Written by David Knight

The internet is responsible for many terrible things, which the world tolerates as long as these terrible things stay on the internet.

But some internet memes become so popular they spill out and infect the real world in ways that simply cannot be tolerated. Such as …

#9.

Hamster Dance

Origins:

In 1998, a Canadian art student began a site dedicated to her pet hamster, which features four .gifs of hamsters and a nine-second loop of an irritating song that was basically the aural equivalent of pubic lice. The popularity of the site remained blissfully small until January 1999, when it inexplicably shot up from around 4 hits a day to 15,000 thanks to a campaign of emails, early blogs, bumper stickers and what must have been a worldwide drop in taste and sanity.

Where it Crossed the Line:

By the end of 1999 Hamsterdance.com was drawing an estimated 250,000 daily hits. Worse still, a band called The Cuban Boys released a song called “Cognoscenti Versus Intelligentsia,” which consisted mostly of that irritating Hamster Dance sound loop and high pitched yodeling you might recognize as the sped up voice of Satan. As you can guess, the experience was similar to having feces injected directly into your eardrums.

Before too long, versions of the Hamster Dance were being released in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the tune was featured in 2001 film See Spot Run and the 2005 film Are We There Yet? (presumably a chilling trip into the human psyche in which a sadistic father drives his family around on an endless journey, blasting the Hamster Dance tune until they beg for the eternal silence of death).

#8.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Origins:

The meme began in 1998, with an innocent animated .gif on a video game website. It was taken from the opening cutscene of a Sega Genesis game called Zero Wing, in which a villain called Cats appears on a space craft’s monitor and says “How are you Gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction!”

If you’ve never seen the whole thing in context, here it is:

This one line, which existed purely because game companies back then couldn’t afford translators, spread across the internet like … man we hate to keep using the pubic lice analogy, but when the irritating contagion fits.

Where it Crossed the Line:

We’re thinking right about here:

And by the end of 2000, it had international media attention–we’re talking mentions on Fox News, the BBC and articles in Time magazine. Or course, by the time the rest of the world had jumped on the bandwagon, use of the phrase would earn you instant rebuke from the daylight-dodging denizens of internet gaming forums.

But that didn’t stop it. In 2003, as an April Fool’s joke, seven teenagers placed signs bearing the slogan all around the town of Sturgis, Michigan. The joke backfired when the town’s residents got worried that it was an act of terrorism, Sturgis being widely regarded by its residents (and no one else) as one of al-Qaida’s next likely targets.

To this day you can find several t-shirts bearing the slogan.

Those shirts are all probably being worn ironically at this point, since internet memes age in dog years. One irony that’s probably lost on the makers of Zero Wing: More money has probably been made off of their inadvertent catch phrase than they ever saw from the game.

#7.

Chuck Norris Facts

Origins:

If you just bought your first computer today, Chuck Norris Facts are an internet fad that consists of hundreds of user-created facts about the actor, usually involving his ability to roundhouse kick your mother into next Tuesday.

It started with a thread on the Something Awful forums back in early 2005, one of probably nine million threads created that day. It simply asked members to post facts about Vin Diesel, at which point hundreds of pieces of completely false and exaggerated Vin trivia came pouring in. Later they were gathered into the Vin Diesel Fact Generator.

The site substituted Chuck Norris by popular request and a phenomenon was born.

Where it Crossed the Line:

Around the time that a World of Warcraft add-on featuring a Chuck Norris Fact generator was released in January 2006, corporate America started realizing this thing might have some crossover potential. Soon enough, references started turning up in non-internet media and then, finally, Chuck himself got on board.

Norris has appeared on several talk shows since this all started. Rolling Stone did a small piece about them, and in 2006, Time interviewed Norris, calling him an “online cult hero.”

Then, in a turn of events almost too absurd even for politics, Norris campaigned for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee … based purely around the premise that he had the magical powers claimed in the facts.

But the ridiculous circle would not be complete until the guy who started the fact generator website, former Cracked.com intern Ian Spector, wrote a book The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About The World’s Greatest Man).

Norris has sued ol’ Ian, the person most responsible for reviving his career. Either Mr. Norris wanted more of a cut of the goods or he was pissed off about the revealing of his super powers, which he had presumably hoped to keep a secret.

#6.

Crazy Frog

Origins:

Crazyfroghits.com

This meme is an example why early detection is so incredibly important. We had many chances to stop this thing before it spread. But it seemed so benign at first.

In 1997, 17-year-old Swede Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself mimicking the sound of a two-stroke combustion engine and posted it on a website. The sound became something of a meme itself, at least in its native Sweden. A local TV producer convinced Daniel to perform his sound on national television, probably on a Swedish prime-time hit called Sounds Made By People.

In 2003, another Swede, Erik Wernquist, created an animated frog to go with the sound, and correctly christened it The Annoying Thing.

Pretty harmless, right?

By 2004, what would come to be known as “Crazy Frog” had spread all over the internet, making the rest of the world wish Sweden could just stick to making Volvos and Victoria Silvstedt.

Where it Crossed the Line:

Shortly after Wernquist combined the frog with the noise of a nearly grown man pretending to be a motorcycle, he was contacted by a German ringtone company called Jamba!, who asked to use it as a downloadable ringtone for cell phones.

The ringtone became one of the most successful ever in the United Kingdom. Jamba! quickly earned approximately £14 million from download sales and everyone who downloaded it quickly lost all their friends.

Again, it seems like some kind of intervention could have kept this thing from going any further. But the world’s government turned a blind eye, and soon a dance track was recorded.

It charted in Europe and follow ups were released. By March 2008, the Crazy Frog had three complete albums, all of which serve as proof that music can be weaponized effectively.

Also released in the UK was a string of merchandise including an electronic game, key rings, backpacks, lunch boxes and air fresheners. Two computer games, each widely loathed by critics, have been released for the Playstation 2.

Worse yet, a German production company called The League of Good People have made a sad mockery of their name by entering into talks with a production company to create a Crazy Frog TV show. A film is rumored to be in the works, and is likely.

Unless, of course, it turns out that there is a just God.

#5.

Dancing Baby

Origins:

One of the earliest internet phenomena, the Dancing Baby (or if you’re official about your internet meme history “Baby-Cha-Cha”) first appeared on the internet back in 1996-97.

The 3-D-rendered animated dancing baby comes complete with a somewhat disturbing hip thrust and mincing arm movements that suggest his parents shouldn’t hold out for grandchildren. It was created as a product sample source file for release of a groundbreaking 3-D character creation program “Character Studio” which was apparently dedicated to creating the creatures that populate our nightmares.

Where it Crossed the Line:

Its most famous crossover was on the popular 1990s legal drama Ally McBeal, as a hallucination Ally experienced.

On the show, it was supposed to represent the ticking of Ally’s biological clock or some shit, but to us, it just interrupted our fantasies of “accidentally” entering the firm’s unisex restroom to find Calista Flockheart and Lucy Liu having a race to remove their underpants first.

The baby appeared in the music video for Blue Suede’s cover of the 1969 hit Hooked On a Feeling. Then a song called “Dancing Baby (Ooga Chaka)” was released by a UK group called Trubble, who not only used an internet meme extensively in their marketing, but also felt the need to spell their name as if an infant had written it.

#4.

Back Dorm Boys

Origins:

The Back Dorm Boys are two former Chinese college students who lip-sync most notably Backstreet Boys songs. Using a grainy webcam, they filmed themselves lip-syncing in a college dorm room whilst an uninterested third student sat in the background with his back to the camera, playing a computer game.

They completed their first video in May 2005, a synced version of “As Long As You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys. They released it on their local college network, but their act was so compelling that it showed up on YouTube and quickly accumulated millions of views.

Where it Crossed the Line:

Before the end of the year, while still in college, the Back Dorm Boys were signed up as spokespeople for Motorola cellphones in China and became the hosts of Motorola’s online lip-syncing contests.

They were also employed by Sina.com, China’s biggest internet portal, presumably meaning that to millions of Chinese peasants, the internet appeared to be nothing more than a high-tech karaoke device. The Back Dorm Boys also maintain a blog, one of the most popular in China, which, in a somewhat unsurprising turn of events, was awarded the “Best Podcaster” award in 2006. The award was given by their employers at Sina.com, but still.

In February 2006, just before they left college, the Back Dorm Boys signed a five-year deal with Taihe Rye, a Chinese talent management company in Beijing, to continue making lip-syncing videos. As it stands, the Back Dorm Boys have made at least 19.

At this point the Back Dorm Boys began to infect the rest of the world, getting mentions in the US on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, South Park and in the first episode of Heroes. We can’t imagine that anyone has gotten more famous on less talent. And luckily we don’t have to, because our number 3 meme exists.

#3.

Numa Numa

Origins

In 2004, a somewhat portly young gentleman named Gary Brolsma, from New Jersey, filmed himself lip-syncing and dancing along to Dragostea din tei, a song by Moldovan group O-Zone.

The term Numa Numa comes from a refrain in the song; “nu m?, nu m? iei,” which roughly translates from Romanian as “you don’t, you don’t, take me (with you).” The video up there has 13 million hits, but that’s just scratching the surface (it was originally uploaded to Newgrounds.com on December 6, 2004, where every single internet user watched it four times).

Where it Crossed the Line:

In February 2005, the New York Times wrote an article about the dance and its creator, and in 2006, UK TV station Channel 4 listed it at number 41 of the 100 Greatest Funny Moments (upsetting critics who thought a home video of some guy getting hit in the nuts with a wiffle ball bat deserved the spot).

