This is Risa Yoshiki, a professional model. She's the star of a new Japanese show called I Want Risa Yoshiki to be Angry at Me. The target demographic is 30-something men. Each 5-minute episode is filled with Yoshiki yelling at the camera. She says affirmations like these:
You’re way too damned old to be getting excited over manga! Hey, hey, hey! Hello? Is there something wrong with you? Just knock it the hell off already, ass! Where the hell are you staring? You’re in your late 30s! Shouldn’t you start acting like an adult? Dumbass, listen when people are talking about pancakes!
Noah Veltman is a journalist who applies statistics to popular interests. Two months ago, we saw his charts illustrating the average costs of goods sold in fashion magazines. More recently, he created a cool interactive chart showing how NFL football players have gotten taller and heavier from 1920 to 2014.
Does this change reflect just how Americans have gotten bigger over the past century? Veltman says that further study would be necessary to find out:
You'd also need to look at the growth of athletes in other sports over time. If all athletes have gotten taller and heavier at similar rates, then it would reflect a general trend, but if, say, tennis players have stayed roughly the same size while football players have grown a great deal, that would indicate that football is still an aberration.
You'll notice that around 1990, the mass of data points began to separate into groups. Veltman speculates that this is due to specialization in football:
That likely reflects increased specialization of body type by position, with the heaviest group containing offensive linemen and defensive tackles, the smallest group containing defensive backs, kickers, and some running backs, and the middle group containing other position groups. Nowadays if you're 6' 3" and 280 pounds, you're too big for most skill positions and too small to play line.
Louie the poodle is a canine of refined tastes. No ordinary slop thrown into the bowl is good enough for him. The local humans cannot be trusted to cater to his tastes, so Louie himself mixes the dry and wet dog food into the proper combination.
Give this pooch a cooking show on the Food Network!
For Americans, September 11 will always be a morbid date. It is a time for mourning. But this was not always so. Once, September 11 represented a glorious triumph for America. Today, Americans should also reflect on a September 11 that occurred before our living memory. For 200 years ago on this date, the United States fought and won the Battle of Plattsburgh--the most decisive battle of the War of 1812.
September 11, 1814 was immediately recognized as a great day to Americans as they were enduring the final months of the War of 1812. Later generations also grasped its significance. In his naval history of that war, Theodore Roosevelt referred to the Battle of Plattsburgh as the “greatest naval battle of the war.” Winston Churchill, in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples, called it the “most decisive engagement of the war.”
The victory secured by America’s fighting men at Plattsburgh was precisely that. More than any other single battle of the war, the outcome of Plattsburgh ensured that the War of 1812 ended in a draw instead of an American defeat.
As I mentioned in a previous post about the burning of Washington, the British grand strategy designed by the Duke of Wellington was to tie down American forces on the eastern seaboard and at New Orleans while driving the death blow down the Lake Champlain-Hudson River corridor. Wellington realized that the war in North America could not be fought like the war in Europe. Because America lacked an established road network in its interior, the rivers and lakes between Canada and the United States would have to serve as the highways that would carry British armies into the heartland of America.
Lake Champlain stretches 125 miles from Quebec into New York State and Vermont. At Ticonderoga, a narrow stream connects Lake Champlain to Lake George. That lake extends south 32 miles to within just a few miles of the Hudson River. And, finally, the Hudson River reaches all the way to New York City, the largest city in the United States. It is down this freshwater road that Britain planned to cut the United States in two.
(Painting of the surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga by John Trumbull)
The British effort in 1814 was not the first attempt to divide America along this path. In 1776, a British fleet defeated an American fleet in Lake Champlain off Valcour Island. The following year, General John Burgoyne landed an army at the southern end of the lake and marched it south with the goal of linking up with British forces then occupying New York City. But surrounded, outnumbered, and cut off from supplies, he surrendered to the Americans near Saratoga. It was a devastating blow to the British war effort.
Open Electronics designed and built a robotic lawn mower that is powered entirely by solar energy. It operates autonomously within an area defined by an underground wiring system. When it encounters an obstacle, it changes direction and keeps moving. When it enters a shaded area, the mower draws energy from a battery that charges from the solar panels. You can find complete schematics, including circuit diagrams and code, here.
