REMINDER: Sunday is No-Pants Subway Ride Day!!

The No Pants Subway Ride is an annual event staged by Improv Everywhere every January in New York City. The mission started as a small prank with seven guys and has grown into an international celebration of silliness, with dozens of cities around the world participating each year. The idea behind No Pants is simple: Random passengers board a subway car at separate stops in the middle of winter without pants. The participants do not behave as if they know each other, and they all wear winter coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. The only unusual thing is their lack of pants.

The date for the next No Pants Subway Ride in 2014 is January 12. Participation details are here.

More information, including videos from previous years, can be found here.

In Japan, colorful bras and frilly knickers - all for men

The underwear is meant to make men feel 'more gentle' 

“Since we launched the men's bra, we've been getting feedback from customers saying, 'Wow, we'd been waiting for this for such a long time”

Akiko Okunomiya, executive director of Wish Room

in Japan, fashion designers have created a new range of sexy garments for men set to arrive in stores in February.

Company Wish Room, who have been making the underwear since 2008, said they want me to have the chance to 'enjoy the same kind of soft, luxurious undergarments that women are used to'.

The range is designed directly for men with special fits for larger frames and the bras have dropped the padding to give men an easy fit without it feeling "unnatural".

More here.

Mark Steyn at his best: Global warming's glorious ship of fools

From Mark Steyn - read the whole thing at The Spectator (why not NRO, by the way?  What's going on there?).  Excerpts:

Has there ever been a better story? It's like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg.

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

The view from the trapped ship
MV Akademik Shokalskiy

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

Duck Decoy How the entertainment industry made the Duck Dynasty family into rednecks.

Interesting article about the transformation of the real Robertson family into the rednecks of Duck Dynasty.  Read the whole thing at Washington Monthly. Excerpts: 

A&E appears to have taken a large clan of affluent, college-educated, mildly conservative, country club Republicans, common across the nicer suburbs of the old south, and repackaged them as the Beverly Hillbillies.

On December 29 Political Blind Spot posted an interesting series of older family photographs of the Robertson family, from back in the 90s, long after they’d founded the company, but before Duck Dynasty and anyone in the entertainment industry had ever heard of them.

Here are Phil Robertson’s four sons, before network TV:

Phil Robertson grew up poor in the northwest Louisiana —“a place where Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect” and in 1972 he,

Founded the Duck Commander company, which sold a line of custom-made duck-hunting calls that quickly became popular among avid hunters for their uncanny accuracy in replicating the sound of a real duck. He eventually sold half the company to his son Willie, now 41, and together they made a DVD series about the family’s duck hunts, which led to a show on the Outdoor Channel, which led to Duck Dynasty on A&E….

The show—a reality sitcom showcasing the semiscripted high jinks of Phil, his brother “Uncle Si,” his four sons, Alan, Willie, Jase, and Jep, and the perpetually exasperated but always perfectly accessorized Robertson-family ladies—has become the biggest reality-TV hit in the history of cable television, reportedly earning the family a holy shit-worthy $200,000-an-episode paycheck. It’s a funny, family-friendly show, with “skits that we come up with,” as Phil describes the writing process. They plunder beehives. They blow up beaver dams.

Here's Willie, before and after his redneck transformation:

Now, as part of the show:

 Before, complete with frosted tips:

The original Duck Dynasty promo billed the show as a “rags-to-riches story of a down-home family business with a heavily bearded band of hunting experts.”

This is no such family. A&E just created its own rednecks.

The ZZ top bearded, camo-wearing mountain men, this fusion of “Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture” is entertainment industry idea of what real America looks like.

The Robertsons are not being exploited; they’re fully on board with this plan, cynical as it appears. And why shouldn’t they be? If A&E wanted to give me $8 million to play a caricature of myself on TV I would totally do it.

Friday links

26 Animals That Are Having the Best Snow Day Ever.

Excellent animated visualization of day-to-day changes in the European theater of World War II.

Famous album covers recreated in Lego.

Hairy elbows syndrome: yup, it’s a thing.

Engravings From A French Ice-Skating Manual (1813).

Canadian Woman Transforms Her Basement into the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

ICYMI, Wednesday's links, including state name etymologies and funny colonoscopy videos, are here.