This Brain Game is really a question-answer, almost like trivia. And while you may have heard the answer before, coming up with it requires brainwork, not recall or knowledge. So if you’re close – say, within five – I’d certainly consider your answer correct.

How many people
have to be together in a room
before there is at least a 50 percent chance
that two of the people in that room
will share the same birthday?

Click here for the answer.

There are certain cross-cultural no-nos when it comes to designing, naming and theming a restaurant, the primary among them being, don’t associate your restaurant in people’s minds with things that taste bad, and things you should under no circumstances eat. Poison, for instance, makes a good band name but a terrible restaurant name. (See example at left.) A close second, in my book, is death, dying or dead people — I’ve always found it extremely weird when people put out little snacks and coffee at funeral parlors, for instance. I’m near dead people; I don’t want anything in my mouth. But just as with every seemingly hard-and-fast rule, there are people out there to break them; much to our amazement there are not one but several restaurants that trade on death as a theme.

Eternity

Nestled at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains — home, not inappropriately, to Dracula’s Castle — is Ukraine’s newest eatery, Eternity. The building itself is fashioned in the shape of a giant coffin, 20 meters by 6 meters, and decorated on the inside with wreath displays and, naturally, more coffins. Its dishes sport mysterious titles like “Nine Days,” “Forty Days” and “Let’s Meet in Heaven,” the third of which seems a foregone conclusion after you’ve ingested the first two. Apparently its owners are hoping to get into the Guinness Book as the world’s largest coffin. (I guess there’s no category for “grossest restaurant,” or they’d win that one hands-down.) (more…)

Remember Gordon Shumway? Or maybe you know him better as A.L.F.
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Growing up Amish in the 21st century brings even more temptations and tough choices than most teens face.
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Humans have built some pretty amazing structures, but we’ve also created some spectacular disasters.
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Scott Wade believes art is everywhere, even in filth.
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Penguin’s 2008 Design Award competition produced entries that are both surprisingly professional and wonderfully creative.
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Sandy + Kara’s 5 Questions should be part of everyone’s morning routine.
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You wouldn’t believe the crazy flavors some companies concoct!

Seattle P-I reporter Todd Bishop is running a series on Bill Gates, in the lead-up to Gates’s “transition” (ahem, “retirement?”) away from daily work at Microsoft. Bishop has turned up a series of amusing emails Gates sent, now made public as the result of various legal actions against the company. The first email shows Gates complaining about how hard it is to install Microsoft Movie Maker on Windows XP. Gates sends his tale of woe to Jim Allchin, the VP in charge of Windows releases at the time (2003). Here are some choice bits (emphasis added):

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues. …

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!). …

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

Read the rest for a great first-person account of how confusing it can be to install software on a modern computer — even for the second-richest man in the world.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Anyone who has had one too many tequila shots, glasses of wine, Irish Car Bombs—pick your poison—can attest to how horrible a hangover is. The pounding headache, the rolling stomach, the spins, grogginess, moodiness, and overall hatred of all things that makes us swear to never drink again.

I bring this up because I found my neighbor passed out in my front yard this morning. After giving him some water and sending him home, I could only imagine the hangover that would follow. Obviously, the best way to cure that is to avoid excess consumption of alcohol, but as Oscar Wilde once put it, “I can resist everything except temptation.” So, I have compiled a list of some of the best remedies for a hangover. Some are international, others you can find online, and some are just plain disgusting. Drink up, my friends!

10 Hangover Cures

1. Menudo: A spicy Mexican soup often times made from tripe (cow stomach), Menudo (not to be confused with Menudo, which may make your hangover worse) is supposed to cure even your deadliest hangovers. It is said to stimulate the senses, rejuvenate the insides, and clear the head. Most alcohol scholars, however, claim that the combination of spices in the soup simply distract your mind and body from the hangover.

2. Prickly Pear: If you’re hungover in the desert and can’t find water, the extract from the prickly pear cactus might just do the trick. It won’t curb the headache but it will alleviate nausea, dry mouth and loss of appetite. Extracting the goods yourself may be difficult, but prickly pear can be found in many dietary supplements.

3. Pickle Juice: Could this Eastern European and Russian staple by the perfect hangover cure? Swilling the juice will replenish the electrolytes your body lost the night before and also wake you up a bit. Professional athletes drank it before Gatorade was invented and rumor has it that Tom Brady will be marketing a sports drink next year that has a pickle juice-based beverage.

4. Go for a jog: Get moving! Doing a little exercise can help flush out toxins, get you to drink more fluids, and distract you from the pounding headache you probably have. Motivation can often be hard to come by the morning after a night of heavy drinking so many suggest finding a workout buddy the night before.
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The NBA Draft is tonight, and you may want to flaunt your knowledge. But that’s not the real reason I’m posting this quiz.

