The intervening years have made it clear that there was no real plan for a sequel to the 1977 movie Star Wars. There was no guarantee that it would be a hit, much less the saga it came to be. Before that year was out, though, science-fiction writer Leigh Brackett was working to construct a sequel. George Lucas nixed many of her ideas, and she died before the project could be finished, so the story was passed to others. So what was in Brackett's treatment of the story?
"I’ve never been able to understand the pleasure human beings get from placing their mouths together."
Spain operates two bases in Antarctica, on Livingston Island and Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands. They are only manned during the summer months and are not equipped to house research teams through the winter. So when the news of a global pandemic came, the scientists stationed at those bases had to plan for a fast escape, lest all borders be closed to them. There was no coronavirus in Antarctica, but being stranded for months with no supplies was not a good option.
Ushuaia, a port in southern Argentina, is a common transit point for Antarctic researchers, but the country was also thinking of closing its own borders. Fearing the worst, the Spanish authorities decided to send Hespérides, a Spanish Navy–operated scientific research vessel docked in Chile, to Antarctica and get the staff from both bases to Argentina before it was too late. If they would be trapped, better there than across Drake Passage.
The date for the ship’s arrival kept being pushed up—from March 19 to March 16. Then, on March 12, the bases found out it would arrive in just two days. Normally, staff would have a week to shut everything down and shield all the scientific equipment and living quarters from the harsh Antarctic winter. This time, they had a single day. González Álvarez and her colleagues ran around Deception’s volcanic cauldron, retrieving their seismic monitoring equipment in violent wind. Others scrambled to pack up not just their own equipment, but all their food, medicine, and trash, too.
That single day was still not fast enough, as several South American countries closed their borders before the Hespérides arrived. While the passengers were virus-free, they couldn't go ashore. Read the story of the convoluted way the Spanish researchers found their way home to a changed world at Atlas Obscura.
If it's true that every picture tells a story, this one delivers it with a punch line. The viral image has everyone wanting to know the cat behind it. His name is Carrot, presumably because of his coloring. Carrot's owners remain anonymous, but were glad to talk about their cat.
“Carrot thinks it’s a game to stick his arm through the fridge crack and grab us while we are in there. No, he has never been hurt by this (lots of people on the internet seem to think that) and luckily we are only a house of 2, are very careful, and we know when he’s doing it. The sign was put up as a reminder. The photo was not staged, and we actually didn’t even think of taking the photo until we saw him do it with the sign and laughed at how perfect it was. If it was staged we would’ve cleaned out our fridge! Haha”
Back in 1989, Joel Hodgson and his robot friends took their local show Mystery Science Theater 3000 to Comedy Central. The premise of MST3K was that they were forced to watch old B-movies, which they spiced up with wisecracks. That first season is rarely talked about, because the cast had yet to find their groove. However, the movies they selected were perfect for the concept. Wouldn't it be great if they could re-do those, with 30 more years of experience in riffing? That's exactly what they are going to do with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live Riff-Along on Sunday, May 3, streaming live on multiple platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Pluto TV, Stirr, Xumo, Redbox, and Vizio. The show will feature a new short called Circus Day and the 1969 movie Moon Zero Two, which was part of that first season.
“We’ll be prepping—it’ll be our downtime,” Hodgson said. “People can watch us as we make it.”
And who better than the MST3K crew to act as role models for maintaining sanity and some semblance of normalcy during quarantine? Isolated from civilization with only advanced technology to keep them company, communications with the outside world restricted to the four (or six) sides of a viewscreen, whiling away the hours in front of filmed entertainments selected by malevolent overlords: These are the tragic lemons that a succession of test subjects have made into comedic lemonade for the past 30 years—and they did it all in clothes that were functional, yet comfortable, to boot.
In the ancient Olympic competitions in Greece, the most popular event was pankration. Pankration is best described as a fighting style that is a combination of boxing and wrestling, with a kind of "anything goes" attitude. Spectators loved it.
