It is difficult for me to believe that these have never before been invented, but there you go — there’s something new under the sun.
Anyway, if you’ve ever dreamed of walking with reverse knees like a horse or goat, you can strap a pair of Weta Legs on, and go to ‘er. For about a thousand bucks.
Gothamist has a great story, um, digging into the rumour that there exist hidden tunnels underneath New York City that exist solely for the purpose of herding cattle. Yes, you heard me right:
According to Edible Geography, historian Betty Fussel discovered that cattle traffic was so heavy in the 1870s that a tunnel was built to increase the flow to slaughterhouses along 12th Avenue and 34th Street. The underground passages were eventually made redundant when refrigerated train cars were introduced, but they’re rumored to still be there!
There’s one reference to the tunnel from 1997, when author Brian Wiprud wrote about “watching a crew install a drainage basin on Greenwich Street when they came upon a wall of wood about ten feet down. A laborer went into the hole with a torch and came out saying it was an oak-vaulted tunnel ten feet wide by eight feet high that trailed off an undetermined distance in either direction. It was then that an old man from the neighborhood stepped up to the trench and said, ‘Why, I see you found the cattle tunnel.’”
An “oak-vaulted tunnel ten feet wide by eight feet high” which may run for several blocks would certainly, I think, become a major tourist attraction. Cities like Moose Jaw (the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and their tenuous connection to Al Capone) and Seattle (tired of the flooding, the city raised the streets a full storey, turning first-floor display windows into basements) have already capitalized on underground attractions.
New York City, by the way, ha had recent success turning an abandoned elevated rail track into a park (the High Line), so one wag on the Gothamist site suggested turning these tunnels into the “Low Line” — which is doubly funny when you think of cows lowing.
Urban exploration of this sort has long fascinated me. I remember living in Toronto and never quite finding the time to go looking for one of its famed, forgotten subway stations. I regret now that I never did.
I can’t really explain it. Here’s a video:
It’s actually a game mod, and you can read all about it at GameInformer. Go to that link if the video doesn’t work, too.
UPDATE: Okay, the video doesn’t embed very well. go to the link. It’s …. oddly nostalgic.
WARNING: If you’re in any way skittish about nudity or sexual content, just skip this whole post.
So, you’re not sure what perfume you should use. Perhaps you have heard of natural pheromones? Like, really natural? Try this on for size:
Or, check out the pornography at it’s official website, SmellMeAnd.com.
But whatever you do, absolutely do not miss the interview at Vice magazine.
(via Adfreak and Copyranter. Thanks, Ryan!)
Give this video all three minutes that it deserves.
It’s by Cyriak, who calls it one of his “creative brain-spillages” and claims, “I am … from 100 years into the future, where I have been exhumed and sent backwards in time via cyberspace in order to welcome you to the unabridged contents of my brain-damaged imagination.”
(Via the Daily What)
So, knowing that the Canadian women curlers were playing a tough gold-medal match against Sweden — and that they were up against it in extra ends — but without any TV in my house, I checked a couple of websites to find out what the final result was.
Sadly for my patriotism, Canada lost 7-6 to Sweden.
Annoyingly, though, I clicked through three separate news sites that all had a variation on the same headline: “Settle for silver.” I guess they had to come up with something quickly — and at least they didn’t use “Silver lining” — but it still made a mockery of the idea of the Internet as a cacophony of different voices.
So I did a quick Google News search: “Settle for silver” and “Silver lining” each brought back a huuuuuge number of news articles — but crazily, they “… and 5,350 more” bit at the end was the exact same number. Does Google News max out at a certain amount of news?
So I checked “Good as gold.” Yup, precisely 5,350 more articles.
Weird. I refreshed it a couple of times, and the number changed, but each time I refreshed the page, the number changed slightly — but each search refreshed to the same number.
My favourite was when there was exactly 5,678 articles left. I felt like I was on the Sesame Street version of Google News.
So, the upshot? Either Google News arbitrarily stops searching after about 5,000 articles have been found, assuming (probably correctly) that you don’t need that much news, or frighteningly every single sports cliché is used exactly the same number of times.
I hesitate to Google “Gave it 110%”
Gordon Lightfoot, a singer and Canadian icon. Not dead. Although, for an hour or so earlier this month, everyone thought he was.
