17 Images That Will Ruin Your Childhood Nostalgia is a sucker's game. We imagine all the toys and TV shows from childhood as perfect and awesome purely because our immature brains hadn't developed the ability to joylessly pick things apart for their flaws. The songs we liked at age 10 weren't any better than the Justin Bieber stuff the 10-year-old girls love now. So it's good to go back and look at our childhood icons through adult eyes. OK, maybe "good" isn't the word for it ... (For a look inside the Star Wars universe that WON'T ruin your childhood, watch Cracked's adventures in Jedi School.) "Luke! The Child Saw: The "bottomless" chasm is as much a staple of the Star Wars universe as the lightsaber. Ruined By: ... onto a bunch of used garage sale mattresses. That behind-the-scenes pic is from the coffeetable book The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. While we're on Star Wars ... "Guys, Make Sure Kenny Hasn't Suffocated." It's not like it's some shock to find out R2-D2 isn't "real." R2-D2 is a dwarf eating a hot dog.
8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think Misunderstood By: Libertarians, Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck has recently found a soul mate in Thomas Paine, the Founding Father known for his Revolutionary War tract Common Sense. So much so that he's gone so far as to rewrite Common Sense for the modern era, essentially stuffing words hand over fist into the mouth of a centuries-dead political philosopher for the soul-shriveling disgust Beck knows Paine would feel about Barack Obama. Libertarians and tea partiers are so enamored by their new ideological BFF that they've taken to dressing up like him on YouTube and spouting off about the evils of taxation, weak foreign policy and too many brown people. But Beck and his minions could probably benefit from actually reading some Thomas Paine. "Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age." An entitlement paying old people to support them for not working?
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it's Korea again. What the hell? Look, I'm not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives. Oh, hell yes. #5. If you've ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing. "Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players." Notice his article does not contain the words "fun" or "enjoyment." "...at this point, younger gamers will raise their arms above their head, leaving them vulnerable." His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a "Virtual Skinner Box." So What's The Problem? #4.
11 Celebrities Who Were Secretly Total Badasses One of the small comforts of watching a movie is knowing that, yeah, those guys might be idols up on the big screen, but off-camera they're probably just like the rest of us: 30 pounds overweight, living in an abandoned semi-truck cab and selling weed for denture money. But every now and then, we come across actors whose real lives are even more incredible than their fake ones. Like ... If there's one thing that Han Solo is really good at, besides stupid ear-piercing decisions, it's being America's favorite aging action hero. The assumption, of course, is that in real life, Harrison Ford is nothing like the smooth operator he plays in movies, especially after we get a gander at that screaming midlife crisis of an ear hole up there. Sure you've flown a blimp Harrison Ford. The Badass: Ford is the real-world Han Solo, if Han Solo piloted helicopters, worked for free and actually liked helping people. "Look, Your Worshipfulness, a friend in need is a friend indeed." And your father.
6 Books Everyone (Including Your English Teacher) Got Wrong With most every classic novel comes some outlandish interpretations. Some people have wild fringe theories about Harry Potter as an allegory for young gay love and Lord of the Rings being about WWII and the atom bomb. But some of these laughably wrong interpretations stick. #6. Upton Sinclair's expose of the American meatpacking industry is largely to thank for the massive drop in cases of gastroenteritis (and rise of vegetarianism) around the dawn of the 20th century. President Teddy Roosevelt took action as a result, leading to the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act and eventually the FDA, despite getting his meat primarily from large game he beat to death with a club (probably). "Who's hungry?" What it's really about: It wasn't about sanitation or meat safety. A pinch of Mitch in every bite. But much to Sinclair's frustration, the public's reaction was less "that poor exploited worker!" "We have to wear coats now?" #5. It's the defining anti-censorship book of our time. #4.
