Now that Disney owns the Indiana Jones franchise, we can take it as gospel that the next movie in the series will be ready by December 2019. But cinematic history is littered with unrealized Indiana Jones projects since Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981. This was because each story idea had to be approved by three people: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford. And you know how hard it is to get three people to agree on anything. For example, take Indiana Jones and the Haunted Mansion.    

We'll start with the one we know the least about. One of George Lucas' suggestions for a third Indiana Jones movie was to send Indy into a haunted house ride. Full details of this never really came to light, but a screenplay was written for it. That was done by Diane Thomas, who had penned Romancing The Stone.

Spielberg resisted this approach in the end, however, feeling that it went too close to one of his earlier films, Poltergeist. It wasn't that Indiana Jones movies hadn't done ghosts and the supernatural to some extent before. But for Spielberg, it just felt like retreading old ground. The haunted mansion idea was nixed.

The majority of the unrealized projects were rejected by Lucas, though, and his input was eliminated when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. Read about several other Indiana Jones adventures that didn’t make it to the screen at Den of Geek.

The real St. Patrick had nothing to do with green beer or leprechauns. He was a Christian evangelist who made it his mission to convert all of Ireland. Patrick’s life is a great story even without embellishments, but the embellishments and legends added after the fact are quite interesting, too. Here is one of them:

The Peist is a dragon-like creature that’s said to live in the freshwater lakes and rivers of Ireland (and along the coast of Scotland and the Orkney Islands). With a long, eel-like body and a horse-like head, the creature is also called the eel-horse, or the Muir-dris. One of the largest of these creatures was the Oillipheist, and it was terrified of St Patrick.

It’s long been said that St Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, and even then, his reputation preceded him. According to tradition, the Oillipheist heard that the saint would be coming for him next, and in his panic, he sliced through the land and created what’s now the River Shannon.

While he was cutting his way through the land, the beast swallowed a famous piper named O Ruairc. The piper was so drunk that he didn’t even notice he’d been swallowed by the dragon, and simply continued to play his pipes. The Oillipheist subsequently decided he was more trouble that he was worth, and vomited the piper back out.

There are a bunch of these legends surrounding St. Patrick chronicled at Urban Ghosts. There are also parenthetical references to the known facts of Patrick’s life, making it an appropriate read for St. Patricks day.

(Image credit: Sicarr)

#SHARE -- Deweyville family riding out the flood on the ROOF! 12News at 10. #SETXFloods (Photos: TEGNA, Enterprise) pic.twitter.com/7DxpBtYGqR

— 12NewsNow (@12NewsNow) March 17, 2016

A flood in east Texas broke a 130-year-old record as the Sabine River reached a crest of 33.24 feet Tuesday night. Residents of Deweyville, Texas, were under a mandatory evacuation order, but one family knew exactly where the record flood level was, and decided to ride out the flood on their roof. Jamie Holden and his son lifted electronics, appliances, furniture, supplies, and a generator to the roof of their new house and have been living up there for four days. This picture makes it look like paradise, and this one gives you another perspective on the flood. Holden also winched the front of his truck up in a tree to protect it from flooding. See more pictures of the Holden roof at the Beaumont Enterprise. -via reddit

The father of six at That Dad Blog is ready for St. Patricks Day with a real-ilife leprechaun! See, the baby became a magical leprechaun with the help of some Photoshop. That was necessary, since the baby isn’t old enough to stand on his own. 

   

See the series of nine photos at his site, plus a video. The formatting on this blog caused me problems in reading the text, but resizing the window narrower will cause the left sidebar to disappear and the full text to show.  -via reddit

The gang from Improv Everywhere staged a prank on a subway car. A panhandler asks for funding for his time machine project. The strange thing about this guy and his fundraising is that the time machine apparently works!

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Yeah, they used several sets of twins to accomplish the prank. It didn’t really scare anyone, but a good time was had by all. You can read the details at Improv Everywhere. -via Viral Viral Videos

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

transcribed by David Kessler, Improbable Research staff

As part of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, four of the world’s great thinkers were invited to give 24/7 Lectures. Each 24/7 Lecture was on an assigned topic. The lecturer was asked to explain that topic twice:

FIRST, a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS; and THEN a clear summary that anyone could understand in SEVEN (7) WORDS.

The time and word limits were enforced by the Ig Nobel referee, Mr. John Barrett, and by the Ig Nobel V-Chip Monitor, noted New York Attorney William J. Maloney. Here are the complete transcripts of this year’s 24/7 Lectures.

Topic: Firefly Sex
Lecturer: Sara Lewis (Tufts Professor of Evolutionary Behavioral Ecology, author of “Silent Sparks”)

Complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS:

“Fireflies are beetles in the family Lampyridae that use bioluminescent signals to find mates. Flying males broadcast signals as they search for females, who respond to intraspecific variation in male flash timing: Females prefer longer flashes and faster flash rates. Firefly females mate with multiple males, so postcopulatory sexual selection has driven males to invest heavily in nuptial gifts. These are nutritious sperm-containing spermatophores that females use to provision their eggs. Males with larger gifts benefit because they sire more offspring.” [Time called by the Referee]

Clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN(7) WORDS:

“Female fireflies favor fancy food-filled flashers.”

Marvel Comics has been with us a long time, giving us superheroes of all sorts that we know and love. We also have the movies, some of which are produced by Marvel Studios. Then there are other movies with Marvel superheroes, licensed from Marvel but produced by someone other than Marvel Studios. If you know which movies are which, you can see the difference. The X-Men series is part Marvel, part non-Marvel. So is Spider-Man. And some of those outsourced movies aren’t half bad.

