I'm laughing my gringo head off. And I didn't even know what a chupacabra was...
Lateral
The new NFL season is upon us... and I'm warming up by watching, re-watching, and forcing everybody who works in the same office as me to watch, the incredible play by Trinity University against Millsaps College.
It happened two years ago, and it still brings a tear to my cheek.
This angle is the best...
but this angle shows how deep in their own territory the Tigers were when the play began.
You've got to love the bit where the commentator shouts, with some understatement: "That might be the most sensational, incredible ending in all of Division Three."
The play is just incredible – and I've never been able to watch rugby the same way again. (I keep yelling "play a lateral!" instead of "pass the ball!") You obviously won't find this in any playbook... as this excellent SlateV clip demonstrates.
It happened two years ago, and it still brings a tear to my cheek.
This angle is the best...
but this angle shows how deep in their own territory the Tigers were when the play began.
You've got to love the bit where the commentator shouts, with some understatement: "That might be the most sensational, incredible ending in all of Division Three."
The play is just incredible – and I've never been able to watch rugby the same way again. (I keep yelling "play a lateral!" instead of "pass the ball!") You obviously won't find this in any playbook... as this excellent SlateV clip demonstrates.
Powers
There's a great piece up at Cracked on the Five Superpowers You Didn't Know Your Body Was Hiding From You.
Sample paragraph: "We're kind of pissed that we can't seem to just summon the super strength at will. Wouldn't that mugger have been surprised if you had thrown him across the street into a plate glass window? But we suppose if science found a way, the muggers would know how to do it, too. Man, that would make for some awesome fights though."
Sounds like another instant classic.
Cradle
Roll over, Piltdown Man. A new paleontological discovery has... erm... discovered that Africa might not be the sole Cradle of Humankind.
That's right, caveman fans: a 1.8-million-year-old has been unearthed in Georgia, suggesting that Early Man did not, in fact, come out of Africa alone... and if Early Man did, then he at least took a holiday in Eurasia for a while in between.
"The question is whether Homo erectus originated in Africa or Eurasia, and if in Eurasia, did we have vice-versa migration?" some guy called Professor Lordkipanidze says in the story. "This idea looked very stupid a few years ago, but today it seems not so stupid."
Psht. Racist.
Elephant
The 10-day Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi has just finished, and The Big Picture was, as always, there to document it. The festivities are incredibly colourful, and it all ends on the day of Anant Chaturdashi, when murtis of Ganesha are immersed in (it says on Wikipedia), the most convenient body of water.
Looking at the pictures in the gallery (especially the ones of the immersed murtis), it looks like one huge, massive, fun party.
Food
I'm hungry. And it doesn't help that I just found a feature at Epicurious.com, where they list their best recipes with five or fewer ingredients. Seriously, you can't go wrong with a Chunky Lemon Applesauce, which requires just three ingredients.
And I'm sure that even I cannot stuffy up Poached Eggs, where all you need is 1 teaspoon vinegar and 4 very fresh large eggs.
Go have a look at their mouth-watering list of recipes. I'll be back after lunch.
Color
I just got my hot little hands on the first five seasons of the sketch comedy show In Living Color. Man, it's got some funny stuff.
Apart from regular favourites like Homey D. Clown, and any time James Carrey (Jim before he was Jim) or Damon Wayans appear on screen, there are a couple of really funny once-offs.
Like this "We Are The World" spoof. Pure genius.
Bad Command Or File Name
A recent New York Times On Language column spoke about how the word "FAIL" has crept into the vernacular (or the parlance of our times, or whatever linguists call it). Somebody then wrote a letter claiming that its modern origins come from the old DOS command "Abort, Retry, Fail?", which I remember as being "Abort, Retry, Ignore?".
I was thinking that my memory was doing an Epic Fail, until I discovered "Ignore" was the old-old system. Which is, I guess, a Minor Scale Fail.
The Business End
The funny folks at Football365 have a handy 2010 World Cup Qualifying guide up, which – with the next round of games already upon us – will have to be updated in a few hours' time. The Preliminary Competition (or whatever FIFA want to call it) is reaching a very interesting stage now, with Brazil and Ghana having joined the list of countries who'll be at next year's World Cup... and Portugal, Argentina and Nigeria looking pretty much doomed.
If you're following the action (and European Group 1 or the Concacaf League of Nations are two good places to start), I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia page, where they list all the permutations and pernambulations (which is, I swear, a word I once heard used on SuperSport).... like, for example, "Denmark will qualify for the World Cup if they defeat Albania AND Hungary lose to Portugal AND Sweden do not defeat Malta."
Simple, really.
Block
I love today's Non Sequitur. It reminds me of this old Calvin & Hobbes classic, which I think every writer has saved somewhere on their computer (if not pasted up on their fridge)...
Battle
Time magazine have a photo gallery up of pictures from the recent fighting in Afghanistan's Kunar Province (hidden away in the gloomy parts of the Hindu Kush). The photos are high-contrast black and white, which makes them look like they fell out of a Sin City comic book.
