Many credit, debit, and gift card systems are moving away from magnetic strips and into embedded chips. The transition isn’t going smoothly at all. Everyone I know who uses a chip card has encountered problems. Even one person who does not have a chip card ran into problems when every card reader in Europe required a chip. It’s like this:
Have you changed to the chip-type cards yet? How’s that working out for you? -Thanks, Carl Baker!
The state of Oregon extended the right to vote to women in 1912, eight years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed that right to all American women. In 1920, the small city of Yoncalla, Oregon, elected a woman mayor and put women in all the city council slots. They were prominent citizens already; some were the spouses of the incumbents they replaced. The municipal election became a sensation in the national press.
The story of the women spread: They had held secret meetings, in which they voiced frustration with the current administration. Upset by broken sidewalk planks and misaligned outhouses, they had hatched a plan to run for office themselves. And, because they were elected just two months after women in the United States received the right to vote, their new administration made headlines all the way to the East Coast. Most publications treated it like a coup d’état: “Campaign secretly organized,” Morning Oregonian declared; “Sex uprising in Yoncalla,” asserted The New York Times.
The real story behind the election of five women is murkier. Local sources believe that the previous council just gave up their part-time unpaid jobs to let the women give it a try. The women, who were used to unpaid work, set out to fix the town’s problems. Read about the all-woman Yoncalla city council at the Atlantic. -via Digg
(Image credit: Douglas County Museum)
Luke Spencer went on a quest to trace the steps of Jonathan Harker, the protagonist of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Harker went from Munich to Transylvania to purchase land for a client. While this trip sounds like a fun time, it was also a research project. Bram Stoker never went to Transylvania himself, but he did plenty of research, so Spencer wanted to see how accurate his descriptions were. The first thing he found out was that places that existed (or not) in 1897 aren’t necessarily easy to find today. For one thing, Transylvania is no longer a country, but a region of Romania. And that wasn’t the only name that changed.
My first stop on the vampire trail was meant to be the Hotel Royale, where Harker stayed the night in the old city of Klausenburg. But looking at an atlas today, there is no city by that name.
Located roughly halfway between Budapest, Hungary, and Bucharest, Romania, the city shed the name Stoker knew it by after World War I, when Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Today it’s known as Cluj-Napoca, and it’s a bustling, bohemian university town.
The Hotel Royale doesn’t exist today, and maybe it never did. But nestled near the train station is an historic inn that claims to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker. The Hotel Transilvania, located on Ferdinand Street, is one of the oldest in the city, and has been an inn since the Middles Ages.
When the Klausenburg railway station was built in 1870, the venerable old hotel went by another name, the Queen of England—perhaps a regal sounding inspiration for a Hotel Royale.
That was only the beginning. What he found was charming, and even spooky in parts. Read about the retracing of Dracula at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Luke Spencer)
2016 Literature Laureate Bob Dylan, age 75, born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. #NobelPrize
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 13, 2016
The Swedish Academy has announced the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan
"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
It was certainly an untraditional choice, and the first Nobel in Literature won by an American since 1993. The oddsmakers had predicted a half-dozen other possible winners, so Dylan will be a surprise. The award comes with 8 million kroner, or about $900,000. -via Metafilter
Have you ever been to a wall that captures your shadow? I saw the one at the Exploratorium in San Francisco years ago. Never would I have imagined that you could recreate one in your own home! But that’s just the beginning of what Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) is doing with this wall.
It glows. It captures shadows. You can draw on it. You can transfer existing images onto it. Combine all those, and get some really cool temporary artwork. The DIY part begins about 2:45 into the video. It’s just a matter of covering your wall with glow-in-the-dark paint or vinyl. Yeah, you can buy that stuff. You’ll also need the proper lights: flashing spotlight, UV flashlight, and laser pens. Most of the video is examples of the really neat things you can do with it. -via Viral Viral Videos
These adorable little mummy faces will be the hit of your Halloween party! And they are filled with yummy no-bake pumpkin cheesecake. The recipe is genius: crushed gingersnaps and graham crackers added to pumpkin and cream cheese, plus more spices. The decorating part requires a little dexterity, but the results are cute as can be. Get complete instructions at Creme de la Crumb. This was part of a list of Halloween party treats at Buzzfeed.
