The world would be so much sweeter if everyone had a sassy gay friend.
(via)
Jun 252010
Jun 252010
No commentary today. Just the film:
Jun 242010
Check out this great video of lightning strikes in Chicago. It appears to be one heck of a storm — according to the Vimeo page, it featured 80 mph gusts of wind, more than three inches of rain, and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in a single hour.
When you’ve got that much lightning action, you’re bound to overlap a few times. And that’s exactly what’s captured on video here — lightning strikes all three of the tallest buildings in Chicago. Simultaneously.
(Via Coudal.)
Jun 242010
Watermelon carving from Vid Nikolic on Vimeo.
To be honest, sometimes I have a hard time getting slices to be about the same size when I cut a watermelon. And until five minutes ago, if you had asked me what the height of watermelon carving was, I would have waffled between “watermelon with a hole you dump vodka in” and “watermelon helmets at Roughriders games.”
Jun 242010
I have a barbershop that I frequent. It’s old, and it’s great.
When I started getting my hair cut there, it was a man and his son who ran the place. They had an old black-and-white TV — in Bakelite orange — sitting in the corner. They had couple of old newspapers and a stack a mile high of Playboys and Maxims by the waiting bench.
They had a big old brass cash register, with a very satisfying ka-ching. There’s a yellowing sign on the wall, apologizing to long-time regulars for raising the price of haircuts above $10.
I don’t know what a haircut there costs these days. It might be $11, or even $12. I hand them a $20, and refuse any change. It’s worth it.
But a couple of years ago the son left, moving to another city to pursue his dream of being a police officer. The father hired a girl to help out. The Playboys, then the Maxims, disappeared. The TV stopped working, and it’s been replaced with a modern model.
The cash register is still there, though — as big and bright as ever.
The man has MS, and he’s not there as often anymore. When he does have the energy to give a few haircuts, it’s with a very pronounced limp. And every now and then he’ll have to rest the full weight of his meaty palm on your head.
But I’ll keep going there for my haircuts.
And until today, I didn’t think there was anything that could make it any better.
But what if they added a bar?
That’s what a place called The Blind Barber in New York did:
I stretched out in a chair, watched a lavishly tattooed stylist come at me with loudly whirring clippers and felt a very, very keen thirst. But how to quench it?
I left that up to the three young proprietors, who decided on something that would have been more appropriate for my subsequent appointment with a straight razor. The Sweeney Todd, they call it. It’s one of their signature concoctions, made of Irish whiskey, egg white, lemon juice, honey syrup and the same dark humor that went into the naming of the place.
The bar’s in the back, and it even has a separate entrance, if you want to go there without getting your hair cut. But I can’t help but love the fact that they even thought about pairing it.
I love my own little barbershop. It’s been there for ages, and I’ll keep going there. Right now, in the back, I think there’s a beauty salon (it isn’t the kind of place where men and women mix much — the new barberess notwithstanding). But maybe they could knock out a wall, expand next door, open a bar?
Even just a fridge, tucked away by the TV, with a few cans of beer.
I’d gladly pay more for a haircut!
Jun 242010
NPR has a fascinating tale of Canadian author Howard Engel who, in 2001, woke up one morning to discover that he could no longer read:
The print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely “Serbo-Croatian or Korean,” or some language he didn’t know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book he knew was in English, and it too was in the same gibberish.
Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn’t make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls “word blindness.” His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him. And because Engel writes detective stories for a living (he authored the Benny Cooperman mystery series, tales of a mild-mannered Toronto private eye), this was an extra-terrible blow. “I thought, well I’m done as a writer. I’m finished.”
Watch to see the kind of amazing story of his workaround:
(If the media player doesn’t load for you, click here to watch it on the NPR page.)
The cartoon, as you may have figured, was drawn and narrated by Lev Yilmaz, of “Tales of Mere Existence” fame. We like Lev.
(via Boing Boing)
Jun 232010
It’s already the longest match ever played at Wimbledon — it has lasted longer than 10 hours, played over two days, and it’s been suspended for the night, to start up again Thursday.
John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France each have won two sets, and they are tied in the fifth set at an incredible 59-59.
Better than the game, perhaps, is the coverage of this marathon.I particularly like Xan Brooks at the Guardian:
4.05pm: The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It’s tennis’s equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they’re watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.
On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.
Ooh, I can see the football out of the corner of my eye. England still 1-0 up!
Buzzfeed has highlights, but it’s almost better to read through the whole thing.
