Enure01

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Legendary comedian Andy Kaufman appeared on The Dating Game in 1978 as a virtual unknown, and took the kooky show a step further with an early incarnation of his Latka Gravas character from Taxi. Same accent, same earnest, innocent expression and manchildish demeanor. Andy never gives up the act, taking it to fruition with the audience and players seemingly uncomfortable and unsure of how to handle the situation: exactly the way Andy Kaufman liked it. Via Dangerous Minds

(Photo: Aram Bartholl)

It looks like a rock in the middle of a park. And it is a rock. But it's more than that. Artist Aram Bartholl hollowed out a portion of the rock and placed a Wi-Fi router inside. It's powered with a thermoelectric generator. So if you want a Wi-Fi signal, you have to start a fire at the base of the rock.

Bartholl calls this sculpture Keepalive. It's at the Springhornhof, a sculpture museum/park in Germany. Visitors can make appointments to use the rock. After starting the router, they'll be able to download a library of survival guides in PDF format. In an interview with Hyperallergenic, Bartholl explained that his sculpture explores the need to trace technological skills back to the most primal of tasks--starting a fire:

“It’s not about easy access,” Bartholl told Hyperallergic. “It has a whole dystopian idea to it, like, will we need something like this in the future? Or somebody finding this in a hundred years — is it still working and they figure something out and they make a fire, or is there going to be a moment where we’re going to need to make fire again to get access to the data?”

-via Amusing Planet

The top picture is of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1917. You can see that what is now the National Mall was indeed a swamp at the time. The memorial’s construction was part of a grander plan, and the reflecting pool that now lies between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument was completed by 1923. A series of photographs at the Atlantic shows more of the construction, the dedication ceremony, and recent pictures as well. You’ll enjoy the photos of kids sledding down the memorial’s steps in 1935 and 2016, and the one of a worker cleaning Lincoln’s ear. Also, did you know the Lincoln Memorial has a basement? It’s set to be developed as a museum space when the monument undergoes a renovation. -via reddit

(Image credit: Library of Congress/ButtercupColfax)

John F. Kennedy’s coffin lying in state beneath the U.S. Capitol’ dome, November 1963 
Image: George F. Mobley

These captivating photographs are from project "Found" at National Geographic. The magazine established the project in 2013, in honor of their 125th anniversary. The purpose of Found is to bring rare and unpublished photos from the history of the magazine to the attention of new generations of readers. 

See more of this compelling collection at the Found archive of National Geographic.

Via Demilked

Loggers and the Mark Twain redwood cut down in California, 1892 | Image: N.E. Beckwith

"Scars of beauty" pattern on the back of a Nuba woman in Sudan, 1966 | Image: Horst Luz

Irish guards remain at attention after one faints, London, England, June 1966
Image: James P. Blair

We’ve been over this before, dude .

Read more...

Last week Sunday, comic book creator Reilly Brown and his partner were gifted with a happy baby boy.

The next Saturday, their block in Hoboken caught on fire, they left for Reilly’s grandmother’s house and watched their home, as it filled with smoke, on the news.

No one died, it seems everyone is safe. But they returned to this.

And this.

And this.

They have suffered considerable damage from smoke and water, all their belongings were saturated in smoke, and as well as books and clothes, they have had to throw out all their new baby things.

Reilly writes,

Insurance will help us out a bit, but not enough to cover everything that needs to be cleaned, everything that needs to be replaced, as well as the moving expenses. I’m confident that we’ll figure something out one way or the other, but for the people who have asked how they can help, I’ll humbly direct you toward my art dealer’s site, www.AnthonysComicBookArt.com/artistgalleryroom.asp… – a few extra sales there could go a long way.

You can also book commissions from Reilly Brown here for upcoming shows, and pay in advance.

And he will be selling his convention sketchbooks digitally, right here, for whatever price you are willing to pay.

I think you should be willing to pay a decent amount.

Deadpool Artist Reilly Brown’s Newborn Baby Has Lost Everything In A Fire. Can You Help?

(Video Link)

I'm struggling to figure out the physics here.

This novel teapot of Chinese orgin has two chambers. You can see that when you look down the spout:

So put regular tea in one chamber and poisoned tea in the other. Pour as needed. 

Each chamber has a small hole hidden on the other side. Covering one hole prevents liquid from leaving its chamber. But how? Redditor AjBlue7 explains:

Yes the reason why water flows through a spout is because there is a second hole in the back where air can come in and push the water out of the container. If there are no external forces but gravity working on a liquid there is a high chance that the molecular bonds will be able to resist the gravity trying to pull it out of a spout. Also it is important that air can't get past the liquid through the main spout. So this teapots spout has the equivalent of 2 straws branching out from the main hole, and the spouts much maintain a thin strawlike tunnel all the way down to the base of each reservoir. The connection of the straw and reservoir happens at the bottom of each to decrease the possibility of air being able to get past the water in the straws. Air is lighter than liquid so any air trapped in the back of the reservoir before putting your finger over the hole will always stay separated and not force the water out of the container.

