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10 Things Target Has Pulled From Its Shelves
In the half century that Target has existed, the retail giant has had more than few misfires. Here are 10 goods that missed the mark and were pulled from its shelves.
Touching among humans is a touchy subject: These are six rules for touching humans, according to science.
The history of the Demogorgon actually stretches back centuries before Netflix’s Stranger Things, appearing in a collection of novels, epic poems, and other works.
Actor and martial arts legend Chuck Norris achieved household name status after his movie appearances in the 1970s and ’80s—but he had been well-known in the martial arts community for years before. Norris won the Professional Middleweight Karate Championship Title in 1968, which he held for six consecutive years. A year after his first Middleweight title, he won karate’s Triple Crown for the most tournament victories in a year, and was later named Black Belt magazine’s Fighter of the Year.
It was this success that led to an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show on December 21, 1971, a year before The Way of the Dragon would make him famous. Eva Gabor was guest hosting that evening, so he taught her a few self-defense moves—but not before she managed to make him blush a few times. Enjoy:
November 1, 2016 – 10:30am
Netflix via YouTube
How badly does Netflix want to keep your eyeballs glued to their screen? Bad enough to have invested a reported $800 million to deliver more than 1000 hours of original content in 2017, including a record-breaking $40 million check cut to comedian Chris Rock for two stand-up specials.
If you can’t wait that long for more original programming, check out five of the fresh documentary features hitting the service this month.
The same audience that turned out for the true crime series Making a Murderer and October’s Amanda Knox will probably devour this documentary about a Swedish man named Sture Bergwall who was confined to a psychiatric institution in the 1990s and eventually confessed to the murders of more than 30 victims. That’s only the beginning of Bergwall’s story—and if you can resist Googling the rest, the film should provide for a satisfying series of twists. (11/1)
The pioneering television producer who radicalized American sitcoms in the 1970s with All in the Family and The Jeffersons is the subject of this documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The film was greeted with huge applause, at which point the then-93-year-old Lear told the crowd he was appreciative but “had to take a leak.” (11/1)
Originally slated as an Indiegogo project, Food Choices was completed and purchased by Netflix for streaming distribution this year. Director Michal Siewierski examines the health effects of a plant-based diet.(11/2)
Leonardo DiCaprio produced this on-the-ground documentary about the morbid business of ivory poaching: Activists capture the lucrative trade of illicit elephant tusks, risking discovery in the hopes of shining a fresh light on a practice that threatens the animals with extinction. (11/4)
Dubbed a “real life comic mystery” by Variety, Sour Grapes documents a wine fraud scam that rocked the vineyard community. Thousands of bottles of faux vintage wine were sold for more than $35 million, leading both collectors and the FBI to trace the sales to an enterprising con artist. (11/18)
November 1, 2016 – 10:00am
From albino sturgeon caviar to cronuts, food usually seems to taste better when it’s hard to come by. But the rarest pasta dish on Earth isn’t likely to become a foodie sensation anytime soon: Su filindeu (literally “God’s wool”) is only made by three women living on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Newser recently shared the video below, which follows the preparation of the recipe step-by-step. The pasta, a dish that’s been passed down through a line of women tracing back three centuries, isn’t especially complicated. The dough consists of semolina flour, water, and salt. Stretching it out is the tricky part. The dough needs to be pulled and folded eight times to create the delicate, hair-like stands. From there the noodles are draped over a circular surface in crisscrossing layers and left out to dry in the sun.
Served in the traditional style with mutton broth and pecorino cheese, the dish looks like what you’d expect to find in a typical Italian grandmother’s kitchen. Sadly the pasta is anything but typical—if you want to try it while it’s still around you’ll have to book a trip to Sardinia.
[h/t Newser]
Header/banner images: iStock
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November 1, 2016 – 9:00am
It’s Movember, the month when normally naked upper lips get covered with mustaches that range from pleasant to preposterous. For many, it’s unnecessary to grow a ‘stache, since the beard is a popular (non?)grooming choice, and few beards are unaccompanied by a sweet ‘stache. In recognition of seasonal and year-long fascination with facial hair, here are some older terms for the non-clean-shaven.
The very rare term barbatulous—a relative of barber—sounds like variation of barbarous, but it describes a quality that, traditionally, would not fit the barbarian lifestyle: having a teeny-weeny beard. This term dates from at least 1600, and since the early 1990s, beardolosists have called such itty-bitty growths beardlets. Oxford English Dictionary examples of the term in use are fairly hilarious, including a 1928 example from the Daily Express describing “The beardlet adorning the under-lip of Lord Bertie of Thame.”
If you’re imberbic, you don’t even have a beardlet. You’re totally beardless, you naked-faced monster. This extremely obscure word popped up in the early 1600s.
Since cats use their whiskers to whiff, some have taken to calling whiskers, especially a stache, cat-smellers. This term popped up in the mid-1800s and deserves a revival.
Though this term brings to mind unholy beasts such as the Tasmanian devil, it’s only a variation of some more common words: tash and stache, which have long been abbreviations of mustache. As Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) shows, taz is versatile enough to not only mean a mustache, as it’s sometimes referred to a beard or the peach fuzz of a whippersnapper.
Facial hair has rarely been in vogue as it is now, and that lack of vogueness can be seen in insults such as face fungus, which have been spotted since the early 1900s. If using this term for someone’s beard and/or mustache isn’t enough, you can also use it as a nickname and/or insult, such as, “Hey! Face fungus!” Far more gentle and complimentary terms include face lace, face fur, and face prickle.
Here’s a mustache-centric term along the same lines. First spotted in the 1980s, this term implies a protruding, monstrous stache more likely to be seen on a contemporary hipster or 1920s movie villain. Fellows with face fins take the mustache to its most extravagant extreme.
Related to the word topiary, this recent but still under-the-radar word refers to trimming a beard and/or mustache in a manner that could be considered artsy-fartsy or fancy-shmancy. Paul McFedries’s wonderful Word Spy site records the first use in a 1993 article in The Independent that describes Sean Connery: “… his beard topiarised to a silvery point, bonds Bondishly with Snipes—gunpowder-dry gags and plenty of oneupmanship—but they never quite spark, leaving the film’s Eastern promise unfulfilled.” McFedries also documents a wonderful variation by Douglas Walker in 2015 on Twitter: “Auto-topiarising your beard is difficult for the partially sighted man.”
This disturbingly rhyming term has been around since the 1960s, according to GDoS. It originally referred to a fellow looked upon as a bookish egghead or radical rabble-rouser.
Jonathan Green suggests this example of rhyming slang may have spawned from an 1846 Edward Lear limerick, which goes like so: “There was an old man with a beard / Who said ‘It is just as I feared!’ Two owls and a hen / Four larks and a wren / Have all built their nests in my beard.” Hate when that happens.
These terms are blends of Greek and English, and despite the fancy sound, they have dirt-simple meanings. Pogonotomy simply refers to shaving, while pogonotrophy is the opposite: allowing a beard to flourish on the facial stage. A 1996 use from the Daily Mail shows how fickle the public can be when judging face fuzz: “This week’s picture of Beatle George Harrison wearing a moustache—and a particularly sad, droopy looking one at that—caught students of pogonotrophy the world over in two minds.”
November 1, 2016 – 8:00am