We’ve had sporadic reports of problems with the ‘name x in y minutes’ quizzes. If you’re willing to do a little QA testing, could you let me know if it works? (Does the timer count down properly? Do you see a timer at all? Are your answers are accepted?)

In case you don’t know any of the last 20 #1 picks but are in a QA testing mood, here are four of the answers: O’Neal, James, Oden and Duncan. When you type those in, they should be accepted immediately. You don’t have to hit the return key. Let us know in the comments if you had any problems (and what browser/operating system you’re on). Thanks!!

Take the quiz/QA test

(Besides, we already posted a much better NBA Draft quiz this week.)

Cable access shows aside, the strangest stuff on TV has to be children’s programming. I used to watch it myself, but I was a picky viewer — much of it I found boring, and downright weird. I was also a nightmare-prone kid, plagued by recurring nightmares about Count Chocula, for instance, and my mom wouldn’t let me watch Thundercats because she thought Lion-O’s mummified antagonist, Mumm-Ra, was too scary for me. (She was probably right.) As I get older, though, I realize that I never had the misfortune of being exposed to the strangest of the strange when it came to kids’ shows — but that’s exactly what YouTube is for! Looking back, it boggles the mind that adult television executives thought these shows would appeal to children; I think they’re some of the creepiest clips ever aired. See if you don’t agree.

Peppermint Park

These puppets are like textbook examples from Freud’s classic essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, perhaps best illustrated by the now-famous “uncanny valley” graph. I’d argue that the “Peppermint Park” puppets are at least as uncanny as reanimated corpses: (more…)

Today marks the 81st anniversary of the opening of the Cyclone, one of the world’s most famous roller coasters. In honor of that coaster, here are 12 questions about Coney Island. How well do you know New York’s Playground?

Take the quiz.

Remember when your mother used to scold you for opening your mouth to the deadly sky as it was pouring? “It’s acid rain,” she’d say. Envisioning raindrops burning through my gums, jaw, and skin, I always followed my mother’s advice. But the last I ever heard about acid rain was in the ‘90s. So where did it go? And what was acid rain, anyway?

Technically speaking, acid rain is rain with, well, acid! Anything with a pH level of below 7 is considered acidic. While even “clean” rain has a pH of 5.5 (due to the normal atmospheric carbon dioxide which reacts with the rain to form carbonic acid), precipitation with pH levels as low as 2 were measured in the US and Europe in the 1980s. While mom wasn’t exactly right about the holes the scary raindrops could burn through your tongue, she did have something right about the water’s harmful effects—particularly on aquatic life, vegetation and agriculture. So, what causes it? And how did Captain Planet save the environment from these evil raindrops?

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The enthusiastic response to last week’s Movie of the Week column inspired me to plant myself in front of the Lifetime Movie Network for a few days armed with a bowl of popcorn and a pen poised over a notebook. (The never-ending rigors of this job boggle the mind.) My favorite made-for-TVers are those based on true stories, especially true stories involving jealous friends or spouses who go on sleazy killing rampages. Here are 5 classics, along with the real stories behind the films:

1. Death of a Cheerleader

THE STORY: Tori Spelling stars as Stacey Lockwood, the “It” girl of Santa Mira high school. Stacey has everything: looks, personality, wealthy parents, and a pack of snooty, sycophantic friends at school. Kellie Martin is Angela, who just transferred To Santa Mira from a nearby Catholic school and longs to be part of Stacey’s “in” crowd. However, although she is certainly intelligent and studious, Angela is awkward in all her attempts to befriend Stacey, who enjoys making scathing remarks about Angela’s thrift shop wardrobe and rusted-out Pinto. One night while hanging out with Stacey, Angie makes an embarrassing plea for friendship. Stacey cuts her down viciously with the ultimate high school threat: “I’m going to tell everyone at school that you’re weird!” Angie whips out a butcher knife in a panic and stabs Stacey to death.

THE TRUTH: The movie remained pretty true to the details of the actual case, only the names were changed to protect…someone, I suppose. Kirsten Costas was the cheerleader in question; she was also a star on the varsity swim team at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California. Her attacker was Bernadette Protti; both girls were 15 years old when the murder took place in 1984. It took police six months to determine that Protti was the killer, and one of her first questions after confessing was “Do I have to go back to Miramonte? I can’t live if it is known. I would rather die.” Bernadette was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced as a juvenile. She was released from prison in 1992 at the age of 23, when she promptly changed her name and left California.

2. 83 Hours Till Dawn

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