The Bristol Stool Scale

If you were to ask most folks to design a scale describing their poop, they'd probably come up with only two classifications -- "everything's fine, stop asking!" and "oh shit, oh shit, oh goddamit where's the nearest bathroom?!"

Ma'am, if you had to assign a number to your last shit, what would it be?

The average person may not be too discerning about their poop, but healthcare professionals tend to be, by necessity, much more preoccupied with the human body's various excretions, and thus the Bristol Stool Scale was created. You've heard of taking a number 2, but it turns out you can actually take a number 1 through 7.

Designed by the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, it's clear these people spent a serious chunk of time looking at our chunks, as this scale describes such things as consistency, cracks, lumps, ragged edges and fluffiness in gloriously disgusting detail. That said, we say the scale could stand to be even more detailed -- hell, they don't even Taco Bell in Bristol or Scandinavia. Come let America show you what diarrhea is all about.


Life Change Units

Life can be an exciting, unpredictable ride marked by moments of both great happiness and sorrow -- you'd think it'd be impossible, absurd even, to create a scale that measures all the changes a person will go in their life, but don't tell that to Thomas Holmes and Richard Rache.

They created the Holmes and Rache Stress Scale, which lists all the major tragedies and life-altering changes a person might go through in a given year, ranking them according to much stress they would cause. The higher an event ranks on the scale the more "Life Change Units" it's worth.

We wonder what this ranks.

For instance going to jail is 63 Life Change Units, but hey, at least going to prison for murdering your wife spared you a divorce, which would have net you 73 Life Change Units. Your plumbing being on the fritz may actually be a blessing in disguise ("sexual difficulties" is rated at 39 units) since at least you'll be avoiding any pregnancies in the near future (40 units). Whatever the stress or trauma you've experienced, there's a good chance Holmes and Rache have a seemingly arbitrary double-digit number assigned to it.

But what do you get for accumulating these Life Change Units? Death, that's what. According to the Holmes and Rache those who rack up over 300 life change units in a year are at serious risk of illness. That's the kind of high-score you may not want to attach your initials to.

Oh and hey, obsessively compiling your stresses and fearing the icy hand of death isn't just for adults either, there's a version for you youngsters out there too!


Sperm Motility Grade

As we've seen so far researchers love to come up with creative ways to judge every little thing you do -- not even being microscopic will let you hide from their stern judgement.

Judging you on a cellular level.

The Sperm Motility Grade scale not only how rates effective your troops are, but describes in specific detail how they're storming the beaches...

At the top of the class you have the eye-on-the-prize straight-line swimmers, while at the bottom you have the sperm equivalent of you and your buddies in high school -- they'd rather spend their time loitering in an apathetic pack than actually chase after the girls.

Strangely, the according to the Sperm Motility Grade scale the guys on the level second from the bottom may actually move backwards, which we have to say actually sounds worse than the sperm at level one. Your sperm merely being lazy bastards is one thing, but when they're actively running away from the egg it may be time for you and your fellas to have a heart-to-heart.

Nathan Birch writes the off-the-scale great webcomic Zoology. JD Niemand also does a webcomic, Stickman and Cube.

The Show Must Go On: X Roles Played by People (Who Happened to be Dead)

The entertainment industry is willing to overlook a lot when it comes to its stars--arrests, adultery, drug abuse, and sometimes even the fact that they're no longer among the living. Here are some of the more awkward examples of stars getting their name on the marquee from beyond the grave...


Bruce Lee in Game of Death

In 1973 Bruce Lee burst onto the scene with "Enter the Dragon" and was on track to become a major star, or at least he would have if he hadn't died three months before the movie's release. The producers of Enter the Dragon weren't about to let the minor issue of Lee's mysterious demise sidetrack a promising young career though.

Before filming Enter the Dragon, Lee had been working on his own film, "The Game of Death", but had only managed to finish filming part of the climatic action scene, which featured him fighting the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar while encased in a yellow track suit that proved his skill at martial arts did not extend to costume design.

We dare say Uma Thurman pulled the look off better.

The director of Enter the Dragon took these fragments and tried to cobble together a finished film using new footage featuring several stand-ins who, aside from also being Asian guys who knew how to kick and punch good, didn't much resemble Bruce Lee. Ah, but the producers of Game of Death had a plan--they had access to footage of Bruce Lee's actual funeral, which they inserted into the movie, explaining that the main character had faked his own death, thus allowing Bruce Lee's fill-ins to spend the rest of the movie wearing fake beards and other wacky disguises. We don't like to judge, but when you're including shots of your star lying in his actual casket in your film, you've officially pole vaulted over the line from inventive, to tragically desperate.

