Carrie needs to sell her 21-year-old car. Her boyfriend, Max Lanman, got some talented friends together and created a video ad to attract buyers for her. From the looks of it, he may end up with some advertising jobs out of it, too.
Paint is in fantastic shape with few cosmetic dings. Drives like a dream. Cat and coffee pot not included. Bug shield, rubber duckies and tape converter included. Featured girlfriend is not actual girlfriend, but an actor. Stunts not performed by a professional driver, but just my actual girlfriend. Do not attempt. Girlfriend is now fiance.
The latest advice for farmers sounds like a superstition: to improve yields, dig a hole in your field and bury your underpants for two months. If you have several fields, you'll need to cough up more underwear. The idea began with the "Soil My Undies" challenge from the California Farmers’ Guild, and is now recommended by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and Quality Meat Scotland (QMS). But it's no old wives' tale. The underwear must be made of cotton, and the result is a relatively cheap and easy soil test.
Evan Wiig, Executive Director of the California Farmers’ Guild, said: “Cotton is an organic material and breaks down naturally just like anything else you’d put in your compost pile. So if you bury cotton in soil teeming with life, all those creatures will begin to feast.
“If you have dead soil, if it is totally lifeless you should be able to pull the pants out of the ground, throw it in the washing machine and put them on like nothing ever happened. If you have incredibly healthy soil, you should have nothing left but an elastic strap.”
Soil that is worked over by microbes, insects, and worms will be more nutritious for the plants that grow there, and for the animals that graze the fields. Read more about the underpants test at the Telegraph. -Thanks, Walter!
What we say today shapes the vocabulary of tomorrow.
Boomers, Generation X, Millennials -every 20 years or so we name a new generation. We characterize them by cultural shifts in fashion (bell-bottoms!), musical styles (grunge!), and food preferences (kale!). But generations can also be characterized by language, as seen in a new book by Allan Metcalf, From Skedaddle to Selfie, from Oxford University Press. The expressions that rise to prominence at particular times often reveal surprising things about who we are.
When the nation was young, members of the Transcendental Generation (born 1792 to 1821) had a spiritual, authority-questioning bent. They brought transcendental into the general vocabulary. They also, writes Metcalf, “bequeathed to the country its greatest and most successful word”: OK. First used by a Boston newspaper editor as an intentionally misspelled jokey abbreviation of “all correct” -similar to the publishing industry’s term TK to indicate material “to come”- the expression took off during the 1840 re-election campaign of Martin Van Buren, who was also known as Old Kinderhook. His supporters set up OK clubs, jauntily suggesting he was “oll korrect.” Detractors quickly turned the new word around to criticize Van Buren (he’s “orfully konfused!”) and his predecessor Andrew Jackson (so illiterate he couldn’t spell all correct!). Eventually everyone forgot where OK came from, and it became an all-purpose staple.
James Patterson might be the most successful man in the book-writing business. But these days he wants something more.
YOU KNOW THE NAME. You’ve seen it, embossed and shimmering, in that big, bold text, in airport kiosks and supermarkets, in bookstores and bulk-buy warehouses, practically anyplace where a book might be sold. There’s a simple reason for that: James Patterson is aggressively better than anyone else on the planet when it comes to making books people love to read. (Image credit: Susan Solie-Patterson)
With more than 305 million copies of his 148 books in print, Patterson has the distinction of having been the top-selling fiction writer (living or dead) of the 2000s, according to Nielsen BookScan. He holds a Guinness World Record for being the first author to sell more than one million e-books. This year, Forbes determined that Patterson is not only the world’s highest-paid writer by a long shot, raking in $63 million more than the runner-up, he's also the seventh-highest-paid celebrity in the world—outranking Taylor Swift and LeBron James.
