Every month, National Geographic publishes a very neat photo gallery called Vision of Earth. This particular one, from the June 2009 selection (third pic, you can see the uncensored version there - warning: clear shot of the behind of a naked, 69-year-old man):
Belarus—Naked on an 18°F day, Valentsin Tolkachev clears an icy canal for swimming. The 69-year-old started the Optimalists—a Minsk-based club with 200-some members—in 1989 to promote hale activities in rural settings.
Your task, after you wash your eyes, is to caption the photo. Funniest one will win a custom black and white Monkey drawing by Adam Koford. Place your caption in the comment section of this post - one caption per comment, please, though you can enter as many funny ones as you can think of. Good luck!
Update 6/19/09 - Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to jj who won with this caption: The season’s first snow always reminds me of my childhood, of crazy Uncle Hank teaching me to swim like a man.
Long
before he was an outlaw country crooner, Merle Haggard was a real outlaw
- albeit a bad one. At the rebellious age of 20, Haggard and a few friends
planned to rob a restaurant.
They got drunk and waited until 3 o'clock in the morning, when they knew
it would be empty. But when they broke in, they were surprised to find
the restaurant full of people. Turns out, in their drunken haze, they
accidentally wandered in at 10:30 pm. The attempted burglary landed Haggard
in notorious San Quentin State Prison, where he saw Johnny Cash perform
three times, inspiring him to pick guitars instead of locks.
In the olden days, crooks used to "case" joints, staking out
a place and detailing all the intricacies before attempting to rob the
business. But on March 12, 2008, two young criminals in Port St. Lucie,
Florida, proved that tradition is dead. The would-be robbers confidently
entered the lobby of a business, hid their hands in their jackets like
guns, and demanded money from the woman at the front desk. Unfortunately,
there was one flaw in the plan - the "business" was actually
a police station.
When God Closes a Window ...
Never
come between a defensive lineman and his chalupa. Employees at a Lawrence,
Kansas, Taco Bell learned this lesson the hard way in 1999 when they forgot
to include one of the deluxe tacos in the order of Dion Rayford, a former
member of the Kansas Jayhawks.
Enraged, Rayford lunged through the store's drive-thru window, going
after the employees like they were chalupas themselves. But drive-thru
windows aren't meant to accommodate a 6'3", 270-lb. lineman, and
Rayford got stuck. There he remained, half inside and half outside the
Taco Bell, until the police arrived to dislodge him, and then arrest him.
Pier Review
Despite
being a former child star, late actor Brad Renfro (The Client, Sleepers)
could never afford a $175,000 yacht. So, in 2000, the 18-year-old actor
decided to steal one from a Ft. Lauderdale marina.
Unfortunately for him, the 45-ft. vessel was still tied to the dock.
When Renfro fired up the engine for a joy ride, the yacht inched forward
and was quickly yanked back into the dock, damaging the stern and alerting
everyone that something fishy was afoot. Nearby boaters held the beardless
pirate until police arrived. (Photo: Brad Renfro's mugshot at The
Smoking Gun)
Go Directly to Jail: 4 Brilliantly Bungled Crimes is written by Adam K. Raymond.
It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the
May/June
2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss'
entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
If you consider that the modern toilet paper was first introduced in 1857, the whole butt wipe thing is waaay due for a major advance.
Ancient Romans used to wipe their butts after going to the bathroom with a sponge on a stick (which they put in a bucket of saltwater after they're done for reuse - Eew!) - so, in a nod to history, here's Comfort Wipe: a stick that lets you wipe your behind without ever coming close to touching it with your bare hands.
Now, before you recoil in horror, consider that this invention is actually quite useful for people with limited range of motion due to disability. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via AdFreak
Handbag designer Rachel Nasvik had a great idea on how to promote her new line for cheap: stage a great urban hunt for handbags!
Rachel places her handbags, stuffed with all sorts of girly stuff like lip gloss and bobby pins along with the note "You didn't find this bag, this bag found you," hidden in public places around New York City. If you find it, you can keep it.
Clues on the whereabouts of her handbags are on Rachel's Twitter. You can see imags of the discovered bags on her blog Thrill of the Chase - via Steve Hall and Angela Natividad's Adrants
Whatever you think of the ad campaign, the photo is priceless! PLEASE NO PEE-PEE.
You're looking at the the star fort of Bourtange in the Netherlands. It sure looks fantastic, but there's a wily logic behind building a fort in such a shape. Turns out, a circular fortification of the medieval era was vulnerable to cannon fire. All the crazy angles and moats surrounding the star-shaped fort was made it easier to defend.
There's no danger of an invading horde today, but these star-shaped formations are so darned picturesque that I wish they'd build more of these instead of ho-hum suburbs and strip malls.
If you like the Bourtange fort above, check out this article written by one of our favorite bloggers, Shaun Usher (better known as deputy dog). He has compiled 6 communities with intriguing bird's eye shapes as can be seen on Google Maps. He even turned the caps on for us: Link - Thanks Dave!
Remember our post about boy scouts trained in anti-terrorism? In one high school in Maryland, you can even take courses in domestic security - but before you cry foul, consider this: it may simply be a good career move for the kids.
Meade High School, where Edler teaches, made its own history this year. The long-troubled public high school become one of the first in the nation to offer a four-year course in domestic security. The goal: to help graduates build careers in one of America's few growth industries.
"This course will help me get a top-secret security clearance," said Darryl Bagley, an eager 15-year-old. "That way I can always get a job."
