World’s Strangest

(Video Link) I can’t speak Russian, but I’ve read that this Russian-language commercial is about a man trying to report a claim to his insurance company. The employees vanish into their equipment the moment that the customer walks in the door. via reddit

Read about four different sightings of wild kangaroos in the United States. Not surprisingly, some people believe that the mystery animals of North America are paranormal manifestations of some kind. But that might be jumping to conclusions. Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon, but to date no satisfactory [...]

LinkScroll down for today’s pictures & links. The Silliest Chase of All Time You know we here at DRB love a good chase in a movie, but this… this… is as atrocious as it’s royally silly. It’s also captivating in a weird way and has to be seen to be believed – taken from “Alluda Majaka” (1995), [...]

Photo: GM/NASA This week’s developments in technological advances, like General Motors and NASA’s Robonaut2 (cleverly and deviously nicknamed R2), and Google’s decision to team up with the NSA got GeekDad’s Curtis Silver wondering about truth mirroring the best of science fiction- and its predictions of an eventual machine takeover that will plunge humanity into mass enslavement. While [...]

Today’s “Feel Art Again” is a double-header. First up was a post on the German-English artist Johann Zoffany (1733-1810); now this post delves into his painting “The Tribuna of the Uffizi.” Read both to get the full story on this talented artist. In the summer of 1772, Johann Zoffany was sent by Queen Charlotte to Florence [...]

Today’s “Feel Art Again” is a double-header. First up is this post on Johann Zoffany, followed by a post delving into his painting “The Tribuna of the Uffizi.” Read both to get the full story on this talented artist. Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) was a German-born English painter and favored portraitist of King George III and Queen [...]

I’m a little late in posting this, but it’s too awesome to pass: Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note has a copy of a 1905 letter sent by Mark Twain to a patent medicine salesman who tried to sell bogus medicine. Twain was furious to have received the pitch as he was recently widowed after his [...]

In what is nominally a book review, chess grandmaster (and lately, politician) Garry Kasparov discusses how computers have changed chess. Famously defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, Kasparov railed against computer chess in the 80’s and 90’s, but now he has some perspective on the matter, and shares his deep knowledge of the subject [...]

You know him as the man who sang “White Christmas” and co-starred in a slew of movies with Bob Hope, but what don’t you know about Bing Crosby? Here are five facts that might surprise you. 1. He Got His Name from a Comic Strip The entertainer was born Harry Lillis Crosby, which doesn’t have quite [...]

Did you know that books are being pirated? I sure didn’t — I thought piracy was limited to music, movies, and software. But apparently there’s a thriving online piracy scene for old-school books. And not just eBooks — in many cases the books are scanned, converted to text via OCR software, and proof-read by the [...]