Allthyngs

The hardest thing about working out is obviously being motivated enough to get to the gym. Once your there, fear of looking silly in front of 25 people who could kick your ass without even noticing takes over and you make yourself have a good workout, but when you’re in your room looking at your gym clothes and your bed and deciding which one looks more comfortable, making yourself have a good workout is much harder. For mornings like those, this article by Henry Rollins is a pretty solid source of inspiration.

Check it out on nerdfitness.com

I’ve been through two Mardi Grases now, so I like to think of myself as pretty expert in the field of absolutely out of control city wide parties, but apparently I still have much to learn. Fallas, a month-long festival in Valencia, Spain, comes to an end with a ceremony called “La Crema,” where huge crowds of people stand around massive paper machè structures and watch as they’re burned to the ground. New Orleans could learn a thing or two from these guys.

Check out pictures of the insanity at Holavalencia.com.

It’s really hard to keep up with news, because there’s so much of it that just keeping up takes hours a day. Fortunately, The New York Times has started putting up a quick, 5-10 minute video every day around 1pm where they analyze everything that’s going on in the world that day and why it matters. It’s one of those things that’s so good it makes you realize everyone else sucks at their jobs.

Check it out onNYTimes.com

I’ve had a lot of dreams in life, but seeing these pictures made me realize that all of them are stupid. Who cares about being a famous comedian or president or one of John and Kate’s kids when there’s someone out there with the power to create a situation like the one in these pictures. What good is ruling the free world if you can’t use it to do stuff like that? On a side-note, I’ll be on spring break all this week, so things might be a little quirky, but theoretically I’ve set it up so that posts will keep showing up while I’m away. Maybe I’ll run into a scene like this while I’m gone. Spring Break, WOOOOOO!!!!

Check out the pictures on Egotastic.

Sometimes, it’s just so damn clear that we don’t understand nearly as much about the universe as we think we do. Watching this video, which shows how certain mathematical patterns and models show up so precisely in nature, makes it clear that there must be something fundamental about the way stuff works that we haven’t figured out yet. Why else would people like Dane Cook? Check out the video after the jump (click “read more”), it’ll blow your mind.

Jamie Oliver’s new show premiers Friday night at 8pm EST on ABC, but instead of watching that you should watch his TED talk, which is much better. The first half of the premier is up on Hulu already (and it’s embedded after the jump, as is the TED talk), and it’s way too reality-showy to be any good. Jamie’s TED talk on the other hand, is brilliant. He lays out pretty solidly all the problems with food in America, and even manages to give me some hope that we can fix them. Check it out after the jump (click “read more”). You can download the TED talk at Ted.com

In the world of Atheism there are weak Atheists, who don’t believe in God, strong Atheists, who believe there is no God, and Sam Harris, who believes even if there were a God but he’d be retarded and not worth worshiping. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens make some pretty strong arguments for why Atheism is the only reasonable theism, but only Sam Harris has the balls to flat out call religious people wrong and stupid. In this TED talk, he argues that not only can science answer moral questions, it’s the only thing that should. Maybe I’m biased, but I think he’s dead-on. Check it out for yourself after the jump (click “read more”).

The Art of Manliness just put up a great new post about how our society doesn’t have any rules any more and how horrible that is. Now, I know you think it’s awesome that you can do whatever you want with your life or your day, but according to Science it’s actually making you want to kill yourself, and according to other science suicide is not awesome. Read the article, because it makes a lot of great points about life today that I think most people aren’t willing to admit.

Check it out at artofmanliness.com

Maybe it’s just my Armenian-ness that makes me love Kim Kardashian so freaking much, but I don’t think so, because I love her way more than I love grape leaves, excessive body hair, and not showering. Seriously, just look at this totally average Armenian woman and tell me we don’t belong at the G8 summit.

Check out my favorite pictures after the jump (click “read more”), or the whole set at Egotastic.com

This Ted Talk by Jane McGonigal, who may or may not be a professor at Hogwarts, is yet another really interesting argument that video games aren’t just a waste of time. It makes sense, I mean, nothing people work that hard at could ever be a waste of time. On the other hand, I’d love to play games in her universe, where apparently Halo players form tight-knit communities because they have to trust each other to play by the rules. Although, I don’t play much Halo, so maybe the rules include tea-bagging and being an obnoxious retard on chat? I can’t be sure. Still, check out the video after the jump, and if you want you can download it from Ted.

