You are browsing the archives of 2009 July.

Often an afterthought on the long checklist of post-production duties, movie title sequences are too frequently totally half-assed last minute affairs. Every so often, though, the person in charge of this seemingly menial task really goes all-out to create something truly engaging, original and somehow complementary to the story about to begin. Creative Review’s Adam [...]

We’ve been a little behind the ball lately with our advertising beat, so today is especially packed with funny commercials. Because after all, humor is the best medicine, and medicine has a tendency to be very addictive, which in turn explains how we got hooked on humorous commercials in the first place. The advertising overlords [...]

True, we just featured iconic A Team-member Mr. T in a listicle two days ago, but do you really think we can ever get our fill of the rhyming, mohawked muscle-man? Not when great T-themed listicles keep coming our way, that’s for sure! Today’s entry in the annals of T comes from Topless Robot, who’ve [...]

We’d rather not think about all the stuff other than food that ends up in our ground beef and other various prepared and processed foods, but every so often the foreign contents is just too conspicuous to ignore. That said, when you’re serving like a billion people a year or some such absurd figure, it’s [...]

Much was made early this week of Olympic overlord and American swimming sensation Michael Phelps’s wardrobe choices at the World Swimming Championships in Rome, and how they were affecting his performance in said swimming tournament.
While we don’t pretend to have any understanding of aquatic dynamics, we’re pretty sure we could come up with better swimsuit [...]

Fan-dom, as virtually all of us know but few will admit, involves about as much copycat art and homage as the Internet can handle. Some of these artifacts are more valuable and laudable than others; like, for instance, Michael Jackson art is a hot commodity right now. In the hierarchy of fan art, experimental videos [...]

Few poses convey a mood of resigned defeat more effectively than the facepalm, which Urban Dictionary defines as “The act of dropping one’s face/forehead into one’s hand. Usually accompanied by a ‘thunk’ or a cr a cry of ‘D’oh!’” For visual support, we suggest Rocketboom’s listicle of 13 Famous Facepalms, although we’re surprised by some [...]

Today is National Lasagna Day, and in order to expand our readership’s appreciation of that sacred Italian dish, we’ve gone looking for some odd and unusual recipes. Did you know that lasagna is named for the Greek word “lasanon,” meaning “trivet or stand for a pot,” and that the word originally designated the dish lasagna [...]

In the kind of advertising stunt that will instantly win over music nerds everywhere, Beck’s (the beer, not the nerdy musician) commissioned 10 graphic artists to come up with new cover art for 10 albums culled from Pitchfork’s Best Albums of the Decade lists from the last 4 decades. After those images were unveiled, the [...]

Remember that totally delirious Warner Bros. cartoon Animaniacs, in which the old Warner cartoon trio escaped from the studio water tower where they’d been imprisoned an wreaked havoc on just about everything? Well, one of the favorite targets of their wacky, scatter shot sense of humor was history, which they recounted fairly regularly. mental_floss offers [...]

An interesting, if borderline sci-fi story from The New York Times details how the American Army is testing soldiers for their ability to detect danger and risk with their minds. While on patrol in Iraqi and Afghan villages, some seem better able to anticipate road-side bombs and the like than others, making them a valuable [...]

Call them victims of the dire and pre-emptive business of declaring species extinct in this day and age, but the animals featured in BuzzFeed’s listicle of 14 Extinct Animals That Were Rediscovered have basically come back from beyond the grave. Perhaps the most extreme case of this is the Coelacanth (pictured below), a semi-amphibeous fish [...]

Animals, especially domestic animals, pretty much seem to be doing cute stuff all the time. This probably has something to do with the life of leisure they live, free from the constraints of actual animal life (ie. catching food, evading predators, performing their own surgery when they swallow a plastic play toy).
Few things are cuter, [...]

Beloved Warner Bros. character Bugs Bunny turns 69 today (his first appearance under that name aired on July 27, 1940), and what better excuse to watch some old WB clips? Technically, for the animation history sticklers out there, Bugs made three televised appearances before earning his name, so you could say that his birthday is [...]

Screaming in the movies is like shooting someone in the face with a nuclear missile: you already have our undivided attention, yet you insist on using maximum force to really hammer home your point. Obnoxious as screaming in movies can become if over-done, when used effectively it can lead to some of the most iconic [...]

It’s Sunday, and you should probably be outdoors instead of stuck in front of your computer reading Listicles. That said, if you must be inside you could at least be doing some exercise, like the folks featured in mental_floss’s listicle of 10 Animals on Treadmills. We’re especially fond of the fellow who attempts a handstand [...]

Hip hop and hockey, despite their obvious alliterative camaraderie, seldom go together. This has a lot to do with the absence of African American athletes in the NHL, and the comparative abundance of black role models in every other professional American sports league. That’s not to say, however, that rappers don’t sometimes make (obscure, misunderstood) [...]

Tracking the strange and winding paths that lead from the funk, R&B, pop and reggae hits of yesteryear to the hip hop hits of today can be fairly torturous (especially when dealing with indie producers who don’t have the money to afford rights to expensive samples). Thankfully, Luke Carr from our sister/big brother site The [...]

By all accounts Amelia Earhart (pictured at right) – who would be turning 112 today if she hadn’t disappeared during a trip across the Pacific in 1937 – was a pretty cool lady. All wit, energy and daring, she’s become an incredibly desirable catch for any major actress, with her combination of vintage cool and [...]

These days we mostly know Pixar animation studios for their adorable and relatively deep and thoughtful computer-animated films (WALL-E, Up!, etc.) and the funny short films that generally precede said features then go on to win all the short film Oscars, but, like most big names in the movies, they go their start in advertising. [...]