Once upon a time, going to a concert was all about the music. Then Alice Cooper came along and turned the concert stage into a circus, playing a character in terrifying makeup, singing terrifying songs in a powerful show that no one could forget. And all while using a woman's name for reasons no one could fathom. Those concerts propelled his songs to the top of the charts.
“[When] that curtain goes up all of a sudden I am not that same guy,” Cooper told me recently about his onstage transformation from Vincent Furnier into the man we all love and fear as Alice. “I become that character and the game is on. And that character is a villain and he goes out there with absolutely no attitude of ‘Gee, I hope you like us tonight.’ He goes out there with the attitude of grabbing ’em by the throat and shaking them for an hour and a half.”
He's been doing that for 50 years now. Alice Cooper shares stories from his long career in an interview at Uproxx.
John Krasinski is best known for playing Jim Halpert in the TV series The Office. Now he's playing the title character in Amazon's new series Jack Ryan (available as of today), based on the Tom Clancy character. It only makes sense that the CIA operative would be instantly mashed up with The Office. Funny or Die jumped on that idea. -via Metafilter
Wire Hon collects action figures, but they don't just lie around. These superheroes are earning their keep by posing for action pictures, many of them with Hon!
The perspective isn't a matter of Photoshop. These pictures were taken with a iPhone placed just right to get the proper angle, to make the action figures life-size.
In case you've ever wondered why the comic strip Garfield isn't funny, comic artist Jim Davis will readily admit to the fact that it wasn't even designed to be funny. The cartoon cat is wildly popular in spite of this ...or specifically because of this. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains the thinking behind Garfield. Despite the apparent length, the story is less then 12 minutes.
August seems like an odd time to post a "best of the year" list, but here we are. There have been so many people trying to get away with something that Mashable has plenty of material to work with. Four months from now, they may have an update, but what we've got so far is pretty egregious, and it doesn't even include politicians.
14. Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame
You might remember McFarland from his other failed scam: Fyre Festival. Unfortunately, he does not appear to have learned a single lesson from that debacle. McFarland was arrested in June and charged with wire fraud and money laundering for a fake ticket sales scheme completely separate from Fyre Fest. Billy, dude, what's up?
3. The royal wedding expert
Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq. sounds exactly like the name of someone who would fake their way into becoming an expert in all things royal wedding. With his best fake British accent, Tommy Muscatello scammed his way into history just in time for the nuptials of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
He perfected his British accent twenty years ago during a school play and put it to good use by appearing on news programs regularly as a royal wedding expert and founding member of the British Monarchist Foundation — only to eventually be called out by The Wall Street Journal. Turns out, Mace-Archer-Mills was just a combination of his friends’ last names. In an interesting twist, the British accent has stuck with Muscatello even after all this controversy. Pretty impressive.
The roots of the words we use for numbers vary around the world, but they often originated in terms that correspond to our body parts. That shouldn't be surprising, since our base ten (decimal) counting system stems from the fact that we have ten fingers. But there are other number systems that arose naturally, that also relate to parts of our bodies.
If you're thinking of relocating, maybe you should check out the average commute times for people for who in or around the city you're considering. Just zoom in on the interactive map at Educated Driver and click on the city's dot for more details. People near where I live commute around 40-45 minutes a day, which seems like a big waste of time over a lifetime. However, the average commute time in L.A. or San Francisco is an hour, and 75 minutes in New York City! Now think of this map as a whole, and consider all the lost hours, the gasoline, the pollution, the traffic jams, and the stress that could be avoided if we could just live closer to our workplaces. -via Digg
Being atop a skyscraper when it sways is disconcerting, but not as terrifying as that sway would be if it weren't for mass dampers. This simple but thorough explanation of how they work from Minute Physics uses a LEGO Saturn 5 rocket, or two of them, to show how it works. The video is really only 3:40 long; after that, it's an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
If you were to name the desires that all people have in common, food would be at the top of the list. And if there was ever a food that people agreed upon, it's pizza. Pizza is the world's most perfect food, containing all the major groups, and the dish people want if they could only eat one thing for the rest of their lives. Add in that someone will make one for you and even bring it to you, and you've got something special. That's true even when we don't eat the pizza ourselves. Andrew Gruttadaro at The Ringer put together a tournament bracket of famous "pizza moments" that penetrated our shared experiences.
