Oh, nothing much happening here other than Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose in 1900 otherwise known as your first car to Alaskans.
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The New Yorker collected the best this year from their Talk of the Town segment.
It was [Chrystal] Harris who set up [Hugh] Hefner’s Twitter account. At first, Hefner wrote his messages on paper, counting the characters himself, and Harris would tweet them. Now he uses an iPad.
Spotted Hugh Jackman on my way home the other week. This and a few other personal photos 
This spacesuit donned by commander Eugene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission was the last spacesuit worn on the moon. This sucker weighs 185 pounds on Earth.
I find it sad we haven't been back since 1972.
[Via]
Brilliant way to collect tips found at the Sherman Oaks Starbucks. Gotta love that the ten dollar bill voted correctly.
[Via]
Scans of the front page of 7 newspapers from around the world announcing the first moon landing. I'm pretty sure the headline above translates to "Holy Shit! We on the Moon!"
We've all seen the popular website Kim Jong-il Looking at Things. Now there's one devoted to his son and successor: Kim Jong-un Looking at Things. That didn't take long.
[Via]
Hulk Hogan once owned a restaurant in Minneapolis called Pastamania! Cue NBC's The More You Know.
[h/t @taylr]
I feel so honored to be able to add the title of "Godfather" to my calling card. That is, the soon-to-be Godfather of Toys R Us.
Snapped on my way home in Hell's Kitchen last night. More photos from my jaunts around NYC If you're going to write about the holidays then please be sure to follow the AP holiday style guide.
Advent The four Sundays preceding Christmas.
“Auld Lang Syne” Sung to greet the New Year, poem by Robert Burns set to Scottish music.
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) – Dateline for AP stories from the biblical site of Jesus’ birth.
Bible Capitalize in reference to the Scriptures; lowercase biblical in all uses.
Boxing Day Post-Christmas holiday Dec. 26 In British Commonwealth countries.
Champagne Capitalize sparkling wine from the French region uncorked to celebrate New Year’s.
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day Capitalize Dec. 24 and Dec. 25 Christian feast marking the birth of Jesus.
Christmastime One word.
Christmas tree Lowercase tree and other seasonal terms with Christmas: card, wreath, carol, etc. Exception: National Christmas Tree.
dreidel Toy spinning top for Jewish celebrations.
hallelujah Lowercase the biblical praise to God, but capitalize in composition titles: Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.
Hanukkah Eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights starting Dec. 20 this year.
Jesus, Jesus Christ Pronouns referring to him are lowercase, as is savior.
happy holidays, merry Christmas, season’s greetings Such phrases are generally spelled lowercase, though Christmas is always capitalized.
Holy Land Capitalize the biblical region.
Kriss Kringle Not Kris. Derived from the German word, Christkindl, or baby Jesus.
Kwanzaa African-American and Pan-African celebration of family, community and culture, Dec. 26-Jan. 1.
Magi Three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus at Epiphany, celebrated Jan. 6.
menorah Candelabrum with nine branches used for Hanukkah.
Messiah Capitalized in references to Jesus or to the promised deliverer in Judaism.
Nativity scene Only the first word is capitalized.
New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day Capitalized for Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
North Pole Mythical home of Santa Claus.
Poinsettia Decorative plant for Christmas; note the “ia.”
regifting Passing along an unwanted present to someone else.
Santa Claus Brings toys to children in a sleigh pulled by reindeer on Christmas Eve.
“A Visit From St. Nicholas” Beloved poem by Clement Clarke Moore that begins, “ ‘Twas the night before Christmas …”
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” Spell the numeral in the Christmas carol.
yule Old English name for Christmas season; yuletide is also lowercase.
Xmas Don’t use this abbreviation for Christmas.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFt6MyiVx54] The only things more awesome than this guest's whistling on a 1984 talk show is his Detroit Pistons shirt and the stunned reaction of the pre-YouTube audience.
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This bullet point "essay" by Ned Hepburn is kind of brilliant.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult because women get hit on all of the time, in every way imaginable.
- Men are inherently lonely people because our defaults are either fucking or fighting related (not counting sleep; eating, obviously), and the New York City default is all about ‘survival’.
- Combine the two previous bullet points and you have a recipe for disaster; a city full of angry dudes at half staff trying harder and harder at a game that women become increasingly bitter at ever being involved in it in the first place.
- I don’t know what it must be like to be a woman in New York. It must be really difficult / freeing / one or the other, but not both.
