Tragic in real life; an opportunity for a joke in movies. Deaths can be funny as long as we know they’re not real …and when they happen to someone in a movie we don’t care about. Funny deaths occur more often in comedies, but there are a few on this list at TVOM that give us a humorous left turn in dramas, too. You see a very familiar example above. What’s the movie death that made you laugh the most? It may be on there; if not, add it to the comments.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Royal Crown Cola, or RC, is over eighty years old. It was an innovative brand that paired well with deep-dish pizza in Chicago and Moon Pies in the South. And RC Cola was still eclipsed by both Coca Cola and Pepsi. Yeah, it’s still around, yet the brand doesn’t spend all that much on promotion, relatively, and it stays out of the “cola wars.”
But the number of RC drinkers could have been much, much higher. In an alternate—and completely plausible—universe, it would have given Coke and Pepsi a run for their money. At one point, it did. Believe it or not, Royal Crown Cola used to be one of the most innovative companies in the beverage industry. It came out with the first canned soda, the first caffeine-free soda, and the first 16-ounce soda. It was the first to take diet cola mainstream, and the first to stage nationwide taste tests.
Given its long and pioneering history, RC deserved to be more than the middling soda brand it is today. In an industry that lives and dies by marketing, RC didn’t do nearly enough. But its failure wasn’t just due to lack of initiative. It was also a case of supremely bad luck, bad judgment, and a fateful ingredient known as cyclamate.
Baby Boomers might remember what happened next, but you probably don’t know all the details. Today RC Cola and its sister brands like Nehi and Diet Rite are still sold, although you may have to look for them. Read about the rise and spectacular fall of RC Cola at mental_floss.
(Image credit:Flickr user pscc.ets)
AsapSCIENCE investigates the questions we didn’t even think of to ask. Can you fart and run away fast enough to escape the smell?
They use chemistry, physics, and math (as well as a few puns) to calculate the speed and diffusion of farts. Best quote in this video: “Farts are like snowflakes.” Yeah, right. The short answer is, probably. Now we need to ask the harder question: Can you outrun the sound of a bagpipe?
In today’s “list worth arguing over” department, Consequence of Sound has ranked 267 Disney songs from 55 animated movies. Each has a video and some trivia about the song. Songs at the bottom are forgettable, or are from movie you could have easily missed. You can skip to the top ten here.
Here’s a link to the entire list on one page, but it has 267 YouTube videos, so may have trouble loading. It froze my browser immediately. That said, Tarzan was robbed, and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan should have ranked much higher. And I will never understand why “Circle of Life” doesn’t automatically make #1 on these types of lists. -via Metafilter
In an experimental program, the Moscow Police canine unit will train a group of Welsh corgi puppies to do police work. According to state news agency RIA Novosti, two puppies are in training already, a two-month-old and a six-month-old. Elena Haikova, head of the canine unit, said there is no guarantee the experiment will yield Corgi police dogs.
She explained that the relatively low height of the corgi means they may prove effective in sniffing out objects close to the ground, and move in tight spaces, searching for bombs or contraband goods.
“They still need to grow, be trained and undergo every test,” Haikova said. “The dogs may buckle under the workload.”
We should know within a year whether corgis turn out to be effective for the tasks they are training for. -via HuffPo
(Image credit: Flickr user mr_wahlee)
In the “might makes right” era, before the rule of law, there were no doubt some people who could manage to make a mockery of the system. Hafthor Julius Bjornsson comes to mind. Maybe this was why we changed to the rule of law in the first place, and all that King Arthur stuff was just retconned. This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
It only takes a couple of weeks to change someone’s life -if they are the subject of a viral social media post. In February, bakery owner Edwina Bandong took some pictures of a farmer taking a load of carrots to market in Sagada, Mountain Province, Philippines. The pictures went viral within days, and the attractive young man was identified as Jeyrick Sigmaton. The attention has landed the 21-year-old a modeling career. Boardwalk PH has made Sigmaton the new face of their clothing line.
See pictures from Sigmaton’s life as a farmer at Mashable and pictures of his modeling work at Uproxx.
The term “supermodel” didn’t come into vogue until the 1980s, when a few highly-paid models became known worldwide outside of the fashion industry. But 100 years ago, one woman’s face and body were used so much the you still see her image everywhere. Audrey Munson posed for photographers and artists, appeared in movies (nude!), and most lastingly, modeled for sculptors whose statues and monuments still stand.
Across the nation, from Florida to California, Audrey remains in our everyday lives. She stands as Liberty and Sapienta (Wisdom) on the Wisconsin state capitol. She can be seen as the nymphs on the James McMillan Memorial Fountain by the reservoir in Washington, D.C. She was the model for Allen George Newman’s Monument to Women of the Confederacy in Jacksonville, Florida, and for his Peace Monument in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia. She posed for the figure of Evangeline inscribed on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial in the garden of the poet’s house by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She inspired three-quarters of the statuary of the Jewel City built in San Francisco for the 1915 World’s Fair. A famous bronze of one of those statues, Descending Night, was acquired by press baron William Randolph Hearst, and now resides at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, on the California coast. One of her surviving “Star Maidens” from the fair now stands in the courtyard of the Citigroup Center building in San Francisco.
Born in 1891, Munson is the subject of a new book, The Curse of Beauty by James Bone, which is promoted in an excerpt at Vanity Fair. The title of the article is How America’s First Supermodel Was Nearly Erased from History. However, the article itself does not tell us how she was erased from history (supposedly the book does), but it introduces us to the woman behind many of the statues you see in New York City and around the country. You can find the short version of what happened to her at Wikipedia (contains nudity).
