Judging from Maggie’s How To Get Out of Jury Duty & David’s dispatches from jury duty (maybe: “How to Get Into Jury Duty”?), we at mental_floss definitely haven’t shied away from how to cope with the litigious life. I haven’t actually had to/had the pleasure to serve on a Los Angeles jury yet, but I did cast the syndicated “Jury Duty” television show last year…Maybe there’s some viable conflict of interest there that would get me off the hook.

But at least I haven’t yet encountered “emergency jury duty”–as the people of Greeley, CO have recently: (more…)

On the subject of the greatest football dynasties of all-time – and yes, the New England Patriots have already cemented their place in this discussion – the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, 1980s San Francisco 49ers, and 1990s Dallas Cowboys likely all come to mind. You would be remiss, however, if you failed to mention a less heralded and, uh, less human team that dominated its competition in, quite frankly, unbelievable fashion: Budweiser.

From 1989-1997, the self-anointed “King of Beers” dominated Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Bowl, the yearly clash between animated bottles of Bud and Bud Light that was featured in a series of commercials during the Super Bowl. The advertising campaign, which persists today in the form of Bud Bowl-themed packaging and promotional events, remains one of the most popular ever.

The Bud Bowl Architect

Grant Pace wrote the six original Bud Bowl ads that appeared in 1989 while working at D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. Pace said he developed the ads under the assumption that Bud Bowl would be a one-year phenomenon, but Anheuser-Busch representatives liked the prototype so much that Pace actually changed the original ending to leave open the possibility for a sequel. (To see the ending that never aired, go here and click on the third white box from the left).
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Bud Bowl I
January 22, 1989: Budweiser 27, Bud Light 24

Narrated by Bob Costas and Paul Maguire, the game that started it all unfolded over six spots during Super Bowl XXIII and proved almost as riveting as the Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers’ 20-16 comeback win over the Cincinnati Bengals. The inaugural Bud Bowl was billed as a thunder and lightning showdown between two beers with contrasting styles. Bud, which boasted the vaunted “Beechwood Backs,” favored a rushing attack, while Bud Light’s pass first, ask questions later attack was led by a QB with Tom Brady-like numbers (49 touchdowns, 8 interceptions).

The back-and-forth game featured all sorts of excitement. Bud Light executed a flea-flicker to perfection, while Bud’s “Appliance of Defiance,” the Freezer, gave Bud Light defenders headaches all night. With two seconds remaining and the game tied at 24, Budsky, Bud’s seven-ounce “nip” bottle placekicker, wobbled onto the field to attempt a 42-yard field goal. The kick bounced off the crossbar and left upright before falling through, sending the boozed-up crowd of Bud beer cans into a tizzy, or fizzy as it were.

Watch Bud Bowl I at commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl II
January 28, 1990: Budweiser 36, Bud Light 34

The following year proved no better for the bottles in blue. Bud, no doubt fired up by an emotional pre-game speech that concluded with the line, “You guys are the king, now let’s go turn out their lights,” earned its second consecutive dramatic win in the series. This one was wrought with controversy.

In snowy conditions at scale-sized Busch Stadium, Budweiser overcame a gritty performance by Bud Light quarterback Budway Joe and scored the winning touchdown as time expired when an offensive player advanced a fumble, which is illegal by NFL rules. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Anheuser-Busch received hundreds of telephone calls about the play over the course of the next week, prompting the St. Louis-based brewery to respond thusly:

“In the National Football League, of course, the offensive team cannot advance a fumble in the final two minutes of a game unless the ball is recovered by the same player who fumbled it. However, no such rule exists in the BFL (Budweiser Football League).”

I was unable to get my hands on a copy of the official BFL rulebook, but there are some other subtle hints that the Bud Bowl wasn’t governed by NFL rules. Like, for instance, the fact that its participants didn’t have any hands.

