This is adorable. He’s a young Star Wars fan. She moves in next door. He’s too shy to introduce himself. But he approaches her in his own nerdy way. Is he just too Star Wars-obsessed for her?
This is the Christmas ad for the German supermarket Kaufland. Don't worry about the language because there is no dialogue. What we have are the universal languages of love, Christmas, and Star Wars. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Marlene Halt of Tonawanda, New York, is a big fan of Christmas. The 66-year-old grandmother decorates, bakes, and shops extensively every December. But this year, Halt became a Christmas cliche when she got run over by a reindeer -well, not a caribou, but a deer- and spent two weeks in the hospital.
It was just after dinner on Dec. 10, when Halt and her neighbor were out on their nightly walk on Heritage Road across from Brighton Park Golf Course.
It was already dark out and they were on the sidewalk, just a few houses down from Halt’s home on Heritage.
Halt felt something slam into her right side.
“It just came out of nowhere,” she said.
Her friend turned to her and gasped: “Did you feel that brush past?”
At first she didn’t see Halt, she later told her. Then she looked down and saw Halt on the ground.
A deer, possibly spooked by a dog, had crashed into Halt and run away, probably back to the golf course, where deer are often seen.
Halt suffered a broken hip in the crash, and was taken to a hospital where she received hip replacement surgery. Her family was worried, but over time came to see the humor in the situation. Halt is such a big Christmas fan that she actually fulfilled the silly seasonal song. She even got a t-shirt to commemorate the event. Halt recovered from surgery well enough to leave the hospital Tuesday and celebrate Christmas with her family. -via Fark
(Unrelated image credit: Oregon Department of Transportation)
Vicky Vásquez and her team at the Pacific Shark Research Center in California have identified and described a newly-discovered shark species that’s as weird as they get. This fish is a black deepwater shark that glows in the dark! The combination of dark skin and photophores that produce a subdued glow give this shark the ability to sneak up on prey and avoid predators at the same time. Its taxonomic name is Etmopterus benchleyi, named in honor of Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws. For its informal name, Vásquez consulted with several young cousins, the youngest being eight years old.
This super stealth, combined with the animal’s sleek, black appearance led the kids to suggest naming it the “Super Ninja Shark.” Vásquez says she didn’t think her colleagues would quite go for that, so she got them to scale the name back a little.
“We don’t know a lot about lanternsharks. They don’t get much recognition compared to a great white,” says Vásquez, who is a graduate student at the Pacific Shark Research Center (PSRC) in California. “So when it came to this shark I wanted to give it an interesting story.”
The shark is now called the ninja lanternshark, which is about the coolest name ever for a shark. Still, this one poses little threat to humans. It grows to about 18 inches long and stays below 800 meters. You can download the original research paper at the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation.
(Image credit: Vicky Vásquez)
IndigoSalsa made a gingerbread house and layered on the frosting in the manner of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” And look, there’s the artist himself as a gingerbread man- with one ear! We don’t know if that was the way he was made, or whether someone bit off the other ear. How appropriate that a famous redhead gets rendered in gingerbread. -via reddit
@rhodri This is me & hubby for the next couple of nights. pic.twitter.com/WhvnBh5DbT
— Diane Griffin (@Artmotiveuk) December 24, 2015
You’ve been gone from your childhood home for a few years, and when you go back for Christmas, you find your folks have turned your old bedroom into a storage unit, so they got an air mattress for you. Or you can share the foldout couch with a sibling.
@rhodri My rather magical bed for the next few nights - my sister (22) is on the bottom bunk pic.twitter.com/SA8K1xRwcF
— Chloe James (@grrrlbrarian) December 24, 2015
Or maybe they kept your room the way it was -a junior twin or bunk bed complete with your licensed childhood bedding. That’s what happens when adult children return home for the holidays -often with partners, kids, and even grandkids. Togetherness!
@rhodri mattress in the laundry room at mum's. Pretty sure I didn't sleep there as a child. #dudewheresmyroom pic.twitter.com/grqL8PordD
— Rachel Maclean (@WhofanRachel) December 24, 2015
Rhodri Marsden has been collecting pictures and stories of holiday sleeping arrangements from all over for several years now. He collected the best of this year’s submissions at Storify. Late entries and more can be seen at his Twitter feed. -via Metafilter
Some of us wanted to be the first to see The Force Awakens last Thursday. Others decided to wait until the crowds died down a little. And then there’s a group of people who had no choice -those who work in movie theaters. An anonymous theater manager gives an account of what this past weekend was like. It was like nothing he/she had experienced before.
