Work out and wake up at the same time with the alarm clock dumbbell which can only be shut off after 30 reps!
As the Guinness guys would say, "Brilliant!" I need one of these. Feel free to gift one to me. Kthnxby.
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News
Man, this Daytona Beach policeman really liked his Starbucks coffee. Lt. Major Garvin, a 15-year veteran, was fired after allegedly demanding free coffee from a particular Starbucks location which he would visit "up to six times a night while on duty, sometimes staying there as long as an hour" and further, would always go straight to the front of the line. There, he didn't want just coffee, no, he demanded "free passion tea and coffee laced with white chocolate mocha syrup." It was a slow news day apparently in Daytona.
Read more here.
[Via]
From Wired's interview with Science writer Jim Holt, author of Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, telling the shortest possible joke that he was aware of:
"Pretentious? Moi?"
Hahahaha. Ah, so good.
Freakonomics coauthor Stephen J. Dubner noted on their Times blog an apparent typo in a recent issue of the Economist. Many readers responded in comments saying in fact that it was not a typo.
I noted that the excellent Economist magazine dropped an “r” from the word “pastries,” inadvertently rendering it “pasties.”
Well, The Economist was not wrong but I sure was. Many readers informed me that a pasty (pl.: pasties) is a small Cornish pie often filled with meat and vegetables.
In the entry's aftermath he also received a surprise package from the Economist:
Those Brits and their crazy food and spelling.
Daily Mail has photos of the first ever documented leopard attack on an alligator, an attack which was captured by an American photographer in South Africa's Kruger National Park, the site of arguably the most viewed amateur wildlife amateur video (previously blogged here).
"There have been recorded cases of crocodiles killing leopards but never the other way around as the meat a crocodile provides is not sufficient enough to justify the risk."
Having vanquished the alligator, next up for the ferocious feline is the "pride" of Russia, Fedor Emelianenko.
View more here.
The Houston Press has a really interesting investigative piece on the underbelly of the magazine publishing business where "just a slight bump in circulation can mean serious money" to the magazines-- a bump provided by problematic and vulnerable "agents" in their late teens and early twenties looking to escape whatever it is are recruited by Fagin-like managers to join their crews who peddle magazine subscriptions door-to-door from city-to-city to "Joneses," what they call customers. When not canvassing neighborhoods with various "spiels," "a school-spiel, cancer-spiel, you name it"--anything to sign up a Jones for a subscription--they party hard often with drugs thanks to their managers. As the Press writes, what follows "is a story of that collateral damage — of murder, rape, assault, overdoses and scamming — and the business decisions and lack of legislation that make it possible."
It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too. Then, in West Texas, a van flipped, killing one agent and injuring three others. That's seven agents out of commission. That's about a $2,800 loss per day.
Read more here.
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Artist Bob Snead created a talking ATM which he installed in various public locations. This ATM shares with the public its back story of love lost and its cycle into deep depression.
I don't know how I missed this, but Drew sent it to me and although it's kind of long (that's what she said), this segment of Triumph the Insult Dog at a Bon Jovi concert this year in New Jersey is pretty damn funny. The band has a pretty good sense of humor about it all considering it's a puppet taking a shit the entire time on their entire musical career. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1EEqt0ovfE]
[Thanks Drew!]
#148. Inventing a magnetic pulse transfer controlling device. #149. Ambidextrous drawing skills by artist Hyona Angela Chung:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czINJRwqPDA]
Although I'm not quite sure how I feel about the New Age-y music score. Actually I know how I feel about it. It's annoying. I am adding banning New Age music to the agenda in the next Asian Conference. Also, am I the only one that watched this and when it ended thought, "Huh. She drew...wolf man. There is a wolf man sitting in her studio."
[Via]
This is for all you GEEKS who are salivating at the thought of seeing the upcoming Batman movie and making group field trip plans to IMAX to see it. This is a good article on Scientific American on whether Batman's wits and physical abilities is attainable in real life and the sort of training that would require to become Bruce Wayne's alter ego. SA sat down with "E. Paul Zehr, associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do" who is publishing a book on this very topic to discuss this matter."
How long would Bruce Wayne have to train to become Batman? In some of the timelines you see in the comics, the backstory is he goes away for five years—some it's three to five years, or eight years, or 12 years. In terms of the physical changes (strength and conditioning), that's happening fairly quickly. We're talking three to five years. In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years. Probably the most reality-based representation of Batman and his training was in Batman Begins.
Read more here.
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The ever spare but eloquent Garfield minus Garfield states the truth:
Kottke just turned me on to my new favorite word, Mamihlapinatapai, which is listed in the Guiness Book of World Record as "the most succinct word" and which Wikipedia claims is the among the toughest to translate. In short:
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as "eye-contact implying 'after you...'". A more literal approximation is "ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other".
Brilliant.
I can't believe the Germans don't have a word for this.
1. In India, taking lean back to an extreme level on a motorcycle: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klteYv1Uv9A]
2. Piloting a RC jet through a highway tunnel (more impressive than it sounds trust me) with the nice Top Gun touch in the end:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-QJLOVLg7M]
3. AND THIS IS RIDICULOUS: sandal surfing in Saudi Arabia while hanging out of a fast moving car:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qukUmDfoDpc]
[Via]
This is what happens when a guy tries to order iced coffee from a fascist coffee shop:
I just ordered my usual summertime pick-me-up: a triple shot of espresso dumped over ice. And the guy at the counter looked me in the eye with a straight face and said “I’m sorry, we can’t serve iced espresso here. It’s against our policy.”The whole world turned brown and chunky for a second. Flecks of corn floated past my pupils, and it took me a second to blink it all away. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a triple espresso and a cup of ice, please.”
He rolled his eyes and rang it up, took my money, gave me change. I stood there and waited. Then the barista called me over to the bar. I reached for it, and he leaned over and locked his eyes with mine, saying “Hey man. What you’re about to do … that’s really, really Not Okay.”
Read more here.
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This entry definitely needs some citations to cover the what, why, how, and where because allegedly it claims that it's a park in Korea. I'm skeptical because I know my people don't roll like that. Japanese maybe. But not Koreans. If it is truly a park in Korea then I'm kinda mad right now that when I was there a few years back we weren't taken to see this place.
Either way, click after the jump for NSFW photos of these park sculptures.
View more here.
[Uhm, thanks N]
This is a good photo essay on the offices and people at Twitter, an online service I've been proselytizing about lately. It's a bit self-referential fluff job for a product that still has a limited audience, but I still found it an interesting read especially with the accompanying fantastic photos.
The number of Twitter users has grown in the past year, and during events that spark a lot of twittering--such as technology conferences--popular users are constantly posting "tweets" to thousands of people. This puts strain on the underlying message-routing architecture, which, the Twitter founders admit, wasn't built to do such heavy lifting."
It's kind of shocking that their architecture isn't very scalable. One would think that nowadays this would be a priority, particularly for a service like Twitter unless they set the bar for concurrent usage to be very, very, very low. They need to address its lack of scalability immediately to ensure the future growth and success of Twitter.
Read more here.
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The Daily Mail seems convinced that the man in the photo above is Banksy, a "former public schoolboy Robin Gunningham."
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Update: This. is. on. every. website. and. blog. in. the. entire. Internets.
