There’s many a slip ’twixt the expensive handheld device and the pavement, as these clips from Fail Army show us. You’ve probably seen at least some of them before, but they are funny enough to justify another peek.
Fail Army put this compilation together to promote their new phone app. Many of the people featured will have to purchase a new phone before they can use it. One grandmother is not interested at all, and would prefer chocolate, thank you. Contains NSFW language. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival hosts all kinds of art and music, but it is noted for its comedy award. This year’s festival crowned punster Darren Walsh with the award for the funniest joke. The one-liner was a part of his one-hour show at the festival. The top 10 jokes were ranked, and they are as follows:
1: Darren Walsh: “I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans-free.”
2: Stewart Francis: “Kim Kardashian is saddled with a huge arse... but enough about Kanye West.”
3: Adam Hess: “Surely every car is a people carrier?”
4: Masai Graham: “What’s the difference between a ‘hippo’ and a ‘Zippo’? One is really heavy, the other is a little lighter.”
5: Dave Green: “If I could take just one thing to a desert island I probably wouldn’t go.”
6: Mark Nelson: “Jesus fed 5,000 people with two fishes and a loaf of bread. That’s not a miracle. That’s tapas.”
7: Tom Parry: “Red sky at night. Shepherd’s delight. Blue sky at night. Day.”
=8: Alun Cochrane: “The first time I met my wife, I knew she was a keeper. She was wearing massive gloves.”
=8: Simon Munnery: “Clowns divorce. Custardy battle.”
10: Grace The Child: “They’re always telling me to live my dreams. But I don’t want to be naked in an exam I haven’t revised for...”
For some of those, I guess you just had to be there. Read more about Walsh’s comedy and the festival (which runs through Monday) at the Independent. -via Metafilter
Cat Hospital is a classic soap opera set in a hospital, with cats. The lead characters are a surgeon who lost an eye to a cat scratch from a patient, and nurse Mittens, who gets around.
Follow the adventures of the doctors and nurses of Cat Hospital, their families, the sexy ambulance driver, Dr. Scratch Adams, patients with nine lives, and a variety of standard soap opera stereotypes both human and feline. Oh yeah, and an overabundance of cat puns. -via HuffPo
’Tis the season to roll out the most imaginative takes on the pumpkin spice craze. The latest is M&Ms. The candy company is rolling out two seasonal flavors: Pecan Pie M&Ms and Pumpkin Spice Latte M&Ms. Both use artificial flavoring; I suppose a lot of it if you’re going to make chocolate taste like not only pumpkin pie spice but latte as well. The Pecan Pie flavor seems even weirder, like ruining two great ideas by combining them. Both flavors will be available soon at Target stores. -via Uproxx
A sign welcoming visitors to the Scottish Isle of Bute in both English and Gaelic has been standing for around nine years, but it was only recently that officials were told of a translation error -actually just a missing accent mark- that renamed the island Penis island.
Àdhamh Ó Broin, a native dialect campaigner and Gaelic coach for the TV series Outlander, said: “It’s meant to be the genitive case, not the genital case. A genitive case is when one noun follows another and its form changes. Bhòid is Bute but Bhoid is penis. You would need the accent over the ‘O’. It says ‘Welcome to the doorway to the beauty of Penis Island’.”
He added: “You know when people speak Chinese the wrong way and they end up saying ‘Your mother is a dog’ instead of ‘The rice is nice’? It’s like that.”
After a photograph of the sign went viral, local council members promised to investigate how the sign ended up that way. The sign will be corrected as soon as possible.
Bute councillor Len Scoullar, an independent, said: “It makes us look bloody stupid.
What can Screen Junkies tear apart in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road? In this Honest Trailer, they are stretched pretty hard to find much to nitpick about. Well, there’s the fact that Max himself is pretty much superfluous to the film.
Oh, the movie isn’t perfect, but it was so much fun that even an Honest Trailer had to admit it was altogether a badass flick. The credits, full of puns and pop culture references, are the best part. -via Tastefully Offensive
Earl Grey is a cat with political ambitions. He is running for prime minister of Canada as the Tuxedo Party candidate. That’s the same party that promoted the candidacy of Tuxedo Stan for mayor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Stan, sadly, died in 2013. Earl Grey is keeping Stan’s legacy alive by aiming for a nationwide office. His platform is all about animal welfare and animal rights, particularly those of cats. Read more about Earl Grey and his campaign at his website, and see more pictures of the cat at Buzzfeed.
It’s all good advice. Some of it hits close to home, especially when they get in my age range. Of course, the best advice is from the 93-year-old man who is the last one. -via reddit
Mary Lou Wesselhoeft runs a Florida creamery that makes skim milk. All-natural skim milk, with nothing added. She has a free speech lawsuit against the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DACS) because they forbade her from calling the product “skim milk.”
Mary Lou wants to label it as “pasteurized skim milk.” But DACS wants her to use a confusing and misleading label that labels the milk something it is not: “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed.”
Why? Because DACS has decided that what you and I call skim milk—that is, whole milk with the cream skimmed off—is not actually skim milk at all unless it’s artificially injected with vitamin A. The fact is, when milk is skimmed, much of its vitamin A is removed. DACS has demanded that it not be called “skim milk” unless and until vitamin A is injected back into it. Mary Lou suggested other labels that would inform her customers the skim milk is merely pasteurized skim milk, not an artificially processed “milk product,” but DACS rejected each one.