This is one of the main principles at work in diving bells, where they trapped air underwater in a big metal bell. To fill the bells with more water they had heavy barrels with a hole on the bottom to let water in, as the barrel sank water would trap the air in the barrel compressing it naturally as it sank. On the top of the barrel there was a hose that hung on the outside, as long as the end of the hose was lower than the barrels hole that let water in, the air would remain trapped. Then they would raise the hose up and into the diving bell allowing for the barrels compressed air to transfer into the diving bell. Oh and they also had a valve on the top of the diving bell to release "hot" air, aka the CO2 byproduct from the divers breathing.

I'm struggling to wrap my brain around this explanation. Fortunately, I've spent the past few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.

-via Nag on the Lake

As we get older some of us put our roughneck ways behind us and try to live a more peaceful life, while others seem to get more violent and aggressive in their later years.

One particularly feisty gang of old dudes in Los Angeles are fighting to keep their beach local, giving Southern California surf culture a bad name.

People who try to surf Lunada Bay in Palos Verdes Estates are encountering a gang of rich guys calling themselves the "Bay Boys" who pick fights with anyone they don't want surfing their beach.

(YouTube Link)

It may sound like the plot of a cheesy 80s movie, but this harassment has been going on since at least 1996, with assault charges filed against a few of the "Bay Boys" over the years.

And last May this localism lunacy was caught on video by Rory Carroll and Noah Smith of The Guardian, who came out to find their car egged with "kooks" written in surf wax on the windows.

Read more about A Rich Old Dude Surfer Gang Is Terrorizing A Los Angeles Beach here

Amy of the food blog Oh, Bite It does provide an actual recipe. But you don't need one. You can just look at the photo, find the necessary ingredients, and get started:

Layer and pile…pile and layer…

Keep doing this until you’re satisfied with yourself..

Or too ashamed of yourself to continue. But if you're preparing this for dinner, you're past shame. Like the guy who was caught enjoying his In-N-Out in public way too much, you're ready to live your life to the fullest.

You don't want to be that guy lying on his deathbed at 46 thinking, "Hey, I should have had those Kit Kat nachos, but I decided to be healthy instead." That kind of attitude gets you nowhere in life.

For those who don't have an In-N-Out in their city or state I have a confession to make- the Double Doubles at In-N-Out really are that good, the perfect panacea for all that ails you.

Don't believe me? Take it from the guy in this video, who looks like he knows a thing or two about a tasty burger- eating In-N-Out Double Doubles can be a sinfully divine experience.

(YouTube Link)

It's hard to watch this video without wondering how long this guy has gone without a Double Double, and why he chose to eat in instead of taking it home, because this is the kind of chowing down most decent folks only do at home!

-Via FAIL Blog

(Yahoo! Answers Link)

Information sites like Yahoo! Answers are meant to serve as community driven forums where people can ask any question and receive an insightful answer, and by any question I mean absolutely anything, no matter how obvious or ridiculous.

Want to know if you can uncover your husband's infidelity based on the smell of his flatulence? Ask the fine folks who contribute to Yahoo! Answers.

(Yahoo! Answers Link)

Some questions read like pure trolling, while others make you pity the person who posed the question because they clearly didn't pay much attention in school. Or maybe in this case we should pity their child...

(Yahoo! Answers link)

And people wouldn't see Yahoo! Answers as an eternal source of educational entertainment if it didn't contain answers to some of the most important questions ever asked.

(Yahoo! Answers Link)

See 21 Yahoo Questions That Are Too Horrifying To Stop Reading here (some content borderline NSFW)

When Sylvester Stallone was told there were no parts for him, he wrote his own.

Sylvester Stallone wasn’t born a leading man. Complications at birth left the son of a hairdresser with nerve damage that slurred his speech and curled his lips into a permanent snarl. His childhood wasn’t easy. His parents fought constantly, and he and his brother slipped in and out of foster care. By high school, they’d moved back in with their mother in Philadelphia, but Stallone’s emotional problems followed him. He struggled academically and was expelled from multiple schools. The arts became his refuge. He spent his free time painting and writing poetry, but his real dream was the silver screen. By the time he was 18, he knew he wanted to act.

