Listicles

10 Tragic Athlete Deaths

The last few weeks in summer sports have seen record temperatures causing near-tragedies here in New York City, a total tragedy in a smoldering sauna championship in Finland, and most recently the collapse of Victoria Azarenka at the U.S. Open on Wednesday. Sadly, casualties in competitive sport are fairly common, as illustrated by Mental Floss’s listicle of 10 Tragic Athlete Deaths, to which we’d like to add (if you’ll allow the inclusion of motor sports, that is) the death of Brazilian Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, killed in a crash during a race in San Marino in 1994.

10 Greatest Fictional Inventors

For tech nerds such as ourselves, the news of late has been of countless innovations and improvements in existing technologies, facilitating the invention or creation of new e-readers, new microchips, and new media players, among others. Of course, the details of such work are much less exciting than the image we keep of nutty fictional inventors toiling away in spectacular labs, like those in Gizmodo’s listicle of the 10 Greatest Fictional Inventors. We’d like to invent an extra spot for the unjustly omitted greatest fictional inventor of all time, Dr. Frankenstein! Also, Dexter. (via Neatorama)

Top 10 Artist Websites

This may seem like a strangely esoteric subject (although, you may recall that we are somewhat sporadic art nerds), but the confluence of contemporary art and Internet innovation is very much our subject. And so, while we thoroughly enjoyed ArtInfo’s listicle of the Top 10 Artist Websites, most of which can in fact be more readily described as art than as websites, we’re an itty-bit irked by the absence of Tauba Auerbach. Seriously, homegirl has a beautiful website that really accentuates the formal affinities between her work and the web. Check it out.

7 Best Shark V. Superhero Fights

This summer, New York City saw some of its first significant real-life shark action since the 1975 documentary Jaws captured the tragic events in waters surrounding City Island, and just in time for Shark Week! Luckily, it never got to the point that we needed to call in a Robert Shaw-type super-human to save us from the prehistoric predators. Comics Alliance chronicles such interventions in their listicle of the 7 Best Shark v. Superhero Fights. We’re a little surprised that despite all the Batman appearances, they left out the time that Bruce Wayne battled a shark with a lightsaber on the Internet.

7 Fugitives Who Became Folk Heroes

Yesterday, in our own Brooklyn backyard, what could have been a sadly routine police blotter blurb about a stolen cell phone turned into an amazing story about a hot pair of Vespa-riding vigilantes (not pictured) recovering stolen property like really, really good Samaritans. Taking the law administration of the law into their own accelerator-turning hands, they joined the ranks of righteous rebels in Mental Floss’s listicle of 7 Fugitives Who Became Folk Heroes, pending the eventual-but-inevitable fictionalizing of their story, of course.

10 Weird Things You Can Rent

What will hopefully be our last year of school for a little while (we are eighth year seniors at our elitist liberal arts community college) is about to begin, and we need to rent the following items: a fridge capable of holding an entire keg of beer; a laptop capable of running Word and World of Warcraft simultaneously; a strict tutor; and a smart, subservient best friend. More of those items than you might expect are covered in Woman’s Day’s listicle of 10 Weird Things You Can Rent, but we’re surprised they forgot the key to our fall semester work-out regimen: a rock-climbing wall rental.

15 Unfortunate Advertisement Juxtapositions

Given how saturated our contemporary visual culture has become with billboards, ads and viral marketing, it should hardly come as a surprise that attempts to get our attention are likely to butt heads. Sometimes, capitalism’s competing compulsions to consume send mixed messages, as Uproxx underlines nicely with their listicle of 15 Unfortunate Advertisement Juxtapositions, which oddly omits the above ads opposing obesity and promoting over-eating. (via NextRound)

Top 5 Reasons for the Recent Dearth of Lists on Listicles

As you may have noticed, we have been rather lax the last week, leaving you hanging loose with little listicle libations, but we have a really good reason (and many not-so-good excuses). Here are the Top 5 Reasons for the Recent Dearth of Lists on Listicles.

5. We were in an awful bicycle accident and lost all our fingers.

4. A corrupt cop framed us for a fraudulent listicle we didn’t compile.

3. We’ve been having issues with our Cheney-brand artificial heart.

2. We passed out from the heat during a marathon viewing of heat wave movies.

1. We’re working on a new, bigger and better version of Listicles that we’ll have ready for you very soon!

10 Unreal Urban Projections

Last week we learned about a forthcoming New York City building that had flown under the radar since its announcement a couple years ago called the Culture Shed, which would literally expand and contract based on the needs of each successive contemporary art exhibition it hosts. That project is still a couple years and many millions off, so for now the most interactive architecture remains virtual, like the stunning lighting effects in Coolist’s listicle of 10 Unreal Urban Projections, which weirdly doesn’t include this project by The Macula in Prague.

25 Bike Fail Videos

By all sports analysts accounts, a time trial today will determine the winner of the 2010 Tour de France, which we might be watching right now. Either that or we are blogging from our laptop as we compete in our own Tour de Brooklyn. If that is the case, we’ll probably end up like so many of the hapless cyclists in Holy Taco’s listicle of 25 Bike Fail Videos, or like legendary Tour tumbler Djamolodine Abdoujaparov during the final sprint of the last stage in 1991.