1950: When Men Were Men, And Women Were Glad Of It

1950: When Men Were Men, And Women Were Glad Of It


Let’s compare an auto racing pit stop in 1950 to the modern variety. What do we notice?

First of all, in 1950 they’re driving a car, not a supercharged sewing machine. You could still burn your hand on the tailpipe. Now that’s a car. You’ll also notice that they used to severely limit the number of people that could work on the car in the pits, even though there aren’t any power tools being used on the car in 1950. The fellow changing the tires only has a mallet. The tires were held on solely by a “spinner,” a single lug in the middle of the wheel. It had a pinwheel shape, and he hammers it off and on to change the tire. If one of those came loose, you’d be turned into Messala in Ben Hur in a hurry when the wheel came off. I think the guy with the gasoline in 1950 just keeps it in a pail, which he sits on while he smokes unfiltered cigarettes between pit stops.

The lesson? Hmm. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. Or maybe it demonstrates that the easier work gets, the more people you’re forced to hire to accomplish the same amount of labor because no one knows how to do much of anything anymore.

OK, now that we settled that, let’s go to lunch for four hours.

Bro, Do You Even Curl?

Bro, Do You Even Curl?

[Video Warning: As you might expect, the “Bro-Science Lab” spokesman swears a bit in his videos]

Bro understands the weight room like a Mormon understands monogamy. He knows everything in the gym is for making your biceps bigger. Full stop. That’s it. He knows the hell out of it. He could do it all day long, with everything and everybody.

Chicks dig biceps. This is known. They squeeze them and whatnot if you’ve got em. What’s a chick going to squeeze if you don’t have biceps? Nothing. Dude knows biceps aren’t just the hood ornament on your Escalade of sex appeal, or even the spinners or the subwoofer bazooka in the back. Biceps are the whole damn ride. Better get to the gym, and get biceptual, bro. 

OK, Hanging Off A Building By Your Fingertips Is Hunky Dory, But I Draw The Line At One-Handed

OK, Hanging Off A Building By Your Fingertips Is Hunky Dory, But I Draw The Line At One-Handed

Ah, so much nope. There’s no nope like Russian nope, of course. Kirill Oreshkin is billed as “Russia’s Spiderman,” but from what I’ve seen on these here Intertunnels, he’s “a” Russian Spiderman, not “the” Russian Spiderman.

Kirill Oreshkin likes taking photographs. Selfies, landscapes, the usual stuff—except his shots are captured atop some of the world’s tallest buildings.

Once Oreshkin gets as high as the stairs or elevator will take him, he often scales up scaffolding or other parts of the structure. The tallest building he has climbed to date is the Mercury City Tower in Moscow. At 338 meters (about 1,109 feet), it’s the tallest in Europe. Oreshkin is one of Russia’s extreme urban climbers, known to hang off the edge of buildings by only his fingers. He does all this unsupervised and without any safety gear.

“Using safety measures changes something—no one is going to recognize that you really risked your life,” Oreshkin says, adding that he knows what he’s doing is dangerous.

Oreshkin’s hobby started in 2008, when he began climbing to the roofs of homes and buildings in his neighborhood. He still doesn’t do any particular physical training, since he says it’s all about having the right mentality. He claims he was nervous about heights at first, and had trouble standing on the edge, which he now does with ease.

“It’s no longer about overcoming myself,” he says. “I just really like doing it. I like to look and study the city from different viewpoints.”

Climbing has become second nature to him. “What’s going through my head when I’m up there? Nothing special,” he says. “I just try to think about hanging tight and staying alive.”

[Thanks to the American Spiderman, Gerard at American Digest, for sending that one along. Well, he’s on the web, anyway]

Milestones Are Important Because They Remind Us No Matter How Far We’ve Come We Will Never Convert To The Metric System

Milestones Are Important Because They Remind Us No Matter How Far We’ve Come We Will Never Convert To The Metric System


You know, when life gives you lemons, I say give life the finger, throw away the lemons, and buy beer.  So does Zach Anner.

I find people like Zach inspirational. Zach’s walk in the park wasn’t any sort of walk in the park for him, but somehow he managed to make us all laugh a bit while he was doing it. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he didn’t know any jokes. He was next to useless, honestly. But Zach is an excellent reminder that life is what you make of it.