Here are some more old fashioned advertisements for you, these ones are mostly dealing with women and where they belong.
Yeah, boys. What were you thinking? You can’t beat the Axis if you have sex with women. Look how prim and proper she looks. She is just full to the brim with gonorrhea and you don’t even know it. Whatever, look, just don’t say we didn’t warn you. (more…)
Ah, those were the good old days, back when women knew their place was in the kitchen making dinner for the man of the house and that cleaning was her profession. Back when smoking was good for your health.
How do these smoking companies know women so well? I thought we kept that smoke in the face hypnotic trance thing under wraps. Maybe she likes you because she thinks your gay for smoking a blueberry cigar (it’s wild!). And this ad guarantees that you will get smoking satisfaction with out inhaling smoke. You get the chicks and you don’t have to inhale? Score.
This goes out to all y’all web developers out there. You know who you are. In 1999 while others partied like it was… 1999, you slaved away trying to get your table-based layout working on Netscape and IE. Thank goodness it’s now 2007, and you can just grab CSS-based layouts from A List Apart.
But off all the possible abuses of old-skool HTML, I bet you never thought of this one:Â using table cells and bgcolor to build an image, one pixel at a time!
Link to video for those of you on RSS.
Brought to you by Japan and cutesy anime chicks.
Now that the 2006/2007 fall TV schedule is over, it’s time to ponder what it is about television that we like so much. Is it watching people do stupid things on reality shows? How about steamy hospital dramas that have more sex than medicine? Is it comedies about fat, dumb husbands with hot wives that hate them? All of these things are well and good, but they don’t really give me what I’m looking for.
I like all types of comedy, but oddly enough, my favorite is physical comedy (oddly enough, I say, because it’s a well-known fact that women don’t “get” The Three Stooges). Perhaps I DON’T like The Three Stooges - but I do enjoy me some fallin’ down. I like people smacking themselves in the face with doors and I like people throwing themselves around the room. What makes it funnier is to see it in the middle of a sitcom where everything else is “normal” and actors get by on witty lines. It’s the physical comedians within these groups that make certain shows stand out. And, of course, there’s the stand-outs on Saturday Night Live. While I tend to consider it a bit easier to do physical comedy on a sketch show, I’ve included the standouts from that show as well.
The following is an in-depth look at physical comedy throughout the past 40 years. You will note that Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball, while mentioned, are not on the list. We’ll call them the far end of the “modern” scale and look past them to those they inspired.
You’ll also notice that to keep your attention, I have sprinkled a bit of nudity throughout the article. Enjoy!
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20./19. (tie) Chris Farley/Will Farrel & John Belushi/Dan Akroyd - For many folks in their 20’s and 30’s, Farley and Farrel epitomize physical comedy. For the preceding generation, it’s Belushi and Akroyd. The main draw for all four of these guys is their size - seeing them take their large frames and hurl themselves through dance routines (Farley’s Chippendale, Belushi and Akroyd’s Blues Brothers, Farrel’s cheerleader) or bandy about the set in a “large” fashion (Farley’s Matt Foley, Belushi’s samurai, Farrel’s hot tub lifeguard) cemented them in our minds as guys who based their comedy on the idea that big guys doing most anything is hilarious. While they could possibly be near the top of just any “physical comedy” list, for the purposes of this list (which focuses on television), we’ll give them their rightful place near the bottom for using the unbridled comedy venue of late night, weekend, sketch comedy television to hone their skills.
18. Molly Shannon - A former SNL cast member NOT known for her movie career, Shannon makes it in to the top 20 by taking some seriously badass falls. Her work as the character Mary Katherine Gallagher was mindblowingly physical - launching oneself into a pile of boxes or chairs on “live” TV is much more impressive than doing it in a movie or even a taped sitcom. All that, and she’s wearing a short skirt! She also added a lot of dancing and gymnastics to her other characters such as Sally O’Mally (”I’m FIFTY years old!”). She probably won’t be remembered as one of the best SNL cast members of all time, and her career went pretty dead after she left the show - but she gets an A+ for effort for slinging herself around with the boys of SNL.
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17./16. Sarah Chalke/Zach Braff - You don’t generally find good physical comedy in today’s sitcoms. Heck, with all the reality show buzz, it’s hard to find a sitcom at all. But along with being brilliantly written and acted, Scrubs holds up the current television schedule with a little bit of physical comedy thanks to Braff and Chalke. From the beginning, Braff has been taking shots to the head from inanimate objects and riding his scooter through seemingly solid objects. And of course, he’s been through the Ritter/Van Dyke school of falling down. Chalke gets her position on the list for being the hottest chick on television (or so I’ve read) to take the occasional fall or just flail around hopelessly.
