The YouTube channel "I Open Doors" is all about opening doors. Every day the guy who runs it (he remains anonymous) posts a short video of himself opening a door. It's usually a different door each day. He’s been doing this now for almost a year.
His most popular video (below) shows him opening a toilet door in an airplane.
He only shows himself opening doors with his left hand, but he promises that if his channel ever reaches 100,000 subscribers he’ll reveal his right hand. As of now (Mar 2020) he’s at 513 subscribers. So he's got a ways to go.
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 3.24 seconds, for $11.10 an hour, or NY state minimum wage (2018). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box. The MWM can be reprogrammed as minimum wage changes, or for wages in different locations.
So, if this is installed in a museum, do people actually get to keep whatever money they get from it? I'm pretty sure some people would stand there cranking it all day.
Nothing will probably ever beat TIMBER BRIDGE INSPECTION (reprinted below for newbies) as the gold standard for boredom, but twenty minutes of UK tractor talk comes close.
It's hard to see what this thing did, other than revolve around the fake Earth. Swing up and down, maybe? I assume there was a counterbalancing capsule on the other end of the boom.
Plus, 300 riders per hour? Three in each capsule, as shown. Six total per "ride." That's fifty rides per hour, given filling and emptying the capsules. One minute swinging around at the end of a boom?
Filmmaker Anders Weberg plans on releasing his great masterpiece Ambiancé in 2020. It'll clock in at 720 hours long (30 days). But to whet everyone's appetite, he released a trailer in 2014 that's a mere 7 hours and 20 minutes long.
In our untiring quest to find the most boring material ever filmed or written, which began with "Timber Bridge Inspection," reposted below, we bring you the entire contents of a scintillating pamphlet.
Eccentric composer Erik Satie wrote "Vexations," a four-line piece of music, around 1893, though that date is a guess because it remained undiscovered until his death in 1925. It was an unexceptional piece of music (by design), except for the instructions he attached that seemed to indicate that it should be played "840 times in succession" by a pianist who should "prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." It's not clear why he chose the number 840.
It was first performed in September 1963 at the Pocket Theater in Manhattan. Composer John Cage arranged for a relay team of 10 pianists to play the entire thing, 840 times. The entire performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes.
There was a $5 admission fee for audience members, but you got 5 cents back for every 20 minutes you listened to it. Joel Meltz sat through the whole thing, so ended up getting a refund of $2.80.
It's subsequently been performed a number of times and is, of course, available on YouTube. Check out the video below of the guy who plays the entire thing, alone, in under 10 hours.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.