Donna Summer – the Queen of Disco — died this morning after a battle with cancer … TMZ has learned.

We’re told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63 years old.

Sources close to Summer tell us … the singer was trying to keep the extent of her illness under wraps. We spoke to someone who was with Summer a couple of weeks ago … who says she didn’t seem too bad.

In fact, we’re told she was focused on trying to finish up an album she had been working on.

Summer was a 5-time Grammy winner who shot to superstardom in the ’70s with iconic hits like “Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.”

She continued her dominance in the ’80s with “She Works Hard for the Money” and “This Time I Know It’s for Real.”

Summer and her producer Giorgio Moroder defined the dance music era of the ’70s and influenced acts like Duran Duran and David Bowie to enter the genre.

Summer married Brooklyn Dreams singer Bruce Sudano back in 1980. They had two daughters together.

Source: TMZ.

There are many themed iterations of a specific famous real estate baron board game, but very few of them involve the horrors of the Lovecraftian mythos descending upon South Jersey and destroying the boardwalk. Behold The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, a satire by artist Lee Moyer, designer Keith Baker, and sculptor Paul Komoda (who worked on The Thing and Cabin in the Woods).

This fun-for-all-ages destruction of reality — which has been in the works for two decades — was “inspired by [Moyer's] love of the Cthulhu Mythos and disdain for a certain board game that shall not be named.”

Even though it bears a superficial resemblance to a certain Parker Brothers land grab, The Doom That Came To Atlantic City is more about destroying the dirty jewel of the Garden State using cultists and eldritch powers. As Baker explains in the rules rundown:

You begin with a happy community filled with houses, and then you and your friends arrive. Each of you is playing one of HP Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, and your goal is to smash houses, open gates, and destroy the world. But you each want to destroy it in your own special way. As Cthulhu, you want to make sure that pesky Shub-Niggurath doesn’t sneak in and destroy it first!

The idea of Azathoth the Blind Idiot God trashing Park Place is pretty fantastic. If you’ve always hankered to combine Yog Sothoth and seaside fun in the sun, you can pitch in at their Kickstarter campaign.

[Via Coilhouse]

Source: io9. Hi-res images and video at link.

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s worn an eyepatch for a week straight pretending to be a pirate, doctors in Australia are now claiming a haircut that covers one of your eyes makes that eye lazy because it doesn’t do anything but stare at your stupid hair all day long.

Optometrists Association of Tasmania education director Andrew Hogan warned that amblyopia, the medical term for lazy eye, can result from obstructed vision caused by hair.

“If a young emo chap has a fringe covering one eye all the time, that eye won’t see a lot of detail,” he said. “And if it happens from a young age, that eye can become amblyotic.”

Want a cool emo haircut but not a lazy eye in ten years? Here’s what you do: punch yourself in the face as hard as you can. Don’t stop until you don’t want the haircut anymore.

Source: Geekologie.

A self-portrait of Amy Winehouse that was made out of her own blood will be auctioned off by friend and former rumored lover Pete Doherty .

Multiple sources are reporting that the former lead singer of Libertines will sell the painting, a small piece entitled “Ladylike,” alongside items such as instruments, diaries and articles of clothing.

The auction will be held at the Cob Gallery in London on Friday, as part of an exhibition of Doherty’s blood-infused works called “On Blood: A Portrait of the Artist”.”

CONTINUED at CBS Las Vegas.

Noted hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, known for creating the modern “bob,” has died at age 84.

At 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, police were dispatched to Sassoon’s Los Angeles home on Mulholland Drive, where he had died of apparent natural causes, LAPD spokesman Kevin Mailberger confirmed to NBC News.

The British style icon opened his first eponymous hair salon in 1954, and it grew into a worldwide chain with locations in New York and Los Angeles.