Watch Bud Bowl II at commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl 3
January 27, 1991: Bud Light 23, Budweiser 21

By the time the foam settled in one of two Bud Bowls to shun the use of Roman numerals (Bud Bowl 8 was the other), there was a new ruler of the cooler. Don Meredith and Keith Jackson called the action, while Chris Berman handled studio duties for the game. Bud Light scored first, using a bottle opener as a spear to clear a path to the end zone.

Filling in for the injured Budway Joe, top draft pick Bud Dry staked Bud Light to a fourth quarter lead, but a Longneck caught a touchdown pass with 3 seconds remaining, giving Bud a 21-17 edge and setting up the most memorable finish in Bud Bowl history.

In a parody of “The Play” at the end of Cal’s victory over Stanford in the 1982 Big Game, Bud Light used multiple laterals to weave its way up the field and through the Bud band, which had wandered onto the field prematurely to celebrate what they thought was a sure third straight title. Jackson bellowed, “The band is on the field!” seconds before a Bud Light bottle sporting a tuba reached the end zone. Bud fans have lamented the fluke loss to this day, but like their Stanford brethren, can find solace in their team’s superior all-time record against its rival.

Watch Bud Bowl 3 at Retrojunk.

Bud Bowl IV
January 26, 1992: Budweiser 27, Bud Light 24

By previous Bud Bowl standards, this was one to forget. Rather than showing bottles run and throw footballs across a field for a fourth straight year, Chris Berman narrated one fan’s quest to retrieve a Bud Bowl sweepstakes ticket that his girlfriend had mistakenly thrown away. (Fans had a chance to win up to a million dollars if the final score of the Bud Bowl matched the score on their game card were a staple of the later Bud Bowls.)

After a predictably disastrous turn of events that involved a trashcan, a police car and a pigeon, the pitiful hero managed to retrieve his ticket and arrived home just in time to catch the final score of the Bud Bowl. Lo and behold, he was a winner! After he put the ticket down to celebrate with an ice cold Budweiser and began recounting his ridiculous story to some friends, the shot panned to an adorable dog that had wandered into the room. You can guess what happened next.

Watch Bud Bowl IV at commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl V
January 31, 1993: Budweiser 35, Bud Light 31

General Hospital heartthrob Corbin Bernsen led Bud Light into Bud Bowl V, while the Bud team and head coach Joe Namath arrived in the Budweiser blimp just minutes before kickoff. Ahmad Rashad and former MTV VJ Karen “Duff” Duffy provided quarter-by-quarter updates of the game, which featured some of the most absurd characters and events in the series’ history.

Bud answered a touchdown reception by Bud “Neon” Light with a kickoff return for a touchdown by Namath’s secret weapon, the Budweiser Rocket. After Bud built a 35-7 lead, Rashad asked a stone-faced Bernsen, “Coach, is there light at the end of the tunnel?” Help arrived in the form of a runaway Bud Light beer truck, which transformed into the Aluminator, an unstoppable offensive weapon.

Trailing 35-31, there was no question who would get the ball for Bud Light on the final play of the game. As the Aluminator barreled through would-be Bud tacklers, an improbable, come-from-behind Bud Light victory seemed inevitable. Instead, a conniving Namath signaled to the Budweiser blimp above. A mechanized claw descended from the blimp and snatched the Aluminator into the air, which led to a fumble that Bud recovered to preserve the win.

After the game, Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Bud Bowl V had big-league special effects and bold commentary by MTV’s Duff, looking buff in black, but this never-ending battle of the bottles has become a real clinker.”

Watch Bud Bowl V at commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl VI
January 30, 1994: Bud Light 20, Budweiser 14

With Marv Albert in the Bud Bowl studio and Mike Ditka and Bum Phillips as the head coaches of Bud and Bud Light, respectively, this game had the makings of a classic. It wasn’t. Bud Light took an early lead on a “Naked Reverse” after its quarterback shed his label at the line of scrimmage. Bud countered with a kickoff return for a touchdown by the Basher, a 24-ounce can of aluminum dominance, who was penalized for excessive celebration and then ejected for cursing at the referee.

