Astonishing. The puppeteer behind Alf (Paul Fusco) stays in character through the bloopers and is generally pretty funny and quick-witted.
Then, he drops the N-bomb.
Like, a bunch.
Some commenters on BadTVBlog say that he is probably riffing on a contemporary episode of L.A. Law, but it’s still pretty startling thing to hear.
Ah, Alf, I’ll never look at you the same way again. Also, you cannot eat my cat.
(via BadTVBlog)
I love that this white-wine decanter has an ice chamber designed to keep the wine cool without letting melted ice dilute the wine at all. From the looks of it, the melted water won’t spill out when you pour the wine, either, so long as you’re reasonably careful.
Plus, it’s made from recycled windshields, which is why it has that green tint.
It’s $50 on Uncommon Goods, which is a little pricey, but not really that far-out. Unfortunately, it is currently sold out. Must be popular!
I’m not sure if this is a real improvement over the traditional way of doing multiplication by hand — you’re just counting up line intersections instead of adding up columns of numbers — but it sure is pretty!
(via Gizmodo)
If you hate Christmas shopping but love mathematics, you’re in luck. Over at Wired, Garth Sundem has detailed a formula that you can follow so that you spend exactly the right amount of money on each person’s gift. Then you don’t end up buying your brother-in-law a $50 gift and running out of cash before you get anything for your girlfriend.
He says:
1. Define your total budget. Be realistic. For this example, I’m using $500.
2. List everyone for whom you need to buy a gift.
3. Now next to each person’s name, give them an importance rank from 1-10 (10 high).
4. Sum all the people, multiplied by their ranks. It should look something like this 10(wife)+8(kid1)+8(kid2)+3(dad)+3(mom)+1(in-laws)+4(nephew)=37(total)
5. Set your total equal to your budget: 37(total)=$500
6. Solve for (total): total=$13.50
7. Multiply this “total” by each person’s importance to see how much you should spend. In this example, your wife gets 10*13.5=$135, and your kids get 8*13.5=$108.
With only $500 in your pocket, and without time at this point to dilly dally with another shopping trip, you’ll be forced to stick to it.
Of course, this only works if you can follow your budget perfectly. If you instead find the perfect gift for someone but it’s a few bucks higher than you’re “allowed” to spend, it will throw all the other gifts out of whack.
Also, in any realistic universe, finding a gift that is to-the-penny exact on your budget will be much more stressful than shopping in the first place.
I would add some fuzziness. Also, this would be interesting to figure out after Christmas, when you reconcile the receipts, and see how close you come to the ideal budget.
This intrigues me — a hand-saw combined with a table saw, so that you move the wood over the blade, but it’s not powered.
I would have thought it would be too difficult to make extensive cuts, but the video is pretty convincing. Although, they don’t show people ripping eight feet of plywood, so who knows.
At any rate, this looks like it’s more for precision work — and judging from the demo video, you can accomplish some great precision work!
(via Boing Boing)
Who here knows the legend of animals being given the gift of speech at midnight on Christmas Eve — allegedly to reward them for giving up their manger (and the rest of the barn) to the newborn Jesus.
I find it kind of odd that this legend seems to have floated along, under the radar, and isn’t more of a main myth every Christmas. Every child wants to wait up and catch Santa delivering presents, but no one wants to have a chat with Fluffy?
Anyway, this adorable compilation of singing animals was sent to me by Kent. I do not think I can improve on his explanation, which went thus:
Merry Absurd Χριστός-mas, Granty. ooo Kent And Ally. After extensive review, I have found that the x’s might be kisses and the o’s might be hugs. So just hugs to you, or kisses, take it however you like. Also, xxx might have been misleading. So yeah, back to the point, I just showed you why they call it X-mas, in a long winded, roundabout way.
Happy Caturday, Kent and everyone!
As (loosely) promised, a bonus Christmas-themed Short Film Friday post!
I thought about posting any one of a billion schmaltzy, feel-good, crappy, cookie-cutter Christmas short films. Seriously. Go to YouTube and search. They’re everywhere, if that’s the kind of thing that blows up your holiday-themed skirt. But that’s not how I roll…
Instead, I offer to you the first episode of Infinite Santa 8000 — a sci-fi horror animated series starring Santa Claus. If mutants and murder and cybernetic implants and cannibalism don’t scream “Christmas,” I don’t know what does.
If you dig it, check out the Infinite Santa website, where you can see the rest of the episodes (currently at 11 and counting…)
In what appears to be an ongoing theme, here’s another Short Film Friday entry involving an old woman and death.
Maybe I should find something with a holiday flavour. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get two Short Film Friday posts today!
Love wine but hate corkscrews? This Bosch power screwdriver comes with a corkscrew attachment so you can power that pesky cork right out of the bottle.
Two thoughts come to mind — first of all, that this would be great not only for manly-men who want a powerdrill-corkscrew, but also for arthritics. And secondly, that this is miles better than my current scheme of sending a drill bit deep into the cork and then smashing the bottle in a rage against the nearest brick wall and slurping the wine out from the shards of glass.
(Amazon, via OhGizmodo and tdw)
Although I’m semi-rural, I’ve never been a fan of snowmobiles or of rising a toboggan behind a truck. That said, I would definitely give it a shot if someone came by with a jet fighter.
According to Neatorama, it’s “allegedly” a Swedish Air Force jet.
(via tdw)
Oh dear, this is too descriptive of many conversations I’ve had with my mom.
