Pixar has released their movie schedule through 2019. Those of you starting families can go ahead and plan your child’s bedroom decor around them. Four of the six are sequels. First up is The Good Dinosaur, an original story which will be out next month. The other original story is Coco, inspired by the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos. The schedule stretches out to 2019, when we’ll finally see the return of The Incredibles. The new Disney movie release schedule goes through 2020, although many of the movies have yet to claim a title.
Learn from your elders, kids, even if it’s you. Even if you know how dumb you are. There’s no education like the education you get from experience. Experience is an even harsher school if you refuse to take advice from those who’ve been there. This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
Quick, who played Frankenstein’s monster? Boris Karloff, of course! Karloff played the monster three times, but the role was also filled by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Glenn Strange. Who? Glenn Strange doesn’t have the name recognition that Karloff had, but he played the monster in three movie -just like Karloff. The 6’5” Strange made his living playing cowboys in Western movies and TV shows, and he isn’t much remembered for that, either.
As the story goes, while making up Strange for yet another cowboy picture in 1944, Universal makeup legend Jack Pierce offered him a few bucks to stay late that night so Pierce could try an experiment. Strange agreed, and when Pierce finished working on him that night and he saw the results, his first response was “I look like Boris Karloff.”
When you go about your day, you use many products and gadgets. You think you know what’s going to happen when you push a button, or squeeze a tube. What if something completely different happened? And when you tried it again, something else happened?
Terri Timely and Park Pictures took that idea and ran with it, in the surreal short film Input/Output. It’s three minutes of pure bizarreness. -via Tastefully Offensive
It’s the usual shenanigans at Brigham Young University. This intriguing item is from the police blotter of the BYU newspaper. Apparently, the students were professional level hide and seek players. -via reddit
For years, we’ve been using the Benny Hillifier to add “Yakety Sax” to a video, although it never was able to speed up the action as promised, and seems to have grown wonky with age. Now comes Benny Hill This! which speeds up any video you care to enter and adds the music. If you don’t have a video in mind to use, there are buttons to bring up examples. It’s amazing how much the mood of Rocky changes when the music is not so majestic. -via Metafilter
On an unseasonably warm day in April 1954, hundreds of women in cowboy hats gathered outside Tupperware’s Florida headquarters to dig for buried treasure. There, in a nearby swampy area dubbed the “Forest of Spades,” 600 shovels stood at the ready. The excitement was palpable. At the appointed signal, the women raced for the roped-off soil, grabbed shovels, and began to hunt frantically for loot.
It was the pinnacle of the inaugural Tupperware Jubilee, a five-day, gold-rush-themed affair celebrating all things Tupperware. No expense was spared: To give the event a Western feel, frontier-style buildings with false fronts had been erected and bulls and horses were trucked in. The women, and a smattering of men, had traveled from all across the country to participate. A collection of Tupperware dealers, distributors, and sales managers, they made the pilgrimage for the motivational speeches, sales instruction, and especially for the bizarre bonding rituals.
For five hours that day, they prospected for mink stoles and freezer units, gold watches and diamond rings. One of them, Fay Maccalupo of Buffalo, New York, dug up a toy car. When she saw the real Ford it represented, she planted her face against the hood and began to weep, repeating, “I love everybody.” Four women fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts. It was understandable, considering that the total cash value of all the prizes buried in the Florida dirt was $75,000.
Presiding over the treasure hunt was the general sales manager of the Tupperware Home Parties division, a 40-year-old woman named Brownie Wise. For hours, she cheered on the ladies from a loudspeaker with an air of royalty. As she watched them hop on shovels and unearth the rewards of their labors, she couldn’t help but feel proud. Wise took satisfaction in seeing her hard work pay off—once again. The jubilee, which she had organized, had all the pizzazz and spirit expected of an official Tupperware event. The media agreed: Network news was there to cover it, and Life magazine ran a photo essay highlighting the excitement and glamour.
Clearly, there’s more to Tupperware than leftovers. The story of the ubiquitous plastic container is a story of innovation and reinvention: how a new kind of plastic, made from an industrial waste material, ended up a symbol of female empowerment. The product ushered women into the workforce, encouraging them to make their own money, better their families, and win accolades and prizes without fear of being branded that 1950s anathema, “the career woman.”
Digging in the dirt for a gold watch may not mesh with today’s concept of a successful working woman, but at the time, the near-religious fervor seen at the jubilees and other Tupperware gatherings demonstrated just how ground-breaking the company’s sales plan was—the product became a multimillion dollar success not by exploiting women, but by embracing and boosting them. All of this was because of Brownie Wise. The story of Tupperware is her story.
Ghost trains in Britain are not supernatural -they’re real! It’s a term used for trains that serve a vestige of a line that should be closed. They may run once a week or even less often, aren’t advertised, and serve stations that aren’t maintained. Why do they run at all? Because in Britain, it’s more expensive to officially close a line than to keep it open, no matter how poor the service. That leaves a bunch of train stations that are officially open, but hardly ever used, and certainly neglected. Like the Reddish South Station, pictured.
The 3rd least-used railway station in the whole of the UK, Reddish South racked up a mere 26 visitors in 2013/2014. In a strange way, it’s impressive that it’s even that high. Unlike Teesside Airport, which runs a service there and back once a week, trains from Reddish South merely depart. Those wishing to return will have to find another way of getting back.