A story in the June 2006 edition of The Believer claims the video “singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams (…) It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.”

While he does certainly appear to be enjoying himself, we submit that for all your singlehanded webcam justification, boobs will do just fine. At the height of its popularity, the video was receiving mainstream attention from shows such as ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s The Tonight Show, and VH1’s Best Week Ever.

The New York Times said Brolsma was an “unwilling and embarrassed web celebrity” and Brolsma canceled several media appearances, suddenly realizing that people were laughing at his hilariously embarrassing private moment.

At the end of 2006, a report on the BBC, based on figures collected by a viral marketing company, reckoned the Numa Numa Dance was the second most viewed video of all time, with 700 million views. Brolsma reappeared in September 2006 with a professionally produced video and began a non-Chinese competition in which contestants pretend to mime to lyrics and win cash, finally accepting that when he lies on his deathbed at age 86, he’ll still be “The Numa Numa guy.”

#2.

Star Wars Kid

Origins:

Maybe the most well-known internet meme ever, this began back in 2002 when Ghyslain Raza, a wonderfully named 14-year-old French-Canadian, filmed himself swinging a golf ball retriever around, as if it were a weapon.

The filming was done in his school’s studio, and somewhat foolishly, Raza forgot about it and left the tape in a basement. Some time later, he found the tape, and, even more foolishly, showed it to his friends. His friends thought it would be funny if they converted it to a .wmv file, and shared it on the peer-to-peer file sharing network, Kazaa. Within two weeks, it had been downloaded several million times, and an adapted version of the video was made, with added Star Wars music and effects.

Where it Crossed the Line:

In 2006, the Viral Factory claimed that the Star Wars Kid was the most popular video on the internet, with over 900 million views. Jumping onto the bandwagon, hundreds of internet users created their own videos, versions parodying everything from Terminator 2 to the Blues Brothers.

Soon after it became a global smash, it was extensively reported in the mainstream news media. The New York Times, CBS, BBC News and GMTV all gave the video a lot of attention, all to the horror of Raza and his family, who, in a huge show of ass-hattery, filed a lawsuit against his friends. The lawsuit stated, in part, that Raza “had to endure, and still endures today, harassment and derision from his school mates and the public at large.”

The joke was on him though, because in a wonderfully ironic move, mainstream media outlets who covered the video’s startling popularity covered the trial as well, all the while tutting about the internet’s ability to ruin a person’s privacy while at the same time giving their readers a chance to watch the original video again and laugh once more at Raza’s tubby, uncoordinated shenanigans. Raza eventually received $351,000 in Canadian money from his (former) friends, who apparently had way more money than we did when we were in high school.

Among the Star Wars Kid’s many references on television, including Arrested Development …

… and American Dad …

… the most famous occurred towards the end of 2006 when Steven Colbert, an adamant Star Wars fan, filmed himself mimicking the Star Wars Kid in front of a green screen.

He showed the clip on The Colbert Report and started a contest, asking for viewers to edit in their own CGI and sound effects with the best being aired on the show. Thousands of amateur filmmakers rose to the challenge and it eventually culminated in George Lucas himself making a video, with CGI done by Industrial Light and Magic.

That sounds like cheating to us, but whatever.

#1.

The Rickroll

Origins:

So there’s this message board. And just as most of the goods in your house were made in China, most of the internet’s irritating memes were manufactured there.

They used to have a tradition there called the Duckroll, where you would provide a link and lie about what was on the other end, often promising underage porn. Once the user clicked through, they’d get a Photoshopped picture of a duck with wheels. It’s difficult to explain.

Anyway, at some point that was mutated into the Rickroll, where the goal was to trick users into watching a video of “Never Gonna Give You Up” by ’80s ginger pop singer, Rick Astley.

Where it Crossed the Line:

Rickrolling had become widespread by May 2007, with hundreds of thousands of occurrences popping up all over internet message boards, despite the fact that it had stopped being funny around the second time someone ever did it. By 2008, it somehow began appearing outside the web, which you wouldn’t think would be possible for a joke based around a misleading link.

A real-world Rickrolling appeared during Anonymous’s anti-Scientology marches on February 10, 2008. In marches in Edinburgh, London, New York and Washington DC, protesters marched up and down outside Scientology sites, blasting the song through boom boxes, in what the UK paper The Guardian said was a live Rickrolling, and which bystanders said was some guys playing a song on the radio.

On April 8, after a web campaign starting at Fark.com, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” won a poll to be played as the 8th inning sing-along at the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium. Five million people voted for the song and, as promised, the New York Mets played it, to the extreme displeasure of the fans who didn’t grasp the four or five layers of irony required to enjoy the experience.

This should highlight the “fish out of water” aspect of internet memes. Take them into real life and, like the fish, they’ll die and stink up the house. And give you pubic lice. Probably best to leave them in the water is what we’re saying.

Written by Holy Taco

Being cool is normally subjective. But there are some things that unequivocally make you uncool. We’re not saying we’re cool, we’re just saying if you own any of these items, you’re not.

10. iPhone

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: You can access e-mails, high speed internet, and watch videos, all on your phone. Because really, normal people around you are so f*&king boring you can hardly bear actually interacting with them.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: I’ve done some research and iPhone is actually a Japanese word that means “something that’s not able to be put in a pocket and instead must be carried in your hand at all times or set on the table in front of you so that any one around you can see it.” This may sound shocking, but when someone remarks how hot it is, they’re not asking you to look up the temperature in both farenheit and celcius, or show them a clip on a 3 inch screen from “An Inconvenient Truth” in an effort to relate this heat to global warming.

9.Ironic Belt Buckles

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: Now you can show up in bars and point at your belt buckle and tell people that you are a “Rodeo Champion” or a “Pac Man” or a “Truck Driver” or a “Jack Daniels.” And while they will know that you are actually none of these things, you think you’re being playful and a little bit mysterious. You also think this tactic will help you pick up women.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: You’re the same person who has ironic facial hair (mustache), drinks ironic beer (PBR) and wears ironic T-shirts (Lucky Charms). You spend your entire life trying to look as shitty and poor as possible while, chances are, you have rich parents or a job for an accounting firm that pays you over $60,000. In four years you will be a Republican living in the suburbs and complaining about your 401k over wine spritzers at dinner parties.

8. Blue Tooth Headset

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: All the other losers have to use their hands when they talk on the phone. Not you! You can talk on your phone and at the same time safely give some loser the finger because they’re only driving the speed limit. It’s Tuesday, doesn’t this asshole know you have your jujitsu class at 24 hour fitness to go to?

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: I don’t give a shit if you’re talking to someone on the other end, when you’re in a Subway Sandwiches and they’re trying to take your order while you say “Listen, you give me that paperwork for the Johnson account by tomorrow or it’s your ass. No mayo. I said no Mayo! Yeah, that’s right, Johnson account on my desk! No pepperoncinis!” it’s pretty god damn confusing and asshole-ish to everyone trying to deal with you. Answer your phone when you have time to hold it in your hand. The only people that should be wearing blue tooth wireless headsets are military field generals and the people that work the day after thanksgiving sale at Old Navy.

7. Quoting Austin Powers/Borat/Old School

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: Put on your earmuffs because that woman has a vageen that hangs like sleeve of wizard. Yeah, baby! Those movies are HILARIOUS, thus if you can quote them, by default you’re hilarious too!

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: We all enjoy quoting our favorite movies, but let’s put these three to bed. Not only did I have every last bit of dialogue to the Borat movie screamed in my face three months before it came out, but let’s face it, Austin Powers wasn’t funny 10 years ago. And I still have to hear people telling me that “circus folk smell vaguely of cabbage.” On top of it, everyone murders the accents. Whenever I hear some asshole in a bar trying doing his version of Borat, somehow he sounds like a tongueless Canadian with a sock in his mouth. This has to stop or I am going to skip the earmuffs and go directly to cutting my ears off.

6. PT Cruiser

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: It’s like a car from back in the thirties! It’s sleek design and throw back look allows everyone tailgating in the parking lot at the Dave Matthews concert know that you’re a free spirit who is all about having good times!

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: If you’ve ever wondered what a gay transformer would turn in to, wonder no more. Not only do they call a retarded amount of attention to themselves on the road, when you drive them you look like a soccer mom whose transporting alcohol during the prohibition era.

5. Tricked Out Bicycles

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: I honestly have no idea.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: Instead of looking like some hipper, younger version of a real biker (who actually is cool), you just look like some 8th-grader who blew his allowance on sparklers for his tricycle. With its weirdly-bent handlebars and wacky forks, your “cruiser” looks like the elephant man of bikes. Plus, these things are clearly uncomfortable to ride. I love watching some tattooed douchebag try to look laid back and cool after he had to dislocate both of his shoulders just to reach the handlebars. Not to mention, you could’ve gotten a friggin’ car for what you paid for this piece of crap. Dumbass.

4. Fidel Castro Hats

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: Wearing a Fidel Castro hat let’s the world know that you’re different and that you have thoughts and ideas that make you significantly more special and free thinking than those who wear traditional baseball hats.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: You know why the Communist Cuba Military can get away with wearing them? Because they carry automatic weapons. You most likely carry a compilation book of Charles Bukowski poems. The tiny bill and camoflauged coloring make you look like a retarded son of a army ranger who had a pair of scissors and access to his father’s closet. I realize you want to tell the world you’re a non-comformist, but unfortunately being a non-conformist means you’re conforming to non-conformism. You might want to ponder that at that next record release party for a band no one’s heard of that you’re pretending to like.

