Spider-Man: Far From Home is the second story in a trilogy that began with Spider-Man: Homecoming, but the advance marketing had to mesh with Avengers: Endgame, which hit theaters just a couple of months before. Then the planned third movie was endangered when Sony pulled out of the Spider-Man agreement with Marvel, then they worked things out for another movie to end the story in 2021. Whew. That's a lot of baggage for one film, but it managed to become the first Spider-Man film to gross more than a billion dollars worldwide. Screen Junkies, however, were able to reduce Spider-Man: Far From Home to "Spider-Man goes on vacation."
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Tiki culture was born in Southern California in 1933 as a fantasy escape from reality, a patron's trip to an exotic culture where everything was perfect for the short time they stayed. Authenticity and cultural sensitivity were minor concerns, so the trappings included both sexism (topless hula dancers) and blasphemy (cups modeled on tropical deities). As the aesthetic spread, it also became cheap. But those fruity cocktails, both authentic tropical drinks and those created for tiki bars, are so delicious!
“The pina colada is a natively Puerto Rican drink,” García Febles says, meaning that it was created in Puerto Rico, with Puerto Rican ingredients, by a Puerto Rican. “It became associated with ‘the tropics’ at the same time tiki was commodifying the concept and was sold to tourists, hence the confusion.”
The subsuming of anything with a hint of rum and fruit under the category of tiki is a misappropriation that has persisted precisely because of tiki’s original sin: What gave birth to it was a far-reaching act of cultural pillage, one that swiped broadly and unabashedly from Caribbean drinking traditions, then forced them into a pastiche molded by Polynesian aesthetics, all for U.S. consumers.
With the modern tiki revival, bartenders are working to undo that original sin, or at least toward some form of absolution — to hang on to the fun and the orgeat, just without the appropriation. But what does it mean to create a distinct sense of place when that place is not your own?
While tiki bars are now rare compared to their heyday in the 1950s, bartenders still want to offer customers tropical cocktails, but without the cultural appropriation. Read about the resurgence of tropical drinks and the issues that come with them at Eater. -via Digg
(Image credit: AlejandroLinaresGarcia)
Have you ever wondered if Neanderthals imagined their role in our lives, that they would be examples of the distant past? They probably had more important things to worry about, like survival. So maybe we can imagine our own roles as teachers of the past for the humans of the distant future. Animator Kirsten Lepore (previously at Neatorama) does just that in a video that takes place in the same museum, but in different time periods. -via Laughing Squid
Fifteen ships entered the Suez Canal in 1967, expecting to traverse to the Arabian Sea in about 12 hours. Instead, they were stuck there for eight years! They couldn't just leave and take the long way around the horn of Africa, because both ends of the canal were blocked. RealLifeLore tells the story -which is only eight minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg
Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze adjectives used to describe men and women in 3.5 million books written in English between 1900 and 2008. They contained around 11 billion words. The results from this large data set confirmed what we already knew.
“We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men. Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level,” says computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein of the University of Copenhagen’s computer science department.
***
Their analysis demonstrates that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times as often for female figures as male ones. The analysis also demonstrates that positive and neutral adjectives relating to the body and appearance occur approximately twice as often in descriptions of female figures, while male ones are most frequently described using adjectives that refer to their behavior and personal qualities.
Augenstein explains why these words matter to artificial intelligence, as such algorithms are made to detect recurring patterns as "true," while humans understand that just because something is prevalent or long-lasting doesn't make it right. Read more about the research at the World Economic Forum. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: The University of Copenhagen)
Antonio López de Santa Anna was a hero of Mexican independence, fought at the Alamo, and was President of Mexico. But with all the stories about him, his influence on the development of chewing gum kind of flies under the radar. It's still part of his legacy.
Two years before he died senile and broke, the disgraced Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna lived in a modest residence in Staten Island. Known variously as the executioner of hundreds at The Alamo, the man who lost Texas, and “His Most Serene Highness” and “The Eagle,” Santa Anna was missing a leg and had recently been conned out of tens of thousands of pesos. He spent his exile moving among high society, plotting to get rich or return to Mexico, and chewing on something called chicle.
