The Complicated, Controversial History of "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Once a piece of art is released into the world, people are free to debate its meaning and merits until the end of time. This is especially true if the work in question is a holiday song that pops back into the public consciousness each December. If the song is “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”—a ’40s-era American standard that some modern listeners hear as a misogynistic depiction of sexual misconduct—it’s cause for an annual barrage of controversies, radio bans, and think pieces.

- mentalfloss

 

Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo

As he prepares to release his final Jackass film, the stuntman takes stock of a surprisingly long, hilariously painful, and unusually influential career.

The other day, Johnny Knoxville came across a relic from his past buried in a drawer at home. “I found a packet of those things at the house,” he said. “What do you call it? I can't remember what they were called.” He paused, searching for the word. 

Eventually, he found it. “Yeah, the catheter,” he said. “They're pretty sizable—about the width of a No. 2 pencil.” 

This sort of thing now happens to Knoxville—run-ins with the random detritus of an extraordinary career. “You'll find arm casts, things like that,” he said. “Bunch of gauze in this drawer. Arm cast over there.” A pair of extra-long prop testicles, from his film Bad Grandpa, are mounted like a work of art in his home office.

- GQ

 

100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying

Whether it’s taking fruit to work (and to the bedroom!), being polite to rude strangers or taking up skinny-dipping, here’s a century of ways to make life better, with little effort involved …

- The Guardian

 

Welcome to the weird world of erotic wrestling: An adult photographic guide

Suplex sex, leotard busting Swanton Bombs and old school jackhammer action, is all part of the blood, sweat and bikinis in the wild world of W.W.E., or rather weird wrestling eroticism. This is the story of how one of the oldest sports known to man, entered the tangential world of all-American erotic wrestling and the Exquisite Mayhem contained therein. 

In the mid-1960s, the aspiring photographer Theo Ehret entered the Grand Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles clutching his beloved humble Rolleiflex camera. At that time, he could not have possibly prognosticated the life he was about to beget as he creaked open the doors to the hushed amphitheatre of bedlam that would soon be bustling. 

- Far Out

How I Became Obsessed With Accidental Time Travel

The web is awash with ordinary peoples’ stories of “time slips.” Their real magic is what they can tell us about our relationship to time.

This year, I turned 30, a development that came with a breathless sense of dread at time’s passing. It wakes me up in the early mornings: Nocturnal terror breaks through the surface of sleep like a whale breaching for air. My ambition and fear kick in together until I get up, pour myself some water and look out the window at the squid-ink sky and the string of lights along my neighbors’ houses. I lie down again after finding firmer mental ground, dry land.

So when a guy that my friend was seeing evangelized about “time slips” — a genre of urban legend in which people claim that, while walking in particular places, they accidentally traveled back, and sometimes forward, in time — I was a ripe target. 

- NY Times