You are browsing the archives of 2010 February.

Our old hockey helmet was very un-cool: not only was it clearly second-hand and badly banged up, it had no fancy decals, paint jobs or stickers. It looked kind of like the ice rink at the end of a period before the Zamboni comes out. At any rate, helmets are sort of the only venue [...]

Once, when we were defense-men for a league one professional soccer team in France, we were approached by an opposing team a week ahead of a major game, and their coach and manager offered to pay us to throw the game. European soccer salaries being what they are, we had to accept, but then when [...]

As rather die-hard completists when it comes to those few musical artists whose work we collect obsessively no matter what, we greatly enjoy those records made up of B-sides, remixes, rough drafts, abandoned tracks, rarities and the like, which help fill out the cracks and blanks in a career-spanning record collection. Anyone with a similarly [...]

Exactly 140 years ago today, a prototype for a pneumatic train system was unveiled in New York City–built secretly, no less!–running for one block underneath Broadway between Murray and Warren Streets. Evidently, despite the cool, super-quick rides pneumatics promised, the idea never really caught on outside the world of sci-fi narratives like Futurama or The [...]

Our first step outdoors during the snow storm that hit New York yesterday turned out to be our last when we slipped on snow-covered ice and landed face down on the sidewalk, only to be pelted with snowballs by neighborhood kids, buried in a snowdrift by a passing plow, and finally ridden over by a [...]

Presumably you saw that especially ridiculous recent campaign ad, the one from Californian Senate seat-seeker Carly Fiorina, but as crazy as that TV spot seemed, it is only the latest in a (relatively) long tradition of crazy campaign ads deployed by American politicos. The good folks at mental_floss have assembled an all-too entertaining listicle of [...]

Paper money is pretty amazing, beyond the strange suspension of disbelief involved in assigning some very abstract value to some relatively insignificant pieces of paper and cotton, but also for all the weird and unusual uses you can put it to. No, don’t worry, this is not the intro to our pyramid scheme pitch (although, [...]

Ask anyone around the Listicles office and they will tell you: aside from doughnuts, the most popular sweet snack or desert among our list experts is a Kit Kat bar (this listicle is brought to you by Kit Kat). However, we remain staunch Kit Kat snobs: There will be no that coffee-flavored, crunchy formatted or [...]

We know a lot (more than we often like to admit) about great and not so great tattoos, so we feel as though we finally know what we would want out of a tattoo: something funny, clever and intelligent; a conversation starter that we could still whip out in 30 years and gets laughs for. [...]

A major retrospective of the drawings, prints, animations, videos, performances, set designs and installations of South African artist William Kentridge opens at the Museum of Modern Art today (after stops in San Francisco, Texas and Florida), but over the last few days (and despite an excellent profile in a recent New Yorker) we noticed that [...]

Though we do not have a cell phone capable of using them, we remain constantly on the lookout for useful and clever smart phone applications, in the hopes that knowing more about them might precipitate our being able to use them. Reverse anticipatory psychology aside, we’re often relieved that we aren’t being tempted into buying [...]

They say (really, they do) that before constructing the Acropolis the ancient Greeks built a time machine, traveled forward to the 20th century and assembled a scale model out of Lego to make sure the thing would hold for a few thousand years. That was probably the earliest (but certainly not the last) Lego artwork, [...]

On this date, a couple days before the February 25 anniversary of the day it was officially renamed the Soviet Army in 1946, some former Soviet block nations celebrate Red Army Day. Though we think of ourselves as socialists rather than full-fledged communists (a distinction some would challenge, no doubt), we have to admit that [...]

So, our other other job involves knowing as much as we possibly can about contemporary art and artists, a field that very recently went through a financial roller-coaster from being absurdly over-valued, to very much at risk of financial collapse, to more or less back to its former moneyed market force. In the process, an [...]

As much as we appreciate a clever billboard, there is something very classy and almost charming about the advertising columns that seem, unfortunately, to be more widely used in Europe than in North America. Unreality rounds up some 10 Creative Column Advertisements that make us envious of European street furniture, although we’d like to add [...]

Today is World Thinking Day, a rather broad and abstract holiday that we think is very strange, and which apparently has something to do with the founders of the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. For our part, though, we like to take a little extra time on Thinking Day to reflect on all the brilliant [...]

Have you ever scene that really cheap-looking TV movie version of the Stephen King book The Langoliers with David Morse? Well, it involves an airplane flying through some sort of inter-dimensional vortex, and when it lands at its destination the passengers find themselves in this eerily uninhabited airport somehow outside of time. They’re eventually mostly [...]

Every Sunday morning (or early afternoon) we stir groggily from our den and try our hardest to pretend that we will go to yoga class. Then we spend the day watching movies and eating greasy food, which is actually a much better hangover cure. This week, though, we’re being shamed into pulling on our stinky [...]

Hey, the 2010 Winter Olympics are on right now in Vancouver! From what we hear and see, there is not exactly a lot of snow up there, but plenty of ice on the slopes and in the arenas. And, though some of the major figure skating competitions have already taken place, with medals handed out [...]

Being, by nature, rather visual, we attach probably an undue amount of importance to the cover designs of books. We have been known to pick up a second copy of a favorite book if we come across an edition with a really interesting cover. So as much as we don’t need more incentive to like [...]