The agency’s reasoning behind the rule is to give consumers what they expect from product labels, but let’s be honest -do you ever think about the vitamin A content of your milk? I don’t. I might think of the vitamin D content, only because milk with vitamin D added is labeled as such. Actually, I just buy whole milk. However, the result of the regulation is that they are ordering Ocheesee Creamery to effectively lie about what their milk jugs have in them. Maybe they could come up with a compromise. How about ALL skim milk be labeled as “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed.” The standard skim milk we are supposedly used to can be labeled “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed and Re-Added.” The result of that will be a whole lot of Floridians switching to regular whole milk. -via reddit
The fabulously wealthy Rabassa de Perelló family build themselves a home in Valencia, Spain, in 1750. They hired the most prestigious architects and builders, and spared no expense on the materials and artwork. The result is an elaborately ornate, even overdone, Baroque palace.
It’s impossible to walk past the palace without stopping in stunned silence at the elaborate alabaster sculptures which frame the principal entrance. A statue of Our Lady of the Rosary stands above the door, while two rivers (symbolizing the “Dos Aguas” of the family’s title) cascade down either side of the niche. Closer to the ground, two buckled-over giants are supporting an intricately-decorated scene of trees, leaves, fruits, animals, the family crest and, of course, abundant waters.
The inside is even more astounding. The Palace of the Marquis de Dos Aguas has been fully restored with many of its original furnishings, and is also the home of the González Martí National Museum of Ceramics and Sumptuary Arts. Quite a sight! Get a mini-tour with lots of pictures and video from Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell at For 91 Days.
Here we have a newsworthy version of the classic moment when a bunch of women see a kitten and squeal with delight. They had a really good reason- this kitten’s life was saved from a storm drain full of rising water during a storm in Charleston, South Carolina. Dorella Tuckwiller of the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee went head first into the drain to pull the kitten out. Firefighter Galeena Wileman held a rope tied to Tuckwiller’s foot in case the attempt went bad.
There were three kittens in the drain when the storm began. The mother cat removed one, another kitten drowned, and the third was rescued. The rushing water was much worse before the video began. Firefighters and volunteers built a makeshift dam upstream from the drain to lower the water level for the rescue. The kitten, named Stormy, spent some time in an animal hospital and is now is doing well in a foster home. -via Laughing Squid
A few years ago, Alex posted about kudzu, a peculiar invasive species of fast-growing vine that has become a symbol of the South. Photographs of kudzu covering trees, telephone poles, and abandoned houses are impressive to those not familiar with the plant. We who live with it make enough jokes about it to add to its mystique. In popular literature, it became “the plant that ate the South.”
Though William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and others in that first great generation of Southern writers largely ignored kudzu, its metaphorical attraction became irresistible by the early 1960s. In the often-cited poem “Kudzu,” Georgia novelist James Dickey teases Southerners with their own tall tales, invoking an outrageous kudzu-smothered world where families close the windows at night to keep the invader out, where the writhing vines and their snakes are indistinguishable. “I thought the whole world would someday be covered by it, that it would grow as fast as Jack’s beanstalk, and that every person on earth would have to live forever knee-deep in its leaves,” Morris wrote in Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood.
For the generations of writers who followed, many no longer intimately connected to the land, kudzu served as a shorthand for describing the Southern landscape and experience, a ready way of identifying the place, the writer, the effort as genuinely Southern. A writer for Deep South Magazine recently gushed that kudzu is “the ultimate icon for the South...an amazing metaphor for just about every issue you can imagine within Southern Studies.” One blogger, surveying the kudzu-littered literature of the modern South, dryly commented that all you have to do to become a Southern novelist is “throw in a few references to sweet tea and kudzu.”
But that’s not the way it is. The oft-quoted statistic of kudzu covering nine million acres came from a dubious source that has since been debunked. In fact, there are many myths about kudzu that just ain’t necessarily so, that you can read about at Smithsonian. -via Digg
Keir Clarke built an interactive map that shows the top ten U.S. cities for every decade’s census from 1790. Included is a changing list of the cities and a red marker showing the country’s geographical population center. As you click through the decades, you can see it move west. The list itself is interesting. The number one city never changes, but others jump on and off the top ten. While New York City stays at the top, Brooklyn was also on the top ten through most of the 19th century. The interactive map is here, and you can read about how the map was created at Maps Mania.
Look at this kitchen. The stove is wrecked. The oven is wrecked. The stove hood is wrecked. Now look up- the lid is embedded in the ceiling! And there are bits of food all over, which they’ll probably be finding for years to come. This is what happens when all the safety features of a pressure cooker fail at once. Redditor MaggleCole posted this as evidence.
This group of friends loves basketball trick shots, even if they are just passing and bouncing the ball until someone actually gets near the basket. How to make it more interesting? Rig up a Rube Goldeberg-style route to get that basketball somewhere near the basket!
This is a one-shot sequence, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only shot. The video description says it took three days of preparation and 137 attempts to get it right. Was it worth it? Two million YouTube views says yes! -via Viral Viral Videos
