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Office politics.


5 Things You Should At Least Pretend To Know Today - November 4, 2014

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1. The Nation's Cranky Grandparents And Disaffected Uncles Head To The Polls Today

It's a midterm election day, which means that a vanishingly slim percentage of the U.S. population is heading out to their local polling places to vote (probably for whichever candidate hates immigrants more). According to pollsters, the Republican Party has a 76 percent chance of reclaiming control of the Senate and making President Obama's life miserable for the next two years.


2. Guy From 'American Psycho' Decides Against Stepping Inside Head Of Steve Jobs

Christian Bale is pulling out of Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin's biopic of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Sources say that the actor, who is known for playing wealthy sociopaths, did not feel that he was right for the role. It seems likely that he's getting tired of playing the same role over and over again.


3. Louis CK Quits Twitter, Leaving Only Dozens Of Other Options To Communicate With Fans

Comedian Louis CK mysteriously deleted his Twitter account this week, leading fans to speculate on the reasons behind his choice. Some believe that it may be related to his angry tirade against ISIS a few weeks ago, though it seems unlikely that he was overly concerned about offending the jihadist group.


4. Did You By Any Chance Forget To Collect Around $2 Billion In Lottery Winnings?

Americans collectively never bothered to claim nearly $2 billion worth of lottery winnings. And that's just counting last year. According to records, many unclaimed winnings are for just a few dollars, but some are for as much as $1 million. So, maybe you'd like to take a moment to go rooting through your old jeans just in case.


5. Science Explains Why You Won't Be Able To Get That One Spice Girls Song Out Of Your Head After Reading This

Some musicologists at the University of Amsterdam collected data from approximately 12,000 people who listened to a random sampling of 1,000 popular songs in an effort to find out what makes a hit a hit. "Very strong melodic hooks seem to be the most memorable for people," according to a researcher. The top three catchiest songs, according to their findings, are the Spice Girls' "Wannabe," Lou Bega's "Mambo No 5" and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." And now you'll be thinking about those songs all day long.


(by Dennis DiClaudio)

Try to guess how many goats are in this picture. You're wrong.

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Hint: you haven't found enough.

Well, you're going to be wrong no matter what because technically they're not goats. The animals in this video are Tahrs, which means "basically, a type of wild goat" in whatever language it's from. The name also means "sneaky little bugger who can simply disappear into grass" in a language I just made up, because that's what these guys are. This video is like a Magic Eye puzzle, if the puzzles suddenly moved after 20 seconds and didn't make you worry about whether it's possible for your eyes to actually get stuck while crossed.

Tahrs are native to Oman on the Arabian peninsula, South India, and the Himalayas. The Arabian and Indian Tahrs are endangered, but the Himalayan variant since has been introduced to the Southern Alps of New Zealand, which is where this was filmed.

(by Johnny McNulty)

11 better "I voted!" stickers for the midterm elections.

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(by Happy Place Staff)

Libertarian party

Finally we get to see what it looks like when you drop a feather and a bowling ball in space.

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Drop it like it's got no air resistance.

For everyone who thinks Cleveland rocks, here's another reason: It's the home of NASA's Space Power Facility. That's a giant silo that usually holds 30 tons of air (30 tons? That takes a little away from the description that something is lighter than air), but when activated, it becomes a giant vacuum chamber containing only 2 grams of air.

They usually use the vacuum chamber to test effects on spacecraft, but in this segment from BBC's Human Universe, Brian Cox uses it to demonstrate the grade school lesson that if you were to drop a feather and a bowling ball at the same time, without air resistance, they would fall at the same rate.

They start doing the spaceship-style countdown to the drop at 2:45.

Brian describes the phenomenon by explaining that Einstein theorized that the reason the ball and feathers appear to drop at the same time is because neither of them are falling at all.

That's heavy. Or as Einstein would probably say, it's warped.

(by Myka Fox)

Why Am I Trending? Ben Stein

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by Shira Rachel Danan

"Why Am I Trending?" gives voice to the people, organizations, and events that are trending topics right now, so they can explain why everyone is talking about them.


What crazy shit will I say next?

