You are browsing the archives of 2009 October.

We’re not opposed to taxidermy per se, but, well, when it’s strictly for entertainment and fantasy purposes it can become a little problematic. Or maybe we’re just really creeped out by the things some imaginative taxidermists create. For instance, all the beasties in Coed Magazine’s listicle of The 28 Creepiest Taxidermy Creations are worrisome, and [...]

We claimed we were going to hold off on Halloween-related posts, but with just over a week to go that seems pretty pointless now. Plus, today’s Halloween listicle is really clever and creative, and may have helped us find our costume for this year. Graphic designer Charlene Chua has made a series greeting cards depicting [...]

When it comes to music, few things (aside from great music) win us over more effectively than a beautiful, clever or ambitious music video. Here are music videos for groups and artists we’ve mostly never heard pf before, but because they were able to put together these 10 Marvelous New Music Videos, they’ll forever be [...]

We once thought that the funniest prank anybody could ever pull on an unsuspecting friend was the old box-inside-a-box-inside-a-box birthday gift, were what seems like a huge present turns out to be multiple layers of packaging with nothing at the center (or coal at the center, in the Christmas version). Now, our taste for comedy [...]

Don’t let the relatively small regional audiences and occasionally mundane stories get you fooled, local news is a high-pressure media arena, and in many ways the lack of major funding forces reporters to go beyond their normal comfort zones more often. Two recent listicles explored the various failures of these overworked and underpaid professionals, mental_floss [...]

Yesterday, while reading a couple of New York Times pieces about e-books–one about how users claim they read more now, and another about Barnes and Noble’s new model–we began to think that one way we might ease into the experience of using an e-reader would be to find one that’s retrofitted to look less sleek [...]

True story: one of our best friends’ mothers growing up was one of Canada’s leading quilters. She would travel around the world (though never into space) attending quilting conferences and the like. She used the family’s garage as her workshop, and had the largest Canadian flag in the world stored there in several boxes. Why [...]

We rarely go beyond our Internet bubble to consider lists in non-electronic media, but Creative Review Blog recently alerted us to a helpful new book that we just couldn’t pass up: David O’Doherty, Claudia O’Doherty and Mike Ahern’s pseudo-scientific nature book parody 100 Facts About Pandas. Readers will learn all sorts of fascinating untrue non-facts [...]

On this date in 1962, the seminal Halloween hit “The Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers reached the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100. Because this was way back in the day before real music videos, however, no official visual accompaniment for the song exists. This has allowed innumerable artists to [...]

It’s been a little while since we featured a single-image list (the famous robot T-shirt design must have been the most recent, and of course the teddy bears in wagons were the first), but fashion photographer Leonard Gren’s shot of 8 B-Boys Wearing Paper Bags seemed like a good opportunity to break the dry spell. [...]

For a little while now we’ve been obsessed with GOOD Magazine’s insanely beautiful infographics, but frankly also a little too embarrassed to seek out others. Inspired Magazine seems to have read our minds (get out of our head!) and have rounded up 20 Essential Infographics & Data Visualization Blogs. Our favorite is Information is Beautiful, [...]

The Star-Spangled Banner, better-known to some as the national anthem of the U.S.A., was first sung exactly 195 years ago, we’re told. Though it was not approved as the official national anthem until 1931, the 1814 poem “Defence of Fort McHenry” by Francis Scott Key was immediately set to the popular British drinking song “The [...]

We couldn’t agree more with the folks at mental_floss that there are few things more beautiful and weirdly exhilarating than a perfectly executed and choreographed tracking shot or long take in a movie. That’s why we’re surprised they left their list at 9 Famous Tracking Shots when they could so easily have expanded it into [...]

It’s Sunday morning, which feels a lot like a blooper reel at the end of the week, left-over time that is of no use to anyone but might get a few cheap laughs for those with nothing better to watch. Appropriately, this makes Sunday a great day for watching funny outtakes, which, happily, are increasingly [...]

Not all sports involve shooting one thing into another, but certainly most of the good ones do–sorry, pole-vaulting. Appropriately, every time someone makes an amazing shot (like the guy from Texas A&M, or Roger Federer) bloggers must compare this new feat to its forerunners, which is how we got Hail Mary Jane’s listicle of The [...]

Between our current event filmmakers‘ obsession with disaster movies, and all-pervading fears of impending environmental doom, it’s not surprising that movies about environmental apocalypse are becoming more common. That’s part of why we’re surprised that TreeHugger left recent entries like The Simpsons Movie (and another included after the jump) our of their listicle of The [...]

Today is World Food Day, a completely ridiculous and nebulously vague holiday. Aside from sending food to those in need, we’re not sure how to celebrate. Except, maybe, by eating worldly foods. We’ll get right on our planetary feast with these 12 Globe-Shaped Foods.

And to think, several trillion years ago it was just a few [...]

If you’re at all familiar with the recurring jokes and comic tropes of the best sitcom pre-AD (Arrested Development), you’ll know that one of Seinfeld’s less well-known but still delightful pleasures are Kramer’s (Michael Richards, yes, that one) entrances into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. To illustrate their subtle comedy, some seriously nostalgic person has assembled a [...]

During a summer bike trip down the West coast of North America some years ago, we passed a broken down clown car and couldn’t help but offer assistance to the unfortunate performers in peril. In true clown transportation tradition, we managed to fit eight clowns on our bike in various precarious ways, which we’re pretty [...]

In a loving Los Angeles Times piece last week on the occasion of Saturday’s celebration, Mike Boehm remembers the time 50 years ago when L.A.’s idiosyncratic, cathedral-like folk art monuments the Watts Towers were almost torn down. Built by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia between 1921 and 1954, the property was slated for demolition, but rescued [...]