Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved. Lyrics by the Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet with Butterfly Wings." How does the affects of morphine (aka Herion) have on humans or animals in a isolated (caged) enviroment vs living in a social (park) enviroment. Researcher Bruce Alexander of Simon Fraser University along with researchers Robert B. Coambs, and Patricia F. Hadaway wrote The effect of housing and gender on morphine self-administration in rats. Using their experiement 'Rat Park' they learned the how the enviroments differed when the rats are administered morphine. The results are extrodinary for the rats in the 'Rat Park' with a 'choice day', the rats prevered to socialize and drink regular water 'kicking' their previous administered habit vs drink sugar water morphine. While the caged rats prever their sugar morphine water and even increasing their dose on their 'choice day'. After finishing reading the articals, a small studio is starting to look similar to a rat cage. Unfortunitly, the state of California has been closing is local and national parks. Learning about Alexander's study, one wonders how the drug addication in San Francisco is affected, especially with so many of its city parks now closed. Every day it seems that more and more trees are being cut down in the city. Be sure to read my post about Park(ing) Day this Friday in San Francisco. Or look for international parking day in your city at http://parkingday.org The experiement is far more indepth and well worth reading, but their is also a comic illustrated by Stuart McMillen.

Providing temporary public open space . . . one parking spot at at time. International Parking Day, This Friday September 20th 2013. Started in 2005 with 1 city and 1 a DYI project by Rebar, a art and design studio, rolled out some sod (grass) put a tree, fence and park bench out for people to come enjoy the city. The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat … at least until the meter runs out! For 2 hours the Park(ing) day was over, however, a iconic image of the event spread the idea like wild fire across the web. Bombarding Rabar with request for more installations for Park(ing) day in other cities. In 2011 the DYI project has now spread to 975 Parks, in 162 Cities, across 5 Countries, and on 6 Continents. Perhaps you are wondering is this actually legal for a Non-Vehicle to take up a parking space. Well on the park(ing) day website they provide the answer to this and many other FAQ. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The specifics depend on your local legal codes and it is your responsibility to check the law. In San Francisco it appears to be legal to do other things in a parking spot besides park a vehicle, but in some municipalities (New York City, for example) alternate activities are expressly prohibited. It’s up to you to be informed and flexible when it comes to obeying your local law." Check for a Park(ing) spot near you http://goo.gl/maps/bZvQB. If you want to contribute to next year Park(ing) Day, plan for next year Park(ing) day is on the third Friday in September. http://parkingday.org

At this point it’s no secret that Retta, aka Donna on Parks and Rec, is one of the more enjoyable celebrities to follow on Twitter because of her TV live-tweeting prowess. That said, she apparently just got around to watching Sunday’s panic-inducing episode of Breaking Bad a few hours ago and took to Twitter to air a few thoughts. Take it away, Retta…

STOP THE (WORD)PRESSES. We all need to march down to MTV Headquarters in Manhattan and demand that the 2013 Video of the Year award for “Mirrors” be stripped from Justin Timberlake. NOW. Tegan and Sara have remade their “Closer” music video with dogs pretending to be humans, and it’s the Video of the Year for every year. THE CORGI AND THE DOG THAT ISN’T A CORGI TOUCH PAWS LIKE THEY’RE HOLDING HANDS. #pugs

So here’s something weird/creative/interesting. You can find the full images complete with step-by-step instructions here. As much as I enjoy the ingenuity and overall oddness of a resourceful and fashion forward Redditor sharing how to turn a huge turtleneck into a dress I can’t quite bring myself to cut and paste the instructions. Besides, like most things on Reddit half the fun comes from the comments, where in this instance SarahPanda’s contribution has inspired random hairy dudes from around the globe to raid their own closets and share results. I’d include some of those here but they’re borderline NSFW thanks to pretty much everything about them. If you need me I’ll be adding this to my “tried and loved” section on Pinterest.

