Have you had it with hipsters? Well, good, because hipsters have had it—or so they say.
“I think people are exhausted by trends that have the half-life of a millisecond,” says John Leland, author of “Hip: The History.” “You live in a state of perpetual whiplash, in which the minute you’re up on one trend […]
A mini-robot has managed to infiltrate cockroach society. In an experiment, scientists in Switzerland used the robot to draw a group of darkness-loving roaches out into the light, according to silicon.com:
Called InsBot, for “insect-like robot”, the mechanical bug mimics the insects’ smell and movements to the point that the roaches have accepted it as their […]
An African parrot named Alex has learned to identify 50 objects and to recognize shapes and colors, according to Wired News. What’s more, he seems to have taught himself a “zero-like concept.” Humans usually don’t grasp what zero means until they’re several years old.
RCA has quite a web site. Which is surprising, really, all these years after it stopped being an actual company. I was expecting the internet equivalent of Buford’s Grocery, an old corner store I remember from childhood–they went out of business one day, but their sign (provided by the makers of 7UP) remained up for […]
The internet isn’t so big, if you’re small. To find out how much children understand about the net and its complexity, researcher Zheng Yan gathered responses from 83 kids.
One five-year-old-boy said “Um, it has two computers on it. It is ten square feet large. It wouldn’t hurt you”.
The children aged between nine and ten appeared […]
It happened to ginger ale, licorice and the Beach Boys. Now the humble scone is prepared to sacrifice its essential self to pander to Milquetoast tastes (and just in time for its “500th anniversary in the UK”).
A new line of scones launched by a Scottish company has been formulated to taste “more buttery.” It’s […]
Watching someone else getting an injection always makes me flinch, if only within (I’m not what you’d call expressive). That sense of inner recoil as the needle goes in is something so palpable—and yet so thin, so fleeting as to afterward seem merely imagined.
But we live in a time when the evanescent can be […]
In a play that offers a fresh take on impossible relationships, a young man falls for a shark. It’s Jaws meets Trick in Rhode Island:
Is it love at first bite? Swimming in the Shallows treats its unusual infatuation as your everyday teen crush, all giddy apprehension and nervous fumbling. Clearly, a little man-shark love is […]
A librarian pedaled a mile and a half to her parents’ house, unaware of the bomb planted under her bicycle seat.
It’s the work of a man known as “Italy’s Unabomber,” says The Guardian.
It’s almost reassuring to know that Western Union, whose relentless TV commercials strain to make it seem natural that you should wire wads of cash to the hapless, maintains its legacy telegram business, albeit halfheartedly.
You can even send a telegram via their web site. (But where would you send it? To 1946, perhaps?) They […]
If rock needs a consciousness movement, Ian Svenonius may be just the guy to lead the revolution.
“I feel like people who are in bands, it’s almost like they are people who work in a bomb factory who think they’re making pencils. They’re totally oblivious to their role in the culture. It’s because of all the […]
Japan SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions) unravels that country’s everyday mysteries for bemused foreigners:
Q. Last summer I was looking around Tokyo for an apartment with my girlfriend. Outside one of the rental offices there was a placard advertising REALLY nice places for super cheap rent. Then my g.f. warned me that they were `bad […]
Even in the face of terror, some people manage to find creative ways to cope. Case in point: Scarlett Littlemore of London, who added this item to her 43 Things list:
Survive an Al-Qaeda attack right by my home
(Authorities are still trying to sort out who’s responsible for the London bombings, according to the New York […]
Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is leaving Berlin, for who knows where. She dressed the Sex Pistols in the ’70s, and in 1984 she said something that would make a sassy epitaph for this queen of punk:
“Sometimes you need to transport your idea to a world that doesn’t exist and then populate it with fantastic-looking people.”
Know […]