3. Guitar Hero

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: Dude, this game totally rocks! I love this song! Hell yes! Welcome to the Jungle, baby! You’re gonna diiiiiiiiiiiee!

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: Despite what the commercial says, you do not suddenly turn into Slash when you’re playing this video game. You are playing a child-sized guitar that doesn’t even have strings. It has multi-colored buttons and an on/off button. And playing this video game does not mean you can play the guitar now. If I have to hear someone say “I can totally play ‘Anarchy in the UK’” but actually mean “I can totally play ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on Guitar Hero,” I am going to take a pee inside the nearest PS3.

2. Longboard Skateboards

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: You’re just a laid back dude who likes to cruise the streets and board walks but still has the credibility shared by those who ride smaller, more dangerous boards.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: You’re basically one step away from being the little kid at Costco who jumps on the big grocery cart when his mother isn’t looking. Whereas if a normal skateboarder falls he injures himself, you’re traveling at speeds that allow those walking to pass you, and if you fall, you’ll most likely fall on the board and continue traveling. Hence, you’re basically riding a skateboard designed for those without any coordination or athletic ability. It’d be like playing baseball, except replacing the ball with a giant stuffed animal.

1. Funny Ringtones

WHY YOU THINK YOU’RE COOL: A ring tone is a great way to give strangers and coworkers a little peek into your personal life and let them know that your grasp of pop culture is vast. You’re pretty sure that having a silly quote from Monty Python or the Transformers theme song as your ringtone will make those around you realize that you are a the guy everyone else wants to be. There is definitely more to you than meets the eye.

WHY YOU’RE NOT COOL: Having your phone play Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” just makes you look (and sound) like an asshole. And the fact that you let it “ring” 15 times while you stand there and look around for reactions to your hilarious little joke not only reeks of desperation, but it makes everyone around you want to cram that phone up your taint. Put it on vibrate like every other normal person and keep your witticisms between you and your collection of Star Wars figurines.

Written by The Positivity Blog

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problem.”

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

Mahatma Gandhi needs no long introduction. Everyone knows about the man who lead the Indian people to independence from British rule in 1947.

So let’s just move on to some of my favourite tips from Mahatma Gandhi.

1. Change yourself.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”

If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take. And so the world around you will change. Not only because you are now viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn’t have – or maybe even have thought about – while stuck in your old thought patterns.

And the problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you will still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You will still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact.

And so in this new situation you will still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

2. You are in control.

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

What you feel and how you react to something is always up to you. There may be a “normal” or a common way to react to different things. But that’s mostly just all it is.

You can choose your own thoughts, reactions and emotions to pretty much everything. You don’t have to freak out, overreact of even react in a negative way. Perhaps not every time or instantly. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction just goes off. Or an old thought habit kicks in.

And as you realize that no-one outside of yourself can actually control how you feel you can start to incorporate this thinking into your daily life and develop it as a thought habit. A habit that you can grow stronger and stronger over time. Doing this makes life a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

3. Forgive and let it go.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

Fighting evil with evil won’t help anyone. And as said in the previous tip, you always choose how to react to something. When you can incorporate such a thought habit more and more into your life then you can react in a way that is more useful to you and others.

You realize that forgiving and letting go of the past will do you and the people in your world a great service. And spending your time in some negative memory won’t help you after you have learned the lessons you can learn from that experience. You’ll probably just cause yourself more suffering and paralyze yourself from taking action in this present moment.

If you don’t forgive then you let the past and another person to control how you feel. By forgiving you release yourself from those bonds. And then you can focus totally on, for instance, the next point.

4. Without action you aren’t going anywhere.

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

Without taking action very little will be done. However, taking action can be hard and difficult. There can be much inner resistance.

And so you may resort to preaching, as Gandhi says. Or reading and studying endlessly. And feeling like you are moving forward. But getting little or no practical results in real life.

So, to really get where you want to go and to really understand yourself and your world you need to practice. Books can mostly just bring you knowledge. You have to take action and translate that knowledge into results and understanding.

You can check out a few effective tips to overcome this problem in How to Take More Action: 9 Powerful Tips. Or you can move on to the next point for more on the best tip for taking more action that I have found so far.

5. Take care of this moment.

“I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”

The best way that I have found to overcome the inner resistance that often stops us from taking action is to stay in the present as much as possible and to be accepting.

Why? Well, when you are in the present moment you don’t worry about the next moment that you can’t control anyway. And the resistance to action that comes from you imagining negative future consequences – or reflecting on past failures – of your actions loses its power. And so it becomes easier to both take action and to keep your focus on this moment and perform better.

Have a look at 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment for tips on how quickly step into the now. And remember that reconnecting with and staying in the now is a mental habit – a sort of muscle – that you grow. Over time it becomes more powerful and makes it easier to slip into the present moment.

6. Everyone is human.

“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”

When you start to make myths out of people – even though they may have produced extraordinary results – you run the risk of becoming disconnected from them. You can start to feel like you could never achieve similar things that they did because they are so very different. So it’s important to keep in mind that everyone is just a human being no matter who they are.

And I think it’s important to remember that we are all human and prone to make mistakes. Holding people to unreasonable standards will only create more unnecessary conflicts in your world and negativity within you.

It’s also important to remember this to avoid falling into the pretty useless habit of beating yourself up over mistakes that you have made. And instead be able to see with clarity where you went wrong and what you can learn from your mistake. And then try again.

7. Persist.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Be persistent. In time the opposition around you will fade and fall away. And your inner resistance and self-sabotaging tendencies that want to hold you back and keep you like you have always been will grow weaker.

Find what you really like to do. Then you’ll find the inner motivation to keep going, going and going. You can also find a lot of useful tips on how keep your motivation up in How to Get Out of a Motivational Slump and 25 Simple Ways to Motivate Yourself.

One reason Gandhi was so successful with his method of non-violence was because he and his followers were so persistent. They just didn’t give up.

Success or victory will seldom come as quickly as you would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons people don’t get what they want is simply because they give up too soon. The time they think an achievement will require isn’t the same amount of time it usually takes to achieve that goal. This faulty belief partly comes from the world we live in. A world full of magic pill solutions where advertising continually promises us that we can lose a lot of weight or earn a ton of money in just 30 days. You can read more about this in One Big Mistake a Whole Lot of People Make.

Finally, one useful tip to keep your persistence going is to listen to Gandhi’s third quote in this article and keep a sense of humor. It can lighten things up at the toughest of times.

8. See the good in people and help them.

“I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”

“Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.”

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

There is pretty much always something good in people. And things that may not be so good. But you can choose what things to focus on. And if you want improvement then focusing on the good in people is a useful choice. It also makes life easier for you as your world and relationships become more pleasant and positive.

And when you see the good in people it becomes easier to motivate yourself to be of service to them. By being of service to other people, by giving them value you not only make their lives better. Over time you tend to get what you give. And the people you help may feel more inclined to help other people. And so you, together, create an upward spiral of positive change that grows and becomes stronger.

By strengthening your social skills you can become a more influential person and make this upward spiral even stronger. A few articles that may provide you with useful advice in that department are Do You Make These 10 Mistakes in a Conversation? and Dale Carnegie’s Top 10 Tips for Improving Your Social Skills. Or you can just move on to the next tip.

9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”

I think that one of the best tips for improving your social skills is to behave in a congruent manner and communicate in an authentic way. People seem to really like authentic communication. And there is much inner enjoyment to be found when your thoughts, words and actions are aligned. You feel powerful and good about yourself.

When words and thoughts are aligned then that shows through in your communication. Because now you have your voice tonality and body language – some say they are over 90 percent of communication – in alignment with your words.

With these channels in alignment people tend to really listen to what you’re saying. You are communicating without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness.

Also, if your actions aren’t in alignment with what you’re communicating then you start to hurt your own belief in what you can do. And other people’s belief in you too.

10. Continue to grow and evolve.

“Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”

You can pretty much always improve your skills, habits or re-evaluate your evaluations. You can gain deeper understanding of yourself and the world.

Sure, you may look inconsistent or like you don’t know what you are doing from time to time. You may have trouble to act congruently or to communicate authentically. But if you don’t then you will, as Gandhi says, drive yourself into a false position. A place where you try to uphold or cling to your old views to appear consistent while you realise within that something is wrong. It’s not a fun place to be. To choose to grow and evolve is a happier and more useful path to take.

Written by rygood

I’m pretty much addicted to photography. Methods, gear, news, you name it. It really is kinda scary. To keep my addiction in check when I’m not shooting or shopping, I need a steady flow of photo content to keep the shakes and withdrawl symptoms from popping up so I put together a list of what i consider to be some of the best photo-related content out there. Read on for more photo link porn than you can shake a stick at including 25 blogs, 20 AMAZING photographers, and some other fun stuff that will make those days you feel stuck at your desk wishing you were shooting go a bit smoother…

Photography Related Blogs

This makes up only about a quarter of everything I’m subscribed to in my Google Reader and are in no particular order. I tried to pick a well-rounded batch of sites to share and had to limit it somehow and it wasn’t easy. If you aren’t listed here, let me know in the comments!

