You are browsing the archives of 2009 September.

Evidently we’re somewhat obsessed with advertising and commercials, so we try to refrain from posting them too frequently. Occastionally, though, we’re assailed by such a rush of stunning new ads that we just have to share their artistry and vision, which is why we’ve assembled these 12 Trippy New Commercials, beginning with what might also [...]

Sadly, we’ve never been to Japan, but if their taste for themed and simply spaced-out hotel decoration is anything to go by, we pretty much belong there.
So we’re going to start planning our trip right now, and being that we’re largely ignorant of Japanese culture and history (a shortcoming the journey will hopefully remedy), we’re [...]

TV-themed tourism hasn’t quite taken off the way movie tourism has (an NBC Studios tour isn’t quite as entertaining as one at Universal Studios, for instance), but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t make a cool itinerary out of visiting familiar TV show locales that are actual places.
Super Tremendous’s listicle of 8 Iconic TV Show Buildings [...]

180 years ago today, Scotland Yard opened for spy business in London. Technically called the Metropolitan Police Service, it’s essentially the headquarters for the police force that oversees Greater London (as opposed to inner city London, whose surveillance falls to the City of London Police). Of course, the force is now housed at New Scotland [...]

As Know Your Meme explained to us a relatively long time ago, one-take video have a special viral appeal and optimum meme compatibility due to their impressive displays of synchronization and the creative endurance that makes a one-take video possible. Appropriately, with the recent success of the Université du Québec à Montréal students’ viral vid, [...]

Pixar animator Angus MacLane, who’s worked on Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille and basically every project the studio has done since the 1997 Oscar-winning short Geri’s Game, apparently has tons of free time in between creating lush and textured digital environments. So much time, in fact, that he’s uploaded images of 97 Lego CubeDudes to his Flickr [...]

As you may have heard, Polish-French director Roman Polanski was arrested over the weekend while arriving at the Zurich film festival in Switzerland in relation to a case from over 30 years ago in which he was convicted of having sex with a 13 year-old girl (who has subsequently forgiven him). We wish people would [...]

You presumably heard about the little girl who was saved from certain car-crushing death by a metal pole in a shopping mall parking lot, right? Well, she’s just the latest in a series of death-defying folks saved by some miraculous stroke of luck on camera. Epic Carnival has assembled the luckiest listicle ever, featuring The [...]

Though we recently regaled you with some of the most memorable newscaster bloopers, it seems unfair to single out media professionals’ pitfalls without highlighting some of the stresses they endure as well. For instance, Epic Carnival’s listicle of the 20 Strangest Moments in Newscasting History features some awesomely unlikely accidents, like uncontrollable reptiles.

No matter how you feel about his Basketball Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Michael Jordan was still one of the best basketball players (and superstar athlete corporate spokespersons) ever. Appropriately, he’s appeared in many of the best commercials ever, as you’ll appreciate while perusing Hail May Jane’s listicle of The 23 Greatest Michael Jordan Commercials [...]

It’s funny, we always thought Chris Tucker’s character Ruby Rhod (pictured) from The Fifth Element had pretty much the coolest haircut ever–a haircut that, incidentally, makes for a very challenging Halloween costume. We’re frankly shocked that Mr. Rhod ended up in Vulture’s listicle of The 12 Worst Haircuts of the Future, but we’re surprised by [...]

Among the many things that the United Nations Security Council worked on yesterday during their dealings in New York was the decision to move forward on measures to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We applaud the move (and urge the French president to stop being a wuss and show his support), and hope that [...]

As magazine readers, we usually pick up issues based solely on their cover (occasionally, we skim the table of contents). In doing so, we tend to pick up some pretty awful stuff because, well, most of the unusual covers these days are being published by really bad magazines. You’ll note that evolution in Best Week [...]

We work in an office, but, happily, we’re either very honest and expressive about our feelings, or very patiently repressive, so we never encounter (or author) any angry notes to co-workers. It may also have to do with the size of our office, which wouldn’t allow for much anonymity in the posting of said nasty [...]

We’ve long wondered how we’d handle being in space, what effects it would have on our body and psyche. We’d like to think we would never go Moon- or Solaris-crazy, but who knows. Hopefully we wouldn’t go quite as crazy as the interplanetarily insane folks featured in io9’s listicle of the Top 10 Mental Cases [...]

We know you’ve been waiting for it all year, and now it’s finally here: National Punctuation Day! Obviously, everyone )ourselves included( misuses punctuation all the time, so it’s important to have days like today to raise awareness of proper punctuation rules. In fact, we’re taking today’s lessons so seriously that we’re contemplating getting a punctuation [...]

Obviously, trying to whittle the field of outstanding Jewish comedians down to a choice twenty will invariably yield some problems, exaggerations and blind spots, and we’re mostly happy with how mental_floss handled the not inconsiderable task. That said, we really don’t like Seth Rogen and don’t understand why he made their list of the Top [...]

Yesterday, we read in the New York Times that China has imposed a new Visa system on Tibet that makes it impossible for foreigners to visit the occupied mountain nation. This is worrisome for many reasons, none more so than the fact that whatever political and religious oppression takes place there will now be even [...]

For whatever reason (lack of vision, lack of necessary parts, lack of concentration), our Lego constructions never quite lived up to the thing on the box, much less to our wild mental images of what we were building. That’s not to say that making amazing objects and infinitely detailed sculptures out of Lego is impossible, [...]

When attacked for all our big talk about living in harmony with the environment despite obviously lacking any cultivated green space to allow ourselves to be somewhat self-sustaining, we’ve often sworn that we wouldn’t start an urban farm until we could maintain it with robot-mounted lasers–sort of our version of “when pigs fly,” if you [...]