Habanerocouscous

Dice-shaming: for when your stubborn, disloyal polyhedra refuse to behave (see also). Dang, I hope this becomes a thing! (via Seanan)

An Australian rugby league team released one of its players today after a photo surfaced that appears to show him pissing into his own mouth.

Read more...

This hands-free chokeslam is sold well by both wrestlers, and even the ref reacts appropriately. Good work all around.

Read more...

Leo Morten Lund has a great trick to peel an entire two-pound sack of potatoes in less than a minute. All he needs is a drill, a round (clean) toilet brush head, a hose, and a bucket full of water.

Read more...

Stillers, Pirates, and Penguins logos, all floating over the Pittsburgh skyline. Yes, this is a very Yinzer tattoo indeed.

Read more...

For the second time in 15 years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is attempting to drop the Washington Redskins' trademarks. It's another example of bureaucracy run amok, with the government interfering in a matter that has nothing to do with its day-to-day operations.

Like many others, I would prefer ...

Michel Babatunde had to leave today's World Cup match between Argentina and Nigeria when he got smoked in the arm by a screamer from one of his teammates. His arm did not take the impact well. This GIF is gross.

Read more...

MLB umpire/country music singer Joe West wasn't nimble enough to avoid Stephen Vogt's foul line drive in Tuesday night's A's-Mets game, so he ended up taking a ball right to the chest. West didn't have the protective equipment of a home-plate umpire, but he was fine.

Read more...

Reality bites

So, you can have lowriders fight each other?

Read more...

It's good to have a sense of eagerness when you're in a race car. It's not so good when you're so eager to get out of the pit lane that you then proceed to destroy your race, everyone else's race, and probably the nearest three census-designated places.

Read more...

There are some things that are inherently believable. Like, when someone tweets "not the greatest of pics, but here's Manziel enjoying some X games after party festivities in Austin at Rio" and it's a dude floating on an inflatable swan chugging a bottle of liquor, you just believe it because, well, why wouldn't Manziel do that? If you had the chance to just chill out on your stomach and float around boozing on an inflatable swan, you would definitely do that.

Read more...

An international friendly between Belgium and Tunisia was stopped in the first half because golf-ball sized hail stones were raining down on the players. The hail became unmanageable at around the 24 minute mark, with the match still scoreless, and play was halted for approximately 40 minutes. As you can imagine it produced some striking images (and sounds).

Read more...

Patrick Wilson, drummer for Weezer, is a pretty smooth operator. Not only can he play drums, but he can play drums, track an incoming frisbee, catch the frisbee with one hand, transfer it to his mouth, and then put it down, all without missing a beat.

Read more...

This melting paraffin man is is an untitled piece by Urs Fischer, who does a lot of amazing life-sized paraffin pieces. (via Crazy Abalone)

Bill Watterson is the Bigfoot of cartooning.

He is legendary. He is reclusive. And like Bigfoot, there is really only one photo of him in existence. 

Few in the cartooning world have ever spoken to him. Even fewer have ever met him.

In fact, legend has it that when Steven Spielberg called to see if he wanted to make a movie, Bill wouldn’t even take the call.

So it was with little hope of success that I set out to try and meet him last April.

I was traveling through Cleveland on a book tour, and I knew that he lived somewhere in the area. I also knew that he was working with Washington Post cartoonist Nick Galifianakis on a book about Cul de Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson’s art.

So I took a shot and wrote to Nick. And Nick in turn wrote to Watterson.

And the meeting didn’t happen.

Bill apparently had something to do.  Or more likely, wanted nothing to do with me.

Which is smart.

But Nick encouraged me to send an email to Bill anyways.   I said I didn’t want to bother him.

But a week or so later, this Pearls strip ran in the newspaper:

And I figured this was as good of a time to write to him as any.

So I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

But he was. And he had a great sense of humor about the strip I had done, and was very funny, and oh yeah….

…He had a comic strip idea he wanted to run by me.

Now if you had asked me the odds of Bill Watterson ever saying that line to me, I’d say it had about the same likelihood as Jimi Hendrix telling me he had a new guitar riff. And yes, I’m aware Hendrix is dead.

So I wrote back to Bill.

“Dear Bill,

I will do whatever you want, including setting my hair on fire.”

So he wrote back and explained his idea.

He said he knew that in my strip, I frequently make fun of my own art skills. And that he thought it would be funny to have me get hit on the head or something and suddenly be able to draw. Then he’d step in and draw my comic strip for a few days.

That’s right.

The cartoonist who last drew Calvin and Hobbes riding their sled into history would return to the comics page.

To draw Pearls Before Swine.

What followed was a series of back-and-forth emails where we discussed what the strips would be about, and how we would do them. He was confident. I was frightened.

Frightened because it’s one thing to write a strip read by millions of people. But it’s another thing to propose an idea to Bill Watterson.

The idea I proposed was that instead of having me get hit on the head, I would pretend that Pearls was being drawn by a precocious second grader who thought my art was crap. I named her “Libby,” which I then shorted to “Lib.” (Hint, hint: It’s almost “Bill” backwards.)

(The introduction of Libby can be found HERE and HERE).

At every point in the process, I feared I would say something wrong. And that Bill would disappear back into the ether. And that the whole thing would seem like a wisp of my imagination.

But it wasn’t that way.

Throughout the process, Bill was funny and flexible and easy to work with.

Like at one point when I wanted to change a line of dialogue he wrote, I prefaced it by saying, “I feel like a street urchin telling Michelangelo that David’s hands are too big.” But he liked the change. And that alone was probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.

