Advertising tends to be a devil’s advocate sort of device, convincing smart people to buy things they shouldn’t (Coke, candy, over-priced clothes) by appealing to some of their most basic desires. This scenario is made especially literal in the sorts of ads featured in mental_floss’s listicle of 8 Angel Vs. Devil Commercials, our favorite of [...]

As you may have noticed, we’re big fans of nerdy costumes. And though we’d never thought of basing a costume on the likeness of an actual video game console, perusing Unreality’s listicle of 15 Video Game Console Costumes, well, we started to think that we’d have picked an Atari joystick or a Dreamcast controller for [...]

While we generally find emoticons silly and pointless and another, rather terrifying example of how digital communication is fast reducing our ability to express genuine, complex emotions in actual words (maybe even sentences!), some of them make up for whatever semantic damage they may do with sheer creativity. Such is the case with a small [...]

Cartoons these days are pretty complicated–weird Japanese creatures, kids with dangerously spiky hair, a comic taste for wacky non-sequiturs. Things got so out of control that we stopped paying attention, like, two months ago. We pine for the simpler times of decades past, when shows were clearly terrible or brilliant (and never confusing). Most of [...]

Obviously, the famous Got Milk? campaign is one of the most effective advertising slogans ever, all the more so because of its meme compatibility–that is, anyone can make a “Got x?” shirt/poster/sign and people will get the reference. The California Milk Processor Board is hardly the first advertiser to harness the power of question slogans, [...]

Today is Name Your Car Day, a truly ridiculous occasion that we can only hope will soon be replaced by Name Your Bike Day (ours is called Kandinsky). In the meantime, though, we kind of appreciate the idea of treating cars like boats and giving them names, it makes something so hard and mechanical a [...]

Underneath its cheap production values, terrible acting and predictable plots, exploitation cinema is among the most important art forms to emerge in the 20th century, with plenty of cathartic, utopian solutions to real world problems that may never go away. You’ll notice as much perusing Complex’s outstanding listicle of The 50 Best Blaxploitation Movies of [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

It’s Sunday morning, and we’re in a Sunday morning kind of mood, which means we’re feeling lazy, vegetative and nostalgic, a confluence of moods that we’re going to indulge by watching Topless Robot’s listicle of The Muppet Show’s 10 Weirdest Moments, more than a few of which involve a surprising amount of violence and death. [...]