Thank you Rasheed Wallace for providing one of the few memorable moments of this NBA season and for causing the announcer to react as if he just saw his grandmother naked. What a shot.
Astronaut Suni Williams will be running this week’s Boston Marathon on a treadmill while orbiting the Earth. Congratulations, you’re simultaneously accomplishing two things I never plan on attempting.
The Minnesota Golden Gophers claim the WCHA Final Five title with this incredible overtime goal by Blake Wheeler.
What’s the best way to dispel gay rumors? Marry a former Playmate of the Year as a cover-up, apparently. I’m jealous— but not convinced, Jeff Garcia. I hope you don’t think that knocking her up will make you any less gay, either. Just ask Tom Brady.
Eddie Griffin recently became the latest idiot to wreck a million-dollar Ferrari Enzo. Since when do ‘B’ list actors get these type of privileges?
West Virginia’s Darris Nichols buries a three at the buzzer to send the Mountaineers to the NIT finals and Mississippi State to Sadtown.
There’s nothing like waking up to blue skies and bright sunshine— especially when you don’t have to go to work. It’s about time we got some decent weather on the weekend. During the workweek, days like today usually tease me as stare helplessly out the window from my desk. Once Friday afternoon arrives, the bright skies are replaced with rain or sleet to put a damper on my weekend plans. I had to take this opportunity to enjoy the weather, explore the neighborhood and take a few pictures.
A view of Court St. from the front of my building.
A view from my building’s courtyard onto 9th St.
The giant black, spotted eyesore— otherwise known as Smith & 9th Street station.
And to think, this next picture was taken only a week earlier…
Stay up-to-date on the NHL’s latest fights
This site not only provides video and commentary on each fight, but it also allows users to vote on the winner. Even cheap shots from scumbags like Chris Simon are documented here. An excellent resource for any hockey fan.
Future Weapons on the Discovery Channel
The only thing I enjoy more than host Richard “Mack” Machowicz’s callus disposition towards combat casualty are his constant reminders to viewers that the weapons featured on the show are used to more effectively fight the evil terrorists. If I get to watch a double reinforced cement building get blown into a million pieces by an “anti-structure” missile, then I’ll deal with the shameless pro-war propaganda. Check this show out Monday’s at 9pm on the Discovery Channel.
My roommate works for a respected interactive agency here in NYC that is currently in the market for a Senior Interface Engineer. While looking through resumes of potential candidates, he came across this atrocity of a website (turn your sound up), accompanied by the following grammatically hilarious cover letter:
Your Senior Interface Designer position is of great interest to me and I’am a treasure chest full of knowledge, waiting to be opened! By blending my extensive knowledge of computer programming, and business marketing skills added onto your vision and goals, new horizons are easily obtainable. Whether you plan to utilize E-commerce or interactive videos, your company will be able to set new objectives, increase its internet exposure, advertising response, market share, and widen its global distribution avenues in the future with my services. I can creatively update any site by utilizing my custom FLASH 3D animations, voiceovers, sound effects, special effects and remixed-music, to establish an interactive video site that will capture your customer’s imagination.
By shooting videos and blending my HTML skills together I can create a futuristic designing theme that creates “Thunder Clapping” MOMA! {Word of Mouth Advertising} My innovative designs will add a sparkling touch of class to any site plus my skills run parallel to the present demands of your vacant position. My background also includes a wide variety of direct mail business marketing knowledge, creative media ads, and business proposal writing skills. I’am self motivated, own all of my own computer equipment, reliable, honorable, catch on quick, able to follow instructions, and possess the operating knowledge to over 52 different computer programs.
My animation skills are expert, and I’am learning advanced coding for FLASH action script games. If you are looking for a professional with insight, foresight, vision, mega experience and common sense! As we enter the outer limits of the new millennium with interactive animations and videos. Then your nationwide search for an innovative FLASH web designer has just ended.
If this guy’s resume came across my desk I would have to give him an interview just so I could laugh hysterically in his face for hours on end. You are a complete disgrace to every talented designer who takes pride in their work and their profession. Could you possibly be delusional enough to think you are qualified for any senior level position, let alone as an interface engineer? You can’t even write a coherent sentence!
Between the website and the cover letter, I have many questions and comments:
The first sentence of your cover letter incorrectly identifies the position for which you are applying. Great start.
