Kelly Dobson has simultaneously creeped me out and made my day. First, her Bio, just to get an idea…

Kelly Dobson grew up in a junkyard. From the age of four she was doing odd jobs such as smashing windows and hauling machine parts from one area of the yard to another. She had machine friends. By six she was holding car funerals and secretly stashing beloved car parts in her own hidden burrow in the far side of the lot. Abandoning the instability of the lot as a teenager in 1990, Dobson began studies in medicine and art, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University’s Department of Architecture, Art and Planning. The studies in medicine and art practice provide background for her interests in alternative forms of therapy. Working in the realms of art, design, engineering, psychology and society, Kelly explores the relationships between people and machines, and has received a Master of Science degree from MIT’s Visual Studies Program and another from the MIT Media Lab. Currently, as a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, she is developing a method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical engagement termed Machine Therapy. Machine Therapy is in response to the overwhelmingly pervasive effects of machines in everyday life. Machine Therapy is tangentially about the parapraxis of machine design — what machines do and mean for people other than what we consciously designed them to do and be used for. In her current work Kelly combines research in digital signal processing and machine learning, technology and society studies, and art and therapy. She builds empathic machines such as Blendie (web.media.mit.edu/~monster/Blendie), Wearable Organs such as ScreamBody (web.media.mit.edu/~monster/screambody), and organizes engagements with existing large culturally implicated machines.

Meet Blendie, an “an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own”

And not to be outdone, here’s ScreamBody – part of Dobson’s Wearable Body Organs series.

You can find out more about some of her projects and designs here at http://web.media.mit.edu/~monster

Found this over on Digg and had to repost it (although the Digg sharing shit tool was being a little bitch)

Word has it Michael Jackson has a 10-show gig lined up in London this July. While Jackson has been busy freaking people out with his bizarre antics, and even more bizzaro anti-nose over the past 12 years, he has not performed a single major show during that span. Jackson announced the coming performances during a press conference Thursday.

“This is it. These will be my final shows performing in London. ‘This Is It’ really means this is it,” Jackson said. “I’ll be performing the songs my fans want to hear. This is the final curtain call. I’ll see you in July and I love you so much.”

If for some reason you don’t fly to England to watch Mike grab his crotch and squeal one last time (I can’t imagine why not), don’t despair; he’s auctioning off all kinds of creepy shit that you can spend a fortune on to own and remember him by, then subsequently run off all of your normal friends with. Check out the collection below.

Being charged with a felony is bad enough. But did you know your ass can get charged with being and habitual felon? Talk about getting bent over.

§ 14?7.3.  Charge of habitual felon.
An indictment which charges a person who is an habitual felon within the meaning of G.S. 14?7.1 with the commission of any felony under the laws of the State of North Carolina must, in order to sustain a conviction of habitual felon, also charge that said person is an habitual felon. The indictment charging the defendant as an habitual felon shall be separate from the indictment charging him with the principal felony. An indictment which charges a person with being an habitual felon must set forth the date that prior felony offenses were committed, the name of the state or other sovereign against whom said felony offenses were committed, the dates that pleas of guilty were entered to or convictions returned in said felony offenses, and the identity of the court wherein said pleas or convictions took place. No defendant charged with being an habitual felon in a bill of indictment shall be required to go to trial on said charge within 20 days of the finding of a true bill by the grand jury; provided, the defendant may waive this 20?day period. (1967, c. 1241, s. 3.)