1. A Photo Editor Blog by Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside Magazine.
2. Digital Photography SchoolJust as the name implies… a blog by prominent blogger Darren Rowse focusing on the basics of Digital Photography.
3. Epic EditsA creation of Brian Auer, the most dedicated blogger I know.
4. f/1.0Photography by Ed Zawadzki. He REALLY loves prime lenses
5. Flickr Blog DO I even need to say? Keps me up-to-date with news from the best photo sharing site in the world.
6. Gizmodo Digital Camera NewsBigtime gadget blog, this is a direct link to their camera news feed… I really only use them for release news and they sometimes have and link to good hands-on reviews.
7. EngadgetAlong with Gizmodo, these two usually break the big camera stories first… which makes them worth mentioning.
8. L7 FotoA general photography blog, great tips and reviews.
9. Magnum Photos BlogNo this isn’t photos of Zoolander, its the blog of the legendary Magnum Photos Agency. If you don’t know what Magnum is, you should.
10. PhotowalkingTrevor Carpenter’s world of photowalking, a craze thats seems to be taking the community by storm.
11. PhotopreneurGreat content, mostly photo-business related.
12. Strobist If someone says the words ‘photography blog’ Strobist is probably the first name to come up. Amazng lighting tips and tricks.
13. What’s The Jackanory?The blog of Andrew Hetherington, editorial and commercial photographer from Dublin Ireland living in New York City
14. Thomas HawkBig name in the community and photowalking legend.
15. Rebekka Probably the most popular photographer on flickr, She is from Iceland and shoots AMAZING things.
16. Photoshop InsiderThe reigning king of Photoshop.. why? He is the best selling Photoshop book author ever, president of the NAPP an awesome photographer and retoucher and much more.
17. PhotoDotoPublished b the same guy who created BigHugeLabs, with well-rounded, fun content.
18. Jim Goldstein Ridiculous landscape photographer and blogger.
19. Photo Critic Another photography blog with great, well rounded content.
20. Stuck in CustomsProbably thebest known HDR artist out there. He creates amazing, artistic HDR creations.
21. Photography Bay My favorite site for photography rumors.
22. O’Reilly Digital Media Blogs Lots of blogs from lots of peeps, has great Photoshop and Lightroom content.
23. John Nack on Adobe Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop. He knows his stuff.
24. Chase Jarvis Ridiculous pro photographer, breaking down the common barriers put in place by lots of pros, and sharing his mojo on his blog.
25. PDN PulseThe blog of Photo District News.

Amazing Photographer Portfolios

This list, in no particular order, makes up 20 of my favorite photographer portfolios out of about 60 I have bookmarked. Each and every one is frikkin ridiculous and I’m leaving out descriptions becasue the images speak for themselves.

1. Michael Muller
2. Eric Ryan Anderson
3. Kris Krug
4. Patrick Hoelck
5. Zach Gold
6. Vincent Laforet
7. Brook Pifer
8. Jeremy Cowart
9. Alberto Oviedo
10. Eoloperfido
11. Joey Lawrence
12. Philip Toledano
13. Matt Stuart
14. Dave Hill
15. Mareen Fishinger
16. Jill Greenberg
17. Branislav Kropilak
18. James Nachtwey
19. Andrew Zuckerman
20. Chris Jordan

Photography News and Post Aggregators

If you don’t have the time to subscribe to hundreds of sites, the sites below can keep you up to date on all the happenings in the photo world.

1. Photography VoterKinda like digg for photography. Post a story, and vote it up to the top.
2. Imaging InsiderHandpicked photography stories from around the web.
3. PicUrls Similar to popurls, aggregates photo content from all kinds fo different sources
4. AphlogPretty much the same as picurls, but with varying content.
5. 1001 Noisy Cameras Digital Camera NewsTons and tons of news, reviews and photo links from just about everywhere.

Photo News & Reviews

They aren’t blogs but they offer great photography related news and educational content.

1. PopPhoto Home of the magazines Popular Photography, American Photo and more. Dig in a bit and find great reviews, blogs and news.
2. The Digital PicturePut simply, the best Canon equipment review site by far. This guy goes into more detail and testing than i thought possible.
3. Photo.net Kinda old and decrepit at this point, but worth a mention because it has a ton of great content if you dig a little.
4. Rob Galbraith Another Canon site, Rob Galbraith has been arond for years and is often the first to get new Canon news.
5. Ken RockwellAnother old school photography ste. It has a jenky design but TONS of great information, including lots and lots of Nikon reviews.

Goodies for Flickr

I’m pretty much obsessed with flickr and these are some of my favorite toys that make it even better.

1. Big Huge Labs The original flickr goodies site, used by millions of flickr users worldwide.
2. Slideoo My favorite flickr slideshow widget.
3. Flickr Leech Ajaxy flickr exploration site, makes browsing images a fast, seamless process.
4. Pic LensSweet Firefox add-on that turns photo browsing into a full screen immersive experience. You really have to try it to understand.
5. Flickr RssMy favorite wordpress plugin for Flickr, allows you to ass your flickr stream to any wordpress blog.

Phew! That was a lot of clicking… I apologize if I’ve detroyed your productivity for the day, or caused arthritis in your mouse-finger… we both know it was worth it. Now it’s your turn. If you have your own site to share, or anything else you think is awesome, let me know in the comments. I’m always on the lookout for more.

*** Update: We have some late additions brought to you by CameraPorn readers

1. The Online Photographer
2. Photub
3. Fred Miranda
4. Manuel Librodo
5. This Week in Photography
6. DP Review – *note: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about this one… I personally love dpreview, but didn’t include it because its always included in lists like this.. just wanted to be different

keep ’em coming in the comments and I’ll continue to add to the list

Written by Addy Dugdale

At a party once, Jesus was asked if he were a leg man or a tit man. The answer is neither. He’s a LEGO man. Well, to be honest, he’s all three, but rather like faith, hope and charity, the greatest of my husband’s loves is LEGO. I’m not bitter. The colorful, benippled bricks have just been around rather longer than I have. That’s not to say LEGO has never caused problems in our relationship. When it did, though, I came up with the following 10-point solution to cope.

To tell the truth, I was once as bewitched by the bricks as he is. We had a massive box at home, a hangover from when my brother, older than me by 11 years, was the snot-nosed kid of the house. (Well, I say massive, but it was barely Yoda-sized compared to J’s Millennium Falcon box of LucasTricks.) When I inherited the snot-nosed kid mantle, my brother having moved on to smoking dope and listening to Pink Floyd, I also inherited the LEGO.

And I loved it, back in the days when I was too small to see my father’s eyes roll when I begged him to help me make a LEGO pony. How fickle I was back then, however, and eventually lost interest-after all, there are only so many minimalist box-shaped houses you can make with a handful of hereditary LEGO. (I abandoned it for an Eagle-Eye Action Man I’d found, but even that obsession only lasted a few months, once I realized I couldn’t get his plastic shorts off with my teeth, a knife or even the help of the dog.)

Point is, I was not fully unaware of the issues when I married a LEGO maniac. I wouldn’t go as far as Lady Di did when she said there were three people in her marriage, but there was a point over Christmas when the whole LEGO thing became a bit of a nightmare. (It might have had something to do with the fact that we had become obsessive 24 watchers, and so, unconsciously, every time we saw the Millennium Falcon box, we could hear that bloody clock ticking down.) The pressure was unspeakable, from colleagues and commenters alike. Reader, I must confess that I threw one of the boxes on the floor, mixing up piles of bricks that he had spent hours sorting out.

The look in Jesus’ eyes. You may say baleful, but I see your baleful and I raise you pure, unadulterated, naked hurt. A lot of humble pie was eaten that night. I vowed to change, so I came up with a ten-point plan with which to sink my irrational plastic jealousy. Here it is:

1. Have a Spare Room
A man needs a shed-a place his tools can call home, and where he can potter about in undisturbed for hours and hours. Since we’re still waiting for LEGO to bring out its life-sized LEGO Shed kit (estimated completion time 4-6 weeks), J keeps the bricks to his Millennium Falcon in the spare room. If we have friends to stay, the boxes are placed reverently on the floor of the office, until the room is vacant again. Blam can attest to this, as he found some LEGO under his pillow when he came to stay in February.

2. Keep the Dog in Plastic Chew Toys
I haven’t yet noticed primary colored bricks in the dog’s poop, but when I do, I know that we need to go to the pet store again. And if Jesus notices, it’ll be time to get a new dog. Joke.

3. Never Hoover
Now, this rule I absolutely love. I have also glued LEGO bricks and mini-figs to the ironing board, the washing-up gloves and the family silver.

4. Always Wear Shoes In the House
Have you ever stepped on a LEGO brick? I know a guy who had to go to hospital to have one of those little one-row brickettes removed from the ball of his foot after he stood on it by mistake. I think you know him too-he writes for Gizmodo.

5. Vote Denmark During Eurovision
I believe there is a trip to the LEGO factory in Denmark coming up in June. Did I want to accompany him, he asked me tenderly months ago? What, and stand in the way of a man and his first love? Feel like a gooseberry as he fingers and fondles the bricks in the factory? No, no, no, no, nonononononononono. No. NO. But do I tell him I don’t want to go and get nipple marks on my fingers from obsessive brickplay? Of course not. Anyway, someone has to look after the dog.

6. Regular Visits to the Local Toy Shop
“Have you got that one? Thought so. And that one. Oh look! It’s a singing Freddie Mercury doll. Now why don’t they do a Freddie Mercury LEGO? Or Bowie? Yeah, come on then, let’s go inside.”

