The word "epic" is by far the most tossed-around of all the Internetisms.

In fact, its overuse is so rampant that many now actively skip videos that are described as being "epic."

Which would be a crying shame in the case of Jimmy Fallon's latest Lip Sync-Off, because it just might be the only video currently on the web deserving of that label.

Picture this: Nearly 10 whole minutes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stephen Merchant, and Fallon himself lip-synching their guts out to such classic songs as "Take On Me," "Tiny Dancer," and Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass."

Even Homer would have to agree that sounds pretty epic.

Also, it's true what they say: You haven't truly lived until you've seen Stephen Merchant lip-sync to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies."

If you get overheated, chase it down with Fallon's previous Lip Sync-Off, starring The Office's John Krasinski:

[video via LNWJF]

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake killed more than 270 people in western Pakistan on Wednesday. The powerful quake also created a small island off of Pakistan's southwest coast.

Countless manufacturing industries have died slow and painful deaths in America. The auto industry dried up. The clothing industries moved to Bangladesh. Yet we—the strong and the proud—can hold our heads up high and say to the world, "Excuse me, I'm on the toilet."

On the toilet manufacturing the toilet, that is! (You probably have to really get on there in order to ensure quality control.) This, then, is how the grand American empire shall reshape itself: not with guns, nor with butter, but with... a "modest" increase in toilet manufacturing in American factories, most of which are foreign-owned. Well, that's something, at least. The Japanese may own the company, but god damn it, it's American hands that prepare the product to receive your bowel movements. The Wall Street Journal, in a story that we imagine was written just for us, reports:

The work is demanding, requiring muscles to lift bowls and tanks, as well as a delicate touch to smooth surfaces.

"You need the strength of a football player and the hands of a sculptor," Manfield's Mr. Morando said as workers in muscle shirts hoisted newly baked porcelain on a recent afternoon.

I don't want to know how many American manufacturing jobs have been lost in the past decade. I don't want to know how wrecked our national finances are, or how low the world's opinion of us is. All I want is reassurance that proud, strong Americans—people who harbored childhood dreams of playing in the NFL—are out there, every day, hoisting freshly baked toilets, by hand.

Those bastards overseas can take everything from us. But they'll never take our poop.

[Photo: Flickr]

It's that time of the year again when the days get shorter, the leaves change colors, and Tina Fey hosts the Saturday Night Live season premiere to make it seem like it just might be worth tuning in this time around.

Of course, the Fey Effect only lasts as long as Tina Fey is actually on TV drawing attention away from everyone else being lackluster by comparison, but you'll still grin and bear all the rest just for those precious few moments.

And if the promise of some Fey isn't enough to convince you to log off HowWillBreakingBadEnd.com for a minute, maybe the promise of another Emmy Awards-style wardrobe malfunction might.

For the record, this is what Tina is talking about:

[video via NBC, screengrab via @mrskin]

Privilege: so sweet to have. But even sweeter to not have. Privilege has its benefits, but the lack of privilege confers that sweet, sweet moral superiority. With that in mind, we have decided to determine who, exactly, has the least privilege of all.

These days, teary privilege confessionals pour forth from the lips of college students in equal proportion to the fiery critiques of our grossly unjust world that pour forth from the unprivileged masses. None of it, however, is very scientific. This is the privilege bracket. It is like an NCAA bracket, but without the privileged assumption that you know about sports, which are an inherently masculine-dominated, ability-privileged activity. Here, we will pit eight categories of non-privilege against one another, tournament-style. Each round, the least privileged will advance. At the end, only a single category of non-privilege will be left standing. Or, more likely, unable to stand.

The full slate of entrants is below, as well as in the bracket above. Cast your votes now! (And please Google any terms with which you are unfamiliar.) The next round is coming soon.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Thurman Winston's life was long and full of experiences, as betrayed by the lengthy obituary handed out to mourners who attended his recent funeral.

But underneath the "loving husband and father with a big heart open to everyone" lay Thurman's dark side.

