Everyday Superhero of the Day: Jess Thom is one of the 10 percent of people with Tourette’s syndrome who also have coprolalia — the tendency to involuntarily blurt out curse words. Her most frequent tic words include “f**k” and “biscuit,” but her tics also cause her to utter brilliant, hilarious and obscene phrases, which she’s started collecting on her website, Tourettes Hero.
The site includes a searchable index of Thom’s best tics, including fan-submitted illustrations of some of the more colorful phrases.
Tourettes Hero is also Thom’s superhero alter ego — costume and all — which she adopted for speaking engagements and classroom visits to help educate people about an often-misunderstood condition shared by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and “change the world one tic at a time.”
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.Carl Sagan
The Cassini Mission began in June 2004 as the first in-depth attempt to study the planet Saturn and its domain. This is footage from that very mission.
To learn more about Cassini and the continuing work surrounding the project, click here.
Mark Ronson is creating a new kind of soundtrack for the Olympics by recording and mixing athletes’ sounds and noises, a fine addition to these great projects creating music in unusual ways.
Short Film of the Day: “This Is My Home”: A short profile of a New York City curio collector whose home is regularly mistaken for a vintage shop.
Money: “This is my home. And I invite people in my home. They’ll stop outside while I’m sitting — usually in the summertime — they’ll stop and say, “what is this?” And I tell them, “well, go inside, satisfy your curiosity, and then come out and tell me what it is, ‘cause I don’t know!”
[thanks mark!]
After the Valentine’s Day story I started to cry, mostly because I’m emotionally volatile when it comes to beautiful, real people.
Ryan Gosling Doppelganger of the Day: Normally I would scoff at an online tutorial called “How To Look Like Ryan Gosling,” but this dude looks like he knows what he’s talking about.
This is hilarious. Also, there’s a dude at Second City in Chicago who totally looks like a lumberjacky Ryan Gosling. Or maybe just a chubby Ryan Gosling… he happened to have a full beard and a red plaid shirt on during the show we saw a few months ago, which may have skewed my perspective a bit.
A cultural twist on SWAN LAKE. watch it, it’ll inspire you. The moment I watched this I instantly had to re-watch it..again and again and again. Masilo is simply brilliant. Her effortlessly artful combination of classical European ballet structure with that of African dance makes you wish this was done more often.
EXACTLY what I was just thinking - why is this not done more often?? So much grace and rhythm.
And clearly Tutus are PERFECT for African dance styles!
Supercut of the Day: After watching every romantic movie ever made, Overthinking It’s Matthew Belinkie pieced together the ultimate Hollywood “I love you” using 95 of cinema’s most memorable soul-baring moments.
I hate to admit it but I sort of loved this. Minus the strange Hollywood makeout scenes at the end.
Words Of Wisdom of the Day: Washington state Rep. Maureen Walsh (R-Walla Walla) chokes back tears as she speaks candidly in support of the state’s bill to legalize same-sex marriages.
Money: “My daughter came out of the closet a couple of years ago and you know what I thought I was going to agonize about that. Nothing’s different. She’s still a fabulous human being and she met someone she loves very much. And some day, by God, I want to throw a wedding for that kid. And someday I hope that’s exactly what I can do.”
The founders say: “We’re trying to get people thinking about new uses for things we normally throw away.” Sounds good!
Check out the video to see how they convert used aluminum cans into speakers — it’s pretty cool. There’s also a longer video in the Discard Studies post.
Sushi-Go-Round of the Day: Take a trip around a Japanese sushi restaurant through the lens of a camera placed on the establishment’s conveyor belt.
Sure, it may not be particularly original, but it’s still pretty darn entertaining, and what else are you going to do for the next seven minutes? Work? Ha ha ha start watching.
This Is Important, You Should Watch It of the Day: To promote his effort to raise production funds for a documentary about anti-gay discrimination, filmmaker Ryan James Yezak released a seven-minute compilation of clips cataloging the conquered battlegrounds of the gay rights movement scattered amidst a war yet to be won.
“I am not a second class citizen,” Yezak says. “You are not a second class citizen. Right now, the laws in place (and lack thereof) say that we are. Let’s change that.”