7. Never Write a LEGO Post for Giz
I value my marriage above all things.

8. Laugh Every Time He Makes You Watch the “Death By Tray” LEGO Skit
This is not exactly a hardship, as Eddie Izzard is funny as fuck. Jesus did actually manage to recite the whole skit when he was drunk in a taxi a few weeks ago. The long, 4am journey home was, believe it or not, alleviated by a slurred version of “Jeff Vader? Runs the Death Star?”

9. Agree That the World Would Be Better If Totally Made of LEGO
How simple life would be. A couple of tiles came off your roof? Buy them from the LEGO store, then go up a ladder and clip them back on again. Kids, we’re going to build a swimming pool this weekend. A leaky one, but still, a swimming pool. No, honestly. Imagine, if the world was made out of LEGO you would just be able to unclip rogue states from the globe and dismantle them before putting them back in the cupboard, and then the world would just be a safer place. And what if everyone’s hands were shaped like those of the LEGO figures? Well, you wouldn’t get any work done, for a start.

10. Try to Relate and Even Join In
Just after his Millennium Falcon arrived, J bought a TIE Fighter LEGO set. “It’s for you,” he said. “You can do that while I assemble the Falcon.” A month later, I had to go back to Britain for a long weekend, and when I came back, I found the TIE Fighter sitting, assembled on his desk. “Oy, I was meant to do that,” I said. Jesus shrugged. “I missed you. And I was bored,” he replied.

So, there you have it. While it may not be as life-changing as AA or NA’s 12-Point Plan, my LEGO-acceptance program keeps us on the straight and narrow. And I know you’re all wondering when Jesus is going to present his newly-clicked Millennium Falcon to the world, well, hell, so am I. However, I think he needs an incentive. Any ideas?

Written by Jeff Giles, Tim Ryan, and Sara Schieron.

RT celebrates Mother’s Day with our favorite good (and evil) cinematic moms.

Mothers are precious. In fact, they’re super-heroines…except when they haunt you, beat you or sell you into government office. (And even then, there’s some love there.) From nurturing and strong to manipulative and murderous, moms do some crazy things in the interest of protecting (or betraying) their brood, and this list — hotly contested in the RT office, by the way — features five good eggs and as many rotten, with a few honorable mentions and iffy selections thrown in for good measure.

Not that this list could (or should) change your Sunday plans, but it might make you feel differently about your where your mom lands on the tolerability index. She may not be Mrs. Incredible, but your dear old mom can’t be so bad she doesn’t deserve a call on the one day a year that’s dedicated especially to her, right?

Well, maybe you’ll feel differently after you read about Bad Mom #1.

Good Moms

more info…

Helen Parr (aka Elastigirl)
Appears in: The Incredibles (2004)
Portrayed by: Holly Hunter

Moms perform superhuman feats every day. They dispense valuable advice. They’re protective of their children, but know when to let go and allow them to forge their own paths. And they’re always true to their own values. Thus, Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter) in The Incredibles is the distillation of maternal excellence — and she’s great at crime-fighting to boot. (Alas, she probably shouldn’t have left the poor babysitter alone with super-infant Jack Jack.)

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more info…

Mrs. Gump
Appears in: Forrest Gump (1994)
Portrayed by: Sally Field

Six years may not seem like a long time, but for Sally Field, they were the difference between playing Tom Hanks’ friend (in 1988’s Punchline) and playing his rock-solid, long-suffering mother (in 1994’s Forrest Gump). From the film’s first act, in which she does some implied horizontal boppin’ with the dean of a private school to ensure her son’s admission, you know you only wished your mom loved you as much as Mrs. Gump loved Forrest. For Field — who is, for the record, only 10 years Hanks’ senior — the role capped a string of positively received roles that brought her back from the squishy rom-com territory she’d wandered into during the mid-’80s (1987’s Surrender, anyone?).

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more info…

Peg Boggs
Appears in: Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Portrayed by: Dianne Wiest

How’s this for maternal instinct? Tim Burton’s 1990 suburban fable hinges on Peg Boggs, the housewife/struggling Avon lady played by Wiest, and her impulsive decision to enter the local Creepy Old Mansion on a Hill on a sales call. She doesn’t sell any makeup, but she does wind up adopting the house’s sole resident, a lab-created boy with scissors for hands, and taking him home to live with her family. It sounds positively daffy if you’ve never seen it — or even if you have, actually — but all of Burton’s best movies need a sweet anchor to keep them from drifting completely off into Weirdsville, and Wiest — whose early addition to the cast Burton credits with helping to get Edward Scissorhands made — plays that role perfectly here.

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Sarah Connor
Appears in: Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
Portrayed by: Linda Hamilton

It’s easy to forget now, but before Linda Hamilton’s bicep-flexing turn as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, women in science fiction films — heck, in pretty much all films — were relegated to stereotypical domestic support roles, or damsels in distress (Ripley excepted). Hamilton may not have been the first of the fairer sex to hit the gym and kick a little bad-guy tush in a major motion picture, but she was certainly one of the most convincing — and the film’s $500 million-plus gross helped convince filmmakers all over Hollywood that maybe the time had come to write female roles that involved more than screaming and baked goods.

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more info…

Elaine Miller
Appears in: Almost Famous (2000)
Portrayed by: Frances McDormand

Early on in Almost Famous, Mrs. Miller’s hard-nosed mothering is hard to read; however, when she lays down natural selection to a presumptuous Billy Crudup, you can’t help but marvel. She doesn’t just protect her 15-year-old son, a rising celebrity music journalist; she extends the stern rules to his possible bad influence. Even a rock star can become a “person of substance,” if properly guided. Lioness mothers don’t typically quote Goethe, which is only a tiny part of why this one is so memorable.

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To Be Determined

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Bren MacGuff
Appears in: Juno (2007)
Portrayed by: Allison Janey

Okay, so her dialogue during the first third of the film drifts perilously close to the brink of the stilted, see-how-hip-we-are patois traditionally favored by screenwriters putting words in the mouth of “real” teens — but Diablo Cody’s script quickly redeems itself, giving Ellen Page the rare opportunity to play a pregnant teenager whose journey to delivery avoids all the stereotypical Afterschool Special plot devices that Hollywood can’t seem to live without. In fact, Juno’s decision to give the baby up for adoption is one of the least dramatic decisions she makes during the course of the film; it takes her no time at all to decide that she is, in her own words, “ill-equipped” to give her progeny the life she wants for it. If that isn’t motherly love, folks, what is?

Bad Moms

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Joan Crawford
Appears in: Mommie Dearest (1981)
Portrayed by: Faye Dunaway

If Christina Crawford is to be believed (and some claim she isn’t), her adoptive mother Joan was a better actress than a parent. Much better. Frank Perry’s camp classic Mommie Dearest shows Crawford hacking off Christina’s hair, giving away her birthday presents, slapping her, using her (and her siblings) for public relations purposes, and tackling her with a force that would make Lawrence Taylor wince. (And let’s not even start on those wire hangers.) In a scenery-chewing — nay, gobbling — performance, Faye Dunaway became one of cinema’s most notorious examples of bad parenting.

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more info…

Mama Bates
Appears in: Psycho (1960)

Poor Norman Bates. All he wants to do is listen to Beethoven and devote time to taxidermy. And yet his mom nags him all the time into maintaining his failing motel. (Spoiler Alert!) No wonder business is slow; Mrs. Bates demands that Norman take a Ginsu to anyone foolish enough to stop by. (At least she taught him how to do housework, since the shower in room #1 is clean as a whistle.) A lot of moms are possessive of their children, but most are at least kind enough not to take up residence in their sons’ brains — or badger them from beyond the grave.

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Eleanor Iselin
Appears in: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Portrayed by: Angela Lansbury

It’s never a good thing when parents try to live out their ambitions through their children. It’s especially uncool to use your kids as pawns in a plot to overthrow the government. In the chilling Cold War drama/satire The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury plays Eleanor Iselin, the wife of a bombastic senator and fellow communist sleeper agent, uses a deck of cards as a trigger to control her son, Korean War vet Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey). Raymond is forced into a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate (and his mother even kisses him far too deeply, just to prove how much she loves him). Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but it’s unlikely she’d get a seal of approval from Parenting magazine.

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more info…

Margaret White
Appears in: Carrie (1976)
Portrayed by: Piper Laurie

You thought your mom was a pain in the neck during high school? She was June Cleaver compared to Margaret White. Carrie’s backwoods fundamentalist mother believes just about everything is sinful — including puberty, the act that conceived Carrie, and, well, Carrie herself. She isn’t terribly fond of the prom, either — and although she ends up being proven more or less right on that count, that doesn’t exactly help her case in the end. In giving life to one of Stephen King’s most hateful characters, Piper Laurie holds nothing back; watching her performance, you’d almost never know she viewed Carrie as a comedy, or that her ill-timed laughter ruined several shots.

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more info…

Beverly R. Sutphin
Appears in: Serial Mom (1994)
Portrayed by: Kathleen Turner

In her defense: She just wanted to keep order. It’s crucial, after all, that fashion rules (no white after Labor Day!) are upheld, and pesky neighbors are dealt with accordingly (Mrs. Jensen deserved to be clubbed like a seal with that leg of lamb). This Martha Stewart of Murder is part homemaker, part Waters-Guttersnipe-Baltimorean. Her kids were ideal, and she was too — until a parent teacher conference gone wrong sent her perfectly coiffed suburban existence into a life of celebreality violence. Like Birdie said: “You know, Mrs. Sutphin, you’re bigger than Freddy and Jason now, except that you’re real.”

