The Avengers have the Christmas spirit! With the help of some editing by James Covenant, the superheroes sing some Christmas tunes. Then there’s a special bonus song by Groot. Really. -via Time
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The Storms family in Austin, Texas, put up 25,000 computer-controlled LED Christmas lights on their home and make them dance to the song “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen. They’ve had amazing light shows for years, but this one with its snowflake and monochrome design is special. They’ve already uploaded five songs from their display this year. -via Tastefully Offensive
The Following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
A mini-opera in 4 acts, about scientists planning a wedding
Words by Marc Abrahams
This opera had its premiere Thursday evening, October 4, at the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The performance, and the entire Ig Nobel ceremony, served as the introduction to an actual wedding.
The Original Cast
Opera Director : Margot Button
Head Scientist: Dierdre Allyson
Assistant Head Scientist: Jim Jordan
Scientists: Adrienne Shelton, Jane Tankersley
Mother of the Bride: Margot Button
Guest Scientists: Nobel Laureates Robert Wilson, Richard Roberts, William Lipscomb, Dudley Herschbach
Model Bride: Amanda Palmer
Pianist: Greg Neal
Narrator: Karen Hopkin
ACT 1 -- "MADAME BUTTERFLY EFFECT"
NARRATOR (spoken): Scientists are fascinated by that natural phenomenon we call "love." Every so often, two scientists will join in an experiment they call "marriage." Tonight's opera shows how the entire scientific community collaborates to formulate the wedding plans. In act one of our opera, an eminent scientist tells her colleagues that Complexity Theory (whatever that is) is the key to having a good wedding.
[MUSIC: "Queen of the Night," from "The Magic Flute," by Mozart]
[SINGER: A lab-coat-clad SCIENTIST lectures to her colleagues. She is describing how they will plan the wedding of two colleagues. Her ASSISTANTS act out the things she's describing, using a blackboard or flipchart and various props -- including a large butterfly-shaped ballot.]
The wedding plans are wonderf'ly specific --
Quite scientific!
They'll organize themselves,
It's just terrific!
A butterfly
Once flapped its wings somewhere in Argentina.
This caused a thunder storm in Pasadena.
In principle, we'll
Use the same technique.
Math'ma-ti-'cly
It will be oh so easy!
It'll be so-o-o-o-o-o easy!
It'll be so-o-o-o-o-o easy!
So-o-o-...[TRILL]...-o-o-o easy!
The right butterfly -- that's the key.
Ha-a-a-a-ha-ha! Ha-a-a-a-ha-ha! Ha-a-a-[TRILL]-a-a-a-ha-ha!
We'll use a butterfly from Florida.
We'll get from Palm Beach County
A butterfly-shaped paper.
This butterfly will let you
Simplify what e'er you want.
Objections!
Inspections!
Or elections!
I feel oh so con-fi-dahnt!
No more ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-unning around!
This way we will pull every string.
Minimal paper shuffling!
Won't have to plan a blessed thing,
Other than picking out a ring.
I am so happy! Hear me sing!
Long before LOLcats and even before Harry Whittier Frees’ animal photographs, people enjoyed looking at animals placed in amusing human situations. Special-effects photography wasn’t yet widely available, so the next best thing was taxidermy. The craze for amusingly-posed animals began with German taxidermist Hermann Ploucquet, who exhibited his advanced taxidermy techniques at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London.
Ploucquet’s work dazzled Victoria and Albert, as well as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, and six million other attendees. Though some of his gory displays incurred critics’ contempt, Ploucquet had his finger on the pulse of the art crowd, creating dioramas that mimicked the style of the fashionable paintings and sculptures of the day. The Victorians found the tableaux unequivocally beguiling, and Queen Victoria described them in her diary as “really marvelous.”
The fantastical allegorical scenes served to humanize the animals and animalize the human spectators in a delicious hybrid of delight and shame. The little landscapes of critters frozen in the midst of human activities were originally known as grotesques. Ploucquet took the art form to the next level with his dramatic tableaux, including scenes of kittens serenading a piglet, a weasel disciplining a classroom of rabbits, dueling dormice, ice skating hedgehogs, and action scenes portraying Reineke, or Reynard the Fox, a medieval European folk tale made famous by Goethe.
Ploucquet’s works were followed by those of Walter Potter, an even more prolific taxidermist, who created huge dioramas of animals doing human things, and left behind 10,000 specimens. Read about Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermy at Atlas Obscura.