The 8 Best Internet Sketch Troupes Whose Initials Aren't TAM Since moving the Muskets! franchise to Hollywood, I've discovered the truth in that old adage: it's not what you know, it's who you know. For example, I know Javier who runs the avocado booth at the weekly farmer's market, and now I literally take baths in guacamole. It's only a matter of time before I leverage that relationship into a film deal (I mean aside from that guy from the fetish website who came and filmed me in a bathtub of guacamole for four hours). But that's how it works out here; you've got to schmooze. So I decided, what better way to make friends of the other sketch troupes out there than to arbitrarily rank them from worst to best, in an article whose title implies that even the best arent nearly as good as my own troupe? So enjoy losing the next several hours of your life (and possibly weeks, if you bookmark this page). The Troupe: According to his Bio section, Scott Gairdner is a Los Angeles-based sketch comedy group comprised of Scott Gairdner and Scott Gairdner.
Learn Your Motherf#@kin' Science: A Textbook for Juggalos You should really watch this video. Yes, it's the moment you've been waiting for: The Insane Clown Posse just came out with a new song. It's called "Miracles," and it isn't just any old cut of sick joker mayhem; it's something special: an opportunity for the ICP to celebrate all of the mysteries of the universe. Oddly, what the Insane Clown Posse categorize as "magical unexplained mysteries" involve things like "rainbows" and "giraffes" and "magnets." Or, alternately, it is my obligation. I've created a juggalo-friendly textbook, taking into account the song's claim that they "don't wanna talk to a scientist," who they consider to be a "lying motherfucker" intent on "getting [them] pissed." Juggaloco Psycho Clown-speak is a shockingly complex language. Daniel O'Brien is a backflipping blackbelt in outerspace funk.
8 Stupid Amazon Products With Impressively Sarcastic Reviews Everybody is a comedian these days, and the Internet has given us all an enormous stage. Maybe the best example is a supposedly comedy-free site like Amazon.com. The deal is, anybody can write a review, on any product, whether they have bought it or not. So it's just a matter of finding a baffling/ridiculous/useless product and watching the Internet's sarcasm run wild. The "Guardian Angel" Acupuncture Device Link Yeah, I know, sex toy jokes, right? Bizarrely so: By the way, the product description claims it's a Korean acupressure device. All right, I guess there was room for at least one good sex toy joke. Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk This is a laptop desk that attaches to the steering wheel of your car, which is all that really needs to be said. I should point out that, when we're done laughing at the stories of people mixing cocktails and eating chili while driving, there are some people who might actually get some use out of this when their car is safely parked.
5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously) Donald Duck Discovers a New Molecule 20 Years Before Science Carl Barks and the ducks did so much for the scientific world that Cornell University named an asteroid after him. This was, of course, after he was published in a scientific journal for his comic book that accidentally discovered a new molecule ... A 1944 Donald Duck comic had the titular Donald being struck on the head while helping his nephews with their science experiment. Carl Barks had absolutely no background in science or chemistry and, much like his ship-raising technique, believed at the time that he was just pulling it all out of a duck's ass. S ... science? Barks had apparently made reference to methylene, described as CH2, almost 20 years before science could prove its existence. Even more insane: A year later, Disney got another letter, this time from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. Those were the "real chemist's" own words: "Dang, that duck is way smarter than we are!" Scrooge McDuck Created Manga
6 Global Corporations Started by Their Founder's Shitty Luck There are a million self-help books out there reminding us that success is all about bouncing back from our failures. We're kind of sick of hearing it, to be honest. But what most people don't realize is how many successful businesses only happened because of a sudden disaster. These are the global empires that only struck gold because fate forced them to at gunpoint. Prohibition Invents the Official Soft Drink of Planet Earth The Company: Coca-Cola In the Beginning: Have you ever gotten bored and decided to try to come up with the perfect drink? If so, you're probably due for one hell of an intervention. If you're thinking to yourself that combining a stimulant and a depressant into one concoction isn't the greatest of ideas, you obviously didn't grow up in the 19th century. And aren't familiar with Sparks, the energy beer. Apparently ads weren't charged by the letter back then, because we suspect it would've been cheaper to write, "BOOZE: Now With COCAINE." The Disaster: Nintendo Booyah! Lego