In a single moment at 7 p.m., we had to process more people than we normally do on an entire Friday night of business. These are the moments you learn that hell is real, and we are living in it. The huge crowd stressed the power supply to the point that the frozen drinks machine kept breaking and the oil line for one of our two popcorn kettles burst open, knocking it out of commission. In a situation like this, I could have 50 staff and it would not make a difference.
It didn’t make much difference how many people he/she scheduled to work, “(Apparently, the only people in town who couldn’t be at the movies that night were theater staff.)” Read the rest at Fusion. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Mike Maguire)
Redditor eudicotyledon posted this gingerbread recreation of the Overlook Hotel from the movie The Shining. His family made it from several kinds of edibles. The maze is Rice Krispy treats, the roof is textured with quinoa, and most of the window "scenes" are melted Jolly Rancher candies. The best part is that five of the windows lead to tiny dioramas inside!
There’s the twins in the hallway (lined with edible wallpaper), and the blood flood.
See Jack and Wendy in the sugar-tiled bathroom, a room full of dead people, and the scene showing how the film ends, in a gallery at imgur. There are about 30 pictures. This is not the family’s first elaborate gingerbread project. By request, eudicotyledon also posted a few of their previous constructions in another gallery. He says,
We worked on and off for about two weeks. My dad does all of the design from photos. We do one nearly every year - no duplicates. Funny you should ask about fights - it is a Christmas ritual to have fights during the construction.
A good time was had by all, because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. -via Uproxx
John Green is all dressed up for the Christmas episode of the mental_floss List Show! Since you’re watching Christmas movies, you may as well learn some interesting things about them. You know some, others will be new to you. What’s your favorite Christmas film? It’s a Wonderful Life? The Polar Express? Home Alone? Die Hard? Elf? Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever? You have hundreds, it seems, to select from.
Once a year, we pull out some familiar hit songs from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60, which we never do in any other season but Christmas. Many new Christmas songs come out every year, but few become standards like “White Christmas” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Ben Yagoda tells us how that happened, and gives us some memorable tidbits about Christmas music, like the story of “Silver Bells,” written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the movie The Lemon Drop Kid.
Ever the efficient and compliant craftsmen—and aware that their contract was up for renewal in a brutal time for studio songwriters—they produced a simple but memorable song called “Tinkle Bells,” about the Salvation Army workers on busy city streets. When Jay told his wife about it she said, “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what the word ‘tinkle’ means to most people?’” The boys kept the melody and changed title to “Silver Bells.” Bing Crosby and Carol Richards’s recording, released before the film, was so popular that the studio called Hope co-star Marilyn Maxwell into the studio to reshoot a more elaborate production number. Hope made “Silver Bells” his Christmas theme, performing it every year on his holiday television special. The website devoted to Ray Evans’s legacy lists 224 recordings of a song, from Clay Aiken through Stevie Wonder. And, yes, their contract was renewed.
From now on, I will think “Tinkle Bells” when I hear that song. Read the rest at Literary Hub. -via Metafilter
The Empire Strikes Back is considered to be the best of the Star Wars movies -so far. So it’s about time it got the Bad Lip Reading treatment, with special guest voices Jack Black, Maya Rudolph, and Bill Hader.
This version is strangely musical: Luke raps while flying his jet fighter, Yoda gets down, and even Chewie has something to sing. While still nonsensical, what they say sometimes actually follows the action. Oh, yeah, and Obi-Wan has some misgivings about Luke’s crush on Leia. Go figure.
Common knowledge has a lot to say about hats—but is it true?
FALSE! While the American frontiersman Daniel Boone became one of the hat’s poster boys, he never wore one. On the contrary, as his son Nathan wrote, he “always despised the raccoon fur caps and did not wear one himself.”
FALSE! You lose just as much heat through your head as you do from other body parts; it just feels colder because the skin on your face and head is more sensitive. (At most, you’ll lose about 10 percent of your body’s heat through your noggin.) This myth started back in the 1950s after a not-so-scientific military study dressed volunteers in survival suits and tossed them into the bitter cold. Since their heads were the only part uncovered, they lost most of their heat there.
Illustrator Gergely Dudás (Dudolf) posted this puzzle at his Facebook page. There are a jillion snowmen and one panda. Your mission: find the panda. It stands out like a sore thumb to me, but people all over the internet are having trouble seeing it. How long did it take you to find it? Give it a try, and let us know. -via Buzzfeed
I wasn’t all that much of a Western fan in 1969, but I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid several times because, you know, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It was a combination that made The Sting a must-see, too, four years later. But when Butch Cassidy came out, Redford was almost an unknown. He wasn’t even the first pick for the role -or the second. Here are some things you probably didn’t know about the movie.
