This video isn’t backmasking, per se, but backward songs nevertheless… watch as Kelly Clarkson competes with Jimmy Fallon to be the first to identify each of the backward pop songs:
Casey Neistat on the horrendous attacks in Israel last Saturday:
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Classic Advertisements
My kids each got a package of those store bought Rice Krispies Treats in the goody bag of a recent birthday party. Ian immediately devoured his but Nesslin hid hers away for safe keeping.
This morning Ian discovered her stash and ate it too which, ultimately, led to Andrea whipping up a fresh batch of homemade Rice Krispies treats. I knew it was a fast an easy recipe but even I was surprised at how quickly they came out. It reminded me of the old Rice Krispies ad where the mom is taking a break in the kitchen pretending that she is slaving away. It didn’t take me long to find it on YouTube.
This particular YouTuber, who goes by the handle Internet Lurker, has an enormous collection of old ads so I went down the rabbit hole. Here are a few that caught my attention:
Have you ever wondered why it was named, “Mac”?
In 1979, an Apple employee named Jef Raskin began working on an experimental appliance-like computer project within Apple. In a 2003 interview with ACM’s Ubiquity journal, Raskin described the origins of what he named the project: “I called it ‘Macintosh’ because the McIntosh is my favorite kind of apple to eat. And I figured that if I was going to have an apple I might as well have a tasty one.”
See also these other Tab cola commercials.
Is that Helen Hunt? Yes, it is. Also, if that kitchen looks familiar it’s because after the show was cancelled the set was used for all 7 seasons of The Golden Girls.
I always liked the actor Harry Anderson. When I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to watch Night Court because of the salacious content but I loved him in Dave’s World. I also quite liked Dave Barry. 1
You’re not allowed to show kids in that kind of headgear these days. Also, thank goodness for iPads… am I right?
I REALLY wanted one of these when I was kid. Despite my own kids already having gone through several, I’ve still never had my own remote control car.
Duncan Hines used to push these brownies HARD. This commercial was on all the time.
When Top Gun was in theatres, Diet Pepsi was on TV.
When he sings about her never having been this far before, where do you think they are going?
- It made my day the time Dave Barry linked to my website[↩]
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Lucky Chocolate
After picking up the kids from school on our bikes today, we stopped by the dollar store for some “mint breaths”1. It’s still surprises me how much of an adventure going to the dollar store is for our four and five-year-old.
Anyway, I stopped by the bakery and picked up some hamburger buns for supper and as I headed home I found a full sized chocolate bar lying on the sidewalk! I thought twice about it but a full sized unopened chocolate bar… who would resist?
I hadn’t actually ever heard of an Island Bar before, but it was basically just like a Mounds bar, shredded coconut covered in chocolate and divided into three pieces.
Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a big hit with everyone. Andrea just didn’t want me to go into specifics with the kids how I found it on the street.
- “Mint breaths“ are what our kids used to call Ice Breakers Mints — and the name stuck[↩]
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World Teacher Day
Today was world teacher day. They were talking about it on the radio this morning as I pulled up to the high school I’ve been subbing at lately. Nobody inside mentioned it directly to me, but they did have Nanaimo bars in the staff room to commemorate the day.
When I think of world teacher day, and I’ve heard this said many times by others, I like to think “every day is world teacher day”. Which I suppose means, there’s never a bad time to thank a teacher.
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Couple Killed in Grizzly Attack
A Lethbridge couple was identified as the husband and wife that were killed in a grizzly bear attack in the backcountry near Banff last weekend.
Colette Derworiz writing for the Canadian Press (via CTV News):
Colin Inglis said his nephew, Doug Inglis, and Jenny Gusse, both 62, from Lethbridge, Alta., died in the bear attack on the weekend. Their seven-year-old border collie named Tris was also killed.
…
“I got an actual phone call from Garmin saying that the SOS had been activated and that somebody had actually entered into the inReach (a message) that said, ‘Bear attack bad,'” he said Wednesday in an interview from Edmonton.
…
Inglis said he was told that a bear spray canister had been emptied and that there were signs the couple tried to scare off the bear.
“There was a struggle and the struggle didn’t stay in one place,” he said. “But, in the end, both bodies were back together.
“They were reconnected. That’s who they were. They were together in life, always.”
My wife and I each have friends that were aquainted with one or both of them. Such a traumatic and heartbreaking story.
Parks Canada sent a team out and immediately put the bear down.
Parks Canada said the team, which is specially trained in firearms and wildlife attack site investigation and forensics, encountered a grizzly bear that displayed aggressive behaviour and charged toward them.
It was killed and a necropsy showed that the 25-year-old female bear was old, underweight and had bad teeth. DNA samples from the bear confirmed it was responsible for the attack, and it was not collared, tagged or previously known to wildlife staff in the park.
Because of the recent antitrust case against Google, this story about the search giant altering search queries in order to make more money has come to light. It’s almost too much to believe:
Megan Gray writing for Wired:
There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it’s clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company’s kindergarten colors.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
Google dropped the “Don’t be evil” motto when it changed its name to Alphabet but apparently hasn’t been living up to their new motto, “Do the right thing”.
Update: It has been noted that this is an opinion piece and the sources haven’t necessarily been vetted. Google’s statement via platformer:
Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems.
Ukrainian officers captured a Russian tank which started malfunctioning. They called Russian tech support to see if they could coax them into helping… and what do you know, Russian tech support helped fix the problem.
David Axe, writing for Forbes:
So when a Ukrainian tanker with the callsign “Kochevnik” ran into problems with his captured Russian T-72B3—problems local expertise couldn’t immediately solve—he called Uralvagonzavod tech support. And incredibly, the help line actually helped.
A drone photographer captured the wild moment when a shark charged into a giant school of stingrays off the coast of Florida.
Although there appears to be thousands of them, the shark went away hungry.
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Delos Alcatraz
Cabel Sasser went down a Disneyland rabbit hole to discover the code name for Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area and its crowning attraction Rise of the Resistance.
This is a very short post about a very short journey. It starts with a new (to me, as of today) theme park fact:
The code name for Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area was “Delos”, and the code name for its Rise of the Resistance attraction was “Alcatraz”.
The interesting part (if you’re into Disneyland minutiae) is the steps he took to discover this bit of trivia.