Links to interesting things found on the Internet
Venezuela is importing 50 million rolls of toilet paper due to a toilet paper shortage.
One supermarket visited by The Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread.
“I’ve been looking for it for two weeks,” said Cristina Ramos. “I was told that they had some here and now I’m in line.”
I guess now’s the time to start looking into that three shells thing?
While attempting to rescue a cat stuck in a tree, an NYPD officer got stuck in the tree and had to be rescued by the FDNY. Reread that to make sure you get the full effect of it.
Then Natto’s colleague put out a call for assistance from the FDNY.
Sources said dispatchers asked him to repeat what was going on — since they couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
When firefighters arrived, “they didn’t go straight to helping him,” Giuong said. “They all gathered around and laughed at him. They took their time just crowding around. It seemed the officer was enjoying himself.”
Stories like this make the Post, and me, very giddy.
What happens to all those Olympic venues when the athletes leave? io9 has a collection of photographs of some of the abandoned Olympic buildings.
The Olympic Games are always proceded by a furious amount of building as host cities construct arenas, pools, ski jumps, Olympic villages, and anything else the games demand. While some of the buildings are repurposed after the athletes depart, others are left to rot.
I love destruction porn.
Business Insider charted the cost of beer at each of the MLB ballparks.
The most expensive beers in MLB can be found in Washington where Nationals fans have to pay at least $8.25 for a beer for the privilege of watching Bryce Harper. The Cleveland Indians and Arizona Diamondbacks have the cheapest beers ($4.00).
The chart they present is what you actually have to pay to buy a beer at the various ballparks. I took the data and massaged it a little bit to see who has the most expensive beer per pint. Turns out it’s the Boston Red Sox at nearly $10 a pint. $10!
Hate doing laundry? MeUndies sells a 365-pack of boxer briefs.
Your eyes aren’t lying to you: we went there. MeUndies now truly offers the ultimate in convenience. That’s right, when you pick up this 365 pack, you now have a different pair of underwear for every single day of the year. We dare you.
What happens if it’s a leap year?
Washington state will rewrite state laws using gender neutral terms.
The new gender-neutral references, for example, include “journey-level plumber” instead of “journeyman plumber,” “handwriting” in place of “penmanship,” and “signal operator” for “signalman.”
[...]
Civil engineering terms such as “man hole” and “man lock,” also will not be changed because no common-sense substitutes could easily be found, Thiessen said.
I think Newspeak started out in a similar way.
An app warns people in Iceland if they are too closely related…for sex.
So far it’s drawing rave reviews, with a 4.5 out of 5 rating on the Google Play store. One user who commented on the app’s website only regretted that it wasn’t released a little earlier: “If I would have had this app last year,” he wrote, “I probably wouldn’t have gone home with my cousin.”
“Probably”.
The New Yorker has an interactive graph that plots the median income of each stop on each line of the NYC subway.
It’s amazing how much the change is from one stop to the next. Take the A train for example…look at the jump between Fulton and Chambers.
A study has found that men who play Xbox are better in bed than those who play PlayStation or Wii.
When the results were broken down, it emerged that Xbox players had been rated the highest by their partners, with 54 per cent of Xbox gamers being described as ‘good’ or above and 22 per cent being regarded as ‘excellent’.
I primarily play Xbox because the controller is more comfortable for my large hands. Just leaving that out there.
Funny or Die parodies American Psycho staring Huey Lewis and Weird Al Yankovic.
This just may be the greatest thing I have ever seen.
Photographer Gabriele Galimberti traveled the world and photographed kids with their toys.
Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively.
Do NOT mess with the kid from Ukraine.
The Today Show has posted a photograph that shows St. Peter’s Square in 2005 and this year.
Being 6’6″ (198 cm), the 2013 view is pretty much how I see every event these days. It’s worse for whoever is stuck behind me.
Update: The Washington Post’s Nick Kirkpatrick found that the two photos are not from similar events, and therefore, should not be considered a fair comparison:
But the top photo, which shows an audience with far fewer gadgets was taken during the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II — a very different mood and event type. There was no one addressing the crowd from the balcony, for example. So, the comparison isn’t quite accurate.
Artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde has drawn floor plans from a number of TV shows. Similar to artist Mark Bennett, but much less formal and much more colorful.
The Ononeon is an updated collection of real news stories whose headlines could be The Onion headlines. For example, “Drinkers sue Anheuser-Busch for watering down beer”, and “Husband Fakes Robbery To Avoid Telling Wife He Blew $1K At Strip Club”.
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Archaeologists from the University of Leicester have used DNA evidence to identify remains believed to be Richard III “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Speaking at the press conference at the University of Leicester, Dr Turi King, project geneticist, said there had been concern DNA in the bones would be too degraded: “The question was could we get a sample of DNA to work with, and I am extremely pleased to tell you that we could.”
She added: “There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig.
“In short, the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III.”
