Two professional warriors face off against each other in a refined yet brutal form of combat. This is sword fight of cinema, which is the source of some of the most compelling scenes in film history. Clara Darko rounded up selections of 60 great movie sword fights, including scenes from The Princess Bride, Star Wars, Rob Roy, Kill Bill, Pirates of the Caribbean, among many more. They're arranged from a cautious beginning to a bloody end. She notes that the soundtrack, which was very well selected, is from Kill Bill.
It's not who he is underneath, but what he does that defines him. For Watermelon Brother, as the people of Beijing have come to call him, that's wearing a watermelon on his head. He's the hero that China's capital city deserves. The Daily Telegraph reports:
One commuter told the Beijing Morning Post he was freaked out by the man who loves to put on the hollowed-out fruit helmet and reported him to police.
"It was so scary last night when I was on the metro,” he said.
“This guy was just hanging around on the train wearing a watermelon mask with a beer bottle … apparently he was totally drunk.”
"I was scared by this watermelon brother too," said another passenger. "I posted some pictures of him on Weibo.”
Beijing Metro Police questioned the man after being alerted to his location by passengers and subway staff.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Thus begins This Is Water, a famous commencement address that writer David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. He tells the graduates that a true education is the ability to have awareness--an awareness of the world around them and the people in it as individuals. The water is the continuing awareness of this while we live in the daily routines that push it into the background of our minds.
Filmmakers at The Glossary offer this excerpt of This Is Water, focusing on the illustration of the checkout line--a time of ordinary life that no one enjoys and is often frustrating.
I wrote this post on Saturday morning on my computer in my living room. I was tired and just beginning to chip away at my to-do list. While searching for content, I played this video. My wife passed by and started watching it.
By the end, I had already decided to post the video at Neatorama. My wife was deeply moved by it and asked how I felt about what it had to say. This question took me by surprise. I responded, "I don't know. I guess I spent the time trying to figure out how to write this up for Neatorama."
The otter aquarium at the Keikyu Aburatsubo Marine Park in Miura City, Japan, is designed for optimal traffic flow. The otters don't have to spend a long time on their daily commutes because their tank includes a roundabout. You can see more photos of their transportation network at Kohan Studio (translation).
BuzzFeed asked its readers to talk about their weirdest dreams. Cartoonist Dan Meth illustrated several of them, such as this one by Sam Michele Uttecht Heltibridle:
Batman (Christian Bale’s version) and Jareth the Goblin King (from the Labyrinth) were slap-fighting each other like children over who was going to go to the theater with me.
Holly and Bai’yali are koalas at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. They've moved away from their mothers and become treemates. As you can see, the couple is getting quite close, as young lovers do. You can see more photos of them at Zoo Borns.
Check your pockets. Do you have $350,000 handy? If you do, then you can own the Undisputable Cuz, this gloriously huge portable barbecue pit now on sale on eBay. Terry Folsom of Brenham, Texas is the current owner. Why he would ever want to part with it is a mystery, especially once you hear what it has to offer: the trailer-mounted assembly is 75 feet long and contains a walk-in cooler. It can cook 4 tons of meat at a time, which is enough to a good family weekend get-together.
Like the bricklaying video I posted a couple years ago, there's something calming and appealing about watching someone become, through practice, the master of a skill you might not think of. This employee of the Golden Gate Bridge Transportation District can plug pylons into holes made for them along the Golden Gate Bridge. He does so while the truck he's travelling on is moving at considerable speed.
He never misses a single hole throughout the video.
Lars Andersen, the fastest archer in the world, is back with a mesmerizing video showing his apparently superhuman abilities with a bow and arrow. He has revived centuries-old techniques in positioning, such a holding the arrow along the right rather than the left side of the bow. Andersen describes them at length in the notes to the YouTube video below.
Happiness is possible on this earth because these haggis pops are actually real! It's more portable than the world's largest haggis and surely just as tasty. Instructables member PenfoldPlant, the inventor of the Möbius bacon strip, made them for a Burns Supper, an annual celebration of the life and work of Scottish poet Robert Burns that takes place on January 25.
PenfoldPlant, a true traditionalist, made them from fresh sheep guts. He even cleaned and prepated the stomach itself, which serves as the coating of these delicious wonders. This step required careful work. He placed a ping pong ball in part of the stomach, then tied off and cut that part off the rest of the stomach.
You stand under the hot water for a couple minutes. It dances over your body. The steam rises and fills your nostrils. Your world is, for a brief moment, calm and peaceful. Now is the opportunity for enlightenment.
That is when a shower thought--an experience of mundane profundity--enters your mind. Imgur member Buttman illustrated 20 of them.
We're living in the future! There are no flying cars yet, but there are all sorts of new careers that you can prepare for. The children's book author and illustrator Richard Scarry became famous for his fictitious city of Busytown, where anthropomorphic animals engage in many different jobs.
When they were first published in the 1960s, the Busytown books gave children many different career options to consider. But most of those are now out of date. This is the internet age, so artist Tony Ruth updates the series with BusinessTown. Have a look to find out "what value-creating winners do all day."
The famous Danish chef René Redzepi has brought the entire staff of Noma, his restaurant in Copenhagen, to Tokyo. At his new location, he's offering his unique take on Japanese cuisine. He launched the endeavor with a grand 16-course feast that began this dish. It's jumbo shrimp served with black ants. The Japan Times describes the taste:
But it is the seasoning — “flavors of the Nagano forest” the menu calls it — that defines this dish. A dozen tiny wild black ants are carefully arranged on the shrimp, their little pinpricks of sharp acidity acting as a perfect accent for the sweet, pink flesh.
Sarah Showfety of New Jersey is the mother of a 22-month old baby. She's got another one on the way. She's busy, tired, and stressed. In other words, she's the mother of a toddler.
Like any parent, she's taking shortcuts. That's the only way you get through this period relatively sane. Showfety knows that her decisions are not always the best, so she's already writing apology notes to her daughter. The results are quite funny. You can read them all at Dear Baby XO.