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The Honorable Mentions

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Elaine Robinson and Mrs. Stifler
Appears in: The Graduate (1973), American Pie (1999)
Portrayed by: Katharine Ross, Jennifer Coolidge

Mrs. Robinson didn’t just personify the cringe-inducing ideal of the sexually aggressive mom, she was the original cougar, hunting for prey her daughter’s age. She was sultry, “mature,” had some righteous lingerie — and then refused to share her lover with her daughter. Does this make her a bad mother? Technically, loverboy Ben (Dustin Hoffman) had little association with Elaine (Katharine Ross) prior to his affair with her mom. It’s not as if she actively seduced her kid’s buddy — that was the work of the first-ever MILF, Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge in American Pie). She did more than contribute a new category to porn. She was unabashed (on the pool table!), indiscreet, and unlike Mrs. Robinson, unwed. Then again, it’s not like she would ever stand in the way if her son ever wanted to get it together with Finch.

Written by Mary Rowland This article is From Reader’s Digest

Clear Those Financial Hurdles

Was there ever a time when any one of us turned our backs on a bargain? Probably not. But today there’s even more reason to hang on to your dollars. The U.S. economy is cooling down, according to the Federal Reserve Board. At the same time, Americans are piling up more credit-card debt than ever before, and our savings rate is negative, the first time since the Great Depression.

So we’ve rounded up ten financial challenges, and come up with solutions to help you keep more of your money.

1. That SUV of yours seemed like a good idea at the time, but now you’re paying way too much to fill ‘er up.

Solution: First, look for the cheapest gas prices in your area before you head for the pump — they may vary by as much as 20 percent within a few blocks and can change frequently. Gasbuddy.com collects price information for the U.S. and Canada from 173 websites. Gaspricewatch.com collects prices on 128,000 gas stations from 123,000 volunteer spotters.

Be careful about how you use debit and credit cards to pay for the gas. Sure, gas company credit cards offer rebates on gas, usually from one to five percent. But they often carry high annual percentage rates and limit you to a particular brand of gas. Some even offer teaser rebates of up to ten percent, which may be available for only 30 days. A better choice is a general-purpose credit card, with rebates wherever you buy gas.

Avoid using your debit card. When you buy gas on a debit card, your bank “locks up” as much as $100 for as long as several days or until the station owner processes the transactions. If your bank account is running low, you may bounce a check or two.

An easy way to save on gas? Properly inflated tires. Check them weekly and shave up to 9 cents off a $3 gallon.

2. You stop at the supermarket a few times a week to pick up something for dinner, tossing in pricey items as you go.

Solution: Order groceries and staples online and get them delivered to your door. E-grocery stores became one of the biggest disasters in the dotcom debacle a few years back. But a handful of them are beginning to resurface, with more sure to follow.

Some sites are still regional, but amazon.com announced the nationwide opening of its grocery store this summer, with 14,000 nonperishable items, some hard to find and many discounted. Amazon offers free shipping on orders over $25. To see which e-grocer operates in your neck of the woods, check out safeway.com, peapod.com, freshdirect.com and netgrocer.com.

More Savings Tips

3. Your daughter wants a clarinet, and you need to get rid of that old couch, but it’s still got some life left in it.

Solution: Try freecycling. Community groups across the nation have organized to help consumers give away stuff they no longer need and find free stuff they could use. This isn’t a barter arrangement. You give or you get, but not necessarily from the same person. Once you find a recycler who has something you want, you make arrangements to pick it up.

Nancy Castleman of Elizaville, New York, has given away Jerusalem artichokes from her garden, lawn mowers, a television, stereo speakers and a sewing machine. She’s received computers, a stove, a lawn tractor and a 30-gallon pail of birdseed.

The granddaddy of online recycling is freecycle.org, a network of nearly 2.5 million members in 3,710 communities around the world. Also global is freesharing.org. Members offer furniture, clothing, appliances, computers and more. Check out the list of other “sites like us.” For a smaller, folksier site, go to sharingisgiving.org. Search by ZIP code for local garage sales and thrift shops.

4. Your son left for college, and you want to keep in touch — without paying huge phone bills.

Solution: Talk for free on the Internet. Go to skype.com and download free software that allows you to make free domestic calls (and very inexpensive international calls) to other Skype users. David Kavaler, a junior at Northeastern University in Boston, went to Venice, Italy, for a summer photo program and used Skype to call home. “It was very cheap, so I didn’t bust my budget on phone bills,” he says. Google is also developing a network to handle calls and instant messages to friends anytime, anywhere. Google Talk is free. Go to google.com/talk to sign up. JAJAH recently introduced a free global calling plan. Go to jajah.com, enter your own phone number and the number of the person you want to call. Your phone will ring and a recorded voice will announce that you are being connected to your friend’s phone. Within moments, you are talking. Free. After this initial call, both you and your friend will need to register (no charge) at jajah.com to continue the free chats. Most countries are in JAJAH’s free zones, but check before calling. Take note: Some phone companies charge for incoming calls.

5. Your wife’s birthday is coming up. She has champagne taste, and you’re on a beer budget.

Solution: Get a cup of coffee, prop yourself up at your computer and take a look at some new online options.

Shopping.com compares prices, warranties, dimensions, quality and other factors for the top five sellers in a specific category. It also provides buyer reviews and ratings. If you’re looking for jewelry, for instance, you can search by material, stone type, style and store. A no-brainer for men short on patience.

Jellyfish.com helps you earn cash back (two to three percent) when you make purchases through a Web retailer. Here’s how it works: Go to jellyfish.com to find the right product at the best price. Once you’ve made the purchase and jellyfish gets its commission from that merchant, jellyfish will credit your account or send you a check for at least half of what it’s received. No fees, no hidden charges.

6. You’d love to get away over the holidays, but with fuel prices and airfares climbing, it doesn’t look good.

Solution: New Internet travel search engines analyze data and update prices regularly to help you get the cheapest rate on airfares, hotels and rental cars. Objective price comparisons and no commissions.

Farecompare.com collects data and updates 6 million fares between 77,000 city pairs up to three times a day. For last-minute getaways, see the Top Deals list. Suppose you live in Denver, Colorado, and you would like to slip away for a long weekend. At FareCompare, you can see that it would cost you $158 round-trip to Chicago, $198 to Cancun and only $247 to Anchorage.

Kayak.com gathers flight and fare information from hundreds of websites in real time to provide what it claims are the best travel deals available, including flight, hotel and rental cars. A recent check found that the cheapest nonstop round-trip fare between Boston and Pittsburgh was $139 on either United or JetBlue. Click on the airline of your choice and you will be linked to that site with the flight ready to book.

Farecast.com charts the lowest fare between the departure and destination cities you choose, predicts whether fares are heading up or down and allows you to see what time of year is cheapest for travel. The site searches the airlines and provides links to each. Click “flexible search” to get a lower-priced option. This site is in beta testing, and for now, departure cities are limited. A recent search showed that the lowest price for a round-trip ticket between Seattle and Houston was $244. Twenty days later it had risen to $333. Farecast predicted that fare would hold for seven days.

7. You signed a two-year contract for a cell phone only to discover that the service in your area is unsatisfactory.

Solution: You’re facing two years of dropped calls or a $150 termination fee to cancel the contract. But a new website — celltradeusa.com — can help you find someone to take over the remainder of your contract.

Click onto this bright red website; the screen is split between “Get Out” and “Get In.” There are advantages on each side: The seller gets out of the long contract and keeps his old number. The buyer gets a shorter-term contract and pays no activation fee.

Once you sign up to sell your contract, you’ll begin receiving e-mails from interested buyers. Pay the $19.99 registration fee and you’ll receive their contact information. Celltrade does not guarantee that a potential buyer will be approved by your service provider. The company will check on the creditworthiness of the buyer, just as it did with you.

8. Your credit-card application was denied, and your mortgage rate is higher than your sister’s. Ouch.

Solution: Improve your credit score and save thousands of dollars. These scores determine how much you pay in interest on your mortgage and credit cards, and how much you pay for auto and life insurance and more. Credit scores can even be the deciding factor in whether you get the job you want (some employers think it speaks to character).

The Fair Isaac Corporation was first to develop credit scores to determine how likely you are to be a good credit risk. A chart at myfico.com lists mortgage interest rates, updated daily, and shows what interest rate you might get, based on your score. For example, someone with a score of 760-850 could get a 6.31 percent interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage of $216,000, according to the site. His monthly payment would be $1,338. For the same mortgage, someone with a score of 620-639 would get a 7.89 percent interest rate and pay $1,569 per month. That’s a difference of $231 a month, or $83,160 over the life of the 30-year loan.

To determine your score, computers grind up a ton of information about your credit history — and spit out a number. FICO scores range from 300 to 850; a score of 720 or more is considered good by most standards; above 760 gets you the best rates — and the right to negotiate even better ones with some lenders. The fastest way to improve your score is to pay your bills on time and reduce the amount of debt you carry.

Go to annualcreditreport.com for your free report — you’re entitled to one every 12 months from each of the three bureaus. You’ll pay extra for your credit score.

9. You’re living paycheck to paycheck, worried you’ll never own a home, get a degree or retire.

Solution: Consult a financial planner. Time was when they refused to do anything short of a full financial plan, which cost thousands of dollars. Today a network of fee-by-the-hour planners will help you with one specific goal — choosing investments for your 401(k) plan, getting out of debt, saving for college — for as little as a few hundred dollars.