Why do men cheat? It’s an age old question. Among women, at least. Not among men, even those of us who would never cheat on our wives know exactly why men cheat. But few of us can put it as eloquently and as beautifully as Anonymous did in this essay on Esquire.com. He just makes it sound so awesome! But… you know… cheating’s bad, mmmkay?

Read the essay on Esquire.com

It’s no secret that I havea problem with the way the internet is unfolding, and it seems blogger and web personality Seth Godin agrees with me. In his latest blog post, Seth hits the nail on the head about how our culture is too focused on “snackable content” and not enough on content that can actually sustain you.

Read the article here, and then check out the rest of his blog here.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that you can’t fail all the time. You can try your hardest, but even the worst hitters get on base occasionally. That’s why Succeed Blog has decided to balance out Fail Blog’s bad vibes.

If you’d like to be happier than you are now, check it out at Succeedblog.org

Wade Davis seems to be a little out of breath, uses unnecessarily big words, looks unshakably like Tim Robbins, and is named after a piece of legislation from 1864, but this talk is mindblowing. He paints a picture of the world exactly the way you have to see it. As he puts it, “there’s no pyramid with Victorian England at the top and all the primitive people at the bottom.” The world is the story of a bunch of different threads going in a bunch of different directions, and each one leads to something profound and amazing. Ours is only one of those threads. This is what “open-minded” is supposed to mean.

I’ve never really gotten into the whole March Madness thing, mostly because I don’t follow college basketball anywhere near enough to fill out a bracket better than a 7 year old girl who knows how to flip a coin. But Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive Madness is definitely something I can get behind. Women in four categories are seeded and matched up for you to vote on, so head on over and make your voice heard.

Vote over at Esquire.com

A lot of girls go to bars thinking they’re gonna find guys there who want more than just to show them their penises. Of course, every so often a girl actually finds a decent guy at a bar, and, even more shockingly, sometimes you can even find them on Chatroulette. Take this guy who goes around improving songs on his piano for the lovely people he gets paired up with. He’s hilarious, and his songs are pretty good too. Although, this guy’s not that different, I mean, he’s only on Chatroulette to show me a pianist.

Check out the rest of his videos in his YouTube Channel, and watch the first one embedded after the jump.

The Catholic Church has been telling me this for a long time, but I don’t think I fully understand just how amazing and powerful sperm are. To help the Catholics convince me that every sperm is sacred, National Geographic has come up with a brilliant new idea for a series: what if sperm were people sized? How epic would their journey be? Apparently, it involves mountains, thousand foot high waterfalls, and the most ridiculously costumed adventure movie of all time. Not to mention that it’s the first ever action-packed Woody Allen sequel.

The show airs next on March 21st, but you can check out the awesome preview after the jump. For more info, go to Nationalgeographic.com

My morning routine isn’t fun. It’s not boring really, and usually I’m too angry that I’m even awake to think about the things I’m actually doing, but there’s really no step in my grooming routine that I legitimately enjoy. That’s because I’ve stopped wetshaving…

Read all about wetshaving after the jump (click “read more”).

You may know Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean, but that’s like knowing Robin Williams as the guy from RV. Rowan had a much better show on the BBC before Mr. Bean called Black Adder, and he also does some great standup comedy. My favorite sketch of his, his guide to the perfect first date, is embedded after the jump (click “read more”).

I don’t want to go into all the ways the food industry in the US is messed up, both because I don’t want to depress you and because I’ve learned you don’t fuck with people who earn a living by killing billions of things a year, but this chart should seriously shake your confidence in the way we make food. It’s not some picture of a bunch of cows being treated worse than enemy combatants, it’s just a simple comparison of how much money the government gives in subsidies for various types of foods and how much we’re supposed to eat those foods. I’ll give you a hint: the one is basically just the opposite of the other. Not a sermon, just a thought.