Hello. My name is Ben Stein, and I'm trending because I called Barack Obama "the most racist president there has ever been in America."

Pretty provocative, huh? 

You might have freaked out when you saw I was trending today. You were probably worried I wanted to snuggle with another pregnant lady or produced another documentary explaining why the theory of evolution is to blame for the Nazis or said another unarmed black teen shot by police was "armed with his incredibly strong, scary self." Woo boy! I'm all over the place, aren't I?

Let me set your mind at ease. All I did was go on Fox News on Sunday and accuse America's first black president of being the most racist president we've ever had. 

Come on. Admit it. You feel provoked. 

If you're still on the fence, you should know that I do include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Polk, and the nine other presidents that owned slaves in that statement. At least none of them ever tried to get black people to vote for them in midterm elections by suggesting their party was more supportive of the rights of minorities! 

Let's take a moment now to try to figure out why I'm even famous. Here's a list of reasons, off the top of my head:

- That one scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

- The show Win Ben Stein's Money

- All the crazy shit I've said

Since my movie and TV days are long gone, all I have left is saying absurd, unsupportable things to keep me in the limelight.

Look, I have nothing personal against our racist president or his racist cronies. In fact, I sat next to Eric Holder on an airplane once! Nice guy. We ended up watching Love, Actually side by side, and when I hit on the stewardess, he did his best not to laugh at what a pathetic old man I am. It's just that I genuinely, deep in the bottom of my heart, think Obama is a racist. Or at least I think that is a pretty wild thing to propose. 

No? You still don't agree with me? Alright, fine. 

Bueller.

Happy now?

Sincerely,

Ben Stein

Somebody let this high-jumping dog inside before he smashes right through the sliding glass door.

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"Can't... seem... to... break... through... forcefield."

As a person who has lived his life in fear of leaning too hard against a plate glass window until I find myself falling, a cloud of razor sharp shards of glass surrounding me as I tumble to the street below, this video makes me exceedingly nervous.

I know this dog never actually succeeds in throwing his body through the door in his attempt to get inside, but I feel like I can't keep watching the video, or he'll end up smashing it eventually.

(by Dennis DiClaudio)


Meme Alert: "A potato flew around my room" is now flying around your Internet.

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Excuse the mess it made. (Via FB)

Getting lyrics wrong to a song is an adolescent right of passage. Revved up like a douche in the middle of the night, anyone? 

It was embarrassing when that dude from Stain'd couldn't get the National Anthem right, but when the little girl behind the Vine account "pg bree" mistook the lyrics of Frank Ocean's "Thinkin' 'Bout You," the Internet fell in love with it. 

The lyrics are supposed to go, "A tornado flew around my room before you came," but in early October, pg bree sang, "a potato flew around my room." Which creates a very amusing mental image that is also very easy to create as a real image. 

That's what "lil syd from the trap" did four days after pg bree made her mistake. Now lil syd from the trap's Vine become even more popular than the original (Click bottom right corner for sound) :

And it has spawned a bunch of other versions:

It's only been less than a month. but this potato meme has already made it full circle

Go forth, little potato, all eyes are on you. 

(by Myka Fox)

True patriot.

A handy guide for idiots explaining where Ebola is in Africa.

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Your eyes are already glazed over, aren't they? Dammit. (via Anthony England)

If you live in a part of America that's currently freaking out about Ebola, i.e. all of America, you might be tempted to, say, make a local teacher resign because she went on a trip to Kenya. This, and let's just be honest here, would make you an idiot. 

Why? Because Kenya is more than an America-length away from any active Ebola cases. The nation of Rwanda is a whopping 2,600 miles away, which was close enough for school officials to force two transfer students from that country to be quarantined after they moved to New Jersey. That's the kind of nonsense that led Anthony England, a chemist with a Ph.D. from MIT who has done a lot of work in Africa and long been frustrated by the West's ignorance of the continent, to make this map and post it on Twitter, where it was widely shared.