Last month, Jeff Miller and Meg Strouse of Thrillist attended the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa, California. They partook of the outlandish foods that have become central to county and state fairs, trying out delights such as deep fried pecan pie and bacon-wrapped Jack Daniel's churro.
What got my attention and made my mouth water are these corn dogs sold by Pickle O' Pete. They're made by coring a whole pickle, sliding a hot dog inside, dipping the combination in corn dog batter, then deep frying. Delicious!
Tomato sauce, cheese, pasta, and meat are a filling meal. But Garfield needs to polish off his supper with a bit of dessert. Ashley, the CenterCutCook, has just the recipe for him. The crust is made of an entire package of crushed Double Stuf Oreos, followed by the creme, then chocolate pudding, then Cool Whip, then mini chocolate chips.
The eleventh episode in the sixth season of Friends is called "The One with the Apothecary Table." It's 22 minutes long. But YouTube user Tunglebrek removed all of the jokes and almost all of the laugh track so that it's just 2 minutes, 43 seconds long. The plot remains entirely coherent with two clearly discernible story arcs (an A story and a B story).
He's also done similar work with an episode of The Big Bang Theory (1 minute, 28 seconds) and an episode of Seinfeld (3 minutes, 3 seconds). What other shows would you like to see subjected to this treatment?
What makes this antique restoration perfect is that the chair almost seems originally designed to look like Finn. It wasn't, of course, but redditor reallylovely saw how its forms perfectly fit as a kawaii version of Finn.
She saw the old chair at an antique shop and saw in her mind the image of Finn on the back. She painted it with acrylic, including glow-in-the-dark paint on Finn's socks and hood. For the seat, she used a pre-existing piece of Adventure Time fabric, but also embroidered details on Jake's face herself.
I know that losing access to Facebook can feel like an emergency. You can certainly experience emotional heartbreak as a result of its sudden, inexplicable departure from your life. But police departments would like for you to know that it is not a crisis that they can resolve. Just shelter in place until Facebook resumes normal operations.
Tragically, this emergency lasted a full half hour before Facebook came back online. During that time, well . . . let's just say no one will forget the carnage of August 1, 2014.
Look around you--right where you are now. Ask yourself if you have all of the skills and supplies necessary to endure a social media outage.
XiaozuoZ, an artist in Hubei Province, China, created these striking images of SpongeBob SquarePants characters. Perhaps he was inspired by the new SpongeBob movie, which will be released next year. But even if the movie is his inspiration, his take on the character designs is unique.
James Kerr, AKA "Scorpion Daggger," is an artist who specializes in collages and animated .gifs. When he combines the two, the results are comical. Lately, he's been splicing together images from Renaissance paintings to show unexpected scenes.
David Bowen is a robotic sculptor. By that I mean he makes robotic sculptures, not that he himself is a robot--at least to the best of my knowledge. And not that there's anything wrong with being a robot--I'm no robophobe, mind you.
But I digress. Bowen made a robot that plays a piano. He installed it at the L'Assaut de la Menuiserie, an art gallery in Saint-Étienne, France. A camera mounted on the roof of the building noted the presence of clouds. As clouds flowed over, the robot played keys, thus playing a naturally occurring music in the sky.
Omid Asadi, an artist from Iran, carefully cuts away naturally fallen leaves into highly realistic scenes. His discovery of this medium began when he noticed that other people casually step on what he regards as naturally beautiful:
I started to think why nobody paid attention to these beautiful leaves and trod on them, because of their name - if they were called flowers we wouldn’t tread on them at all!
He's developed this craft with not only refined, precise detail, but also an imaginative eye for the possibilities of the medium.
It's all the elegance of a fine Japanese restaurant with the convenience of a state fair food stand. This is the spicy tuna corn dog, a creation from the Culinary Bro-Down. The first step is to get tuna rolls from "your cheapest, dirtiest local supermarket." Don't worry about food safety because you will deep fry any parasites into submission.
Next, shove a wood stick inside. Then roll it in a batter made of cornmeal, furikake, ginger, and sriracha. Deep fry and serve. You can use chopsticks, but you won't need to because it's a corn dog.
