You are browsing the archives of 2009 November.

We’re not sure what’s more enjoyable about AdFreak’s listicle of the 10 Best Celebrity Computer Ads of the 80s: It could be the arcane language used to pitch prehistoric computers to a hyper-computer-illiterate audience; It could be the fun of seeing old celebrities hawking really awkward and unsexy products; or it could be some combination [...]

Over the weekend the city of Dubai and its crazy pop-up economy that seems built on little more than quicksand garnered quite a bit of attention when one of the United Arab Emirates’ major banking groups asked for money to ensure that there wouldn’t be a run on its banks amid fears of excessive borrowing [...]

A little over a year ago, when Listicles was first coming into existence, we began to develop a comic book hero called Listor, who would be able to organize any and all information into a list. His day job would be at an alternative weekly publication, where he’d write lists, but at night he would [...]

We used to be huge fans of twist endings (the end of Usual Suspects still sends chills down our spines, Fight Club not so much), but lately the third act mindfuck has become something of a gimmick. How many times can our narrator turn out to be a ghost with amnesia, and how often will [...]

We never quite mastered the dunk–we could grab the hoop, but never got enough leverage to actually hold the ball and get it over the rim for a proper dunk. This is one of the great shames of our lives, and more or less the sole reason we didn’t pursue an NBA career. It’s their [...]

If you live in the United States, you probably ate an inordinate quantity of food yesterday, and maybe feel a little stuffed now–if you live elsewhere in the world, presumably you ate yesterday, and maybe you overate? In that case, you probably feel like the food you abused yesterday is getting back at you, but [...]

Traditionally, one eats turkey on Thanksgiving, but increasingly those who can afford to do so are turning to alternatives like tofurkey and other meat substitutes because, well, most turkey farms are hellish hell-holes from hell. At any rate, one oft-overlooked alternative to conventional turkey and turkey substitutes is to make the whole holiday a sweet [...]

While most penguins have chosen to live in pretty much the most inhospitable climate the world has to offer, a smart few have given up their prime Antarctic real estate in favor of a safe spot on iceberg Internet. As perpetual purveyors of cute, penguins are a staple of the web not unlike cats, dogs [...]

Tomorrow is Turkey Day in the U.S. of A., which means widespread turkey slaughter and belt-loosening. But Thanksgiving, which has something to do with pilgrims being helped by Native Americans in a moment of extreme need and thanking them a few months later by taking their land and all their possessions, is about much more [...]

We’ve wanted to open our own bakery and pastry shop for a while, but we can’t seem to come up with a good gimmick. After all, in its post-Atkins over-compensation, New York has gone a little sugar crazy, and now there are gourmet cupcake and donut shops everywhere, so we’d need something to help us [...]

Long before the invention of Skype, which allows users to yell at their computers and magically be heard by people listening at great distances on their telephones, there were these things called TVs that often took up the better part of a living room. They displayed things like sports matches and current events, and if [...]

It’s not just people that wear costumes and disguises in attempts to infiltrate tightly controlled venues like exclusive Halloween parties and enemy bases: it’s all rooted in animal behavior. While it’s quite rare that animals are caught on camera posing as other animals, or with something of another species in their midst, but when it [...]

One of our favorite buildings in the world, the Vancouver Public Library, is in the shape of a snail, which in our minds makes it a food-shaped building. We gather that for most people snails are merely an insect of some sort, which must be why that cool structure was left out of WebUrbanist’s listicle [...]

As much as we enjoy learning all the various details that contribute to the expansions and contractions of successive global empires, we’d much rather watch them unfold as an animated infographic than have to, you know, learn them in a textbook or something. Happily, graduate student Pedro M. Cruz’s thesis on information visualization involved creating [...]

The first jukebox (according to Wikipedia) went into service on this date in 1889 at San Francisco’s Palais Royale Saloon, making today the 120th anniversary of American bars’ most essential non-alcoholic asset. Of course, in the age of digital music the beautiful old boxes of vintage Americana are hard to come by, and their touchscreen [...]

During a recent debate over the respective merits of cheese fries and poutine, the Listicles office almost came to blows over the question of what topping would make the better flavor for a new line of french fries (poutine-flavored fries, obviously). At any rate, we think either of those products would fare better than some [...]

Since one of the great unifying experiences shared by a significant percentage of the human race in the 20th century is the doctor’s visit, it seems only fitting that there should be a bounteous plethora of interesting doctor characters out there in the worlds of fiction and reality. We’ve combined two recent listicles–mental_floss’s 8 Famous [...]

One of the things we like about the NFL (we must admit, there aren’t that many, tailgating is another big one) is their ability, by and large, to support a losing team gracefully. Soccer fans aren’t so good at this, baseballs fans don’t fare much better, but you’ll rarely see a more solemn and passionate [...]

For ten days in May of 2009, the street artist RIPO used news headlines as inspiration for a painting that he then covered with another painting of the following day’s news–a commentary on the over-saturation of media and fleeting nature of news–before peeling back a strip for each day to created a spectacularly striped, multicolor [...]

Jeanne-Claude, one half along with her husband of the artist duo Jeanne-Claude and Christo, died on Wednesday in New York at age 74 of complications from a brain aneurysm. The couple’s most iconic work, incidentally, was probably their Gates installation in Central Park in 2005, but the two had been active since the 60s. (They [...]