Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is illustrated perfectly with falling dishes, silverware, and food. This is not animated; as you can read about on the production page, Optical Arts really did drop and smash all those dishes, filming them with a high speed camera in order to get nice slow-motion footage. Then it was all edited together to perfectly match the music.  -via Metafilter

Will Smith is a power player in Hollywood, a movie star with a long list of hit films on his resume, so it's hard to think of him as anything else. But those of us of a certain age remember that in 1990, he was a rapper who lucked into his own TV series. The trajectory of Smith's film career changed greatly in 1996, when the film Independence Day opened across the US on July 3rd. It showcased Smith's acting chops in a way that opened doors to all sorts of blockbuster roles to come.  

As Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal has pointed out, the irony of Smith’s Hollywood coronation is that Emmerich had never considered his action-disaster spectacle to be star-driven. “One of the points we made was that we didn’t want this to be a movie-star movie,” the filmmaker said in 1996. “The movie was the star. We didn’t need a movie star to make it more expensive. And it would complicate the marketing.” And when crowds went in droves to see Independence Day, which premiered on July 3, 1996, the Will Smith they encountered wasn’t radically different than the one on Fresh Prince. On paper, Steven Hiller was just another smartass with swagger, but Smith seemed more poised and grownup than the sitcom kid audiences knew. And unlike Smith’s boisterous Bad Boys character, Hiller didn’t come across as a self-conscious asshole — Independence Day was the first time Smith seemed fully comfortable on the big screen, imbuing Hiller with effortless charm and buoyancy. Smith relaxed, and so we did, too. Suddenly, he looked like a movie star, the thing he was always meant to be.

Read about Will Smith's career and how Independence Day changed it at Mel magazine. -via Digg

"The Existential Threat" is a new song by Sparks, from their album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip. It's about extreme psychological trauma, so of course they got Cyriak Harris to make the video. As you might guess, it's pure nightmare fuel. The lyrics are at the YouTube link.

See more of Cyriak's work in our previous posts.

(Image credit: Hannah Rose Summerfield)

Once I found a cat that had decided to live upstairs in my house, and had been there for a week. He did not want to leave. My other cats never told me about him. But that's not an uncommon story, as the Facebook group My house, not my cat is quite popular. A list at Bored Panda has stories of cats who moved in, or moved in and then gave birth, the cat who brought home kittens that weren't hers, and the dumped mother cat who is now working as a foster mom. The picture above shows what happened when Hannah went to feed her three cats and found five! I was particularly taken with this story:

I Have Been Feeding A Cat For Some Time Now. Of Course I Set Out A Little Shelter And Blanket Also. I've Grown To Call Them My Phantom Kitty. I Could Never Catch It During The Day So I Figured I Would Sneak Out To Take A Peek Tonight. Look At This "Cat"

Continue reading to see the accompanying picture.

Hasan Kaval is a madman. But he knows how to relax, in a well-worn leather love seat, watching TV with chips and soda. Only he's doing in high in the sky! He's speaking Turkish, and the wind is so loud that auto-translate cannot hear it, so you might want to skip through the first minute and a half. Then- holy moly! The lack of a seat belt will make you nervous, but he survived to post the video. Do not try this at home. -via reddit

How will you celebrate the Fourth of July this year? To stay safe and commemorate the United States declaring itself independent from the British Empire, you might want to watch the American Revolution unfold on your television. The big event is the debut of the Broadway hit Hamilton on Disney+ of course, but to keep you entertained all weekend, Den of Geek has compiled a list of the best movies about the birth of our country. They range from 1959 to today, and include musicals, miniseries, and animation, as well as the movies you are already familiar with. Some are about the Founding Fathers while others look at how the war affected everyday people, plus subjects that were untouched in your history classes. There's even one British production!  

Europe has neighborhoods where the US has zoning laws. Buildings in many US cities and mid-size towns are highly divided by use, with apartments downtown, stores in shopping centers, industries in the industrial park, and single-family houses in vast neighborhoods and suburbs, where you must have a car in order to buy groceries, eat out, or socialize.  -via Digg

The city of Florence, Oregon, has opened a new municipal park named Exploding Whale Memorial Park. The name was selected by a poll of citizens, and commemorates the infamous 1970 incident in which Oregon authorities decided to get rid of the rotting carcass of a huge beached whale by blowing it up with a half-ton of dynamite. The ensuing disaster became a tale to be told for generations. And now the event will live on forever in the Florence park. They even have a mascot named Flo, seen above. Read more about the park, and the exploding whale, at Oregon Live. -via Boing Boing

The toy that eventually became known as the Slip 'N Slide was patented in 1961 by Robert Carrier. The first prototype was made of Naugahyd, because Carrier worked at an upholstery shop. Once it was made, he spent time improving the design.  

