Redditor youphoric posted this picture, under the title “the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on.” Of course, he was instantly corrected, as rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents. But the title is a quote. The rest of the comment thread is a rundown of every line of the movie. You know which movie.
But I also learned that you can tell a rodent from a lagomorph by looking at its teeth. A lagomorph has four incisors on top, and a rodent has only two. So someone needs to look carefully into the mouth of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog to make sure. Otherwise, we can assume it is no relation to the Rodents of Unusual Size.
Don’t laugh (so much). There have been reports of killer rabbits right here. Remember that one that pursued Jimmy Carter? After all, rabbits used to be scary big.
Pip the duckling has never been in the water before, but he’s about to have a swimming lesson in an aquarium. He doesn’t know he’s built for this, so he’s a little scared. But once he gets in the water, he finds out how much fun it is! -via Tastefully Offensive
Matt Bray of Project One Life did a video last year in which he learned the Napolean Dynamite dance in 100 days. He’s pretty well perfected the dance, and in this video, he’s doing it in 100 different places! And he only changed clothes about eight times. The video is mesmerizing. It’s a tribute not only to his dance skills, but also the editing that made the transitions so smooth. What it once for the choreography and editing, and then a second time for the locations. -via Viral Viral Videos
The show is live. You play completely different characters in back-to-back skits. You’ve got less than two minutes to change from one to the other, while the backstage area is crowded with other actors doing the same thing. It could be chaos, yet the cast members of Saturday Night Live do it every week. They do it with the help of dressers, who are skilled at getting everything right in no time flat. Keith Shaw has been a dresser for years, both in TV and for Broadways shows, and gives us some insight into the logistics of getting the SNL cast ready on a tight schedule, over and over.
AVC: How quick is a quick change?
KS: We can do a total change from one big costume to another, with wig and makeup changes, in 45 seconds. It’s kind of like a Nascar pit crew.
AVC: What has to happen for one to run smoothly?
KS: The actor has to be calm. Calm, calm, calm. And just help as much as they can. The worst thing they can do is freak out or panic that they’ll miss their cue. It is much easier for them to just stand still rather than panic and scream, “Hurry up!” Newbies, generally speaking, tend to freak out more, but once they get used to the speed and time pressure they calm down. They get what needs to happen, and know they have to help as much as possible.
On my side of things, at SNL, we have racks with all the costumes the actor will be wearing that show, so I’ll already have the next one ready. I’ll have the pants on the floor, puddled in a pile, so they’d drop one pair and just step over into the other one and pull them up. While they’re doing that, you’re taking the top part of their costume off.
At SNL everyone has both a wardrobe person and a hair and makeup person. It’s a tag-team if I need to change clothing and they need to change a wig or add a mustache. It can get really complicated if the space is small or the costume is big, or if the actor is tall, because then you need a step ladder just to reach them. One dresser does the hosts; she’s of average height, but if there’s an athlete hosting, those guys are just enormous. They tower over her. So that’s rough, especially since the hosts often have the most or quickest changes because they’re probably in every sketch.
The “British Invasion” period of rock music in the 1960s exposed American audiences to some of the best bands of all time. For anyone who lived through it, it was electrifying. Imagine hearing a new record by the Beatles for the first time. (Bonus: Parents hated it!) There were new groups and new sounds coming over the radio airwaves and arriving in record stores every week. But given how many bands there were, it’s amazing how many disappeared just as quickly as they appeared.
Inspired by American music forms, particularly early rock ’n’ roll, country and western, and rhythm and blues, British teenagers started forming garage bands in the early 1960s, merging those styles together. The music press called them “Beat” bands because they had a driving drum beat, but also “Merseybeat” bands, named for a small magazine that covered local bands. The magazine— Mersey Beat— took its name from the River Mersey, which is located in northwest England and runs through one of the centers of British garage-band music, Liverpool. Not all Merseybeat bands were from Liverpool, though. Many hailed from Manchester, Newcastle, and other working-class towns in England’s “Midlands” that were decidedly not London.
But when dozens of these groups began signing record deals and scoring international hit records— primarily because one Beat band, the Beatles, paved the way for them— the wave of English acts that swept over North America became known as the British Invasion.
Here are a few of the bands from that era, which dominated rock music from the early 1960s well into the ’70s.
BILLY J. KRAMER AND THE DAKOTAS
If the Beatles were the varsity team, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas were the JV squad. They had the same manager (Brian Epstein), the same producer (George Martin), and a lot of their songs were written by Lennon and McCartney. Epstein signed Kramer because he was good-looking and could possibly be a teen idol. (The rest of the band was signed separately and assigned to Kramer.) Their first single was a cover of the Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” with piano played by Martin. It went to #2 in the U.K.
The next one, Lennon-McCartney’s “Bad to Me” went to #1. Before long, Kramer, whose real name was Billy Ashton, got tired of doing Beatles castoffs, so the band recorded “Little Children” (written by an American) and released it in the U.S., backed with “Bad to Me.” Both songs went top-10. Their success would be short-lived, though— it was okay to sound like the Beatles as long as the Beatles still sounded like the Beatles. But by 1966, they had gone experimental and progressive, and all the bands that sounded like the pre-Sgt. Pepper Beatles were suddenly very passé. Kramer’s group broke up in 1968.