Stallone studied drama at the American College of Switzerland and then at the University of Miami, but then abandoned school to pursue a career in New York City. By his mid-twenties, he was getting by on odd jobs like cleaning lion cages and ushering at movie theaters. The bit parts he did manage to land were few and far between. Once, when funds were short, he took a role in an adult film to keep from living in a bus station. When Stallone landed bigger parts, it was because his drooping, stone-chiseled face made him the perfect heavy (Subway Thug No. 1 wasn’t an uncommon credit). By 1975, the 29-year-old actor was desperate for something bigger, so his agent sent him to the L.A. offices of Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, two producers who had a standing deal with United Artists.

The meeting didn’t go as planned. When Winkler and Chartoff met Stallone, they didn’t see a movie star. Dejected, Stallone had his hand on the doorknob when he turned and made one last pitch. “You know,” he said, “I also write.”

The script Stallone turned in was an underdog tale, the story of Rocky, a streetwise palooka who gets an unlikely opportunity to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. But the story of how the film itself got made is even more improbable.

Earlier that same year, a boxer named Chuck Wepner had silenced the world. Pitted 40:1 against the heavily favored Muhammad Ali, Wepner landed a blow that knocked Ali down. Though Ali ultimately knocked out Wepner in the 15th round, Stallone was riveted by those moments in which it seemed like Wepner stood a chance. When he sat down to write a screenplay, it took him just three days to dash it off.

Stallone centered his story around Rocky Balboa, a club boxer plucked from obscurity and eager to go the distance. But Rocky would have the odds stacked against him. Even his trainer, a salty old cynic named Mickey, would write him off—until a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fight against brash champion (and Ali stand-in) Apollo Creed arises.

To ground his story, Stallone drummed up a love interest for Rocky: Adrian, a shy pet store employee. The unlikely romance allowed the film to become as much a character study as a genre slugfest. But when Stallone’s wife, Sasha, read an early draft, she pushed him to sand down his hero’s rough edges even more. In the rewrites, Rocky, who had started out as a violent thug, emerged as a gentle and deceptively wise soul who, in the actor’s words, “was good-natured, even though nature had never been good to him.”

Impressed by the story’s heart, Winkler and Chartoff agreed to produce the film with United Artists, which gave them creative freedom for any picture budgeted under $1.5 million. But the studio balked. A boxing picture and all its trappings—extras, location, and arena shooting—just couldn’t be made for so little money. And with a nobody in the lead role, the flick seemed doomed to box office failure. Chartoff and Winkler countered by offering to make the movie for less than a million, promising to cover any overages out of pocket, and the producers sent the studio a print of Stallone’s recent independent film, The Lords of Flatbush, to seal the deal. With no one in the screening room to recognize him, the executives assumed handsome costar Perry King was the young nobody who had written the script.

Fine, they said. Go make your boxing movie.

The small budget meant that the production team had to get creative. Interiors were shot in L.A., since a full 28-day shoot in Philadelphia was too pricey. Instead, the team spent less than a week on location, quietly shooting exteriors using a nonunion crew. Driving around in a nondescript van, director John Avildsen would spot an interesting locale—a portside ship, a food market—and usher Stallone out to jog, sometimes for miles, while he rolled film. It wasn’t long before the actor gave up smoking.

The slim budget was evident everywhere. Stallone’s wardrobe was plucked from his own closet. His wife worked as the set photographer. But it was more than that— the movie’s finances also meant that the director had to be choosy about how many shots to film. A crucial scene where Rocky confesses his fears about the fight to Adrian (played by Talia Shire) was almost cut before Stallone begged the producers to give him just one take. The scene became the film’s emotional spine.

When the director proposed shooting a date between Rocky and Adrian at an ice rink, the producers laughed. A rink full of extras, combined with the costs of filming all the takes, seemed risky. But when Stallone convinced them of the scene’s worth, they wrote around it. In the movie, Rocky pays off a manager to let the duo skate in an empty rink. The result was easier to shoot and made for a beautiful metaphor: a clumsy dance between two misfits, each holding the other up.

But improvisation wasn’t always an option. For Rocky’s climactic bout with Creed, Stallone and actor Carl Weathers rehearsed five hours a day for a week. Though both were incredible physical specimens, neither had ever boxed and their earliest attempts were exhausting. (Ironically, only Burt Young, cast as Rocky’s sad-sack pal Paulie, had any actual ring experience: He was 14–0 as a pro.) When the director saw their first sparring efforts, he told Stallone to go home and write out the beats. Stallone returned with 14 pages of lefts, rights, counters, and hooks, all delivered using camera-friendly gloves too small to be legal in a real prizefight. As they practiced, Avildsen circled them with an 8mm camera, recording them to point out their weaknesses. He even zoomed in on Stallone’s waistline to remind him he needed to shape up.