4. STEVE MCQUEEN DROPPED OUT OVER BILLING.
If Newman was the biggest movie star in the world at the time, Steve McQueen was right up there with him. The idea of casting not one but two mega-stars as Butch and Sundance made perfect sense, but there was a problem: whose name would go first in the credits? Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck later said that he proposed an unusual arrangement where half the prints of the film would list Newman first, the other half McQueen, but McQueen (or his representatives) wouldn’t accept anything other than top billing across the board. And that was that.
5. IT WAS “THE SUNDANCE KID AND BUTCH CASSIDY” UNTIL THE CASTING WAS SETTLED.
Once they’d settled on Redford as Newman’s costar, a new (minor) issue arose. Newman thought he was playing Sundance in what had heretofore been known as The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. It turned out Hill, the director, actually wanted him to play Butch, and Redford to play Sundance. No problem; Newman was fine with the switch. But now they had a situation where the character being played by the less-famous actor came first in the title. The obvious Hollywood solution: reverse the title. “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy” sounds weird to us now (as does the notion of Redford being significantly less famous than Newman), but there you go.
Read more about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at mental_floss.
I’ve been avoiding posting computerized Christmas light shows, because they start to look alike after a while, and the songs are too long. But this is special. Tom BetGeorge’s home in Tracy, California, went all out with a light show set to a medley of Star Wars themes.
BetGeorge is well known for his light shows, we posted the Star Wars light show he had last year in Newark, New Jersey, and his 2013 light show, too.
Since 99% of the lights are LEDs, the electricity to run the show for the entire month is about $80. I sequenced the show using LOR, mixed the music/sound effects with Digital Performer, and filmed it using a Sony A7s Mark ii and a Phantom 3 Pro. This is now my third year decorating. I built all the props using wood, metal, acrylic and corrugated plastic. I am a music director for a living (Centerville Presbyterian Church in Fremont), hence the massive instruments! If you look closely (especially during the Cantina song) the instruments are playing the real notes! Although the beams are powerful up close, they are a small percentage of real searchlights and are so widely dispersed that by the time they are up in the sky, they don't interfere with aircraft etc. The guitar is 17', the piano is 19' and the drums are standard. About 20,000 channels running around 70,000 lights.
The BetGeorges are accepting donations for their local homeless shelter, the McHenry House, from folks who come by to enjoy the lights. -via The Daily Dot
Brian Henson inherited the Muppets when his father Jim Henson passed away in 1990. He had barely taken the reins of the company when he directed The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992 -his first feature film. Along with talking about the choice of material, the casting of the Muppets in each role, the special effects, and Michael Caine’s contributions, he also addressed the high expectations the production laid on his shoulders.
A lot of people who were counting on this to continue your father’s legacy — fans, people who worked on these productions, that sort of thing. I imagine there was a lot of weight on your shoulders when you were, what, 27, 28 when you took everything on. Can you talk a little bit about those pressures in that moment in time?
I mean, it is everything that you would have thought. It was terrifying at the time, and it was a lot of pressure to take over… Just to be running the company was already a big pressure for me, and I’ll be honest, I did not want to direct it. I had approached a couple of other directors that were favorites of mine, and favorites of my father’s, and they both said, “No, you should do it.” At the time, I was really quite terrified of it. I also felt like, “I have an awful lot I need to already be doing, trying to run the company.” Honestly, it was like I had to direct it, because that was just what everybody was saying. Everybody was saying, “No, Brian, you direct it. You direct it.”
I had directed quite a bit. I had not directed a feature. I had directed television, and second units on features, but it was definitely a big step for me. It was scary, and I didn’t want to screw it up. We made it very carefully, and everybody just helped me tremendously. Frank Oz was a huge help all the way through, and the performers were incredibly supportive, and the shop people. It was a really wonderful atmosphere on set, very, very supportive environment, and we all knew it was working. As soon as we started shooting, we were like, “Wow, this is working. This is really working.” It’s a whole new direction, and it’s fun, and it’s poignant. Maybe it’s a little bit more poignant than people were used to the Muppets being, but at the time that felt right, in that it was the first big production after Jim’s death. It is a more touching and heartfelt story than the Muppets had done mostly up until then.
Twenty-three years after The Muppet Christmas Carol, Henson makes it all seem new in an interview at Uproxx.