Slowly but surely, the man who had a "passion for cars, motocycles (sic) and entertaining family and friends" bided his time, patiently waiting for just the right moment to unleash hellfire on the fair-weather sponges who have been leeching off him his entire life.

And then that moment finally arrived: The last line of his obituary.

[H/T: News.com.au, photo via Imgur]

While teasing a live report on the Lodi Grape Festival, Fox 40 field reporter Sabrina Rodriguez got unexpectedly felt up by a boob-grabbing baboon named Mickey.

Later asked if the "cheeky monkey" was showing its teeth because it was mad or smiling, Rodriguez responded, "I'm gonna go with smiling."

Checkmate, creationists.

[H/T: Guyism]

Paul Karason died on Monday, 15 years after he permanently turned blue. Karason's blueness made him into a minor celebrity in 2008 when he appeared on The Today Show.

Karason turned blue in the late 1990s after he started using a silver-based medication to treat his dermatitis. He also drank homemade collodial silver to treat the disease.

From NBC:

Silver has antibacterial properties and has been used to fight infection for thousands of years. But it went out of use when the far more effective penicillin was developed in the 1930s.

It continued to be used in some over-the-counter medicines until 1999, when the FDA banned it because it causes argyria, which is a result of the silver reacting with light the same way it does in photography. The silver collects in the skin and other organs and does not dissipate.

In addition to argyria (blue man disease), Karason suffered from a number of other health problems, including heart disease.

“He has been too ill to work for a while,” Karason's widow told NBC. “He didn't like to go out in public much – only when he thought he needed to, like to to go to the bank or to pick up tobacco.”

One reason why he didn't like going out in public, aside from being in terrible physical shape? People kept calling him “Papa Smurf.”

“That was a nickname he didn’t appreciate, depending on who said it,” his widow said. “If it was a kid who ran up to him saying ‘Papa Smurf,’ it would put a smile on his face. But if it was an adult, well ….”

Karason was 62.

[Image via Getty]

In the latest installment of his long-running Funny or Die interview series Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis sits down with Justin Bieber to finally ask him all the questions sycophantic entertainment reporters have refused to ask — and then spank him.

No joke: Galifianakis confronts Bieber about all the bad things he's been doing over the last few months — from saying Anne Frank would have been a Belieber, to peeing in a restaurant kitchen, to driving recklessly around LA, to doing drugs with his punk "friends."

"You're too young to be smoking pot and pee-peeing in buckets and driving up and down on the highway fast," Galifianakis actually yells at Bieber at one point, before taking off his belt and spanking him. "You're not a child, and that's the point. So I can hit a grown man with a belt."

Finally.

[video via Funny or Die]

Earlier this month, the shipping company Maersk got itself on the cover of Businessweek, after investing billions of dollars in the biggest ships ever built in world history. Today, Maersk says: Hey, anybody wanna buy the world's biggest ship?

The company is just about ready to take delivery of the first of 20 "Triple-E" ships that they ordered two years ago, at a total cost of $3.7 billion. These ships are so god damn big! "They’re 1,312 feet long, 194 feet wide, and weigh 55,000 tons empty. Stand one on its stern next to the Empire State Building, and its bow would loom over the heads of those on the observation deck; a single link from its anchor chain weighs 500 pounds."

Just think of all the stuff they can put in that ship, and ship it!

How fucking psyched is the head of Maersk to finally get his hands on this humongo super ship—upon which he has literally bet the entire financial future of his company? Pretty psyched! Well—kind of psyched. Not really psyched. He tells the Wall Street Journal:

"It's pretty clear that when we look back to early part of 2011 when these ships were ordered, ours and everybody else's view on growth was somewhat different than what it turned out to be and therefore the market will not be as quite as big in 2015 as we thought it to be," Mr. Skou said.

Now available for parties, bar mitzvahs, and weddings: a big old boat.

[Photo: AP]

An estimated 2.1 million people die each year from air pollution. Want to know where the most polluted (and deadly) places to live are? This NASA-created map will show you.

