In order to survive during the financial meltdown last fall, Morgan Stanley received a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ. Andrew Sorkin writes, "The payment was supposed to be wired electronically, but because it needed to be made on an emergency basis on a holiday, Mitsubishi cut a physical check, perhaps the largest ever written." Here's the check:
[Via]
Send a free greeting card through snail mail courtesy of Google! This is a great way to tell your friends and loved ones that you are too cheap to spend 5 dollars and 44 cents on them this holiday season.
LOLosaurus at "Hyphen." Seriously though, whoever hired this clown should get a refund.
Italian artist Fabio Viale's tromp l'oeil sculptures are created from marble, including this white balloon.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PSbUl_68k] The view from this arm chair is out of this world in this viral ad video to promote a Toshiba LCD TV. Ad agency Grey London attached a helium balloon to a red armchair and sent it soaring 98,268 feet high. More details here.
Balloon chair 1, balloon boy 0.
Clémentine Henrion's shiny helium balloons are in fact made entirely from fabric and can be hung from a ceiling hook or rod to give the illusion that they are floating.
NPR takes a look at rectangles versus triangle cut sandwich debate that has been raging since 18th century English aristocrab John Montagu aka Earl of Sandwich first "ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread." It doesn't look good for the squarists, as the report has "Chefs, foodies, an architect and even a mathematician" and this blogger voting in favor of the diagonal.
If your bread is square, and if each side is 4 inches long, you have 16 inches of crust. Cut that bread down the middle, and you get 8 inches of crust-free surface. Cut that same bread diagonally, Calter calculates, and you end up with almost 11 inches of crustless surface. That's a substantial increase.
Check. Square, your move.
Readers, which do you prefer? Take a poll!
[polldaddy poll=2333979]
GOOD Magazine has a transparency that looks at "your most likely cause of death (excluding uncontrollable events like accidents and homicide), given your race, sex, and age." Suicide among the young is just insane. Come on, kids, stick around...at least for cancer when you're 45.
Back in 1959 there were no modern air flight restrictions and this provided an opportunity for military pilots training at Nellis Air Force Base to fly through the nearby Grand Canyon, sometimes flying so low that the river water sprayed up as they buzzed by overhead. Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine posted on their website an amazing video recording from the cockpit from one such trip. The plane dips so low that at times it looks like the pilot is just a couple feet above the canyon river.
The teaser poster for Iron Man 2 featuring WAR MACHINE. OH HELLS YES.
The perfect gift for the gummy bear addict: A 5 pound, 9.5 inches tall gummy bear that is the equivalent of 1,400 regular sized ones. Comes in blue, green, red, or on a stick. $29.95 here.
[Hat tip - Bradford Shellhammer]
Apropos of nothing, here's the cover of Golf Magazine's January 2010 issue featuring Tiger Woods and President Obama.
[Via]
I get an odd feeling of alterna-history when gazing at this photograph of Fidel Castro visiting Lincoln Memorial when he visited Washington, DC in April 1959 shortly after he assumed power in Cuba.
Australian jewellery designer Polly van der Glas uses (sterilized) human teeth in her latest jewelry collection. Ladies, don't wear these on a first date.
[Via]
Three years before African Americans were allowed into the league and the same year Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, Japanese American Watura Misaka was drafted in the first round by the New York Knicks. He later served in the US Army stationed in Hiroshima three months after the atomic bomb devastated that city.
I wonder if this fascinating and largely forgotten part of history made it into Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball.
[Via]
Haunch of Venison Art Gallery in New York recently displayed this "life-size chocolate replica of a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona couch, a collaboration between the artist Leandro Erlich and Sant Ambroeus’s Guido Mogni" at an event in early November.
[Via]
A 50-foot Santa Claus display accidentally burned down this past weekend in Santa Catarina, Brazil. That's what you get Santa for not bringing me those Air Jordans in 1993. I never forget.
View more photos including the final skeletal shell of Saint Nick here as well as the obvious yet still hilarious Disaster Girl meme.
A blogger reviews a "soy sauce flavored" Kit Kat that they received from their parents. The label turned out to be false advertising, because contrary to the packaging and much to their disappointment it didn't have a drop of soy sauce taste. So what did it taste like?
Now I’m stuck with a box of delicious tasting, crispy, maple syrup-flavored, white chocolate Kit Kat, which is the complete opposite of what I wanted. The only thing that kind of disgusted me was the unusually long length of time the maple syrup flavor lingered in my mouth, but it didn’t make me gag like a salty soy sauce flavored candy would’ve.
Where's the bacon flavored Kit Kat?
