The Sheriff's Office of Jefferson County, Missouri needs you to get inebriated and will provide you with the booze to do it.

On Facebook, the Sheriff's Office explains that, in order to provide practical training for officers in conducting field sobriety tests on drunk drivers, they ask that volunteers get liquored up at a designated facility. The officers will then run the volunteers through standard field sobriety tests, including a breathalyzer. This event is called a "wet lab" and is apparently a common practice among police departments.

Participants will be provided with a free ride home (not to jail, the author emphasizes) at the conclusion of the exercise.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay

The gentleman, who is named Tanner, was stopped by police in Cleveland, Ohio on November 23 for driving erratically. Cleveland 19 News reports that the officers suspected that he was intoxicated beyond the legal limit and performed a sobriety test.

Tanner insisted that he was in full control of his faculties and not impaired. To prove it, he asked for and received permission to do a backflip. It worked!

Well, his backflip worked and Tanner landed on his feet. But he failed the test, which involved walking in a straight line, and police arrested him.

Here's the full video of the encounter/performance.

-via Dave Barry

I made this thing called LOL Verifier: a device that only lets you type lol if you’ve actually laughed out loud pic.twitter.com/Gsc63yGEm0

— Brian Moore (@lanewinfield) January 3, 2023

Because we live in fallen times, it has become commonplace for people to use initalisms, such as LOL or LMAO, instead of actually communicating in the English language properly.

Once upon a time, people used the initalism LOL to represent actually laughing out loud during text-based communication. Then that degeneration of the English language decayed into representing mild amusement.

Now LOL is a punctuation mark that has no meaning beyond an acknowledgement of having read something that someone else has typed. It is a sort of online grunt that emerges as a sputtering, eschatological gasp from a dying civilization.

Standing athwart this catastrophic outcome is digital tinkerer Brian Moore. His LOL Verifier records you to make sure that you're actually laughing when you type LOL. It will not allow you to proceed unless you are, indeed, laughing out loud.

-via Laughing Squid

This is Jason Grosboll. KIII-TV News in Corpus Christi, Texas reports that Grosboll has been working at Cinemark's Century 16 movie theater for ten years. During that time, the "Popcorn Guy", as he has become known, has practiced and refined his acrobatic craft.

When you want someone to sling some popcorn your way and to do it so that it's more interesting than Avatar 2, then Grosboll is your entertainment hero.

Recently, TikTok user Oscar Leal observed Grosboll in action, recorded an everyday performance of the master at work, and posted it for the people of the internet to enjoy. Grosboll has since become a viral sensation.

-via Born in Space

The short answer is hard.

The longer answer involves advanced technological aids.

Jacob Schopf represented Germany at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where he won a silver medal in the sport of canoe sprinting. The Olympic events for this sport include separate categories for men and women, singles and doubles, as well as distances of 1000 meters, 500 meters, and 200 meters.

This video from last year shows Schopf using a stationary simulator. I can't find much information about the simulator, aside from this video which shows how complicated it is to enter a kayak in it. Instagram user @CanoeSport illustrates a variety of exercise machines that appear to be made specifically for canoe sprinting.

-via Super Punch

Every year, many classical creative works enter the public domain on January 1^st under US copyright law. Most are forgotten and forgettable, but some still draw in audiences. Smithsonian magazine has a roundup of some of the more famous works that will no longer pay royalties to the estates of their creators. Among them are the original Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, who died in 1930.

Another is, appropriately, the song “The Best Things in Life are Free,” written by Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson in 1927. This song, which revived in popularity due to film performances in the 1950s, is still commanding popular attention—it was recently featured in the TV series White Lotus.

Some classic films are also entering the public domain, including Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Learn about them and more at Smithsonian.

-via Amanda Brennan | Photo: Kim Traynor

The force is strong with this one.. 😂

🎥 IG: marissa_chrzan pic.twitter.com/9JogbN1zu2

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 26, 2022

Instagram user @marisa_chrzan must have been delighted to watch her son appear in the church’s Christmas pageant. The boy, though, had only a shaky grasp on the plot and appeared to think this was an action film. Dressed as a shepherd, he advances upon another shepherd and engages in mock combat.

Some commenters are saying of the boy, “The Force is strong in this one.” Yes, and clearly someone who is skilled with video editing should find a way to replace the staffs with lightsabers and add in appropriate sound effects. The shepherds’ outfits are pretty close to Jedi uniforms as they are.

-via Buitengebieden

Redditor /u/the_colorist is an adherent of the Burning Man lifestyle. Every year, he attends that countercultural festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

One of his recurring problems is that the beers that he carries on his bicycle go flat as it bounces around. He needed to hold them steady, so the_colorist invented and printed this automatic stabilizer.

In the reddit thread at the Burning Man subreddit, many commenters urge him to patent the idea, as they think that it has great money-making potential. He refuses to do so, but freely gives the CAD files to anyone who wishes. As a true believer in the Burning Man lifestyle, he sees profiting from the joy he can bring his fellow festival-goers as morally indecent.