From NASA's Earth Observatory website:

The map above shows the model estimate of the average number of deaths per 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) per year due to air pollution. The researchers used the difference in pollution levels between 1850 and 2000 as a measure of human-caused air pollution. Dark brown areas have more premature deaths than light brown areas. Blue areas have experienced an improvement in air quality relative to 1850 and a decline in premature deaths.

As you might expect, the deadliest pollution is in China. Europe and India are also bad, as are parts of Mexico, west Africa and the midwestern United States. Somewhat surprisingly, there are parts of the world that actually have less air pollution than they had in 1850, including most of the southeast United States.

[via David Grann]

"Our brother asked us to be his best men for his wedding." So begins the preface to the greatest wedding toast in nuptial history.

It continues:

We knew the hardest thing would be doing a traditional best man’s speech because we would cry too much. So instead, we made an 80’s music video, since it's the coolest decade by far and because Robin is an 80’s boy.

And thus Rufus Starlight was born.

Or rather, reborn, since according to the (presumably fictitious) bio on the band's Facebook page, the duo has been around since before the Eighties were the Eighties:

Rufus Starlight formed in August 1977. 'We Are Brothers' was inspired and produced just six short weeks later. Not only did it define a music video genre, it has been credited, by somebody, as inspiring '80s icons such as Human League, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Heaven 17, ABC, George Michael, David Hasselhoff, and Tom Cruise.

Rufus's star shone brightly but, oh so briefly. Almost as soon as it banded it disbanded, because of unresolvable creative differences. At the time, NME called this "a pity".

Along with the resurrection of Rufus Starlight, so too did the music video for "We Are Brothers" resurface.

Starring band members Rufus Starlight ("the old bossy one") and Baddy Paris ("the young musical genius"), it's been compared to "Night at the Roxbury set in the Tron universe and scored by Gary Numan."

Which is how all the best things in life should be described.

"Do not forget," Paris and Starlight tell Robin in the video's description, "you are our brother!"

After this wedding toast, no one will ever forget that.

[H/T: The High Definite]

Remember Lucas Duplan, the Stanford dropout who grabbed a $25 million investment for an app he won't tell anyone about? He still won't explain what "Clinkle" does, or when it will come out, but that didn't stop him from making this insanely pretentious promotional video.

AllThingsD quotes Duplan, who is taking a measured approach to his nascent company that hasn't actually done anything yet: “We really want to make sure we test everything before we start hyping it." It's been two years.

That's wise, except he's already begun hyping it! This video is the definition of hyping a thing: take an object that has no demonstrable merit (Clinkle), toss in lots of weighty words about altruism, interconnectivity, revolution, and changing the world. Use dramatic music liberally. Concerned faces. Optimistic glances. Determination. Borrow some of the production values generally associated with ads for anti-depressants or United Airlines. Try, very hard, to make people forget they have no reason to care about Clinkle. Pretend Clinkle isn't just another way to buy shit with your phone.

The ad's tagline is "We’re All In This Together"—and Duplan had better hope so, or he's going to have some very disappointed investors.

Another Thursday, another New York Times Style section faux-trend story about Williamsburg. It's all a bit tedious, isn't it? Since these stories are written primarily to generate blog posts by people like us, we feel entitled to demand a few changes in how this neighborhood is covered, moving forward.

Situations In Which It Will Be Acceptable to Write and Publish News Stories About Williamsburg

• Mass shooting
• Traffic pileup of more than 20 cars
• Fire consuming greater than 30% of the total developed real estate
• Asteroid strike
• Godzilla attack
• One of those big condos just falls down unexpectedly

This list should be clear enough. But where does that leave all the stories about upwardly mobile young whites moving into a neighborhood that they formerly did not inhabit and building lots of fancy restaurants and bars and hotels and condos and driving up the real estate prices and having kids and pushing strollers and eating brunch and having parties that eventually attract curious Manhattanites? We're glad you asked.

