As contestants on a game show that has video producers competing against each other, the team of Travis Kurtz and Matin Atrushi had 72 hours to make a funny video, and this is the finished product.
We made this video for a TV show called "Viral Video Showdown" on SyFy Channel (Episode "Such a Cliche"). We had 72 hours to come up with an idea based on: 1.) action 2.) a cliche and 3.) the idiom "Between a rock and a hard place" and then write, shoot, edit and deliver a final product. We hope you enjoy it.
The episode featuring the making of this video will air this Tuesday. -Thanks, Travis!
It's once again time for our collaboration with the wonderfully entertaining What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Or can you make up something interesting?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
See all this week's unlabeled objects at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update:Craig Clayton identified it as a spark plug, which is correct but not fully explanatory. Then JJUUSSTTIINN said these as "ninja rocks," which are broken ceramic spark plug parts used specifically to break windows. As it's a holiday weekend and Alex is feeling generous, both will win t-shirts! Learn more about ninja rocks at the What Is It? blog. The funniest answer came from Lori Cunningham, who told a Thanksgiving story:
The remnants of my grandmother's gravy boat, which I broke 20 years ago, but still hear about every-freakin-Thanksgiving when someone says, "Pass the gravy, please." At least that is what I think they are saying. I'm still at the kid's table.
So she wins a t-shirt, too! Thanks to everyone who played along, and thanks to the What Is It? blog.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Right here in this very post, for your enjoyment and reading pleasure, we reveal the fantastical, the perverse, and the unbelievable history of the one, the only … Coney Island!
In 1884, it had the only hotel in the world shaped like a giant elephant. In the 1920s, it was home to Violetta the Limbless Girl and Toney the Alligator-Skinned Boy. And in 2003, it was the only place in America where you could fire a paintball gun at a human target for the paltry fee of $3. Yes, Coney Island has always been one of a kind.
America's playground didn't spring from the foreheads of entertainment entrepreneurs fully formed and ready to corrupt the masses. Instead, its beginning unfolded much like the history of New York itself.
In 1609, Henry Hudson happened upon a barren sandbar separated from the New York mainland by a shallow creek. What would one day become Coney Island was just a spit of land infested with wild bunny rabbits. According to legend, the fervor with which the rabbits enjoyed themselves impressed early settlers, who decided to name the island in the animals' honor: (The word "cony" is Middle English for rabbit.) Half a century later, English colonists purchased "Rabbit Island," along with the rest of south Brooklyn, from the native Canarsee Indians for the bargain price of some wampum, two guns, and three pounds of powder.
Coney Island remained as barren as the day Hudson found it until pleasure cruises and sea bathing became popular in the early 1800s. Eager to capitalize on the new American infatuation, entrepreneurs opened Shell Road, connecting the burgeoning borough of Brooklyn to Coney Island via a toll road paved with oyster shells. In 1829, Coney Island's first hotel opened, soon followed by more hotels, clam shacks, and bathing pavilions. Within 30 years, Coney Island had become a full-fledged resort, attracting New York's wealthy as well as its working class.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the upper crust moved on to distant, fancier beaches, and Coney Island became a blue-collar getaway. It was democratic, sure, but slowly it succumbed to gambling, drinking, brawling, and prostitution. Partial credit for the demise belonged to John McKane, Coney Island's exceptionally corrupt police chief (who was also the superintendent of a large Sunday school). Under his charge, the resort was nicknamed "Sodom by the Seaside." Garbage boats regularly dumped tons of rotting vegetables, tin cans, and even dog and cat corpses just a mile off shore. When the tide came in, so did New York's refuse.
Fortunately, by the turn of the century, Coney Island had cleaned up its act -sort of.
The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Not actual science.
by Antoni Chan, Ithaca, New York Benjamin Stein, New York, New York Kenneth Bromberg, New York, New York
After purchasing six-packs of soda cans or beer cans, must we cut the plastic rings that hold the cans together? People say that if we discard these rings without first cutting them, birds and fish will get caught in them and die. We decided to test that claim.
The 6-Pack Safety Hypothesis Is there really a significant problem? Does our environment -- and the survival of several species -- hinge on us snipping these plastic rings? Our goal was to prove that fish and birds will not get caught in 6-pack rings.
To do this, we used baited 6-pack rings to try our hardest to catch a bird or a fish.
Our Equipment To purchase supplies for this experiment, we went to our local grocery store, the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. We noticed that outside the store there are both birds in the trees and fish in the water.
