A small town cemetery in Romania has made a name for itself by being the most colorful boneyard ever. The Merry Cemetery in Săpânţa has wooden markers painted with pictures of the deceased and “colorful” epitaphs about them. These were all made by Stan Ioan Pătraş and, after his death, his protege, Dumitru Pop.
People come from all over the world to see the cemetery. Dylan Thuras brings us another video in the 100 Wonders series from Atlas Obscura. Read more here.
In another example of things you never thought about before, we look at the importance of lateral movement in film. We feel more natural when the action moves from left to right on the screen instead of the converse, even when we don’t notice or can’t articulate the difference. Filmmakers knew that, even before the research that confirmed it.
And it’s not just movement, either. There’s a reason that the devil sits on a character’s shoulder to our left, while the angel sits on the shoulder to our right. This explanation comes to us from Now You See It. -via Digg
There are movies like Casablanca and Camelot that convinced me that the best films don’t have happy endings. In both those examples, the protagonist chooses honor and the needs of the many over personal happiness. But honor isn’t necessary to make a movie with an unhappy ending turn out great. Movies in which evil, or “the bad guy” wins in the end tend to leave you with something to think about on the way home, as if it’s not really over. And you remember those movies years later. TVOM looks at ten such movies that rose to the top of the marquee as well as our memories, with video clips and trailers. The list is full of spoilers in case you haven’t seen the movies, so I used a picture of a rather old entry here.
You know Randy Newman from the songs in Toy Story, or, if you are a certain age, from his 1977 hit “Short People.” You might not know that Newman, while releasing a dozen albums over the years, has been steadily making a name in Hollywood composing film scores. His talent came naturally. Randy Newman’s uncle Alfred Newman was the musical director of Twentieth Century Fox for two decades. His uncles Emil and Lionel were also musical composers. The musical legacy of the family was brought out in a 2014 award ceremony in Vienna.
As part of the Vienna festivities, Newman conducted a section of his score for The Natural and then handed the baton to his cousin David Newman, one of Alfred’s sons and an eminent film composer in his own right (Ice Age, Hoffa, Anastasia), who led the orchestra through passages from Randy’s soundtracks for such films as Ragtime, Avalon, and A Bug’s Life. At the concert’s end, Randy rejoined the orchestra, sitting at the piano to sing his universally known song from Toy Story, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
Newman won his first Oscar in 2002, for the song “If I Didn’t Have You,” from Monsters, Inc., after losing out the initial 15 times he was nominated. (“I don’t want your pity,” he joked to the audience in response to their standing ovation.) He has since won a second Oscar, in 2011, for the song “We Belong Together,” from Toy Story 3, securing his place both as a decorated practitioner of the family business, film music (Alfred won nine Academy Awards, more than anyone except Walt Disney and the production designer Cedric Gibbons), and as Alfred’s heir as the wise old head of the Newman family—“kind and approachable, very patriarchal, but sort of second-generation patriarchal,” as his cousin Thomas Newman, David’s younger brother, put it. Tom Newman, too, is a big-deal film composer, a 13-time Oscar nominee who has collaborated regularly with Steven Soderbergh, Andrew Stanton, and Sam Mendes. The current Academy Award nominee Bridge of Spies and the next big Pixar release, Finding Dory, are among his recent credits. David and Tom’s sister Maria is a composer and an in-demand violinist and violist for film-scoring sessions, and one of Lionel’s grandsons, Joey Newman, composes the music for such TV series as The Middle and The Mysteries of Laura.
Other members of the family have been involved in movie production and music publishing. The real outlier was Randy’s father Irving, who was a talented musician but “was the rare Jew who felt he had let down his family by falling into medicine.” Randy grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by Hollywood musicians as influences. A profile at Vanity Fair follows the story of Alfred Newman and his brothers and their progeny in the movie music business, especially Randy Newman, whose career has been split between great success in film scores and a legacy of socially-conscious songs. -via Digg
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows. The Shadow, or the Predator, as he is called here, lingered for decades, lurking through snapshots, fashion shoots, and portraits taken on the streets of both cities and small towns. And he never changed, until he just disappeared in the 1970s. These many photos have become a project for art collector Jean-Marie Donat.
