The next Star Wars movie is a stand-alone film covering the life of Han Solo in his younger days, before he met Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa. Disney aired a 45-second teaser during the Super Bowl last night, and promised the full trailer would debut today. And now it's here. It's only a minute and a half, and we don't see much of Han, but this is what we have.
The film stars Alden Ehrenreich as the title character, Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, plus Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, and Thandie Newton as characters we haven't met. Solo: A Star Wars Story will be in theaters May 25.
Once upon a time, the Super Bowl was all about football. Then it became all about the party ...and the food. Then as ad rates soared, the game became a showcase for advertisers to put their best foot forward, with new and clever ad campaigns that cost millions. Well, that's still true, but those of us who don't want to watch hours of football know that those premiere ads would be easier seen on the internet. And so it is. You can watch the best of them all in one place this morning. See Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman channel Busta Rhymes and Missy Elloit, watch Wendy's diss McDonalds, get a fleeting glimpse of the new Star Wars movie, and see what the Bud Knight does.
Kaplamino gives us look at the project he's been working for three months. It's a chain reaction marble run on a tilt table. There are magnets, levers, fidget spinners, catapults, and all kinds of clever segments all working together to get one blue marble to the end.
Kaplamino (previously at Neatorama) says it took about 500 failures to get this video, but he refined the design along the way. After the design was perfected, it only took about 30 tries to get everything to work in one perfect run. -via reddit
It's fascinating (at least to us) to find out how classic children's books were created. There aren't necessarily magical stories behind them; some were conceived in bars or business meetings, some were inspired by hated relatives, and some just evolved out of other books. Still, it's interesting trivia. Here are some examples.
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
In November 1955, Maurice Sendak, a young storybook artist, drew up a draft of a children's story he called Where the Wild Horses Are. The only problem: "I couldn't really draw horses," Sendak said, "and I didn't, for the longest time, know what to use for a substitute. I tried lots of animals in the title, but they just didn't sound right." In 1963, Sendak finally settled on Things, dumping the horses in favor of monsters that were based on the Brooklyn relatives he detested as a child. "I remember how inept they were at making small talk with children. There you'd be, totally helpless, while they cooed over you and pinched your cheeks. Or they'd lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like, 'You're so cute, I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would."
There's been a lot of talk about going to Mars lately, talk that includes plans for human settlements on Mars, which doesn't sound like a very good idea considering what sci-fi has taught us about off-world colonization.
But do you know what's an even worse idea? Trying to settle on Venus, where life would literally feel like hell thanks to the sulfur dioxide clouds in the sky, intense heat and ten-mile-thick toxic cloud that covers the surface.
This animated video by Second Thought breaks down all the horrible things awaiting anyone foolish enough to move to Venus, but I think Venus might be okay if it had a theme park...Disney Venus anyone?
Calling names, now huh? I've got enough problems without appliances getting an attitude. There's a perfectly logical explanation. "Slut" mean "finished" in Danish and Swedish. In Norwegian, it would say "slutt." I don't know how you would say finished in Finnish. -via reddit
My bookshelf is actually three bookshelves, one large two medium, and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to whittle my collection down to one bookshelf because I keep finding new books to fall in love with.
And since I stopped collecting comics for the most part and now collect graphic novels instead my book collection has to be trimmed down a bit every so often because I'll be damned if I'm gonna buy another bookshelf!
Although...this Incidental Comics strip by Grant Snider does remind me I have two boxes full of books that fit in to many of these categories sitting in my garage waiting to be shelved...BOOKS! *shakes fist*
The sports of the Winter Olympics have us watching mainly to see who slips and falls on the snow and ice. Could we possibly make it more dangerous? Think of this: downhill ice skating. Then give it a winding course with jumps and have a bunch of skaters go all at once. That's Ice Cross Downhill, a sport invented by Red Bull, of course. The video here is a compilation of crashes.
Pirates are one of the original subcultures, and like the punks and goths who appropriated their style centuries later their lifestyle and fashion choices were considered questionable by polite society- especially considering male pirates wore earrings and married other men.
Pirates didn't just wear earrings to be fashionable- they wore them to protect their hearing while firing cannons and as a form of life insurance:
The crafty sea criminals would hang wads of wax from their earrings to prevent this sound damage. They popped the waxy contraptions into their ears like a makeshift earplug when firing cannons.
The infamous piercings that pirates wore in their ears were actually insurance to make sure that they'd be given a proper burial. Whether gold or silver, the precious metal could be melted down and sold to pay for a casket and other funeral necessities even if a pirate's dead body washed ashore.
Some pirates went so far as to engrave the name of their home port on the inside of the earrings so that their bodies could be sent home for a proper burial.
