Working The Night
Welcome to "What We Learned This Week," a regular feature where we share all the most interesting nuggets of information we picked up in the past week.
Being The Night Guard At A Museum Is Way Better Than Ben Stiller Made It Out To Be
The exhibits don't come alive, but that's what makes the job so great, explains one anonymous night guard to Hopes & Fears. He doesn't have to deal with tourists, he gets to experience the entire museum in peaceful repose1 and even gets to see new works before they hit the floor. File this job under Chill Careers For Mild Agoraphobes.
Scientists Want To Grow Foreskins Back Like A Salamander
For many men in the U.S., circumcision is just as American as apple pie and ice cream2. And although rates are dropping, reports Arikia Millikan for Motherboard, a growing number of men — calling themselves "intactivists" — seek to abolish the practice. For those who have gone though "unnecessary amputation," Forgen hopes to offer a regenerative cure that mimics the way a salamander regenerates an arm. It sounds sort of crazy and elaborate for what is essentially a sexual enhancement procedure! But what's even more alarming is the complete lack of research surrounding the foreskin.
A Nice Man Wants You To Back His Fake Baby Water Bottle
Meet Simon. Simon wants to discreetly enjoy beverages in public. To do this, he invented an insulated baby doll in which you suck juice from its head. He is asking for $70,000 dollars.3 It is just crazy enough to work. Who is going to bother the person mindlessly suckling the head of a plastic baby?
Public Transit Twitter Is A Nightmare And There's No Easy Way To Fix It
Think about how often trains or buses ruin your day. Think about how much stress and anger taking the subway generates in a given year. If you are a normal person, it's probably a non-negligible amount! Now, think about how many times this has moved you to the point of tweeting at your public transit agency. Probably very few times, if any. And yet, these agencies still enjoy a deluge of overwhelmingly negative feedback. Which leaves them with two choices: either turn the other cheek, or attempt to placate their anger.
One St. Louis Band Tried To Raise Money To Kill Their Drummer And Keep Punk Alive
Twin Cities shock-punk band Without Mother Fucking Order has a problem: their drummer, Crash, has been alive for too long. For 15 years, he has pounded the skins, and despite the band's best attempts to cut his head off with cheap "samurai" swords, Crash lives on.4 And so they started a GoFundMe campaign: Build a Death Machine to Kill Crash — or at least they tried to. At press time, the GoFundMe page was taken down.
Sound Mixing Is Extraordinarily Complicated
As it turns out, ensuring that a brilliantly shot, tightly edited and masterfully directed feature-length motion picture that sounds pleasing is not easy. As you watch this year's Academy Award winner for sound mixing scroll across a chyron while some actor yawns, read this story and truly understand this under-appreciated art form.
FIFA Proves Itself To Be Even More Comically Corrupt
It was bad enough when, in 2010, Qatar's World Cup bid hinged on air-conditioned stadiums. It was even worse, when, it was exposed that building said stadiums relied on an army of slave laborers dying by the thousands. And it seemed almost unreal that FIFA would even consider moving the World Cup to the winter. And yet, here we are. The 2022 World Cup will be played smack dab in the middle of just about every single professional league on this planet Earth. And we'll probably still watch it anyway.5
And finally, here's your (very spoiler-heavy) Oscars cheat sheet:
Even he, Jaded Museum Night Guard, still gets spooked on a regular basis.
And an over-abundance of firearm-related deaths, and ignoring high-profile domestic abuse cases, and painfully ironic shouts of 'Merica echoing across liberal arts campuses.
Hey, believable baby dolls aren't cheap.
We're not sure if they're joking. Which is pretty punk.
Unless every single country just didn't show up. A crazy notion, sure, but what if! It's probably the only way to defeat a supra-national governing body with billions of dollars in the bank, and their corrupting tentacles laced throughout every single organization loosely related to soccer on the planet.