By assembling his findings in the book Predator, Donat stitches together a narrative from disparate events, makes one antagonist of many ordinary persons. The obsession inherent act of collecting extends to from Donat and into the shadow in the pictures; they are two characters, separated by time yet bound by the hunt.
Here, Predator is both fictional and manifest, phantom and embodied. He is stand-in for all photographers and collectors and indeed anyone who becomes consumed and preoccupied with memories. We know him intimately, and yet he remains unnamed. He is a grim reaper of sorts, fixing his mortal subjects in a single place and a single time forevermore.
Or he's the photographer, making sure the sun shines on his subject, while he shoots a picture with a twin-lens reflex camera, while wearing his hat. But that isn't quite as much fun. See eleven of the photos featuring the Predator at Feature Shoot. (via Metafilter)
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!
by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff
There’s pleasure to be had in reading “The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods,” if only the pleasure of feeling the author’s possible satisfaction at having done a thorough job.
The Man There exist few reliable, firsthand reports of the pain experienced during an execution. Harold Hillman was Director of the Unity Laboratory of Applied Neurobiology, and a Reader in Physiology at the University of Surrey, in Guildford. He spent years gathering whatever information he could find about what it feels like to undergo each of the most popular forms of capital punishment.
Dr. Hillman drew from a wide variety of sources: “Observations on the condemned persons, postmortem examinations, physiological studies on animals undergoing similar procedures, and the literature on emergency medicine.”
This he caringly distilled into a fact-filled, eight-page report that provoked reactions of many different kinds— admiring, disgusted, disdainful, horrified, and in some circles, mordantly amused.
The Methods Dr. Hillman gave a detailed description of each method of execution: how the act is performed, the typical physiological course of events in the executee, and a quick pathological examination of the remains.
Geeks Are Sexy and photographer Nick Acott took in London Super Comic Con over the weekend. Even in February, serious cosplayers were out to show off their latest creations. The Force Awakens was well represented, as well as comics, anime, video games, and other movies.And even TV!
The science fiction film The Martian won a Golden Globe Award for Best Drama: Musical or Comedy, even though it was neither a musical nor a comedy. We still haven’t heard a convincing explanation for that one. But Mashable saw an opportunity.
See, it's all in the framing. All you need to do is lift every clip of someone smiling, falling, or messing up something to make it look like a comedy. Then add a comedy voiceover narration, some cheesy background music, and a comedy font. Oh yeah, and people singing. You can use the existing footage for that. There you have it, The Martian as a musical comedy! Or at least a trailer for one. The feel good hit of 2015. -via Tastefully Offensive
What fun is it when you have a laboratory full of different things you can combine to see what happens! It’s even better when you have a professor around to encourage such shenanigans, then offer some questions to explore and ideas for possible explanations. That’s what’s happening here as they add a bar of lithium to a beaker of 7UP. Why? Because 7UP originally had lithium salts in its recipe.
The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, while Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727. But if the prizes had been around during his lifetime, he would have won it hands down in multiple years.
Einstein is renowned for his imagination and ability to intuitively lay out new conceptual models of the universe. Newton's talents were different. His unparalleled logical and mathematical genius allowed him to formulate observations into laws and to prove ideas through rigorous mathematics. When the mathematical machinery he needed didn't fully exist, he invented it. That's what largely inspired RealClearScience Editor Alex Berezow to name Newton the smartest person who ever lived.
While Einstein's physics are still being proved today, Newton's is so monumental, so important, so fundamental, so proven within its realm of validity, that scientists of every sort take it for granted every day. The laws of gravity and motion that Einstein reenvisioned were edits of the commandments first called down from the ether by Newton's blinding brilliance.