Pirates also practiced gay marriage as far back as the 1600s, which is quite the practical practice when you consider practically every pirate and sailor on the High Seas was male:
Pirates spent long periods of time on ships surrounded by other men so it’s no surprise that some shared intimate relationships. Other pirates formalized same-sex relationships through a practice called matelotage, a French word that may be at the root of the pirate greeting "Ahoy mate."
In pirate society, two men could join into matelotage and share all their plunder, even receiving death benefits if one died before the other. Pirate mates would live together, exchange gold rings, and sometimes even share female prostitutes.
If you knew what this corgi has been through you wouldn't look at him like just another dog, and if Dirk had been able to access that cute little critter's mind when they were first introduced he wouldn't have run around investigating and whatnot- because the case would have been solved in a flash. However, had Dirk not met Rapunzel the corgi he never would have met Todd and Amanda and the Rowdy 3! Okay, that last one probably wouldn't have been such a bad thing...
Take the key to the mystery with you wherever you go with this Everything Is Connected t-shirt by Matt Parsons, it's the fun and stylish way to pretend like you're a holistic detective every day!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Among the gory medical tales from Thomas Morris, here is one about a "lady past middle age" who consulted a doctor in 1853 about pain and constipation. She had been suffering for twelve years already.
Her appearance being thin and haggard, and the statement of her symptoms involving much that was unusual, an examination of the rectum was deemed necessary. On passing the finger into the bowel, a hard uneven substance was encountered, having somewhat the shape of a vase, and being at least fifteen inches in circumference.
Patients have an uncanny habit of sticking the most unsuitable objects inside themselves, so the doctor no doubt suspected that this foreign body actually was a vase.
Its exterior did not in the least resemble that of indurated [hardened] faeces, feeling, indeed, as hard as stone, and being rough, like an oyster shell. Very fortunately its interior was not so hard as the outside, otherwise its removal might have been impracticable. By the use of a pair of long polypus forceps, a hole was gradually made into its centre, and working outwards from this by degrees, the mass was broken down, and extracted piecemeal by means of a scoop.
The patient recovered, and the pieces of the mass that was removed from the woman was sent to a meeting of the Pathological Society of London. The members went to work to figure out what it was, and how it managed to form inside the woman's bowel. Read how she made her own version of concrete at Thomas Morris' blog. -via Strange Company
Orcas aren't holding a grudge over the whole Sea World/Blackfish thing, in fact they've been getting a bit chummier with people since whaling has gone out of style.
Wikie, the main orca in the study, was born in captivity and had already been taught to imitate behaviors on cue by a trainer at Marineland, but now she can deliver "recognizable copies" of words like hello, bye-bye and one, two, three:
"We are interested in the possibility that other species also have cultural processes," the study's lead author, José Zamorano-Abramson, told The New York Times.
For this study, the trainers used that motion after noises instead of actions. They started by presenting her with sounds she already knew how to make on command, like a noisy breath or a high-pitched peeping sound.
Then they introduced "novel sounds" she had never been trained to make before. Some of them were orca sounds, which Wikie would copy either from her calf, Moana, or from a recording. She might hear a squeak like a creaky door, a wolf-whistle-esque siren, or a noise like an elephant call — sounds she had never been heard to make on her own.
Then there were the human sounds: "Ah ah," "hello," "bye-bye," "Amy," "one-two" and "one-two-three."
Those were definitelynew to Wikie. But she gave it a shot. She caught on to "hello" and "one-two-three" on her first attempt, although some of the others took far longer.
If, for some reason, you will be in the midst of a group of football fans this evening, you might feel a little out of place. You really don't know much about the game, but you don't want to look stupid, either. Help is here! Kayden Hines posted this handy chart to help you get through the evening. She says,
The trick with all of these is to leave the room immediately after you say something and don’t answer any questions
Xena is a Siberian husky, and her buddy Lana is a Malamute. They live together, and most of the time the dogs are best friends, but here they are having an argument. You can see them both trying to get a word in, raising their voices, reaching out, rebuffing, pressing their points, turning their backs to pout, cooling off, and all the behaviors you'd expect in a family dispute.
The two eventually made up, but you have to wonder who won, and what they were arguing about in the first place. You can see more of Xena, Lana, and their other housemate Kiko at Instagram. -via Tastefully Offensive
Can you guess what year a photograph was taken just by looking at it? Then test yourself with Photo Roulette. The game will give you a picture, and you have ten guesses to get it right. Wrong guesses will give you a hint, but it's not as easy as you might think. If there are people in the photo, you can easily narrow down the era by what they are wearing, but landscapes and buildings are really hard to peg. Once you guess the right year (or run out of guesses), you'll get a "view photo" button that takes you to its Library of Congress page and all the information about the image. The picture above is listed as "between 1900 and 1910," but the game made me use several guesses to get to 1900. Try Photo Roulette here. It could be addicting. -via Metafilter
