and ingredients that are rarely seen in restaurant kitchens, builds them back up in near-unrecognizable forms. His amazing eggs benedict, for example, features deep fried cubes of hollandaise sauce and a little cylinder of egg yolk the texture of fudge.

So I was clearly excited to see where the magic happened in his kitchen, and I wasn’t disappointed. Over the course of this week I’ll be posting the videos I shot during my kitchen tour, starting with how Wylie uses liquid nitrogen. In it, he shows me how he uses the stuff to create perfectly spherical balls of ice cream surrounded by chocolate cookie crumbs. Because the microphone on the Flip video camera I used is about as good as the mic on a rotary phone, a transcript of the video is below.

What’s getting a lot of sway right now with urban chefs is liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen, much the same way you can a use hot oil to fry things at 375 degrees, with liquid nitrogen you can freeze things at about minus 275 degrees. And you know, people get excited because it’s so cold that when it’s exposed to the air it turns into a gas, which is a very Hollywood or rock and roll sort of thing.

[Pastry chef Alex] takes more or less sort of a cookie, he would kill me if I said this, but not all that far off from sort of an Oreo cookie, purees it, adds some fat to it, purees it into a liquid phase. Then they take ice cream, milk flavored ice cream. They pipe the milk ice cream into a bowl of liquid nitrogen. So it gets super frozen and from there they drop it into the liquid cookie and they roll it after that in cookie crumbs. And what happens is the ice cream is so cold it instantly sets a shell, even though its in a liquid, on the outside and then they can scoop it out and roll it in some crumbs. And then you get, you know, whatever they call those Dibs or Dabs that you get at the movies. This is a much better, much more high end version.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Drink. Smoke. Fuck. Don’t let the perfect writing, production, and acting fool you. That’s really what Mad Men—one of the best TV series ever—is all about. And wondrous retro tech too, like you can see in these videos.

Ah, Don Draper, how much I wanted to be like you. A creative mind at a top banana, zowielala company in New York, drinking 12-yo single malt scotch at work, going to great restaurants and fancyschmancy clubs, having love affairs left, right, and center, with your perfectly cut 50s suits.

I need to buy one of those suits.

Mad Men Season 3 starts on August 16. If you haven’t seen it yet, you have two days to get up to speed. But if you don’t fell like it, you can watch these shorts showing the retro tech in the series, from the passive exercise thingamajig to the first copier, cameras, and lots of old clickityclack electric typewriters with IBM keyboards. [Mad Men—Video compilation by Spencer Lund based on an idea by Joel Johnson]

The cool thing about Mad Men’s perfect production and attention to detail is that they get all their stuff right. The other is that you get to see a lot of new products that were invented around that age, like the passive exercise machines you now see in endless infomercials. Even better, you can see their genius as they created the need for those products using their black magic powers.

Here you have an IBM Selectric II typewriter. At the time, its optional correction feature was a godsend for office workers all around the country and the world.

I wonder what they would have said about projectors is cameras back then. Although knowing how cool they were, they probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, and just came with a cool name for it. And then proceed to use it to record their sex antics.

No solid state flash recording. Just pure, unadulterated, silver-based film goodness with no sound.

Back then, copiers were wonders of technology. They probably invented buttxeroring too.

And finally, a small compilation of various tech objects from the series.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Sony Ericsson will use their own interface in their next Android-powered Rachael smartphone. The good news: It kicks serious ass. Check out the video demonstration, as well as the new images of this hot Android smartphone and the new Kiki.

As you can see in the video, the user interface in the 7.2Mbps HSDPA Rachael—which is rumored to have a Snapdragon processor, an 8-megapixel camera with auto-focus, and 3D acceleration—is extremely sleek, making full use of the touch interface, with pretty widgets everywhere. It also appears to be heavily oriented to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I like it enough to make me want to ditch my iPhone—if it had equivalent apps to the ones I use, that is.

People were discarding already Sony Ericsson—myself included—but if they release this on time, bug free, and with this interface, they may have an opportunity to become the leading Android smartphone. [Esato via Boy Genius Report]