Okay, it’s not a Pop Tart -it’s Pop Art! Falcon Toys offered Han Solo frozen in sugary icing on a toaster pastry made of resin for a short time until they were sold out. Maybe they'll make more! Recommended for serious adult collectors with a sense of humor, who grew up eating Pop Tarts for breakfast and carrying their lunch to school in a Star Wars lunchbox.
You can see why it’s not recommended for children. And why didn’t someone think of this long, long ago? Well, someone didthink of it, but never made it out of food or anything else. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A man was in a particular hurry to get his children to school in Toronto Monday morning. Instead of waiting at a traffic light, he decided to take a short cut through a parking lot. He didn’t see the yellow metal poles planted to protect a sidewalk exit ramp. So this happened. Constable Lilly Fitzpatrick said he must have been going too fast.
“He actually bent the first concrete pole and then the vehicle got hung up on the second one,” she said.
No one was injured but the vehicle’s undercarriage was significantly damaged.
“We had to have a special tow truck that was able to lift it up from the pole and get it down,” the constable said.
What you don’t know about Broadway (and off-Broadway) musicals can be fascinating. Dame Judi Dench was in Cats? Well, sort of. And there were a lot of non-actors who’ve had parts in stage productions, like Walter Cronkite and Joe Namath. Learn quite a few more facts about musicals in this video. Also this week, I found out what my other boss looks like, as Executive Editor Erin McCarthy hosts the mental_floss List Show. -via mental_floss
You read about Major William Martin, the soldier who did not exist, in a recent Neatorama feature article about wartime fakery. Did you know you can visit his grave in Spain? You can also visit the Museum of Art Fakes, and even the Cardiff Giant.
It’s called one of the greatest hoaxes in American history, and you can still see the Cardiff Giant on display at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The Giant was the work of a cigar maker named George Hull. Hull’s plan was to get very rich very quickly, starting his scheme in Iowa with an order for a five-ton hunk of gypsum. He had it shipped to Chicago, where he hired a stonecutter to carve it into the shape of a 10-foot-long giant. It was then shipped to the small town of Cardiff in Central New York and buried, where it would be discovered only a year later by the landowner as he attempted to dig a well.
If you love a good hoax, you can even plan a road trip around visiting the places where these stories happened. There’s a list of ten with backstories at Urban Ghosts.
Pixar animation studios has carved out a cottage industry of making people cry. It’s an emotional, cathartic cry that makes the funny parts of their movies extra hilarious in contrast. Have you ever wondered how they manage to do it so well and so consistently?
Let’s take a tour of Pixar’s super secret SadLab. Even though this is a parody video classified as comedy, slight references to movies you may have seen could cause tears. -via Tastefully Offensive
You’ve probably heard that Australia is overrun with an invasive species: rabbits. Or at least you’ve heard of the “rabbit proof fence,” which incidentally, turned out to be anything but rabbit proof. How did this invasion start, anyway?
In 1859, Thomas Austin made a very small decorative decision with very large consequences. Austin was a British expat living in Australia, grown newly wealthy through sheep farming, and he had most of the trappings of his new lifestyle in place—the bluestone mansion, the horses, the 29,000-acre estate. All he was missing were some atmospheric reminders of his homeland. So he asked his nephew to bring him some English fauna—a bunch of blackbirds, thrushes, and partridges, and 24 European rabbits. Hunting them would make for a good weekend activity, and besides, he wrote, "the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm."
Well, of course, they bred like rabbits. From those two dozen bunnies, the population boomed to ten billion by 1920. The rabbits eat vegetation until a formerly-lush area is completely barren. They dig warrens that destabilize soil and encourage erosion. They ruin the habitats of native animals. They destroy agriculture. The Australian government has tried several ways to control the rabbit population, with grim results. Read about how rabbits took over Australia (as well as the rest of the world) at Atlas Obscura.
Anthony Federica Granai is upset with his Labrador mix, Ettore. Thanks to a Google translation of the Italian video site, we find what Ettore had done. "He was pretty much making a hole in the sofa.” But he is SO sorry, and he wants Anthony’s love and forgiveness SO badly.
I don’t see how Anthony held out so long against those big puppy dog eyes, that nuzzling, that begging. But everything turned out fine for Ettore. You can see an English transcript here. -via reddit
Antidepressants are among the most commonly detected human pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment. Since their mode of action is by modulating the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, aquatic invertebrates who possess transporters and receptors sensitive to activation by these pharmaceuticals are potentially affected by them.... molluscan reproductive and locomotory systems are affected by antidepressants at environmentally relevant concentrations.
Recognize the alien in this picture? Of course you don’t, because it was just a prototype that never appeared in the film. Good thing, too, because it would be hard to build a relationship with such a creature. Imagine if this was really E.T.’s race.
Fresh off a hit in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg found himself beset with requests to make a sequel, because Hollywood's problems are not new. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2: Closer Encounters of the Fourth Kind was shot down, Spielberg pitched a dark and gritty follow-up in Night Skies, about a group of alien scientists terrorizing a farmer's family and violently mutilating their livestock like so many kidnapped hitchhikers.
