The American Humane Association has announced the winners of the sixth annual Pawscars™, the awards for animal acting and other cinematic achievements by animals. Picture above is Crystal, a capuchin monkey who was recognized with the Lifetime Diva Achievement Award.
This beloved capuchin monkey has been an animal star for 18 years starring in more than 25 films including the “Night At The Museum” series, “The Hangover: Part 2,” “American Pie,” and the “Dr. Doolittle” films, as well as television shows, and commercials. One amazing fact about Crystal is that she is a rescue animal. Crystal is far from the only rescue animal working today: approximately 80 percent of the cats and dogs you see on the large and small screen are rescues or adopted from shelters. This monkey is so beloved that the late Robin Williams called her “his favorite leading lady.”
There were winners in ten categories. You can see the announcement video and read about all of the winners at the Humane Association’s website. -via Time
Before we had clocks, our concept of the passage of time wasn’t measured in minutes or hours. But now we don’t know any other way to think about it. And the development of clocks changed not only the way we think about time, but the way we use it, and the way we measure and quantify the world around us. In this video, Adam Westbrook looks at the changes that the simple clock brought to the world. -via Digg
This deep-dish pizza is wrapped all the way around the crust with strips of bacon- three and a half feet of bacon! Little Caesars announced today that they will offer the Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza for a limited time starting Monday, February 23rd. At $12, it’s just about the most expensive pizza the outlet offers. It’s not only wrapped with bacon, but it has pepperoni and bits of bacon as toppings. Read more about the new bacon-wrapped pizza at USA Today (link contains auto play video). -via Buzzfeed
The beloved children’s book author Theodor Seuss Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, died in 1991, but he’s got a new book coming out in July. What Pet Should I Get? is believed to have been written between 1958 and 1962, and features the same brother and sister from the 1960 book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
Geisel's widow, Audrey Geisel, found the manuscripts and illustrations in their La Jolla, California, home soon after her husband died. She set the materials aside, only to rediscover them in 2013 while cleaning out his office.
"While undeniably special, it is not surprising to me that we found this because Ted always worked on multiple projects and started new things all the time," Audrey Geisel said in the release.
The new Dreamworks animated feature film Home will hit theaters on March 27. Based on the acclaimed children’s book The True Meaning of Smedkay by Adam Rex, it involves the collision of two worlds: the everyday life of a young girl named Tip (voiced by Rihanna) and the fish-out-of-water extraterrestrial called Oh (Jim Parsons). In their adventures together they travel the Earth and beyond.
The book The Art of Home by Ramin Zahed gives us a glimpse into the process of creating the beautiful scenes, characters, and action we’ll see in the film.
Randall Munroe at xkcd presents us with a flowchart to determine what kind of chart or graph you prefer. And he then attempts to give you what you want, in one way or another. But as you and I know, there’s no pleasing some people. The arrow at the bottom points to the “random” button at the website. Which ought to please anyone.
Boston now has 95 inches of snow, and other towns in Massachusetts have recorded over a hundred. The snow scenes coming out of New England are insane. The mayor of Boston warned residents to stop jumping out of windows into the snow -or off roofs and balconies- because it’s dangerous. It’s become a thing on YouTube and Vine. Marty Walsh’s speech probably did not have the effect he intended.
Greater Boston resident Christina Phaup, 25, told The Huffington Post that she hadn’t even heard of anyone jumping out of their windows before Walsh’s speech.
“I haven’t had contact with the outside world in days," said Phaup, who was snowed in at her apartment over the long weekend. Now that Walsh gave her the idea, though, “I’m putting that on my to-do list.”
Phaup’s friend, 25-year-old Andrew Rosenblatt, lives in the Boston suburb of Quincy and told HuffPost he would definitely heed Walsh’s warning. However, after learning of Phaup's response, he stated, “If she’s doing it, I’m doing it.”
One of the gigantic snow piles near MIT. They're calling it Mt. Cambridgemanjaro (or Mt. Simmons. It has many names). pic.twitter.com/uzkCqaVzjW
What do scurvy and measles have in common? They are diseases we can defeat, as long as we take the proper steps to prevent them. This video from It’s OK To Be Smart goes over the basics of the immune system and how vaccines affect them. More of it is about the history of vaccines, and how it’s possible that we can sometimes forget how important medical breakthroughs are when we become used to better health. Talk to someone who is familiar with smallpox or polio, and the view changes. On another note, can you say “Citrus fruits cure scurvy” three times fast? -via Geeks Are Sexy
In this short film by Evelien Lohbeck (previously at Neatorama), the computer’s fan sets off a chain reaction a la Rube Goldberg. But the action eventually returns to the computer, where the chain reaction continues on the digital screen, although in a strangely mechanical way. There’s a lot packed into a minute. No, you don’t have to understand all of it to enjoy it. -via Viral Viral Videos
Well, maybe not always, but men are much more likely to misinterpret a woman’s friendliness as flirting than women misinterpret men’s behavior. About 90% of American women report that a man thought she was romantically interested in him when she wasn’t at least once in their lives, while American men say the converse happened to 70% of them. While both rates are high, that’s quite a disparity.
But what accounts for this gender difference? As Mons Bendixen, a psychologist at the Norwegian university of Science and Technology, writes in a study recently published in Evolutionary Psychology, there are two main theories: Error-management theory argues that men have evolved to overperceive sexual interest in non-familial female relationships so they don’t miss out on the opportunity to reproduce — at best, they get to pass on their genes; at worst, the woman ends up saying no and they move on. Women, on the other hand, have evolved to underperceive sexual interest, because sex with the wrong guy means risking pregnancy and child-rearing without the help of a mate, not to mention lost opportunities to procreate with other, less flaky men. In other words, the sexual stakes are higher for women than for men — or they were, at least, in the distant past, when evolution shaped behaviors that linger to this day.