(from UWindsor, via Mike Potter)
I am both enthralled by this art project, and saddened that it’s come to this — we need an ati-billboard to remind us that the natural environment is worth looking at.
My friend and co-worker Colleen pointed me towards this piece in the Design Observer:
Out in Washington State, Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han, of Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio, recently put up a piece along the Canadian border that is stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. [[there is] a story about it in the new issue of Icon.] To counter the visual clutter along the road into the United States—countless billboards of garish, cheesy advertising fouling a once pristine landscape — they’ve created their own billboard, a negative billboard that frames the ever-changing sky. The structure itself is an evanescent thicket of steel rods, left incomplete along the top edge so your mind can fill in the shape.
Giant billboards are some of the most invasive forms of advertising, especially when you consider that they are strictly visual and mostly stationary. They’re just so huge!
What an interesting way, then, to make an artistic statement: to make the viewer mentally erase one of those billboards by providing, instead, a frame, and filling it with the natural vista behind. It reminds me of the artwork in Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo,’ which showcased photos from which all the advertising had been erased — leaving blank circles, squares and ovals where ads and logos had been.
Instead of just blank gray spaces, though, this one gives the viewer a great gaping hole, something to look through and see what would otherwise be hidden.
I like it.
What happens when you edit together 270 movies from 2010? I would’ve guessed “an incredibly unwatchable mess.”
Not so. It’s fascinating, enthralling and remarkably cohesive.
Now I have to track down every last one of those films I haven’t seen and watch them.
(via BoingBoing)
This staircase looks almost like a bookcase, doesn’t it?
I love it — I love the way it is jarring and dissonant, and yet there’s nothing really all that wrong with it. The stairs would be perfectly functional. You just would have no option about whether you wanted to go right-foot-first or left-foot-first.
Each stair riser is double height, and the left is offset from the right, so they don’t look normal stairs, but when you see both sides together, it’s obvious what they are.
The whole effect is one of pleasant disorientation — “This is … different,” says your brain, “but not necessarily wrong.”
If you take a close look at the top of the staircase in this picture, you’ll see that the top stair on the left is “half-height” (or, “normal height”) and I kind of wonder what it looks like in real life.
But it also looks set back from the top stair on the right, so it appears that the floor wraps around the top, where I assume there’s a railing. I’ll bet it’s pretty functional.
This is exactly the type of do-a-double-take architectural feature that I would love to have in my house — I just wish I had an attic that needed new stairs.
It’s got the right amount of whimsy for a kid’s loft, too, if you had the right kind of kid.
The photo was taken by Foster Huntington, who blogs at A Restless Transplant, and the stairs live in his grandfather’s Wisconsin farm house.
As part of a top-secret homemade Advent calendar project for Amy, I came up with a couple of Christmas playlists for her. But, now that she’s opened that door in the Advent calendar, I can share those Christmas playlists with you.
There are two playlists, with 20 songs each. I played with trying to get to 24 or 25 songs each, but it seemed to naturally fall at 20 songs. One of the playlists is a little slower and quieter, the other one a little faster. But neither of them are exactly raucous. And both tend towards the folky/acoustic side of things, but not from any actual effort on my part to make them that way.
My entire modus operandi was to create playlists that you could put on in the background of a holiday party — nothing that would be the main event itself. And yet, I wanted to branch out and find non-standard Christmas tunes. I tried to only use Christmas songs that I had never heard before, although a couple of familiar ones did sneak in.
Let me know what you think!
She’s Underneath the Mistletoe Again - Antsy Mcclain
Great Adventure - Dan Bryk
Don’t Want Another Christmas (Like Last Christmas) - Gentleman Auction House
Xmas In The Jailhouse - Ox
All I Want For Christmas - The Genuine Fakes
It’s Christmas Time Again - Harley Poe
All These Winter Nights - The Higher Elevations
Christmas On The Beach - Irene
Jingle Jangle Christmas - Metro Jets
Christmas Peace - Shadetree
Christmas Day - Strayfolk
Here Comes Christmas - Bill Kelly
(Merry Xmas) Thanks For The Roses - Antje Duvekot
Whiskey Christmas - Darby O’Gill And The Little People
Gold Front Tooth - Dick Smith
X-mas song - Fireflies
Last Christmas (Wham! cover) - Jimmy Eat World
Just Like Christmas - Low
I Wanna Spend My X-Mas Time With You - Phil Lee
Black Christmas - Poly Styene
Download “Red Christmas” in a single zip file!
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Christmas at the Trailer Park - Antsy Mcclain
Christmastime Blues - Jaimi Shuey
Christmas in London - Krista Detor
Christmas Is Coming Soon - Blitzen Trapper
It May Be Winter Outside (But In My Heart It’s Spring) - Milberg
Oh Sweet Christmas! - Oh Sweet Music!
A Blue Christmas - The Perishers
Carol For The Lonely - Sofia Talvik
Holy Night - Thomas Denver Johnsson
Christmas Isn’t Christmas - The Boy Least Likely To
I’d Like You for Christmas - Christabel and the Jons
Red-Eyed Santa - Dick Smith
Christmas In Prison - Emmy The Great & Lightspeed Champion
Be My Valentine On Christmas - Glenna Bell
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Hem
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Hoax Funeral
The Christmas Song - Mark Jungers & the Whistling Mules
Christmas is for Losers - Mike Nicolai
All I Want is Truth (for Christmas) - The Mynabirds
That Was The Worst Christmas Ever! - Sufjan Stevens
Download “Green Christmas” in a single zip file!