Santa Anna hoped that his supply of chicle, a natural latex harvested from trees in the same fashion as rubber, would make him rich. He’d pitched Thomas Adams, a local inventor, on developing this foreign substance into an inexpensive replacement for rubber. It never worked.
But chicle was just perfect for chewing gum, even though the success of the product never benefitted Santa Anna. Read about the exiled Mexican president and the history of his chewing gum at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Carlos Paris)
Little green army men have been a mainstay in toy boxes for generations, but they are rarely updated. When you see them, you get a World War II vibe, particularly from the green color that isn't reflected in more modern military uniforms. However, if the color were changed, they wouldn't be little green army men anymore, now, would they? But that's not the reason they are what they are. These plastic soldiers actually predate World War II, having been introduced in 1938. And if you take the time to look closely, they aren't era-specific or consistent at all.
Those very first soldiers from 1938 were based off World War I troops and were fairly accurate models. Over time, however, they’ve become less and less accurate, mixing time periods with little regard for history. As the Wikipedia page for them explains, “They are equipped with a variety of weapons, typically from World War II to the current era, often depicting the 1964 Vietnam-era M16 rifle with fixed M7 bayonet. … Army men are considered toys and not models; due to this fact, historical and chronological accuracy are generally not a priority.” So they actually aren’t just from World War II, yet somehow they still seem to be from that time. “The little green army men sold in buckets are usually used like WWII GIs, although they more resemble Vietnam War era soldiers,” explains Kent Sprecher, the owner of Toy Soldier HQ and an expert on the history of toy soldiers.
Still, there are reasons that the World War II vibe is preserved in the little green army men -even as they are joined by little green army women. Read about the iconic plastic soldiers and how they became what they are at Mel magazine. -via Digg
The very first sad thing about this video is that you knew it was going to be a gender reveal without having to be told. In order to hide whatever is inside, the balloon had to be heavy duty. So it made no sense to whack at it with bats instead of poking it with pointy things. But they whacked away until the mooring gave way. What now? Chase it, of course, to the point of falling on your butt, even though the balloon was already quite out of reach. I suppose they won't learn the baby's sex until the birth. -via reddit
Once you have reached the level of the elite, you get introduced to other wealthy and famous people, whether they are in the same field or not. If you are a coveted dinner guest, you'll get to meet other coveted dinner guests. Which can lead to friendships that may go unnoticed, but surprise people when they find out. But there are also cases where one person is famous, and the other is not ...yet. For example, H.P. Lovecraft was paying his dues as a writer when he found himself a ghostwriter for Harry Houdini.
Harry Houdini was famous the world over for his escape skills, so when he visited Egypt in 1910, the locals knew all about him, and had a surprise in store. A guide took him on the expected sightseeing trek, but then delivered him into the hands of a gang of thugs. They tied him up and dropped him down a shaft in a pyramid, leaving Houdini to pass the test or die in the attempt.
At least, that's the story Houdini liked to tell. But his publishers wanted it written up as a proper story and so dug up a ghostwriter, settling on a young H.P. Lovecraft, who did a little fact-checking and found Houdini had made the whole thing up. So when writing the story, he figured there was no harm in exaggerating things even further, turning it into full-fledged cosmic horror. He wrote that in the bowels of the pyramid, Houdini met hippo-headed men worshiping strange artifacts and an ancient god, and raised the possibility that the guide who betrayed him was a time-traveling pharaoh. Basically, he took a pulpy tale that was pretty illogical already and went full Cthulhu with it.
Houdini liked it, and that started a relationship that lasted for some time. Read the rest of that story, plus those of four others that may surprise you at Cracked.
A thread ask AskReddit poses the question: "Chefs of Reddit, what are some 'red flags' people should look out for when they go out to eat?" There's plenty to digest in the answers. Buzzfeed lists some of the more notable.
4. "Specials are just leftovers — they're things that we'd rather sell than throw out."
5. "Ask where your seafood comes from. If they don’t know, you don’t want it."
7. "Watch for 'No Substitutions.' If the place makes its own food, they can sub virtually anything for anything else. While they may try to play it up as 'Our food is perfect and we refuse to change it on moral grounds,' it's almost always a sign of 'This was made two months ago and all we do is reheat it.'"
You can read the entire thread here, or check out the short version in 15 Restaurant "Red Flags" You Should Look For When You Go Out To Eat at Buzzfeed.