Stay classy Game of Death.

Of course this death fakery plot needed some sort of set-up, so early on in the film they had to shoot around the impostors using shadows, giant sunglasses, incredibly awkward editing and "special effects" that a 15-year-old making videos on YouTube would find embarrassing.

No, you're not imagining things, they actually glued a cardboard cutout of Bruce Lee to the mirror to cover the other actor's face in that scene. At least they were still sort of trying at that point though, unlike the end of the movie where they just throw up their hands and don't even make the slightest attempt to disguise the new actor's appearance.

The producers of Game of Death weren't content to sew together just one ridiculous mockery of a film out of unused Bruce Lee footage though, they were hoping to make it a full-on franchise, producing Game of Death 2 three years later. Bruce Lee's character is actually killed off early in the 2nd movie, but you sure as hell wouldn't know it from the trailer...

John Candy in Wagons East!

This comedy about a bunch of whiny pioneers (who talk like characters on a C-grade Seinfeld clone) deciding to give up on the West and head back East was pretty much doomed from conception, but the situation was only made worse when star John Candy died during production. The producers swore up and down that Candy had finished all his scenes before he had passed away, but clearly this was a John Candy sized load of bullshit.

Just sayin', he was kinda a big guy.

Even though he was the top billed star, Candy probably ranks third or fourth in terms of total screen time, and the the filmmakers fill the movie with reaction shots of Candy nodding or staring blankly into space just so you won't forget he's there. At one point it's revealed in front of everybody that Candy was, no joke, the wagonmaster for the Donner Party, and so Candy gets sad, rides away and is simply missing for a large chunk of the movie. Nobody seems to care that he's gone, nor are they particularly concerned about his dabblings in cannibalism once he comes back.

"Yeeeeah...I'm blowing this shitty movie guys."

However the most damning evidence that Candy hadn't finished all his scenes before dying was the fact they actually reused certain bits of footage, awkwardly superimposing it over new backgrounds, such as these eerily similar scenes where Candy's character gives up drinking not once, but twice...

Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos

Back in the year 2000 Nancy Marchand, the actress who played Livia Soprano, passed away and the producers of the show decided to use the futuristic 21st century technology now available to them to create one final scene between Tony and his mom using a combination of existing footage and CGI. The results ended up being slightly less convincing than if they'd used a sock puppet or taped a picture of Tony's mom to sack of potatoes.

They taste like spite.

It all comes off as creepy, with Tony's mom looking oddly washed-out and otherworldly, and far from being her usual spunky murder-plotting self she just repeats a handful of tics and mumbles. The effect almost makes it seem as if she's already dead and Tony is yelling at a ghost.

Then in the very next scene we're informed she died off-camera anyways, making one question what the purpose of the scene was, other than to underline for the millionth time what a cock Tony is (which admittedly was kind of the entire point of The Sopranos).

God dammit, you're not supposed to like Tony. If you people don't stop I'm going to write the most anticlimactic series finale ever. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow began life as a teaser trailer produced by two guys in their living room, which impressed movie producers so much they gave them a giant stack of money to make a full film that ended up looking like a blurry Xbox game. Plus it lost like, 80 million dollars.

Oh my God...are those the first weekend receipts?

The movie's plot revolves almost entirely around the question of "who is Dr. Totenkopf?" His name is mentioned literally every 30-seconds, usually in hushed dread-laced tones, until you're sure this dude must be Voldemort, Darth Vader and Sauron all rolled into one. So after over 90 minutes of build, they finally come face to face with Dr. Totenkopf -- and it turns out he's basically Zordon from the Power Rangers as played by old archival footage of Laurence Olivier.

The conversation they have with him is stilted, feels out of context and the effect is cheesy (the Wizard of Oz did floating heads better back in 1939). Why'd the filmmakers bother doing something so pointless? We're not sure, but they've had plenty of time to contemplate their mistakes, since Hollywood promptly deposited the guys back into their living room after the failure of Sky Captain and they haven't made another movie since.


Shemp Howard in various lousy Three Stooges shorts from 1959

In 1959 everyone's favorite Stooge, Shemp, sadly passed away from a stroke. Despite the death the Stooges were still under contract to deliver four more shorts featuring Shemp that year, so they cobbled them together using the small amount of footage Shemp had filmed for these final shorts, along with old material. Not the most dignified way to treat a brother or friend, but let's be honest, the remaining Stooges probably would have dug up Shemp and done wacky pratfalls with the corpse if they had to.