Social-roles theory, on the other hand, argues that gender differences in rates of sexual misperception — not to mention in other sorts of behavior — come down to societal norms and expectations. So in places that lack gender equality, one would expect a large disparity between men’s level of misperception and women’s, with the rates becoming more and more similar the more gender-egalitarian a culture is.
Are we hard-wired by evolution, or were we just raised that way? The next step was to study men and women in a more socially egalitarian society than the U.S. to see if the same disparity holds up. Read what happened when Bendixen reproduced a 2003 American study in Norway at New York magazine. -via Digg
Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar (played by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) appeared on the SNL 40th anniversary special and proved they are just as loved as they were a quarter-century ago. The recurring skit “Wayne’s World” was such a hit on Saturday Night Live that it propelled Myers onto the big screen for the feature film Wayne’s World in 1992. Here’s some things you should know about both of them.
1. WAYNE BEGAN LIFE ON A DIFFERENT SERIES ALTOGETHER.
Though it’s Saturday Night Live that made Wayne Campbell a household name, the character—which Mike Myers began working on when he was still a teenager—began his on-screen life on Canadian television, first on the alternative video show City Limits and later on It’s Only Rock & Roll in 1987 in a sketch called “Wayne’s Power Minute.” When Myers joined the cast of SNL in 1989, he brought Wayne with him. "Wayne’s World" made its SNL debut on February 18, 1989.
12. “BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY” ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT INTO THE FILM.
In 2014, Myers told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast that using “Bohemian Rhapsody” was one of the things he fought for hardest on Wayne’s World. “They wanted Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses were very, very popular, they were a fantastic band,” Myers said. “Queen, at that point—not by me and not by hardcore fans—but the public had sort of forgotten about them. Freddie [Mercury] had gotten sick, the last time we had seen them was on Live Aid and then there were a few albums after where they were sort of straying away from their arena rock roots. But I always loved ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ I thought it was a masterpiece. So I fought really, really hard for it. And at one point I said, ‘Well, I'm out. I don't want to make this movie if it’s not ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Gary Harold Lee Levitch, the eldest son of comedian Jerry Lewis, was born on July 31, 1946. Gary was supposed to have been named “Cary,” because of his mother's great love of movie actor Cary Grant, but the hospital he was delivered in made a clerical error and he was to be “Gary" forevermore.
Being the son of a hugely popular comedian of the 1950's and '60's, Gary grew up with a love of show business and made appearances in both TV shows and at least one movie featuring his father.
In 1960, when Gary was 14, his dad gave him a drum set for his birthday. In 1964, after the Beatles hit America, along with millions of other teenage boys, Gary formed a group.
One day, two of the group members showed up late for rehearsals and Gary sarcastically asked them, “Where have you playboys been?" Everyone immediately loved the name and thus, “The Playboys" were officially christened.
Soon, the five-man band got signed to play a string of gigs at Disneyland (at the time, no one realized the Jerry Lewis connection, and the band went by the name “Gary and the Playboys”). They were very successful and drew consistently big, enthusiastic crowds. All of this was unknown to father Jerry. Gary and the band would rehearse secretly in their home, but only when Jerry was out.
Gary and the boys were soon spotted by a record producer named Snuff Garrett. Garrett liked what he heard, with one exception: another member of the band, guitarist Dave Walker, was singing lead on most of the vocals, with Gary in the background playing drums.
Garrett came upon the revolutionary idea of having a celebrity's kid singing lead in a rock band and Gary was given a "promotion,” instantly becoming the band's resident Mick Jagger. It doesn't take much imagination to conceive how Dave Walker must have felt at this decision.
Garrett set up an actual recording session for the still-fledgling group. This session was financed by Jerry's wife, Patti Lewis. Patti warned Gary not to say a word about the session to his dad. “Hey, if this venture fails, I gotta come up with some kind of excuse on where the money went, so don't tell your father about it,” she cautioned her son.
This guy is traveling down a snowy mountain on his snowmobile. If you think it seems like an awfully steep hill, you are right. At one point, he loses the snowmobile! As the guy slides and spins down the mountain, we wonder if the machine is going to run him over. Then we don’t see it for a while, and we assume it stopped. No, there it comes tumbling after him! So he’s trying to catch the snowmobile without being smashed by it. This is one nerve-wracking video, and that mountain is definitely too steep for a snowmobile run. -via Digg
An anonymous Boston resident spent hours shoveling snow from a parking space in front of his home. He even shoveled a path to his house from it, and left an old bookshelf in the spot to block it. In Boston, if you shovel out a space, no one but the shoveler is supposed to use it for at least 48 hours after snowfall has stopped. In Boston this winter, that’s about how long it takes for another snowfall to begin! Anyway, this guy returned home from work to find someone had taken his space.
He spent Monday considering his options. Then, on Monday night, he shoveled all the snow back into the spot.
Sebastian appears to be addicted to the computer. You can’t blame him for enjoying the fish swimming across the screen. Hamlet, however, can take it or leave it. The two cats illustrate the conflict that occurs when one of a couple can’t stop playing video games, while the other feels neglected. “Honey, you’ve been on that computer for hours. Why don’t you come play with me for a while?”
The videographer described the action as Hamlet trying to prevent Sebastian from scratching the screen. Although they are both cases of anthropomorphism, I prefer my interpretation. Who knows what really goes on in the minds of cats? -via Daily Picks and Flicks
