Blog Posts

Did You Have a Nice Pranksgiving (April Fools)?

April Fools’ Day 2013 will go down in history as one that was particularly saturated with public pranks. Among our favorites:
april fools• Outdoor supply company REI announced that it would be selling “Adventure Kitten Gear”. Among the items: a “Wild Cat” backpack that held “100 cubic inches of kibble and catnip,” and an $11 bandana that “doesn’t do anything, but looks cute in photos.”
• The British car show Top Gear announced it was filming in the Netherlands, and that in order to set a new land speed record, a busy 20-mile stretch of highway outside of Amsterdam would have to be closed. Citizens grumbled about the delays and rerouting…until it was revealed that there was no show. It was all a prank from a mischievous Dutch police officer.

RIP Roger Ebert

Aw, rotten news:

Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.

His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for many years.

Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer, starting in 2002, gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his chin, and he was fed through a tube) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook he had started, on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.

Much more at the paper he wrote for for decades, The Chicago Sun-Times.

And he had a very funny and wise FaceBook presence, and the same on Twitter – where he was posting up until very recently.

Oh – just saw this: just two days ago Ebert announced that his cancer had returned – and that he was taking a “A Leave of Presence“:

Stall of Fame: Abandoned London Public Toilet Turned Into Coffee Shop

So awesome:

On Foley and Great Titchfield Streets in London, there was an underground public men’s restroom built in the 1890′s accessible via its own caged entrance in the middle of the sidewalk. There were quite a few of these facilities built at the time which were used until the 1960′s, when they were locked up and left in disuse for the next 50 years.

A few years ago, the city sold off these odd spaces to various enterprises. In the case of the underground toilet on Foley Street, some restaurateurs took it over and have turned the abandoned urban outhouse into a remarkably pleasant little espresso cafe.

It’s called “The Attendant.” Just another public toilet turned into coffee shop. Here are some pics. The first one we snagged from Google Street View. It’s the green cage on the sidewalk! (And never mind that Google Street View thinks that parking sign in the coffee shop.)

public toilet turned into coffee shop

Steve Martin, Edie Brickell Make Album

This could be real good:

Steve Martin and singer-songwriter Edie Brickell are set to release their first collaborative LP, Love Has Come for You, on April 23rd through Rounder Records. Comprising 13 new songs that combine Martin’s banjo work with Brickell’s lyrics and vocals, you can now get a taste of the record’s unique sound and take an exclusive look at this interview in which the duo discuss the making of the LP.

If you don’t recognize the name, Edie Brickell became famous in 1988 with her, “What I am is what I am is what you are or what?” song. (Then she married Paul Simon and got lost in the attic of one of his Manhattan mansions, we’re pretty sure.)

P.S. Is it just us or..

Some Not So Egg-cellent Easter Products

Easter eggsIt’s the hoppiest day of the year! Here are four egg-citing Easter products.

1. Funny Bunny. This wind-up toy rabbit distributed by a candy company called Treat Street dispenses jelly beans as it waddles across any flat surface…by pooping them out. As the packaging notes, “Wind him up and watch him GO!”

Three Other Rock Star Meltdowns

Earlier this month, Grammy-nominated singer Michelle Shocked went off on a bizarre diatribe near the end of a San Francisco performance. While her behavior may have, uh, shocked, fans, it’s not a first. Here are some other examples of rock star meltdowns.

Axl Rose. The Guns N’ Roses singer is a little unpredictable in concert. He’s been known to show up several hours late, for example, but the worst event happened at a St. Louis show in 1991 when he caught a fan filming the show. Rose’s response: He threw himself into the crowd, wrestled the camera away from the fan, and then stormed off stage. End of show. The audience responded by rioting. More than 60 people were hospitalized.

Billboard in Peru Turns Air Into Drinking Water

No way. (Way!)

Just outside Lima, Peru, a billboard provides drinking water to whomever needs it – mainly, its neighbours.

The panel produces clean water from the humidity in the air, through filters.

Researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima and advertising agency Mayo Peru DraftFCB joined forces to launch it.

So far it’s made more than 9,000 liters of water – or about 96 liters a day. And it goes into a storage vat that has a tap at street level – so nyone can go up to it and get some water. And they need it, because, even though it’s very humid there (up to 98% humidity in the mornings! ow!), it hardly rains at all! Check this out:

“WOMAN’S HOUSE BURNT DOWN BY SNAKE SHE SET ON FIRE”

Best. Headline. Ever.

One woman’s extreme reaction to finding a snake in her yard backfired in tragic fashion. After being set on fire, the flaming snake caused the woman’s home to burn down. […]

“While cleaning up, she saw a snake, threw gasoline on the snake, lit the snake on fire,” Bowie County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Randall Baggett told the station. “The snake went into the brush pile, and the brush pile caught the home on fire.”