Did you really just refer to yourself as a “treasure chest full of knowledge” and your experience level as “mega”? God I hate you so much.
I assumed even high school dropouts knew the contraction for “I am”. Guess not.
The animated GIF’s that litter your website make me want to throw up in disgust while having an epileptic seizure. Any “designer” that thinks these things “add a sparkling touch of class to any site” needs to be shot in the back of the head at very close range.
Is this or this or this or this what you consider to be “expert” animation skills? These are hilariously bad.
Your cover letter sounds like you bought a book of internet buzz words and randomly strung them together into sentence fragments.
Microsoft WordArt 3D graphics are quite possibly the tackiest things in the world. I’m surprised the entire website wasn’t written in Comic Sans.
You say your “futuristic designing theme” creates “Thunder Clapping MOMA! {Word of Mouth Advertising}”. First of all, what the fuck does that even mean? Second, how the hell did you manage to misspell your own acronym???
Your voiceover skills are nothing short of hilarious. The echo effect gets bonus points.
Hit ctrl+A on his homepage and scroll down. You may think you are outsmarting Google by doing this, but this ill-advised attempt at Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) is actually killing your Google Page Rank. You would know this if you were, in fact, the web designer you claim to be.
Listen very closely. Not everyone who can throw together a webpage with some annoying music is a web designer. You suck. Application denied.
If you grew up with the last name “Tootoo”, chances are you know how to throw a punch. Dallas Stars defenseman Stephane Robidas learned that the hard way after an unsuccessful attempt to defend Stars pretty boy, Mike Modano. Not only did he cleanly level one of the leagues premier forwards, but he had the instinct to know that reinforcement was not far behind. Without hesitation, he stood up and blindly delivered a ‘one hitter quitter’ to Robidas’ chin— not even bothering (or needing) to drop his gloves. Well done.
Mark that one in my book as ‘Five Minutes for Being a Total Badass’.
The Guinness Book of World Records was originally established to settle the drunken arguments that were previously settled with good old fashion brawls in British and Irish bars. In 1991, alcohol related entries were banned from the book due to fear of litigation. Luckily, the 1979 edition printed these records, which have been reproduced below. Updated records and their sources are included when available.
Strongest Beer
Bavarian brewer Harald Schneider, from southern Germany, brewed a beer that was 25.4% alcohol (2005). Source
Weakest Beer
The weakest liquid ever marketed as a beer was a sweet ersatz beer from Germany be Sunner, Colne-Kalk in 1918. It had less than 0.2 percent alcohol.
Speed Beer Drinking
Steven Petrosino of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania on June 22nd, 1977, drank 1 liter of beer in 1.3 seconds. Peter G. Dowdeswell of Earls Barton drank two liters in 6.0 seconds on February 7th, 1975.
Fastest Beer Drinking Relay
Czech patriots drank 2,662 half-litres of beer in less than 17 hours. Drinking at a rate of over 156 beers per hour, or 2.6 mugs per minute, the Czechs can now claim to be the fastest “relay” drinkers in the world (2004). Source
Highest Documented Blood Alcohol Level
An unidentified middle-aged Latvian man was unconscious but stable after a blood test showed 7.22 parts per million (0.7%) of alcohol, police spokeswoman Ieva Zvidre said. “An average person would vomit at around 1.2, lose consciousness at 3.0 and stop breathing at a level of about 4.0 parts per million” Zvidre said (2003). Source
Most Alcoholic Person (actual name of record)
It is recorded that a hard drinker named Vanhorn (1850 – 1911) averaged more than four bottles of Ruby Port per day for 23 years prior to his death at 61. He is believed to have emptied 35,688 bottles.
Beer Consumption
The nation with the highest beer consumption per person is West Germany, with 39.8 U.S. gallons per person in 1976. In the northern territory of Australia, the annual intake has been estimated to be as high as 62.4 U.S. gallons per person.
Youngest Recorded Death from Alcohol Poisoning
A 4 year old boy, Joesph Sweet, in Wolverhampton, England, in died 1827 from alcohol poisoning, reported in the Stafford Assizes case R. v. Martin.
Most Alcoholic Drink
During Independence (1918 – 1940) the Estonian Liquor Monopoly marketed 196 proof potato alcohol. In the United States, Everclear (190 proof) is marketed by the American Distilling Company.
