Warner Brothers Blooper Reel

From 1937! You can imagine the hilarity this caused at the Christmas party.

Master 5 on Asphalt Flat Roof

Music by Grampian Horn, video by Alex Morris. (via b3ta)

Friday Fun Links

Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko is a sex bomb.

Jon Stewart explains the credit card business and how the new law will "help" us.

Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening. (via Neatorama)

Happy Ending Massage. May be NSFW.

Stereotypes for Users of 40 Websites. I LOLed at Slashdot, Blogger, and Best Best users.

You may have heard that filmmaker Kevin Smith was asked to leave an airplane because he's too fat. Here's the animated news version of what happened.

Alphabet Shoot. Shoot letters with letters, but the real enemy in this game is physics.

Admiral Ackbar wants to be the new Ole Miss mascot. It's not a trap!

Cat Plays I Spy

(via Arbroath)

Who Not to Marry: 6 Black Widows

Some women who vow to “love, honor, and cherish” end up violating those vows in a deadly manner. These stories of women who kill their men have some eerie similarities. A man dies, and someone notices his wife had already lost a husband or two due to a similar illness. An investigation reveals that each man had the same poison in his system. That’s the story of the human black widow. Read about six of them in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Loblaw's Grocery

Starring William Shatner, 1974. (via Everlasting Blort)

Informative Links

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. The scheme never discouraged drinking, but killed around 10,000 of those who dared to drink.

In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power. As bizarre as these stories of small town justice are, you can bet they go on in other parts of the country as well. (via Boing Boing)

The Land of Underwater Birds. An author looks at what makes a book title a winner -or a loser. (via Metafilter)

4 Famous TV Co-workers (who struggled to get along). Big egos plus big opportunity often equals a thin sheen of tolerance.

10 Astounding Actions Earning A Medal of Honor. These are the stories of ordinary men in extraordinary situations who did what they had to do, and did it better than anyone else.

An interactive scale model of our universe. Slide your way from the whole enchilada down to the strings in your string theory.

West Brain, East Brain: What a difference culture makes. Neural mapping research done in one country might not hold water in a different part of the world, again raising the nature/nurture question.

During World War II, V-2 rockets were developed and built at a concentration camp called Dora, where prisoners were used for slave labor. When the US Army liberated Dora in 1945, they found 750 workers and 3,000 corpses -and the engineers and equipment they needed to start the space program. (via Metafilter)

Niche Blogs: Focused on Food

Among the gazillions of food blogs are some that always feature a subject you know and love -as long as you know and love what the blogger has chosen to write about. When a blogger has a passion for a specific subject, they have no trouble finding enough material, no matter how narrow the chosen subject. Even if it’s only one particular dish. Read about a dozen or so highly focused food blogs in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Fun and Funny Links

An eyebrow-raising accessory for your next party (NSFW).

Take a lesson in how to write a Craigslist ad that will get noticed. It's gotten lots of positive response.

A world-record stick bomb chain reaction that will make your mouth fall open. Am I the only one who has never seen stick bombs before?

How to make cookies using Photoshop. I would have left off the raisins and added more color, but hey, they look delicious!

Why People Really Watch Figure Skating. It's the spills as much as the skills, with the bonus of those silly ice-dancing costumes.

I had no idea who Justin Bieber is (Wikipedia helped), but this 3-year-old is crying because she loves him. You may be tempted to dump out of this video, but if you stay through four minutes (skip ahead if you must) the punch line is worth every second.

How to make Pancakes like a Crackhead. (via b3ta)

6 Insane Coincidences You Won't Believe Actually Happened.

Trolololo

A Russian clip from 1966. That's all I know about it. He seems to have forgotten the lyrics.

Update: Neatorama has more.

Cat Pwns Robot

(via Arbroath)

Walk, Don't Run

Sung by knitted plush toys, in Japanese. (via Buzzfeed)

Good Reads

Uncoiling the spiral: Maths and hallucinations. Is there something in our brains that make humans see the same geometric patterns during drug use, illness, or near-death experiences? (via Metafilter)

Award-winning journalist Ray Gosling admitted on television that he killed someone he loved who was dying of AIDS year ago. His confession landed him in jail and reignited Britain's debate over euthanasia. (via Buzzfeed)

7 Mad Science Experiments You Can Do At Home But Probably Shouldn't.

The ancient Nasca geoglyphs of Peru are huge drawings some think are greetings for space aliens. Their long and complicated history is not quite as exciting, but infinitely more interesting.

