This summer, Andy Warhol's legendary Campbell's Soup Cans turns 50. Here's everything you need to know about Pop Art's greatest masterpiece.

1. Though Warhol had been successful as a commercial artist -designing book jackets and album covers- he was still struggling to break into the fine art world in 1962.

2. New York's art scene, in particular, had little interest in warhol's work.

3. Warhol's earliest efforts were inspired by comic strips. He abandoned the style because it felt derivative of Roy Lichtenstein.

4. Warhol had to go LA for his first solo show. Irving Blum, the owner of Ferus Gallery, convinced Warhol to show there by telling him the clilentele inclluded movie stars.

5. The tomato soup painting is the most famous. But the work was actually a series of 32 different 20-by-16-inch paintings -one canvas for each Campbell's variety on the market.

6. Warhol's inspiration: "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about."

(Image credit: Jack Mitchell)

7. The paintings were hung on the wall for the show, but each hanging canvas also rested on a shelf to complete the grocery-store feel of the piece.

8. Warhol's show brought out the catty side of some galleries. A rival LA space filled its window with a pyramid of soup cans under a sign reading, "Get the real thing for only 29 cents a can."

9. Despite the sneers, the show put Warhol on the critical map. It didn't hurt that ArtForum's offices were upstairs from the Ferus Gallery.

(vimeo link)

Stanley Kubrick was a master of the one-point perspective shot, and this supercut by  kogonada points out just how many he used.  -via Geekosystem

The blog Star Trek Points at Things is taking the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation episode by episode and posting each incident of pointing, in order. Gestures are counted to see which character does the most pointing, and scores are being kept. The blog is now on the third episode of season one, so there will be a lot of new pointing in the future. Link -via Wil Wheaton

When you rearrange the letters in certain celebrities' names, you can find wise descriptions or wonderful jokes. You'll see both in a collection of surprising anagrams at Unreality. Link

The Atlantic Cities has a chart that and calculates how long it would take a person making the average wage in the top 100 American cities to save up for a down payment on a 2,000-square-foot home based on the average price per square foot in that city. This assumes you set aside 10% of your income, earn 1.5% on savings, and make a 20% down payment. The time ranges from 28 years in Honolulu to about 3 and a half years in Detroit. Paradise comes at a price.  

As the table below shows, in San Francisco you’ll need to work 20.6 years at the local average wage of $1,478 per week in order to save enough for a 20 percent down payment on a typical 2,000 square-foot home. That’s more than anywhere else in the country except Honolulu, where housing prices are high but wages are much lower.

New York is also among the 10 least affordable metros when comparing home prices to local wages. Note that six of the ten least affordable metros are located in California. With housing markets getting even tighter in California, those metros won’t get more affordable any time soon.

Check the stats for your city -if you dare. Link -via @Marilyn_Res

(Image credit: Flickr user Chris Griffith)

(YouTube link)

Bruce Lee gets all philosophical and then beats up Chuck Norris. If that ain't the essence of cool, I don't know what is. Here he is, remixed and Autotuned by John D. Boswell, who also gave us the Symphony of Science videos. -via Boing Boing

(YouTube link)

A Grand Theft Auto modification lets you play as Marty McFly! And yes, that means you're driving a DeLorean with a Flux Capacitor at 88 miles per hour. No, you can't just download this -yet. YouTube member seedyrom34 worked for months on this custom mod. You'll find a lot of links at the YouTube page, and there's a forum about the Back To The Future: Hill Valley project. Link -via The Daily What Geek

(YouTube link)

Mike took a picture of himself every day for five years to bring you this awesome video of his changing appearance. Somehow I get the feeling this involved way more pictures than we'll ever see. -via The Daily What

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

Moe Howard, his kid brother Curly, and Larry Fine, a popular vaudeville/movie comedy team, had recently split up with their former boss, a mediocre comedian named Ted Healy. "Ted Healey and his Stooges" had made a handful of very forgettable comedy shorts for MGM in 1933. The Stooges and Healy also made a few feature films during their brief stint at MGM, most notably a musical called Dancing Lady starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. Dancing Lady was also the film debut of a young dancer named Fred Astaire.

After the split with Healy, Curly and Larry were both worried, but Moe, always the group's leader, reassured them. "Look," Moe told his partners, "Let's call ourselves the Three Stooges and go out on our own."

Moe managed to wrangle a contract with Columbia Studios in March of 1934. The first verifiable Three Stooges contract called for a $1,000 fee to be paid to the threesome for one short film, with the option for eight additional shorts at the same salary. Equal partners, the Stooges split their salary in equal portions.

On May 5, 1934, the first Three Stooges short was released. It was titled Woman Haters. This short did not have the legendary opening Three Stooges banner on it at the time. The next short, Punch Drunks, was actually their first "official" short, billing Moe, Larry, and Curly as "The Three Stooges" for the first time. Woman Haters, upon its release for television, would have the Three Stooges introduction banner added to it.

Billed as a "musical novelty," not a comedy, this strange short is unlike any other film the Stooges would ever appear in. The plot involves three best friends getting together and swearing off women for life. To insure they can do this, they join a club called The Woman Haters Club. Also unlike future Stooge shorts, the boys each assume a real name: Moe is "Tommy," Larry is "Jim," and Curly plays "Jackie." In almost every other Stooges short, they go by their own names: Moe, Larry, and Curly, and play essentially themselves, just three bumbling idiots.