According to Carrier’s 1961 patent , the “aquatic play equipment” was a portable surface for the “sport” of body planing. From his original strip of Naugahyde, Carrier took a ream of the plastic material and sewed a tube into the side, forming an “irrigating duct” to which a hose could attach. The duct had punctures along the length of it, from which water could be released via pressure from the hose. Seams stitched across the length of the fabric at regular intervals also carried water laterally, wetting the repellant surface but not making it soggy.

“It’s very easy to dismiss,” says Walsh. “The best inventions are so simple that people are like, ‘Wow, why didn't I think of that?’ But if you look at the patent, I mean it is really genius. You attach the hose to one end and then sew the other end shut so that there's pressure, and then you put spaces in between the stitches so that water literally shoots out every inch and lubricates the entire surface of the slide.”

But the inspiration for the Slip ‘N Slide was to make things safer for his son. Read the "accidental" origin and the history of the Slip ‘N Slide at Smithsonian.

If Tim Burton's Batman were made in 1945, it would be The Bat-Man. YouTuber Journey's End edited together the movie from 1989 with vintage footage and gave it the necessary filters to look somewhat like the 1943 Batman serial, now starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Palance. I'd go see it! -via reddit

Nice sweaters, but what are they sitting on? It's a hand! Those are some small sweaters, but they didn't shrink in the wash; they are made that way. Althea Crome is a micro knitter. She knits sweaters so tiny that they are in danger of getting lost in your hands, but just look at how detailed they are!



Crome explains how she does it.

Crome uses a fine silk thread and fashions her own knitting needless from surgical wire. According to her website, they’re sometime as small as 0.01 inches and can “accommodate more than 80 stitches per inch.”

Read more about Crone's micro knitting at Messy Nessy Chic.

See more of Crome's work at Instagram and at her shop.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has produced a new fireworks safety video with plenty of warnings about what damage fireworks can do. And visuals. We well understand that the rules are good ones, and that we don't ever want these terrible injuries to happen to anyone, but watching the non-stop destruction happen to dummies is kind of fun. Blowed them up real good, they did! -via Digg

Between "Do They Know It's Christmas" and the Live Aid concert, a group of mostly American musicians got together under the name USA for Africa and recorded their own song for Ethiopian famine relief: "We Are The World." It was organized by Ken Kragen, inspired by Bob Geldof, produced by Quincy Jones, and written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Jones had the bright idea to record the song on the night of January 30, 1985, right after the American Music Awards, when many artists would be in town. The core group was recruiting singers right up through the AMAs, and weren't sure who would show up.   

Bette Midler. Cyndi Lauper. Kenny Loggins. Willie Nelson. It was like a record store come to life. Everyone looked a little mystified. Smiling, yes, but . . . maybe not quite sure what was happening.

At one point, the gate opened for a man on foot: Springsteen. Jeans, black leather jacket, gloves with the fingers cut off. Twenty-four hours ago, he was on a stage in Syracuse. He drove himself to the studio in a rental car, and he told Kragen, “I got a great parking spot right on La Brea!”

Stepping from the parking area into the anteroom and finally into Studio A was like leaving the natural world. “Everybody usually walks around with their assistant, or their entourage,” [Daryl] Hall says. “But you had to walk in the door yourself, just you, and be in this room with a lot of people like you, with your peers, many of whom I had never met, and vice versa—they had never met me. It was—what’s the word?—slightly disconcerting. I’m a pretty self-sufficient guy, but I’m used to walking into a situation having some support around me.”

The result was a night of magic. The song itself was fairly bland, but the participation of a Who's Who of stars was unmatched. Read an oral history of that recording session 35 years ago at Esquire magazine.  -via Metafilter

I dunno, maybe if you saw the original Star Wars trilogy as a child, you could be surprised to learn in this century that there's no internal consistency in the Skywalker saga. Those of us who were adults in 1977 were already used to space movies that made no sense at all, but we went nuts for the humor and special effects anyway. Suspension of disbelief and all that.

However, most of the pictofacts in this list at Cracked have to do with even weirder facts from the Expanded Universe of novels and comic books. After reading them, you'll no longer be puzzled at Disney's decision to declare all that alternate media non-canon.

Hot enough for ya? Laurence Brown moved from Britain to the US and found out what summer heat really is. He explains the difference between the two nations in his series Lost in the Pond. The US is very hot in the summer. Or at least most of it is. Where I live, it's not only ferociously hot, but also humid as any swamp. In other words, British heat waves ain't got nothing on America. In this video, he tells how he discovered the things Americans use to cool down. Europeans think they are crazy, but when you actually encounter the summer heat, they are lifesavers.