Have you ever heard of a tussie-mussie? Spellcheck certainly hasn’t. Before cities had adequate fresh water and sewers, when horses filled the roads, the air was full of the foul smells of body odor and worse. A tussie-mussie was a fancy container that 18th- and 19th-century ladies could carry sweet-smelling flowers in to fight the ambient stench. Collector Irene Deitsch, who wrote Tussie-Mussies: A Collector’s Guide to Victorian Posy Holders, tells us about them.
In her book, Deitsch organizes her tussie-mussies by their materials—sterling silver, silverplate, gold, ivory, glass, porcelain, mother-of-pearl, straw—as well as their styles—handheld vs. lapel pin, bosom bottle vs. three-legged tripod. While some of these objects may be admired for their beautiful enameling or intricate etching, many are also windows into the courtship customs of privileged young ladies during the Victorian Era, particularly in England. “Some have flirting mirrors on them,” Deitsch says, “so a young women carrying a tussie-mussie could see who was behind her.” Others sport small flat surfaces holding thin sheets of ivory, upon which the names of gentlemen desiring a dance would be written.
Learn more about tussie-mussies and how they were used, and see a gallery of lovely examples, at Collectors Weekly.
The most topical costumes for Halloween 2016 include the presidential election, Harambe, Suicide Squad, and Stranger Things. The Netflix show has several characters you could portray but the most iconic image from the series is the wall of lights. The costume above was spotted at Dragon Con. It’s the most elaborate of the many Stranger Things wall costumes in a list at Buzzfeed. The others would be much easier to pull off.
When any TV show ends a successful run, the suits behind it salivate over the thought of a spin-off show. People like the characters, so why not re-use them? Those spin-off shows can be big hits or disappear quickly. And there are even more proposed spin-offs that never happened for one reason or another. Those reasons can be fascinating, as we learn on this this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.
We enjoy our hi-tech world until something goes wrong, then you wish things were built just a bit simpler. For example, it’s nice to push a button to roll down the car window until it stops working. Once upon a time, you could remove the door panel, see what the problem is, and fix it. You didn’t even have to know auto mechanics to do that, but back then parents taught their kids how to fix their own cars anyway. It’s useless these days, since so many parts of an automobile are controlled by computers. A story about a British tea drinker follows the same line.
Mark Rittman is a data specialist and no stranger to tech. He has a new wifi-enabled tea kettle, and set about brewing a cup at 9 AM yesterday. Three hours later, it still wasn’t working.
A key problem seemed to be that Rittman’s kettle didn’t come with software that would easily allow integration with other devices in his home, including Amazon Echo, which, like Apple’s Siri, allows users to tell connected smart devices what to do.
So Rittman was trying to build the integration functionality himself.
All that is completely over my head, but Rittman kept working on it, sharing every step on Twitter. Every time he solved one problem, another would pop up. Eleven hours later, he finally got his first cup of tea of the day.
My work is done. And now onto everything else I meant to do today, after that first cup of tea. pic.twitter.com/bJPuJ85TCT
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Commenters who followed the story on Twitter wondered why Rittman didn’t return the kettle to the store, which would have taken much less time. Hey, it was a challenge for the tech guy, and made a great (if long) story in the end. Read the short version at the Guardian. Or you can see the long string of Tweets that chronicled Rittman’s day, although he says he will condense the story on his blog, once he gets caught up on everything else he didn’t do yesterday. -via Metafilter
Update: Rittman's account of the tea kettle saga is up at his blog.
After fame in The New Yorker comics and 1960’s TV, the creepy, kooky Addams Family went to the big screen in 1991. A new generation got to know The Addams Family. The casting of Raoul Julia, Angelica Huston, and Christopher Lloyd was inspired. But was Lloyd’s character Uncle Fester really an Addams? That question fueled the plot, and changed during the production.