Ma Yan Yan performs on the talent show Amazing Chinese 2014. You think she’s going to dance, and she does, but as it turns out, this is mainly a magic show. Oh, you know some sleight-of-hand tricks? Can you do them en pointe? Can you even do them without sleeves? It’s a weird combination of skills for an act, but I’m impressed. -via Bits and Pieces
She first appeared in a photo posted to reddit in September of 2012. The tiny genetically-disadvantaged cat who became known as Grumpy Cat was shared by, well, everyone on the internet, which led to bigger things, like a job advertising Friskies cat food and a made-for-TV movie. So how much money has this little cat pulled in?
Those numerous endorsements and personal appearances have generated about $100 million in revenue, some of which went to Grumpy Cat’s lucky benefactor, 28-year-old Tabatha Bundesen from Morristown, Arizona, whose brother posted the first picture on Reddit. Bundesen was working as a waitress when Grumpy Cat went viral. She tells Express, “I was able to quit my job as a waitress within days of her first appearance on social media and the phone simply hasn’t stopped ringing since.”
We will probably never know the extent of Grumpy Cat’s influence on how many people have adopted non-standard cats, but that’s a legacy worth applauding. Read a rundown of Grumpy Cat’s accomplishments at Uproxx.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.
Many people have a favorite book, movie, or TV show that nobody seems to appreciate. And then one day it’s considered a “classic.” Here’s the story of an underrated television show that became a cult and critical smash.
FIRST BLOOD
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1987 with a degree in filmmaking, Joss Whedon went to Hollywood to write for television. Doors were already open for him -his grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and his father wrote for The Golden Girls and Benson- so Whedon was able to land jobs on the sitcoms Roseanne and Parenthood. But he found the work dull and uncreative. He wanted to develop his own characters, in his own style. He wanted to do something different. (Image credit: Gage Skidmore)
So he decided to write a movie script that would follow a classic horror film formula, but with a couple of major differences.
* First, it would be funny and the dialogue was snappy and fast-paced.
* Second, Whedon flipped the character structure. The young blond girl who typically appeared in horror movies as a hysterical, screaming victim, was the hero. Men were helpless victims, not the heroes.
* To make it even more ironic, Whedon named his heroine the cutsiest, anti-action hero name he could imagine: Buffy Summers.
* The plot of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: a high school cheerleader dates boys, attends class …and fights vampires, demons, and werewolves. And at the end, Buffy ends up not a hero, but an outcast when she burns down her school gym because it’s full of vampires.
"The Christmas Can-Can" by Straight No Chaser (previously) provides the soundtrack for the Christmas greeting video from Service Sanitation, a portable toilet company. Yes, this digital light display is mounted atop 100 porta potties! It took three weeks to program and eight hours to set up. The behind-the-scenes video is just as interesting as the finished greeting.
-via Metafilter
The east Texas city of Lufkin is home to Lufkin Industries, which makes oil field equipment, including pumps. While other towns have a municipal Christmas tree lighting ceremony, Lufkin instead lights up Rudolph the Red-Nosed Pumping Unit, who then dips his nose festively from 10AM to 10PM through the Christmas season. The tradition has been going on in Lufkin since 1966, and this year’s lighting ceremony was on November 21st. From the Lukfin Convention and Visitors Bureau:
Brought to us by Lufkin Industries, Rudolph is a full-size Mark 640 oil pumping unit. The unit is fully operational; however, the red paint job is a special touch reserved only for the holiday season. It takes nearly three days for a crew to get Rudolph moved in to his holiday spot in the Lufkin mall parking lot. It takes an electrician about four days to set up the 1,000+ 7-watt lights that adorn Rudolph. When the unit is fully extended, it is 45 feet from top to bottom. Talk about a Christmas miracle! Attached to Rudolph is a 38-foot dump trailer decorated to look like Santa’s sleigh, complete with a wooden cutout of Santa and all of his gifts for the good boys and girls of Lufkin.
Every year, the new, locally manufactured pumping unit is sent out to work in the oil fields after doing its Christmas duty. So the next time you are traveling through oil country and see a bright red oil well pump that resembles Rudolph, you’ll know why. The video above is from the lighting ceremony in 2011. -Thanks, Russ!
