Ryan Menezes

1 week ago | cracked.com | Ryan Menezes

Spend a few moments talking with a famous singer, and you might be surprised by what you hear. “What the hell is that?” you might ask, listening to what comes out of their mouth. “There’s no melody at all. I don’t hear any instruments. You aren’t even rhyming.” You may turn violent, and the police will need to intervene. Later, when you are cuffed and in the hospital bed, the doctors will explain to you, “They were speaking. Speaking and singing are different.”“Ohhhhh,” you say.

2 weeks ago | cracked.com | Ryan Menezes

The Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea” features astronauts in a space station who are able to remotely connect to android bodies located on Earth. Sometimes, to do maintenance on the station exterior, one of the guys will put on a suit and pop outside. That part about maintenance is just as much science-fiction as the part about beaming their consciousness wirelessly. In reality, astronauts do perform extravehicular activity, but they don’t just go out immediately.

2 weeks ago | cracked.com | Ryan Menezes

When you choose what to call a town, you can name it after whoever founded the place. Or you can name it by pulling letters out of a bag at random. There is another option, however: You can assign the town a name in order to set up a long-term elaborate gag. This is difficult, because the events that actually form the gag will happen in the future, outside of your control and without your foreknowledge. But the universe will sometimes step in to make the joke work.

2 weeks ago | cracked.com | Ryan Menezes

Brazilian man Walter Orthmann may well hold the record for the longest time spent at a single job. He started working at a textile company in 1938, and he still worked there when he died in 2024, 86 years later. As far as we can tell, he retained his job so long by keeping his head down and doing nothing interesting, even as the world changed around him. Other people, however, aren’t quite so skilled at staying put and staying mum, and their résumé pays the price.

2 weeks ago | cracked.com | Ryan Menezes

Aaron Sorkin made such TV shows as The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which fans remember fondly for their witty dialogue. Non-fans don’t remember those shows quite so fondly. Sorkin shows, they say, have an annoying habit of recreating situations from real life and then making characters respond in seemingly the perfect way, as though the writer is trying to correct the public about how to act. This came to a head with his show The Newsroom, and he hasn’t worked in television since.