Cracked.com
In my quest to contribute to all modern iterations of classic humor magazines (see MAD), I contributed to Cracked.com during the height of its popularity from 2011 to 2013. My articles amassed roughly 5 million hits for the site. Click the images to read the full article.
My most popular article—the idea of artists putting secret dirty messages into their work turned out to be a compelling reason to click for many folks.
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“When The Last House on the Left was submitted for rating, the MPAA insisted on cutting so much that the final product was only 60 minutes long. After struggling to edit together a coherent story with so little footage, producer Sean Cunningham finally just said "to hell with it," put all the horrifying stuff back in, and spliced in some official MPAA R-rated footage from another movie that was being put together down the hall. You'd assume that somebody is on hand to check these things, or that there's some code that makes the rating footage specific to the film or something -- but nope! Everything turned out fine. No one had any idea The Last House on the Left was released as an unrated film until Craven told the story decades later in a documentary.”
Definitely the most fun of my Cracked articles to write. I finally got to put all my music knowledge—the worse the band, the more I remember, sadly—to good use. So who’s to say I’m wasting my brain space by memorizing Blues Traveler songs?
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It's easy to miss, you know, because it's an instrumental, but hiding just under the surface of Hendrix's iconic take on "The Star-Spangled Banner" are various references to the horrors of war. Things start out pretty standard, but when he hits the "... and the rockets' red glare" line, Hendrix goes into full-on freak mode. Those crazy sounds aren't just Jimi making noise for the hell of it; those are the "rockets" referred to in the song dropping and exploding. And after that? Screams. Later he adds in some machine gun noises for good measure.
The etymology of words turned out to be full of odd stories—many of which had rarely been circulated online before this article. While most pieces have only 6 entries, the editors accepted 10 examples of bizarre word origins.
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The word "cliche" doesn't derive from any Latin word or even any prior French word. Actually, as legend has it, a group of printers back in 1800s France got the idea to save time by forging common phrases onto a single plate instead of writing out every line of text word-by-word. In English, these plates are referred to as stereotypes. So what the hell is it supposed to sound like? The forging of that metal printing press plate.