You are browsing the archives of 2009 July.

Here at Listicles we spend so long in the writing of lists that whenever we come across snazzy lists within images (which, if you’ve been following, is fairly often), we react with a strange mixture of admiration and defensiveness. After all, if these illustrators and designers can make lists without us, the writers, then what [...]

As far as we can tell, summertime beach trips are just fraught with contradictory compulsions. For instance: you want to enjoy the sun, but you don’t want skin cancer. Likewise, you want to swim in the salt water, but then you’re all sticky and salty and won’t really feel comfortable until you shower. And then [...]

Movie lists are seriously a dime a dozen, but we really, really like Future of Classic’s recent listicle of the 10 Worst Movie Sunburns. It’s an interesting, season-appropriate subject, and the choices aren’t painfully obvious. To top it all off, they included nearly all the right movies. Nearly. It took us a few minutes, but [...]

There were studies conducted, if memory serves, back in the early days of CGI movies, which determined that viewers would be way too weirded out by super-realistic animated characters. That’s why, we guess, the Final Fantasy movie flopped so hard. While we don’t really buy the argument – we’d like to think that given the [...]

If you were to visit the Listicles office, you’d often find us slumped in our chairs, wide-eyed and zoning out to some beautiful piece of non-narrative visual pleasure. We’re fairly addicted to the output of what seems to be millions of graphic designers, directors and cinematographers who’re able to make shorts like the little gems [...]

If there’s a genre of music that’s more obsessed with covering Top 40 hits than reggae, it’s got to be Mariachi band music. Similarly, the chronic cover impulse has a lot to do with the need to produce cross-overs lest artists be ghettoized in the “world music” category. This, in turn, produces some amazing moments [...]

You can usually chart the quality of any given sports film fairly accurately based on how moving its locker room pep talk is – usually delivered at half-time or between the second and third periods, with the team trailing pretty significantly – and some really bad movies are temporarily elevated by stunning speeches. Ask Men [...]

Today is National Junk Food Day and, appropriately, we’re using it as an excuse to pig out on the trashiest kinds of art all day. We weren’t even aware of the holiday when we posted this morning’s fast food mafia, but now that your appetite is whetted get ready for a feast of junk food-themed [...]

If you’ve bitten into any of the scary texts about the fast food industry (Fast Food Nation, The Future of Food, Food Inc., Poultrygeist, etc.), you’ll know that their operations often approach organized-crime levels of corruption and manipulation. To make that parallel nice and clear, artist Andrew Shirey made this awesome drawing depicting 5 Members [...]

In our ongoing quest to remodel the humble Listicles office into an epic design showroom with nothing but the coolest, slickest objects and items, we’ve made some… questionable purchases. Seriously, though, how were we expected to know that the Jurgen Bey tree trunk work bench (pictured below) was actually just a tree trunk with chair [...]

Today, on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the news is all moon-related – or rather, Earth Moon-related. None, save fearless Listicles, have noted the perverse human-centrism at work in the constant obsession with our moon, as opposed to every other moon in the universe. Typical humans, only thinking of themselves. Well, to right [...]

The whole idea of a president needing a vacation sounds, to be honest, more than a little wimpy. After all, you’re the leader of the free world, and the free world never takes a break. If “vacation” was code for “diplomatic trip abroad,” we might understand, but every president seems to make a point of [...]

Let’s face it, at some point we all wanted to be ninjas (in some cases ninja turtles, ninja surfers, or even three ninjas). And we’ve probably all had some embarrassing moments of aspiring ninja combat gone horribly wrong. For instance, we remember jumping just a little too high in a room with dangerously low ceiling [...]

Let’s face it: by and large, baseball movies are among the worst kind of sports movies (which might have something to do with Kevin Costner’s disproportionate contribution to the sub-genre). Whatever it is, movies set in and around the baseball diamond can’t really compare to footballe, soccer, hockey and, yes, even basketball movies. That said, [...]

We sort of hope Damien Hirst’s days as an art star will slowly become a funny memory of how out of control the art market got during the first decade of the 21st century. After all, no artist has mastered the mass-production of his brand so successfully since Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, re-packaging a [...]

Legendary modernist architectural photographer Julius Shulman (seen in the self-portrait at right) passed away Wednesday night at age 98, and over the course of his rich, visionary career, he captured some of the most legendary modern structures of the 20th century, both in the U.S. and abroad, by architects like Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, [...]

Remember that time you had that really deep discussion about which way you’d die given the choice between fire and ice? Well, there’s a reason water is never an option: drowning extremely painful. It’s also kind of pathetic and doesn’t exactly make for the most exciting cinematic death, usually. Sometimes it’s actually awesome, as you’ll [...]

Call us strange (no really, please do), but if we had a weird, obscure and fairly embarrassing phobia of something (and we’re not saying we don’t), the last thing we’d do is ask a daytime talk show to cure us. Apparently, we’re more or less alone in that camp, as you’ll observe if you watch [...]

If, as the old ad agency dictum goes, “sex sells,” then humor is, um, very persuasive. Indeed, how could we have become the advertising addicts that we are without clever and creative people going for our funny bone. To prove our theory, we’ve selected some of our favorite recent ads for this listicle of 7 [...]

We’d love to ride around town stuntin’ on our blinged-out bike (we’ll refrain from using the term “pimped” because we find it offensive), but honestly, the more inconspicuous your bike can be, the better. It won’t get stolen, it won’t matter when you fall (as we did, very drunkenly, on Friday) and it gets banged [...]