The rest of Marvel’s out-sourced movies have been nothing short of disasterous. Between three (technically four) Fantastic Fours, three Punishers, three Blades, two Ghost Riders, two Daredevils, one Hulk and a smattering of odds and ends (including, infamously, Howard the Duck), there has not been a single good movie.

The Blade movies all overly rely on poor CG and the tiresome acting prowess of Wesley Snipes (even if Guillermo del Toro made the second film more than just passingly forgetable). Each Fantastic Four is more artistically inept than its predecessor (and that’s saying something, given that the first was made by Roger Corman). The Ghostriders are comically inept, the Daredevils painfully angsty and the Hulk features protracted fight scenes with a Gamma-irradiated poodle.

Read more about which is which, and why those characters should all come home to Marvel, at TVOM.

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Have you ever encountered a podcast on the internet that made you scratch your head? The variety available is amazing. Some are are niche interests, which may really appeal to you, but others will seem just plain weird to you. Mike Rugnetta tells us about some of the weirdest podcasts ever this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show. The one that examines the movie A Talking Cat? minute-by-minute takes the cake.

This is why you shouldn't sit on roofs pic.twitter.com/P4M3oNILh3

— DubV Party Crew (@DubVPartyCrew) March 13, 2016

This happened at a house near California Polytechnic State University. Redditor colincush tells us about the party next door, and when the crowd overflowed into his yard and people climbed on the roof of his garage, he called 911 to have them moved out. That phone call helped to exonerate him from liability when the roof collapsed. There were non-serious injuries, but “Someone did get a big splinter through the side of their thigh.”

See more pictures of the aftermath at imgur. The landlord rebuilt the garage with the insurance payout. We don’t know what the consequences for those who actually threw the party.  

As we’ve seen with many other videos, zoo animals can see people behind the glass pretty well, despite the difference in lighting. Here, a man interacts with a baboon by doing a little sleight-of-hand.

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You have to love the way the monkey’s skeptical eyebrows shoot up just before the “You gotta be kidding me!” moment. The man must be pretty satisfied with the incident -after all, it’s not easy to find an appreciative audience for simple magic tricks these days.  -via reddit

A continuing TV series can’t just stop production when a pregnant cast member starts to show. Productions have found various ways to deal with the fact. They can write the pregnancy into the story. They can make the character take a vacation. They can add prosthetics and make her obese for a while (it happened). Or they can put her in oversize coats, adjust camera angles, and have her carry large bags all the time, which ends up looking pretty ridiculous, especially to fans who know what’s going on. Vulture gives us list that’s not intended to be comprehensive, but an overview of the different techniques TV shows have used to deal with pregnancy, from I Love Lucy to The Americans.

Nevada is known for Las Vegas, but there’s so much more to explore in the state. Its wide-open spaces were a big part of Wild West history. Boomtowns sprung up around the silver mining industry and then died. Other spots flourished temporarily around gold, borax, and even coal mining. Mormon settlers came and went. The US Army selected Nevada as a nuclear testing site because it was so sparsely inhabited. And the legalization of brothels brought a more recent business boom that only lasted a few years. Urban Ghosts has a vacation recommendation for urban explorers with this mini-tour of abandoned Nevada, and a virtual tour for the rest of us.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jeff Moser)

During election season, we see poll after poll taken by various groups that sometimes hit the mark, more or less, and sometimes are just plain wrong. Maarten Lambrechts produced an interactive graphic called Rock ’n Poll that explains why polls don’t line up with real-world results. Click the check button to advance the graphic. Through the simulation, we take political preference polls in the fictional country of PollLand, which has a million voting citizens, represented by a thousand dots, and eight political parties, each represented by a bright color.

The exercise illustrates the margin of error in imaginary polls in which sampling is perfectly representative and everyone cooperates and tells the truth. If errors creep into polls in PollLand, you can imagine how hard it is to get correct results in the real world. -via Flowing Data  

Between 1975 and 1977, Paramount and Gene Roddenberry planned to make a Star Trek movie, but it turned out to be anything but easy. What would it be about? Plot ideas in included time travel, snake people, God, black holes, and the titans of ancient Greek mythology. Writer after writer took a turn at coming up with a story.  

With the Star Trek movie project still hobbling along by the autumn of 1976, producer Jerry Eisenberg brought in Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, who'd written the adapted screenplay for Nicolas Roeg's horror film, Don't Look Now. Bryant and Scott went away and wrote up a 20-page treatment which took the idea of a cinematic Star Trek and ran with it.

They imagined that the Titans of Greek legend actually existed on a distant planet. Spock, leading an expedition searching for a missing Kirk, finds this planet hovering on the brink of a black hole. With Klingons hot on his heels, Spock touches down, finds Kirk, and also discovers that a race of evil aliens called Cygnans have destroyed the last of the ancient Titans. The story would have ended with Kirk and Spock escaping into the black hole in the Enterprise, before emerging in Earth's orbit at an early point in our history.

But there were too many people who had to approve. There was no way to please everyone involved in the project, and Planet of the Titans and all the other ideas were rejected. The whole idea of a Star Trek film was completely dropped -for a while. Read the frustrating story at Den of Geek.

That is a complicated name for a movie, isn’t it? First the franchise name, then the episode name, then the number, indicating that the episode was split into two movies to grab all possible box office cash. Well, of course it was a hit. People who watched all the other movies wanted to know how the story ended. But now we have an Honest Trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2.

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And if you still haven’t seen the movie and care what happens, this contains massive spoilers. Enough spoilers so that I never have to watch this movie series. -via Tastefully Offensive