It’s hard to get every letter right when you’re Tweeting from a phone. For some people, even large keyboard keys and small words will trip you up. So it was inevitable that a site dedicated to Twitter typos would come along. Illustrated Twitter Typos not only showcases the funniest typos, but shows the “Freudian typos” illustrated. Misspellings are included as well as typos, as long as they’re funny. The results are unintentional puns, like these:
-via Geeks Are Sexy
Look at this homemade TARDIS console room! Just look at it! J.P. Fox built this himself, in his home, which makes it a thoroughly geeky home everyone will want to visit. Get another view of it here.
I decorated the room, did all the lighting and electrical, built the whole console and painted the floor. All up it took a year to put together. I was incredibly blessed and lucky. I had the hexagonal shaped room already, owned all the timber and worked at a factory with a lot of spare parts to be dumped which I used for the controls. I wish you all had a chance to visit it in person.
This is just one of the featured rooms in the post 16 Super Geeky Houses Inspired by Film, and if you don’t recognize the pictures, or can’t read Spanish, read it translated into English. Included are homes styled after the X-Men, Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman, Tron, LOTR, and more. -Thanks, Miss Terious!
An installment in the video series Every Frame a Painting shows how Robin Williams harnessed motion to tell a story through his movie characters. Tony Zhou was inspired to address the subject by re-watching Williams’ films after his death. The finished project is more about movement, blocking, and body language, and how those things contributes to a good film -and Robin Williams happens to be the greatest example, as he was a master of expressing his character through movement. Talented directors and editors could spot and make those movements work to their advantage, and together they made awesome scenes that, in some cases, could completely dispense with dialogue. -via Laughing Squid
Andrew Huang (previously at Neatorama) recreated the 1983 Nena song “99 Luftballons” using only red balloons! He didn’t need 99 of them; four balloons made all the sounds he needed. This obviously took a lot of experimenting, timing, and editing -I'm impressed! -via Time
Associate anthropology professor Ellen Miller and her team found some fossils in the Egyptian desert. Although fossils of this animal had been found before, Miller and her associates determined that it was a previously undescribed species that they named Jaggermeryx naida, after Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.
The creature belonged to a family of extinct hoofed animals called anthracotheres and was one of six species of this group found at the site. The jaw fragments suggest it was the size of a regular deer and could be described as a cross between a long-legged pig and a slender hippo. “We imagine its lifestyle was like that of a water deer, standing in water and foraging for plants along the river bank,” she said.
It was further distinguished from the other fossils by a series of eight holes on either side of its jaw that Miller said held nerves, giving it a supersensitive lower lip and snout. That would have helped the creature forage for plant foods along riverbanks.
That “supersensitive lower lip” inspired the name. Jagger edged out Angelina Jolie for the honor. What did the animal look like? It was described as “a cross between a long-legged pig and a slender hippo.” Read more about Jaggermeryx naida at Wake Forest News Center. -via Uproxx
The campaign 97 Hours of Consensus is an effort by Skeptical Science to highlight how 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real and that humans have caused it. See them at the interactive website. The 97 hours began Sunday and will end Thursday. During that time, a different scientist is featured each hour, drawn as a cartoon, giving their view on the science of climate change. There will be 97 scientists in all.
You can be notified of updates by following the campaign on Twitter, or look through the images already posted at imgur in the gallery above. -via The Daily Dot
The sport we know as mountain biking had an far-flung genesis, evolving from trick riding in Paris, countryside races in England, and mechanical developments in the U.S. in the 1950s. But it really took off in the 1970s due to the Repack races in Marin County, California, from 1976 to 1979. Collectors Weekly talked to several of the folks involved of those races, Gary Fisher, Alan Bonds, Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, and Wende Cragg, about the early days of mountain biking.
For Cragg, who still holds the record for a female rider (5:29, for an average speed of about 22 miles per hour) but wasn’t into the competitive aspects of mountain biking in the first place, the vibe around the racing was sometimes a bit much. “There was a lot of testosterone at the top,” she allows. “The guys were dead serious about wanting to get the title. It would just be so tense.”
It was also dangerous. “I remember the couple times I raced, I had trouble keeping my feet on the pedals. We didn’t have straps back then. So it was like your feet would be slipping off the pedals as you were trying to stay composed and think about what you were doing. The last time I crashed, I went into this cavernous kind of rut that I had trouble getting out of because it was pretty freaking deep. That was the day I decided I’m not doing this again. I was lucky to walk away without any broken bones. Yeah, there were some terrifying moments on that race course.”