The breadth of that power is difficult to reconcile with the man himself, a casual fellow with untamed eyebrows and a paternal air. He’s just arrived early (he’s always early) to the Manhattan headquarters of his longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Company, where the James Patterson team has 10 full-time employees. Coming from Briarcliff Manor in Westchester, New York—where he owns a lavish house overlooking the Hudson, in addition to his 20,000-square-foot home in Palm Beach, Florida—he’s in town today for a slate of afternoon meetings. Tonight, he’ll catch a Yankees game with his 17-year-old son, Jack, which means he’ll miss the new episode of Zoo, the prime-time CBS series based on his 2012 novel. He’s just notched another No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list for his latest hardcover, Alert. “Yes, I love that people are reading the books,” he says, waving off a congratulations. “It doesn’t matter to me, strangely.”
Maybe that’s because if Patterson pays attention to the good, he has to pay attention to the bad. And there has been bad. Stephen King once called him “a terrible writer.” Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson trashed his work as “sick, sexist, sadistic, and subliterate.” With the help of an army of paid co-writers, he’s so prolific—17 books for adults and kids in 2015—that his name has become a kind of critical shorthand for mass-market mediocrity.
It matters not. Millions of people are almost pathologically addicted to his tales of veteran cops and kidnappers, lending Patterson access to an expansive demographic. His thrillers are the most requested at Rikers Island, the New York City jail. For the last eight years, he’s been the most borrowed author in British libraries. Against the stereotypes, despite his characters’ many mutilations and gory deaths, women are his most loyal fans.
As they have in previous years, Salt & Straw in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland is offering special limited edition ice cream flavors in the month of November that mimic the taste of a classic Thanksgiving dinner. Specifically, this year's Thanksgiving ice creams are 1. Sweet Potato Casserole with Maple Pecans, 2. Buttered Mashed Potatoes & Gravy, 3. Apple Cranberry Stuffing, 4. Salted Caramel Thanksgiving Turkey, and 5. Spiced Goat Cheese & Pumpkin Pie. Honestly, those might be good if you take out the words potato, gravy, and turkey. Los Angeles magazine offers a description of each flavor, although the stuffing flavor is different from the company's menu. They do note that
(they skipped that green bean-mushroom soup thing, which was wise)
It's fairly common for children to eventually enter the family business. It's even more common when you grow up in an industry town like Hollywood. Many famous actors got their training and connections from their actor parents. But some of these connections you might not even know. For example, I had no idea that Gwyneth Paltrow is the daughter of Blythe Danner, although there's really no reason why I should have known it. You might be surprised by some of the parental connections in this gallery. Some look just like their famous parent, while others look completely different. Check out sets of celebrity parents and their celebrity children at the same age at TVOM.
Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell recently moved from an apartment to a 115-year-old row house. The doors are so small that she couldn't get her existing furniture in the rooms they were meant to go, so she had to replace most of it with IKEA pieces to be assembled in place. The procedure made her wonder about the history of the house. How did people move their furniture to a new home 100 years ago? That question led her into research that we all wish we could do on our older homes. She found some actual data on the address, and added in speculation about its inhabitants and their lifestyle.
In order to glean how working people moved back in the early 1900s, I decided to focus on a few key areas of research:
What kind of wages the family would make, what they would spend it on and what kind of local industry they might have participated in.
What kind of stuff was being moved; (AKA what kind of furniture these folks bought and how much it cost)
What the costs were of moving services during this time, and whether they were affordable for the family in question.
We've seen a few ridiculously funny videos from Faireset, in which he adds French dialogue to cat videos. This video features a hungry cat and a curious cockatiel. But what if the cat was a grumpy restaurant patron, and the cockatiel was an earnest but inept waiter? Watch the English subtitles, but keep one eye on the critters.
If a hedgehog were made of gummy candy, it would look like this. But this a real caterpillar. Janice Ang of Singapore found and recorded this caterpillar on a Macarthur Palm tree and posted it to the Facebook group Mothing and Moth-watching. The species is Olona, of the Limacodidae family. It will growing a nondescript moth that looks nothing like the caterpillar.
Limacodidae caterpillar is like a walking gummy bear
Limacodid larvae are often highly ornamented and brightly coloured.
Two main types can be distinguished: Larvae armed with rows of protuberances bearing stinging spines called “stinging nettle” caterpillars, or non-spined forms where the surface of the larvae may by completely smooth, called “gelatin” caterpillars.