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15. Don Knotts - Knotts gets his points basically for being extremely funny-looking and putting it to use in a comedic fashion. He’s funny just when his hair is out of place as Barney Fife. He’s funny when he’s scared. Funny when he’s drunk. Funny when he’s trying to be macho. His high-pitched excited voice and spindly frame serve as a template for actors like Zach Braff (16), Andy Dick (13) and Michael Richards (10) as he fully embraced his end of the comedy spectrum as “that weird little guy.” Later in his career, on Three’s Company, he kept up his reputation as being a sort of “rubberband man” with his his bug-eyed facial expressions and slow-wittedness. While Knotts didn’t do as much falling down shtick as others known for their physical comedy, his ability to play out “anxious” through facial expressions and mannerisms sets him up as a true modern physical comedy legend.
14. Ellen DeGeneres - Before Ellen was known as a lesbian, she was known as a great female physical comedian. Able to clumsily dance and sing her way through her sitcom (and now even her own talk show), she brought back the clumsy female lead we really hadn’t seen since I Love Lucy. Although the sitcom itself wasn’t really anything to write home about, the classic setup of miscommunication -> “madness ensues” was made more palpable and fresh by having DeGeneres herself do the pratfalls and play the dummy. DeGeneres plays as a female Don Knotts doing the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld and getting herself into situations similar to Lucille Ball.
13. Andy Dick - It would appear that while Andy Dick played America’s favorite spazz on television (Newsradio), he was also quite a spazz in real life. The Newsradio writers obviously put this to good use and used Dick as a punching bag for the show - during the second season, every show opened with Dick’s character falling down for some reason or another. While this didn’t carry through to the following seasons, falls, smacks and flailing were a part of Dick’s repertoire throughout the rest of the show’s run. Combine that with the perfectly clueless nature of Matthew Brock, and this little gem of a physical comedian shines. Much like Scrubs, which adds more humor to its already awkwardly-humorous setting (a hospital) by adding slapstick, Newsradio brings a new facet to making office life humorous by adding physical comedy in the form of Andy Dick.
12. Chevy Chase - Really not known for his work on TV…but his stint as a cast member on Saturday Night Live solidifies him as one of the most memorable physical comedians in modern TV history. Why? Well, I am a huge fan of the prat fall and no one does it better than Chase. While Chase is known as a terrific prick and was definitely not a favorite amongst fellow cast members, he sure did a hell of a job falling down on camera. He didn’t even resemble Gerald Ford in the least bit, but he ingrained the image of Ford as a clumsy boob for all future generations. Chase did the “fall of the week” during SNL openings…and that’s why he’s number 13.
11. Steve Martin - Like Chase, Martin isn’t known for his television work anymore, but he’s so good he’s remembered for being a cast member on Saturday Night Live (which he wasn’t). Martin is the modern equivalent of a Vaudeville man, using props, songs and incredibly lame humor in his act. He’s very much the guy who made the “fake arrow through the head” funny and danced around like a complete buffoon singing about King Tut. Martin’s physical appeal is in his lanky body and large voice, accompanied by his self-deprecating humor. His physicality in the “wild and crazy guys” alone earns him a spot on this list for funny catch phrase, funny costume, funny accent and funny dance.
Don Herbert, best known as Mr. Wizard, passed away last week. Mr. Wizard taught and inspired two generations of children on his television shows Watch Mr. Wizard (1951-1965) and Mr. Wizard’s World (1983-1990).
More than just demonstrating how to measure the height of a tree from by its shadow, Mr. Wizard taught kids two very important lessons. First, he taught them that science is about how the world works, and the world doesn’t always work the way you think it does.
Second, he taught them that science was not just for old men in lab coats with millions of dollars of equipment, that a lot of interesting experiments and demonstrations could be done with household objects and a little adult supervision.
This is a particularly bad time in our nation’s history to lose Mr. Wizard, because science is being attacked on exactly those two points.
We’ve shown you the total awesomeness that are Japanese obstacle course competitions. And we’ve brought you the true power and spectacle of Hard Gay. So now head three minutes into the video below to see the Beyond-Ultra-Power-Awesomeness that happens when you combine the two.
Bonus Awesomeness awaits when the British announcer points out that Hard Gay’s competitor “takes one to the old happy sacks”.
What do we have against the metric system? Can anyone tell me why the good old US of A hates the metric system so much that it stands practically against the world in it’s single minded “We’re Number One” mantra? We stand alone with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia. This doesn’t bode well in the US’s current stance in about any world wide political situation. I mean, when an argument could be won by almost any country by saying something school-ground childish around the lines of “well, we use the metric system, what do you use?” I think it becomes time to reconsider your standing point on the issue.
Most people (except Americans, Liberians and Burmese) would agree that the metric system is much more useful and makes a lot more sense than a system that relies on body parts (length measurements such as feet and yards) and old fashioned carrying devices (peck, quart, pint). If you don’t believe me that we stand alone in this war against reason, here is a pretty picture in which the red countries are the countries who do not use the metric system. Bottom line is, the metric system makes more sense, period.
If you have ever run a web site, you’ve been exposed to the addictive, number-crunching fun provided by web stats. Any web site that’s worth it’s pixels will have, at the very least, a freeware program like AWStats parsing through the server logs and putting together colorful charts and reports. Our host, Q5media, are kind enough to provide us with LiveStats by Deepmetrix.