Or from the pages of Battle Action Force.
Malign
And now this one.
(By the way, the heading on the previous post is a pun on "Anything said in Latin sounds profound".)
(Har Har.)
Squidsquid Latine Dictum Sit Altum Videtur
It's been a terrible week at work, and I was looking through my files (yes, I have files) for an old Non Sequitur comic strip to help sum it up.
I found this.
And I laughed at work for the first time this week.
Hold
While other scientists waste their time searching for stupid stuff like... y'know... a cure of cancer, others are spending their time and research grants more wisely. Like the eggheads at the Israel Institute of Technology who've conducted research into what it's like being put on hold when you're on the telephone.
Turns out women like alt.rock, men like classical music, and nobody likes that annoying chick from Telkom to come on the line and say: "Your call is important to us. You are number" ... "Twenty-nine" ... "in line".
And they needed researchers to figure that out?
Beslan
It's been five years now since the horrific Beslan school massacre. I was working in online news when it happened, and I remember sub-editing the Reuters news reports at the time, thinking: "This can't be happening."
The best account I've ever read on the events at Beslan is the feature published in Esquire magazine. Esquire rate it as one of their seven best stories ever, and it's hard to disagree. It's long (6 000 words, if I remember correctly) and it's harrowing. But it's some of the best writing, and best journalism, I've ever read.
Take a deep breath and go check it out.
President
I'm blowing the dust off a Cracked classic: The 5 Most Bad-Ass (American) Presidents of All Time. It's one of those stories where you kind of understand what Dan Carlin meant when he said, "History has ruined fiction for me."
Try this quote, from the entry on Andrew Jackson:
"The bullet, by the by, remained in Jackson's body for 19 years because, we assume, Jackson knew that time spent removing the bullets would just fall under the general category of "time not dueling," Jackson's least favorite category."
The rest of the revelations are no less insane: John Quincy Adams kept a pet alligator in the White House. And (again, to quote) checking Teddy Roosevelt's resumé is like reading a How-To guide on ass-kicking manliness.
Legends
There's a fun feature up at Smithsonian.com, where they debunk a whole list of spooky legends about the creepy Smithsonian Castle. The big old Gothic/Romanesque red sandstone building certainly looks scary... and the legends are pretty cool.
Sample: The Smithsonian tried to find Noah’s Ark at Mount Ararat.
Another sample: There's a secret underground archive under the National Mall.
My favourite sample: The Smithsonian discovered Egyptian ruins in the Grand Canyon.
Sadly, none of the legends are true. And the whole point of the story is to prove that.
Psht.
Whatever happened to no letting the facts get in the way of a good story?
Atlas Shrugged
Maybe, in my quest to shed some kilos, I should sign up for the old Charles Atlas deal. Smithsonian magazine had a brilliant feature on Charles Atlas last month. Here's a man who started out as a skinny, picked-on bully magnet, and ended up tearing telephone books in half.
Kind of like Spider-Man, just without the webs.
Mountain
"Fifteen minutes. I'll give you 15 minutes. And then you must go." While that's not the ideal start to an interview (although, come to think of it, it's about standard issue for South Africa's hapless sports journalists), in the case of Brad Wetzler's superb profile of Reinhold Messner for Outside magazine (published way back in 2002, but still there in the archives), it's the start of something great.
Messner is a grumpy, cantankerous old mountain goat, but you end up loving him despite all that. The feature is well worth the read (even if you don't care about mountain climbing), and the photos by Anton Corbijn are... Well, they're the reason I started reading the story in the first place.
20kg
A week or two ago the medical aiders from Discovery Health came to our offices to offer voluntary health assessments. I'm happy to reveal that my cholesterol and blood glucose levels are both perfect, as is my eyesight. I'm not quite as happy to reveal that Discovery recommended I lose 20kg.
I weigh a round (OK, not that round: I like to think that my body is more a broad V than an O) 100kg, which means Discovery want my to drop 20% of my body weight. I've since signed up for the Men's Health New Man Challenge.
Let's hope it works.
Minus
After about two seasons, I kinda felt like Dawson's Creek would've been better without Dawson in it. Dan Walsh felt the same way about Garfield – so he started a comic strip called Garfield Minus Garfield.
He does it using the same technology that helped Hitler get rid of Goebbels, helped Mussolini get rid of his horse-handler, and helped Microsoft get rid of a black dude.
And the results are no less bizarre.
Yo Joe!
I watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Saturday night, and it was as big and stupid as I thought it would be. Movie critics have been absolutely merciless with it. Rolling Stone's review said: "I don't know what to say about the acting, writing and directing in G.I. Joe because I couldn't find any", while Premiere claimed that "This movie’s sole purpose is to make teenage boys high-five each other".
