When you go to Showtime at the Apollo, you expect to hear some awesome music, and maybe see a dance routine or two. The audience wasn't prepared for Troy James.
The audience reaction is the really enjoyable part. Troy James is a noted Canadian contortionist who has appeared in several movies, usually as a monster or supernatural being, designed to freak people out. He's good at that! -via reddit
While Condé Nast Traveler had 70 people from 70 countries together, they asked them all kinds of things. We showed you how they imitate Americans and revealed their own nation's stereotypes. Now they all show us how to imitate a dog and then a cat in their own language.
The sounds that a cat and a dog make aren't all that different around the world. That's okay, because the real comedy here is in listening to all these folks barking and meowing in rapid-fire succession. -via Tastefully Offensive
You are much more likely to sell something on the internet if you show it in a photograph. How do you take a picture of a mirror you're trying to sell? We've seen the photos of mirrors that show someone naked in the background, because those always go viral.
Yeah, the first thing I thought of is to take a picture of the mirror at an angle. Few people think of that, but many go the extra mile to get the picture without showing themselves. The results can be ridiculous.
Or the picture ends up showing the seller, but not in the way they would want to be seen. After all, the picture is of the mirror! Bored Panda has compiled a list of 63 pictures of mirrors for sale, ranked for their comedic value.
The series Roseanne will return to ABC on March 27, with the same actors reprising their roles in the Conner family. The show was considered groundbreaking in its depiction of a working class family in 1988, but it wasn't the first. Let's jump back a couple decades to 1971 and All in the Family. Before then, almost all sitcoms featured successful middle-class families with a single wage earner in a beautiful home. Archie Bunker and his family were different, and more relatable to Americans who lived the same way. Producer Norman Lear adapted the British show Till Death Do Us Part to highlight the generation gap between Archie and his wife Edith and their more progressive daughter and son-in-law.
The dilapidated aesthetic mirrored Archie’s character traits; he was retrograde, incapable of dealing with the modern world, a simpleton left behind by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, a pathetically displaced “historical loser.” Lear used him as a device to make racism and sexism look foolish and unhip, but liberals protested that as a “loveable bigot,” Archie actually made intolerance acceptable. Lear had intended to create a satirical and exaggerated figure, what one TV critic called “hardhat hyperbole,” but not everyone got the joke.
Archie was relatable to audience members who felt stuck in dead end jobs with little hope of upward mobility, and who were similarly bewildered by the new rules of political correctness. To these white conservative viewers, he represented something of a folk hero. They purchased “Archie for President” memorabilia unironically and sympathized with his longing for the good old days. Archie was both the emotional center of “All in the Family” and the clear target of its ridicule.
But the real legacy of All in the Family was its effect on television comedy as a whole. It opened the doors for so many culturally significant shows that came after, including Roseanne. Read about how All in the Family changed TV at Smithsonian.
The weekend is only wonderful for those who have a life. It's not so bad if you crave solitude, but even if you enjoy time alone, it's a bit frustrating to realize that you don't have a choice in the matter. Jake Like Onions has an antidote for all the celebratory "It's Friday!" posts you'll see today.
Traffic in rural Vietnam stopped because some ducks were crossing the road. How many ducks? All of them!
Lê Tấn Tài started recording them after noticing how many there were. We'll never know how many ducks had already crossed by that time. I don't know what that guy was thinking, honking his horn. They aren't going to go any faster. And you can't make them stop following each other. -via Digg
A narrow gorge in Staffordshire, England, looks like something out of a fairy tale. But Lud's Church is a real place that could have inspired fairy tales. The chasm penetrates 60 feet down into the bedrock, and the humidity encourages growth, even as the limited sunlight struggles to penetrate its depth. The result is a lush, green, moss-covered chapel of rock. The various tales told of Lud's Church associate it with Arthurian legends, the Celtic god Llud, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robin Hood, and Walter de Lud-Auk, leader of the Lollards. His daughter is said to haunt the gorge.
Local legend tells of Alice’s ghost haunting Lud’s Church, along with “a headless figure echoing the beheading ritual of Gawain and the Green Knight.” Whatever your personal beliefs, the Arthurian reference is notable for the chasm’s connection to the Green Chapel, where in the chivalric romance Sir Gawain of the Round Table faced the Green Knight one last time. Based on the anonymous author’s description, the Green Chapel is thought to be either Lud’s Church or nearby Nan Tor.
Read deeper into the mythology of Lud's Church, and see more beautiful pictures at Urban Ghosts.