Curly's head went on to star in several classic Stooge shorts after his death.

Throughout the shorts remaining Stooges Moe and Larry spend a lot of time scratching their melonheads and wondering aloud where that darn Shemp has got to. When Shemp is seen on screen the difference between old and new footage is blatantly obvious -- Shemp was in a bad way towards the end and so he bounces back and forth between his regular merely hideous appearance and looking like something out of a George Romero movie.

These shorts were particularly infamous for their use of "Fake Shemp" stand-in Joe Palma. For the most part Palma was only shown from the back (and even the back of his skull didn't look much like Shemp's), which came off as jarring in the hijinks heavy Stooge shorts. It's one of those basic rules of cinema -- when a character is the center of attention you show their face, so it came off as particularly odd to have somebody performing wacky physical comedy with their back to the camera. But hey, screw you cinema, the Three Stooges don't play by your rules.

Besides, we doubt audiences were really that disappointed to see less of Shemp Howard's face.

Proud winner of the prestigious "Hollywood's Ugliest Man" award from 1950 to 1957.

Beloved celebrities in some pretty awful commercials

Most celebrities today would be willing to take a camera crew to their mother's funeral to film a Pledge Casket Wax commercial, but ironically this very whorishness means folks are more willing to take shopping advice from a guy in military fatigues screaming on a street corner than a celebrity these days. But hey, what if you could resurrect a beloved dead celebrity from an era when stars had integrity? Start the voodoo incantations, we've got steak knives to sell!

One of the earlier examples of advertisers harnessing the power of new-fangled computer effects to reanimate the dead was a 1997 commercial for Dirt Devil in which Fred Astaire has his old dance partner Ginger Rogers replaced with a vacuum cleaner.

Dirt Devil - Fred Astaire - Ceiling (1997) - 0:15 (USA)

Volkswagen wasn't about to be one-upped when it came to defacing the work of a legendary dancer though, unleashing a commercial featuring Gene Kelly breakdancing through his iconic scene from Singin' in the Rain. Kelly's moves are so jerky and unnatural looking you'd swear Skynet accidentally sent a Terminator back to the 50s.

Now what if your company made a fortune selling something completely unremarkable, like say popping corn, based entirely on the strength of your spokesperson, and then that person dies? There's only one solution -- ZOMBIE REDENBACHER.

Peter Sellers in Trail of the Pink Panther

Trail of the Pink Panther was the last movie in the long-running series to star Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, which was an impressive feat considering he was over two years dead when the movie came out. While filming earlier movies in the series Sellers had left behind a wealth of outtakes and unused scenes, which the producers of Trail tried to piece together into a "new" film. The result was less than flawless, with characters miraculously changing age from scene to scene, and frequently seen driving cars, using phones and sporting fashions a decade or two out of date.

Hey kids, find the hundred things from this shot that prove it probably wasn't filmed in the mid-80s.

At one point Clouseau has to fly to England for no good reason other than they had an unused scene filmed in England they wanted to use. One problem -- they had no pre-existing footage of Clouseau on a plane. Their solution was almost brilliant in it's sheer stupidity...

They had Clouseau wrap himself up in bandages for the plane ride, a move the script makes no effort whatsoever to explain. Apparently by that point the producers of the series thought, "come on guys, Clouseau is a moron, nothing he does actually has to make any sense" was explanation enough. The few glimpses you get of the guy behind the bandages looks more like Saddam Hussein than Peter Sellers, and at the end of the scene his cast and most of his bandages magically vanish as they cut to back to old footage.

After about 45-minutes of this, the editor of the movie apparently shot himself in the head out of embarrassment, and so Clouseau "dies" off screen in a plane crash, and the rest of the movie becomes a straight-up clip show. When not replaying favorite moments from past Pink Panthers, the 2nd half of the movie basically forgets it's supposed to be a comedy, instead revolving around a plucky lady reporter standing up to the mob while trying to locate the missing Clouseau. Unfortunately while she has plenty of pluck, she's also kind of incompetent because after 90 minutes the movie just ends with Clouseau never found. No resolution at all. An entire additional movie, Curse of the Pink Panther, continued the "Search for Clouseau" storyline, and when he's finally found he's played by Roger Moore doing a terrible Sellers impression while sporting a bucket on his head.

Still not as stupid as half his Bond movies.

Sellers' widow actually filed a lawsuit against the film's producers, claiming that the movie was so bad it had sullied her husband's reputation forever, and she won. Trail of the Pink Panther, a film so shitty it's practically illegal.

Nathan Birch also writes the dead celebrity-free webcomic Zoology.