- Last night I was outside of a bar, and this woman dropped something from her purse and kept walking. It was one of those “buy 9 get the 10th free” things and I figured she’d want it back so I tapped her on the arm and tried to hand it back to her. “You dropped this”, I said, and she gave me a look as if I had just vomited shit out of my eyes. She didn’t take the damn card. This was in front of five people.
- Her friend saw it and whispered “Don’t worry, I’ll take that”, but holy shit, how bitter can someone be when they drop something and someone tries to hand it back to them?
- Perhaps its got to do more with the human condition.
- Perhaps we are all just very, very lonely and defensive. We are all just monkeys still with money and guns.
- That’s what I initially thought.
- But then I saw a guy fingerbang his girlfriend over her skirt while at the bar, and it made me think.
- Perhaps there are two types of men in this world:
- 1. Guys that fingerbang people at bars, and
- 2. Guys that don’t.
- I looked around the bar and saw everyone else just stand around, waiting and wanting to be looked at. Men, women, everyone.
- Perhaps we’re just looking for a hole to fill. I mean that metaphorically.
- Or I guess the other way, too.
- The human heart doesn’t want to be bitter. The brain does not want to be angry. These are not our default settings. These are switches and dials in our heads that have taken years, sometimes decades to change that way. It’s easier not to remember those original settings. It’s a lot easier to become what the world wants you to be, instead of making the world become what you want it to, which takes years, years, years.
- Positivity is a marathon, not a sprint.
- It’s just that these people have made many smaller decisions, split second ones, hundreds of them, to ignore that and turn the other way.
- It’s a lot easier to focus on your own problems and project them.
- Which is why I think she didn’t want to take her card back, because she thought I was trying some sort of maneuver.
- Which is worrying in and of itself, because it’s just a card, lady. It’s not a proposal nor am I trying to fuck you.
- Which, I guess, made me feel kinda sad for her
- And people like her
- Who look at an exchange like that and their take home is “Stacey, this guy outside the club tried to hand me something!” “Oh my god!” “I knooooow!”
- And they don’t look at it any other way and chalk it up to their “Well I Never!” category in their head
- And that whole cycle just breeds loneliness.
- And you see people walking down the street hand in hand, and you wonder how they did it.
- I guess through just ignoring everything I’ve just said, right?
- It’s like that Bret Easton Ellis line “People are afraid to merge”, except he was talking about people on the freeway, really.
- And I’m just talking about a lady dropping something on the sidewalk.
December is a bittersweet month for me because on one hand I enjoy the pageantry of the yuletide holiday season, but on the other hand it also signals the end of yet another year. Without further adieu here are some entries of mine from the past couple weeks over at Sundance Channel's SUNfiltered.
- Tales of a NYC film location scout.
- Collection of Occupy movement posters.
- Artist prints out all the photos uploaded to Flickr in a 24 hour period.
- What you didn't know about the Muppets like did you know that Oscar was originally orange?
- Awesome socially conscious graffiti on a dam.
- Dali's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.
- First covers of famous magazines.
- Cool invisible bridge in the Netherlands.
- Collection of video game deaths.
- The drawing robot.
In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol, and it was the worst twenty minutes of my life.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh9RQCvxmg] This 1 hour 24 minute long conversation between an out of character (but still hysterical) Stephen Colbert with (also always hilarious) Neil deGrasse Tyson about the meaning and importance of science and our relationship with the cosmos is a must watch video and explains my long fascination of Tyson as a scientist and educator, brilliant in equal parts. This took place at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey in front of a damn lucky audience and by the high standards of this talk, damn lucky students. You will learn more and inspired more during these 84 minutes than all the hours you've spent over the past week consuming whatever content you're consuming.
As my group of friends have begun expanding their lives into the realm of parenthood, Tyson towards the end of the discussion delivers a message-a plea to parents to permit and value their children's curiosity-that I hope they embrace. That said, I may or may not be speaking from personal experience, but if you're going to give your kid a microscope for Christmas, try to balance it out with a Transformer action figure.
Undated photo of cigarette smoking banning mayor Bloomberg lights one up while wearing an Amar'e Stoudemire Knicks jersey.
Discover Magazines compiled "10 things everyone should know about time" from a recent "multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time" including the below fact that unites all creatures great and small.
A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”
This is why I don't watch scary movies: I can't afford to use up all my heartbeats in just two hours.