(Image credit: August Schwerdfeger)
Oh yeah, you better believe this one contains spoilers for The Last Jedi. In fact, it tells the entire story (more or less; Leia and Poe are skipped) in fast-forward style, narrated by a young fan who can't be bothered to remember all the character's names. Bonus: the original trilogy is covered in the first 12 seconds.
Yes, I know it's CGI instead of stop-motion. This is from Disney, after all. Sure, you probably can't follow the plot this quickly if you haven't seen the movie, but if you haven't seen the movie, you wouldn't want to watch this video anyway. -via Star Wars
As we power through the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA basketball tournament, we may want to take a minute to contemplate how we got here. Basketball is a relatively recent sport, invented in 1891 by PE teacher James Naismith as a safer alternative to football. Within just a few years, it had spread to YMCA teams, the military, high schools, colleges, and even spawned professional teams. An end of the year tournament first occurred between Indiana high schools in 1908. The idea went to college when the NAIA held a tournament in 1937, and the NIT followed in 1938.
Ohio State coach Harold Olsen, who was the president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches at the time, knew his association, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), had to devise a tournament to keep pace with their rivals. On March 17, 1939, the NCAA tournament was born with eight teams vying for the top spot. It ended with a championship game at Patten Gymnasium on Northwestern’s Evanston campus between the Oregon Webfoots and Olsen’s Ohio State Buckeyes. In front of an almost sold out crowd of 5,500, plus James Naismith himself, the Webfoots beat the Buckeyes, 46 to 33. The whole tournament actually left the NCAA in the hole financially about $2500 (or about $35,000 today), but no matter. They did it again the next year, 1940, and it turned a profit. The NCAA tournament has been turning March mad ever since.
But where did the term March Madness come from? That's even more complex, as it was used for things other than basketball long before it became associated with the NCAA tournament. Read the origins of the phrase along with the tournament history at Today I Found Out.
A bachelor lives with the memories of all his former lovers. It's a haunting fantasy, but he likes it. It's comforting when everyone gets along and all are focused solely on him. But then he meets a real woman. The former lovers sleep while he interacts with her, but will they stay that way?
This short film from Oren Lavie (previously at Neatorama) is a music video from his album Bedroom Crimes. He not only did the music, he wrote and produced the video. And starred in it, too. -via reddit
The issues addressed here are timely, but even when you get outside the realm of internet security, you can see that this is a universal problem. You have a supervisor (or maybe client) who is convinced he is smarter than you because he is your supervisor (or client). He wants what he wants, and does not want to hear your reasons for saying no. And because he is your supervisor, he has a built-in target for blame when it all goes downhill. This is the latest comic from CommitStrip.
You've probably seen this picture somewhere. It gets posted at reddit every few months, and it is shared on social media quite a bit. The cat's name is Suki, and she has 800,000 Instagram followers. Suki the Bengal cat was adopted by Marti Gutfreund, who trained her from kittenhood to walk on a leash and to enjoy traveling to new places, such as the beautiful parks of Alberta, where they live, and the deserts of the Southwest. Suki has a great time, and takes awesome pictures because she always looks like she is posing.
Though Suki usually appears without a leash on Instagram, she’s always wearing one when outdoors — Gutfreund simply removes it in Photoshop to achieve a cleaner image.
Canada’s provincial and national parks require animals to be leashed, and Gutfreund is committed to Suki’s safety. She encourages other owners of aspiring adventure cats to properly leash-train their pets before taking them outdoors. Once a cat is comfortable outside, owners should ensure their pets stay hydrated even on shorter adventures, Gutfreund advises.
Suki herself is gearing up for the adventure of her lifetime: In August, Gutfreund is whisking her to Europe for six months. They’ll visit Gutfreund’s family in Germany and tour the rest of the continent too, snapping as many pictures as possible along the way.
Read about Suki at Adventure Cats and see more pictures at Instagram.
Mary is a 17-year-old in Australia. Secret is her dog, a border collie/Australian shepherd mix. With a pedigree like that, you know this is an intelligent dog. Mary has been training Secret all her life, beginning with clicker training. They even exercise together!
Secret is learning new stunts during their exercise routines.
Secret also dances, does housework, and creates art. And she finds time for some fun, too! See more of Secret at her Instagram page. That's a good dog. -via reddit
Thor seems a bit shocked. Never underestimate the power of a cat responding to the basic feline instinct of knocking things to the floor. And you can grant them all the power in the world, but that won't motivate a cat to come to your rescue, unless he happens to be in the mood to do it. This is the latest comic from Jon Baker at Alarmingly Bad Comics. -via Geeks Are Sexy