Copy and paste the following search query into Google, replacing “BAND NAME” with, you guessed it, a band name. The search will return open indexes that contain downloadable music files matching your search criteria. Try it out for yourself.
I was trying to catch a cab home from the West Village at around 4am on Friday night when I came across this strange situation. I saw a girl laying on her stomach on the corner of a busy intersection screaming what sounded like “Save Ireland.” As I stood and watched in awe for about 15 minutes, a large crowd started to gather— including the NYPD. The girl must have been on some type of speed. This was not normal drunken behavior— this was absolute insanity. At one point I decided this was too good to not be videotaping, so I started to record the scene with my phone (sorry for the bad quality).
A man, claiming to be a doctor, approached the girl to ask her what was wrong, but she continued to scream the same nonsense about “Ireland” in his ear. The NYPD asked him to leave stating “she’s not going to die.” As he attempted to comply, he lost his balance and tripped backwards— to which one officer responded by grabbing him by the collar and pulling him up. When asked why he was being threatened for trying to help, the officer arrested him immediately. The man was understandably confused, considering he was trying to help this girl as everyone else, including the police, stood around laughing at her. Arresting him, not the girl screaming face down on the pavement, was the obvious decision. Nice work boys.
As he was being put in the back of the police car he kept saying “to serve and protect!” I thought that was a nice touch. You have to love the NYPD’s double standards, though. Had that been a guy on the ground screaming, he would have been arrested for disorderly conduct before any crowd could have witnessed something as ridiculous as this.
What can really happen in a day? Rome couldn’t be built, as the famous saying goes. Policies can’t be changed. Diseases can’t be cured. As pessimistic as it may sound, the only major change that can be made in a day would be something catastrophic— ending the world as we know it. This isn’t the rant of a doomsday prophet, but rather the scientific conclusion of some of the worlds most renown biologists, geologists and astrophysicists. Our universe is an incredibly volatile place— it can end at any time and in a number of ways.
Have you ever worried about two atoms colliding at the speed of light, creating a Black Hole whose tidal forces would rip us all apart atom-by-atom? How about a landslide off Africa’s coast that triggers a mega-tsunami which wipes out the east coast of the United States? Of course not. These scenarios are usually dismissed as being the product of a wild imagination and too many science fiction novels. But the fact of the matter is that it’s not a question of if these events will happen, but when. Worried yet?
I’m not saying we should all live our lives crippled in fear over this scientific inevitability. Rather, we should take this opportunity to more actively observe and question our surroundings and escape the cone of ignorance that we are falling into. I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “what goes up must come down” and accepted it as scientific fact. Based on our experiences, we are given no reason to believe otherwise— it’s the law of universal gravitation at work just as Newton described it.
The truth is, if an object is given an initial upward speed of 11.2km/s it would break Earth’s gravitational pull and never return. So much for that theory. Obviously no human is capable of projecting an object at such a high rate of speed, but that’s not my point. The point is, when did we, as a society, become so willing to accept things at face value? Has history not taught us that science is a constant cycle of improving past theories to reflect new discoveries? Then why do we theorize about gravity like it’s 1687?
The universe is billions of years our elder— not all of its intricacies will become apparent within the confines of our lifetimes or even our planet. We are looking for the easy answer, because we all fear what we can’t understand. But we shouldn’t be afraid. Being baffled is at the heart of all innovation— it’s what keeps us asking questions and further pursuing that which we can’t comprehend. I often feel like my generation has lost interest in asking ‘why?’— the foundation of all discovery. Answers, accurate or not, are offered to us so readily that it has become inconvenient to seek any first-hand knowledge. Now that’s something to worry about.
I recently finished a book on this topic called ‘Death by Black Hole’ by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a world renown astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. While some of the scientific jargon was a bit over my head, the book gave me a new appreciation for the world around me, and what a fragile balance our universe hangs in. It encourages you to forget everything you think you know and open your eyes to the world as it is revealed to us. I would strongly recommend anyone interested in this topic read this book. For those of you who are more interested in an abridged version of the universes chaotic schemes, the BBC just released an excellent short film detailing many of the same theories, but without the scientific explanations the book offers.
So take a little time to appreciate the world today. There might not be a tomorrow.