As you can see, the pizza moments have been broken up into four regions: In the Movies, On TV, In Sports, and In Life. Each pizza moment was then seeded based on my general opinion of its popularity and recognizability. Because Pizza Day is only 24 hours long, we do not have enough time to stage a popular vote. Instead, I will be deciding the winners of each matchup based on a combination of things: the moment’s popularity and notoriety, the moment’s nostalgia factor, the prominence of the pizza in the moment, how delicious the pizza looks in the moment, and what the moment says about pizza. If you disagree with my pizza moment takes and the outcome of this bracket, then you should make your own. (I genuinely mean this, with no ill will: Pizza is for everyone, and therefore everyone should be allowed to construct their own pizza moments bracket.)
Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent much of his time exploring the Arctic. Instead of taking vast stores of food, he ate what the Inuit ate: fish, caribou, walrus, and other meat, with few fruits and vegetables of any kind. This was in the early 20th century, when nutrition experts pushed raw vegetables for health, and encouraged minimal meat eating. Stefansson wrote about the Inuit diet, and encountered skepticism from those who couldn't believe it. To show them, Stefansson and an explorer friend went on a meat-only diet in 1928 -for an entire year. They began the experiment in a hospital where doctors could monitor their health, but that didn't last long.
While doctors condemned the diet as dangerous, Stefansson was defiant, attributing his increased vigor and “ambition” to his all-meat diet. Newspapers and magazines across the country ran stories on his experiment, contrasting it with the vegetable-heavy diets most doctors recommended. Soon, Stefansson left the hospital, having lost a few pounds, and continued his meat-eating endeavor from his New York apartment. Doctors examining the two men during the year-long trial reported that neither had heightened blood pressure or kidney trouble, the expected result of a carnivorous diet. The one thing lacking in their diet, Stefansson noted, was enough calcium.
Another conclusion Stefansson came to was that the protein he was eating wasn’t as important as the fat. He briefly flirted with “rabbit starvation,” a condition named for the fact that eating solely meat without sufficient fat can prove deadly. The human liver can only process so much protein sans fat without kickstarting the symptoms of protein poisoning: nausea, wasting, and death. Fat, and lots of it, is essential to the all-meat diet. Aquatic mammals are especially rich with fat, though. Recent studies point to genetics also playing a role in the Inuit aptitude for fatty, meat-filled diets, but as in Stefansson’s time as well as today, there remain questions about the relative healthiness of fats.
Master editor Melodysheep (John Boswell) took a fairly psychedelic movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and remixed it to be even more magically psychedelic. -via Tastefully Offensive
There are generally three ways you are familiar with the couch pictured. Maybe you sat on one while watching TV in the 1970s. Maybe your parents or grandparents still have it in their home because why should they change a perfectly good couch? Or maybe you -or someone you know- wouldn't have a couch at all if grandma hadn't decided to finally get rid of a perfectly good couch. This couch has even been made into a meme because it is so ubiquitous in elderly people's homes.
“This couch is a hat tip to Early American or Colonial Revival décor, which was massively popular through most of the 20th century—married to an indestructible, essentially plastic Space Age fabric, which our grandparents would have found appealing because our grandparents didn’t tend to redecorate constantly,” Kueber explains. “They had one sofa. They bought their furniture on a layaway, and by the time they found enough money for a sofa, they wanted it to last forever. So the good news was that fabric was going to last forever—but the bad news was that fabric was going to last forever.
“I say that in a loving way: They got the fashionable look of the day, which was this novelty print on their sofa, and it was made from a fabric that had all the modern qualities that one would want. So, hooray! I’m sure it was a big day when that sofa came home.”