Read an extensive article about the early days of mountain biking, at Collectors Weekly.
(Image credit: Charlie Kelly’s Mountain Bike Hubsite)
Have you ever seen a Rube Goldberg contraption powered by light? You have now, with this ad from the Japanese fiber-optic internet provider Au Hikari, which means “light.” This light bounces, bends, and burns! And it looks cool, too. -Thanks, Takanori Kubo!
John Green returns to mental_floss video, but this week he’s got a co-host who doesn’t say anything, because Lila is a cat. The subject is cats, and you’ll hear 36 things about cats that you might or might not already know (although it seems like more than that). Even if you already know them, you’ll still enjoy this week’s show!
Calgary, Alberta, got its first snowfall of the season yesterday. What season is that? Summer, by my calendar. I have to agree with the snowman, that’s too soon! The good news is that their weather forecast has warmer temperatures by this weekend. -via reddit
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Judy Garland had to wear a painful corset-style device around her torso in The Wizard of Oz so she would appear younger and flat-chested.
Bert Lahr's cowardly lion outfit in The Wizard of Oz weighed 90 pounds. It was made from two real lion skins.
Mae West had it written into her contract that nobody would wear white on the sets of her films.
In his will, Stan Laurel left his famous derby to Dick Van Dyke (Stan actually had more than one derby, but he did leave one to Van Dyke, which was a treasured possession to the TV star).
Bela Lugosi was buried in his legendary Dracula cape.
The battered hat worn by Henry Fonda in his Oscar-winning, final role for the movie On Golden Pond (1981) was actually Spencer Tracy's. Katharine Hepburn, who surprisingly had never met Fonda in the 50 years they had each spent in Hollywood, presented it to him the first day on the set.
The red jacket the legendary James Dean wore in his seminal role for Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was later given to his friend, Sammy Davis, Jr.
Actors must have loved Sammy Davis, Jr. he was also given "the" cowboy stetson hat worn by the great John Wayne. This is the light, tan-looking hat we see in so many of Wayne's classic westerns.
John Travolta's famous white suit he wore in Saturday Night Fever (1977) was purchased by movie critic Gene Siskel at auction. Siskel always considered it his proudest possession.
Nick Acosta of Cargo Collective converted scenes from Star Trek: The Original Series into cinematic widescreen images, as if it were shown in Cinerama. How’d he do that?
I was able to create these shots by waiting for the camera to pan and then I stitched the separate shots together. The result is pretty epic. It reminds me of the classic science fiction movies of the 50’s and 60’s. Suddenly the show has a “Forbidden Planet” vibe. Other shots remind me of how director Robert Wise would use a camera technique to keep the foreground and background elements in focus.
He stitched them together very well! See 34 of the enlargeable images in glorious color at Acosta’s website. -via Metafilter
Robert Jones has assembled another fantastic collection of the best parts of YouTube clips for Tastefully Offensive, this one showcasing the odd phenomena of animals riding atop other animals. The smart one is the one getting a free ride! Then again, some of these seem like a case of “Hey! My couch started off walking!” -Thanks, Robert!
If you keep in mind that historical dramas are often more drama than history, they serve to pique our interest in true stories we didn’t learn in school. The 1995 film Braveheart was lambasted by historians for its inaccuracies, but it still won five Oscars. Even if you know the script by heart, there’s always something new to learn about how a movie was made. Now’s your chance to learn a little more about Braveheart. For instance,
8. Mad Max influenced the battle scenes.
Gibson admits that he borrowed the cinematic techniques for most of the violent shots in the movie—like shooting at different speeds or using jump cuts to emphasize the violence—from his Mad Max director George Miller. He also admittedly borrowed ideas and techniques for more atmospheric shots from director Peter Weir (who directed Gibson in Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously ).
9. Gibson had no choice but to star as William Wallace.
Gibson was relatively new to directing and was known more as an actor when he took on Braveheart – at that point his only directing credit was the small drama The Man Without a Face . Because of his onscreen fame, Paramount Pictures would allegedly only agree to let Gibson direct the movie if he starred in it.
Read the rest of the 15 things you probably didn't know about Braveheart at mental_floss.
While looking for something else entirely, I came across this fascinating photograph of a dog and a phonograph. It was taken by National Geographic photographer Herbert G. Ponting in 1911 in Antarctica. The dog, named Chris, belonged to explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who took a gramophone along on the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. Although neither Scott nor Chris survived the expedition, Ponting did not accompany them to the South Pole, and lived to take many more pictures.
