The contenders in the 2015 Name of the Year Tournament have been unveiled. Sixty-four names made the cut due to their individuality, whether it resulted from marriage, foreign languages, legal name change, or parents with a wicked sense of humor. The number one seeds this year are Cherries Waffles Tennis, Littice Bacon-Blood, Mussolini Africano, and Dr. Electron Kebebew. They will face some stiff competition from Genghis Muskox, Malvina Complainville, Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Amanda Miranda Panda, and Beethoven Bong. The ultimate winner this year will no doubt eclipse the 2014 winner, Shamus Beaglehole. Check out the enlargeable bracket for all 64 names. Voting in each region will begin soon, so check back at Name of the Year or get updates through Twitter. -via Metafilter
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
When Jill and Zeon go to the San Diego County Fair this year, they’ll have to try the new “all that and a bag of chips” sandwich -except this one has the chips right inside. The Grilled Chili Cheese Frito Crunch Sandwich makes chili, cheese, and Fritos a little easier to eat while you’re walking. You’ll find it at the the Grilled Cheese-a-Fair booth, whose proprietors unveiled it at a recent fair planning meeting. Does anyone want to place bets between now and then that they develop a method for deep-frying this sandwich?
(Image credit: San Diego County Fair)
Burn! This is the creature who put the “sass” in Sasquatch. But entirely appropriate. I’ve wondered from time to time how they may feel about being nicknamed for an oversized body part. It probably does things to one’s self-esteem. This comic is the latest from Zach at Extra Fabulous Comics. -via reddit
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
We live in the age of movie sequels. Movie historians well know the the sequel is a relatively new phenomenon. Sequels used to be extremely rare, but nowadays it seems like every other film gets a sequel (or sequels) made.
Almost inevitably, a sequel is weaker and makes less money than the original, but with a blockbuster film the producers are happy to make a fraction of what the original made. Few movie fans will list any sequel on his or her list of all-time best or favorite films.
Okay, let's take a look at a list of bad, unnecessary, or curious movie sequels.
1. Son of Kong (1933)
Listed by some film historians as "the first movie sequel.” King Kong was such a huge smash, this rushed sequel is historic also, in that it is the only movie sequel to ever be released in the same year (1933) as its original.
Sadly, Son of Kong has no Fay Wray.
2. Return to Oz (1985)
Disney's sequel to the classic The Wizard of Oz came 46 years after the original, earning a sequel place in the record books. Unfortunately, that's all it is known for, as it was a commercial and critical failure.
Director Walter Murch reportedly wanted only scant references to the original film, with the intention of remaining faithful to the L. Frank Baum novels; for instance, the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion are only briefly in the film.
3. McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force (1965)
A strange sequel, based on the hit TV series McHale's Navy and a sequel to the 1964 hit film of the same title. But strangely, there is no McHale in this one! Series star Ernest Borgnine (who played Quinton McHale) does not appear in the film named after his character. Ernest was off filming Flight of the Phoenix when this was being made. Much worse than it's predecessor. Ironically, Flight of the Phoenix is better than either of the McHale's Navy films.
4. Grease 2 (1982)
Shampoo has come a long way since it was first introduced in the 19th century. I remember when some shampoo company started advertising the idea that you should shampoo every day. That was a really novel idea at the time, since showers weren’t all that common in houses yet, and a lot of folks still didn’t have indoor plumbing. Craig Benzine guest-hosts this week’s mental_floss List Show, posted a little earlier than usual. He’s got facts about shampoo, including the reason there’s silicone in your shampoo.
Screen Junkies gave us Honest Trailers for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and now finally, the Hobbit Trilogy finishes up with the Honest Trailer for The Battle of the Five Armies. Whew -it’s about time! -via Tastefully Offensive
A new exhibit of Japanese art in San Francisco called "Seduction: Japan’s Floating World" presents the image of beautiful women doing alluring things in an opulent world. But these women of the Edo period were prostitutes in the Yoshiwara pleasure district outside Edo (now Tokyo). The art promoted business, and invited intrigued men to sample the decadent pleasures of what was once called the "suffering world," but then was changed to the “floating world” to whitewash any negative connotations. Laura W. Allen, curator of Japanese art at the Asian Art Museum, put together the exhibit. She cautions us on what we don’t know about the women.