Jun 232010
Hey, this is cool — the original sketches for a Pac Man game:
Blog 1up says that they’re from 1979 or 1980, and that Pac Mac creator Toru Iwatani brought them to a Dutch games festival earlier this month.
That’s awesome.
Also, I remember doodling on graph paper. Such fun! I always preferred graph paper to lined foolscap — I liked the option of turning it sideways.
Now, time to go play some Pac Man (original style or Google style).
(from Control)
Jun 232010
Wow — this is something I’ve often noticed but didn’t think anything could be done about.
F.lux is the solution to a common problem:
Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?
Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?
During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.
F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
Download it here. There are Windows, Mac and Linux versions. I can’t wait to try this.
Jun 232010
Maybe at one time, owning a MacBook was a good way to express your individuality, and to show off to the world that you Thought Different. But now they’re everywhere. And, because all Macs look quite a bit alike, it just looks like you’re toting around conformity.
Stick With Me Baby to the rescue, with a series of stickers you can use to adorn that glowing Apple logo:
Now, Apple logo stickers are nothing new — there’s been an Iron Man one (two), a Cinderella one, and a vintage one — but there’s something about the hair that I really dig.
The only thing about the moustaches is that, to me, the apple leaf looks kind of like the stereotypical infant’s topknot.
Idea: soother sticker!
Jun 222010
It’s strange what kinds of things become Internet memes — you know, those things that catch on and circulate all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be any formula as to what might catch on. For example, I was sure that Grant’s experiment with eggnog last summer was a sure-fire hit. Sadly, it seemed to sink with barely a ripple.
Now I read about a new image meme: “Sad Keanu.”
For example:
(photo courtesy urlesque.com)
I’ve not come across any of these images in my admittedly excessive time on the web, which begs the question: Is it really an Internet meme if it is only reported as a meme? Where does that threshold lie for something to become so pervasive enough online that it can be considered a meme?
These questions lead me to ask another question: Has the Internet given birth to a new field of philosophical inquiry?
Surely answers to these questions exist. At the moment, though, I’m too busy looking for pictures of sad Keanu.
Jun 222010
The other day I was reading a post on Jezebel about the lack of dancing in music videos. It was bemoaning how most female artists seem to just spend their time in their videos posing, and don’t have much to offer in the way of dancing.
But at the end, they suggested there might be someone out there who breaks the mold. And her name is Janelle Monáe.
To give you an idea of Monáe’s style, her latest album, The ArchAndroid, is a concept album with influences such as Alfred Hithcock, Philip K. Dyck, and the classic film Metropolis.
Very cool.
Here’s her video for the song “Tightrope” that Jezebel referenced in their post. I’m kind of in love with this girl.
Jun 222010
Normally, you would pop batteries into the back of a wall clock, and hands on the front would move around, telling you the time.
Booooring.
This design, by The Wrong Objects, replaces the hands with the batteries. Two blank clock faces move around each other, and the position of the front-facing batteries themselves tells you the time.
Interesting. I like it. Gives you a reason to choose say, Duracell or Energizer, if one goes better with your room decor. Or, perhaps to strip off the wrapping and expose the dull metal underneath, as above.
Only thing I don’t like is that most of my clocks use a singe AA battery, and this one will double my clock-related battery expenses.
(via Gizmodo)
Jun 212010
Pro tip: At a concert, don’t throw things at the stage unless you are certain the band wants them thrown.
Stick to bras and flowers. Not hard, pointy things.
Despite what you may think, throwing a CD of the band’s own music back up at them is not flattering. It is instead, as Carl Newman from the New Pornographers says, “perplexing.”
Bandmate Neko Case uses her sweet, sweet voice to make things crystal clear:
“I will go to jail …. I don’t give a shit. I will fuck you up. I will fight every single fucking person in this room. Seriously, don’t pull that shit again.”
Jun 212010
Have you ever wondered how many people died in a movie that you just watched?
Well, Bodycounters has got you covered. They count bodies, so you don’t have to. Here’s a selection from the Ks of their extensive A-to-Z list:
- Kill Bill: Volume One – 67
- Kill Bill: Volume Two – 4
- Killer Drag Queens on Dope – 12
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space – 51 people, 4 klowns and 2 dogs
- The Killing Room – 3
- King Kong – 26 with Ape. Also 3 dinosaurs, 4 T-Rexes, 35 various giant insects and 3 giant bats.
- Kingdom of Heaven – 1,578 and 16 horses
A useful (?) resource.