via

Reader’s Digest: 50 jokes for 50 states.

Florida
My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned 60 and that’s the law.
–Jerry Seinfeld

Georgia
How do you know you live in Georgia? When all directions start with “Go down Peachtree …” and include the phrase “When you see the Waffle House …”

Kansas

What do a jackknifed semi in Ohio, a guy getting a divorce in Alabama, and a tornado in Kansas have in common? They’re all fixin’ to lose a trailer.

Kentucky
How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Kentucky? If it’d been invented anywhere else, it would have been called a teethbrush.

via

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw

Chances are, if you spend any time online you’ve come across Flickr. Flickr is a wonderful site for storing, sharing and building community around photographs. It’s similar to online photo services like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly except with a greater social focus and tools and features reminiscent of Facebook.

About a year ago Flickr launched the Flickr Commons, a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo collections of the world’s leading cultural heritage institutions. Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resource.

We are delighted to be the latest institution to join in this endeavor, with an initial contribution of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections.

More

Obama: The College Years

via

The watercolors that John White produced in 1585 gave England its first startling glimpse of America.

John White wasn’t the most exacting painter that 16th-century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief, has two right feet; his study of a scorpion looks cramped and rushed. In historical context, though, these quibbles seem unimportant: no Englishman had ever painted America before. White was burdened with unveiling a whole new realm. More

How to Illustrate a Wooden Frame on a Wall Scene

Another fun step-by-step Photoshop tutorial at PSDTuts: how to draw the platonic ideal of an ice cream bar.

Draw an ice cream bar in Photoshop

or

Illustrating a Cool Glass of Beer

How to Create a Classic Guitar from Scratch In Photoshop