Karl Rabeder, a millionaire from Austria, is giving away all of his fortune after he realized that it was making him unhappy:
“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.
But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.
“More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.
I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.”
He intends to raffle off his house and all of his other possessions and use the money to fund a charity he’s created which helps people in South America start their own businesses without having to rely on loan sharks. After that, Mr. Rabeder plans to move into a small shack with a minimum of possessions.
I’m happy to present the Muppets to you once again with another musical rendition. This time it’s Beaker singing (singing?) Dust in the Wind, by Kansas. They’re added some user comments over the video to mock the usual lowbrow comments found on Youtube.
Every now and then the Google Street View van picks up something weird. And apparently in the UK they’ve started throwing rocks and rotten vegetables at it, not wanting to have their homes photographed. In the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen, however, they picked up this: two angry grown men in scuba suits chasing the van with giant forks. I used to live in Norway with my girlfriend (who is thankfully not Norwegian and has never chased me with a giant fork in scuba gear) and that is the most Norwegian thing I have ever seen. Apparently, they had been waiting there a while for the van, taking advantage of Norways rather lax working hours. You can get the full story, autotranslated from Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper here.
More coarsely, if San Francisco’s other steep streets are Boys, Ripley is The Daddy: a broad-shouldered, dominating 400-foot stretch of peeling tires, boiling radiators, and grinding brake pads! Lose control on lesser inclines, and via the proper application of wits, reflexes, hedges, curbs, side streets, and other cars, you just might be able to negotiate a Happy Ending. But screw with Ripley, and you will certainly endure a most Severe Punishment upon the Bottom!
In 1930, the MPAA drafted a code, called the Hayes code after it’s creator, designed to censor any material deemed unsuitable for the public, such as homosexuality, safe-cracking, ‘dances which emphasize indecent movements’ and ‘white slavery’. The above photo was taken by A.L. Shafer, head of photography at Columbia and passed around secretly to protest the rules. It broke ten of them.
Why not spend the next ten minutes zooming in on the biggest fractal in the universe? Actually, this one is considerably larger than the known universe. Fractals are mathematical constructs that look exactly the same at any magnification, so you can keep zooming in as much as you want and they don’t really change.
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, by Caleb Larsen, is a sculpture (piece of artwork?) that perpetually sells itself on eBay.
Combining Robert Morris’ Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard’s writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perpetually attempting to auction itself on eBay.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
It just sold for $6 350 US on eBay and is currently being shipped to it’s next owner. If you have way too much money and would rather spend it on this than something more worthwhile, I’m sure you could find it there.
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