Too cold to use your iPhone? Try using a sausage:
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
The band OK Go has a new video for their song “This Too Shall Pass”, but you’re not allowed to post it on your website. Now, this is a band that owes much of it’s exposure to the viral web. How many people first heard about OK Go because of their treadmill video?
Why, you might ask, would this new video be any different?
The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.
Pretty much describes what’s wrong with the music industry these days.
So instead, let me invite you to enjoy this great little video of OK Go practicing “This Too Shall Pass” with a choir for a performance on the Tonight Show.
Perhaps it’s the hollow yet the forbidding facades. Probably it’s the neglected and decaying interiors, riddled with gusty corridors and the relics of their former purpose. More likely still there’s something in the fear and stigma attached to mental disorder itself. Abandoned buildings of all descriptions seem haunted by the ghosts of their past – but when the ghosts are the souls of those declared clinically insane and sectioned, the place is likely to hold more bad memories than most; bad memories but also great character, rare solace, and irresistible magnetism for urban explorers.
A beautiful collection of photos of abandoned and decaying British asylums. How creepy is that dental chair? Great stuff.
Most of the Super Bowl ads sucked this year. This one was by far the best of the bunch. Here’s how it happened.
For the second year in a row, breast reduction for men represents the fastest growing segment of the cosmetic surgery business in the UK.
The Creator of Calvin and Hobbes gives a brief email interview 15 years after he called it quits.
It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.
I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.
(via df)
In the dead zone we didn’t encounter eight-legged frogs, giant grown trees or mutant children. But the breathtaking silence was more we could have ever imagined for. It’s hard not to make a fantasy out of this place.
Take a video tour of the remnants of life in Chernobyl.
In a brief piece on the late author, Dave Eggers touches on the idea that J. D. Salinger had been writing for the last 50 years, as some have hoped, and just hadn’t published anything. He doesn’t sound hopeful.
To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.
“There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.
The Onion honors J. D. Salinger.
The garage I park in every day is old and pretty narrow, and the car doors only open about half way to get in and out. But that’s nothing compared to this guy, whose garage is only 6 centimeters wider than his vehicle.
I love how he has to open the door to his house to get out of the car.
(via cynical-c)
But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm wrote, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, she said, which said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.
RIP.
Created by designer Igor Udushlivy, these playful dust jackets and bookmarks work in tandem to give the book a unique look that breaks the normal plane of the cover.
Yet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd — emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off “Lost” and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how “Avatar” is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it’s important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.
Totally agree. Counting tickets sold is the only way to go. And until you get 200 million people to leave their house to go see your movie, Gone With the Wind is going to be number 1.
Wes Anderson received a Special Filmmaking Achievement award for Fantastic Mr. Fox from the National Board of Review. He accepted the award as a stop motion animated character.
From the NY Times:
On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art accidentally lost her balance and fell into “The Actor,” a rare Rose Period Picasso, tearing the canvas about six inches along its lower right-hand corner.
With the amount of traffic through those galleries, it’s a wonder that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.
Great satire to promote the healthy fare of The Pump restaurant in New York.
When Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov fell ill while on an Antarctic expedition in 1961, he was one of twelve people stationed at a remote polar outpost, and the only physician of the group. He knew the symptoms; he was suffering from acute appendicitis. To survive, his appendix would have to come out, and he would have to perform the operation on himself.
When Rogozov had made the incision and was manipulating his own innards as he removed the appendix, his intestine gurgled, which was highly unpleasant for us; it made one want to turn away, flee, not look—but I kept my head and stayed. Artemev and Teplinsky also held their places, although it later turned out they had both gone quite dizzy and were close to fainting . . . Rogozov himself was calm and focused on his work, but sweat was running down his face and he frequently asked Teplinsky to wipe his forehead . . . The operation ended at 4 am local time. By the end, Rogozov was very pale and obviously tired, but he finished everything off.
(via kottke)
A skimmer is a little device that fits over the slot on an ATM and steals credit and debit card information when you swipe your card. They’ve been around for a while, but they are getting more and more technologically advanced. Consider this one, found in California, that even includes a little camera:
It’s hard to know whether this was a homemade skimmer, or one that was purchased from online criminal forums. Some of the skimmers sold on these forums are extremely sophisticated, incorporating features such the ability to send an SMS text message to the thieves’ mobile phone whenever a new card is swiped.
This type of fraud is actually far more common that you might think: A quick query on Twitter for “ATM skimmer” usually brings up plenty of local news reports about these devices being found on ATMs.
(via cynical-c)
Says Jason Kottke:
If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.
Damn.
The structural system for the Big Dig House was built from concrete and steel salvaged from Boston’s Big Dig project.
Planning the reassembly of the materials in as if it were a pre-fab system, subtle spatial arrangements are created. These materials however are capable of carrying much higher loads than standard structure, easily allowing the integration of large scale roof gardens. Most importantly, the project demonstrates an untapped potential for the public realm: with strategic front-end planning, much needed community programs including schools, libraries, and housing could be constructed whenever infrastructure is deconstructed, saving valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars.
Beautiful.
(via contemporist)