In other ways, too, the station is utterly dismal. A lack of electric lighting means it becomes a dark and slightly-threatening wasteland at night; a spooky black hole on the edges of the community. As its Wikipedia article glumly points out, even the badly-served Denton station further up the line boasts a bench as its sole passenger facility. Reddish South boasts nothing.
Visually, the station is terrifically unappealing. The cracked and faded platform seems designed for overcast weather, and the steps are badly rusted. The entrance is even gated shut and surrounded with grim signs threatening ‘trespassers’ with thousand pound fines. Perhaps it’s no wonder Reddish South is so badly underused.
You might know Kirk “The Ripper” Hammett as the lead guitarist for Metallica, but he’s also a serious collector of horror ephemera and memorabilia. It started when he was a child and was thrilled to be terrified by the 1962 movie The Day of the Triffids. He started collecting comic books, horror magazines, and models, as much as he could with a kids’ budget. After hitting it big with Metallica, his collecting went into overdrive, as he could then acquire rare and coveted items.
In 2012, he published a book on his collection called Too Much Horror Business, and the following year, he created “Kirk’s Crypt” to display some of his horror memorabilia at the Orion Music + More metal festival in Detroit. Kirk’s Crypt inspired him to launch a full-on three-day horror convention, Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil, in his hometown of San Francisco in 2014. The annual event has featured interactive displays, including one on Hammett’s monster collection; performances by metal bands like Carcass, Death Angel, and Hammett’s pre-Metallica band Exodus; and guest appearances by modern horror actors, directors, and makeup artists, as well as the children of classic horror stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Currently, travelers going through San Francisco on Virgin or American Airlines can view part of Hammett’s horror collection at the San Francisco International Airport Museum’s “Classic Monsters: The Kirk Hammett Collection” exhibition in Terminal 2.
Hammett talked to Collectors Weekly about how his obsession with horror developed, the history of horror films and the memorabilia they spawned, and how he learned the business of collecting such rare items as movie props and custom horror guitars. There’s a bonus gallery of classic horror memorabilia, too.
Did you catch this during the National League wildcard playoff last night? Quite a few baseball fans who are also Star Wars fans did. ShenaniganZ posted the droid’s reaction at Facebook. The Cubs went on the beat the Pirates 4-0.
When a new season of The Walking Dead approaches, AMC runs a marathon of the entire series to get fans excited, and newbies caught up on the story. As I catch someone in my family watching an older episode, I look at the screen and think, “You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead, and you’re dead, too.”
But what’s it like for the actors who play those parts? It’s got to be a great day when you find out you’ve landed a part on The Walking Dead, but you also know that you could be killed off anytime. Some are hired knowing their time is short, but even long term major characters kick the bucket. How well you do the job has little to do with how long it lasts. Uproxx spoke with six actors whose characters were killed off about the experience and how it felt. I won’t tell you who, because some folks may be avoiding spoilers even at this late date.
A virtual world that resembles the real world gets boring after a while. I love it when someone comes up with a strange and different mod for the Grand Theft Auto universe. BlackSmoke Billy built a ramp on the front of a big rig tractor to see what would happen.
Chaos happens, sure, but what if you took that thing into a tunnel? What if you made it cover all the driving lanes? What if you drove it backward? All that happens in this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We’ve enjoyed James Cochrane’s Gadget Orchestra a couple of times before, although it’s been a few years. Now he’s programmed a few gadgets to play “Break On Through” by The Doors.
There are two versions in this video. The second has lyrics, with vocals provided by a DECTalk device, which was the first such device Stephen Hawking used, so it sounds like he’s the one singing. (We’ve heard him sing, after all.) The other band members are an HP ScanJet 3C, two Yamaha CX-5M computers, and two hard drives on percussion. -via Metafilter
A plan like this starts to sound better and better over time, doesn’t it? I have a daughter who thinks this way. She worked hard to make sure we have four cats, and then she moves out. This is the latest from Kangel at Anything About Nothing.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Ty Cobb and Napoleon Lajoie
The 1910 American League batting race would be classified as, unequivocally, the most bizarre in the history of baseball. The race was a two-man battle between two baseball dichotomies. These two divergent hitters were both incredibly talented batsmen and would both end up enshrined in the baseball hall of fame. But, as men, they inhabited two opposite polar extremes.
Napoleon “Nap" Lajoie was a gentle, good-natured, friendly second baseman for the Cleveland team. Because of Lajoie's great popularity and in his honor, the Cleveland team actually changed their name to the Cleveland “Naps". By 1910, Lajoie, besides being beloved by both his teammates and the fans, had already won four batting titles.
On the opposite pole, Ty Cobb, by 1910, was already the most hated and reviled player in all of baseball. A notorious racist, misogynist, bully, bigot, and all around misanthrope, Cobb was hated, not only around the rest of the league, but by many of his own teammates. Nonetheless. Cobb was widely respected as a great hitter, having won the AL batting crown in 1907, '08, and '09.
To spice up the race, Hugh Chalmers of the Chalmers Motor Car Company was offering a brand new Chalmers Model 30 automobile to the eventual winner.
Lajoie had almost a 30 point lead in the race by mid-July and looked like a good bet to win the new auto. But by early September, Cobb had whittled the lead down to eight points.