Trend Stories Formerly Written About Williamsburg May Now Only Be Written About the Following Neighborhoods

• Bed-Stuy
• Crown Heights
• Prospect Lefferts Gardens
• Ditmas Park
• Sunnyside
• Ridgewood

When we reach the day when we're being subjected to unbearable faux-trend stories about "North Bed-Stuy vs. South Bed-Stuy, which has best maintained its bohemian D.I.Y. roots, with its indie boutiques, bearded mixologists, artists’ lofts and working-class families?" then we will update this list.

[Photo: Flickr]

Back in early July, a helmet-cam video of a Fresno firefighter rescuing an unconscious kitten trapped inside a smoke-filled home briefly caught the Internet's attention.

That video has now gone viral yet again after being recut as an ad for GoPro's HD HERO3 camera.

That's the good news.

The bad news is what GoPro isn't telling you: Despite firefighter Cory Kalanick's valiant efforts, the cat eventually died of smoke inhalation.

A person claiming to be a GoPro employee noted in a Reddit thread about the video that the company wasn't aware that the cat had died.

"At least no one in any of the meetings I was in knew about it," he wrote.

To which another Redditor responded perfectly, "what's crucial here is that, to my knowledge, GoPro wasn't using the footage to show a firefighter ensure the kitten life a long and happy life, but rather show the great work the firefighter did in his/hers efforts to save the kitten."

RIP Lucky.

[video via GoProCamera]

David and Jackie Siegel set out to build the United States' largest single-family house (in Florida, of course), but after David's time-share business, Westgate, went belly-up, they lost it all. This was depicted in last year's astounding Queen of Versailles documentary. In the time after the movie was filmed, as Jackie claimed earlier this year on Watch What Happens Live, David's business gained footing, posted its biggest profits ever, and the couple bought back their formerly foreclosed 'roid roost. They also disputed the veracity of the documentary, in court and elsewhere.

On CNBC's new show Secret Lives of the Super Rich, Jackie showed off progress on the house she and her husband are calling Versailles, which actually looks about as far along as it did in the documentary, most of which was shot in 2010. In fact, the entire clip above is reminiscent of the beginning of the doc, with Jackie reporting her lavish plans for a 500-person-capacity ballroom, showing off a 6,000 square feet "master closet," and discussing her plans for a "wet and wild slide" out back, attached to the infinity pool. There are also scenes of Jackie soaking in paparazzi attention and interacting awkwardly with her cold husband David, just like in the movie.

These people have learned nothing.

The plan is for Versailles to be finished in 2015. I'm skeptical, but I can't wait to see what happens with it between now and then.

The least you can do if you're going to copy Buzzfeed's style with a single-page gallery of photos of a crazy Russian bachelor is make sure Buzzfeed didn't already publish the exact same photos 18 months ago. (To be fair: Back then he was Serbian.) This is the kind of thing a Facebook founder should be all over.

My 1st @Buzzfeed piece, "9 reasons I care about #cliamtechange - and you should too." Pls RT: http://t.co/9Y2JN3ZWOk

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) September 26, 2013

Sheldon Whitehouse is a United States senator from Rhode Island.

This pranking warehouse employee likes to scare the living Dickens out of his boss.

And who can blame him, with that priceless expression of near-death on Paul's face?

In fact, the bearded fear-monger has gotten so good at his job (scaring Paul, that is), that chances are he'll get you too.

Can you guess where he's hiding before the clock runs out? If the suspense is killing you, skip to the 30-second mark.

[H/T: Tastefully Offensive, video via Jake Dell]

With your help, we are on a quest to find the least privileged subgroup of all. Yesterday, we launched The Privilege Tournament. Today, it is time for you to vote once again.

Remember: vote for which of the two competing groups has the least privilege. Please Google any terms you are unfamiliar with. The first round produced some major surprises—for example, gays and lesbians were both knocked out by plushies and bisexuals, respectively, and gluten allergy narrowly lost to pet allergy. Shocking, but there's no arguing with public opinion. Together, we will settle this thing once and for all.

[Image by Jim Cooke]