Sassoon’s popularity grew as he promoted his low-maintenance, “wash and wear” hair philosophy, changing the constricting, structured styles of the 1950s to the more free-flowing, creative cuts of the ’60s – taking a cue from the women’s liberation movement. Sassoon grabbed headlines when he created Mia Farrow’s iconic pixie cut for the 1968 movie, “Rosemary’s Baby” – at a reported cost of $5,000.

CONTINUED at MSNBC.

Common sense dictates that an IP address is just a number associated with a connection, and not a human being. Copyright crusaders aren’t exactly known for loads of common sense and rationality. Thankfully, a New York judge has ruled that an IP address alone is not enough to pin illegal downloads on a specific person.

The ruling comes in the context of mass torrent lawsuits that just dump thousands of IP addresses into the court and charge everyone associated with them. Cases like theHurt Locker suit filed against 5,000 people for downloading the movie. Judge Gary Brown’s ruling isn’t the first to point out that these cases are idiotic, since there is no practical way to efficiently tie that many address to the specific individuals doing the downloading, but it’s by far the most detailed. We’ve embedded the full ruling below. [TorrentFreak]

Judge Gary Brown IP Address Ruling

Source: Gizmodo.

• New documents disclose $500,000 tab Michelle Obama left  for taxpayers
• Voters sour on Obamas’ lifestyle that critics call ‘tone-deaf’ and ‘hypocritical’
• New video reveals First Lady’s ‘fantasy’ to sneak way from Secret Service
• Mrs Obama mulls political future and possibility of Presidential run

A public art controversy is blooming in San Diego thanks to a mysterious man who has turned 100 stop signs into flowers using yarn and wire.

Back in March, the computer programmer who only identifies himself as “Bryan” started a “yarn bombing” project in which he and a dozen others knitted and crocheted green stems and leaves onto 100 stop signs in his neighborhood.

“I went out at night and wrapped scarves that I had already knitted around the signposts and stitched them to the poles and added leaves that I made with yarn and wire,” Bryan told The Huffington Post. “At first, people ignored me, wanting to avoid that guy standing on a step-ladder near a stop sign, but as I got up to 50, 60 signs, people started to stick their heads out of their cars and tell me they loved what I was doing.”

But that love hasn’t bloomed in all corners. Recently, San Diego City official Bill Harris contacted Bryan through his website and told him to stop turning signs into trees.

“The City is forced to announce that the Stop Sign Flowers must come down. Even with the great community spirit this effort has generated, there are just too many restrictions to overcome,” Harris wrote in a letter that was excerpted in San Diego Citybeat. “City staff looked through state law and local policies trying to find some way of allowing the flowers to remain in place. Unfortunately, particularly with traffic control signs and including all other City assets, there is just no way to retain the works where they now are.”

Bryan has 10 days to remove them before city employees do so, and he is currently weighing his options.

“If I remove them, I can repurpose them, but if I leave them, it’s possible they just might stay,” Bryan said. “In January, 2011, I put up five as a test run and they are still there, so I’m hoping it was just the city doing their due diligence. But I’d like to think that if you were a busy city worker and had a whole day’s work ahead of you, removing this might be too much trouble.”

Although he is resigned to fate, others like San Diego City Councilwoman Lorie Zapf are trying to see if they can pull any strings to keep the yarn-coverings on the stop signs by gathering support via Twitter

Meanwhile, the artistic community is also rallying behind Bryan, a.k.a. “Knitter Guy,” according to San Diego arts and culture journalist Enrique Limon, who stitched together the first story on the stop sign flowers for San Diego Citybeat.

“The cool thing about this is that Bryan isn’t trying to be cool or edgy, he’s just trying to do a project to beautify his neighborhood,” Limon said. “I think removing them is detrimental to a city that is not exactly on the cutting edge of public art.”

Bryan would like the stop sign flowers to stay, but realizes that he may not be able to stop their removal. Still, he’s happy that he has a great yarn to tell his kids.

“I have two daughters — 11 and 13 — and this has been inspirational to them,” he said.

Source: The Huffington Post. Video at link.