Everyone has had awkward family moments (and many of us still do). Not everyone has had their awkward family moments photographed, posted online, published in a book and mocked in a board game. You’ll find the lucky (or unlucky) few who have on the humorous website Awkward Family Photos.
Bangkok is a city full of luxury hotels offering a high level of personalized service. Among them all, one luxurious hotel with a high level of personalize service rises above the rest, literally: The Tower Club at lebua.
The Tower Club suites occupy the top floors of the State Tower, the tallest hotel and third tallest building of any sort in the whole of Thailand. But is higher better? The Tower Club at lebua invited Spot Cool Stuff to stay in one of their suites for two nights. Here’s what we found:
While skiing the dunes, sand will get inside your clothes. And it will go to places you very much would rather it wouldn’t
Ski bums, do not despair when the weather warms at your travel destination. Though the snow may vanish, your opportunity to partake in downhill skiing and boarding needn’t.
Here’s a Spot Cool Stuff look at three non-snow ski surfaces and where to enjoy them:
After thousands of years of hindsight it seems maybe rice wasn’t the best choice for humanity’s most popular food staple. Yes, it tastes great with sushi. But growing rice is very water and labor intensive. And it requires a flat field that farmers can flood during the planting season.
Rice is particularly labor intensive in hilly areas where farmers must create their flat field by carving floodable terraces into hillsides. We find even a single terrace impressive when we contemplate all the work involved, work usually done by hand. The sight of multiple rice terraces, stacked atop each other as if to form a giant’s staircase, is truly awe inspiring.
Spot Cool Stuff has been a longtime fan of rice terraces. We once flew round trip between San Francisco and the Philippines specifically to spend a single day in Banaue, supposedly the site world’s most grand rice terraces. Supposedly. After nearly two decades of rice terrace travel we’ve formed our own opinion on such matters. Here’s our list of the top 10 rice terrace destinations:
Last year humans world wide spent an estimated US$100 billion on products for dogs. With a market that big is it surprising that some of those products would be, shall we say, sub-optimal?
With that in mind Spot Cool Stuff decided to take one of our occasional breaks in our quest for superlative stuff and look instead for the worst. In this case, the worst dog products we could find.
If you’re more feline inclined don’t feel left out—we’ll review the worst cat gadgets and products in the future. Sign up for our tech RSS feed to get that, and all our tech articles, delivered to you by email. Or join us on Twitter or Facebook, to be notified when that comes out.
Wow! What kind of car is that?!
That was a question drivers rolled down their windows to ask us every few blocks as we were test driving the 2011 Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet through downtown Dallas, Texas. On the highway cars adjusted their speed so to drive alongside us for a closer look. When we stopped in a Starbucks we overheard customers entering the coffee shop talking about what a sleek set of wheels we had.
Nissan flew Spot Cool Stuff to Dallas for their media unveiling of the world’s first all-wheel drive crossover convertible vehicle1 in advance of the vehicle’s April sales launch. From the moment we saw the Murano CrossCabriolet we knew it would be a head turner—it’s unlike any other vehicle on the market today. But is it worth its $46,390 price tag? Our review:
There’s something inherently cool about taking a structure conceived for an animated movie or TV show and building it for real.
Spot Cool Stuff regulars may remember our piece on the the real life Simpsons house constructed in Nevada. Building an accurate rendition of that was difficult enough—and it was a regular suburban dwelling. Imagine the challenge of building the house featured in the Pixar hit movie Up. That house was attached to balloons and was able to fly!
The 2011 updated version of the Apple MacBook Pro is out. The majority of the improvements over the previous MacBook Pro incarnation deal with performance. The most significant of those: new quad-core Intel processors that increase speed nearly 100%. There’s also a new graphics processor (three times faster than the old MacBooks), an HD camera for video chats, a somewhat more powerful battery and a “Thunderbolt” port that can connect to HD displays and transfer data at a blazing 10GB per second.
Though every new MacBook Pro has those improvements not every model offers the same configuration. You, the consumer, have choices to make. 4GB of memory or 8GB? An HDD or flash drive? Is the speed of the Intel i5 processor vs the i7 worth it? And so on.
Here’s Spot Cool Stuff’s take on how to most cost-efficiently configure the latest generation Apple MacBook Pro.
Dude, where’s my treehouse hotel?
That’s not the title of a bad sequel to an Ashton Kutcher movie of a similar name. It’s what you might be saying to your room mate were you and he guests at The Treehotel in Harads, Sweden. That’s because one of the accommodations options there, the Mirrorcude, is invisible!
Really!
Octopi have three hearts. They change colors to show emotion. (When they’re red they’re happy, white they’re scared). They are able to use tools, build structures, commit what they’ve learned to long term memory and are otherwise remarkably intelligent, that despite only 30% of their neurons being located in their brains—the remainder are in their tentacles.
So what does all that have to do with this post? Not much. It’s all just part of the extra service Spot Cool Stuff provides when presenting our readers with these five cool chairs with designs inspired by our favorite invertebrate.