Since then, the map was picked up by the Washington Post, and it reminded them of another important Africa map from a few years ago, published by map-maker Kai Krause. It illustrates the basic reason why Americans and others keep failing at understanding the continent: they have no clue how huge it is. To be fair, this is partly the fault of our Mercator Projection maps, which shrinks the equatorial regions and enlarges the areas closer to the poles (and, as luck would have it, most rich countries are relatively far to the North), so that Africa looks like it's the same size as Greenland. This is not true. It can eat a whole bunch of Americas:


Long story short, Africa is big and everywhere else is really small. (via Kai Krause)

What do you say, America? Can we get this straight? No? No chance whatsoever? Oh. Ok. Well let's just all use our excellent educations and go vote, then.

(by Johnny McNulty)

p.s. thanks to reader @pullrich for pointing out that the Mercator Projection shrinks regions near the Equator, not the Southern Hemisphere in general.

This acrobatic sign spinner is insanely good at his job.

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I'd buy what he's selling if I could read it.

If you're sitting at your job, pretending to be busy while watching the clock and thinking about how underpaid and unappreciated you are, take a walk to the bathroom, look in the mirror and slap some sense into yourself. Then go back to your desk, watch this video and become inspired to be the absolute best at whatever the hell it is you're being paid to do. Not only because it's right thing to do, but because young dudes like this candidate for Employee of the Decade are hungry as hell and coming for your job! While you've been busy complaining, this guy turned one of the crappiest jobs you could think of into an art form.

(by Jonathan Corbett)

House of Representatives

If you're addicted to the Serial podcast, you're going to want to hear these "lost episodes."

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If you're a regular podcast listener, chances are you've been addicted to Serial, the weekly podcast from This American Life that investigates a fifteen-year-old murder for which the wrong man might have been convicted. (If you haven't listened to it, "STOP. Go back, and listen from the beginning" is a paraphrase of something that Sarah Koenig enjoys prefacing each episode with.)

For many, the podcast has become so addictive that the wait for each new episode on Thursday is almost as unbearable as (maybe-or-maybe-not) being wrongly imprisoned for a murder you didn't commit. 

Comedians Paul Laudiero, Zach Cherry and Will Stephen have stepped in to fill the void. These parody "lost episodes" finally point the finger at one of the most mysterious characters in the story: The Mail Chimp!

(by Bob Powers)

Mitch McConnell got photobombed by an unhappy voter at his local polling place.

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"Is this right? I can only vote for myself once?"

When photographer Aaron P. Bernstein followed soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell into a polling location at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, he was probably expecting to walk away with one more in a long, long tradition of dull images of politicians casting votes for themselves.

Instead, what he got was an Election Day photo for the ages:

Voting really does allow you to make a statement. (via Getty Images)

Nobody knows who the mystery photobomber is, but we can probably make a safe assumption about his political leanings given the the direction of that thumb and the sourness of that face. So, he'll probably be pretty bummed out once the the results come in tonight.

But he'll always have this moment.

(by Dennis DiClaudio)


Nate Silver

Someone turned a NYC subway car into a cardboard apartment.

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All a (card)board the train! (Via reddit)

It is unclear what is going on here. Is this a nod to the many homeless who are forced to make homes out of cardboard, or just IKEA's strategy to advertise a new line of even cheaper furniture made from the boxes that contained their already cheap furniture? Either way, the MTA just got a little META. 

The MTA's Adam Lisberg spoke to Gothamist about it, and he told them, "I don't know what the heck it is, but if it impeded any of our 6 million daily customers from getting on a train or finding a seat, it never should have been there in the first place."

My guess from the clearly visible word "Empathy," is that it is most likely a reference to the people who are in the unfortunate position of needing to sleep on the subway. Gothamist also notes the "furniture" is tagged with the phrase "Love the snow, try sleeping on it."

Here's a blurry photo a real-life new yorker captured of the setup.

 

Real estate in NYC is at a premium, and goes fast, so I've put the apartment up on Craigslist here.

(by Myka Fox)

This 'Orange is the New Black' actress shouted down a crazy subway preacher.

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Takes the train. Doesn't take crap. (via Getty)

Lea DeLaria plays the take-no-shit convict Big Boo on Orange is the New Black, but she's also pretty badass in real life. At least when it comes to dealing with looney preachers on New York City subways.

