Don’t let the innocent smile fool you: Daryl Hannah is an infrastructural menace!
Or at least that’s what Zimbabwe’s Water Resources Minister says.
…
Yeah, an elected official, that real, live people in the 21st century voted for, said that mermaids have delayed the construction of reservoirs by hounding workers away. Naturally!
And equally obvious was Minister Nkomo’s solution to the problem — apparently the only way to evict the fishy ladies is “to brew traditional beer and carry out any rites to appease the spirits.”
“Any rites”? Seems scientific enough. I mean, involving beer is a no-brainer, but the rites are kinda up in the air. My suggestion? Just shrug your shoulders a lot while drinking the beer — after all, that’s probably how Minister Nkomo came up with this plan in the first place. Zing!
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).
Spielberg wisely left this nugget on the cutting-room floor:
Add your captions in the comments section below! Winner gets the self-satisfaction of knowing that they made the best joke about Nazis presenting a kitten with a dandelion and a grenade EVER!
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?
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.
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.
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)
Your tax dollars (disguised as grant money) at work:
According to Time Magazine, some brilliant psychologists in England requiring one more flimsy published study to secure tenure have concluded that some wine drinkers may perceive whatever they’re drinking as better or worse depending on what music is playing while they’re doing so.
So if you hate the band Disturbed (warning: not suitable for listening to. Ever.) and that friend of yours throws them on as part of their dinner party soundtrack in an attempt to be ironic, you may find the wine less tasty than if there was something more appropriately-ignore-able (think “sad Starbucks compilation CD”) playing in the background.
Of course, that sour taste in your mouth (TWSS?) could be because even the finest wine ever fermented tastes like shit when you’re chugging it in an effort to flee said dinner party and forget that you ever knew the host(s).
Thanks, Science. Now where’s my f@#king hoverboard?!!
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