When you want to pop the question to the love of your life, nothing says it like pizza. Whether that’s a good thing or not is totally up to the couple involved. For most of us, how the question is asked is less important than whether it is asked at all. But everyone loves pizza, and it’s a creative medium composed of different foods that can be arranged, plus often a nice box with a big lid to write on the inside of. See the efforts of 15 people who proposed marriage with a pizza, and one with ice cream, at Buzzfeed.
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Kazakh architect Aibek Almassov has designed a cylindrical home made of glass and transparent solar panels that encloses a full-grown tree like a greenhouse. It’s a livable space with a full bath, kitchen, living and sleeping areas, and a spiral staircase to four floors. While there doesn’t seem to be much privacy, it can be built in a thick forest with trees nearby or in a clearing. And it may just be built, now that Almassov has two sponsors, one of which manufactures glass and transparent solar panels. But back to the greenhouse idea: if you can get by having tree branches in your way for some home activities, what happens when they grow and flourish? See more pictures of the house and floor plans at Dezeen. -via Everlasting Blort
(Image credit: A.Masow Architects)
The ability to move things with only the power of one’s mind can power horrifying movie plots. Even when it’s not the focus of a film, it opens up the opportunity for great special effects. How do you defend yourself from someone who doesn’t even have to be close to attack you? There are a lot of movies that harness the power of fictional telekinesis, but few that were more terrifying than Carrie.
For being a scared little high school girl for most of the movie, Carrie is one of the most powerful figures on this list. Let’s see, she literally trapped her classmates in a burning gym, cooking them all as revenge for getting a blood bucket dumped on her, she stopped her mom’s heart with her mind and then as a grand finale, sucked her entire house into hell. Not bad.
That still leaves nine movies on this list of telekinetic cinema, which you’ll enjoy at TVOM.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is in theaters today, so it might be a good time to talk about the phenomena that was Nia Vardalos’ 2002 movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was shot on a budget of only $5 million, but blossomed into the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time. Will the sequel do as well? Only time will tell, but here’s some things you should know about the original.
1. IT BEGAN LIFE AS A STAGE SHOW IN LOS ANGELES.
In 1997, Second City alum Nia Vardalos wrote and performed a one-woman show about her Greek family. "I basically took every Greek wedding I’ve ever been to, including mine, and on a scale of one to 10, I turned it up to an 11," Vardalos said. Los Angeles' Hudson Theater over-sold the six-week run of the show after Vardalos sent flyers to every Greek church in Southern California. Rita Wilson, who is also Greek, attended one of the performances; she went backstage after the show and told Vardalos that it should be made into a movie. One week later, Wilson's husband, Tom Hanks, attended a performance.
3. DISNEY WANTED MARISA TOMEI TO STAR.
Before Hanks' call, several production companies expressed interest in purchasing the rights to Vardalos' project. One wanted to turn it into a story about a Hispanic family. Disney was interested in buying the story as is, but wanted Marisa Tomei to star in it. Hanks and his production company, Playtone, saw Vardalos playing herself.
And no one could have performed the role better, because the script was based on her experiences and the people she knew. Read more about My Big Fat Greek Wedding at mental_floss.
The year 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. In preparation for a television special on the Bard, Channel 4 sent investigators to Shakespeare’s burial site at Holy Trinity church in Stratford-on-Avon, where they used ground-penetrating radar to see inside the crypt. What they found gives credence to a rumor that Shakespeare was the victim of grave robbers over 200 years ago. His head looks to be missing.
The most striking conclusion is that Shakespeare’s head appears to be missing and that the skull was probably stolen from what is a shallow grave by trophy hunters.
Kevin Colls, the archaeologist who led the team, said the grave was not as they had expected. “We came across this very odd, strange thing at the head end. It was very obvious, within all the data we were getting, that there was something different going on at that particular spot. We have concluded it is signs of disturbance, of material being dug out and put back again.”
The evidence is not exactly conclusive, and the church’s vicar isn’t disposed to disturb the grave any further. The Channel 4 special on Shakespeare will air Saturday night. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: David Jones)
There have been a lot of Batman movies, eight if you count only the live-action series beginning in 1989. But there were more that were conceived, proposed, pitched, or written that never made it to the screen -and some of them are pretty weird. Blockbuster movies these days always come with an implied possibility of a sequel, so producers are constantly thinking of “the next one.” Such was the case for Joel Schumacher’s 1997 movie Batman and Robin.
Nicolas Cage as the Scarecrow. Courtney Love as Harley Quinn. Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, and Jim Carrey returning as the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, Two-Face, and the Riddler. More Bat-Nipples. All this, and so much more, was set to happen in Batman Unchained, Joel Schumacher’s follow-up to Batman and Robin that never happened because, well, he made Batman and Robin. Mark Protosevich’s script dealt with Batman “learning to conquer fear and to confront the demons of his past,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, including “sadistic” Harley and “brilliant” Scarecrow teaming up to drive the Dark Knight insane and send him to Arkham Asylum. Schumacher told Protosevich that he had written “the most expensive movie ever made,” and when Batman and Robin bombed, the studio “pulled the plug on the whole project.”
That’s just one example of five unmade Batman movies you can learn about at Uproxx.
Microsoft launched an artificial intelligence chatbot on Twitter, to see how interacting with other social media users would teach the program conversational skills. The bot was named Tay and had a female profile pic. Tay’s developers sadly neglected to take into consideration what happens when the internet public is encouraged to exert influence.
But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide.
Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets — though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself. Tay is simply a piece of software that is trying to learn how humans talk in a conversation. Tay doesn't even know it exists, or what racism is. The reason it spouted garbage is that racist humans on Twitter quickly spotted a vulnerability — that Tay didn't understand what it was talking about — and exploited it.
Tay's Twitter feed has since been deleted while the team makes “adjustments,” which presumably will include filters. It’s an example that proves that any public demonstration of technical engineering (as well as PR campaigns) needs to be run through a consult with a devil’s advocate. You can see some examples of the offensive deleted Tweets at Business Insider. -via Digg
What happens when an artificial intelligence entity is born? First off, the creator does not want to name it Barbara. It has a lot to learn in a hurry, and even though it can absorb the sum total of human knowledge in an instant, it still doesn’t know as much about human nature and the true meaning of power as the average house cat does. This video from exurb1a contains NSFW language. -via reddit
At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two policemen demanded to be buzzed in by the guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At least, they looked like policemen. Once inside the Venetian-palazzo-style building, the men ordered the guard to step away from the emergency buzzer, his only link to the outside world. They handcuffed him and another guard and tied them up in the basement. For the next 81 minutes, the thieves raided the museum’s treasure-filled galleries. Then they loaded up a vehicle waiting outside and disappeared.
Later that morning, the day guard arrived for his shift and discovered spaces on the walls where paintings should have been. Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” Vermeer’s “The Concert,” Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” and five works by Edgar Degas were missing. In some places, empty frames were still hanging, the priceless works crudely sliced out.
It was an appalling attack on a beloved museum, the personal collection of an eccentric heiress who handpicked the works on travels through Europe in the 1890s. The crime sparked a sweeping multinational investigation by the museum, the FBI, and numerous private parties. To date, the Gardner heist is the largest property theft in U.S. history—experts have assessed the current value of the stolen art at more than $600 million. Twenty-six years later, the case remains unsolved.
In fact, not a single painting has been recovered. But in March of 2013, the FBI signaled that it was close to solving the mystery. Officials announced that investigations had uncovered new information about the thieves and the East Coast organized crime syndicates to which they belonged. The art world buzzed over the news, yet one man doubted what he heard.
In 1978, James Potter graduated from Hogwarts and celebrated at a bar with Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. It seemed like a perfect evening until young Severus Snape walks in.
This Harry Potter fan film was written and directed by Justin Zagri and shot in just four days. -via Buzzfeed
You can’t make this up. Two trucks collided on I-95 in Florida Wednesday morning, which caused both to spill their cargo. A semi-trailer of Busch beer swerved to avoid another vehicle, and instead crashed into a box truck from Frito-Lay, which overturned.
"Neither driver was hurt, but you had Doritos and Busch beer all over I-95," Sergeant Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, told NBC News. "That's like a Super Bowl commercial right there."
The interstate was shut down for several hours while heavy equipment was brought in to clean up the snacks. -via Uproxx
If you’ve ever attended a Masonic funeral, you know how important those rites are to the club members. So it shouldn’t surprise you to know that the modern idea of life insurance grew out of secret societies, where fraternity extended beyond death. In the 19th century, death could leave one’s family destitute, even unable to pay for a gravestone, and the peace of mind insurance brought was an important consideration. Eventually, societies based around the idea of life insurance cropped up. One of the more long-lasting was the Woodmen of the World, and later Modern Woodmen. They offered activities and camaraderie in addition to insurance, but you had to go through initiation rituals to be considered worthy.
The Modern Woodmen took such rites to new levels. They’d challenge recruits to put their hands in (fake) molten lead. Others were subjected to spanking machines and collapsing chairs. The Ferris Wheel Coaster Goat, patented and sold by a company co-owned by Modern Woodman member Ed DeMoulin, would flip the unsuspecting rider upside down and fire blanks from its rear.
What did a slapstick goat gag have to do with selling insurance? Everything. Besides reminding recruits that death was always at the door, the Woodmen “had to come up with all kinds of gimmicks to get people to join,” Lettelier explained. “When an initiate had to ‘ride the goat,’ everybody else would sit around the lodge room and have a big belly laugh. … If you ‘rode the goat,’ then you were in with the clique. Then that new member would bring in his buddies so the Woodmen could prank them. What it did was help build their insurance company.”
Woodman of the World insurance is still available, although not with the trappings of a secret society it once had. Read about the Woodmen and other mutual benefit societies that made life insurance common at Collectors Weekly.
Grant Snider of Incidental Comics has been charming us with his comics about his daughter for a few years. Now he’s doing it all over again -with a son! He posted this comic in celebration. We’ve seen these guys before, and know they all want to hold their baby just like the very last image. A belated congratulations to the Sniders, and we look forward to more parenting insights.
A few years ago, we showed you that if you put enough rubber bands around a watermelon, it will eventually explode, although it may take hundreds of rubber bands to do it.
The Slow Mo Guys made it a sensation. A lot of other people have tried this “experiment” in the years since, but for some reason, these young fellows were allowed to do it inside the house. What could possibly go wrong? -via Uproxx
Say what you will about naming a research ship Boaty McBoatface, you have to admit it makes a lot of people smile. And that’s not a bad thing when circumstances try to put you in a bad mood. London’s South West Train service was delayed Tuesday, putting hundreds of commuters behind schedule. But renaming one of the trains trying to go from from Portsmouth to Waterloo “Trainy McTrainface” lightened the mood for many of them.
A South West Trains spokeswoman confirmed the "one-off" name change was genuine.
She said: "It is a one-off by one of our creative guards who wanted to bring a smile to the face of our customers."
What really lightened the mood was knowing that someone in the organization knew it was time to spread a smile, and cared enough to do it.
(Image credit: Matthew Fifield)
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