(Image credit: Lufkin Industries)
Warning: the following video will cause frustration and possibly hair-pulling. The car is fairly small. The parking lot is not crowded. There is snow on the ground, but it doesn’t appear to be slippery. So why does it take this driver four minutes to get out of the lot? He/she is trying to complete the classic 250-point turn! Get ready to cringe at dozens of poor decisions made during the maneuvers. The worst was continuing to leave after dinging the red car. The Calgary police are looking into the incident. -via Viral Viral Videos
A few months ago, we posted a story about how many Southern plantations gave tours that whitewashed their histories and made life there seem genteel and aristocratic. Today marks a step in changing that.
The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana was founded in 1752 by Ambroise Heidel. His family raised indigo and then sugar cane by the labor of slaves for generations until the Civil War. New Orleans lawyer John Cummings purchased the Whitney Plantation in 1998 and spent $7 million transforming it into a museum of slavery. Slave quarters, work buildings, and a church have been brought in to restore the plantation to what it may have looked like as a working sugar plantation. There’s also a granite wall inscribed with the names of the slaves who worked there, and life-size statues of slaves. The original “big house” is still there, but it’s not the focus of the museum tours.
The Whitney Plantation Museum will have its ribbon-cutting ceremony today, and open for regular tours on Monday. You can see more pictures here. -via reddit
Pringle is a fashionable and adventurous bearded dragon who lives in Melbourne, Australia. He lives the high life, playing games, going on outings, and dressing up for the camera. And he’s very popular!
Continue reading to see more of Pringle.
The blog NYC, 1981 focuses only on the city of New York, and only on the year 1981. There is no dearth of material- after all, the city’s newspapers were filled every day. The blog was set up to promote the upcoming movie A Most Violent Year. The fact that it’s a promotional blog doesn’t make it any less interesting, as the subject matter could well stand on its own.
New York City, 1981. It is a time that contributed massively to culture as we know it today, but a place where you would probably not want to raise your children. Pulsing with chaotic energy and apparent lawlessness, the city was in a fragile state with a total of 637,451 felonies committed in 12 short months. It was an era where the line between good and evil often seemed blurred, and an individual’s success was a testament to their persistence. But there were fissures of creativity and light in the city’s asphalt crust, and remarkable moments in cultural history happened on the regular.
It was the year that Fort Apache, The Bronx was filmed amid protests against the production, the city’s sanitation department went on strike in December, and hip-hop music was in its infancy. There’s also retro media, profiles of neighborhoods, and plenty of graffiti. -via Laughing Squid
(Image source: Classic New York Street Gangs)
A stray cat roaming the streets of Varna, Bulgaria, stands out against the crowd of feral felines. We’ve featured a green cat before (and puppies, too), but this one looks like something out of a science fiction movie. At first, people thought the cat was painted by vandals. But it came to light that this cat regularly sleeps on a pile of discarded green paint in a garage. By licking his fur, he has spread the green all over his body. That didn’t sound quite right to me, because cats cannot lick or reach their spines well. But if you look closely, especially in the second video, you’ll see that the cat’s spine is only lightly tinted green. It still looks like a special effect
A Bulgarian commenter says the cat, although unfriendly, is a celebrity in Varna and gets plenty of food, and has also been checked out by a veterinarian. No doubt his cat buddies also benefit from the attention. -via Buzzfeed
Even thought the Will Ferrell movie Elf seems fairly recent among classic Christmas movies, it is eleven years old now. You may enjoy watching it again this year, but you’ll enjoy it even more when you learn a few things that went on behind the scenes. Such as
3. Director Jon Favreau favored practical effects.
Inspired by the Christmas specials he grew up with, Favreau explained in the film's commentary track that he employed “old techniques” instead of CGI whenever possible. This included stop-motion animation, and using forced perspective to make Buddy look like a giant among his elf peers. For North Pole scenes, two sets were built—one larger scale for the actors playing elves, the other smaller to make Buddy and Santa look big. These elements where then carefully overlaid in camera, using lighting to blend the seams.
14. Will Ferrell broke James Caan.
The Academy Award-nominated Godfather star was hired to play Walter in part because Favreau wanted a stern persona to play against Ferrell's giddy Buddy, and Caan took the comedy of Elf seriously. He knew it was crucial for Walter to be annoyed—never amused—by his supposed son's antics. But when it came to the blood test scene where Buddy bellows when pricked by a needle, Caan cracked. Watch closely and you'll see he turns away from the camera so as not to ruin the take.
Now, see, these are things you'll notice and appreciate the next time you watch the movie. Read the rest of 21 trivia tidbits about Elf at mental_floss.
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