This is just too cool for words. One winter day in New York City, 207 people casually wandered into Grand Central Station. At exactly 2:30 pm, they all froze in place like statues, confusing the many bystanders and official-looking people around them. Exactly 5 minutes later, they all continued on with their business as if nothing had happened.

The performance was organized by a group called Improv Everywhere, which has pulled off many such stunts over the past several years. The photos, obviously, don’t do it justice - so be sure to watch the video to get the full effect.

• Itchy labels on bungee ankle straps so I itch the whole way down
• People on fire—they’re always asking for favors, even if they hardly know you
• When my opera cape gets caught on homeless people’s junk
• When a woman stands near me and people think her ugly baby is mine and it is
• See the rest at McSweeney’s.

Will Ashford takes pages from old books and creates new works of art, obscuring or emphasizing certain words or letters through the use of inks, pencils, and translucent colored vellums.

The Church of Scientology was founded in 1953 by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard as an extension of his self-help book Dianetics. That book claimed that all of a person’s psychological problems can be traced back to unconscious traumatic memories. Scientology teaches that those traumas were actually experienced by (or implanted into) the thousands of alien spirits that have possessed each person’s body. The eventual goal of a Scientologist is to purge those alien spirits in order to achieve what is known as the “State of Clear.”

The centerpiece of the vast “Space Opera” mythology that the Scientology belief system is based on is the story of Xenu, which Hubbard authored in 1967 under the title “OT III“. The story was kept secret from the public and from low-level Church members until it was entered as evidence in a 1985 court case and subsequently revealed by the Los Angeles Times.

About 75 million years ago, Xenu was the alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, which consisted of 76 planets, including Earth (known then as “Teegeeack”). Each planet was home to an average of 178 billion people. In order to deal with this critical overpopulation, Xenu recruited psychologists to bring billions of people in for what they were told would be income tax inspections. Those people were then injected with a paralyzing solution and loaded on space planes which looked very much like the 1960s-era Douglas DC-8, then flown to planet Earth, and then stacked around the bases of volcanoes such as Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many others. Xenu lowered hydrogen bombs into the volcanoes and detonated them, killing everyone.

However, the billions of disembodied alien souls (known as “Thetans” in Scientology-speak) began to float around on the nuclear winds, and Xenu worried that they would try to come back for revenge. So he captured all of the souls using special “sticky” electronic beams, loaded them into boxes, took them to huge cinemas, and made them watch 3-D propaganda films designed to confuse them by implanting all sorts of preposterous ideas about God, the Devil, and Christ, among others. When the films were over, these confused souls thought they were all the same person and therefore clustered together by the thousands. And each cluster of thousands eventually inhabited one of the few remaining living bodies on earth.

Scientology teaches that you and I, until we have achieved the State of Clear, are to this day still being controlled by the traumas and propaganda that were fed to these body thetans by Xenu (including our belief in God), and will continue to be controlled until we have taken the many levels of expensive “auditing” courses offered by the Church that are designed to set us free. The final level of training, OT VIII, also known as “The Truth Revealed”, can only take place on Scientology’s luxury cruise ship, the Freewinds. It costs $10,000.

In Hungary during World War II, vinyl for making records was hard to come by. So some clever folks used discarded medical X-ray film instead. Jozsef Hajdu presents some fine examples.

December 21, 2012, marks the end of the 12th b’ak’tun of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar. Some unimaginative types speculate that the start of the 13th b’ak’tun, the last day of the Mayan calendar, signifies some sort of transfiguring shift, such as a world-ending catastrophe, perhaps at the hands of Quetzalcoatl. I’d like to propose a much more novel shift: the End of Friction.

At midnight on December 21, 2012, all friction that exists between physical objects will vanish entirely. And so begins the 13th b’ak’tun.

An unsuspecting human sitting in a chair at that moment will notice this peculiar change immediately. His zipper will suddenly come undone. His glasses will slide off of his face. His shoes will come untied. In fact, all of his fabric-based clothes will suddenly disintegrate into a pile of loose fibers, since friction was the only thing holding them together. And that pile of fibers will quickly flatten itself across the entire surface of the floor. At that point, he will slide off of his chair, unless he has his fingers securely hooked around its legs.

But he would have bigger things to worry about than sliding butt-naked onto the floor. The hot and cold faucets suddenly turn on full blast, right as the pipes themselves unscrew and clang to the ground. All of the nails and all of the screws that are holding his house together suddenly start falling out of the wood (well, only those that were installed with their tips pointing upwards). His plastic raincoat, however, stays hanging securely from its loop on the coat rack - and his loose change is staying put in its jar. Which just slid off his not-quite-level dresser.

If he were able to escape his disintegrating house in time (perhaps by blowing air to propel his naked self across the floor and out the front door), he would find the outside world faring no better. Balloons untie themselves and splutter away from crying children. Dogs’ leashes slip out of their owners’ hands, leaving them to scuffle excitedly in place as if the sidewalk were a slick hardwood floor (a sensation not foreign to most dogs). Moving cars are dropping parts until they’re not much more than an engine block and tires skidding along the asphalt in a pool of bolts, axels, mirrors, and body panels. Street signs are dropping from their posts, and the posts themselves (those not embedded in concrete) are toppling to the ground as dirt and gravel begin to liquify like quicksand.

Overhead, birds circle bemusedly, not quite sure what to make of the chaos below. Although an osprey might begin to wonder why it dropped the delicious bass it just caught.

The exhausted citizens of Earth swim through the oceans of debris and begin to gather on islands of bedrock and concrete. They must rebuild their civilization under these new physical rules. Clothes may no longer be made of thread and zippers, but rather sheets of plastic and seaweed held taut by hooks and buttons. Homes must be built of solid interlocking parts held in place by tension and gravity. Transportation is made possible only by harnessing the power of the wind, or just flopping around a lot until you end up somewhere new.

Better to just find yourself a nice shallow depression in the bedrock where you can curl up with your seaweed blanket and a good book.

Maybe the next b’ak’tun will be better.

David Maisel’s Library of Dust consists of photographs of copper canisters containing the cremated remains of patients at a state-run psychiatric hospital (the same one where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed). These initially plain and utilitarian urns are now bursting with color and texture as the ashes have interacted with the metals over the decades, imparting uniqueness and personality in defiance of their anonymity.

In 1716, the King of Prussia gave Russian czar Peter the Great a gift of a 180-square foot room encrusted with six tons of amber panels backed with gold leaf, aptly known as The Amber Room. Invading Nazis looted the room in 1941, packing the amber into crates and hightailing it back to Germany. The missing panels have never been found.

Blackbeard the Pirate was a total badass. His real name was Edward Teach, but nobody is sure if he was born in London, Bristol, Philadelphia, or Jamaica. His reign of terror lasted only about six years, from 1713 to 1718, in the seas between the Bahamas and the Carolinas. In particular, he spent a lot of time terrorizing the coast of North Carolina, and even delivered booty to governor Charles Eden in exchange for protection and an official pardon. In 1718, he blockaded Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, plundering five merchant vessels before he was through. Later that year, Blackbeard met his end at the hands of British Lieutenant Robert Maynard when a price of 100 pounds was put on his head. According to legend, in his final battle Blackbeard was shot five times and stabbed more than 20 times before he went down, and his headless body is said to have swum circles around his ship seven times before it sank.

However, it is unclear who would have won had he done battle with ninjas. Arrrr!!!

Artist Kent Rogowski turns teddy bears inside-out and restuffs them. I love these plucky little freaks!