Here is a list of the equipment we used: * 1 set of rings from a 6-pack of soda * 1 worm (to use as bait for fish) * bread (to use as bait for birds) * string, a rock and a stick (for fishing rod) * potato chips (to snack on while we waited)
And here is a cost analysis of our research project.
When you think of Thanksgiving films, you think of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and Alice's Restaurant, and to some degree, Miracle on 34th Street, and …what else? There are not very many classic movies centered around Thanksgiving, but if you dig a little, you'll find a few films that aren't exactly fit for prime time audiences. For example, there's Blood Freak, from 1972.
This movie is about a man who turns into a murderous monster with the head of a turkey after he eats a chemically treated gobbler at the turkey farm where he works. Blood Freak has been a cult classic for Thanksgiving for decades now, with many Movie Host shows of the late 70′s onward making a point of screening it at this time of year. The biker who turns into the blood-crazed turkey monster is an Elvis look-alike which adds to the fun. So does the desk-bound, chain-smoking, script-reading narrator who sermonizes about the evils of drug abuse while the movie plays.
There are more lesser-known Thanksgiving movies and shorts in a list at Balladeer's Blog. Link
Government artists knew what would grab attention for China's aerospace research program. Babies! Puppies and kittens! Adorable smiling faces! See more of these posters from the 1960s through the 1980s at Retronaut. Link -via Flavorwire
Fiona Apple is postponing her South American concert tour to be with her dying dog, Janet. Her message explaining the decision was posted at Facebook.
I have a dog Janet, and she’s been ill for almost two years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now.I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then ,an adult offi cially – and she was my child. She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face. She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders. She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight ,or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist. Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact.
But that's just the beginning -the rest will make you run for the tissue box. Read the whole story at Uproxx. Link
Billy is demonstrating different ways to behave at the dinner table. Billy needs therapy, or at least constant supervision. This video contains language that may be deemed a bit rude in the workplace. -via Buzzfeed
It was a lovely idea. A crowd of children were waiting for Father Christmas to arrive at the Broad Street Mall in Reading, England. Santa Claus, played by Steve Chessell of the 11th Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, lowered himself into the shopping center's atrium by rope -but was stopped by his beard getting caught in the rope's rappelling mechanism! Link -via Fark
How do you deal with human-sized steps when you've been bred to have incredibly short legs? It takes courage for this puppy, but she has it. -via Buzzfeed
The Epic Meal Time guys put together a Thanksgiving feast featuring a pig stuffed with a stuffed turkey (by Chef Zadi), brown goo, and a fast-food lasagna, among other dishes. And then they served it at Someone Cares Soup Kitchen. Warning: NSFW language. -via reddit
The Daily Mail has a story about, well, it really doesn't matter what it's about and who can tell from the headline anyway, but don't you just love the way they string words together? Link -via Boing Boing
Design students Laurent Beirnaert, Pierre Bouvier, and Paul Tubiana created "Oncle Sam," a machine that pops popcorn one kernel at a time. It can even butter and salt each individual kernel! Not all that efficient, but as an art project it's fun to watch. The contraption is part of a French exhibit called "Low Tech Factory." See a video of it working at Laughing Squid. Link
Rock critic and music memorabilia collector Simon Reynolds is the author of the new book Retromania. In it, he asserts that obsessing over the past is holding back creativity in music.
Reynolds: I wonder why we’re so obsessed with the past, particularly in music, because that’s my thing. A lot of the other retro phenomena I find vaguely amusing, but the music is a genuine worry because I like to be surprised. The first instinct for a new band starting out now—and I’m talking about very musical, intelligent people—is to go to an existing template and then tinker with it. They have fun trying to reproduce it as exact as they can or adapt it to their purpose in some way. But there are not so many musicians trying to come up with something out of nowhere, which is quite hard to do.
In the past, though, people have tried to do that. That was the general modernist ethos for a long period in music, particularly in the ’60s, but also in the post-punk era I grew up in, and in the electronic techno scene of the ’90s. You might use an idea from the past, but you’d probably mutilate it in some way or drastically change it. Or you’d use it as a springboard to go somewhere new. Now the ethos is much more like reproducing antiques. It’s about getting that drum sound or that guitar texture. It’s literally a backward movement. My concern is a sense of everything being seemingly vaguely familiar. It’s a bit depressing.
How true is it that modern music, and pop culture in general, depends too much on the past? There are plenty of examples in an interview with Reynolds at Collector's Weekly. Link