This one hit the jackpot as both spiky and gelatinous. Which honestly sounds like words you'd use to describe an alien species in a science fiction movie. -via @ziyatong
In the Victorian age, coal mining in Britain paid so little that not only did a miner work long hours underground, so did his wife and children. Women and children were paid half as much as a man, but every little bit helped keep the family fed. An inspection of a Staffordshire mine in 1841 revealed women and children as young as five working underground. What shocked the commissioners the most was how the women were dressed. They would ditch their shirts to work in the hot mines, and even worse, they wore trousers!
But women miners had few options when it came to clothing: flimsier, cooler clothing, which revealed the contours of their body, were seen as “an invitation to promiscuity.” Trousers, and other practical garments, were “unwomanly”—and often led to wardrobe malfunctions. In his 1842 speech to Parliament, Lord Ashley described how the work sometimes wore holes in the crotch of these women and girls’ trousers: “The chain passing high up between the legs of two girls, had worn large holes in their trousers. Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work. No brothel can beat it.” (What’s especially striking about these observations is that they seem more concerned about the modesty of the women than that they toiled in life-threatening situations.)
When women and children under ten were forbidden to work underground, they sought jobs up top sorting coal. The women at the mines in Wigan, still wearing trousers, became a tourist attraction for those wanting to witness such a scandal. Read about the pants-wearing women of the mines at Atlas Obscura.
Nick Murray Willis took famous lines from 22 movies and gave each one of them a cartoon. But the context as they are drawn is completely different from the movie scene. There's a list of the movies at the YouTube page in case there are any you don't recognize.
The way people interpret a word can totally change depending on the context. The very first story in this video illustrates that: Because Bugs Bunny used a fairly unfamiliar word, it must be an insult. And it's been considered so ever since. There are plenty of terms that have gone through a change, for many different reasons. Language evolves quickly, even in one lifetime. You'll be surprised by some of what you'll learn in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
What we have here is a heavy metal Disney tune sung by Tom Selleck, as Dave Letterman plays drums. Or not. Last night, Dave Grohl guest-hosted the TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live, dressed in his Halloween costume as Letterman. His guest Kristen Bell was Tom Selleck/Thomas Magnum, complete with chest hair. They both have daughters who are big fans of the movie Frozen, so they performed the song "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" mashed up with Metallica's "Enter Sandman."
The 1982 film Poltergeist was terrifying. Written and produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, it starred Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, so it was a guaranteed hit from the get-go. But we most clearly recall the adorable Heather O'Rourke as the youngest child of the family who moved into a cursed house. If you were impressed by Poltergeist, you'll want to learn what went on behind the scenes.
5. Out of all the scary scenes only one really got to O’Rourke.
She didn’t mind anything except the scene in which she had to hang from her headboard as a giant fan pushed everything into her closet, meaning the scene in which the poltergeists were trying to take her again.
4. The skeletons in the pool were real.
Nobody told JoBeth this until afterwards. Some people even thought that the cast was cursed after the use of real skeletons since the eldest daughter was killed after the films release and O’Rourke passed away several years later.
Tom Hanson owned a few Pizza Man restaurants and a few KFC outlets in southern California in the 1960s. But what he really wanted to do was get into the movie business, just like millions of other people who moved to Los Angeles from elsewhere. Hanson had done some bit parts, but in 1971, he jumped into film production with both feet -to solve a crime. The Zodiac Killer had been menacing L.A. for a couple of years by then, but no one knew who he was. Hanson spent $13,000 to make a movie about the crimes, rented a theater to show it, and set up surveillance to see who attended. He was sure that the Zodiac Killer could not resist seeing a movie called The Zodiac Killer.
On the last night of the engagement, Hanson interrupted his surveillance for a bathroom break. “I was standing at the urinal and thought I heard the door open,” he says. “I turned around but didn’t see anyone.”
Without a sound, a man had materialized at the urinal next to Hanson’s, remarking about a graphic scene in the movie and how “real blood” wouldn’t come out of a body like that. “I zipped up, turned, and saw the same face that was on the wanted poster. Same eyes, nose, mouth, hair, everything. I thought, 'Son of a bitch, it’s him.'"
