Unlikely Words » aaron cohen

Pig butchery time lapse

aaron cohen — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:48:01 +0000

Here's a high speed time lapse if a pig being butchered with a hip hop soundtrack.

Via Wayne

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Dumbest company in the world executes dumbest PR stunt in world history

aaron cohen — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:05:15 +0000

Online pawn shop company, Pawngo, made themselves a lot less popular in Boston this afternoon as they dumped 900 pounds of Buterfinger candy bars in Copley Square making fun of New England Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker. Obviously they're thinking any publicity is good publicity, and they sure got a lot of publicity out of this. That said, Boston hates them now, and a search of Twitter shows sentiment is overwhelmingly negative. I'm not sure how they imagined a mean-spirited PR stunt would go off any differently, but bringing it to Boston? Speaking as a Patriots fan, people might be mad at Wes Welker, but now they're MUCH angrier at Pawngo.

According to the City of Boston's website, the company is going to be charged with violating commercial dumping laws and the honorable pawn brokers of the Boston area are calling for the Attorney General to investigate Pawngo's business model.

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Timelapse of the moon and clouds

aaron cohen — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:20:41 +0000

I'm pretty sure if you watch this video you turn into a werewolf.

Via Giles

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Prince wrote Manic Monday and Nothing Compares 2 U

aaron cohen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:45:03 +0000

I guess Prince writes a lot of songs, but I was still surprised to find out he wrote Nothing Compares 2 U, made famous by Sinead O'Connor, and also Manic Monday made famous by The Bangles.

The other surprise from this is that the woman from 4NonBlondes wrote Pink's entire album.

My favorite of these all time is that Young MC wrote most of Tone Loc's album, including Wild Thing and Funky Cold Medina, but that's probably just because I love Young MC.

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Mini Groundhog Day art show

aaron cohen — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:06:22 +0000

I thought it'd be fun to have more art inspired by the movie Groundhog Day, which is one of my favorites. Since I can't draw, the task fell to my friends (Vaughn Fender / Chris Piasick / Josh Lafayette / Lee Crutchley). We're going to try to do these a little more often, so we'll see how it goes. The art is below.

Josh Lafayette

Lee Crutchley

Chris Piascik

Vaughn Fender

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Annual tribute to Ned Ryerson

aaron cohen — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:07:23 +0000

Watch that first step. It's a doozy.

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Free ebook of old punk flyers

aaron cohen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:32:56 +0000

DC Scorpion Girl started collecting punk flyers 10 years ago with the idea of publishing a book of flyers from around the world. If you're a fan of Old Punk Flyers this is the book for you. I have some of these flyers somewhere, I think.

'Come to our show!' they pleaded as they handed out flyers, posted them on telephone poles, wheat-pasted them on walls. Here are the flyers from the world's most pioneering punk bands including Minor Threat, Fugazi, Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Brigade, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, A.R.Z. (Peru), Fun People (Argentina), Leek and the Bouncing Souls (South Africa), Scream, Bikini Kill, Los Crudos, The Nation of Ulysses and many more.

You can download the book here [PDF].

Via Mike

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Rotten Tomatoes list of top 100 movies of 2011

aaron cohen — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:54:38 +0000

I watch a lot of movies, but I guess all the movies are terrible, because I only saw 8 movies from this list of the Top 100 Movies of 2011 by Rotten Tomatoes. The highest rated 2011 movie I saw was number 34, and I only saw 2 in the top 50. How did you do?

Via Kari

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This is only exciting for me and my friend Ben

aaron cohen — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:22:31 +0000

This is one of my biggest internet sleuthing successes of the last year or so. Get excited for me, because that's the only way any of this will be interesting to you. About 7 years ago or so, Ben started working for the same company I did. We were bursting at the seams, people were jammed everywhere, 2 to a desk, etc. Ben ended up sharing an out of the way table with the printer. I sat around the corner and heard people asking Ben about print jobs all the time. I remembered hearing a This American Life about a guy in an office who sat in the hallway next to the copy machine. He was constantly getting badgered by people about the copier and no one really knew his name. In any case, I started telling Ben about this and figured it'd be no problem to find the show for him to listen. This was around 2005-2006 and the TAL website wasn't what it is now. Search was available, but it was terrible. I couldn't find the show. Anywhere. But I knew it was there. I knew it existed. And so every now and then when I thought about it, I'd try new search terms and variations on the TAL site and Google. Nothing. Ever! UNTIL the other day, I started fresh and happened upon this blog post talking about a very similar story and mentioning This American Life. Success! But wait. Unfortunately, since TAL changes their website every quarter or so, the link was dead. I knew I was close, though, and I persevered, finally finding Episode 241: 20 Acts in 60 Minutes and the mystery was solved. The reason I never could find it is this episode doesn't have a summary of all the stories so regardless of what I put in to search, the words were never there. In any case, I am now triumphant and Ben has heard the story.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Playboy profile by Carl Zimmer

aaron cohen — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:32:41 +0000

Cool profile of astrophysicist extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson in Playboy by Carl Zimmer (not linked to Playboy). One thing I didn't know about Tyson was he was the first to say Pluto was not a planet.

Tyson’s demotion of Pluto only came to the public’s attention when Kenneth Chang, a New York Times reporter, noticed there were only eight planets featured at the Rose Center. When Chang asked other astronomers to comment, they called the decision absurd. Letters of protest poured into the museum. But Tyson held firm, and in the years that followed, astronomers discovered other icy bodies at the edge of the solar system that were even bigger than Pluto. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to classify it as a dwarf planet.

