BDC Now: In a Fight Over a Parking Space, Don’t Do This

By Doug Saffir

November 6, 2014

3 minutes to read

It’s the holiday season, so a trip to the mall is inevitably in your future. If someone steals your parking spot, there a few ways to handle the situation. See how not to do it on today’s BDC Now, and read more about a man being eaten by a snake, a four-minute-long cover of Taylor Swift’s album, spying on isolated villages in the Amazon, and sending a GoPro to space.

Happy Holidays

People start to get a little crazy this time of year. The holidays are closing in and the pressure to find the perfect gifts for loved ones starts to build. So when you hit the mall hoping to knock out your holiday shopping, you won’t be alone. Here’s some advice: When you eventually get into a fight with another holiday shopper, do not handle it like this guy. Like Frank Costanza trying to get the last doll on the shelf, the man goes nuclear over a parking space. Now, in addition to dropping hundreds of dollars on gifts for his friends and family, he’s probably going to have to pay for repairs to both cars as well as a lawyer so he doesn’t end up in jail for almost running those people over. This man is the reason holidays like Festivus are born. Don’t be that person.

Eaten Alive

The Discovery Channel has it rough. There are 52 weeks in a year, and, unfortunately, it can only do wall-to-wall shark shows for one of them. So what’s a station to do to draw viewers the rest of the time? How about a man being eaten alive by a snake? Would you watch that? Would that entertain you? Because that’s what it’s doing. This Sunday at 8 p.m., you can watch wildlife filmmaker Paul Rosolie dress up in “a custom-built snake-proof suit’’ and get eaten, head first, by an anaconda. There’s even a teaser trailer for the event. This is a thing that’s actually going to happen so presumably the man and the snake both survive. And ashamed as we are to admit it, we’re probably going to watch.

13 T-Swift Covers, 4 Minutes

We know it’s been hard on Taylor Swift fans since she broke up with Spotify and took away all that sweet, free access to her new album, “1989.’’ YouTube singers Superfruit know it, too. The only difference between us and them is that they actually did something about it and we just made fun of Swift’s burgeoning hip hop career. They took the pop star’s entire new album, crunched it down into their own well-orchestrated, four-minute medley, then put it up on the Internet for all to enjoy. We’ll admit that listening to two dudes perform these songs isn’t exactly the same as listening to Taylor Swift, but if you can’t stream her stuff, you have to take what you can get.

Welcome to the Grid

It’s 2014 and there are somehow still whole groups of people that live totally isolated from the rest of humanity. Well, since “the rest of humanity’’ is pretty rude and invasive, that’s quickly coming to an end. Thanks to developments in satellite imagery, researchers are now able to track five isolated villages in the Amazon rainforest and learn just about everything about them – from changes in the villages’ populations to the amount of land they have cultivated. On the one hand, it’s interesting to learn how societies develop and survive without any help or influence from the outside world. On the other hand, it’s a bit troubling to know that even when you think you’re all alone in the middle of a rainforest, someone, somewhere is still watching.

GoPro Goes to Space

We know it’s only been three days since the last time we talked about a GoPro video, but bear with us for this one. Why? Well, for starters, this video was recorded on the International Space Station. If man’s incredible journey into outer space isn’t intriguing enough for you, it was also filmed from inside a ball of water. We’re not even sure what’s cooler: that GoPro got NASA to take its camera off the planet, or that water can take the form of a ball in zero gravity. But that’s pretty much GoPro’s marketing scheme: Make videos so amazing you have no choice but to click.