A few months back, we told you that Obama had paid lip service to a petition about being able to legally unlock your phone, but that nothing was going to happen from the sound of things. Apparently, we misheard the sound of things, because the White House is actually pushing the FCC to do something. Specifically, the White House has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to make phone unlocking at any time completely legal. It’s currently illegal because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Explaining why would take forever, and not even the government can offer a good reason. Will the FCC do it? Considering who’s running the joint, odds look pretty good: Before resigning earlier this year, former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the commission would examine the issue “to see if we can and should enable consumers to use unlocked phones,” adding that a ban on unlocking “raises competition concerns; it raises innovation concerns.” Tom Wheeler, President Obama’s nominee to succeed Genachowski, said during a nomination hearing in June that he supported lifting the ban. Needless to say, there’s the usual mindless panic among people who insist that this will bring to an end to subsidized phones. Which it won’t, because most of those subsidized phones are tied to a contract anyway, and it makes far more sense to buy the unlocked version of a phone than eat an early termination fee. Now, contracts themselves are increasingly an endangered species, but that’s due to market forces and phone hardware update cycles, not government intervention. Unlocking phones means we can get more use out of them, and that we can choose more easily what network we use when communicating. The White House views it as giving consumers the tools to vote with their wallets, and really, that’s what it is, in the end. Besides, considering how many phone ads we see now, it’s not like wireless carriers will have to shell out more for marketing.

Just a friendly reminder: iOS 7, probably the most compelling product Apple talked about last week, is out. If you’ve got an iDevice capable of running it, you need to get it. Why? Glad you asked! Not for the graphics finishes; people will be having a nice rabble rabble about that for days, and it couldn’t matter a bit less. No, what matters is what’s under the hood. The Notification and Control Centers are probably my favorite feature. The Notification Center is a very clean, simple way to look at your stuff in one place, something that iOS could use a better form of. The Control Center, meanwhile, is something Android will swipe in the next update: Essentially it puts all the settings you could want right at your fingertips. The camera software has also gotten an overhaul: While I find the Instagramming of every piece of camera software on every phone to be almost as nauseating as the gold iPhone 5S, I’m forced to admit Apple’s filters were actually designed to make a photo look better. That’s as close as I’m going to get to a glowing recommendation, but if you have to use filters, Apple’s gone out of its way to make some good ones. Finally, the most subtle change is the best. Apple has dumped the whole “Oh, you’ve never used a smartphone before” attitude in favor of designing the OS to just make sense and flow naturally. Everything is more sensible, smoother, more logical. In some ways, iOS 7 shakes off some unnecessary cruft in favor of being more user-friendly in general. In short, it’s easily the best thing Apple’s rolled out this year. Go get it!

Ted Mosby: man whore. That’s according to the team at the Daily Beast, who put together a compilation of Schmosby’s many sexual exploits over the course of How I Met Your Mother, as told by the Mother to their kids. The video also insinuates that he’s a bad father, but we’ll get to that. As for the slut part: nope. Someone with a lot of time on their slap-betted-out hands deduced that over a 15-year span, Ted dated 31 women and had sex with 20 of them, including personal favorite Natalia. Those numbers might be a little high, based on false preconceived notions of “right” and “wrong” promiscuity, but they’re not at all unreasonable for a 30-something living in New York City. I’m sure the equally invidious Ross Gellar was nearly as successful in making women regret their life choices, to say nothing of the walking mistake that is Barney Stinson. But we’ll get to that.

In 1969, long before Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham inspired Wayne’s World signs and shoved sharks up women’s vaginas, hell, even before they went by Led Zeppelin, they played on P.J. Proby’s largely forgotten country-blues album, Three Week Hero. Proby, a music industry legend who had a number of hits in the U.K. but is most remembered for the “pants-splitting incident” in the States, signed the then-New Yardbirds foursome to a two-day recording contract, likley beginning on August 25th, 1968. According to Dangerous Minds, that date marked “the very first time that Led Zeppelin would enter a recording studio together.” You can read more about the sessions here, or just listen to the great “The Day That Lorraine Came Down” below.

