I’ve been really into some british bluffing game shows lately, and here are some favorites.
First, Carrot in a box.
Then, from Would I Lie To You?, Lee Mack and his mysterious keys
Other ones worth visiting:
But perhaps the best bluff of all time is from Golden Balls, which Radio Lab based an entire episode on.
I found this video on reddit the other day, and I liked it, but not as much as I liked being reminded of this other video, by Jeremiah McDonald.
I’ve always been captivated by the idea of being able to talk to your past self. And this one is awesome.
And if you’re as fascinated with the creative process as I am, this making-of is interesting and entertaining too.
I have had a few of these pretty weird experiences.
The guy being interviewed wrote this article for The Atlantic called If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy, which might leave you terrified. In it, there was an interesting idea from a teenager’s perspective on surveillance.
Surveillance, he said, was pointless, a total waste. The powers that be should instead invite people to confess their secrets willingly. He envisioned vast centers equipped with mics and headphones where people could speak in detail and at length about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, delivering in the form of monologues what the eavesdroppers could gather only piecemeal.
What I find ironic about this whole thing is that people are paranoid about the data that’s being collected on them, and some of that data is being collected because of paranoid national security measures. Can’t we all just fucking relax?
This is the guy you need if you have door problems. I found this informative and entertaining.
FASCINATING.
Prices go up. Occasionally, prices go down. But for 70 years, the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola didn’t change. From 1886 until the late 1950s, a bottle of Coke cost a nickel.
On today’s show, we find out why. The answer includes a half a million vending machines, a 7.5 cent coin, and a company president who just wanted to get a couple lawyers out of his office.
Along the same lines as my last post, some amazing human saved K-Mart store music tapes between 1989 and 1993, and recently put them on the internet. Put this in your ears, and remember the time when K-Mart was peaking.
Mark Davis, the aforementioned amazing human, writes:
I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.
Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was intoduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.
BUT NOW WE HAVE THEM, INTERNET
There are some gems in here. The one I linked above, even. If you wait long enough, you’ll hear an in-store ad, which might be my favorite part of the deal. ATTENTION, KMART SHOPPERS!
A pretty fascinating slideshow of scenes from the mall in 1989.
I remember my local mall around that time, and parts looked a lot from these photos. What was different, though, is that instead of it feeling like this bizarre other-world as it does when looking at those photos, it felt like magic.
One of my favorite comedians, and favorite comedy bits. Totally ON POINT, and hilarious.
(Youtube likes to flag this for copyright violations, so if this video doesn’t exist whenever you’re watching this, here it is on Netflix, as part of the comedy special “Bare”. Start at 26:17 for this video.)
Can’t say I’m a big fan of guns, or bullshit arguments. And neither is Jim.
Check out part of a radio interview with him, where the gun-owning host is challenging some of his points.
This guy is awesome. I love his attitude toward creativity, and making things.
The way he says “People assumed that I was just having fun, playing football with myself. But actually, I was making a drink”. 😂😂 So funny.
So what, let’s do the ridiculous. And by doing the ridiculous, something else might come of it.
I’ve always had this feeling that times running out. That you only get so much time on the earth, and you’ve got to contribute something.
I hear that.
This is a fantastic episode of On Being on Mindfulness and Mindlessness. This shit is everything, and parts of this idea are very reminiscent to me of what David Foster Wallace talked about in This Is Water about default modes. Our default mode is to be mindless, running our lives in autopilot. Most times, our default modes aren’t great. Which is why being mindful is important.
Ellen Langer is a social psychologist who some have dubbed “the mother of mindfulness.” But she defines mindfulness with counterintuitive simplicity: the simple act of actively noticing things — with a result of increased health, competence, and happiness. Her take on mindfulness has never involved contemplation or meditation or yoga. It comes straight out of her provocative, unconventional studies, which have been suggesting for decades what neuroscience is pointing at now: our experience of everything is formed by the words and ideas we attach to them. What makes a vacation a vacation is not only a change of scenery — but the fact that we let go of the mindless everyday illusion that we are in control. Ellen Langer has shown it’s possible to become physiologically younger through a changed frame of mind; to find joy in what was experienced as drudgery by renaming it as play; and to induce weight loss by substituting the label “exercise” for labor.
Grit your teeth through the parts where the host talks over the guest, trying to fit in some lesser point that feels like all she really wants us all to know that she knows things, too, because Ellen Langer has some pretty great truthbombs about brains and life.