Penguin takes a crap on the floor of the Kentucky state senate, and the senators proceed to be hilarious about it.

I figured the best way to try out the video on my new iphone was to say goodbye to my old phone.

Jay Sherman and his Stomach

But it sure is noxious, you gotta give me that!”

Little known fact…President William McKinley survived for 8-days after being shot by an assassin in 1901.

Lesser known fact…he spent those 8-days getting brandy injections and having “nutritive” concoctions of egg whites and whiskey shoved up his ass.

Incredibly rare footage of USS New Jersey and USS Missouri firing their main AND secondary gun batteries after their modernization/reactivation in the 1980’s.

There’s lots of video of the Iowa-class battleships firing their 16-inch guns in the 80’s and 90’s, but I’ve never seen them fire their secondary 5-inch guns full on. The muzzle flashes only seem “little” because the massive main batteries are also firing, but each of these two-gun dual mounts equaled the some firepower (two 5-inch guns) modern cruisers carry today. Each Iowa-class battleship had 6 of them, with 4 having been removed to make room for Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles during their 1980’s reactivation.

This must have been a site to see. Two dreadnoughts, cloaked in smoke, pounding away with their guns. But for the rotating radar dishes and modern missile launchers, this could have been footage from the Battle of Jutland.

(Despite what the narrator says, these are not automatic guns. The 5-inchers were obviously much faster than the main battery, but were still manned by dozens of sailors (or in the case of one turret on each ship, a detachment of marines). Also, the ships don’t move backwards in the water more than a millimeter.)

“Say we were all trapped in this classroom, and I had to prepare dinner and all I had was the stuff in that vending machine. And then say somehow I managed to put together something resembling a meal beyond what you normally eat out of a machine. You’d be tremendously impressed. Then say I invite you over to my home for dinner. You’d probably expect a nice home-cooked meal. If I served you an arrangement of vending machine food it wouldn’t fly.”

US Navy training film for 16 inch main battery guns.

No. No no no no no no no. No.

thedailywhat:

Beauty Pageant Kids These Days of the Day: I have a theory about Toddlers & Tiaras that involves TLC working with Child Services to lure unfit parents into a trap a la police station lotteries.

It has to be that. It just has to.

[bwe.]

Battleship Missouri firing its main gun battery in 1991

Battleships are so fucking cool. The 16-inch main guns of an Iowa-class battleship could hurl a projectile the size of a Volkwsagen Beetle over 24-miles, and they had enough armor plating to laugh off almost any modern anti-ship missile, mine or torpedo.

Built in the 30’s and 40’s, they were last deployed during the 1991 Iraq war. The guns were fired using the same primitive, room-sized computers used during WWII. Building artillery on this scale is impressive enough, but then making it float on a boat that can go 30 knots is an engineering marvel.

Sadly all the Iowas are now serving as museum ships (though subject to recall in the event of a national emergency). Right now a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is having to show the flag in the Straits of Hormuz, and there’s a lot of debate about what would happen if one of these nuclear powered bedrocks of the US Navy came under actual attack - something that’s never happened.

Whereas one well-placed cruise missile could take out a carrier’s flight deck and render her useless, or blow an escort vessel in half, an Iowa battleship could have sailed into the straits with no such worries. Iran’s anti-ship missiles would literally char the paint, with all the ship’s critical systems protected behind armor designed to deflect the impact of 18-inch armor-piercing shells.

Guess it’s time to watch “Under Siege” again…

Okay Let’s Do an Improv Post - ZZ Top’s choreography and making physical choices

When improvisers make and commit to physical choices on stage, the audience payoff is always disproportionately large. Just think about the last time anyone on your ensemble got picked up and carried around during a scene. The audience probably went nuts, even if the improv was shit. If the improv was good too, you were probably blowing the roof off the place.

You don’t need to be a brilliant mime or a natural mover on stage to add this layer to your work. It’s entirely a matter of intention. You choose to do it, and to demonstrate my point I can think of no better example than ZZ Top.

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill have some extremely basic choreography they incorporate into their songs. It’s so simple, just a few cross-steps, pushing their guitars forward at the same time, c’mon they’re old guys at this point. Literally anyone could do it, and there’s honestly nothing that impressive about the moves in and of itself, but anyone will tell you watching Billy and Dusty click into those moves together is what makes a ZZ Top show.

Could they just stand there and play their instruments and have it be great? Sure. Can you just stand there and talk and maybe (maybe!) hold a glass in your scenes and have it still be fun? Sure, I’ve done probably 98% of my scenes like that. But the fact remains the effort/payoff ratio in those 2% of scenes where physical choices played a big role was much easier than any laugh found by being verbal and clever.

So does this mean if you’re a talky player to abandon your style and start flailing your body around in every scene? Of course not. It just means over a 25-minute set, agree with your ensemble that at least one scene will have a physical focus. Put nothing on it beyond that. On the individual level, commit to taking yourself out of your physical comfort zone at least once.

That’s all ZZ Top is doing. They’re making the choice to add this element to their show. Why an audience goes batshit for improvisers being picked up, or improvisers touching in general, is for another post, but the fact is they do.

So just do it. Have that show where you all collectively form an 8-person dragon and fly around on the stage. The edge-of’-your-seat “holy shit they’re really making this up” audience excitement physical work generates is not only available to the Fred Astaire improvisers out there. I wish I did it more, and there’s no real excuse not to.

If ZZ Top can do it, so can you.