Body Odor Through the Ages: A Brief History of Deodorant. Human stink may have kept us from being a predator's lunch, but we'd rather smell socially acceptable now.

A Swiss man held his breath for more than 19 minutes, breaking the world record. Experts explain how he did it, and why you shouldn't.

An intriguing question: Is Inglourious Basterds a science fiction movie? Be warned that even bringing the question up provides a spoiler.

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs talks about the late Phil Harris of The Deadliest Catch. You didn't have to know the captain that well to know that he was worth knowing.

7 Creative Uses for Poop

As long as the animal kingdom exists, we’ll have a steady supply of digestive byproducts, whether you call it dung, manure, sewage, feces, or poop. We may as well use it for something! Oh sure, you know about fertilizer, but there are plenty of other ways we reuse “biological waste”. Read about camel apples, guano mines, and recycled coffee in this article I wrote for mental floss.

Fun Links

Lost Art of Inglourious Basterds. Awesome movie posters reinterpreted by various artists and signed by Quentin Tarantino are being auctioned off to benefit Haiti. (via Gorilla Mask)

Axe Cop: The Movie.

Invasion of the tumbleweeds. This would be golden with a soundtrack of Yakety Sax instead of hysterical children.

The J! Archive contains Jeopardy! questions and answers from 26 seasons plus charts and statistics about each game. Oh yeah, and it's a completely fan-created and maintained site. (via J-Walk Blog)

T-Shirt War is a stop motion video featuring t-shirts. That doesn't sound exciting, but believe me, these are talented t-shirts.

In any movie, witnessing a murder will surely lead to a chase scene. In Pivot, the animation is what makes the chase special. Until the ending.

20 Unholy Recipes: Dishes So Awful We Had to Make Them. In the 1950s and 60s, industry helped homemakers by publishing new and bizarre recipes that would stretch a family's budget and sell food products like Spam and Jell-O.

Bacteria

By Jonathon Coulton. (via Metafilter)

Good Reads

6 Man-Made Natural Disasters Just Waiting to Happen. Like New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, the world is full of keep-your-fingers-crossed engineering.

Why Your Food is Getting Sweeter. Even pizza gets a cheap shot in the arm with more sugar.

King Tut didn't have the easy life of royalty we all thought. According to a DNA study, he was inbred, disabled, and altogether unhealthy. (via Neatorama)

Put a physicist in a hotel with a water-saving plan and you're just asking for an experiment on fluid dynamics. It turns out that some environmental awareness is just a matter of perception.

How to make perfect french fries from scratch. Also the real scientific reason we are supposed to fry them twice, which I must try tonight. (via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Movie critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer four years ago. He no longer speaks, but he has plenty to say in this interview.

How deep is the Mariana Trench? The deepest ocean point is illustrated to scale in this graphic.

Happy Pancake Day!

In the Christian tradition, today the the final day before the beginning of Lent, also known as Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), Faschingsdienstag, Malasada Day, Sprengidagur, Martes de Carnaval, and Pancake Day! All these terms refer to the last hurrah of overdoing it before the Lenten fasting begins. Celebrating by eating pancakes uses up your supply of oil, eggs, milk, and sugar, which you may be giving up until Easter. See many ways of celebrating the pancake in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Informative Links

Parade Time in New Orleans. An overview of the different Krewes and their Mardi Gras pageants.

Prince rehearsing in his basement in June of 1984. I wouldn't be surprised if these videos were pulled by the end of the day.

What do you say to a scared little girl whose just had a baby and feels all alone in the world? A young NICU doctor has a few suggestions. (via Metafilter)

"Inuk" is the ninth human to have his entire genome sequenced but unlike the previous eight, he has been dead for some 4,000 years. His DNA tells us about him, his tribe, culture, where he came from, and how he is related to the rest of mankind.

Antibiotics Breed Superbugs Faster Than Expected. The strongest bacteria just get damaged, which sparks lots of mutations.

Now Sea This: The 10 Most Amazing Bizarre Sharks. Different species developed weird and oversized body parts because no creature was ever brave enough to criticize a shark over its looks.

We May Soon Be Able to Clone Neanderthals. But Should We? Isaac Asimov took a look at some of the ethical considerations fifty years ago.

