The Linktopus is honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King by tearing a frigate apart.
Here is some stuff that exists.
Words with no English equivalents –
5. Zeg (Georgian)
It means “the day after tomorrow.” Seriously, why don’t we have a word for that in English?
…
7. Lagom (Swedish)
Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish? This slippery little word is hard to define, but means something like, “Not too much, and not too little, but juuuuust right.”8. Tartle (Scots)
The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.
Steve Thomas – Mars
This art, by Steve Thomas – is really cool. There are a series of solar system retro travel posters being sold as a 2013 calendar that was (unfortunately) already sold out by the time I saw it. Nonetheless, his site is worth checking out, because there are many more things like this excellent poster. And someday, there will be more calendars.
Alt-country rocker Ryan Adams got so sick of people yelling out “Summer of 69!” by 80’s crap rocker Bryan Adams that he finally just performed an aggrivated version of it. He had previously reacted by freaking out and throwing people out of his shows when they said it, which they frequently did. At the end he says “Can it finally stop now, please?” He sounds desperate, and I admire that. I can’t link to the song itself because there seems to have been some DRM weirdness, but you know, there’s google if you really want to hear it: the important part is that you know it happened.
Glee ripped off Jonathan Coulton’s arangement of ‘Baby Got Back’ – Really hard. It’s a cover already, but evidently, everything you change about a song you cover, is thereafter copyrighted by you. And in this case, where Coulton’s arrangement is totally new itself, with a melody that doesn’t have anything to do with the original, it’s extremely obvious it was copied. They even left in his change from “Mix-a-lot” to “Jonny C”…like they just ran this thing off in 15 minutes thinking no one would ever find out. JoCo was never even contacted. Hopefully this further shame the shameful series who’s ear-piercing covers are starting to show up before the original versions on sites like iTunes, to the horror of all right-thinking people.
Terrible Sex Advice. I had a girlfriend who used to read Cosmo. So while she was frantically casting around her room for the car keys she lost again, I’d casually flip through it to avoid wondering whether we’d actually be able to get to the airport in time. Between the onslaught of half-baked and frequently contradictory information about weight control and celebrity interviews that always seem to have been conducted entirely with publicists, there was the really bad sex advice. The attitude of it was usually actually fairly positive, if they stripped out all the tips themselves you’d just end up with something along the lines of: “try new things, be enthusiastic, don’t be afraid to take charge, and have fun!”…and that would be great advice. And there were 50/50 odds the flight would be delayed anyway. But…unfortunately for the women, (and men) of America, they can’t just write that over and over again every month, so it is easy to see how those articles eventually morphed into a freaky netherworld of activities no one in their right mind would actually engage in. Every other one seemed to involve a food. A weird, or at least messy, food, because they did all the ones involving chocolate sauce or strawberries—the only two sexy foodstuffs.
Aitch-Bar 