Click the photo to see the source.
…we in the United States will be able to get along with each other like these two pals, and overlook things like creed, sexual orientation, skin color, and tragically bad taste in footwear. (Seriously, dude, what’s with the Spider-Man socks-and-sandals combo?)
Click the cartoon to see the source.
A lot of people I know made sure that I was aware of this cartoon, which appears in the April 18th issue of the New Yorker.
Found at Art Tattler’s Winston Churchill archive.
A grainy copy of the doctor’s note that Winston Churchill used in order to be able to drink while visiting the United States during Prohibition has been making the internet rounds. The scan above is much cleaner.
In case you were wondering, 250 cubic centimeters (also written as 250cc) is about 8.5 fluid ounces, which is enough booze to make four standard “doubles”.
This photo was floating around the internet back in January, and I assume the sign in the photo was for a small independent book store. I think that there will always be a place for paper-bound books, but for more ephemeral works, especially things like rapidly-outdated technical manuals, I’m grateful for the electronic versions.
Back in my university days, I once freaked out some scientifically illiterate hippie friends by telling them that bubble wrap was a way for the military-industrial complex to cheaply dispose of nerve gas from the Gulf War (this was the early ’90s, so I was referring to the first one). “It’s diluted, but it’s still poisoned enough that each pop of a bubble takes away a second of your life,” I’d say, and then I’d start popping bubbles. Hilarity ensued.
The prank worked because it had the right elements: it fed into my friends’ science illiteracy, fit into their world view and conspiracy theories, and I started popping those bubbles well before they had any time to think a little more critically about what I’d just said.
A similar but harmful prank was played on a Burger King in Coon Rapids, Minnesota to more costly effect. They received a call from someone claiming to be the local fire department, telling them that a gas leak had “pressurized” the restaurant and the only way to prevent the explosion was to release the gas by smashing all the windows in the restaurant.
The manager, who’d been made “frantic” by the call (that’s the word used by the police), evacuated the restaurant and followed the instructions given to him, as the video below shows:
What helped make the con work was the supposed urgency of the situation. It didn’t give the manager time to think things through and come up with questions like:
What also helped is the nature of the job. At fast food places, it’s drilled into you that you’re not paid to think, but to follow procedures and orders.
If you think this kind of prank will work only once, think again. It happened previously at Shawnee, Oklahoma…
…as well as Morro Bay, California, where an overzealous manager drove a car into the drive-thru window in order to release the “dangerous gas”:
Photo from Mark Hamill’s Instagram. Click to see the source.
“I’m sure Master Yoda was a lot easier to piggyback than you are, Master Luke.”