Beyond, of course, the good family fun aspect of watching a couple of guys beating the crap out of each other, the popularity of pankration with ancient people over other similar sports is largely attributed to them believing that pankration represented “the ultimate test in strength and technique”. This differentiated it from boxing and wrestling of the age, which tended to be won by whichever man was biggest, with skill a secondary factor unless the two men were more or less in the same league of one another in size.
This trend is no better typified than by the wrestler known as Milo of Croton who was able to dominate the ancient wrestling world for two decades by being too big for any of his opponents to grab, lift, or push over. Because the main goal of ancient wrestling was to knock your opponent over three times, none of Milo’s opponents could score a point against him. As for him, he would simply grab his foe in a bearhug and violently slam them to the ground. Amusingly, Milo was eventually defeated when a young wrestler called Timasitheus did nothing but run in circles away from him until Milo reportedly fainted from exhaustion.
You've heard how Sonic from the movie Sonic the Hedgehog was redesigned after the movie was finished because of the reception of the trailer. But how about the finished movie that actually played in theaters earlier this year? Turns out it was pretty good for what it is: a kid's movie based on a 1990s video game. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The earliest known iteration of the legend of Hua Mulan goes back to a 1500-year-old song about a woman who took her father's place in the army and became a war hero in disguise. The story may be even older in the oral tradition, and it may even have been rooted in fact. While there isn't any evidence of a warrior named Hua Mulan, anthropologists Christine Lee and Yahaira Gonzalez re-examined remains of 29 skeletons in Mongolia, and found two that are female and show evidence of warrior training. As quoted from New Scientist:
Three of the skeletons belonged to Xianbei women—and two were potentially warriors. Lee and Gonzalez reached this conclusion partly due to the nature of marks left on the bones where muscles once attached. The marks are larger if the muscle was heavily used, and the pattern of marks on both women’s skeletons suggests they had routinely worked the muscles someone on horseback would use. There were also indications that they practiced archery.
Steve Cutts (previously at Neatorama) takes an animated look at what happens when humans lock themselves inside for an extended period. This is a sequel to his 2012 cartoon called MAN. -via Laughing Squid
Randy Tuten was one the dozen or so design artists who made posters for Bill Graham’s rock concerts in San Francisco in the 1960s. As such, those original posters are quite collectible today, particularly the ones for Led Zeppelin concerts. Tuten emblazoned his posters with fancy typography, often paid with a mundane but incongruent photograph of a boat, train, or automobile. Graham didn’t give Tuten a lot of direction for his posters, and trusting the artist’s instincts led to some memorable posters.
“When I started working for Bill Graham,” Tuten says, “I learned pretty quickly that the band names were more important than the artwork. If I did a nice piece, that was all fine and dandy, but it was the band name that made the poster collectible.” In fact, Tuten designed a lot of Led Zeppelin posters that have since become quite collectible. “Rick Griffin ended up doing most of the Jimi Hendrix posters for Bill,” he says. “I ended up doing all of the Led Zeppelin posters. It wasn’t planned that way. It was just an accident.”
Many of those posters have become iconic, including the one shown here that was a recycling of a college project. Read how that came about, as well as Tuten's other posters for Led Zeppelin and other concerts (for decades afterward) at Collectors Weekly.
Good Morning America on Tuesday featured a segment from reporter Will Reeve about pharmacies. Like many broadcasters, Reeve is now reporting from home via internet link. However, you have to be careful when you are doing your own video and audio hookup, because the shot of Reeve was a little wider than it should have been, and you can see he is wearing a suit coat but no pants. This is one clip from GMA that, so far, had not been posted to YouTube by the network. And if you are wondering about the resemblance, Will Reeve is the son of the late Christopher Reeve. Read more on the incident at Gizmodo.
Salazar Slytherin was one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the world of Harry Potter. Now a new species of snake has been named in his honor. And it's only appropriate: the species Trimeresurus salazar translates to Salazar’s pit viper.