Meade offers its 2,150 students a standard high school curriculum, including electives like advanced calculus and carpentry. But the 90 ninth-graders who chose the new homeland security program this last school year focused on topics torn from the headlines: Islamic jihadism, nuclear arms, cyber-crime, domestic militias and the like.
New themes even were added to their science, social studies and English classes.
"There's a lot of homeland security issues in 'Romeo and Juliet,' " said Bill Sheppard, the program coordinator. "Like, how do you deal with infiltration in your own family?"
Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times has the story of agents in the making: Link (Photo: Chris Usher / LA Times)
We've all experienced the tip of the tongue moment where we wanted to say something but just couldn't remember the word. But what causes this momentary lapses in vocabulary?
Psychologist Jennie Pyers of Wellesley College in Massachusetts compared billinguals, monolinguals and people who are fluent in sign language to - what is that darned word ... elucidate - the possible cause of this phenomenon:
To provoke tip-of-the-tongue moments, the researchers showed the bilinguals, as well as a control group of 22 English monolinguals, pictures of dozens of different objects and challenged the volunteers to name them in 30 seconds. The viewed objects – which included axes, weathervanes, gyroscopes, nooses and metronomes – were obscure enough to elicit tip-of-the-tongue experiences in all but one participant.
As with previous experiments, monolinguals had fewer tip-of-the-tongue experiences than bilinguals, about 7 words versus 12, out of a total of 52 – though Pyers' team counted only instances where the volunteer knew the word.
However, Spanish bilinguals experienced roughly the same number of tip-of-the-tongues as sign language bilinguals. This rules out the possibility that similar-sounding words compete for our brain's attention in tip-of-the-tongue experiences.
More likely, tip-of-the-tongue experiences occur when we're trying to recall rarely used words, Pyers says.
"People often have tip of the tongue experiences for proper names, again because we don't use them very frequently," she adds.
After years of pulling stunts on museums around the world, the guerrilla artist Banksy has gone legit. Somewhat. He's pulled off his most audacious stunt yet: a secret exhibition in Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery.
In a rare statement Banksy said: 'The people in Bristol have always been very good to me - I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum. [...]
He added: 'This is the first show I've ever done where taxpayers' money is being used to hang my ictures up rather than scrape them off.'
The exhibition - called Banksy Versus Bristol Museum - consists of more than 100 items and will run for three weeks.
We've seen many strange things for sale on eBay (our pal Urlesque blog even has a regular feature called Today in eBay about the strangest things sold on the popular auction site), but this one is really, really weird: drool.
The seller [of a China's equivalent of eBay] claimed the saliva was a 'tonic' and was asking the equivalent of £2 a small bottle, reports Hunan Online. Listings for the bottles included pictures of the 18-year-old girls the saliva was supposedly taken from. [...]
"The drool was all collected from 18-year-old pretty girls when they were sleeping. And buyers can pay later after they certified the authenticity of this product," he said.
The listings were pulled, and the seller didn't even sell a bottle: Link
It's like that movie Final Destination. An Italian woman who didn't get on Air France flight 447 because she arrived late to the airport was killed in a car crash just two weeks later:
Johanna Ganthaler, a pensioner from Bolzano-Bozen province, had been on holiday in Brazil with her husband Kurt and missed Air France Flight 447 after turning up late at Rio de Janeiro airport on May 31.
All 228 people aboard lost their lives after the plane crashed into the Atlantic four hours into its flight to Paris. [...]
It said that Ms Ganthaler died when their car veered across a road in Kufstein, Austria, and swerved into an oncoming truck. Her husband was seriously injured.
From Neatorama's Online Store, here's The Worst Day in the 9th Grade ... Ever by Matthew Lawson. Available in T-shirt, sweatshirt, and hoodies.
Oh, I remember the dissection day in my high school biology class. Ah, good times! http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?worst-day-9th-grade-pid318.html | More Funny Science T-Shirts
Ninjas have got nothing on these animals! One minute you see only a sofa, and the next out comes ... a dog, cats, and a ferret (ok, so they're not all in the same couch, mmkay?)
Urlesque blog has the top 5 best videos of animals hiding in sofas: Link
Next week is Father's Day, and in the spirit of celebrating dads, Asylum has put together the greatest moments in pop culture fatherhood:
Ah, the pop culture dad. Is anyone more bumbling? Film and TV have provided us with a bevy of memorable dads, all perpetuating the stereotype of the well-meaning, but dim-witted (or borderline psychotic) pop. (Actually, sometimes it isn't borderline.) In honor of Father's Day, we salute a few of the greatest moments in pop culture dad-itude. They all deserve a "Father of the Year" novelty award ... and possibly psychiatric counseling.
From martini-mixing lessons to murdering mobsters, see some of the best moments [of pop culture fatherhood]
Housing prices may have tanked, but the cost of a coveted parking space in Back Bay, Boston, is apparently unfazed by the economic crisis:
An unidentified buyer yesterday paid $300,000 for a private parking space in the Back Bay, making it the most expensive parking space in Boston, according to Listing Information Network, which tracks the city's real estate market.
Debra Sordillo, the Coldwell sales agent who brokered the deal, said several residents at 48 Commonwealth Ave. engaged in a bidding war for the space, driving the asking price of $250,000 up to the record-breaking $300,000. The winning bidder did not want to be identified, she said.
The price is more than what many people pay for a house, but Sordillo said prime parking spaces near the Public Garden are in short supply.
