Imagine our delight when we found this sentence while reading a New Yorker story about gourmet beer: "Wood experts rate a species’ hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board." It sets up perfectly a lowbrow joke: of course super-aggressive date-a-holic Paul Janka would have a last name that refers to measuring the hardness of wood, right? So we did some research to estimate where on the Janka scale Paul's personal wood would actually be.
Balsa—the thinnest, softest wood—rates at about 100. Eastern White Pine's a 380 and Hemlock is a 500. Those are all fairly soft woods.
Brazilian walnut is one of the hardest woods, at 3684. Ebony rates a 3220, and red oak is at the low-middle end, with 1290. Which wood would compare to Paul Janka's hardness most accurately?
We'd guesstimate—a very uneducated guess—somewhere around the hardness of sycamore. Look it up.
At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert, in its heyday, was a
Oh I can hardly believe it! Such language! No, not from the mewling hormone vessels (ack, remember those days?) on
[Pretty pretty princess and Britney Spears apologist
Somewhere in Japan a ragtag group of people on some sort of television show got together and (some donning black face) reenacted, with eerie precision, the famous pile-up of celebrities that is the video for 1985's charity song "We Are The World". Japanese Michael Jackson! Japanese Cyndi Lauper! Japanese Lionel Richie! Even Japanese Ray Charles! No matter that this has nothing to do with anything. We just can't send you into the comfort of the weekend without first making you ponder the fact that things such as this exist. Video after the jump.
"I always feel like something of an impostor," Jodie Foster