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POPSHow To Tell If You're Being Followed Are you being tailed? How do you know what to look out for? Use this handy guide to see if they're really watching you or if it's all in your head. If you want to identify a tail, look at their shoes: they are hard to change. Move frequently between crowded and empty places: this forces them to keep closing for fear of losing you, drawing back, then closing again. This makes them conspicuous. But don't jump on or off trains just before the doors close--that's for the movies; and anyway, a good surveillance team will already have someone on the train, as well as on the platform. (Via Jason Kottke.)
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POPSGiant Turkey Chases Boston Woman, Pecks Bottom Repeatedly When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead. He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys. Distance-shmistance, we want to be near the turkeys. I, for one, am against the city of Boston trying to regulate mutually consensual human-turkey behavior. A light ass-pecking never hurt anyone, am I right? Even though this incident happened right near my apartment, I have not been lucky enough to experience any super-sized turkeys on my errands, sadly. Look at the size of that sucker...he's gotta be like 12 feet tall! :)
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POPS"We're Not Dangerous...We're Persian!" While it's hard to beat the hilarity of his opening bit, Iranian comedian Jobrani's entire politically incorrect routine is online: 1 , 2 . Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the seriousness of the world.... (Via The Daily Dish.)
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POPSomg!!!! — Navy Cracks Kids' High-Tech Online Code Actual slide from an actual US Navy presentation on why recruitment rates are at record lows amongst the youngest generation and how deciphering their mysterious alien language could help. im in ur navy, draftin ur kidz!
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POPSHow to Survive In a Black Hole... ...or, more precisely: How to squeeze out a few more hours during which to contemplate the highs and lows of your life and what you could have done differently to avoid having it end in the middle of a damn black hole. :) The analysis is usually done by thinking about a person who falls into the black hole starting from a state of rest at the event horizon.... But in general a person falling past the horizon won't have zero velocity to begin with. Then the situation is different — in fact it's worse. So firing the rocket for a short time can push the astronaut back on to the best-case scenario: the trajectory followed by free fall from rest.
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POPSQUIZ: What American Accent Do You Have? If you think you don't have an accent, think again. This short quiz is a way to find out which dialect of American English you speak. Different regional accents become more prevalent in countries at different times throughout the years for various socio-economic and geographical reasons. These accents come to be perceived as "neutral" or "accent-less" by the majority during these times. For a while, the American dialect sometimes called "Standard Midwestern" has dominated but, like accents themselves, this "standard" constantly evolves. Recently, the spoken aspects of American English have trended westward along with the population center of America. Many features distinct to Northeastern accents (think NYC, Boston) are being replaced in popularity with those from Western accents (think LA) across America. This shift tends to be more prominent the younger the speaker is.
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POPSThe Trash Princess: Why Americans Love to Hate Paris Hilton An ambitious look into the unstoppable American celebrity phenomenon that is Paris Hilton and her permeation into world culture. Why do we love to hate her and just how representative of American culture and ideals is she anyway? Questions for our times.... The only thing complicating this picture of dissipation is that Paris Hilton isn’t quite the airhead she plays on TV. She created her persona of Paris the Heiress with an instinct for America’s suspicion of the idle rich. Confession of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose is the title of her best-selling book. It’s the title of a woman who is in on the joke. (Via kottke.org.)
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POPSHuman Wins in "Man vs. Machine" Scrabble Competition! Fighting the evil robot uprising, one Scrabble tile at a time. Kramer had the choice of spelling a five-letter word and picking up all the remaining tiles. Rather, he used four tiles to complete the word "meeter" on the board, leaving one available tile and confounding the computer. Kramer explained that if he had picked up all the remaining tiles, the computer would have known exactly what he had in his rack. But by leaving one behind, he stymied it. "That's just something hard for the program to solve. There are too many possibilities," Kramer said. Who's the Genius now?
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POPSHow To Be Funny Very nice tips with funny examples. Surprise is often worked into a joke through the 'pull-back/reveal' technique. The joke focuses your attention on a particular angle or detail of the scene, then suddenly pans out to show you the whole, surprising picture. Very often the success of these jokes hinges on the joke-teller's subtle control of rhythm: a beat here, a breath there.
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POPS830! How a MA carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever Controversy erupts in the competitive Scrabble world as three world records are destroyed in one game by a pair of club amateurs. "If they weren't really trying to win," an intermediate-level player named Mike Eldeiry wrote on the Crossword Games-Pro message board, "then can we really consider it our record? Fun, yeah. Neat, sure. Promotable, why not? But record, ummmmmmmm, I don't know." Eldeiry told me the game reminded him of a 600-foot batting-practice home run. If experts always shot for the moon, he said, "I think they'd have cracked 850 by now. But they'd have lost a lot of games in the process." Maybe, but there definitely seems to be some sour grapes amongst the experts here. See the article for the play-by-play analysis.
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POPSTop 5 Greatest Movie Monologues According to the author, the top 2 greatest movie monologues ever are: 1. Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove . 2. Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen in Network . Can you guess the other 3 without looking? Do you have some better suggestions? What makes a great movie monologue? Even more to the point, what qualifies as a monologue? Hamlet's soliloquy would certainly make the cut, but its origins didn't spring from film, so it's probably ineligible. Does a speech have to be a certain length to qualify as a monologue? Can it be addressed to someone who reacts or occasionally interjects something in the middle of the display? (Via kottke.org.)
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POPSGeraldo Gets High At Bellvue. In 1974. Under doctor supervision for TV. Incredible. (EDITed for credibility. :) )
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POPSHidden "S-E-X" message in 1990s Pepsi Cans For a limited time during the summer of 1990 (Memorial Day through the Fourth of July), Pepsi distributed its flagship soft drink in four specially-designed "Cool Cans" as part of a promotional campaign. The four designs included confetti, neon, sunglasses, and surfer motif. Oh man, did this ever take me back. I remember that summer of 1990 when it was all the rage in school to collect two of the new neon Pepsi cans to spell out that secret, dirty message on the playground. In Catholic school, no less! Scandalous! :) (Curiously, much later in life, Pepsi was one of my mountain biking sponsors for a couple years...coincidence...?)
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