Friday, February 29, 2008

Did you hear about the missing toupee truck?

Police are still combing the area.

Q: What do garlic, cocaine, Sunny D and Olympic commemorative coins all have in common?

A:
They are just some of the unintentional highway scenery at Truck Spills. Pic of a glue spill below... (via Growabrain)



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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Can we please do Ziggy next?

The comic strip Garfield hasn't been funny for years. Who knew that the cure was to take the Garfield out of Garfield?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Garfield Minus Garfield. (via The Comics Curmudgeon)





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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Crazy bikes


The blog for MAKE magazine posted this photo of a pretty crazy-looking bike the other day, and it inspired me to look for other unusual bikes.




The Dandy Horse or draisene (named for German inventor Baron Karl von Drais) was patented in 1818. It had no pedals, but was instead propelled by the rider pushing along the ground with her or his feet as if they were walking or running. The front wheel and handlebar assembly was pivoted to allow steering. The height was not adjustable, so each one had to be custom-made to measure.




In the 1870s and '80s, the most common form of bicycle was the ordinary bicycle a/k/a highwheel a/k/a pennyfarthing. Lacking a steering system, the huge front wheel was to provide stability at speed. Also, since the pedal was affixed directly to the wheel, the only way to increase the distance you traveled per pedal revolution was to make the front wheel as large as possible.

FYI: The name refers to the British penny and farthing coins of the time; the former being much larger than the latter so that the side view of the bicycle resembled two such coins placed next to one another.

Eventually the chain-driven bicycle was introduced, and the pennyfarthing fell out of style, though the love of riding up high remained. Check out this page of some early tallbikes (such as this one below).




Lastly, and my favorite of the bunch, is this story of a couple of guys who toured the Canadian Maritimes in a Couchbike. Here they are in the drive-thru of some fast food spot. Awesome.


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Thursday, February 21, 2008

Dude! Your great-grandma was hawt!

I've been really digging the wonderful photos at Shorpy, The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog, and though neither the blog nor most of the photos are exactly 100 years old, they're all pretty fascinating.

Here are a couple of great ones to get you started. Click on either the title or the photo to view in more detail.


They Are Blind To My Beauty
While the first thing that you notice might be the two winners in this bathing beauty-type contest from 1920, what really makes the photo is the priceless look of the girl on the far-right, who obviously disagrees with the judges' decision.



Little Fattie
A 1910 photo of a six-year-old newsboy in St. Louis, MO. I have a little guy about the same age and that expression means just one thing: trouble waiting to happen.

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Drugs Are Like... Everything!









Drugs Are Like That

This anti-drug short from the early 70s(?) is narrated by Anita Bryant and features two annoying kids who play with Legos, argue and mumble their way through their lines while Anita equates drugs with a baby's pacifier, playing on the swings, the Step On A Crack, Break Your Mother's Back sidewalk game and other insane comparisons.

WARNING: May actually encourage drug use in order to make sense of this odd little film.

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Finally, someone who can kick Gimli's ass



At just 2ft 9in, Indian muscleman Aditya 'Romeo' Dev is the world's smallest bodybuilder.

Pint-sized Romeo is well-known in his hometown of Phagwara, India - for his ability to lift 1.5kg dumbbells - despite his overall 9kg body weight. (Editor's note: Not to snark, but is lifting one-sixth of your body weight really that impressive? That would be equivalent to a 180-pound/82-kilogram man lifting 30-pound/13.6 kg dumbbells. Perhaps there is something about the physiology of dwarfs that make this more impressive, I dunno. Dwarf experts and/or expert dwarfs please enlighten us with your comments!)

More photos and full story here. (via Across-the-Board)


A worried Gimli.

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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Straight Outta Orlando



Whoops. Sorry for the disappearing act there. Took the fam to Mouseworld for a week, and didn't have time to get that mentioned here in our rush to drive for four hours through a flipping blizzard in order to get to Detroit, in order to catch a flight the following morning. Sheesh.

Anyway, everyone had a reasonably good first visit to the Land of Dis, including yours truly, who managed to get on just about every coaster in the joint. I spent the entire week interwebs-free, hence the content gap here in Ye Olde Tyme Waster, but now that I've returned from out of that horrid, horrid sunshine and 75-degree weather, I am sure I'll be able to post new stuff in the next day or so as my vitamin D levels fall back to their usual Michigan mid-winter nearly undetectable levels.

The pic above is from a Brazilian site devoted, for no discernible reason, to posting ugly Mickeys.

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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Finally, more reasons to bring cake to work

Sure everybody already knows that February is Black History Month, and a few may celebrate it as being the time of year to celebrate Low Vision Awareness Month, Termite Awareness Month or even Sinus Pain Awareness Month. But I must confess I wasn't aware it was National National Awareness Month Awareness Month. Until now, of course. (via Metafilter)

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Thursday, February 07, 2008

Stop. Watch.

This was from a couple of days ago, so I kinda am late sharing this with you. In my defense, when I saw it was one of those "flash mob" events, which I honestly usually find to be more annoying than amusing or entertaining. This one got a smile from me for some reason.

Hundreds of people make time stand still in Grand Central Station. (via Steel White Table)




Ooh, look! It's Han Solo frozen in Carbonite! In Legos! "Brick artist" Nathan Sawaya does a lot with Legos, from a giant replica of the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima built out of 100,000 Lego bricks to a cute little Lego iPhone. View his gallery to see lots more.

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Sunday, February 03, 2008

Shockingly, no HeadOn ads in the bunch



A selection of perfect ads. This one is for Mondo Pasta. (via Growabrain)

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He's got my chin, and your eyes...



A (longish) while back I mentioned a nifty little webtoy called Stereotypes, where you can mix and match top and bottom halves of portraits by photographer Eric Myer. It looks like he has a new batch of them out now, so get out there and play with Stereotypes Edition III. Don't forget to check out Edition I and Edition II as well.

Here's one from the new set of pics...


Which, don't you think, bears more than a passing resemblance to...?



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