A windstorm blew into the stadium early in the second half, making things difficult for both offenses. The situation at a nearby bar, where patrons were nearly out of Budweiser, was more serious. Several Bud blimps combined forces to physically lift the stadium into the cozy confines of the bar, leading Albert to deadpan, “I don’t know where this game is headed, but this is what I call a beer run!” Predictably, Bud Light scored the winning touchdown after a man in the bar grabbed a Bud defender from the playing field and proceeded to quench his thirst.

“My biggest problem with the whole Bud Bowl thing is that they never really have any good teams playing,” syndicated sports humor columnist Norman Chad once wrote. “I mean, if the Anheuser-Busch bigwigs had any brass at all, they’d get, say, Heineken and Samuel Adams every once in a while. Heck, Bud Lite’s (sic) like Notre Dame – it doesn’t matter what their record is, they’re bowl-bound.” The Bud Light-Notre Dame comparisons don’t end there. Like the Fighting Irish, Bud Light’s last bowl win came in 1994.

Watch Bud Bowl VI at spike.com or commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl VII
January 29, 1995: Budweiser 26, Bud Light 24

Anheuser-Busch probably should’ve sent its bottles to the recycling plant after Bud Bowl VI. Instead, they gave us 60 seconds of Iggy, Biff, and Frank, castaways who watched Bud Bowl VII unfold from a desert island. With Bud trailing late in the game, Iggy was transported off the island and into the game, where he caught a pass and began rumbling toward the end zone. Eighty yards later, following a dream-like montage of press clippings and cereal boxes commemorating his newfound celebrity, Iggy gave Bud its fifth Bud Bowl win.

Watch Bud Bowl VII at commercial-archive.com.

Bud Bowl 8
January 26, 1997

After a one-year hiatus, Bud Bowl VIII returned with another single, forgettable spot. Howie Long and Ronnie Lott provided coverage, holding Fox Sports microphones no less, from a bar in the Louisana bayou. After a fan stole his microphone and opened a fridge to reveal the Bud Bowl in action, Lott threw him out of a bar window and into a swamp. Lott proceeded to reveal the final score before the spot ended with a familiar refrain from the fan, who was sharing space in the swamp with an alligator: “I love you, man.”

This past Sunday marked the 203rd anniversary of Samuel Palmer’s birth. The British Romantic painter had visionary experiences as a child, which influenced his works. “In a Shoreham Garden” is different from most of his other paintings, with a more modern, less mystical, feel. For today, I’ve prepared a few ­_flossy facts about Samuel Palmer.

1. First exhibiting at the Royal Academy at age 14, Samuel Palmer could be considered a prodigy. He taught himself to paint, receiving little formal training and no formal schooling, and had only begun seriously painting 2 years prior to that first exhibit.

2. Palmer is most well-known for his Shoreham years, “the happiest and most creative period of [his] life,” during which he painted mysterious paintings that presented his “Valley of Vision” as a paradise of sorts. His home during those years was the run-down cottage “Rat Abbey.” (more…)

Last summer I found myself with a dozen pumpkins and no plans for what to do with them. I ended up giving some away, and using the rest for porch decorations. After a couple of hard freezes, they were ready for the compost heap from which they sprouted about a year ago. I retrieved some seeds (a messy job after the pumpkins go soft) because I have real plans for them this year. I’m going to experiment with geometric pumpkins!

The first time you see square watermelons, your instinct may shout “Photoshop!” but they are really square. Not a genetic variant, these are made the old-fashioned way. They are grown in boxes, and take the cubic shape gradually as they grow. It’s a labor-intensive process, but the end result fits nicely in a refrigerator, and wastes no space in the truck. And they won’t roll around! They’ve been growing them in Japan for years, because space is at a premium. The watermelons are at premium prices, too.