Web stats can be really useful for blogs. They can tell you all sorts of interesting things about your readership, for example, last month 55 people found the site while searching for Yakety Sax, no doubt landing on our article about how Yakety Sax makes anything funny. Other top searches included guys kissing, how youtube works, and once you go black. Hopefully everyone found what they were looking for.
You are far from any beaches, or the ocean for that matter. But the sun is out and you’ve got your surfboard waxed — how can you get your surfing in? Head downtown, grab a friend and a few sticks of dynamite, and surf the river:
It looks like this is an ad for Quicksilver who sell surfing gear, so I have no idea if it’s a real video they picked up or something staged. But I’m impressed.
Dynamite isn’t the only way to surf a river. If you’ve got some predictable rapids, you can surf the waves formed where the water flows over submerged ledges and rocks.
It has recently come to my attention that there is a new diet pill on the market that is FDA approved. This is big news for pharmaceuticals, who make the most money in OTC sales via diet/weight loss supplements. What will happen in the pharmaceutical war for market coverage with this new drug?
What I am really excited about is not the fact that this expensive diet supplement will help obese people to manage their weight issues. No, it’s not that they will be able to have a healthy lifestyle again where walking down the stairs isn’t a four hour adventure. It’s that these people are going to actually have to practice self control. Will it work? Alli, yes; self control, who can say?
How awesome would it be to have one of these to play around with for a while?
Back in the day, I was huge fan of Sim City, Sim City 2000, and even Sim City 3000. So much so that I put up a small fansite and was constantly bombarded by emailed requests to download Sim City for free.
Sim City was a great game but it never was a completely accurate city simulator. In Sim City 2000, for example, filling every square of land with high-rises would only get your population to 100,000 or so. In order to reach the millions, you had to wait past the far-flung future year of 2000 and build arcologies.
Now we are seven years past 2000, so where are the arcologies? On their way. There a number of projects being proposed and built that could qualify.
First, there’s this huge pyramid proposed for Tokyo Bay. Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid is obviously an arcology, just take a look at this clip from Extreme Engineering:
I left a cliffhanger of a post in Part I of this article. This section of the article will focus more on things to help you be successful and knowledgeable in your clinical skills as a student nurse, even if you do decide to go further for your master’s or doctorate degree in nursing.
Palm Pilots
As I mentioned in the previous article, buying a palm pilot was the smartest thing that I ever did. Going on many websites, your head may swoon when thinking of all that you have to consider when buying a Palm Pilot. There are only three things that you need to worry about: price, compatibility, and memory.
Price
Most good palm pilots (PDAs) start at a range of $199 and can go as far as $499 or higher. I am not a rich person at all. The Palm Pilots (yes, plural…see below) I have bought took months for me to save up for. In my humble opinion, I would have to say that a PDA for $199-299 might be all that you need.
Before you tsk, tsk me, there are several things working for you as a student nurse. The first is that you’re a student, a poor, poor student who needs help financially. Most companies offer some kind of student discount if you order PDAs from their website like Skyscape and Epocrates. These two websites offer bundles in which you buy PDAs and medical programs together at a discounted price. There might be more sites out there, but these are the two big sites that I deal with when shopping for medical stuff for my PDA. Secondly, as I said in the last section of this article, you can always hit all of the relatives up for some palm pilot lovin’ during Christmas/Hanukkah/birthday or whatever time.
Does sorting bottles and cans really save the earth? You may have heard the rumor that the whole thing is a big sham - either a misguided to make ourselves feel better about our wasteful lifestyles, or worse a conspiracy of crystal-wearing, tree-hugging hippies.
You may have noticed a number of geeky environment-related posts on Unsought Input. Some of our writers like to think of themselves as environmentalists. Now, before you click your back button, I should explain: no one here will ever tell you to stop driving and live in a cave! We are positive, progressive environmentalists who come to our green views through a love of innovation, efficiency, scientific progress, and yes, even market economics.
So, is recycling a bunch of bullshit designed to make us all feel better about ourselves? Does putting glass and plastic in a green bin actually damage the environment more than help?
Pretty much no one nowadays takes any personal responability for their actions. Look at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He still refueses to admit he had anything to do with the firing of the attorneys even though all the evidence points to him doing so. All he has done so far is pretend to not remember anything and blame all of his subordinates for what happened.
Look at the TB patient who flew all around the globe potentially infecting people. He blames everybody else, even though he was repeatedly told not to travel and to seek medical treatment. Apparently his wedding was more important than the health of anyone else besides himself. Then he has the nerve to say that quarentine procedures are unconsitutional. Ok Mr. Big Shot lawyer good time proving that case while evryone on those planes sues your ass.
Akon is the latest egomaniac to emerge. He’s already in hot water for dry humping a 14 in the Caribbean. Now at the recent K-Fest in Fishkill Akon hurled a 15 year boy from the stage after he threw something at him.