8. THERE WAS AN ACTOR REBELLION, LED BY 10-YEAR-OLD CHRISTINA RICCI.
The actors were concerned about the ambiguity of the big Fester storyline in the script. Initially, it was going to be unknown if Gordon, the man suffering from memory loss that looked just like Uncle Fester, was actually Fester. The actors nominated Wednesday Addams herself, Christina Ricci, to give an impassioned plea to [producer Scott] Rudin and [director Barry] Sonnenfeld two weeks before shooting that Fester should not be an imposter. Sonnenfeld remembered that the only actor to not care was Christopher Lloyd, the man playing Fester.
10. HUSTON HAD TO GO THROUGH A LOT TO GET INTO CHARACTER.
''Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw,'' Sonnenfeld told Entertainment Weekly, ''so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I've never seen any woman have in reality.'' The role also required Huston to get gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and fake nails daily. ''Come afternoon, I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages,'' she told EW. ''And because I couldn't lie down (in the corset) or rest, it was fairly exhausting.''
Read more of what went into the production of The Addams Family at mental_floss.
Have you ever noticed all the birds in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho? Sure, when they mention them, but if you start looking, there are way more than you first realized. And the placement of every one of them is significant. Mind blown.
Hitchcock was really big on framing and designing each shot, as well as symbolism and foreshadowing. It’s possible I overlooked the presence of so many birds because I saw the 1963 movie The Birds before Psycho. ScreenPrism sets that right with a closeup on all those creepy birds. -via Digg
The horror of potatoes! Watch the trailer for the film Peeled: The Potato Resurrection. While the premise is silly, there are moments of real terror.
Of course, after you’ve seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, you’ll believe anything can be made into a movie. I actually checked IMDb to make sure this wasn’t a feature film. It’s a horror film parody trailer, written and produced by Katrina Naficy (who also stars) and directed and edited by Nick Massey. Well done, just like my potatoes. My apologies if YouTube makes you watch a real trailer before the potato trailer. -via Laughing Squid
Before Christian Bale was Batman, he was Bateman, the psychopath in the 2000 movie American Psycho. He’s attractive, wealthy, and smart, but it doesn’t take long to see that he’s the kind of person you’d want to avoid at all costs. The movie makes you wonder about everyone around you. It was a horror/comedy/satire that thrilled and confused the audience. If you liked the movie, you’ll want to learn some of the things that went on behind the scenes.
Christian Bale based his performance of Patrick Bateman off of a 1993 Interview that Tom Cruise did on The Late Show with David Letterman. Bale said that he saw “this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.”
Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Ewan McGregor, and Leonardo DiCaprio were all set to play Bateman before Christian Bale took the part.
Christian improvised his little dance that he does when he starts playing “Hip to be square.” Director Mary Harron said that she “collapsed in laughter” when he caught her off guard with the moves.
Read the rest of the 30 facts about American Psycho at Unreality.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Quite possibly, along with The Wizard of Oz, it is the single most beloved film of all-time. This American classic is the first color film to win a Best Picture Academy Award (1939). Okay, let's take a look at a few lesser-known facts about the immortal film Gone With The Wind.
1. Despite the fantasies so many women have about getting kissed by Clark Gable, actress Vivien Leigh did not actually enjoy kissing Gable. She claimed his dentures smelled bad.
2. The smokingest leads in movie history? Vivien Leigh smoked four packs of cigarettes during the filming of GWTW. And Clark Gable was a lifelong three pack-a-day smoker. That's seven packs of smokes a day- that's a lot of nicotine (cough cough hack hack)!
3. In one of the biggest "cattle calls" in Hollywood history, over 1,400 actresses were considered for the female lead role of Scarlett O’Hara. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Susan Hayward, Katharine Hepburn, and Lucille Ball (!!!) were all in the running. Another candidate was Carole Lombard, the real-life great love of Clark Gable's life. Tallulah Bankhead, a real-life southern belle, was actually a major front-runner, but her unsavory personal life made producers reluctant to cast her as Scarlett.
4. Although 1,400 actresses were considered for the role, only 400 were given actual readings. Of the screen tests, only Vivien Leigh and Paulette Goddard were given their tests in color.