“Don’t take these paintings at face value,” Allen says. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, yes, it’s a picture of a beautiful woman, wearing beautiful clothing.’ But it’s not a photograph. It’s some artist’s rendition, made to promote this particular world, which was driven by economics. The profiteers urged the production of more paintings, which continued to feed the frenzy for the Yoshiwara.
“The artwork is very much glamorized and idealized,” she continues. “I haven’t been to 17th-century Japan so I don’t know what it was actually like, and the women didn’t write about it, so we don’t have their firsthand accounts. To imagine it from a woman’s perspective, it must have been a very harsh reality. There’s been some modern scholarship that promotes idea that the women working as prostitutes had an economic power that they might not have otherwise had. But I think the day-to-day reality of living in the Yoshiwara could not have been pleasant.”
The life of an Edo Period prostitute was strictly ranked and regimented, and Yoshiwara flourished under their labor. Read some of the history of the pleasure district and the women who lived and worked there, at Collectors Weekly. You'll also see samples from the art exhibit.
(Image source: the John C. Weber Collection, image © John Bigelow Taylor)
Where did all the principles in the AMC TV show The Walking Dead come from? Either Britain or The Wire. Or someplace else. Screen Junkies gives us a peek at their earlier roles. (via Uproxx)
This is probably some kind of enrichment activity for red pandas in the Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo, Japan, but it ends up as pure entertaining cuteness. They slap slices of apple onto the glass windows of Eita’s enclosure and he has to get them himself. The apples taste so good after all that effort! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
See more red panda action from the Maruyama Zoo.
Looks like Wile E. Coyote has been up to his old tricks again! Who else would drop a vintage safe from some height right onto a parked car? You’d be forgiven if you thought this must be an art installation, and you’d be right, too. It’s a promotional gimmick on the streets of Limerick, Ireland, for Grandmother’s Giant Journey, a performance that is part of the Giant Saga by the French art company Royal de Luxe (previously at Neatorama). Grandmother will arrive in Limerick September 5th to stay through the 7th. Well, according to the legend, she will actually fall from the sky, but I wouldn't worry about any cars being crushed -at least none accidentally. -via reddit
Voldemort, the bad guy from the Harry Potter series, is out with his version of “Uptown Funk.” Elijah Thomas is Voldemort, and the cast includes musicians, dancers, and a group of cosplayers from Brigham Young University. The lyrics are at the YouTube page. -via The Daily Dot
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize–winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the winners page.
2006 Ig Nobel Biology Prize
Awarded to Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.
[REFERENCE: “Limburger Cheese as an Attractant for the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae s.s.,” B.G.J. Knols and R. De Jong, Parasitology Today, vol. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 159-61; and other papers.]
Here’s a quiz that will pay off for those who have been following Neatorama for a few years. You’ll be shown a picture of a cat, and you determine what species it is. We’ve posted some of these exact photographs. I expected to ace this one, but got tripped up on an easy one, and found one cat I wasn’t familiar with. Oh well, maybe I should write up a post on that cat!
You’ve seen women in movies undergoing beauty treatments at spas. You may have remarked that they look like a salad, slathered with some food-based mask and sporting cool cucumber slices on their eyes. Now that look really is food! Anna Hezel and Gabriella Paiella at Lucky Peach made this cheese ball in that likeness using various cheeses covered in mashed avocados. Her towel head wrap is mozzarella cheese, and her lips are a big red bell pepper. But they make it clear that they did not come up with the original idea.
Anna initially found Spa Lady when she was browsing around for Halloween-themed crafts. A few clicks down the rabbit hole, a tutorial on Hungry Happenings revealed her in all her glory. We read the comments, which we’re told never to do, and found throngs of home cooks bickering about her true origin. While many lauded Spa Lady as a breakthrough in cheese-ball artistry, one commenter claimed that the recipe was not revolutionary whatsoever, and had been around since she was “in school.”
Then you get to see the recipe, and the process of building this in pictures. -via Boing Boing
Sam Dekker of Wisconsin dunks the ball so hard that the net swings around and it goes through the hoop a second time! The Badgers went on to eliminate the Oregon Ducks from the NCAA tournament 72-65 yesterday, but it wasn’t because of this weird goal. It didn’t count, because 1. the opposing coach called a timeout before the dunk, and 2. even if it were a legitimate 2-point basket, the opposing team gets the ball after a goal, so you can’t score two goals in a row without surrendering the ball between them. It’s still a neat little stunt to catch on video. It’s not the first time Dekker has astonished the crowd with a weird throw. This one happened last fall.
-via reddit