A video of Apolo Ohno in training sheds some light on how speed skating is done. It still seems fairly impossible to actually do.

Dust in the Wind

Beaker tries his hand at YouTube fame. It's not as easy as he thought! (via YesButNoButYes)

Fun and Funny Links

My New Pink Button is lipstick for your what?

A Brief History Of Pretty Much Everything. Explained wordlessly yet eloquently with notebook doodles, probably drawn during class.

The Top Ten Saturday Night Live Sketches Ever. Yes, with videos. Conspicuously absent: John Belushi. (via Gorilla Mask)

How to store and organize your cats. I like to color code mine as well. (via Everlasting Blort)

"Crash Blossoms" are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. There's even a blog collecting them. (via Metafilter)

One Button Bob is a game that uses only one button on your mouse. It's up to you to figure out what to do with it to pass through each level. Luckily, you can die many times without losing the level you're on. (via b3ta)

A preying mantis using a computer? Not quite; he just wants to eat the cursor.

What happens when a heavy metal band is stranded on a desert island for 20 years with only the music collection of a 13-year-old girl to listen to? No, it didn't happen, but that's the idea behind Rock Sugar.

Maru's Security Blanket

The secret is out! The internet's favorite Japanese Scottish Fold. Maru, carries a security blanket. I've had several cats that did the same. (via Arbroath)

Vaudeville Animal Act

A silent film from the Library of Congress, a vaudeville act featuring a baboon, dog, and donkey. They believe it is from 1919 or 1920. (via Boing Boing)

Friday Fun Links

How animals participate in the Winter Olympics.

Wow, A Talking Fish! A 1983 animated Russian film of an Armenian folk tale featuring a wildly kaleidoscopic wizard.

Oh, you're invited to the Valentines Day party, but you can't express any affection. Burbia gives us another reason to avoid Home Owners Associations like the plague.

An internet classic, Squirrel vs. Penguin. Probably not what you were expecting, but a delight anyway.

The prettiest time-lapse video of a city in the fog you'll see today. Vancouver City is a nice song as well.

Movie posters and video game titles. They go together so well!

The sex scene from Back to the Future. It was cut from the final movie after it ripped the space-time continuum.

The Best Neuroscience Study Guide Ever (Because It Has Cats). And a sparkly title and lots of sweet sugary cuteness along the synapses. (via Metafilter)

Olympics 2010: Skiing Solo for a Snowless Nation

Jamaica is not sending a bobsled team to Vancouver for the Winter Games, but the Caribbean nation will be represented by one skier. Several countries will have only one participant in the Olympics, because there are no winter sports to speak of in these tropical lands. Yet sometimes the work of one person keeps the Olympic dream alive. Read about eight skiers who are their entire team in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Good Reads

Carnivals Around the World. These events will have different dates, but they'll be celebrated again this (and every) year.

Missile Silo Confessions: Living on the Edge of Armageddon. Lots of photographs and reminiscing from the people who built, manned, and recovered a Titan missile site.

Edgar Parker opened his dental practice in 1892 and found business was not that great. So he took his practice on the road and became "the P.T. Barnum of dentistry."

6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of. Of course, babies wouldn't consider them evil, just the result of natural selection that made their existence possible.

After years of delays, the world's largest commercial airplane took its first test flight Monday. The Boeing 747-8 will lift almost a million pounds fully loaded into the air when it goes into service, possibly by next year.

An Intellectual History of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. It began in 1964, which makes it older than any of the models in this year's edition.

The Top Ten Important Moments in Snowboarding History. The next couple of weeks in Vancouver may add to the list.

Take a POV Tour Of The International Space Station. It's much smaller than you'd imagine from watching movies, but much cooler than any fiction.

Winter Olympics Drinking Game

First, lay in a stock of your favorite beverage.

Then, turn on NBC and observe the following rules:

1. Take one drink every time a NBC announcer invites you to "share a moment with the world."

2. Take one drink every time snowboarding highlights are backed up by rock-and-roll guitar/heavy metal headbanger music.

3. Take one drink every time a female athlete is described as "America's _____ing sweetheart." Take an extra drink if the athlete in question is "American's curling sweetheart."

4. Clap your hands and take one drink every time reference is made to "the revolutionary new clap skate" being used in speed skating.

