David Letterman is retiring later this month after 22 years of The Late Show on CBS. The show put together this tribute to Dave’s most memorable moments with his some of his guests. -via Tastefully Offensive
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City Council meetings are usually pretty dry affairs, and even more so when it’s not your town. This is an exception. During a council meeting in Georgetown, Texas, a councilman leaves to relieve himself in the men’s room. But he forgot to turn off the microphone he was wearing. Rachael Jonrowe tries to make her point while he’s gone, but cannot contain herself when the bathroom audio starts. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Ryuji Imai is a real Bruce Lee fan. He has the moves from his movies memorized, and can recreate them with his nunchaku. And Ryuji is only five years old! In this video, he recreates a fight scene from the 1972 film Game of Death. He doesn’t even have to see the movie to know what’s coming next. -via Viral Viral Videos
The Labyrinth Table is a coffee table designed by Benjamin Nordsmark that has a detailed maze underneath its glass top. Even though its enclosed, you can try to solve this maze: it has 6 little figurines of people inside.
Move them around with the help of handles that you run under the table. When you’re through, the handles will stick anywhere on the table, so you can’t lose them. Unlike a full-size labyrinth, the people in this one won’t panic or starve if you run into a dead end or leave them for days without moving. See the Labyrinth Table in action in this video. -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Trevorbirchett)
I lived near Memphis, Tennessee, when The Pyramid was built on the banks of the Mississippi in 1991. It was supposed to be a shining symbol of the city, defining its skyline and drawing people to the downtown river area. I saw Van Halen perform there. But that was a long time ago. The Memphis Grizzlies signed a contract that gave them control over the use of the Pyramid, and then found the construction to be so shoddy that they had their own arena built elsewhere and moved out in 2004. The Pyramid sat unused for over ten years. Until last Wednesday.
The 32-story, 535,000-square foot building is now a Bass Pro Shop. Really. In fact, it’s an entire theme park for outdoorsmen, with its own swamp, hotel, bowling alley, archery range, shooting range, laser arcade, restaurants, and more.
(Image credit: Trevorbirchett)
The result of the makeover is impressive. The cypress swamp covers most of the ground floor. Moss dangles from fake trees, and the watery bog is dotted with stuffed wild pigs and other animals.
Surrounding the swamp are various retail sections with hand-painted wall murals of idyllic outdoor scenes. The fishing section contains about 30,000 items. A general store will sell homemade fudge. The 13-lane bowling alley has a water motif with fish dangling from the ceiling and ball returns shaped like alligator mouths. There's also an interactive duck hunting game.
An elevator takes visitors up to The Lookout at the Pyramid, a restaurant and bar with an observation deck providing panoramic views of the river and city.
Rooms at the Big Cypress Lodge were inspired by hunting camps. They have a rustic feel, with dark wood trim and private porches with rocking chairs.
So beware, if you ask Dad where he’s like to go for vacation this year, he may suggest Memphis, and now you know why. -via BroBible
Every action movie trailer follows the same formula in the past twenty years or so. The formula is so established that I’m often a bit confused as to whether this is a new trailer or something I’ve seen before. Red Letter Media lays out the formula.
Establishing shot of a city.
Bwaaaaaam! (often the sound familiar from Inception)
Mysterious, cryptic, and vague lines.
Make your characters look cool.
Build up to silence, then BAM!
Action Montage!
And don’t forget the powerful and/or inspiring monologue.
End montage with another cut to quiet.
Eh, throw in a laser shooting into the sky. Why not?
Title. (finally)
Clever and/or funny end tag before release date.
Each trope is illustrated with more examples than you can shake a stick at, if you were so inclined. -via Boing Boing
Two days ago, NASA’s MESSENGER orbiter crashed onto the surface of Mercury, after 11 years of exploration. Its final Tweet was enough to bring a tear to your eye.
Well I guess it is time to say goodbye to all my friends, family, support team. I will be making my final impact very soon.
— MESSENGER (@MESSENGER2011) April 30, 2015
It inspired Becky Ferreira to look at other robotic space explorers and how we regard them as sentient beings, gladly sacrificing themselves for the greater good. A lot of that is due to NASA’s habit of setting up first-person Twitter accounts for spaceships, probes, and rovers, in order to engage the public. But NASA isn’t the only space agency that does that.