Starting with one single tweet — “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” — the false news was picked up, retweeted, and amplified until it hit the mainstream media (all of which took a mere 10 minutes, frighteningly).
Lightfoot himself, apparently on his way to a dentist appointment when he heard the news of his own demise on the radio, was actually alive and well, and everything was quickly cleared up.
Now, though, the author of that first tweet — let’s call her Tweeter Zero — has written an essay in the Globe and Mail about how the whole thing got started, and how it brought the wrath of the internet down on her:
By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.
(Full disclosure: I was briefly acquainted with the aforementioned Mr. Capstick during my days at Canadian University Press.)
Lest you think the poor Tweeter Zero is fully to blame, she broadcast the message only to her meagre 100 Twitter followers, and she blames the origination of the whole episode on a telephone prank call (“But nobody seems to be interested in him. He used the telephone. And dude, that’s just so 20th century.”)
A lesson, perhaps, in the power and speed of the information superhighway.
Now, we came not to bury Gordon Lightfoot, but to praise him:
To a website like 4chan, mainstream is cancer. It’s kind of like when all the preps started listening to your favourite indie band, and you were all like, “Daaaaamn. What am I going to listen to now?”
Either that, or someone pulled a fast one on the producers.
Two very different portions of my brain are now meeting in an explosion that rivals the crash of that Star Destroyer into the surface of the Death Star:
(via Coudal)
Ladies love the colour pink, or advertising has led me astray. And ladies love makeup, or advertising has led me astray twice — and I can’t believe that.
So ladies must love pink makeup, right?
Well, try this on for size — pink makeup for your lady-parts. Down there.
That’s right, feast your eyes on My New Pink Button, “a simple to use genital cosmetic colorant that restores the ‘pink’ back to a woman’s genitals.”
At $30 a tub (enough for 20 applications) My New Pink Button is more than a makeup — it’s actually a dye for your labia. The official product description purports to reveal that many women feel that their skin is the wrong colour:
My New Pink Button ™ is a temporary dye to restore the youthful pink color back to your labia. There is no other product like it. This patent pending formula was designed by a female certified Paramedical Esthetician after she discovered her own genital color loss. While looking online for a solution she discovered thousands of other women asking the same questions regarding their color loss. After countless searches revealing no solution available and a discussion with her own gynecologist she decided to create her own. Now there is a solution!
Now, as a male, I’m obviously not qualified to state whether or not any individual woman is happy with her own vajayjay. But, speaking strictly in my male capacity, I don’t think dye is the solution. In fact, for me, it would be a problem.
Hair? Sure. Nails? Of course. Labia? NO.
I like my coffee black black black black black. I don’t let sugar or artificial sweeteners touch any mug I might someday use. And when well-meaning baristas ask me if I “want room for cream?” I snarl at them, “Cream is the devil.”
They recoil — horrified, yet impressed despite their horror — and bring me my coffee, which is black black black black black.
And yet, I can appreciate the art of a good experiment. Once, as a child, I figured that since I like both sandwiches and stirfries, perhaps lunch that day would be a sopping soy sauce sandwich.
It worked out better when I attempted to combine my love of sandwiches with my love of refined white sugar.
So, knowing that you win some, you lose some, in the game of culinary invention, I was intrigued to read of the exploits of one brave soul — a man who goes by the alias Phronk — putting weird stuff in his coffee.
He’s got a whole blog devoted to it here. He’s tried cake, banana, peanut butter, peanut butter and jelly, smoked salmon cream cheese, and even bacon, as above. His rule? “The things I put in coffee must be things that I would tolerate eating on their own. So no, I will not put dog poop in coffee, but you’re right that it would be very weird.” A fair rule.
So, how did bacon coffee taste?
This project was a little daunting at first. The world of meat-based coffee additives is, as far as we could tell, completely unexplored. It could have turned out disgusting. But to be honest, it wasn’t. The bacon added a subtle smokey flavour that did not clash at all with the dark roasted coffee. The bacon grease left a beautiful sparkly film on top and gave the coffee a creamier texture than usual.
At the bottom of the mug is a beautiful puddle of bacon-wrapped coffee.
The only problem is that you’re left with a large chunk of bacon sitting there, which makes it hard to drink the last bit. And what do you do with the bacon? While bacon flavoured coffee is quite delicious, coffee flavoured bacon is bland at best.