To find an à la carte planner, go to garrettplanningnetwork.com. Participants in this network have been trained and approved by Sheryl Garrett, the planner in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, who set up the network and who has been named one of the most influential people in financial services. Michael Donahoe, a planner in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, met with a young couple who wanted to buy a home. They had $10,000, but they couldn’t manage to save the remaining $10,000 needed for the down payment and closing costs. If they kept their $10,000 invested at 8 percent, Donahoe estimated, it would take them about 8 1?2 years to buy a home.

Donahoe set them up with a systematic investment program and reviewed their retirement benefits at work. As a result of his suggestions, they will probably be able to purchase a new home in two years, says Donahoe, who charged them only $370. Donahoe provides a fee estimate before he starts work. “And I don’t bill above what I estimate,” he says.

10. You’d like to go to the movies and eat out more often, but the “fun stuff” really costs.

Solution: Check out meetup.com, a social networking site unlike the others: Folks actually get together. Over 2.5 million have joined local Meetups, and there are more than 4,500 interests listed, including dining out, movies, belly dancing, scrapbooking and ghost tracking. Join an existing group for free, or start your own.

But you’ll have to check your neighborhood at meetup.com to see which groups discount activities or offer them at no charge. A yoga instructor in Brooklyn, New York, for example, gives free lessons since she found a studio she can use at no cost; she asks for a $5 donation. A movies Meetup in Orlando, Florida, and a vegan group in Boston get group discounts.

Written By Tom Chiarella Photo by Leif Parsons

A man can be expert in nothing, but he must be practiced in many things. Skills. You don’t have to master them all at once. You simply have to collect and develop a certain number of skills as the years tick by. People count on you to come through. That’s why you need these, to start.

A Man Should Be Able To:

1. Give advice that matters in one sentence. I got run out of a job I liked once, and while it was happening, a guy stopped me in the hall. Smart guy, but prone to saying too much. I braced myself. I didn’t want to hear it. I needed a white knight, and I knew it wasn’t him. He just sighed and said: When nobody has your back, you gotta move your back. Then he walked away. Best advice I ever got. One sentence.

2. Tell if someone is lying. Everyone has his theory. Pick one, test it. Choose the tells that work for you. I like these: Liars change the subject quickly. Liars look up and to their right when they speak. Liars use fewer contractions. Liars will sometimes stare straight at you and employ a dead face. Liars never touch their chest or heart except self-consciously. Liars place objects between themselves and you during a conversation.

3. Take a photo. Fill the frame.

4. Score a baseball game. Scoring a game is an exercise in ciphering, creating a shorthand of your very own. In this way, it’s a private language as much as a record of the game. The only given is the numbering of the positions and the use of the diamond to express each batter’s progress around the bases. I black out the diamond when a run scores. I mark an RBI with a tally mark in the upper-right-hand corner. Each time you score a game, you pick up on new elements to track: pitch count, balls and strikes, foul balls. It doesn’t matter that this information is available on the Internet in real time. Scoring a game is about bearing witness, expanding your own ability to observe.

5. Name a book that matters. The Catcher in the Rye does not matter. Not really. You gotta read.

6. Know at least one musical group as well as is possible. One guy at your table knows where Cobain was born and who his high school English teacher was. Another guy can argue the elegant extended trope of Liquid Swords with GZA himself. This is how it should be. Music does not demand agreement. Rilo Kiley. Nina Simone. Whitesnake. Fugazi. Otis Redding. Whatever. Choose. Nobody likes a know-it-all, because 1) you can’t know it all and 2) music offers distinct and private lessons. So pick one. Except Rilo Kiley. I heard they broke up.

7. Cook meat somewhere other than the grill.

Buy The Way to Cook, by Julia Child. Try roasting. Braising. Broiling. Slow-cooking. Pan searing. Think ragouts, fricassees, stews. All of this will force you to understand the functionality of different cuts. In the end, grilling will be a choice rather than a chore, and your Weber will become a tool rather than a piece of weekend entertainment.

8. Not monopolize the conversation.

9. Write a letter.

So easy. So easily forgotten. A five-paragraph structure works pretty well: Tell why you’re writing. Offer details. Ask questions. Give news. Add a specific memory or two. If your handwriting is terrible, type. Always close formally.

10. Buy a suit.

Avoid bargains. Know your likes, your dislikes, and what you need it for (work, funerals, court). Squeeze the fabric — if it bounces back with little or no sign of wrinkling, that means it’s good, sturdy material. And tug the buttons gently. If they feel loose or wobbly, that means they’re probably coming off sooner rather than later. The jacket’s shoulder pads are supposed to square with your shoulders; if they droop off or leave dents in the cloth, the jacket’s too big. The jacket sleeves should never meet the wrist any lower than the base of the thumb — if they do, ask to go down a size. Always get fitted.

11. Swim three different strokes. Doggie paddle doesn’t count.

12. Show respect without being a suck-up. Respect the following, in this order: age, experience, record, reputation. Don’t mention any of it.

13. Throw a punch. Close enough, but not too close. Swing with your shoulders, not your arm. Long punches rarely land squarely. So forget the roundhouse. You don’t have a haymaker. Follow through; don’t pop and pull back. The length you give the punch should come in the form of extension after the point of contact. Just remember, the bones in your hand are small and easy to break. You’re better off striking hard with the heel of your palm. Or you could buy the guy a beer and talk it out.

14. Chop down a tree. Know your escape path. When the tree starts to fall, use it.

15. Calculate square footage. Width times length.

16. Tie a bow tie.

Step 1: Make a simple knot, allowing slightly more length (one to two inches) on the end of A.

Step 2: Lay A out of the way, fold B into the normal bow shape, and position it on the first knot you made.

Step 3: Drop A vertically over folded end B.

Step 4: Double back A on itself and position it over the knot so that the two folded ends make a cross.

Step 5: The hard part: Pass folded end A under and behind the left side (yours) of the knot and through the loop behind folded end B.

Step 6: Tighten the knot you have created, straightening, particularly in the center.

17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well.

When I interviewed for my first job, one of the senior guys had me to his house for a reception. He offered me a cigarette and pointed me to a bowl of whiskey sours, like I was Darrin Stephens and he was Larry Tate. I can still remember that first tight little swallow and my gratitude that I could go back for a refill without looking like a drunk. I came to admire the host over the next decade, but he never gave me the recipe. So I use this:
• For every 750-ml bottle of whiskey (use a decent bourbon or rye), add:
• 6 oz fresh-squeezed, strained lemon juice
• 6 oz simple syrup (mix superfine sugar and water in equal quantities)

To serve: Shake 3 oz per person with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glasses. Garnish with a cherry and an orange slice or, if you’re really slick, a float of red wine. (Pour about 1/2 oz slowly into each glass over the back of a spoon; this is called a New York sour, and it’s great.)

18. Speak a foreign language. Pas beaucoup. Mais faites un effort.

19. Approach a woman out of his league. Ever have a shoeshine from a guy you really admire? He works hard enough that he doesn’t have to tell stupid jokes; he doesn’t stare at your legs; he knows things you don’t, but he doesn’t talk about them every minute; he doesn’t scrape or apologize for his status or his job or the way he is dressed; he does his job confidently and with a quiet relish. That stuff is wildly inviting. Act like that guy.

20. Sew a button.

21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer.

Once, in our lifetime, much of Europe was approaching cultural and political irrelevance. Then they made like us and banded together into a union of confederated states. So you can always assume that they were simply copying the United States as they now push us to the verge of cultural and political irrelevance.

22. Give a woman an orgasm so that he doesn’t have to ask after it.

Otherwise, ask after it.

23. Be loyal. You will fail at it. You have already. A man who does not know loyalty, from both ends, does not know men. Loyalty is not a matter of give-and-take: He did me a favor, therefore I owe him one. No. No. No. It is the recognition of a bond, the honoring of a shared history, the reemergence of the vows we make in the tight times. It doesn’t mean complete agreement or invisible blood ties. It is a currency of selflessness, given without expectation and capable of the most stellar return.

24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope. Brand, amount, style, fast, like so: Booker’s, double, neat.

25. Drive an eightpenny nail into a treated two-by-four without thinking about it.

Use a contractor’s hammer. Swing hard and loose, like a tennis serve.

26. Cast a fishing rod without shrieking or sighing or otherwise admitting defeat.

27. Play gin with an old guy. Old men will try to crush you. They’ll drown you in meaningless chatter, tell stories about when they were kids this or in Korea that. Or they’ll retreat into a taciturn posture designed to get you to do the talking. They’ll note your strategies without mentioning them, keep the stakes at a level they can control, and change up their pace of play just to get you stumbling. You have to do this — play their game, be it dominoes or cribbage or chess. They may have been playing for decades. You take a beating as a means of absorbing the lessons they’ve learned without taking a lesson. But don’t be afraid to take them down. They can handle it.

28. Play go fish with a kid.

You don’t crush kids. You talk their ear off, make an event out of it, tell them stories about when you were a kid this or in Vegas that. You have to play their game, too, even though they may have been playing only for weeks. Observe. Teach them without once offering a lesson. And don’t be afraid to win. They can handle it.

29. Understand quantum physics well enough that he can accept that a quarter might, at some point, pass straight through the table when dropped.

Sometimes the laws of physics aren’t laws at all. Read The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone, by Kenneth W. Ford.

30. Feign interest. Good place to start: quantum physics.

31. Make a bed.

32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick. I once stood in a wine store in West Hollywood where the owner described a pinot noir he favored as “a night walk through a wet garden.” I bought it. I went to my hotel and drank it by myself, looking at the flickering city with my feet on the windowsill. I don’t know which was more right, the wine or the vision that he placed in my head. Point is, it was right.