I don’t want to say any more about our exchange because to do so would probably be to compromise the privacy he so zealously guards. But I will offer you this one biographical tidbit:

Technology is not his friend.

I found that out when it came to the logistics of the artwork.   I drew my part first and then shipped him the strips. I wanted him to fill in the panels I left blank, and simply scan and email me back the finished strips.

I asked him to do this because I did not want to be responsible for handling his finished artwork. Partly because I knew it would be worth thousands of dollars. Partly because I knew he wanted to auction it off for charity. And partly because my UPS driver has a tendency to leave my packages in the dirt at the end of our driveway. (I could just imagine the email I’d have to write the next day: “Dear Mr. Watterson – The first comic strip you’ve drawn in 20 years was ravaged by a squirrel.”)

So this left doing it my way. Digitally.

And this is when I found out that Bill Watterson is not comfortable with scanners or Photoshop or large email attachments. In fact, by the end of the process, I was left with the distinct impression that he works in a log cabin lit by whale oil and hands his finished artwork to a man on a pony.

So I proposed working out our technological issues over the phone. But he didn’t want to.

At first I thought it was because he didn’t own one. Or have electricity. But then I remembered we were emailing.

And so I soon came to the sad realization that he probably just didn’t want me to have his phone number. Which was smart. Because I would have called that man once a week for the rest of his life.

And so we worked through the technological problems via email.

And unlike every other technological problem I’ve ever had, it was not frustrating.

It was the highlight of my career.

The only thing Bill ever asked of me was that I not reveal he had worked on Pearls until all three of his strips had run. (And if you haven’t yet seen those three strips, they can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.)

And so I did not reveal his participation until now.   And it was the hardest secret I’ve ever had to keep.

Because I knew I had seen something rare.

A glimpse of Bigfoot.

This dog is an incredible athlete but also super, super terrifying. Basically, this is the Ray Lewis of dogs.

Read more...

This is Kazuhito Tadano, a pitcher for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of the Japanese Pacific League, uncorking what is likely the purest eephus pitch you will ever see.

Read more...

I'm glad video stabilization technology is mainstream now. It's giving us new insight into historical events, opening new perspectives in scientific research, and then there is the endless fun factor—like seeing how ridiculous the battle scenes in Star Trek: The Next Generation are. Enjoy!

Read more...

International friendlies are unusual in soccer in that nobody there — a bit like the only baseball game I've ever been to — cares very much about the outcome.

Read more...

Jalen Rose sets 'em up, and right on cue, Doug Collins knocks 'em down with a timely quote from one of the great underappreciated tracks from the early aughts.

Read more...

The Sexagintuple Vanilla Bean Mocha Frappuccino now holds the record for most expensive on-menu Starbucks beverage, coming in at a whopping $54; the 128 oz drink had 55 shots of espresso, with an estimated caffeine dose of 4.5g. Its owner, Andrew Chifari, spent about five days consuming it. He ordered it as his free bonus drink on the Starbucks loyalty card scheme, which gets him one free drink for every 12 (my own joke about this, worn as thin as onion-paper, goes like this: every tenth drink, I ask the folks at Giddy Up to give me "one of everything in a bucket with a piece of banana bread stuck in the top"). Andrew set out to break previous most-expensive-Starbucks-beverage record by enlisting the assistance of the baristas, as he explained to Consumerist: Read the rest

Charlie Whitehurst, who signed on to be the Titans backup, has never worn anything but No. 6 in his eight-year career. There was one problem: That's been punter Brett Kern's number since he came to Tennessee in 2009. The usual solution would be for Whitehurst to make Kern an offer for it. They went with something less orthodox.

Read more...

From the 2014 Tour of Somerville in New Jersey, 18-year-old Noah Granigan celebrated his tight victory in the junior criterium race with arms raised . . . and then immediately went down hard, sliding a good thirty feet past the finish.

Read more...

Rapper 50 Cent (left) shakes hands with Mets’ OF Curtis Granderson before throwing an abysmal first pitch. (AP)

There’s nothing like a bit of unintentional comedy to divert attention away from organizational disarray. On Tuesday night at Citi Field, prior to the Mets-Pirates game, rapper 50 Cent uncorked one of the worst ceremonial first pitches ever seen.

Here it is in all its “glory” :

On hand to promote an upcoming concert at the ballpark, 50 Cent’s wild pitch not only didn’t reach the catcher or pass through any part of the strike zone, it never even shared the same zip code with the left-handed batter’s box. As Major League‘s Harry Doyle (played by Frick Award-winning broadcaster and ex-major leaguer Bob Uecker) would say — and as Mets announcer Gary Cohen echoed in the above clip — “Juuuuuust a bit outside!”

So far outside in fact, that the errant toss recalls that of former Cincinnati mayor Mark Mallory, who let loose this doozy before a Reds game at Great American Ballpark in 2007:

Elsewhere in the annals of first pitch fiascos, Stacey Gotsulias of the Yankees blog It’s All About the Money, Stupid, nominated a trio of doozies, the best/worst of which belonged to pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen, whose toss barely made it off the mound:

My own nominee to ad to the worst first pitch collection goes to 10-time Olympic medalist Carl Lewis, who prior to a 2003 Mariners game made it clear that his athletic prowess did not extend to the diamond:

As for 50 Cent’s pitch, many jokesters on Twitter suggested he may have been in the club prior to taking the mound, which at least makes for a better excuse than a possible elbow injury. Interviewed by SNY’s Kevin Burkhardt during the game, he blamed the poor pitch on Curtis Jackson — his given name.