If you’re into watching someone else drink weird things, then Putting Weird Things In Coffee is a blog you should follow. Hey Phronk — if you’re reading this — videos!
Some mashups are great — David Bowie vs. MGMT, for example — and others are not. Now that technology has enabled mashups to move beyond the realm of music and into the wider world, we’re seeing all kinds of weird things. I don’t mind a book table made of books, say.
But a cell phone that runs on Coke?
And yet, such a Frankenstein exists, at least conceptually, thanks to the efforts of designer Daizi Zheng, on behalf of Nokia.
From the project’s website:
A bio-battery is an ecologically friendly, energy supply system which uses enzymes as a catalyst to generate electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar). In order to use the bio-battery as a power source for the phone all that is required is a small supply of a sugary drink. Once the battery dies only oxygen and water remains. Bio-batteries are fully biodegradable and have, on a single charge, a potential life-span three to four times longer than conventional lithium batteries.
Now, a phone that runs on Coca-Cola is hardly ecologically friendly. But a sugar-powered fuel cell that lasts three times as long as a lithium battery does sound like it has potential.
I have a friend who made me swear, once, that after he died, I would steal his body from the funeral parlour, take it out to the desert, and burn it, a la Gram Parsons. Of course, he also said at another time that he wanted his body turned into sausages and fed to his unsuspecting funeral guests. You can’t really do both.
At any rate, I should probably convince him to try for something a little more positive, like Jack Greenberg.
Greenberg, who died with an estate of over $10 million, gave a lot away to charity, including buying ambulances for Israel. But he saved $1.5 million for his friends — enough to throw a birthday party for himself every year for the next two decades, with limos to bring all his friends to the site of his grave, and then to lunch, where they can reminisce about him.
From an article at Cincinnati.com:
Greenberg thought the memorial birthday parties would be a good way for his friends to get to know each other after he died, said [estate trustee Steven] Wilhelm.
“He figured that he enjoyed each of them, so they’d probably enjoy each other as well,” said Wilhelm. “He wanted to perpetuate the friendship over time.”
Sounds like a fun way to ensure your legacy, but it also sounds a little controlling. The article describes how each party is planned down to the minute (limos pick them up from the cemetery at 12:35 precisely) and according to my best guess at the date, I think this happens on Christmas Day every year.
Which I guess is less of a big deal if you’re Jewish, like Greenberg, but I wonder about some of his friends not being quite so thankful that their Christmas lunch is booked every year for the next two decades.
Oh, and about those friends — the article says Greenberg changed his mind as to who was on the list (and who was off) so often, that his lawyer eventually threw up his hands and made him put it in a safe-deposit box, so he could change the list whenever he wanted.
Speaking of birthdays, I’d much rather be one of the twin boys born the other day in Florida. Normally, a difference of a minute or two between twins is no great shakes. Somebody has bragging rights for being older for a few years, then the other one has bragging rights for being younger for the rest of their life.
But these twin boys were born on either side of midnight, New Year’s Eve. So one was born in one decade, the other was born in the next decade.
Makes one wonder what might happen when they try to sign up for sports teams or even school classes where the cutoff is Dec. 31. Wouldn’t it be hilarious/frustrating if one twin was forced to be a grade below the other?
I found this news story to be oddly believable:
A man in Detroit was stabbed — apparently with a steak knife — but couldn’t find anyone at the nearby apartment complex to help him. So, with the knife still embedded in his chest, he walked to a nearby diner to call 911 and wait for the ambulance. Sorry, did I say nearby? He walked A MILE to the diner to wait for the ambulance.
While waiting, he chatted with other patrons, didn’t appear to be in much pain or discomfort, and actually ordered coffee.
Astonishing. And yet, one time I pushed a pin all the way through my finger (long story) and felt no pain. I think it’s possible to just, well, miss the pain-sensing nerve endings. That or he was in shock.
C4 is a common military plastic explosive that, according to Wikipedia, detonates at a velocity of nearly 30,000 km/h. If you don’t use a blasting cap or detonator to set it off, though, you can light it with a match and it will burn.
This guy says you can use spitball-sized pieces of C4 to heat up your coffee:
As one ball would burn out, you rolled another up next to it, so it would ignite. We used a modified C-ration can for a stove. One side was cut open, so there was plenty of air for the ‘rapid combustion.’
The trick, apparently, is not to stamp out the fire.