The first iteration of Colonial Revival originated around 1876, when Victorians were celebrating the United States centennial, and the throwback interior style—which sought to shed the frilly excesses of cluttered Victorian neo-Rococo fashion—remained popular up to 1940. It branched off into two larger design subsets: 18th-Century Colonial Revival and Early American. The former embraced the stately, symmetrical style seen in the homes of the Founding Father elite—the exteriors defined by red brick, white shutters, and maybe symmetric neo-Classical columns; the white-walled interiors a combination of elegant, scrolling Georgian and Neo-Classical upholstered wood furnishings and gold-trimmed mirrors. Early American is more about the hard-working pilgrims, farmers, and pioneers in their log cabins and farmhouses with heavy, simple wood furniture.
The Grandma Couch doesn't exactly fit either of those styles, but it was quite popular to accompany the dark wood paneling and the TV that was too big to lift in a home furnished 50 years ago. Read the history of the Grandma Couch and the home decor that went with it at Collectors Weekly, and don't miss the gallery of pictures at the end that will take you back in time.
In the 1950s, a young goatherd named Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja was abandoned in the mountains of southern Spain. He did not want to return to his impoverished and abusive home, so he stayed in the wilderness from the age of seven until he was 19. Rodríguez lived among the wolves, lost his language skills, and never learned to socialize with people. He was eventually found and sent to a convent to be reintegrated with society, but was instead exploited and regarded as an oddity. Then in 2010, his story was made into the movie Entrelobos (Among Wolves), and suddenly everyone wanted to know Rodríguez.
Suddenly, to his shock and dismay, Rodríguez became a celebrity: Spanish TV declared him the “son of wolves”; the BBC dubbed him “the wolf man”. Spanish papers seemed to write about him every other month. At first he was pleased with the attention: after years of rejection and disbelief, his story was being told, and he was finally being accepted. But soon, people wanted more of him than he could give. Journalists were lined up outside his door, and the press wanted to find out everything about his life. Fans wrote him from Germany, America and all over Spain. He was the famous wolf man of the Sierra Morena.
What Rodríguez remembers of his time living wild is that it was “glorious”. When he was found by the police and brought down from the mountains, an untroubled, simple adolescence among animals and birds was cruelly cut short. He had always found it hard to relate to humans, who were baffled by his ignorance and infuriated by his inability to communicate. But now the intensity of their belated fascination was almost as puzzling as their earlier contempt – Rodríguez could never understand what was expected of him.
Fifty years after rejoining civilization, Rodríguez still considers his life among the animals to be preferable to the way he was treated by people. Read the story of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja at The Guardian. -via Digg
This is Beau Tox, a Labrador who was born with facial deformities. His first Instagram photo explains:
Before I was born, I was so squished in the womb by my puppy siblings that my skull didn’t form as it should have. Although my face may look different, it doesn’t cause any issues with brain function. I was adopted after my previous owner had kept me outside and uncared for. I was so infested with heartworms and ear mites that it wasn’t likely I would survive very long. However, a group of amazing doctors did whatever it took to get me healthy again. Because of my ear mite infestation, I lost hearing in my left ear. I am also partially blind, due to my facial deformity. However, these issues don’t bring me down. I am one of the happiest and most loving dogs you’ll ever meet!
Jamie Hulit adopted Beau and makes the many ties you'll see him wearing. Beau now works to promote the adoption of shelter animals. Some have noticed his resemblance to Dug from the movie Up.
The Dover Boys at Pimento University is a classic Merrie Melodies cartoon from 1942. We've posted it here a couple of times. We now have a remake of sorts, a collaboration of more than 90 animators who got together to put their personal spin on the Chuck Jones story. The linked credits are in a spreadsheet used for the project. While the cartoon is still funny as ever, the extra fun is in finding the modern easter eggs many of the reanimators slipped in. -via Metafilter
