a Faux Pas

… into showing you his secret watering hole.

Them Thangs. nsfw

Them thangs is right.  A serious cocktail of wacky, weird, symbolic, druggy, female, poetic oddness.  I feel like I know the guy who posted this up after scrolling through the whole thing.  This is sure to be the best collection of pictures you’ve seen today.  Oh, I should have warned you… there was nudity.  Sorry about that, I hope you didn’t get fired.

- Regretfully, AFP

There is more … keep clicking “next”

How’s that for the first picture back?  Wilt Chamberlain, Arny and Andre on the set of Conan the Barbarian.

Andre the Giant was and is a lengend.  Not just for what he did inside the ring, but what he did outside of it.  The Selvedge Yard has taken it upon themselves to dig up all the best Andre the Giant pictures I’ve ever seen and relate some of the tales of his ridiculous booze habit.  A habit that could exceed a case of beer every 90 minutes (not humanly possible? Andre wasn’t human..).

First, consider the number 7,000. It’s an important number, and a rather scary one considering its context, which is this—it has been estimated that Andre the Giant drank 7,000 calories worth of booze every day.The figure doesn’t include food. Just booze.

7,000 calories.

Every day.

I don’t know about you, but it makes my brain turn somersaults. Hell, it makes my brain perform an entire floor routine, complete with colored ribbons.
via TheSelvedgeYard

A monster among men, a god among mortals, and a scary booze habit to boot.  Get out of the way.

- Still in awe, AFP

With a big move coming from yours truly, I haven’t had time to update. The posts will start rolling again this weekend!

The United States and Antigua have been in a bit of a fight.  It started off with the US disallowing online gambling for sites based in Antigua (which is completely legal there).  Antigua, upset that the US allows its own internet gambling, argued their case to the WTO.

The [WTO] agreed with Antigua that it had no effective trade sanctions against the United States other than to suspend its WTO obligations to the United States in respect of copyrights, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property. Antigua now has the right to produce counterfeit copies of Hollywood movies, Microsoft software, or whatnot to satisfy the judgment.
(via TheRegister).

So what started as a tiff around gambling, has opened the door for legalized pirating of Music and Movies.

zookz.com is the first Antiguan-based company to exploit this loophole by offering unlimited downloads of music or movies for $9.95/month, or both for $18.95/month.  Get your hard drives clear and your bandwidth free, you need to strike while the iron is hot, because you can bet that the US will try to close them down.  If you sign up before August 15th, you get a free month of movies for buying their music plan… excellent.  The biggest con is that they do not have a queue system in place yet, so everything must be downloaded one at a time.  A small price to pay.

As a bonus, here are some additional links.

Allofmp3.com was a fantastic Russian-based music site (Russia doesn’t recognize our copyright law).  However, here are the best alternative, yet dodgy pay sites: http://mp3sparks.us/?p=13.

The best singular MP3 downloading site? Amazon.com’s DRM-free music and cheaper than iTunes.  They may just take over Netflix as well.

The best all-you-can-download MP3 site?  Zunepass, which allows you to keep 10 songs per month and unlimited downloads for $14.95/month.

- Downloading like a madman, AFP

Awful Library Books indeed!  Metafilter user wendell put together a terrific post exploring some of the best posts from the Awful Library Books blog.  One of the better posts included this book with some rather outdated commentary:

Volumes that are so outdated or so outmoded that they no longer belong in a public library.Your grandfather’s Computer Science. Your grandfather’s Rocket Science. Your grandmother’s Feminism.Your great-grandmother’s Pre-Feminism. (And your great-grandfather’s.) Your grandparents’ parents! World Powers that no longer exist! Old predictions that didn’t happen! Bios of people when they were famous for something else! Roller Disco! Books considered crackpot when they were new! Stuff even the Politically Incorrect would think are Just Plain Wrong! And more!
(via Metafilter and Neatorama)

How about these bonus nuggets of advertisements that I’ve scrounged from the internets…
(click the pictures to enlarge)

Housekeeping Monthly – The 1955 version:

Every good woman needs a good spanking:

Lysol is what is missing in your marriage.  Not love:

The answer to this question is “certainly.”  That is, when she can’t work a simple postage machine:

And the age old picture that’s made its round on the web for years:

- Still impressed with the boldness of our grandparents, AFP

The BBC reports on an interesting new study in psychology.

Hundreds of wallets were planted on the streets of Edinburgh by psychologists last year. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the 240 wallets were posted back. But there was a twist.

None of the wallets contained money, but had special contents to see how it would affect their return rate.  It turns out, there were significant differences.  Those that contained baby photos were returned 90% of the time!  Different photos were placed in the clear window of the planted wallets containing either a smiling baby, cute puppy, a happy family or a contented elderly couple.  There were also wallets depicting recent charity donations and finally a control wallet.

40 wallets were planted in each category and placed randomly in busy public places.

The baby photograph wallets had the highest return rate, with 88 per cent of the 40 being sent back. Next came the puppy, the family and the elderly couple, with 53 per cent, 48 and 28 respectively. At 20 per cent and 15, the charity card and control wallets had the lowest return rates.

The takeaway?  Put baby pictures in your wallet whether you have them or not.  We’ve provided an example for you in this post.

- You’re welcome, AFP

I hope you have a few hours to spare.