Like it or not, fall is here, (pretty much, let’s not get technical about it, okay?). We all know what that means — hot apple cider, digging out your sweaters from the back of the closet, and people going on and on about how much they love pumpkin spice lattes. It was only so long before the market responded, and now are subjected to an onslaught of pumpkin spice-flavored crap so extreme, we think things have gotten a tad out of hand. Here are just a few examples that the fad has gone too far.

As you probably know, Grand Theft Auto V was released today, and is waiting for you to offer up *at least* 100 hours of your life to it. Of course, as we all, know, you can spend much, much more time in a GTA game just blowing things up and running from the cops for fun. Everyone agrees it is an amazing game, but if it’s going to be a while before you get it, or you don’t plan on every playing it, don’t feel bad. Here are 11 things you could do in the amount of time you would have spent playing GTA 5, assuming you spend at least 100 hours on the game.

Every year we produce over 300 million tonnes of plastic. Of this, over 7.25 million tonnes of it ends up in our oceans in the form of top-level floating debris – that’s 4.8 million medium-sized cars or 51 billion iPods floating around the ocean. This plastic breaks down into smaller pieces each year, poisoning the food chain and ultimately affecting the food we eat.

NASA is noted for its incredible photography of space, earth and our farthest reaches of the known Universe. They’re less known for Photobombing. But that’s exactly what happened on Sept 7th when the Lunar Atmosphere & Dust Environment Explorer (known as LADEE) was launched into the stars above. During a photograph of its launch, the NASA team amazingly captured a small frog in amongst the furore. It was either innocently sitting on the shuttle itself or on the ground nearby – either way it must have had quite a shock! The result is a tiny silhouette of a frog being blasted some 30ft in the air, engulfed in smokey exhaust of the shuttle. NASA has since confirmed the image is in fact real (no Photoshopping of Kermit going on here) before awkwardly adding “the condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.”

If you haven’t eaten sushi before, you really should give it try. Not only it is delicious, it’s incredible healthy for you, low in fat and high in essential oils and vitamins. For centuries the Japanese have been eating sushi (raw seafood) but those easy bite size sushi rolls that many of us partake in today, first stated in Edo, Japan somewhere around the middle of the 19th century. At the time, they were seen as the ultimate fast-food, you could carry around a healthy snack without the need for plates and cutlery. In America it was the trusty chicken nugget, in Japan it was the nigiri and maki rolls – and fortunately NOT kittens, as this hilarious ad might cause you to believe.

When it comes to the majority of our clothes, we wear them, clean them, fold them and store them. And we repeat this cycle until they are too outdated too worn to wear – we seldom actually have fun with our clothes. The same, however, cannot be said for Austrian photographer Bela Borsodi. From her private New York studio, she’s unleashed a selection of freakish faces, formed and folded entirely from fashionable clothes. Titled ‘Fashion Faces’ she’s taken designer jeans, jackets, shirts and sweaters and contorted them into unusual & somewhat grumpy faces. Even more impressive that her origami-esque skills is the fact she did all this without a single drop of glue or pair of scissors being needed. Her only tools were a vivid imagination, buckets of clothes and lots of trial and error. The result? Your laundry never looked so…..lifelike!