33. Hit a jump shot in pool. It’s not something you use a lot, but when you hit a jump shot, it marks you as a player and briefly impresses women. Make the angle of your cue steeper, aim for the bottommost fraction of the ball, and drive the cue smoothly six inches past the contact point, making steady, downward contact with the felt.

34. Dress a wound. First, stop the bleeding. Apply pressure using a gauze pad. Stay with the pressure. If you can’t stop the bleeding, forget the next step, just get to a hospital. Once the bleeding stops, clean the wound. Use water or saline solution; a little soap is good, too. If you can’t get the wound clean, then forget the next step, just get to a hospital. Finally, dress the wound. For a laceration, push the edges together and apply a butterfly bandage. For avulsions, where the skin is punctured and pulled back like a trapdoor, push the skin back and use a butterfly. Slather the area in antibacterial ointment. Cover the wound with a gauze pad taped into place. Change that dressing every 12 hours, checking carefully for signs of infection. Better yet, get to a hospital.

35. Jump-start a car (without any drama). Change a flat tire (safely). Change the oil (once).

36. Make three different bets at a craps table. Play the smallest and most poorly labeled areas, the bets where it’s visually evident the casino doesn’t want you to go. Simply play the pass line; once the point is set, play full odds (this is the only really good bet on the table); and when you want a little more action, tell the crew you want to lay the 4 and the 10 for the minimum bet.

37. Shuffle a deck of cards.

I play cards with guys who can’t shuffle, and they lose. Always.

38. Tell a joke. Here’s one:

Two guys are walking down a dark alley when a mugger approaches them and demands their money. They both grudgingly pull out their wallets and begin taking out their cash. Just then, one guy turns to the other, hands him a bill, and says, “Hey, here’s that $20 I owe you.”

39. Know when to split his cards in blackjack.

Aces. Eights. Always.

40. Speak to an eight-year-old so he will hear. Use his first name. Don’t use baby talk. Don’t crank up your energy to match his. Ask questions and wait for answers. Follow up. Don’t pretend to be interested in Webkinz or Power Rangers or whatever. He’s as bored with that shit as you are. Concentrate instead on seeing the child as a person of his own.

41. Speak to a waiter so he will hear.

You don’t own the restaurant, so don’t act like it. You own the transaction. So don’t speak into the menu. Lift your chin. Make eye contact. All restaurants have secrets — let it be known that you expect to see some of them.

42. Talk to a dog so it will hear.

Go ahead, use baby talk.

43. Install: a disposal, an electronic thermostat, or a lighting fixture without asking for help. Just turn off the damned main.

44. Ask for help.

Guys who refuse to ask for help are the most cursed men of all. The stubborn, the self-possessed, and the distant. The hell with them.

45. Break another man’s grip on his wrist. Rotate your arm rapidly in the grip, toward the other guy’s thumb.

46. Tell a woman’s dress size.

47. Recite one poem from memory. Here you go:

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

–William Butler Yeats

48. Remove a stain. Blot. Always blot.

49. Say no.

50. Fry an egg sunny-side up. Cook until the white appears solid…and no longer.

Leif Parsons

51. Build a campfire.

There are three components:

1. The tinder — bone-dry, snappable twigs, about as long as your hand. You need two complete handfuls. Try birch bark; it burns long and hot.

2. The kindling — thick as your thumb, long as your forearm, breakable with two hands. You need two armfuls.

3. Fuel wood — anything thick and long enough that it can’t be broken by hand. It’s okay if it’s slightly damp. You need a knee-high stack.

Step 1: Light the tinder, turning the pile gently to get air underneath it.

Step 2: Feed the kindling into the emergent fire with some pace.

Step 3: Lay on the fuel wood. Pyramid, the log cabin, whatever — the idea is to create some kind of structure so that plenty of air gets to the fire.

52. Step into a job no one wants to do. When I was 13, my dad called me into his office at the large urban mall he ran. He was on the phone. What followed was a fairly banal 15-minute conversation, which involved the collection of rent from a store. On and on, droning about store hours and lighting problems. I kept raising my eyebrows, pretending to stand up, and my dad kept waving me down. I could hear only his end, garrulous and unrelenting. He rolled his eyes as the excuses kept coming. His assertions were simple and to the point, like a drumbeat. He wanted the rent. He wanted the store to stay open when the mall was open. Then suddenly, having given the job the time it deserved, he put it to an end. “So if I see your gate down next Sunday afternoon, I’m going to get a drill and stick a goddamn bolt in it and lock you down for the next week, right?” When he hung up, rent collected, he took a deep breath. “I’ve been dreading that call,” he said. “Once a week you gotta try something you never would do if you had the choice. Otherwise, why are you here?” So he gave me that. And this…

53. Sometimes, kick some ass.

54. Break up a fight. Work in pairs if possible. Don’t get between people initially. Use the back of the collar, pull and urge the person downward. If you can’t get him down, work for distance.

55. Point to the north at any time.

If you have a watch, you can point the hour hand at the sun. Then find the point directly between the hour hand and the 12. That’s south. The opposite direction is, of course, north.

56. Create a play-list in which ten seemingly random songs provide a secret message to one person.

57. Explain what a light-year is. It’s the measure of the distance that light travels over 365.25 days.

58. Avoid boredom. You have enough to eat. You can move. This must be acknowledged as a kind of freedom. You don’t always have to buy things, put things in your mouth, or be delighted.

59. Write a thank-you note.

Make a habit of it. Follow a simple formula like this one: First line is a thesis statement. The second line is evidentiary. The third is a kind of assertion. Close on an uptick.

Thanks for having me over to watch game six. Even though they won, it’s clear the Red Sox are a soulless, overmarketed contrivance of Fox TV. Still, I’m awfully happy you have that huge high-def television. Next time, I really will bring beer. Yours,

60. Be brand loyal to at least one product. It tells a lot about who you are and where you came from. Me? I like Hellman’s mayonnaise and Genesee beer, which makes me the fleshy, stubbornly upstate ne’er-do-well that I will always be.

61. Cook bacon.

Lay out the bacon on a rack on a baking sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

62. Hold a baby.

Newborns should be wrapped tightly and held against the chest. They like tight spaces (consider their previous circumstances) and rhythmic movements, so hold them snug, tuck them in the crook of your elbow or against the skin of your neck. Rock your hips like you’re bored, barely listening to the music at the edge of a wedding reception. No one has to notice except the baby. Don’t breathe all over them.

63. Deliver a eulogy. Take the job seriously. It matters. Speak first to the family, then to the outside world. Write it down. Avoid similes. Don’t read poetry. Be funny.

64. Know that Christopher Columbus was a son of a bitch. When I was a kid, because I’m Italian and because the Irish guys in my neighborhood were relentless with the beatings on St. Patrick’s Day, I loved the very idea of Christopher Columbus. I loved the fact that Irish kids worshipped some gnome who drove all the rats out of Ireland or whatever, whereas my hero was an explorer. Man, I drank the Kool-Aid on that guy. Of course, I later learned that he was a hand-chopping, land-stealing egotist who sold out an entire hemisphere to European avarice. So I left Columbus behind. Your understanding of your heroes must evolve. See Roger Clemens. See Bill Belichick.

65-67. Throw a baseball over-hand with some snap. Throw a football with a tight spiral. Shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably.

If you can’t, play more ball.

68. Find his way out of the woods if lost. Note your landmarks — mountains, power lines, the sound of a highway. Look for the sun: It sits in the south; it moves west. Gauge your direction every few minutes. If you’re completely stuck, look for a small creek and follow it downstream. Water flows toward larger bodies of water, where people live.

69. Tie a knot.

Square knot: left rope over right rope, turn under. Then right rope over left rope. Tuck under. Pull. Or as my pack leader, Dave Kenyon, told me in a Boy Scouts meeting: “Left over right, right over left. What’s so fucking hard about that?”

70. Shake hands. Steady, firm, pump, let go. Use the time to make eye contact, since that’s where the social contract begins.

71. Iron a shirt. My uncle Tony the tailor once told me of ironing: Start rough, end gently.

72. Stock an emergency bag for the car.

Blanket. Heavy flashlight. Hand warmers. Six bottles of water. Six packs of beef jerky. Atlas. Reflectors. Gloves. Socks. Bandages. Neosporin. Inhaler. Benadryl. Motrin. Hard candy. Telescoping magnet. Screwdriver. Channel-locks. Crescent wrench. Ski hat. Bandanna.

73. Caress a woman’s neck. Back of your fingers, in a slow fan.

74. Know some birds. If you can’t pay attention to a bird, then you can’t learn from detail, you aren’t likely to appreciate the beauty of evolution, and you don’t have a clue how birdlike your own habits may be. You’ve been looking at them blindly for years now. Get a guide.

75. Negotiate a better price. Be informed. Know the price of competitors. In a big store, look for a manager. Don’t be an asshole. Use one phrase as your mantra, like “I need a little help with this one.” Repeat it, as an invitation to him. Don’t beg. Ever. Offer something: your loyalty, your next purchase, even your friendship, and, with the deal done, your gratitude.

Top 10 Jackie Chan Fight Scenes : video link

Top 10 Jackie Chan Stunts : video link

Top 10 Jackie Chan Greatest Hits : video link

Fish suicide is a major problem now.

-where did that fish get the balloon?
-Inaccurate! Homicide!