A couple weeks ago when I was researching vintage advertising imagery for reference material and inspiration to use for the re-design of my Now Accepting Girlfriend/Boyfriend Applications tees, I found some pretty amazing ads from women’s magazines of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.They weren’t exactly revelatory or surprising — right after we moved to Baltimore a few years ago, Meredith and I hit the kitsch jackpot while hitting up thrift & antique stores for stuff to decorate our house: tons of back issues of True Story magazine. Loaded with full-page ads trying to sell women on using Lysol to both disinfect their kitchen counters and their panty liners, and lots of other classics.

But when I found this over at PlanetOddity.com, it floored me:

There are a few things going on here that are cramazing:

• Directly equating a woman’s happiness with the volume of housework she engages in
• Calling what is essentially speed “vitamins”
• The fact that FREAKING KELLOGG’S, home of Tony the Tiger and Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies and Eggo waffles, and founded by consensus nut-job health-food masochist William Kellogg, was the company manufacturing and selling Pep Vitamins

The thing that’s so entertaining about this sort of advertising is how spectacularly this sort of cultural mindset crashed and burned at the turn of the 1960s and resulted in the dark underbelly of suburban swellness (see Men, Mad and Dolls, Valley of the. Or, if you’d rather laugh than cringe, John Waters’ Mom, Serial).

I try not to “re-blog” other peoples’ content too much — they work(ed) hard to be funny/crazy/stupid/embarrassing to themselves & their families, and I don’t want to develop a rep as a plagiarist.

If something is worthy, I like to take a pass at it too and contribute my own two cents to [insert witty blogger's name here]‘s scholarly analysis.

But Bobby Finger’s break-down of nouveau Christmas classic Love, Actually is pretty much perfect. You can check it out here at The Hairpin.

A few notes of my own, though:

— My wife isn’t a big rom-com fan. She’s OK with Love, Actually, and thought Crazy Stupid Love was good, but generally she likes to tease me about the fact that I will stop and watch any of the following whenever they pop up on the cable guide:
• When Harry Met Sally
• Four Weddings & A Funeral
• Sleepless In Seattle
• You’ve Got Mail

Essentially, anything with Meg Ryan and/or Tom Hanks circa me no longer thinking girls were icky.

— How weird is it to see Andrew Lincoln butchering zombies on The Walking Dead now after having his role as Mark in Love, Actually be the one that defined him for the rest of the 2000′s?

— Whatever happened to Kiera Knightley?

— Is Bill Nighy contractually-obligated to appear in every single big-budget, ensemble-casted movie out of the UK?

— Colin Firth was awesome in the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones’ Diary, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on two roles in which he played the same character (his last name in BJD is even Darcy, for f@#k’s sake!) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since the early 2000′s?

— Hugh Grant IS awesome in everything he’s in, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on playing the same character (himself) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since Four Weddings & A Funeral?

(Tip of the hat to Adj!)

This is Jukusui-Kun, a new robotic pillow combo in the form of two polar bears designed in Japan as a sleep aid to combat snoring. Yes, seriously.

How is this miracle of science achieved? Well, the smaller bear-pillow contains a small sensor which attaches to the afflicted sleeper’s hand. This sensor monitors oxygen levels in the blood, which a microphone embedded in the larger bear-pillow records noise levels.

Both pillows feed this data wirelessly into a THIRD unit, a terminal that compiles and analyzes the data. When blood oxygen levels dip and noise levels increase at the same time, the “mama” bear is triggered by the terminal and gently brushes its paw across the sleeper’s face in order to induce them to roll over without waking them up (sleeping on one’s side instead of the back is believed to alleviate the snoring).

Interested? Well, too bad — the researchers who designed this not-at-all ostentatious device that nobody asked for will not be producing it commercially.

So Japan spent an obscene amount of money to design a robotic anti-snoring pillow device and fabricated it in the form of an adult and an infant polar bear (complete with baby bottle) that essentially does what my wife’s elbow does for free after I pass out drunk. With no plans to recoup the R&D budget by mass-producing it.

No, don’t get up, Japan — we’ll lick this climate change/famine/poverty/overpopulation/war/pollution thing in a jiff.

(Via Springwise.com)

I’m not sure how I missed this, but apparently an insane person broke into the facility housing the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland back in April of 2010.

Let me break it down for you: this kid with zero security clearance was found inside the facility wearing “weird” clothes (I wear tweed sport coats all the time—I’m not weird, I just went through a very serious Belle & Sebastian phase in the late 90s) and rummaging around in some trashcans and was immediately arrested. During questioning, he claimed his name was Eloi Cole and that he was searching for fuel for his “time machine power unit” (police reports indicated this device looked a lot like a kitchen blender) when he was discovered. He also revealed that he had traveled back in time to sabotage the Collider:

“Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

Kids these days!

Seriously, how stupid are the Swiss & French police to be so confused by this? Weird clothes + garbage-fueled time machine that looks like something made by Cuisinart = an idiot who’s basically a real-life Cable Guy because his parents let him watch the Back to the Future trilogy way too much as a kid:

“Yes, Marty. You two do become assholes in the future!”

