Up until a few days ago, I was quite unaware of a battle between rival rappers taking place across the pond. Maybe that's because the battle's being waged so... politely.
This war of words is a bit more (okay, a LOT more) gentlemanly than your typical hip-hop dissyfit dustup, because the rappers in question aren't strictly in the hip-hop camp, but rather a humorous offshoot called chap-hop, tea-sipping Victorian-style steampunks who would rather rap about their knowledge of cricket and maybe challenge the other guy to a bout of Queensbury Rules boxing.
The two with the beef are called Professor Elemental, clad in Victorian-explorer garb complete with pith helmet, and Mr. B. The Gentleman Rhymer, a bit more modern and dandy-ish, and an ever-present banjolele.
The Funnies: 1922 - Twenty-one little kids. All wearing hats decorated with characters from the funny papers. At Johnny's 11th birthday party. And they're mortified, every last one. You really need to view the large size to appreciate.
While you're there, check out the rest of Shorpy,assuming you don't mind losing track of the next couple of hours. Great stuff!
And I'd have to say that President Dave (at 1:29) did indeed make a tasty-looking sandwich. He could probably win a second term with just that sandwich as his running mate. (via The Dish)
It's all fun and (board) games until someone gets hurt, and that appears to have happened after a 20 year-old man fell to his death from a seventh-storey Brisbane balcony while planking on the balcony railing. (via The Daily What)
Kids! Dinner! Last one to the table gets the tetanus stool!
From the ever-wry pages of Catalog Living, proving time after time that when it comes to the people inhabiting the pages of Pottery Barn, Plow & Hearth, et al., their cheese has done slid completely off their cracker.
From the It's-The-Little-Touch-That-Means-So-Much Dep't.: Note the little balloons in the bottom right corner. Not quite sure this is exactly up to code.(via Guzer)
Nena with a remake from 2009 of her one and only Stateside hit "99 Luftballoon" (99 Red Balloons), and listening to the new version, it's still got some air left in it. As for the video itself... Nena looking like she's in Second Life? Man, she really is retro!
Let the balloon-popping monkey in you out for some playtime with Bloons 2.
Japan didn't just make cheesy Godzilla movies in the 60s, you know. No, they also made cheesy movies starring a giant flying radioactive fire-breathing turtle named Gamera, too. Here's the trailer to the 1967 classic Gamera vs Gaos (a giant flying radioactive fire-laser-breathing bat). Go, go, Gamera!
I know the royal wedding is this week, but it wasn't something that really held any interest for me. That is, until I discovered that one of the invited guests is Rowan Atkinson, better known to most of us as Mr. Bean.
Hopefully this time around, meeting Tha Q-Dawg will go a bit better.
In 1979 Atari released Hercules, one of the largest pinball machines in the world, standing 83 inches tall by 39 inches wide by 93 inches deep. It used a standard billiard cue ball instead of the traditional smaller steel pinball, and boasted over 18 square feet of playing surface.
I was quite the arcade rat at that time, and remember playing this. Sadly, the gargantuan game provided Lilliputian fun. The larger, heavier ball meant frustratingly slow gameplay compared to a traditional steel pinball, and the cue ball moved and felt like a shotput being heaved about as it lumbered from target to target. That coupled with the uninspired and overly-simplistic playing field made for a really, really dull game.
Just after Christmas last year, a Dayton, Ohio design company came out with the world's largest claw game called The Santa Claw. It allowed internet users to connect and control the 2000-pound robotic claw game as they tried to pick up giant balls filled with (mostly) small prizes that the company would ship to the lucky winners, free of charge.
It became wildly popular, with queues of 700 or more people, which meant minding their browser for 8+ hours waiting for a brief three-fingered grasp at destiny. Over 4,000 prizes were awarded, ranging from a set of those plastic chattering teeth to the complete Dokken collection on vinyl.
The game no longer awards real prizes, and crowds have since died away so there's probably no more than a few minutes waiting, but you can still play for fun at TheSantaClaw.com (via Destructoid)
J! Archive has the answers and questions to every Jeopardy! show since Alex Trebek started hosting 27 seasons ago in 1984. I'll take Holy Crap! for a thousand, Alex!
Scary Ice Hockey Accident Clint Malarchuk was goalie for the NHL Buffalo Sabres in 1989. During a game against the St. Louis Blues, Steve Tuttle of the Blues and Uwe Krupp of the Sabres became entangled while chasing the puck and crashed into Malarchuk's goal, Tuttle's skate caught Malarchuk on the neck, severing his internal carotid artery.
Thanks to some quick action by the team's trainer, Malarchuk survived the incident, though surgeons needed over 300 stitches to close the wound.
