June 29, 2013
“That’s the spirit Thing, lend a hand!”
If you’ve played pinball in the last 20 years , you’ve almost certainly played an Addam’s Family at some point in your life, and we're going to take it to task here, show you some ways to play the game. This entertaining series of videos features an extremely jargon-filled description of game strategies; with a top-down and forward-angled view of the table. Part 1 (Multiball), Part 2 and Part 3 (Mansion Rooms)
"biomechanically speaking, a twelve-foot-long penis."
A Clean House Is A Safe House.
" The House In The Middle" A 1954 Civil Defense film shows how you can protect your home against atomic firestorms via good housekeeping (13 min, YouTube)
It's our civic duty to bang the booty.
Fear Of A Black Hat was a 1993 film in the tradition of This Is Spinal Tap, a mockumentary of early 1990s rap such as Public Enemy and NWA. The entire movie is now available, officially, on YouTube.
"When I do my act, I never think of a f*cking ending."
Nosewise and Pangur Bán
Fido and Spot weren't always generic dog names. Dogs and cats (and monkeys, birds, etc) have been kept as pets for a long time, and medieval pet names can sound very strange or oddly familiar to modern ears. [more inside]
Dream 1-1 is not my favorite mud dream.
First, SomethingAwful posted a parody of LifeHacker's How I Work series that imagined it interviewing famed Internetter Nick Smith, aka Ulillillia. Then Smith responded with a detailed 18-point critique of the original post. "Though not an all-out error, I primarily use paper towels instead of napkins for degreasing. Paper towels are far more effective and they practically never stick like napkins pretty much always do (they still do, depending on various circumstances (grease level of cheese and the food's temperature being the main ones)."
You may say that I'm a Dreamer
"The success of the campaign made the three activists wonder: Could they replicate it on a grand scale by getting themselves detained on purpose? Inside immigration detention facilities, they would surely find dozens, if not hundreds, of low-priority detainees like de los Santos whom they could help. At the same time, they could publicize the fact that it wasn’t just criminals who were being deported, as the Obama administration kept insisting. “We realized we could be more effective if we just went straight to the source,” Abdollahi says. Doing so would flip the script on immigration agents; the activists would be taking advantage of their undocumented status and thus could be detained and deported. Deportation was unlikely, because they were Dreamers without serious criminal records. Even so, this would make the risk they’d taken in Charlotte look like nothing. But Saavedra, Abdollahi, and Martinez had been growing more fearless, and more radical, since they’d met." -- Los Infiltradores: How three young undocumented activists risked everything to expose the injustices of immigrant detention—and invented a new form of protest.
"Chinese music under Banyan trees.
Tango Shenanigans (in Swedish!)
Five Ants - Forward and Backward Tango (youtube). [Fem myror - Framåt och bakåt-tangon. Clip from a children's show, in Swedish with no subtitles.] [more inside]
You're going the wrong way
Eric Strand finished this year's Grandma's Marathon in Duluth in 6 hours and 15 minutes. But before he got to the starting line that day, he had run the entire course backwards.
unexpected encounter
Jimi Hendrix and Dusty Springfield’s duet of “Mockingbird,” the soul/novelty number originally made famous by by Inez and Charlie Foxx in 1963, hasn’t surfaced in decent quality yet, and maybe it never will, so savor this admittedly murky peek at it, apparently taken from a super-8 camera pointed at a TV screen when it originally would have aired in 1968.
Joe Hisaishi in Budokan, celebrating 25 years of Studio Ghibli music
Joe Hisaishi in Budokan was a series of concerts given in August 2008 to commemorate both the Japanese theatrical premiere of Ponyo and the 25 years of musical collaboration between composer Joe Hisaishi and film maker Hayao Miyazaki. This massive concert featured performances of these signature Miyazaki film scores composed by Hisaishi, conducting from the piano, and the 200-member New Japan Philharmonic World Dream Orchestra, along with six featured vocalists, the 800 combined voices of the Ippan Koubo, Ritsuyuukai and Little Singers of Tokyo choirs, plus a 160-piece marching band. Altogether there were some 1160 musicians and singers on stage, backed by images from Miyazaki's films projected on a giant screen. The almost two hour long show is on YouTube in HD, for your viewing pleasure.
The Car Built For Homer.
"All my life, I have searched for a car that feels a certain way ... powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball ... now at last I have found it." -- 22 years later, "The Homer" is now a reality. [more inside]
Planet Rise
What would the night sky look like if the other planets were as close as the moon?
Fracking After the Boom
Chesapeake, the largest natural gas producer in Pennsylvania, is losing money. The current low price of gas will leave the company around $4 Billion in the red this year. Part of their response is to use a recent state Supreme Court ruling to justify charging landowners for the drilling and transportation expenses involved in extraction, reducing or eliminating all royalties. What was once a windfall to Pennsylvania communities is now becoming a burden, with Chesapeake now retroactively billing landowners for previous expenses. StateImpact Pennsylvania has written and recorded a thorough report on the issue.
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