If you work in a spirit-crushing cubicle farm and can’t remember the innocent joys of childhood, here’s a compromise: Get a cube farm playset, including office furniture, a meaningless job title generator (“Domestic Engineering Associate”), and downloadable decorations.
If that’s not highbrow enough for you, theory.org has Lego versions of social theorists Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie, and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism sold separately.
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” — Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962
“The bow is a simple weapon, firearms are very complicated things which get out of order in many ways … a very heavy weapon and tires out soldiers on the march. Whereas also a bowman can let off six aimed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one in two minutes.”
That’s Colonel Sir John Smyth in 1591, advising the British Privy Council to skip muskets and stick with bows.
InfoToday collected a lot of similarly farsighted advice into an online feature, appropriately called OOPS!
The Museum of Unworkable Devices debunks a whole fleet of perpetual-motion machines.
On this date in A.D. 600, Pope Gregory the Great decreed that saying “God bless you” is the correct response to a sneeze.
How does that work, exactly? When you become pope, do they give you a special hotline phone? If so, I think there are more important questions he could have asked.
You can spare others the whole “gesundheit” question by tickling the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue — it stops the sneeze impulse.
Ambigrams are word renderings that can be read both right-side up and upside down (or, sometimes, in a mirror). They’re hard to do convincingly, though some designers are pretty good at it. The one above was actually generated by a computer: Word.Net’s Ambigram.Matic. It’s not as elegant as the others, but I’m surprised that a machine can do this at all.
“When you are 8 years old, nothing is any of your business.” — Lenny Bruce
Ron Bailey, famous for inserting “pants” into Star Wars dialogue, has branched out into Spanish translations:
Luke Skywalker is Lucas Trotacielos, and the Force is la Fuerza. Yeesh. I suppose some Spanish films must sound embarrassingly dorky in English, too.
The exact layout of Air Force One has always been classified, but How Stuff Works has figured it out and rather recklessly published it online.
When they retire the plane in 2010, I’m hoping they put it up on eBay. At 4,000 square feet, it’s twice the size of my house, and my house doesn’t have a pharmacy, an operating table, 85 telephones, 19 televisions, radar jammers, hand-crafted wooden furniture, and flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles.
Also, Air Force One holds 2,000 meals and feeds 100 people at a time, and it can carry 70 passengers halfway around the world without refueling. I think that would be handy on vacations. I can probably fit 10 people in my dining room if we set up an extra card table, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
The Language Museum has samples of more than 2,000 languages, rather amazingly compiled by one guy in Beijing. Showoff.