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We’ve featured a number of how-to’s on Neatorama, but never this (until now anyhow): how to win a fist fight by Joe Peacock of Mentally Incontinent.
Well, yes – the best way to win a fist fight is not to get into one, but what if the situation is unavoidable? What if the fist fight comes to you and you can’t run? If you’re a geek like me*, this may come in handy:
Whatever you do, do NOT fill that space with your thumb. Your thumb MUST be outside your fingers, sitting at a 90 degree angle to your index finger and bent at the second knuckle. Don’t let it stray off to the side; don’t do that little “thumb out” fist-pump swagger thing you saw DMX do in that one Jet Li movie…
The same goes with your pinky. Some flashy morons try to show how cool they are by sticking their pinkies out in the air while waving their fists at you, like it’s wine-tasting time. Don’t be that guy. Keep your fist tight – all four fingers folded and your thumb out of the way, or they’ll be sticking WAY out… In a fiberglass cast for six to eight weeks.
Now that you’ve made a fist, it’s time to fling it at someone. First, a word of caution (or, if you prefer, a note on technique): It is IMPERATIVE that you keep the back of your hand completely in line with your forearm at all times. Never, ever flex your wrist in any direction when delivering a punch, or you’ll break it.
* My fightin’ days are long gone: when I was a young ‘un, I could handle myself fine (brown belt in karate, dudes!), but now that I’m older, wiser, and fatter, I rely on screaming like a woman and hitting 911 on speed dial.
Link – Thanks Joe!
The Japanese appliance company Amandana has added whimsical warnings to their normal product warning illustrations. You cannot control your girlfriend with a remote control. You cannot fly your calculator as a kite. You cannot insert a parking ticket into your desktop music player. You cannot make yourself disappear with your humidifier. And you cannot trap monkeys with your DVD player! Gizmodo has a gallery of lots of these. Link -via Dump Trumpet
On August 15, 1969, a farmer named Max Yasgur addressed one of largest assemblies ever to gather when he addressed the crowd at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in the name of peace, love and music.
Mr. Yasgur, now a cultural icon, allowed 40 acres of his 1,100 acre farm in upstate New York, to be used for Woodstock, thus making the musical and cultural event of the century possible.
Today, the home, barn and lands of the world’s most celebrated farmer can be yours, as the “For Sale” sign has gone up on the original homestead of Max Yasgur.
$8,000,000 and it’s yours. Link -via Metafilter
Every year, Lake Superior State University publishes a list of overused words from the year before. I tried to see how many I could use in a sentence (the title of this post) but I didn’t get too far.
I would add the words/phrases initiative, implement, end of the day and world-class.
Here’s the full list, but for the reasoning behind each one, check out the official list.
- Perfect storm
- Webinar
- Waterboarding
- Organic
- Wordsmith/wordsmithing
- Post 9/11
- Give back
- Author/authored
- ‘Blank’ is the new ‘Blank’ or ‘X’ is the new ‘Y’
- Surge
- Black Friday
- Back in the day
- Decimate
- Random
- Sweet
- Emotional
- Pop
- It is what it is
- Under the bus
Ailurophobia is the irrational fear of cats.
Some famous sufferers include Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Benito Mussolini.
The Macau Tower is an icon of Macau and one of the most advanced towers on the planet. At a height of 338 meters (1108 feet) high the tower doubles as an urban playground and place for people of all ages and abilities to challenge themselves for a good ‘ol bungee jump.
In this clip, this guy felt compelled to give it a try by bungee jumping off the Tower. The jump is considered to be the world’s highest commercial bungee jump.
“Why live life on the edge when you can JUMP OFF IT” – AJ HACKETT
Image: AJ Hackett Macau Tower
Video: Youtube
"The strictest law often causes the most serious wrong."
– Cicero, Roman statesman and philosopher (106 BC – 43 BC)
The wait is almost over, you guys. Yes. Lost is back on January 31. I know not everyone is into Lost, but the people that are *really* are. I include myself in that statement.
There is a group of six of us that get together for "Lost night" once a week and to have dinner and watch the show at one of our houses. When Lost went on hiatus, we started watching Grey’s Anatomy (big mistake. I’m so done with Grey’s). When everything was on repeat this summer, we started watching old Mystery Science Theaters.
Anyway, now that I have actual Lost night to look forward to again, I’ve been trying to plan a party for that night, with Lost-themed food and décor and whatnot. In case you’re planning a party, here are a few ideas for you.
1. Serve airplane-sized bottles of liquor and mini packets of peanuts
2. Label all of your condiments and boxes with Dharma logos. You can get a Dharma font here. It’s pretty cool, actually – not only do you get the Dharma logos for cola, crackers, candy and more, you get each of the stations plus the logos for the Hanso Foundation, Oceanic Airlines, Mr. Cluck’s Fried Chicken, DriveShaft and more. Here’s another option for you.
3. Seafood of any kind is always an option. Smoked salmon would look exceptionally good.
4. These awesome cupcakes from myaimistrue.com.
5. Scatter your luggage all over the living room (or wherever you’re viewing the show).
6. If you’re artistically inclined, draw a Dharma logo on some butcher paper and attach it to your door as if your guests are entering a hatch when they’re entering your house. If I tried to do this, it would look like something a four-year old drew. I’m just sayin’.
7. I’m not this fancy, but if you’re really doing it up, send out invitations that look like Oceanic Air Boarding passes. It wouldn’t be too hard to Photoshop up.
8. Cookies shaped like fish – for Sawyer’s fish biscuits
9. For snacking, leave out a tray of candy bars covered in the Apollo logo.
10. Order good ol’ KFC but put "Mr. Cluck’s Fried Chicken" labels on the buckets.
11. For an exclusive Lost soundtrack, hit up iTunes. You could give out a prize for the first person to correctly identify when/where the song was used on the show. Here’s what you’re going to need:
– Make Your Own Kind of Music – Mama Cass
– Downtown – Petula Clark
– Wonderwall – Oasis
– Good Vibrations – The Beach Boys
– Catch a Falling Star -Perry Como
– Walkin’ After Midnight – Patsy Cline
– La Mer – Charles Trenet
– Anything else from thislist.
12. For dessert or decoration, artfully arrange orange slices on a plate. You could add some pineapple and coconut to balance it out. The orange slices are the obscure mention though.
13. Mark your wine with a Moriah Vineyards label.
14. Label a bottle of whiskey as "MacCutcheon". You could also use apple juice if you don’t feel like tying one on.
15. Print off these pictures and slide them in one of your CD cases. Leave the CDs somewhere inconspicuous.
Just a few ideas… there are so many you could run with, especially obscure references. For some more ideas, just hit some random pages on Lostpedia. You’re bound to get all sorts of ideas. And if you have any brilliant thoughts on what I could do/make, leave me a comment and let me know.
p.s. 15 ideas… get it?
Part of the fun of the Interweb is that you re-discover "oldies but goodies," like this story from 2006 about a neighborly dispute that ended up with … er, just read:
A city councilman in Utah, Mark Easton, had a beautiful view of the east Mountains until a new neighbor purchased the lot below his house and built a new home. The home was 18 inches higher than the ordinances would allow, so Mark Easton, mad about his lost view, went to the city to make sure they enforced the lower roof line ordinance.
The neighbor was forced to lower his roof at a significant expense. So while he’s at it, he decided to add a "abstract art representing a cactus" on his vet cover so his complaining neighbor can see it everyday!
Links: More pic at Brainless World | Snopes said it was true – via Ectoplasmosis
I’ve always thought that Apple’s motto should be "damned the cost, full speed ahead." Their machines are always more expensive than comparable PCs (well, they probably perform better though my experience dealing with Macs has been limited to the only Mac product I’ve ever owned, the crappy iMac I owned to write my doctoral thesis).
But I never thought buying a Mac would require you to take out a mortgage, as Jason Kottke found out about the newer, faster Mac Pros:
Apple announced newer faster Mac Pros today. They start at $2799 but you can configure them up to several thousand dollars (including software and accessories).
The really expensive bits are the 32 GB of RAM ($9100), the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 video card ($2850), the four 15,000 RPM hard drives ($800 each), the two 30" Cinema Displays ($1700 each), a Fibre Channel Card ($1000), and an unlimited-client copy of Mac OS X Server ($999). [...]
Hanan Levin of Grow-a-brain is thinking of calling it quits and shutting down his blog:
This weekend, Grow-a-brain passed the 12 million hits mark, according to its stats counter. Since February of 2003 I’ve been consistently posting to it every single day, searching & sharing many thousands of links with a large, but mostly anonymous audience.
Unfortunately I’ve been thinking of shutting this blog down. I get the empty feeling that fewer visitors stop here, and that nobody cares about me & my “discoveries” any more.
I still have about 5 pages of links that will be published automatically in the next few weeks. Unless something changes, I’ll be going back soon into the great void where I came from.
I hope he reconsiders, Grow-a-brain is definitely one of my favorite blogs in the whole wide Blogosphere: Link | See also his subsequent post explaining why and what’s next.
Are you frustrated when you called a company and found out that you’ve been routed to an Indian call center?
Well, your frustration’s nothing to what’s afflicting those on the other end of the line: heart attacks, ulcers, and insomnia.
Researchers estimated that heart disease, strokes and diabetes would cost India more than £100 billion in lost productivity over the next 10 years.
Staff in call centres dealing with customers in Britain say they have been shocked at the ferocity of the verbal attacks they encounter.
Nidhi Aggarwal, 24, said she had never heard some of the insulting language used – including the word "Paki" as a term of abuse – before she began taking orders for a British catalogue company, which routes its customers’ calls to a Bangalore call centre. [...]
Miss Aggarwal, an English graduate, said she planned to quit, tired of wishing customers a good morning only to hear: "Oh, I’m through to India am I? Put me through to someone who can understand English, you f****** cow."
It seems like every year we see alarm clocks with new methods to wake you up, like requiring you to "defuse" a bomb, solve a puzzle, go hide and seek, just using plain ol’ loudness.
Well, this one takes the old saying "you snooze you lose" and turn it into economic reality (hit ‘em where it hurts, the pocketbook!):
The SnuzNLuz uses the very complex psychological phenomemon known as ‘HATRED’. Basically it’s human nature to wish harm upon your enemies. Similarly, it’s human nature not to give your enemies gobs of cash so that they can grow big and dominate the world with their totally wrong, stupid and invalid point of view. ThinkGeek realized that. That’s why everytime you hit the snooze button, the SnuzNLuz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate. The problem of sleeping in is solved.
Erhm, it’s an April Fool’s joke, folks. But the concept is sound: here’s an article about pre-commitment by Nobel laureate and economist Thomas C. Schelling at the New York Times.
It was a nailbiter for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, but she finally beat Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary. According to polls (and pundits), Clinton was trailing Obama as much as 10% as late as the even of the primary:
In Iowa, Clinton lost out to Obama among women 35 percent to 30 percent. In New Hampshire, however, 45 percent of female Democratic primary voters picked Clinton, compared to 36 percent who went for Obama.
Older voters also overwhelmingly outnumbered younger voters, a proportion that benefited Clinton. Sixty-seven percent of Democratic primary voters were over the age of 40, and they were breaking heavily for Clinton over Obama.
On the Republican side, John McCain handily beat his closest rival Mitt Romney even though before the primaries, Romney had been leading in the polls (just like the situation Clinton was in).
Link: CNN article
Trivia: I just found out that Mitt Romney’s first name is Willard, named after Willard Marriott (of the hotel fame!). "Mitt" comes from Milton Romney, who played quarterback for the Chicago Bears in the 1920s.
One of the three Chinese pigs bred in 2006 (previously at Neatorama) has given birth to eleven piglets after mating with a normal boar. Two of the piglets inherited the gene for Green Fluorescent Protein from the mother.
“The mouths, trotters and tongues of the two piglets glow green under ultraviolet light, which indicates the technology to breed transgenic pigs via cell nuclear transfer is mature,” Liu Zhonghua, a professor at Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, was quoted as saying.
The first generation of glowing pigs was produced by injecting Green Fluorescent Protein while they were embryos. Link
(image credit: Reuters)
