Sir Ian McKellen kept an online diary between 1999 and 2003 that chronicled his time filming The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He calls the first part of it The Grey Book, followed by The White Book, and it's delightful.

So the journey has begun without me. On Monday 11th October, Elijah Wood et al gathered in Hobbiton — and I hear they are behaving themselves! I have been in Toronto, masquerading as Magneto, the master of magnetism, on the set of Bryan Singer’s “X-Men.” I have just sent Peter Jackson an e-mail of good luck. I don’t expect an immediate reply — directing a film is totally time-consuming.

Meanwhile, Tolkien aficionados are mailing to the “Grey Book.” From teenagers and readers old as wizards come the advice, the demands, the warnings — united by the hope that the film’s Gandalf will match their own individual interpretations of the Lord of the Rings. I take comfort from the general assurance that they approve of the casting (not just of me but of all the other actors so far announced - thrilling news that Cate Blanchett is joining us.) Yet how can I satisfy everyone’s imagined Gandalf? Simply, I can’t.

I recognise the responsibility of course. It's not as if LOTR were a play that could be revived over and over, each new cast adding to the discoveries that their predecessors have made. The Jackson trilogy will be unique. It is, after all, unlikely that there will be a re-make any time soon - although there have already been the cartoon "Hobbit" (which I have yet to see) and the BBC's radio LOTR (with Ian Holm as Frodo). But some of my correspondents seem to think that actors are essayists or critics who analyse a character's complexities and then parade them, like sticking on a false beard. It's just not like that.

It bears repeating that, as with Richard III or James Whale or Magneto, I must discover Gandalf somewhere inside myself - and that process depends on absorbing the words of the script and its story, listening to the reactions of the director and responding to the performances of the rest of the cast. So now, still 3 months away from shooting (for me), my Gandalf doesn't exist, not even in my mind. He will only come to life as the camera turns and discoveries are made in the very moment. Even when I am in the thick of it, in costume and make-up and speaking Tolkien's words, I'm not sure I will be able to describe the character to you. Actors don't describe - they inhabit.

You can read McKellen's musings of his Gandalf experience in chronological order at his site, or in its original form through the Internet Archive.  -via Kottke

Algol designed a visualization of the four billion year history of the earth. The overall effect is to drive home how relatively recently everything we know came about. The video is three quarters of the way through before plants made it to land, and the percentage of oxygen finally got above 1%. Then things go pretty fast. But it's not as if nothing happened earlier. There was that time the ocean turned red, and meteor impacts to stir things up, and the time the ocean turned purple. If you have trouble catching the notes along the way, they are easier to read here. -via Digg

To the average American, Italian food means something flavored with garlic. To some, the more garlic, the more "authentic" a dish is. But that isn't the story in Italy, and the flavor of garlic was not always welcomed in America the way it is today. See, in most of Italy's long culinary history, garlic was seen as something only poor people ate.

While garlic is as central to Genovese pesto and Piedmontese bagna càuda as it is to any spicy Calabrian tomato sauce, there is a sense that strong flavors like garlic were initially introduced to mask the absence of better ingredients in times, and especially regions, of scarcity. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi famously wouldn’t allow anyone in his cabinet to eat garlic when they were around him—a taste that suited his “successful businessman” persona. And when Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan called the overuse of garlic “the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” she was not denigrating any region or class of Italian food per se, but rather attempting to distinguish her recipes for dishes like delicate risotto alla parmigiana or luxurious vitello tonnato from the cucina povera that had dominated Italian-American cooking up to the mid-20th century.

And who immigrated from Italy to America? Poor people, looking for better opportunities. Read how garlic came to be accepted and even lauded in America, while the rift remains in Italy, at Taste.  -via Damn Interesting

If you're in the US, you might not have realized that there is a Canadian version of Family Feud. A recent episode featured the question "What is Popeye's favorite food?" The answer highlights generational differences in pop culture knowledge, but the best part is how proud she is of herself. But there's more, as these two people had a hard time getting any answer right.

There's more to the #FamilyFeudCanada chicken story - What happens when contestants guess wrong on a sudden death round? Take a look at these behind-the-scenes bloopers and see what you'd never get to see on TV. #bloopers #chicken pic.twitter.com/K7x6V0hpSv

— Family Feud Canada (@FamilyFeudCa) January 10, 2020

-via Boing Boing

A central element to an effective post-secondary education that prepares the mind for the workforce and engaged citizenship is pizza. College students need pizza to survive, especially when ramen is in short supply.

So it is good that the University of North Florida in Jacksonville has installed a pizza vending machine. It is stocked with pre-cooked pizzas, which are warmed up when hungry college students buy them. This particular one is conveniently located in one of the residence halls on campus.

In this video, Joe Lachina, dining services manager at the University of North Florida, demonstrates how the ATM works.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: CBS 4 Miami

The Star Wars franchise has been rich with worldbuilding, history, and unique set designs and scifi gadgetry that is still celebrated today. With four decades of 11 films, six television shows, and a lot of releases in other media, it’s always been a wonder for many to think about the process behind the creation of any aspect of the famed franchise. Wired talks to Victoria Mahoney, the second unit director for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Mahoney shares what it’s like behind the scenes of the movie, and the process of its creation: 

If you thought even space opera scenery would get humdrum after seeing it all day, every day for months, think again. “I can tell you with my whole soul that every time we went to a new location, or we walked onto a different sound stage, I had the same feeling as when I walked onto the first one: ‘Hoooly shit,’” Mahoney says. “You’d hear everyone whispering through the crowd, ‘I love this set.’ [As a director,] what’s fun was finding how to celebrate each crew’s set and all the little, teeny hidden Easter eggs they tell you about. It was like a really great Rubik’s cube. You had to really study them.” Getting her to pick a favorite was difficult, but she settled on Ajan Kloss, the jungle planet where the rebels make their base. “The height and the scale was really something to see. A ship inside a soundstage! The crew had built a forest! There were so many places for really delicious shots and story points to be discovered.”