Delaria was riding the D train when a Bible thumper began preaching to disinterested commuters. At the beginning of the tape, you can hear him saying "Jesus loves you," which seemed to be enough to get the undivided attention of DeLaria, who clearly wasn't in the mood for a sermon. She probably had a good idea where the guy was headed. Anyone who rides the trains knows that "Jesus loves you," is usually the appetizer for a main course of "God hates gays."

DeLaria confronted the guy, shouting over him that "he has no right," even though I'm pretty sure he does, at least according to the First Amendment. She may have been just exercising her own right to yell whatever the hell she feels like in the process of shouting down an obnoxious asshole.

'You have absolutely no right sir. Get off this train!. Other people believe other things and everybody has the right to believe in other things on this planet and in this world.' 'Jesus never sent for you to do this never, not anywhere in the Bible. Show me anywhere in the Bible where Jesus says it is OK for you to do this. Don't come at me because I went to fucking Catholic school for 12 years and I know every lie.’

You can tell by the guy's reaction that he's not used to being outshouted. He may have also been thrown off by someone yelling about a Catholic school education while wearing a "Bad Jew" T-shirt. That probably confused a lot of people.

If nothing else, the NYC passengers got a break from the monotony of being yelled at by an amateur crazy person, and were treated to a pretty great monologue delivered by a professional actress.

(by Jonathan Corbett)

The creators of the most badass music video of the decade are making the world's first POV action movie.

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Finally, an action movie with a protagonist I identify with: someone with arms.

In March of 2013, we wrote about a music video called "Insane Office Escape," which was a first-person point-of-view thrill ride that made Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" look like a trip to the candy store. Now, its creator, Ilya Naishuller, has set out to expand it into a full-length movie called Hardcore, filmed entirely by Russian stuntmen wearing GoPro cameras on their heads, and it sounds like it will actually live up to the levels of crazy that that implies.


See that black figure flying in the middle? That's the main actor AND the cameraman.

The original video, as the title implied, was an action-packed escape from Russian gangsters in an office, and it's like watching someone beat a first-person shooter video game perfectly, except with way more adrenaline. Here's that original video (Fair warning: this would be rated 'R' in case this preview image of the literal male gaze didn't tip you off):

That video (which was for the song "Bad Motherfucker" by Naishuller's punk band, Biting Elbows) took the Internet by storm. The YouTube version has over 23 million views, plus it's Russian and was popular on sites besides YouTube, so the total is much higher. Given how much time, effort, money and creativity seems to have gone into Hardcore, I can only hope that at least the same number of people see this new film, which actually seems to be innovating a new form of filmmaking. 


The camera.


A better view of the stunt actor/cameraman's headset from behind.

So, check out their teaser trailer and Indiegogo pitch. The teaser starts at 3:55, while the first few minutes discuss the challenges of making the film (with some awesome shots of how they filmed it), why they need to raise more money to finish editing and post-production, and what the perks are for supporters.

Support the film here.

(by Johnny McNulty)

This motion-sensing mobile allows babies to post selfies from the crib.

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Baby is at the GoPro Diaper Station. (via)

If you been struggling to find the perfect gift for North West, it looks like your search may soon be over. Because a design student in the Netherlands has invented a mobile for a baby's crib that doubles as a command center for all things social media. It looks like a lot of other hanging mobiles, but the motion-sensitive stuffed toys attached take pictures every time the baby moves and posts them online. Sound crazy? It is!

The device is called New Born Fame, and is the creation of Laura Cornet. She claims to have come up with the idea after realizing that the current crop of newborns is the "first to be brought up by parents who grew up with Facebook." Even if her timeline is a little off, you get the idea. And that idea sounds terrible.


Pics or your baby didn't happen. (via)

Some of the stuffed toys are in the shape of Twitter and Facebook icons. There's also a pair of tiny running shoes with an internal pedometer which tracks the baby's kicks, which is perfect for new parents worried about their infant's mileage.

The good news is it's not on the market yet. So there's still time for the rest of us to figure out how to use Facebook's photo filters.

(by Jonathan Corbett)

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