While I fully agree with Eloi that Kit-Kats are Satan’s candy, eating them seems like an alright trade-off for limitless energy and the elimination of poverty. Maybe he’s a big Ayn Rand fan.

But the most distressing aspect of this whole story is that security at the Collider is so lax that this nut-job was able to waltz right in, and that the police were CLEARLY not concerned about it, or the fact that he then escaped from the mental hospital they took him to post-questioning:

Mr. Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Switzerland, just because you’re neutral about everything doesn’t mean you get to be lazy, too.

Or so this guy hopes you’ll be saying:

That there is An Yanshi, a Chinese calligraphy teacher who claims he listened to the music of the spheres and that it told him that green tea leaves grown in panda poop have twice the cancer-prevention power of regular green tea leaves.

“But Matt, surely this guy can’t be serious?!”

First: don’t call me Shirley. Second, he very serious. So serious he’s actually secured a license from the Chinese government.

But real talk: we’ve been using animal pooh as a fertilizer for tens of thousands of years, both wittingly and unwittingly. The use of panda pooh in lieu of good ol’ democracy-loving bovine/equine/swine-ine waste to grow vegetables isn’t what’s shocking. It’s the price tag this dude thinks such tea is worth: $343 per 50 grams. That’s a lot of green for not a lot of green (tea)! And this insane pricing might seem more fair if there was actual, y’know, scientific evidence backing up An’s claim. But there’s not.

So, y’know, same old story: starving-Chinese-calligraphy-teacher-comes-up-with-hare-brained-get-rich-quick-scheme-to-dupe-consumption-obsessed-Westerners-out-of-their-money (which is really China’s anyway now because of how Crippling Debt Rules Everything Around Me—C.D.R.E.A.M.)
(Via ForkParty.com)

It’s been a while (well, a few weeks) since Japan teamed up with Science to give me nightmares—guess they wanted to give the first few episodes of season two of The Walking Dead a few at-bats in my mindscape—but they are back on the job and better (worse?) than ever:

Basically, these are what will be applauding the zombie herds from the sidelines as they chase me through the southeast in my dreams. Because relentless undead hordes need a cheering section.

(Via io9.com)

We already know about how Swedish moose like to party. But now we get a little insight into the mysterious lives of Swedish elk!

Snapped by Peter Lundgren of Lindome, Sweden while getting some fresh air on his balcony, these three elk were just hanging out, nomming some (let’s face it, probably fermented) apples before they got down to business.

Apparently elk business is conducted in much the same way dog business is, but with input from the elk in the cubicle nextdoor. Someone needs to proof these contracts before we get them notarized, Larry!

(Via Daily Picks And Flicks)

Nevermind the fact that I’m playing fast and loose with the rules of space/time by using an NPR ‘Sandwich Monday’ post for content on my ‘WTF Wednesday’ post—this is terrifying.

Quick aside: Sandwich Mondays is just one of many hilarious reasons that NPR is worthy of our tax dollars. Do yourself a favor and click the link above for past installments—you won’t regret it!

The ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’ staff decided to take their cardiovascular health into their own hands last month and review Denny’s Mac N’ Cheese Big Daddy Patty Melt. Described on Denny’s menu as “A hand-pressed beef patty topped with our NEW creamy Mac ‘n Cheese, melted Cheddar cheese and zesty Frisco sauce on grilled potato bread,” this is clearly (and literally) not a sandwich for the faint of heart. Also, why is ‘Mac ‘n Cheese’ capitalized here? Pretty sure it’s not a proper noun—unless it’s referring to Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., aka the third-best Joey-related joke on Friends (#1 being the fact that Joey’s favorite food is “sandwiches”, and #2 being Joey’s ultimate fantasy of scoring with the hot copy store girl while in a tub full of Monica’s home-made jam. Naturally.)

While best described by Robert: “This has everything you need combined in one convenient package. It’s a Swiss Army heart attack,” the final verdict agreed upon by the judges seemed…well, I guess positive, but with a lot of warnings and modifiers tossed in:

“This is really, really tasty. It’s embarrassing to like something this bad so much. If you can get over your embarrassment, and your love of being alive, this is worth a try.”

(Via NPR.org, courtesy of Adrienne!)

SWALLOWABLE PARFUM® from Lucy McRae on Vimeo.

Can’t you just take ONE WEEK OFF from fomenting NIGHTMARES in my mind-grapes?! Do you know what kind of person sits around and thinks “Hey, what if we INGEST our perfumes instead of spraying it on topically? That’s TOTALLY something EVERYBODY’S been waiting for us to develop.”?

A CRAZY person. And, god bless him, let’s not forget what happened when Mr. Wonka tried to develop similar technology:

In FORTY YEARS the most we’ve been able to advance is going from anthropomorphic blueberries to weird, moist Edward Cullen lookalikes. Does this look like progress to you?!

NO. DAVID. BLAINE.

(Via SpringWise.com)