Slate.com has hit the nail on the head.  What’s popular these days?  Mocking a narrow slice of life and devoting a webpage to it.

Coined Single-Topic Blogs (or single serving blogs), these slices of life use crowd-sourcing to collect pictures (with captions for effect), comments, statuses… anything; some have even received book deals.

You may have already heard of some of the bigger ones through word of mouth:

• Textsfromlastnight.com Forward your embarrasing or dissapointing texts, get laughs.  Too many to list.
• Fmylife.com Write a sad/funny story about your life with FML at the end.  Simple.
• failblog.com The quintessential collection of all things we fail at.  A picture or video with the word: Fail. Examples are here.
• Awkwarefamilyphotos.com Obvious… Some of my favs.
• thisiswhyyourefat.com Brought us classics like the McGangbang.

But, these were not the first.  Remember back when you first heard about LolCats from icanhascheezburger.com?  Started by the web zealots at 4chan.org, it chronicled the best pictures of cats with the most ridiculous misspelled captions (lolcatspeak).  4chan (started by moot in 2003) has been responsible for some of the most juvenile and hilarious events of crowd-sourcing on the net.  They’ve been credited with the creation/popularization of internet memes like lolcats, rickrolling, Anonymous’ war against Scientology, even rigging Time Magazine’s Most Influential Person voting through hacks.

These days the topics are getting even narrower.  Slate’s twitter roundup produced some more that you may not have heard of, or have just heard of:

• Thereifixedit.com Simple fixes to everyday problems.
• latfh.com Look At This Fucking Hipster has some gems like this, or this.  NSFW Bonus: lookatthishipsterfucking.  Not linked on purpose..
• petswhowanttokillthemselves.com So sad.  So cute.
• fupenguin.com Yea.. you tell that animal who’s boss.
• lovelylisting.com Bad real estate listings, funny photos.  Bonus: The Chair updates.
• cakewrecks.blogspot.com Exactly that.  Some are just gross awesome.
• asleeponthesubway.tumblr.com I’ve been guilty of this one.
• stuffwhitepeoplelike.com Well I like this too.  Does that count?
• happiestpeopleever.tumblr.com Ironic.
• stfumarrieds.tumblr.com Mocking married peoples’ status.
• owltattoos.blogspot.com Because owl tattoos kick ass.
• theyahooanswers.tumblr.com People ask the darndest things.
• sexypeople-blog.com More irony
• unicornwolflazersfuckyou.tumblr.com Um, what?
• whythefuckdoyouhaveakid.com Excellent question.
• lasercats.tumblr.com Cat plus laser eyes.

The “Fuck Yeah” category:

• fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com Celebrating cilantro in spite of all you haters.
• fuckyeahryangosling.tumblr.com
• fuckyeahannehathaway.tumblr.com.
• fuckyeahanimalswithcasts.tumblr.com
• fuckyeahvans.tumblr.com
• (many more aren’t included because they aren’t funny.  Sorry fuckyeahpuppies.tumblr.com and cuteoverload.com.  You’re relegated to fuckyeahfuckyeahs.tumblr.com)

The Slate author Farhad Manjoo has even started his own tumblr account to keep track of the STBs called lookatthisfuckingtumblr.tumblr.com.  Still in its infancy, we’ll see if it takes off with the stiff competition from fuckingcurated.tumblr.com.

Some more bonuses just because they’re interesting:

• stealourideas.tumblr.com
• moviesinframes.tumblr.com
• I’m getting tired.  Find the rest on your own.  If you have any more, list them in the comments!

- Think I’d let you leave without a bonus? AFP

Never seen a swimming, diving deer?  What a coincidence, neither have I.  In

2007, however, a scientist found the remains of an animal that was said to be an ancestor to whales.  A stretch, yes, but apparently they have similar anatomical features.  And plus, that picture looks like a whale, right?  Riggght.

The species divurged and 35 million years later the whale is well known and all we had was a fossil from India.  That is until last year when scientists were finally able to confirm what had long been related by locals.

Observers saw a mouse-deer swimming in a forest stream. When the animal noticed the observers it submerged. Over the next hour, they saw it come to the surface four or five times, and maybe more unseen. But it often remained submerged for more than five minutes at a time.

Later in 2008, the scientists were able to return with a camera to document

the phenomenon, and it was reported by the BBC.  And there you have it.  Undeniable proof that whales are deer.  Look, they even have the same noses.

-AFP

If you haven’t stopped by The Consumerist before, you’re doing yourself an injustice.  Chronicalling the worst Customer Service experiences and behind the scenes stories from popular stores, the website reveals all and gives the consumer a chance to fight back… against the man.

The latest spat involves a man who had complained about Toyota Service employees stealing from his car during appointments.  His previous complaints went unnoticed, so he took it upon himself to rig up a camera to see what happened during his next appointment.  Not only did he capture employees repeatedly snooping and stealing, he caught one watching porn in the cab of the car.  Classic.

And what better way to nail them, than send the dealership owner the DVD.

I am writing to you as an unsatisfied customer. I think the DVD enclosed will speak for itself… Everyone always wonders if the workers dig through personal belongings. I think this DVD not only answers that question, but proves it happens multiple times. Could it be a coincidence that this happened only to me three times?
(via Consumerist)

All offenders were instantly fired, but only after photographic proof.  Complaints simply didn’t warrant a response.

Snooping and manhandling pills:

Stealing Change: