A Spindle-Full of Weird

Scott clears his spindle from time to time, and I have my own spindle of weird but oddly compelling news.  Like video of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott downing a beer in seven seconds at a victory celebration of an Aussie soccer football team. Good on ‘ya, mate!  I knew there was a reason I liked Abbott.

Steak copySpeaking of consumption, any traveler along Interstate 40 or the old Route 66 knows about the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, which has the legendary contest where you get a 72-ounce steak for free if you can eat it (and all the sides dishes too) in under an hour.  A shockingly high number of people have accomplished this feat.  But none greater than the 120-lb California woman who last week succeeded in eating three of the Big Texan’s 72-ounce steaks—in 20 minutes.

Finally, in really important news, there exists an oral history of Airplane!, one of the five greatest movies ever made.  A representative sample:

We were influenced by many things, but certainly by MAD magazine. There was a regular feature in MAD – I think it still may be today – called “Scenes We’d Like to See,” and the way they’d do it was to have each panel leading up to the final panel be completely straight, nothing was silly, and the characters weren’t caricature-y, and then in the last panel they’d make the joke and sort of pull the rug out from under you. We always felt we’d learned subliminally from that. So we cast straight actors and used serious music, and instead of having silly sets, we put it on a real airplane. That kind of stuff allowed us to get more ridiculous with the jokes.

Two of the co-creators of this classic, David and Jerry Zucker, are among the handful of conservatives in Hollywood, incidentally.  They put their comic chops to work a few years ago on the under-appreciated American Carol. Here’s one short representative scene for your edification:

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