image via Wired

When the flight attendant asks the passengers, "Is there a doctor on board?" you may be in for an adventure. Do you respond if you're a veterinarian or a psychiatrist? It might depend on the emergency. For a 1995 case, two doctors, Angus Wallace and Tom Wong, were flying British Airways from Hong Kong to London and realized that a woman who had fallen before takeoff was in worse shape than they initially knew. A fractured rib had punctured her lung, causing a pneumothorax. The air leaking into her chest cavity could kill her during descent, so an emergency landing was not an option. An account of the in-flight surgery is at Dr. Wallace's Wikipedia page.

With the limited medical equipment on board, Wallace and Wong had to improvise heavily. The medical kit had lidocaine – a local anaesthetic – but the catheter in the kit was designed only for urinary catheterisation and was too soft for use as a chest tube. The doctors fashioned a trocar from a metal clothes hanger to stiffen the catheter, and a check valve from a bottle of water with holes poked in the cap.[9] They sterilised their equipment in Courvoisier cognac, and began surgery by making an incision in the patient's chest, but with no surgical clamps available, Wong had to hold the incision open with a knife and fork while Wallace inserted the catheter.[7] The whole surgery lasted about ten minutes; the doctors successfully released the trapped air from the patient's chest, and she spent the rest of the flight uneventfully eating and watching in-flight movies.[9]

Wallace's more detailed account of the emergency was published in the British Medical Journal. Since the incident, medical kits in both British and US commercial planes have been expanded to include more equipment and medicine. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Alan Wilson)

Tom Booth is a visual storyteller. Even single images speak of adventure, childhood joy, and magic.

This time, however, he tells a sadder tale. Without words, he shows a man grieving the loss of the woman he loves. The woodworker finds himself carving her image into wood wherever he goes. As the years pass, he gets older and grayer. She stays just as young--and just as forever separated from him.

You can see the story of Booth's woodworker summarized at My Modern Met. And as you can see from Booth's Instagram feed, it has inspired sculptures, tattoos, and fan art.

Karl Patterson Schmidt was a renowned American herpetologist who had years of experience with snakes and other reptiles. But he was mistaken about one very important fact- how venomous a boomslang snake is. He was bitten on the thumb by a juvenile boomslang in 1957.

Karl Schmidt, like many herpetologists at the time, didn't believe that boomslang venom had the fatal dose necessary to kill humans, although peer-reviewed studies showed otherwise. Instead of treating his bite wound, Schmidt took the train home from work, and began to record the effect of the venom in his journal. Schmidt believed that accepting treatment would upset the symptoms he was documenting.

By treating the snake bite as an experiment to observe instead of an emergency, Schmidt didn't seek treatment until it was too late. However, it may have always been too late, since no antivenom was available in 1957. Read Schmidt's story at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: safaritravelplus)

Medina Dugger is a photographer in Lagos, Nigeria. She's fond of the work of the late Nigerian photographer J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, who documented the fanciful hairstyles of his homeland.

To commemorate his work, Dugger has taken up where  'Okhai Ojeikere left off, photographing the women of Nigeria who style their hair so expressively.

Redditor Stephen Hues brings us this interesting image. Wheeling up a hill can be tiring. So the urban planners have incorporated into the sidewalk a space where a wheelchair user can stop and rest.

-via Core77

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If dogs could talk, then this world would certainly be a better place to live. I can imagine a thousand things I could talk about with them if they could really converse with us. Understanding them would be much easier, too.

Check out this video by Robby and Penny over at The Dodo.

What would you ask to your dog if he or she can speak?

(Image Credit: robbyandpenny/ Instagram)

Movies that are fiction have a disclaimer that tells the audience that it is fiction -even for such fantastical tales as comic book superhero movies. Like every common disclaimer, this one has an interesting story behind its use. The precedent involved, believe it or not, Rasputin. His story was such a good one, it had to made into a movie, even while the principles were still alive. That was a mistake, especially that one part that was fictionalized. Cheddar tells the story.

Found in East Lothian, Scotland, is the village of Stenton. It is a small agricultural village with a couple of buildings and patches of farmland. The main produce of this village back in the medieval period were grain, hides, and wool, all of which were sold at markets each week. Erected at a market was a public balance called a tron. At one time, trons became a common sight across rural Scotland.

(Image Credit: Richard Webb/ Wikimedia Commons)

Aging is a process all of us have to go through until our deaths. But can we slow it down? Scientists were able to prove that we can slow down aging, at least in these worms. By tweaking a couple of cellular pathways, they have extended the lifespan of these worms by a staggering 500 percent.

C. elegans is a humble little worm that often finds itself at the heart of aging studies. That’s because it shares many cellular pathways with humans, and it typically lives for three or four weeks, meaning any changes to that lifespan are quickly apparent and easy to measure.

In plenty of past studies, scientists have managed to use drugs or genetic engineering to increase the lifespan of C. elegans by 50 or 100 percent. If directly applied to the average human lifespan of about 80 years, that would be like living to between 120 and 160 years. But in the new study, the team unexpectedly made the worms live five times longer than usual – the human equivalent of which would be 400 years.

This is not a guarantee that this will translate to humans. However, it should be able to give scientists “a new avenue to explore in developing anti-aging techniques.”

More details about this over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill/CC BY SA 3.0)