5. Take one drink every time figure skating commentator Scott Hamilton shouts that a skater "NAILED!!" a jump.

6. Take one drink every time you hear a hockey announcer shout, "He shoots...he scores!" Take two drinks if you're watching women's hockey and you hear, "She shoots...she scores!"

7. Take one drink every time NBC promises to get "up close and personal" with an athlete.

8. Take one drink every time a skater is presented with a bouquet of flowers.

9. Take one drink every time America's quest for its first medal in luge is mentioned. Take an extra drink if America actually happens to win a medal in luge.

10. Take one drink and sigh, "That's good, mon" every time reference is made to the Jamaican bobsled team.

11. Take one drink every time the REAL Olympic theme is heard.

Buzzfeed illustrates some more rules of this classic drinking game specifically for the Vancouver opening ceremonies tonight. Warning: Canada jokes. Here are the number of extra sips you should take depending on who lights the cauldron.

(image credit: Michael Barrick)


Links for Fun

We Love xkcd. An all-star cast from the Blogosphere recreates this comic that parodies this ad.

Michael R. Barrick created a graphic last summer using the Vancouver Olympics mascots and the internet cartoon known as Pedobear. It was only a matter of time before someone used it without knowing that Pedobear is not an Olympic mascot.

Is there an Academy Award for weather forecasts? This guy must be trying for one, the way he's hamming it up.

The Coolest Taxi License ID Ever. Yes, even cooler than Ben Bailey's.

How many times have looked in a mirror and saw someone you didn't realize was there with you? Never? Well, it happens a LOT in the movies. (via Gorilla Mask)

A group of passionate Betty White fans want her to host Saturday Night Live. And why not? She's funnier than any other 88-year-old woman you can think of!

Weird Festivals & Strange Celebrations. Proof that, no matter where you live, people love to throw things and make a mess whenever they have an excuse.

The worst (UK) game show answers ever. Proving that American contestants aren't the only ones who fall apart under pressure. (via Bits and Pieces)

Hadacol, the Last of the Medicine Shows

Advertiser-supported entertainment is nothing new. Since medieval times, people could see free entertainment right in their hometown as long as they listened to a sales pitch for dubious remedies along with the singing, dancing, and side show acts. Sales of snake oil and other patent medicines paid for the show and then some. Like other forms of traveling entertainment, the medicine show lost its luster when people gained the opportunity to go see movies instead. The medicine show had one last hurrah during the 20th century in the form of Hadacol. Read the story of the last great medicine show in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Cat Goes on a Business Trip

(via Metafilter)

News and Information Links

Economic inequality in the free market system holds everyone back because of inefficiency, according to economist Samuel Bowles. Too much time, money, and effort goes into keeping the poor from gaining what the rich have. (via Metafilter)

The Real Rules for Time Travelers. A physicist explains how there would be no paradox if time travel were possible. Then it gets weird.

Land reform in Africa may be the key to solving the continent's other problems. Land rights would bring security, stability, sustenance, and power to those who've lost them over the past couple of centuries. (via Metafilter)

The Top 100 Singles (ten for each year) of the 70s. These would make the ultimate mixtape of memories for me. (via Neatorama)

11 Little-Known Grammatical Errors That Will Shock and Horrify You. Curiously, I am neither shocked nor horrified, but I do find this information useful and worth passing along.

Ghost Ships: Ten Scary Spirits Of The Seven Seas. I'll have to file these and pull them out again to tell the kids around a campfire and ruin their sleep.

German scientists say our world may be a giant hologram. They're looking for Morpheus and his little red pill to find out for sure. (via Neatorama)

A nurse who reported a doctor for malpractice may go to prison for blowing the whistle. Let that be an example to anyone who tries to mess with a friend of a Texas sheriff.

Gimme Dat Ding

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

Camp Variety Speciality Acts 1940s

(via J-Walk Blog)

Good Reads and Information

The Many Lives of Count Dracula. There was plenty of inspirational material for Bram Stoker's vampire, who went on to inspire all other vampire characters.

It's a terrifying scenario you may have dreamed about: falling to earth from a high altitude. Popular Mechanics has a survival guide that will take you longer to read than the six mile fall would take. (via Metafilter)

Will Marry For Health Insurance. Too bad it has to come to this, but people get married for far more frivolous reasons. (via Neatorama)

4 Strange Greenpeace Moments. Sometimes the quest for publicity pays off and sometimes it backfires bigtime.

10 Unbelievable Inheritance Stories. (via Look at This)

A survivor of child sexual abuse is still victimized years later because of a video still in circulation. Now she's seeking restitution from anyone who downloads it, but some think this may set a disturbing precedent.