Indeed, MESSENGER isn’t even the first spacecraft to have live-tweeted its own death, and it certainly wasn’t the most melodramatic about it. That award goes to China’s Yutu lunar rover. In January 2014, the Yutu published a series of tearjerker posts on its Weibo account, after a malfunction threatened its life.
Whoever was operating Yutu’s account milked the situation to the fullest, and even brought up the rover’s thoughts about how its “mother”—the Chang’e 3 lander—would react to its death.
"[Chang'e] doesn't know about my problems yet," the Yutu Weibo account said. "If I can't be fixed, everyone please comfort her."
We envisioned the Philae lander as a cartoon character when it landed on a comet. We all cheered when the Mars Curiosity rover landed so spectacularly on the red planet. Even its creators treated “her” like a child who left home and made good. It was a real contrast to the sadness we felt when the Spirit rover shut down after six years of work -the feisty robot was only scheduled to last three months.
Its story, told by Randall Munroe at xkcd, devastated us. But you’ll be glad to find there’s an alternate ending for that comic in an article about our habit of anthropomorphizing spaceships at Motherboard. -via Digg
Weird Al Yankovic finally received his engraved 2015 Grammy Award, so he took the opportunity to parody all those unboxing videos while he opened it. This is actually Weird Al’s fourth Grammy: he won one each in 1984, 1988, and 2004, too. -via Viral Viral Videos
The Very Merry Seamstress is a company that makes historical costume accessories, and some of their offerings might confound you.
We can take any historical portrait and reproduce a customized Elizabethan whisk, rebato, underpropper or supportasse for you. We work with historical reenactors and theatrical companies to provide only the highest quality accessories for your Elizabethan needs.
Our wisks are constructed with sturdy - yet easily shaped copper wire, bound at cross-points with wire thread. Wisks are covered with your choice of sheer crystal organza in any color or with sheer silk, if you require a period correct whisk. The edges are hand-bound and covered with starched Venise lace. We can add pearls, beads or any other type of embellishment you may need.
Our rebatos are made the same way out whisks are made and are hand-shaped with copper wire, bound at cross-points with wire thread, covered with silk and starched lace.
Our underproppers and supportasses are not as decorative, since they aren't as visible as whisks and rebatos. They are padded and stiffened with sturdy buckram slats, designed to hold your large ruffs in place.
What does all that mean? Relax, wisks, rebatos, underproppers, and supportasses are all types of Elizabethan fashion accessories for the neck. Each one is explained with pictures. Until now, you didn’t even notice they were different, did you? Elizabethan ruffs have their own page. -via Metafilter
A British man tries out a hi-tech toilet in Korea that offers several bidet functions. The video is SFW while the audio is priceless. He’s fortunate the buttons are labeled in English, which leads me to believe he's staying at a tourist hotel. Jeremy had a great comment at YouTube:
The ones I found in Seoul were never in English and the last thing in the world you want is a surprise enema.
I once hit all the buttons and the thing started blasting water out the toilet and against the opposite wall, I couldn't figure out how to shut it off so I just ran away haha, good thing their washrooms usually have a drain in the floor.
Dominik M. Schwarz has always been fascinated with maps. He's also traveled a lot, and he wanted a big world map -the size of an entire wall, with detailed information and place names. Like many of us, he wanted to stick pins in the places he'd been. He couldn’t find the map he wanted for sale, so he made his own!
That doesn’t mean the process was easy. There’s the data collection, the image stitching, testing it on the wall, finding a printer for such a large one-off project, mounting the map, attaching it to the wall, and finding the perfect pins. Every step was more complicated than you’d think, and there were many ideas discarded along the way. Schwarz spent a year and a half on the project, and posted each step with pictures. He’s quite happy with the results. -via Metafilter
If your far-away lover gave you something to remember him by, keeping it in your underwear might seem like a good idea. In fact, that’s how scrimshaw art got into whalebone corsets. If a woman is going to be wearing stays made of baleen or whalebone anyway, a gift inscribed with love from a sailor made him feel closer to her heart -and other body parts.