Strangely, the film's dialogue is recited completely in rhyme! For example, at one point, Larry sings, "Either rain or shine, I'll meet youse on the train/ and now I'll tell the lady I'll never see her again.

For the first and only time in his movie career as a Stooge, Larry Fine, the middle Stooge, takes on the starring role, a romantic lead yet! Larry (Jim) falls for a very pretty, petite, platinum blonde and agrees to marry her (albeit under duress). The marriage upsets Jackie and Tom (Curly and Moe), and they go on a train, following the couple, and try to break the marriage off.

A bus driver alerted police and emergency personnel when one of the tourists on his sightseeing tour went missing. The excursion to Iceland's Eldgjá volcanic canyon was put on hold for hours while a search was carried out. A helicopter was even summoned for the search-and-rescue operation.

However, the search was called off at 3 am when it turned out that the missing woman had been on the bus all along and even participated in the search for herself, mbl.is reports.

Before reentering the bus after the stop at Eldgjá, the woman had changed her clothes and freshened up, resulting in the other passengers not recognizing her.

According to information from the Coast Guard, a helicopter was ready to be sent to the area to assist with the search but the plans were put off due to foggy conditions. Around 50 people participated in the search on vehicles and by foot.

The unidentified woman hadn't recognized herself in the description of the lost woman. Link -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Páll Stefánsson)

Some fictional places in which TV shows are set are highlighted to make us want to go there, sometimes just for a look, sometimes it's a place we'd like to live. If the locale ever changed, you'd feel like a character died or something. Think of Springfield in The Simpsons, Hooterville, or Twin Peaks. Read about these places and some others in shows you might want to start watching at the A.V. Club. Link 

It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Or can you make up something interesting?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

See all this week's mystery objects at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: the strange item shown is a salesman's sample of a Heatilator fireplace insert, although you have to admit that the picture you were given looks a lot like a sci-fi character's mask. There are more pictures at the What Is It? blog that showed how it looked completely folded and unfolded. Anker was the first one who knew what it is, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Lord_Dissident gave us the funniest answer of the week: "It's a large hunk of metal that was only placed there to trip us up!" That's good for a t-shirt as well! Find the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

The geeks who help customers at Apple stores' Genius Bar may be geniuses, but they must learn to do things "the Apple way." Gizmodo got hold of an Apple training manual. It's not about technical issues, but all about making the customer feel good about their gadgets and the company that sells them.

The manual explains that "AppleCare's legal counsel has defined [these] terms that should be avoided when discussing product issues with customers."

Did your computer crash? No, it "stops responding." Never say crash.
What if some Apple software has a bug? Wrong: there's an "issue," "condition," or simply "situation."
You don't "eliminate" a problem—you "reduce" it.
No Apple products are hot—at most they're "warm."

Switching "disaster" out for "error" might make sense to calm down a panicky client, but most of this is a straight up whitewash, the sterilization of language that could very well be accurate for a given problem. Sometimes there are bugs, laptops do run hot, and laptops crash.

Our modern world: customer service designed by lawyers. But that's just a small part of an extensive article on how Apple Geniuses are trained to deal with people, which some of the geekiest computer whizzes probably need. Link -via Flavorwire

When British teenager Alice Pyne found she had terminal cancer, she made a "bucket list" of things she wanted to do before she died. That was four years ago. One year ago, she started a blog and posted her list, but acknowledged that "some are possible, some will remain a dream."   

She quickly became something of an Internet sensation – the hashtag #alicebucketlist began trending on Twitter, attracting the attention of celebrities from David Cameron, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Johnny Depp, according to the Huffington Post. The hashtag even became the top trending term one morning in June, The Guardian reported.

Through her Internet stardom, Pyne has managed to get 40,000 people to join the Bone Marrow Register, according to ITV News. But Pyne, cognizant of her terminal illness, hopes the trend will continue far into the future. “It’s really good that I’m getting so many people to join the register, but what about when I’m not here?” she wrote in 2011. “I don’t want it all to stop.” Pyne then explained her next mission: to have large card companies such as Hallmark, Camden, and Phoenix become involved in spreading the word as well.

And just recently, a company in Vancouver arranged for Alice to accomplish the last thing on her original list.

Whale watching was probably one of the main things on my bucket list and I've wanted to go for as long as I can remember but I'd kind of accepted that I would never get to do this one. I wanted to see Orca whales in their natural habitat and without me knowing, Mum had been chatting to Nicole at Mackay Whale Watching to set things up. I first chatted to Nicole about a year ago cos she sent me a You Tube video that she'd made of whale watching. At the beginning, it has her dad saying "welcome aboard Alice" and I can't tell you how amazing it was to hear him say that to my face! Yes, it was a bit mad as we couldn't get full insurance but mum and dad had decided that they needed to get me there regardless and as I was on what we call 'a good spell', they just took me!

Congratulations, Alice! Link to story. Link to blog.

(YouTube link)

Nashville musician Ned Evett not only sings, but also sculpted and animated the little clay figures (Ned Heads) that dance in his music video! -Thanks, @medtek!