Newton formulated laws of physics, and worked in optics and astronomy, too. He was also named Warden of the Mint, and introduced monetary safeguards that would have won a Nobel Prize in Economics as well. Tom Hartsfield figures he could have won up to eight Nobels for his life’s work, and that doesn’t even count inventing the cat flap. However, those don't take into account who his competition would have been in those particular years, which would be an extensive project for someone so inclined. Read about each of Newton's possible Nobels at Real Clear Science.
I can so relate to this. Most of my kids’ teachers have been wonderful, enthusiastic, friendly, and knowledgable people. But there was this one kindergarten teacher who was the old schoolmarm, pursed-lips, by-the-book type that intimidated me so much I felt like an elementary student in trouble all over again, even though she was probably younger than I was at the time. It took a year to get my daughter to enjoy school again after that experience. This vignette is the latest from Lunarbaboon.
Warning: the following contains spoilers from last night’s episode of The Walking Dead. If you saw it, don’t follow the show, or don’t care about spoilers, it’s a hoot. It had to be done, because a ridiculous chase scene should always feature Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax.”
As soon as the idea was mentioned on The Talking Dead, I knew there would be multiple versions of this on YouTube this morning. I was not disappointed. (via Uproxx)
Christina Crawford wrote a book about growing up as the daughter of movie star Joan Crawford, which became a hit movie starring Faye Dunaway in 1981. Mommie Dearest won six Razzie awards. The scandalous film depicted Joan Crawford as a nightmare parent, while behind the scenes, Faye Dunaway was a nightmare while playing a nightmare.
4. THE CREW STRUGGLED TO WORK WITH FAYE DUNAWAY.
One of the most frequently reported rumors from the set of Mommie Dearest was that Faye Dunaway was a bit of a nightmare. “People despised Faye,” Rutanya Alda, who played Joan’s assistant Carol Ann, told the Bay Area Reporter. “Joan got her way in a ladylike way. Faye was despised because she was so rude to people. Everyone was on pins and needles when she worked, and everyone relaxed when she didn’t. I wish Faye had learned from Joan.”
6. DUNAWAY GOT PHYSICAL WITH RUTANYA ALDA ON SET.
In an interview with Gay City News, Rutanya Alda recounted her uncomfortable experience with Dunaway. “When [Jocelyn Brando, who played the journalist] saw me go down after Faye hit me, she said, ‘I can’t afford to be injured, [I] just spent six months in the hospital,’” Alda recalled. “Initially, Frank wanted both me and Jocelyn to pull her off Diana [Scarwid, who played Christina], but she saw Faye was out of control and said, ‘No way.’ We did maybe 10 takes and Frank had to deal with it because Faye wasn’t gonna change what she was doing. I got knocked down maybe twice—she hit me hard in the chest.”
When you name a TV series Full House, you shouldn’t be surprised that people focus on the house. Especially a million-dollar house in the middle of San Francisco. While packing lots of people in a home is not unusual, everyone in the show got their own bedroom except for the two youngest daughters. Everyone seemed to have their own car, yet they converted the garage to a bedroom. Meanwhile, parking spaces in San Francisco cost as much to rent as a full house (pun intended) where I live. Even taking in to account space needed for camera angles, the Tanner house had a lot of weird things going on. Read about several of these discrepancies that viewers have noticed at TVOM. And when the sequel drops later this week, we can double-check them.
The female redback is 50 times larger than the male— an important advantage during mating, when the females eat the males. While females eating the males after mating isn’t particularly unusual behavior among spiders and insects, what is unusual about the redback is that the female begins to eat the male during the act of mating, not after.
It’s the largest spider by weight, and the second-largest by leg span. From end to end, this spider is nearly a foot long. The name, however, is a misnomer— it could eat birds if it wanted to, but it doesn’t. It lives in the Amazon River valley and eats insects, and occasionally frogs or mice, paralyzing its prey with neurotoxins that come out of its inch-long fangs.