Five myths about America's credit card debt. The short version: it's not all your fault!

The Vancouver Experiment. Nothing to do with the Olympics, this experiment involves helping heroin addicts with a safe place to shoot up. (via Metafilter)

Saigon Soul

A music video capturing life in Saigon today by Ryan Quinn Mattingly.

Heart Shaped Meals for Valentines Day

We set a day aside for sweethearts to express their love for each other, which sometimes devolves into a “how much will you spend on me?” test. Don’t fall into that trap! You can express your Valentines sentiments with a little more effort and less money spent by sharing a meal at home. Heart shaped food will tell him or her that you really care. Or at least you’ll both have a laugh! See lots of heart shaped foods you can prepare in this article I posted at mental_floss.

Fun and Funny Links

A compilation made especially for Star Trek fans who have a 12-year-old's sense of humor. That's what she said.

Extreme Gaming, anywhere you want. Sure, he could do the same with a handheld game, but this is so much cooler.

7 Of The Most Expensive Flops In Television History. Remember Cop Rock? Supertrain? There's a reason you don't.

Which Disney princess is the greenest? We would all be greener if we could use magic instead of energy to get things done!

Ten Word Wiki describes itself as an encyclopedia for the ADD generation. The site is like Wikipedia, but all entries are limited to ten words. (via b3ta)

The Old Disappearing Water Prank. If she can forgive this, then they've got a wonderful future ahead of them.

If People on the Internet Told the Truth, all the fun would be sucked right out. Even if we know the real story, we like to have our little fantasies.

The newest talking sex robot will set you back ...only a few thousand dollars.

Informative Links

7 Real World Heists That Put 'Ocean's 11' to Shame. Of course they weren't perfect crimes because we found out who did them... all but one.

Radiation therapy saves lives while it kills cancer, but mistakes can lead to horrifying injuries or death. When radiation is delivered by computer software, mistakes can go on too long before someone notices.

15 Big Cheats and Fakers. That includes plagiarists, parodists, impostors, con men, lip-synchers, and those who take credit for other people's work. (via Neatorama)

The Top Secret Drum Corps of Basel, Switzerland should not be a secret. This much rhythm and discipline should be showcased, and often.

The Jihadist Next Door. How an Alabama honors students ended up as one of the leaders of a terrorist group targeting Somalia. (via Metafilter)

The Chaos is a poem often used to demonstrate how difficult it is to pronounce words in English, as the spelling and pronunciation varies so. The poem is now 274 lines long, meant to be read out loud. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

5 Ways to Get Closer to Your Garbage. the point being to understand what it is and how it will affect our world.

A personal story tells how difficult loving a soldier can be when wars and other conflicts never end.

Misery Bear Takes A Day Off

(via Arbroath)

Stars of the Wild West Show

In the latter part of the 19th century, before television, radio, or even movies with sound, traveling exhibitions were the biggest form of entertainment most people encountered. The wild west show merged the entertainment of the circus with the adventure of the new west and brought it to crowds of the eastern US and beyond. The stars of the wild west shows were as famous as world leaders and military heroes -or even more so! Read about the biggest wild west show stars in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Fun and Funny Links

Five-year-old Malachai Nicolle tells the stories and his 29-year-old brother, a professional comics illustrator draws them up. The result is wonderful webcomic called Axe Cop.

Pee Wee Herman Gets an iPad.

The Star Wars read-along storybook is now on video, illustrated by vintage action figures. Turn to the next page when you hear R2D2.

8 Greatest Jon Stewart Pwnages.

An Englishman marries an American and moves to New York City. Despite knowing the language, he finds himself in a very foreign place.

6-year-old Gabriella Crump made a splash as a gymnast, dancer, and contortionist. Now she's 7 and appearing in TV commercials.

Drug-dealers vs software developers. They only differ where it really counts.

The 12 Most Insane Things You Can Buy on the Internet. But only if you have the bucks!

Chewbacca

By Supernova. (via Everlasting Blort)

Istanbul

Craig Ferguson lip-sync's Istanbul by They Might Be Giants on his late late late show. (via Metafilter)