(Image credit: Jim.henderson)
Last month, we had a supercut of iconic movie lines delivered just before the star killed someone. Now it’s time for the followup: iconic movie lines delivered right after the star kills someone.
Often, the line is a continuation of something said right before the shot is fired, or maybe it’s a pun. But if you’ve seen these movies, you remember those lines well. Burger Fiction had all the raw material ready from researching the previous supercut. A list of the movies used is at the YouTube link. -via Tastefully Offensive
Brett Helling had surgery to correct a deviated septum in hopes that it would help his frequent sinus infections. Afterward, he suffered from an inability to feel himself breathe. He felt like he was constantly struggling for air. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, and he was eventually diagnosed with depression. Through his own research, he’d found something called “Empty Nose Syndrome,” which plagued a small minority of people who had turbinate reduction surgery. Only later did he find out that his turbinates had been reduced during the surgery. But he still couldn’t find a doctor to help him.
Inside your nose are two bony shelves divided by your septum, and these shelves contain three sets of turbinates. Each side of the nose contains a low, middle, and high turbinate. The low one, called an inferior turbinate, is the biggest — like a small cigar, about five or six centimeters long — and inside the inferior turbinate are blood vessels that can swell and shrink dramatically. (Imagine a penis and you’re not far off.) Turbinates help regulate airflow through the nose and also warm, filter, and humidify the air using a moist outer lining of tissue called mucosa.
Allergies, sinus infections, and other conditions can cause the inferior turbinate to stay enlarged, which leads to nasal blockage. If that’s the case, and if antibiotics don’t work, it’s not unusual for an otolaryngologist to recommend reducing the inferior turbinate (and, in rare cases, the middle turbinate).
There are a couple of doctors who are researching Empty Nose Syndrome, and one who is doing turbinate reconstruction. But it was too late for Helling. Read his story and the story of Empty Nose Syndrome at Buzzfeed.
(Image credit: Mauricio Alejo)
The 1974 movie Death Wish was violent, disturbing, and vicariously gave people what they wanted: the cathartic feeling of fighting back against the evils of the world. That’s pretty common in movies now, but at the time, that was a groundbreaking concept in film. I recall the rush of seeing Paul Kersey, just a regular guy, get revenge on the criminals who destroyed his family, and then go after other bad guys as well. Then we felt bad about that rush, and had to think about how we’d react in that situation. Let’s look at some of the trivia behind the movie.
3. HENRY FONDA AND GEORGE C. SCOTT BOTH TURNED DOWN THE LEAD ROLE.
Henry Fonda said no because he found the script to be "repulsive." George C. Scott turned it down because of all its violence.
4. CHARLES BRONSON AND HIS AGENT DISAGREED ON THE FILM'S MESSAGE.
"It's the only time Paul Kohner, my agent, ever disagreed with me about a film," Bronson said in 1974. "Paul felt very strongly that it was a dangerous picture—that it might make people think it's right to take the law into their own hands. This is what the hero of the picture does when he wants a one-man vigilante squad to kill muggers, after three of them have murdered his wife and raped his daughter. I told Paul I thought the message was the same there that runs through a lot of my pictures: That violence is senseless because it only begets more violence."
And there’s a lot more to learn about Death Wish in a trivia list at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Martin Budden)
Horses own the winner’s circle in English idioms. But where did these popular phrases originate?
1. Hold your horses!
800 BCE
A line in Book 23 of Homer’s Iliad is commonly translated as “Antilochus—you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!” (Although the original 1598 translation has it as “Contain thy horses!”)
2. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth*
380 BCE
(Image credit: Flickr user Lorenia)
This idiom is so old that when St. Jerome translated the New Testament, he included it in the introduction: “Equi donati dentes non inspicuintur.”
3. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink
1175
One of the oldest aphorisms in English, this adage was first recorded in the Old English Homilies: “Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken.” A modern version appeared in the 1602 play Narcissus: “They can but bringe horse to the water brinke / But horse may choose whether that horse will drinke.”
4. Horseplay
In the Unites States, tomorrow Monday is the deadline for filing your income tax returns. In honor of the deadline, which we affectionately call Tax Day, the Atlantic made a quiz to see how much you know about the U.S. budget. You’ll be given two items at a time, and you try to guess which costs more. You are timed, so you feel the pressure to decide quickly, and you lose time with every wrong answer. But once you’re done, you get a rundown of the costs of each expense in the quiz, so you can take your time then to learn about them. Try it yourself. -via Digg
Update: The deadline for filing your tax returns this year is April 18. Here's an explanation. -Thanks, dev!
Poor C-3PO. He is a victim of circumstance, being pulled from one end of the galaxy to the other. He’s been pulled apart and reassembled over and over. He’s been put in harm’s way too many times, through no fault of his own. And still he retains a civil tone of voice.
Mixmaster Zapatou (Luc Bergeron) highlights the plight of C-3PO to the tune of “Mr. Roboto” in this sequence that uses clips from all the Star Wars films so far. -via Geeks Are Sexy
You protect your physical world with locks -on your car, your home, and your workplace. But the digital world is different. There’s a lot to think about here.
In the physical world, there are workarounds for emergencies. My husband once broke in a door to rescue a resident who’d had a stroke. Police with warrants can demand keys or break physical locks. And of course, burglars will get into locked places if it’s worth the risk to them. But how would one get around a digital lock in an emergency? And then there’s the big question of who gets to decide what an “emergency” is, because a loose definition would threaten normal privacy. CGP Grey lays out the conundrum that those who use the digital world and government authorities are wrestling with now. Oh yeah, there’s a footnote video, too. -via reddit
Email This Post to a Friend