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French underground restoration artists

aaron cohen — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:02:02 +0000

This Wired article about UX or Urban eXperiment, is fascinating and long. UX "is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself."

So many nuggets and details, just go read the whole thing:

UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

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The best story you’ll read about a burglary you’ll read this week

aaron cohen — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:40:16 +0000

Burgled in Philly on The Bygone Bureau is a crime story with some quirky details.

A word about the machine guns: one of them is mine, the other one is Matt’s, and they were for decoration. They were functional and we had ammunition, but they weren’t really for home defense or hunting. We thought they looked badass hanging on the wall — and they did.

Via Kayfabe

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Wastelander Panda movie trailer

aaron cohen — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:33:34 +0000

If the question is, "Would I watch 'Wastelander Panda'?" The answer is yes. If the question is, "Would I have to wait for my wife to be away to be able to watch it?" The answer is also yes.
"
The tale of the last remaining panda in a post-apocalyptic wasteland."

Via Andrew Simone

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Holy shit. Glenn Danzig’s Yelp Reviews

aaron cohen — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:10:16 +0000

Here are Glenn Danzig's Yelp reviews. As good as Cormac McCarthy's.

"If this place was any shittier and more unoriginal, it'd be called "The Misfits with Michael Graves"."

Via @Carveslayer

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Why do first class passengers get to skip TSA lines?

aaron cohen — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:44:49 +0000

Whenever I travel by plane I become furious at the different things we have to do in the name of security. The TSA has a hard job, to be sure, and they get a lot of criticism. That said, the ban on liquids and having to take our shoes off impact... Well, these arguments have been made before. I've always noticed the first class line that lets travelers with more expensive tickets skip to the head of the line. Usually when I notice this, I'm filled with a white rage that dissipates by the time I get where I'm going and I forget to look up why this is. Turns out that first class passengers get to skip the TSA line because...the TSA isn't responsible for the TSA line, the airlines are. This is, obviously, bullshit. If the TSA wanted to dictate a policy in this regard they could. In any case, I guess it's good to know the answer, even if it is just as infuriating as most of airport security.

The T.S.A., whenever it is called on the carpet (which is often) about the two-tiered system it countenances, responds with the same piece of casuistry. The rich are scanned the same way as everyone else, the T.S.A. insists, but the formation of the queues themselves is not our department. “That real estate in front of the checkpoint is owned by the airlines,” one spokeswoman told USA Today in 2006. (The law is not crystal clear. It gives supervisory responsibility for the entire airport to a T.S.A. “federal security director.”)

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Ravens-Patriots trash talk from The Wire

aaron cohen — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:18:09 +0000

All sports trash talk should be done with images from The Wire.

Original images by Jake's friend, Jake, and Jamie.

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Lookout Records shutting down

aaron cohen — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:11:02 +0000

Gosh, this is sad news. The label that was home at one point or another to Screeching Weasel, Green Day, Avail, Rancid, and Operation Ivy, among others, stopped putting out new music in 2005, and since then has struggled to right the ship. Unfortunately, losing their distributor, CD printer, and mail order provider in the span of a year was too much to overcome. This is a microcosm of something, but really the label kind of died in 2005 when they gambled on new bands with money owed to the higher earning older bands. They lost and thus lost the rights to Green Day and Op Ivy's back catalog. The specifics aren't clear in their blog post, but it looks like their sending everything left over back to the bands. Here's an interview with Lookout Records co-founder, Larry Livermore.

Lookout Records will be closing its doors over the next few months. Most people that are reading this know that the label stopped releasing material towards the end of 2005. It was then that Lookout ended its long relationships with Green Day, Operation Ivy and a few other artists. That development meant significantly scaling down the business, which included letting the staff go and moving from the label's Berkeley headquarters and warehouse into a small office.

It wasn't easy to keep catalog items in print and that became especially challenging when our primary compact disc manufacturer and our distribution partner Lumberjack-Mordam went out of business unexpectedly. Having our physical distributor and a manufacturer go belly up disrupted our sales, meant a significant loss of income, and caused inventory and accounting problems. The next year when our mail order partner, Little Type, went out of business, Lookout was also dealt another significant blow. We did our best to resolve the issued caused by these developments but both ultimately amounted to a lot more work and severely impacted income.

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Story of Tweeter and the Monkey Man

aaron cohen — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:36:01 +0000

Not only does the Traveling Wilburys song Tweeter and the Monkey Man mention the titles of 8 Bruce Springstein songs, it also mentions 2 additional songs released AFTER the album came out. The songs are: "Stolen Car", "Mansion On The Hill", "Thunder Road", "State Trooper", "Factory", "The River", "Lion's Den", "Jersey Girl", "Lion's Den", and "Paradise".

Additionally, the Wiki surmises that Tweeter is a male to female transsexual, which I'd never thought about before.

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Martin Luther King – I Have A Dream Speech

aaron cohen — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:22:34 +0000

I like watching every year this to try to imagine what it was like 50 years ago, and it's practically impossible.

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Is it appropriate to add ‘That’s what she said’ after this sentence?

aaron cohen — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:22:49 +0000

Kottke posted this 'that's what she said' classifier by Daniel Rapp. Since I'm simple, and don't really understand how to read Github, I don't know quite what it does, but when I saw it, I knew what I had to do. Humor is complicated. It's hard to know what's funny, so in order to help you out, I came up with this little tool to help you know if you should say, "That's what she said" after a joke (assuming you're not Michael Scott). My friend Joe helped with the code.

Enter a sentence here:

So there you have it. Now you know whether it's OK to add, 'That's what she said' to the end of a sentence.

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