Everyone was enthusiastic except Spielberg himself, who couldn't get in the cattle mutilation mood and wanted to make something more optimistic. Luckily, Harrison Ford's girlfriend, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, was around to tell Spielberg that she thought the best part of Night Skies was the subplot where the family's young son befriends one of the younger, less mutilation inclined aliens. Spielberg, liking Mathison's vision, asked her to write the first draft of a little film that you now know as... Schindler's List.
Okay, not really. It was E.T.
The earlier version of the aliens in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial are just one of 8 Iconic Characters That Were Originally Insane, meaning very different from the product we know, at Cracked.
Redditor Skwerilleee posted pictures of Louie’s Pizza in Colorado Springs, where his friend works. The employee went in the back to get something, and found a baby bear. There were more pictures taken later, when animal control personnel arrived.
The cub had a broken paw, possibly from an auto accident, so he was taken to a veterinarian. No Mama Bear was found.
Many movies have two or more possible endings before one is selected for the final edit. The chosen ending is often a result of test audiences’ preference, a better idea that occurred to writers along the way, or the decision to open the door for possible sequels.
Screen Rant lets us in on the endings that weren’t used in five movies. Therefore, this video contains spoilers for First Blood, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I Am Legend, Terminator 2, and 28 Days Later. I think if you were ever planning to see those movies, you would have by now. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, is planning a superlative roller coaster that will, if everything goes as planned, break ten world records. The Valravn Birdseye will be the tallest, the fastest, and the longest dive coaster in the world. It also shows that all the good roller coaster names have been taken. Other world records it will break include the longest drop, the highest inversion, and the most inversions. The rest of the records have to do with how many roller coasters are in one theme park. Let’s take a virtual ride in this conceptual video.
M*A*S*H was a book, then a movie, then a smash TV show that lasted 11 seasons and ended with the most-watched series finale ever. What is there to learn about the show you don’t already know? Plenty, because these are things that went on behind the scenes.
1. ALAN ALDA AND JAMIE FARR SERVED IN THE U.S. ARMY.
Alda (Hawkeye Pierce) was in the Army Reserve for six months as a gunnery officer during the Korean War. Farr enlisted, and was stationed in Japan when Red Skelton requested his services on his USO Tour through Korea. Wayne Rogers (Trapper John McIntyre) joined the U.S. Navy for a time as a ship navigator. Mike Farrell (B.J. Hunnicut) served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
2. MCLEAN STEVENSON AUDITIONED FOR HAWKEYE, AND COMEDIAN ROBERT KLEIN TURNED DOWN THE ROLE OF TRAPPER JOHN.
Stevenson was convinced to take the role of Lt. Colonel Henry Blake instead. As for Klein, he denied a claim that he lived to regret the decision.
3. LARRY GELBART WROTE THE PILOT IN TWO DAYS FOR $25,000.
The veteran screenwriter had been living in London after growing tired of Hollywood, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try to adapt Robert Altman’s movie for television audiences.
That’s the beginning, and then the M*A*S*H trivia list at mental_floss covers production, a few key episodes, and the show’s aftermath -including the fate of the time capsule they buried on the outdoor location.
My daughter made a pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting last week that was so rich that you had to cut the slices very thin. Yet it was gone in a day. That pumpkin/cinnamon/ginger combination makes a variety of foods taste like autumn, from breakfast rolls to dessert. With cream cheese? Yes, I’ll take two. You might prefer adding the taste of peanut butter, Nutella, Oreos, chai, rum, gingersnaps, yogurt, cocoanut, or chocolate. Pictured here are Pumpkin Chai Cupcakes from Baking a Moment. The other twenty recipes are linked at Buzzfeed.
Margaret Gorman became the first Miss America by winning a popularity contest in Atlantic City in 1921 that measured the crowd’s applause as well as the judges decisions. She wasn’t called Miss America until the next year’s pageant. The pageant has changed a lot since then. Over the weekend, Miss Georgia, Betty Cantrell, won the title of Miss America 2016. Psychguides.com noticed how much skinnier each Miss America has become over time, and constructed a chart to compare the Body Mass Index (BMI) of the pageant winners for whom weight and weight are available with the average young American woman at the time.
In the early generations, the BMI scores for Miss America winners hovered within the middle of the healthy weight range but soon began their descent toward the low, unhealthy range. Using historical data on both the pageant winners and the average American woman, we were able to estimate that the only decades during which Miss America fell into the same range as the average U.S. woman were the 1940s and 1950s. In the decades since, the pageant winners have become markedly thinner, while the average woman’s BMI has been increasing. Now more than ever, the ideal image of beauty portrayed by the contest inaccurately represents average American women.
The post goes on to discuss the dangers of an unhealthy body image presented by the Miss America pageant and how this contributes to eating disorders. But the real enticements are the several visualizations of Miss America winners from 1921 to 2015. -via Tech Insider
