Beach Blanket Bingo Days to heat up California’s beaches this summer

by Jamie Rhein on

Recognizing that if the economy doesn’t perk up by June, this summer is going to be the absolute pits, California’s Department of Tourism is taking action. In a joint effort with the public beaches from Coronado Beach to Carlsbad and Newport to Morrow Bay, 250 of California’s stretches of public sand and surf are revisiting the days when life was more fun.

Beach Blanket Bingo Days is an answer to the doldrums. The hope is that if people are having fun, their buoyant moods will get them to buy. Vendors who set up their wares along beach boardwalks are counting on it.

Says department spokesperson Bitsy Carmichael, “The Beach Blanket Bingo theme was a no brainer for us. We couldn’t think of another time in U.S. movie history when heading to the beach meant putting your cares away. Watching just a few minutes of Annette and Frankie was a real pick me up. Beach Blanket Bingo Days are a way to relive that time. We’ve developed a series of events to recapture the mood. A day at the beach will put a smile on your face.”

Each beach will offer its own brand of Beach Blanket Bingo fun such as Annette and Frankie look-a-like contests and dance offs, but at 2:00 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday from Memorial Day to Labor Day, anyone can play Beach Blanket Bingo. Pick up a bingo card from designated life guard station, spread out your beach towel and join in on a beach-wide bingo game and a chance to win a host of prizes. The grand prize for each game is a Beach Blanket Bingo picnic basket filled with items like an Annette and Frankie beach ball, flip flops, beach towel, sun visor, Frisbee and the movie DVD.

“We’re also going to be selling Commemorative Beach Blanket Bingo Beach towels as a fundraiser for beach clean-ups. With California’s current budget in disarray, there aren’t enough beach cleaning personnel and all the trash puts a real damper on a good time,” says Carmichael. “The beach towels are an affordable $10 and a way to take the beach mood home with you.”

To prove her point, Bitsy Carmichael clicked on the remote to show the kind of fun the department is hoping to generate come summer. [see movie trailer]

Beach Blanket Bingo Trailer–Join in the Fun

Crop circles are over. Enter crop triangles!

by Annie Scott on

It started in the English countryside, we think. Now they’ve been spotted everywhere from Iowa to the open fields of Mexico: Crop Polygons.

Crop circles have been appearing all over the world for years, with debates going back and forth over whether they’re alien, man-made, or some crazy weather phenomenon. Now, as if mother nature is slapping us in the face and laughing, we are suddenly being presented with crop triangles, rectangles, and there are even rumors of a hexagon near Dyersville, Iowa.

“We’re just glad there are no pentagons or stars,” says a local farmer. “That would be scary.”

“Look what those bastard aliens did to my corn,” says another.

The perfect circles are typically created by using a rope and cutting/orbiting around a specified central point. In theory, the fastest way to create these new shapes would be to place a triangle or square form around an epicenter and pull ropes out equidistant from that center, lining up with the angles of the shape. By connecting those endpoints, they would create a perfect, larger version of that shape.

We hope that is what’s happening, because if someone has found another way to do this, chances are that person is wasting even more time than necessary.

Thai prostitute refuses sexual encounter with American backpacker; “He too dirty,” she says

by Aaron Hotfelder on

Backpackers have never had a reputation as being especially finicky about their appearance or cleanliness. But things may have reached a new low in downtown Bangkok yesterday when a Thai prostitute named Chanhira Thanarat refused a sexual encounter with American backpacker Brad Thompson because he was “too dirty.”

“He never shower,” Thanarat said of the 19-year-old Thompson. “He think he can love me with bad smell. He never wash Bob Marley shirt. I find different man!”

Thompson doesn’t deny that it had been “weeks, maybe months” since he had last washed his favorite t-shirt, a green short-sleeve displaying the face of legendary reggae musician Bob Marley. “Still,” Thompson said, “I don’t think it smells that bad.” Thompson proceeded to reach into his backpack and pull out a shirt whose smell can only be compared to an unholy mixture of body odor, feet, and death.

Asked when he last took a shower, Thompson paused for several seconds before asking, “You mean, with soap?”

Extreme sheep herding

by Annie Scott on


You may think being a shepherd is passe, but these guys in the United Kingdom found a number of ways to spice things up!

First they herded they sheep marching band style, encouraging them to form a larger, friendly-looking sheep.

When the sheep got good at that, they introduced LED lights and quickly found the sheep amenable to simulating a game of Atari – style Pong.

In fact, the sheep were so smart, the shepherds had little trouble arranging them into the trickiest of patterns — even piecing together a timeless Italian work of art!

They celebrated their diligent and successful explorations of the art of shepherding with some abstract and sort of confusing fireworks displays.

Good on ya boys. But you’re better with the sheep!

Cleveland man wishes he could travel the world, decides not to

by Aaron Hotfelder on

“I’ve always wanted to travel the world,” says Cleveland accountant Jim Eckhart. “Whether it’s visiting the Pyramids in Egypt or riding the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia, getting out and seeing the world is absolutely my biggest fantasy.”

Eckhart, who is unmarried and recently turned 26, receives $80,000 a year from his Cleveland accounting firm and has almost $75,000 in savings. “Unfortunately, I may never be able to…” Eckhart says before trailing off.

“He’s always prattling on about how he’d ‘love to see the world,'” says Eckhart’s grandmother, Rose Cowen. “So we always says to him, ‘Go ahead and do it!’ but then he gives us this hogwash about why he can’t. Something about his work. He gets a bonus if he stays 18 more months, I think he said.”

Eckhart says that some “complications” with work prevent him from going on a trip that he’s “waited for his whole life and want[s] more than anything in the world.”

Eckhart’s boss, Rick Wainwright, says, “We’d hate to lose Jim, but I think it’d be great if he took a year off and saw the world. We’d certainly have a place for him if he wanted to come back.”

While Eckhart dreams of hiking to Machu Picchu, floating in the Dead Sea, or exploring the Australian Outback, pursuits he says he would “give anything for,” he ultimately believes he needs to stay home.

“I can’t leave,” Eckhart says. “I just, I mean… you know, work and all that.”