“The whole concept was to give your loved one a memento, some tangible thing that she could wear or use,” says Nancy Rosin, the president of the National Valentine Collectors Association, who has 38 scrimshaw busks in her collection. “A woman would use something like a pie crimper often, and every time she used it, she would remember her sailor. Busks were huge tokens of love. She could wear it in her corset, where it would be a constant reminder of his love—probably because it was uncomfortable.”
Scrimshaw busks would be engraved with all sorts of symbolic images: A palm frond might indicate a place the whaleman had sailed to, while a North Star would assure the woman that her man would be guided home. Wheat stalks stood for abundance, houses meant security and comfort, and a church indicated plans for marriage. All of these hopes and dreams would be pressing into her torso throughout the day.
These busks were cherished in a bittersweet manner because a woman did not know if her sailor would ever come back. And if he didn’t, then his work would be a memorial. Collectors Weekly explains more about whaling, scrimshaw art, corsets, and how they all fit together.
(Image credit: National Museum of American History)
How many ways can you do Queen's song "Bohemian Rhapsody?" In this collaborative project, Cody the Payne rounded up 59 different Vine users, who each contributed a six-second clip of the song. Individually, they are cute, but together they made an entire music video. Some try to emulate the original video, some illustrate the lyrics, some lip sync, and a few even play instruments. Then there are those who just did something interesting and artful. Is this the beginning of a new collaborative trend? I hope so; projects like this can be a lot of fun! -via Buzzfeed
Neatorama’s favorite unicycle-riding flame-throwing bagpipe-playing cosplayer, Brian Kidd, also known as the Unipiper, has teamed up with Rogue Ales to produce a beer called UnipIPA, which is an IPA beer (explained here) featuring “bagpipe-roasted habanero peppers and lots of geeky goodness,” according to Kidd.
"I've never used the bagpipes as a cooking utensil before," said Kidd. "I just have these ideas and somehow I just make them work."
With help from Buckman Botanical Brewers, Kidd is now roasting habanero peppers with his flame-throwing bagpipe to spice up the IPA naturally named UnipIPA.
"It's like, yes, this makes perfect sense," said Kidd.
"We were just going to roast the peppers like normal people, but he's got flames on his thing, [bagpipes] so we decided to do that obviously," said Buckman Botanical Brewer Danny Connors.
UnipIPA beer will be unveiled May 5 with a tasting at Green Dragon Bistro and Pub in Portland. See a news video about the beer at KPTV. -Thanks, Brian!
(Image credit: The Unipiper at Facebook)
(Image credit: Flickr user Shawn Smith)
The long-running game show is adored by millions. But there was a time—and another time, and one more time—when questions swirled around its survival.
When he welcomed a reporter into his Southern California home, the 44-year-old Alex Trebek was on a roll. Trebek was an industry veteran. For years, he’d worked as a newscaster and sportscaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation while trying to kick-start his career as a TV personality. So far, nothing had stuck. But at the start of the 1984 TV season, he landed something promising—a job as the host of Jeopardy!
Unfortunately, the program had a checkered history. Ratings had soared in the 1960s and early 1970s, but the show had also been canceled—twice. Now the high-paying trivia contest was being updated for a new generation. And as Trebek had quickly learned, Jeopardy!’s biggest hurdle was convincing station managers that a smart game show deserved premium air time. It was a hard argument to make. Programmers knew that established game shows like The Price Is Right and Family Feud could reliably draw a mass audience. But a show this cerebral was a gamble. In several major markets, including New York, Jeopardy! was relegated to a 2 a.m. time slot, a ratings wasteland. Trebek and the producers were pressured to dumb down the program and make the clues easier so viewers wouldn’t feel left out. Still, he remained optimistic.
(Image credit: Flickr user Steve Jurvetson)
As he and the reporter chatted, Trebek suavely flipped on his TV. At the time, Los Angeles was an outlier, airing the show at the decent hour of 3 p.m. But instead of seeing himself trot out to greet the audience, Trebek saw Jack Klugman. The local affiliate had replaced Jeopardy! with reruns of Quincy, M.E. “The fact that Quincy was a coroner seemed appropriate,” Trebek would later write. His optimism instantly disappeared.
What a difference three decades make. Trebek no longer worries about job security. But before viewers grew accustomed to shouting answers at the screen, its host and crew had to resolve one nagging question: Was Jeopardy! too smart for its own good?
Creating Jeopardy!
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