In case you haven't noticed, from our numerous posts on tattoo's, here at LOLJam we are big fans of permanent skin ink. But they all have one common theme (regardless of how great or shocking they are) they’re all contemporary examples of tattoo art. The real question is, where did todays tattoo artists get their inspiration from? Who influenced their designs? And is the “new” truly groundbreaking or merely a homage for the tattoo masters of yesteryear? To answer the question truthfully, you’d have to go back to around the Neolithic times. The earliest example of a tattoo goes as far back as the fifth millennium BC when an Iceman was discovered in the Alps with 50+ tattoos in total across their spine, knee and even right ankle. They were simple dots or markings if you will, but evidence nonetheless that man has been styling his body for centuries. It would be nice if we could bring you a selection of the very best Neolithic tattoo trends, but let’s face it that’s going to be a tough ask (even for us.) So we’ve selected some of the most interesting, extensive and iconic ink work from as far back as the 1920′s along with the genuine characters who underwent hours of pain in the chair. Who knows, you might even find your Great Great Great Grandfather in amongst them all!

It might sound slightly ludicrous, but if you were one of the Egyptian builders working on the Pyramids in 1600 BC, your daily wage wasn’t in the form of currency – but 1 gallon of beer. In retrospect, that sounds like a good deal right? Although having a hangover of epic proportions, whilst attempting to build one of the Seven Wonders Of The World in the scorching sun probably wasn’t the smartest move. Another example of beer fandom amongst the annuals of history, takes us across to the United States. The founding fathers of America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams & Ben Franklin aside from being astute & visionary individuals, were also all brewers and avid drinkers of beer. In fact it was over several beers at their local tavern that they decided to start the revolution. Did several the jugs of malt & hops single-handedly cause them to rise up in the name of liberty for the common man? Probably not, but there’s no denying it helped the cause along that night. Those are just a few of the interesting tidbits from the ‘Beer Saved The World’ infographic below, you’ll find many more facts, figures and trivia as you scroll down. So next time you relaxing with a beer in your hand enjoying those hops, just think, without them the world could be a very very different place right now.

There’s few dance videos quite as breathtaking as ‘Nuance’. Created by Marc-Antoine Locatelli it’s the near perfect blend of choreography, motion graphics and jaw-dropping imagery a combination which rarely works together as a whole. But here the effect are simply astounding. The monochrome film sees gifted dancer Lucas Boirat earnestly trying to battle countless geometric shards of light against a backdrop of darkness. Turn out the lights, turn up the speakers and prepare to be amazed.

Occasionally it takes a little bit of hindsight to realise just how good we once had it, how effortlessly cool and iconic we once were, without ever really trying. But in the modern era of constant selfies, cheaper cosmetic enhancements and a desire to be more shocking, controversial and scandalous thanks to reality TV – somewhere along the line we lost our sense of style and even class to an extent. It’s easy to forget that 1940′s swimwear use to look like this and beauty treatments in the 1900′s were certainly a lot more disconcerting than they are now. Sex appeal is vastly more invasive than it was say 50 years ago, our clothes becomes smaller and tighter, our bodies more sculpted and our quest for youth easier, of that there’s little doubt. But do we have the effortless grace and poise so apparent in previous generations? Who is our modern-day equivalent of Audrey Hepburn? Who shimmer with sultry charm of Marilyn Monroe? And have we let our standards drop along the way? Whilst we all have different answers to those questions and even though fashion and beauty are constantly evolving, you simply can’t deny classic beauty. The following 26 iconic photos are a reminder of just that, the very definition of retro cool.

Authors asserts that are real kettlebell and made of cast iron. They have three conventional sizes: small, medium and large. "Sports equipment for real men who are thinking about women, even when holding the iron in their hands," - the authors explain his idea.

China in the lens of a French photographer: Laowai as migrant workers in 2050 China? What will China be like in the future? French photographer Benoit Cezard recently expressed his view by traveling all around China and taking a set of photographs titled “China 2050″. What’s strange however is that the people in these photographs are mostly blue-eyed, big-nosed laowai [foreigners]:

See how well the graphics artists of the 2013 anime film "The Garden of Words" matched real life scenes of Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo.

You wish your bedroom was this cool. Awesome reddit user and loving father carpenter75 designed this Nintendo-inspired bedroom for his daughter: complete with wall decals, plushies, and of course a sweet setup to play the game that started it all.