All I'm going to say is, it was loads of fun to watch. And I'll start listening to "serious movie critics" only when their "serious movies" start featuring Scarlett and The Baroness.
It did, though, get me to thinking about the Battle: Action Force comics my brother used to read (and I used to steal). And that got me snooping around the Intrawebs, where I found...
a site called Blood For The Baron, which has scans of all the old comic strips (repeat: all of them), there for my time-wasting, childhood-reliving pleasure. I'm so excited about this discovery, I'm pretty much beside myself (I'm sitting here next to me).
I mean, seriously: how cool/retro/geeky/nerdy/sad/brilliant is this?
Keeper
The incomparable Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (and yes, I did just use the word incomparable) has a great piece up at Soccernet, where he talks about ill-informed soccer fans and their ill-informed opinions on who is and isn't the best goalkeeper in Germany right now.
You could replace "soccer" with "any given sport", "goalkeeper" with "any given position" and "Germany" with "any given country", and you'd have a perfectly good sports story for any given newspaper.
Annie
As part of their enormous Fall Fashion section, New York magazine have a feature story up on Annie Leibovitz. If you don't know who she is, pick up a copy of Vanity Fair, or Vogue, or a vintage copy of Rolling Stone, or pretty much any magazine with a reputation for iconic, beautiful, big-budget photography. Chances are, Leibovitz shot the cover photograph.
Now you'd imagine that someone so talented and so high-profile would earn top dollar. And you'd be right. Unfortunately, while she earns top dollar, she also spends top dollar. And, according to the article, she's pretty much broke.
A couple of sources weigh in on where the money went. "She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread," says one. "Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect."
"She's a massive perfectionist," adds another, "and absolutely doesn't care about the impact on her own bottom line."
It's entirely her own fault. But it's still sad. And it makes her another (deserving) formerly-flush casualty of the economic crash of the late-noughties.
Sign Bin
So for some reason I was thinking this morning about the time the New Zealand Cavaliers came on tour to South Africa in 1986. It was, I believe, in one of the Test matches (which all ended in fistfights) that Springbok forward Uli Schmidt got sin-binned for some or other outrageous act of violence.
Instead of sitting on the sidelines in a plastic garden chair, seriously thinking about what he'd done, Schmidt spent his 10-minute penalty reaching into the crowd to sign autographs for eager fans.
You've got to love that.
Hard Rock
OK, so I don't usually take conspiracy theories all that seriously (although I maintain that Oswald did not act alone)... but here's a point in favour of the Fake Moon Landings crowd.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just determined that the moon rock given to the Dutch Prime Minister by the Apollo XI astronauts in 1969 is a total, shameless fake. That's no moon rock, baby – it's a lump of old wood!
Natural
I went snooping around the New York magazine slideshow archives, and found this cool little collection: Super Models Without Make-up Or Retouching, taken from a feature for Harper's Bazaar. Of course, in their natural state Mses. Crawford, Valetta, Harlow and company look like total dogs.
Or maybe not.
Or maybe not.
Soul ≠ Soldier
Oh, happy day! I got my ticket to The Killers, live in my home town in... December.
That's three months I'm going to have to wait, which means three months of Killers on perpetual repeat.
Moments
Back in the mid-90s, when it was still a semi-respectable gentleman's magazine (and not the soon-to-be-shut-down slapper mag that it is today), Loaded magazine used to have a regular short feature called "Drop Me Bacon Sandwich!". The idea a of list Earth-shattering events: things that come as such a shock (the cancellation of the Grand National, Jarvis Cocker upstaging Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards, etc) that anybody who witnessed them would drop their proverbial bacon sandwich in stupified amazement.
Here in Internetland we don't eat bacon sandwiches. Instead, we spew out TLAs like LOL and WTF. And while nobody's compiled a definitive list of WTF moments, the good people at UGO have compiled a superb list of The Top 50 WTF Moments In Comics.
The list is amazing, and it's well worth the hour you'll spend trawling through all 50 entries. I especially liked the shoutout to Y: The Last Man. I've just finished reading the list.
And I loved it.
Hence all the comic-book pictures in this post.
(s)he?
Here's the final (yeah, right) word in the he/she Caster Semenya gender debate: Slate's latest Hang Up And Listen podcast reveals that
CASTER SEMENYA
is an anagram of
YES A SECRET MAN.
Rewind
A recommendation from Slate's Culture Gabfest sent me to the Shorpy Photo Archive, where they have an archive of thousands of high-res photos from the 1850s to 1950s. There's some amazing stuff there, and it's easy to get lost in the time warp.
The photos offer an incredible insight into what life – arb, everyday life – was like back then. The clothes, the tech, the transport... some of it seems to come from another world, let alone another time.
I love the little details in some of the photos too. Like the bicycle resting against the wall in this posed football shot. Guess the players didn't drive their own cars to practice back then...
I wonder, though, what my random Facebook pics will look like a century from now. Although I suppose they'll be lost on a broken server somewhere.
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