To achieve such results, you have to have a proper box, made of tempered glass or durable plastic. Transparent boxes are best, or else you won’t know exactly when to harvest, or even worse, waste your equipment on a rotten fruit! K-mac Plastics sells boxes especially designed to grow watermelons in, complete with proper drainage.

Keep reading for even stranger shapes

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Slate recently ran an article asking Who is Grady Harp? — the short answer is, he’s one of the top “customer reviewers” on Amazon. But the long answer is a good deal more complex. Grady Harp is one of just a few Amazon reviewers who reach the Top 10, reading excessive numbers of books and handing out lots of five-star reviews. The reviewers seem to scratch each others’ backs by voting on each others’ reviews, and some of them seem just a bit nutty. Here’s a bit from Garth Risk Hallberg’s Slate article:

I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: “an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits,” as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of “Web 2.0″–an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas–one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

More after the jump.

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Here’s a cool idea realized: a Sydney, Australia-based art collective called The Glue Society has re-created scenes from the Bible as if captured by Google Earth’s ubiquitous satellites. Says Glue Society’s James Dive: “We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real. As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.” Let’s see what they created!

Parting of the Red Sea
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It’s Zach Kanin week here at mental_floss, and I’m so excited about it, I’m going to lock the Caps and type that all over again: IT’S ZACH KANIN WEEK HERE AT MENTAL_FLOSS!

Zach’s responsible for many of the hilarious cartoons over at The New Yorker and has a funtabulous new book out called The Short Book: Tall Stories, Freakish Facts, & the Long & Short of Being Small in a Great Big World.

If you’re short, if you’re friends with someone short, married to someone short, in love with someone short, envious of someone short, sympathetic to someone short, or just plain short on time, you really want to pick up a copy of this little gem, right over here. Tomorrow, Zach will be sending us our own cartoon for the caption contest, which he’ll personally judge. And then Thursday, well, you don’t even wanna know what’s coming Thursday…

Look, I’m so excited about it, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a little background on the little man: in addition to working for The New Yorker, at 5’ 3”, Zach was the shortest president ever of The Harvard Lampoon.

And now, the interview! Click on through to find out how Zach came up with the idea for his book and other fun things like why Romans used to starve children and constrict their growth. And for more great Kanin cartoons, check out this page at the Cartoon Bank.

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Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites (actually 63). I found True Films to be fascinating; you may find something else that’s right up your alley.
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Most strokes occur when blood vessels in the brain get clogged. Doctors now have a tiny little vaccuum cleaner they can send in to unstop them.
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5 Nastiest U.S. Presidential Elections in History. If we’d only had TV back then, the ratings would have been through the roof.
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An ad to be aired during the Superbowl that will make you laugh and think. Don’t adjust your speakers. It was created by deaf artists for Pepsico.
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Where are they now: the Cast of M*A*S*H. Hint: they are either dead, painting pictures, or have a new movie coming out.
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Puppy vs. Robot. Not just a cute video, this is 8-bit style videogaming.
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Six Musicians With Pasts They Hope You’ll Forget. No, not criminal records, just records that gave them a strangely different image.
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How To Get Detained By Airport Security. Several cases that may surprise you. Or may not.

Every time all my favorite people leave town, you’re liable to find me whining about how “this place is a ghost town,” etc. That feeling either fades or it doesn’t, but if ghosts were sandmen, they’d be all over this town:

Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port of Lüderitz. In 1908, Luederitz was plunged into diamond fever and people rushed into the Namib desert hoping to make an easy fortune. Within two years, a town, complete with a casino, school, hospital and exclusive residential buildings, was established in the barren sandy desert.

But when diamond sales floundered post WWI, the exodus began, and by the fifties the dunes started repossessing what had been left behind. I wonder if there’s a way to get a modest dune installation in my bedroom. It’s dramatic, sure, but it also looks terribly comfortable, and isn’t the Tempur-Pedic  craze just about passé now, anyway? Link via Fogonazos.