Billy Crystal’s 1991 film City Slickers was released on June 7th, which is a good enough excuse to look back on what made it the comedy hit it was. Many would say the secret to the movie’s success was Jack Palance, but he was balanced out by city boys Bruno Kirby, Daniel Stern, and Crystal. Did you know that
1. JACK PALANCE WAS BILLY CRYSTAL’S ORIGINAL CHOICE TO PLAY CURLY.
When Crystal first came up with the seed of the idea for City Slickers, he immediately thought of Jack Palance as the crusty bad guy with the heart of gold. He thought of him because the first movie he had ever seen was the 1953 movie Shane, where Palance played the bad guy. The actor left a lasting impression on Crystal, who was seven years old at the time of his first movie-going experience. Because his father produced jazz concerts, Billy saw Shane seated on Billie Holiday’s lap.
6. PALANCE GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH THE DIRECTOR ON THE FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING.
The veteran actor yelled at Ron Underwood over his first direction, but everything went smoothly after that. When Crystal asked what had happened, Palance explained that he always gets nervous on his first day of shooting. Sure enough, Tim Burton told a similar story about Palance snapping at him on his first day of shooting on Batman over how he was told to walk out of a bathroom, with Burton admitting that the incident scared him "to death—I literally saw white and left my body.”
A photo posted by yourleo (@yourleo) on Jun 7, 2015 at 10:34am PDT
We’ve posted the photography of Murad Osmann a couple of times before. He’s the guy who travels the world, being led around by his girlfriend Natalia Zakharova. The series has reached its logical climax as he is being led down the matrimonial aisle, in the presence of friends and family. Yes, he can no longer follow his girlfrind because he'll now be following his wife! Her Instagram post is mostly in Russian, but Vera Wang is spelled the same in both languages. You can see more wedding pictures -and even their faces- at Buzzfeed.
Sometime in 1917, probably in November, Emerson High School in Oklahoma City got new chalkboards. Apparently they installed them right overtop the old chalkboards, which were only discovered this past week as chalkboards are now being replaced with whiteboards. The older chalkboards still had lessons drawn on them, untouched since that time!
“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the Oklahoman. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”
Besides the ever-popular TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard’s crew also roamed the universe in four movies- Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). The first movie came out the same year the TV series ended, so the franchise seemed to have just been promoted to the cinema instead of actually ending. Star Trek: Generations actually served to link the series with its predecessor from the ’60s.
1. The first of the Next Generation films was something of a rush job as principal photography on the film with the Next Generation cast started one week after the wrap on the seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation itself.
Filming of the scenes with Kirk, Scotty and Chekov took place while the TV show was still shooting. Wrap on the film had to be only a matter of a few weeks later to meet the release date in November of 1994. "All Good Things," the Next Generation finale, aired on the 23rd May.
2. There's an entire opening sequence that was cut from the film depicting Captain Kirk (retired) landing from an orbital skydive in a wheat field where Captain Scott and Commander Chekov are waiting. The Captain then exclaims that he's not going to the Enterprise-B ceremony.... and that's final!
The orbital skydiving, or spacediving suit then later ended up on screen worn by Lieutenant B'elanna Torres in Star Trek: Voyager's "Extreme Risk" after she discovered that the Dominion had wiped out the Marquis in the alpha quadrant. The cut scene is on the Blu-ray and some DVD releases.
That’s just the beginning of a trivia list that covers all four movies at Den of Geek. And the fandom lives on. However, if you have not seen the movies and plan to, there are spoilers.
Surely you recognize Hollywood star Buster Keaton. He’s the one who always insisted on doing his own stunts, and they weren’t just pratfalls. He was the first true action star.
Like Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton routinely risked his life performing virtually all his own stunts. He nearly drowned while filming a river scene in Our Hospitality (1923) when a safety line broke, and he actually broke his neck filming a scene in Sherlock, Jr. (1924), when he fell onto a railroad track while dangling from a water tower. Both of these scenes were used in the final films. (Keaton didn’t even realized he’d broken his neck until 11 years later, when he finally got around to having it X-rayed.)
No, this is not the cover of a porn magazine. I’m pretty sure it contained knitting patterns with which you could make a gift that the man in your life would die for. Or maybe die of embarrassment. Oh well, it was only 35 cents -or ten cents if you bought it used.
While the fashions of the 1970s could be pretty weird, they were never as weird as the advertisements for them. Even at the time, we wondered if the models realized how very uncool the pictures were. Men in Belted Sweaters is just one small part of a roundup of strange catalog entries, advertisements, and fashion shoots featuring menswear of the ‘70s. -via Boing Boing
One model is dressed in the fashions of the day for every decade since 1915. Lucky for her, they skipped the corset for the first dress! Most of them look really nice- and I particularly love the 1945 look.
What a strange and wonderful mashup: the audio from three of the most memorable scenes in Breaking Bad set to video from Spongebob Squarepants! They mesh perfectly thanks to the editing skills of YouTube user runningflannel.
If you play guitar, seeing one on a shelf in any store naturally draws your attention -even in a toy aisle. You say to your buddy, “I wonder how hard it would be to tune that thing?” One thing leads to another, and soon you’re jamming for an iPhone video. This is Clay Shelburn and Zac Stokes performing Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Pride and Joy” in the toy department at Walmart. -via Metafilter
I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy. Come on, Squishy Come on, little Squishy.
Sami the German Shepherd has always been a maternal dog. She’s cuddled with babies, kittens, and even a snake before. But this time, she’s latched onto a lobster that was purchased for dinner! Watch her protect the crustacean from anyone who would harm it.
The alternate theory is that she’s protecting her dinner, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t she go ahead and eat it? Not long after this video was taken, the family got a new puppy, and Sami was very happy to be its mother. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