-via Core77

In the TV show Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the famous stage magicians invite other illusionists to trick them. After performing in front of Penn Jillette and Teller, the duo try to describe how the guest star performed the illusion. A panel of judges determine if they succeeded. If Penn and Teller are wrong, then the guest star wins a trophy for successfully fooling their famous colleagues.

In this video, Axel Adler shows how competitive stage magic can be. Somehow he appears to have three legs. Which one (or possibly two) is fake? Just when you think you've got it figured out, Adler does a trick that throws you off.

-via The Awesomer

Can you talk to your toilet? Yes, and some of us do. But toilets generally don't answer back.

Until now. The future has arrived in the form of the Kohler Numi 2.0. The Verge reports that for a mere $11,500, you can have a toilet that comes equipped with Alexa, which is Amazon's digital assistant. Command her to fire up your custom music playlist for your special event.

Additionally, the Numi 2.0 has what you'd expect from a luxury toilet: UV light sanitation, a bidet that can sweep through all of your precious areas, an automatical misting bowl, a heated seat, and an air dryer. You can control all of these features with a handheld remote control.

I don't see any indication that these advanced toilet commands can be controlled by Alexa. That's a shame because I like to keep both hands freed up, not bound to a remote control.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Kohler

The old joke goes that the only reason why people actually watch hockey is for the fights. So why not cut out the boring passing and scoring and focus on just the fights? 

This is the combat sport of ice fighting. It's a lot like mixed martial arts bouts, but takes place on ice rinks by combatants wearing full hockey gear, including skates.

Ice Wars International, which is the athletic league that organizes these fights, has been conducting events this year to growing crowds of spectators. Cowboy State Daily reports that beach bout consists of two one-minute rounds. Most of that limited time is spent in sheer, brutal combat.

Embedded above is a recent ice fight in Canada. The action starts at the 3:20 mark.

-via Dave Barry

1/ Here is how the abomination that is the AT-ST came about. Spoiler alert, it comes down to compromises & mission creep.

"Initial Requirement: We need a small dropship deliverable armored sentry tower (ST) for forward operating bases with space for 4 sentries"

An early sketch: https://t.co/T4FRTI8hd0 pic.twitter.com/3oSp7xoCQS

— Jake Chapman 🇺🇸🚀 ✨🇺🇸 (@vc) December 8, 2022

The Pentagon Wars is a comedy film made in 1998 about the long and bizarre development of the US military's Bradley Fighting Vehicle. This long scene from the film summarizes the long design process of this combat vehicle ran hugely over-budget and failed to accomplish its central purpose:

The organizational culture of the Department of the Defense during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as the Bradley moved from the drawing board to the battlefield is not unique. Jack Chapman explains in a long Twitter thread that the Galactic Empire, in its final years, demonstrated a similar paralysis of leadership that led to the invention of the AT-ST--a combat vehicle that was so inept that even Ewoks armed with Stone Age technology could defeat them.

-via Debby Witt

最近のマクドナルド、手洗い場のみならずスマホ洗い場まであるぞ。。。 pic.twitter.com/sL6D4mZWoE

— shao as a service (@shao1555) October 26, 2022

For most of us, washing our hands after using the toilet is a reflexive act ingrained by long habit. But how often do you wash your phone? I think that I intentionally do about once a month, but that probably isn't enough.

The news website Japan Today reports that the Japanese company WOTA recently introduced the WOSH system of sanitation stations. It's a portable, stand-alone barrel-shaped hand washing sink that includes a phone washing tool that uses ultraviolet light. The company claims that in just 30 seconds (long enough for you to wash you hands), it will sterilize your phone of 99.9% of pathogens.

-via Massimo

The theme music to this classic television series, which aired between 1966 and 1973 is compelling and immediately recognizable. When Argentinian composer Lalo Schifrin wrote it for the series, NPR reports, it was an instant hit. That is endured into the modern film series, which has reworked the theme but found it irreplaceable.

In this remix, musician Jamie Dupuis uses a guitar and a banjo to perform the theme.

Although the banjo is traditionally associated with bluegrass music, it's appropriate for so many other pieces, such as "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Eine Kleine Natchmusik" and "Flight of the Bumblebee."

-via Born in Space

There’s a whole subreddit called Why Women Live Longer which is all about this phenomenon: men doing stupid, dangerous stunts because it would be cool to try. An example is this real-life Beavis & Butthead incident from Britain.

The Daily Mail reports that firefighters in Epping, Essex, UK responded to a hilarious emergency: three men who were building a DIY skatepark in an industrial facility found a huge dryer and decided it would be fun to go for a spin. They were trapped inside for two hours. The intervention of firefighters was necessary because of the men got his ankle trapped in the door and was unable to extricate himself.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo: Alex Borland