(YouTube link)

Studying all that footage paid off. The fight was shot in front of 4,000 restless extras, corralled with the promise of a free chicken dinner. In the original ending, Rocky walks off with Adrian backstage. But composer Bill Conti’s score was so soaring that the director decided to reshoot the finale, despite having run out of funds. The producers paid for the overage themselves, allowing for the unforgettable final scene: Rocky in the ring, with Adrian fighting through the crowd to reach him, her hat pulled off by a crew member using fishing wire. The image freezes with Rocky embracing her— stopping at what Stallone later called the pinnacle of Rocky’s life. It was the perfect crescendo to an emotional journey—not only for Rocky, but for his alter ego.

The parallels between the actor’s story and Rocky’s were not lost on United Artists’ marketing strategist, Gabe Sumner. A clever publicist, Sumner knew he had quite the task in front of him: selling an old-fashioned boxing movie starring a nobody. Rocky’s competition at the box office didn’t make it any easier. Late 1976 was filled with blockbusters, and Stallone’s hero had to battle with King Kong, a new Dirty Harry sequel, and Carrie for ticket sales.

To compete, Sumner turned up the volume on Stallone’s shaggy-dog story. He sold the narrative about Stallone, a self-made actor-writer who had scraped and clawed his way to the top, as irresistibly American. And he bent the facts a little, too. In Sumner’s version, studio execs offered Stallone hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the script if they could cast a bankable movie star in the role. The impoverished actor, despite having a pregnant wife and just $106 in the bank, stood his ground. He hitchhiked to auditions. He had to sell his dog. But Stallone wasn’t a sellout, and this was his one chance to break through. The truth, Sumner later admitted, was that the studio had never met Stallone. None of it mattered, though—this was Madison Avenue mythmaking at its best.

The marketing strategy struck a chord. The actor’s tale so perfectly mirrored his onscreen role that the film received significant attention from both the media and audiences. And as word of mouth spread, Rocky became the highest-grossing picture of 1976, earning more than $117 million at the box office (the average ticket price at the time was just over $2). Audiences were equally captivated by the soundtrack. “Gonna Fly Now,” Conti’s trumpet-heavy theme, which accompanied Rocky’s training montage, moved more than 500,000 units.

Though some critics, including The New York Times’ reviewer, panned the flick for its sentimentality, most media embraced it. "Rocky KOs Hollywood," crowed a Newsweek cover. The Academy agreed. At the 1977 Academy Awards, Rocky became the first sports film to win Best Picture, beating out heavy hitters Network, All the President’s Men, and Taxi Driver. Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin wrote Stallone congratulatory letters. He became a bona fide movie star, anointed by two Hollywood legends who had built their careers making heroes of the common man.

Today, Rocky's boxing trunks hang in the Smithsonian. Wedding ceremonies have been held at his statue near Philadelphia’s Museum of Art. Fans still run up the adjacent steps, mimicking his sprint to glory. As for Stallone, he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 2011, making him the only actor ever to receive the honor. In his vision of a gentle slugger searching for an opportunity to shine despite the longest odds, Stallone crafted a story that continues to resonate with millions of moviegoers: It’s the American dream played out at 24 frames per second.

(Image credit: Flickr user Andrew Bowness)

When Sumner’s publicity exaggerations were discovered in 2006, few seemed to care. Perhaps that’s because as a character, Rocky did more than go toe-to-toe with Apollo Creed. At a time when Taxi Driver’s sociopathic antihero Travis Bickle preyed on audience fears and Network played to the bleak pessimism of a struggling nation, Rocky reminded the country what it means to hope. As Sylvester Stallone once said, “If I say it, you won’t believe it. But when Rocky said it, it was the truth.”

_______________________

The article above, written by Jake Rossen, is reprinted with permission from the May 2013 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!

When an establishment decides to go with an overall theme they like to make sure the theme runs through the entire place, including the bathrooms.

Making the bathroom fit the theme might entail hanging some fun pictures on the walls, or adding dispensers and other machines to give the place that arcade feel.

Or you can just install a urinal shaped like that guy who lurks around and creeps everybody out, like this monstrosity spotted at Universal City Walk in Osaka, Japan.

Maybe your bar is full of musicians and band geeks rather than circus folk?

Install a urinal they'll remember, like these brassy basins found in the Bell Inn in Sussex, England, and patrons will be tooting their horns to everyone they know about your awesome urinals.

And you can still convey a strong theme without going too crazy with your urinal budget, like this guillotine setup found in Rheinfels Castle, Germany that makes you appreciate all that you still have in this world.

Take A Pee(k) At The World's Weirdest Urinals here