flickering pictures

After an impromptu beatboxing lesson from a pro, Paul MacInnes, the Guardian’s slightly disheveled entertainment editor, takes the stage and delivers a valiant if somewhat silly-looking live performance. I gotta say: it’s good to see a reporter who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
“They’ve got a special bit for me in the second half,” he […]

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Before I read this, I didn’t know that octopuses could navigate mazes, solve problems, and even work the lid off a screw-top jar in search of food.
Wikipedia says:

An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords […]

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Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.”
Here’s an excerpt:

On television, for every 10,000 murders, we see one […]

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Mao would be pissed.
Along with a bar and hair salon, the store offers 38,000 square feet of blonde-haired, big-boobed dolls. Despite its location, only 10 per cent of the store’s dolls will look Asian, apparently because of Mattel research that indicates Chinese girls and young women want American-looking Barbies.
The GlobalPost reports:

The plan is to […]

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They totally should have given it to him.

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Ever wondered why Mario can jump many, many times his own height? Or why he can then fall safely back to the earth at a speed that would crush the eyeballs out of a regular mortal’s head? So did this guy over at the Physics Factbook:

Gravity is [the] force which is responsible for […]

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If you’re a regular reader around these parts, you may know that I can sometimes be a little harsh when it comes to the fine city of Toronto. So to restore a bit of balance here at flickeringpictures, and as evidence of my journalistic integrity, here’s a positive post for a change — one […]

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And they say there’s no such thing as climate change…
For 12 weird and wonderful hours last week, a Kenyan village turned into a winter wonderland.
From a Reuters story picked up by Yahoo! News:

A huge hailstorm turned parts of central Kenya white, thrilling residents most of whom had never experienced such conditions, officials said on Wednesday.
[…] […]

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Though it’s not exactly independent, the tiny Republic of Kalmykia is a self-governing member state of the Russian Federation. Located just west of the Caspian Sea and not far from Ukraine, it’s a bit of an oddity in über-secular Russia for the prominence that Kalmykian leaders give to spirituality — all the more so […]

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Can someone explain to me what this is?
I *think* it’s a series of creepily beautiful flash games that may or may not have any kind of goal or purpose. Either that or a real-life version of fear.com. If someone’s trying to sell something here, they’re certainly not advertising it.
What is this site? […]

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