And the best possible single sentence EVER in a story about a woman who burnt her house down by setting a snake on fire:

Oddly enough, a local fire department official says the incident isn’t as unique as one might think.

Maybe it’s just us, but we would have thought that having your house burnt down by a snake you set on fire was pretty much the living definition of the word “unique.” But hey, you learn something knew every day!

This site has the transcript of the 911 call:

When Celebrities Meet Bad Guys

Former NBA rebounding champion (and all-around weirdo) Dennis Rodman recently made headlines during an ill-advised trip to North Korea to meet its “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong-un.

While this sounds like a PR stunt or an article from The Onion, Rodman isn’t the first American celebrity to associate themselves with dubious elements. Here are a few more examples.

Patty Hearst. After being kidnapped by a far-left revolutionary group calling itself the “Symbionese Liberation Army,” newspaper heiress Patty Hearst succumbed to the effects of brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome and willingly helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank in 1974. Hearst was arrested in 1975 and imprisoned for two years before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.

Humans Have Left the Solar System (Or Not)

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And no, this is not about Charlie Sheen.

Ba DUMP.

Thank you, no really, thank you! Try the gharghmey!

Where were we? Oh yeah: Humans have left the Solar System! (Okay, they say “may have left,” but dangit, we’re not scientists, Jim!)

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the farthest-flung object created by human hands — has traveled beyond the sun’s sphere of influence and may even have left the solar system forever, a new study suggests.

On Aug. 25, 2012, 35 years after the Voyager 1 mission launched, Earth’s most distant spacecraft detected a sharp change in the intensity of fast-moving charged particles called cosmic rays, suggesting it had left the outermost reaches of the heliosphere marking the edge of the solar system.

“Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere,” said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, in a statement.

Here’s a helpful graphic from NASA:

Well, sorta helpful. Nice colors, anyway.

And hold up – NASA says, Not so fast:

Habemus Papam! (That’s Latin for “We have a Pope!”)

This week 76-year-old Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope on the fifth papal conclave vote. Fun fact: Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is the first pontiff from Latin America. To mark the occasion, here are a few more bits of pope-culture.

Pope vote: The vote usually doesn’t take long. Over the past century, the conclave has never lasted more than five days. Longest on record: 33 months, spanning 1268 to 1271. An angry mob got so fed up with the indecision that they literally tore the roof off the building the college of cardinals was staying in and limited their meals to bread and water to inspire them to pick up the pace. (They picked Pope Gregory X, who reigned for four years.

The Great Hollywood Toilet Boycott

Celebrities: they’re just like us…except that they don’t use toilets.Matt Damon Toilet Boycott The great toilet boycott has started.

At least some of them. Movie star Matt Damon, who does a lot of humanitarian work on the side, co-founded Water.org, an organization devoted to bring clean water to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who lack sanitation, including 800 million who don’t have access to clean drinking water.

To promote his cause, last month Damon publicly announced that he would refuse to use a toilet until everyone in the world enjoys the same water privileges as first world nations.

Playing Music…With Ice

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Very cool!

A group of Siberian percussionists have become an internet hit with an exhibition of ice drumming on frozen Lake Baikal.

In minus 20C, they found by pure chance that the one metre thick ice has a distinctive and haunting rhythm all of its own, reported the Siberian Times.

‘I felt like we were playing on the drums that Nature has left out for us, alone under the sun on the frozen waters of the world’s most magnificent lake,’ said Irkutsk architect Natalya Vlasevskaya, 31, a mother-of-one and organiser of Etnobit percussion group.

• More here.

• Much more here:

Four Weird and Oz-Mazing ‘Oz’ Facts

Oz: the Great and Powerful crashes into movies theaters today harder than Dorothy’s farmhouse killed a witch. Brush up on your Oz knowledge before you go see the movie.

Wizard of Oz• Published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the first Oz book, and the basis for the classic 1939 film, but it’s not the first thing author L. Frank Baum ever published. Decades earlier, he was a chicken farmer, specializing in Hamburgs, a rare German breed. In 1886, Baum published a chicken raising guide called The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise Upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs. (The Oz novels are much more entertaining.)

RIP Alvin Lee

Reuters:

British blues-rock guitarist Alvin Lee, who was best known for his performance with rock band Ten Years After at Woodstock in 1969, died on Wednesday at age 68, his family said.

“With great sadness we have to announce that Alvin unexpectedly passed away early this morning after unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure,” the family said in a statement on the singer’s official website.

Ten Years After—”Spoonful”:

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