There was once a time when everyone wanted a wicker peacock chair. That time was in the late 1970s and early '80s. You saw it in magazines and ads and especially album covers, which made it cool. But even then, it was a continuation of a long-lasting design. It came to be a stand-in for a throne. But eventually we figured out that it wasn't comfortable, took up too much room, and became rickety with use. Still looks cool though. -via Metafilter
Plants do not have brains or neurons, so how can they possibly be intelligent? We know that plants communicate with each other through the exchange of chemicals. We know they react differently to different threats. We know they can share resources and support each other. We assume that plants developed these abilities through millions years of natural selection. They tend to do what is good for the species; that's why they've survived. Still, as we narrow the definition of intelligence, we find out more about how plants display their own type of "thinking." Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano conducted an experiment in which she dropped potted Mimosa pudica plants from a height of six inches. The plant is famed for closing up its leaves when disturbed.
The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism.
Gagliano concluded, in a study published in a 2014 edition of Oecologia, that the shameplants had “remembered” that their being dropped from such a low height wasn’t actually a danger and realized they didn’t need to defend themselves. She believed that her experiment helped prove that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.” The plants, she reasoned, were learning. The plants, she believed, were remembering. Bees, for instance, forget what they’ve learned after just a few days. These shameplants had remembered for nearly a month.
The more we find out about plants and their reactions to the environment, the more intelligent they seem, although it would have to be a completely different type of intelligence than we are used to considering. Read an overview of what we've learned about the amazing abilities of plants at the Paris Review. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Johan)
Hoping to catch the audience that wasn't allowed to watch The Walking Dead when it debuted in 2010 (or several years afterward), AMC has a new yet-untitled series scheduled to launch in the spring of 2020. It features high school students who have been sequestered inside a walled city for the ten years of the zombie apocalypse, so they of course have to go out of it to find themselves. Read more about the show at the A.V. Club. Meanwhile, the 10th season of The Walking Dead has begun. The news out of New York Comic-Con is that the show has been renewed for an 11th season, and Lauren Cohan will be returning as Maggie ...sometime.
A few years ago, Alex posted about kudzu, and it floored me that so many people did not know about kudzu. Here is another example of something that is very familiar to those in certain parts of the world, and completely new to those in other places. It's a shoe dryer. A real appliance you can buy. Redditor joeChump posted it under the title Norwegian shoe drying machine. In response, people from other Scandinavian countries, Alpine countries, and Canada let him know that these are common in any area that deals with a lot of snow. I had never heard of them.
It's AMAZING. If you've been outdoors playing in the snow and want a break to relax, you head inside and pop those tubes in your shoes and get a cup of hot chocolate and eat some Kvikk Lunsj. When you're done with the chocolate and Kvikk Lunsj and you feel like going out again you pop on the warm shoes and it's like walking with the warmth of an angel wrapped around your feet as you go out to battle the ice giants once again
This was certainly not something I'd expect seeing high up on my feed! Being from Norway myself, I had no idea this device would be seen as peculiar to anyone. This is the great thing about reddit.
Now I want one. They say you can get them at Canadian Tire, but if I lived anywhere near a Canadian Tire, I would have already known about them.
Unless you are a student of Russian history, you probably only know Catherine the Great as the empress who amassed a remarkable collection of royal treasures and had a scandalous number of lovers. But there's a reason she was called "the Great." She was masterful at taking an opportunity when it presented. Catherine had no royal blood, but married the future tsar Peter II, then arranged to replace him during a military coup.
If Catherine had considered the magnitude of the task that confronted her that morning, she may have headed straight back to bed rather than boldly accept the army’s invitation to become their tsarina. Russia in the mid-18th century was a vast, unruly and, in many ways, backwards country, blighted by poverty and massive inequality. Thanks to her riotous love life, her passion for high art and her fabulously expensive tastes, Catherine would carve out a reputation as one of the most colourful rulers in European history, arguably becoming in the process the most powerful woman in history. But it was her achievement in turning Russia from basket case into a bona fide world superpower that earned her that most prized of epithets, ‘the Great’.
Read about the tsarina who ruled so completely that her own son made it illegal for a woman to ever rule Russia again, at History Extra. -via Damn Interesting
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