The newest member of the genus Trimeresurus Lacépède, which includes at least 48 species of pit viper distributed across east and southeast Asia, the snake is the fifth reptile discovered by scientists in India’s northern state of Arunachal Pradesh in the past year or so, joining three other snakes and a tortoise also native to the region. A paper published in the April issue of Zoosystematics and Evolution describes the find, made by a team of researchers led by Zeeshan Mirza, a biologist at India’s National Centre for Biological Sciences.
The genus Trimeresurus has been described as "charismatic, venomous serpents.” Read more about the snake and its name at Smithsonian.
Be warned that this video may or may not give you the willies. Artist François Vogel has turned his surrealist eye on what's available at home, and that means his cat. He calls this sequence "Jellyfish Cat," although commenters at reddit called it "Salvador Dali's cat." However, that phrase makes us think of an ocelot. See more of Vogel's cat hijinks at Laughing Squid.
You may have always thought of "chintz" as a derogatory term for garish style, like your grandmother's floral curtains. The term "chintzy" was coined just for that purpose. But actual chintz was a kind of imported fabric that took the Western world by storm.
Chintz — although it might today be largely associated with twee or cutesy armchairs and wallpaper — is, in its true form, a fabric that was not only once highly prized the world over, and helped revolutionise fashion and design, but also changed the course of history — in many cases, unfortunately, for the worse. “[Chintz tells] a story that is much larger, and often much less pleasant”, according to Harvard historian Dr Sven Beckert. “A tale of armed trade, colonialism, slavery, and the dispossession of native peoples.”
The story Beckert is referring to begins, for the most part, in the late 15th Century; but the history of chintz extends far beyond that. Chintz — which comes from the Hindi word chint, meaning “‘spotted’, ‘variegated’, ‘speckled’, or ‘sprayed’”, as Fee writes in the book Cloth That Changed the World — originated in modern-day India and Pakistan thousands of years ago. Contrary to what many think, chintz does not necessarily have anything to do with glazed fabric, or even floral prints. Simply put, chintz is cotton to which substances called ‘mordants’ and ‘resists’ — used to help dyes adhere to it — have been applied.
The demand for chintz helped to shape the shipping industry which in turn shaped much of world history. It is true that chintz was banned in some places, to protect local fabric producers. But the story is much bigger, as you'll read in an article at BBC Culture. -via Damn Interesting
The opening sequence of a TV series can be very memorable -after all, the same introduction begins every episode, sometimes for just a season, sometimes for years on end, designed to let you know your favorite show is starting now. Andrew Stephens constructed a quiz about those opening sequences that you might breeze through, or might drive you nuts.
Here are a number of frames taken from well-known television shows. Likely you have seen these frames dozens of times - but can you remember the shows?
Click on an image and type the name of the show (press return to submit your answer). You will know when you get the answer correct.
The shows range from decades old to some that are running now (or both). Can you name the show from one screenshot? If you guess right, the quiz will tell you, but if you are wrong, you'll just have to try again until Stephens adds an answer key -any day now. The best I can do is 12 out of 20 so far. -via Metafilter
Self-isolation affects everyone, but while we may envy the homes that wealthy people can retreat to, some celebrities may suffer an added effect that the rest of us would never think about. That is, until we may someday see the evidence. Plastic surgeons in California have had to shut their doors to all but medically necessary procedures. A couple of months on, some of their clients are late for their regular maintenance.
...Jezebel spoke with four surgeons, most of whom agreed that in lieu of injectables, at-home skincare is becoming the new focus of face maintenance. Because botox requires upkeep every three to four months, it’s possible that some celebrities will emerge with looser faces than previously seen. Fillers require updates every six to 12 months, so it’s unlikely that all of white Hollywood will return to its thin-lipped glory—unless, of course, they were due for an update before self-isolation became a requirement. Some may be receiving treatment at home, which may very well be unethical. And, like all non-essential industries, plastic surgeons have had to get creative to continue to provide their services.
