Movies about inspirational teachers are common, but in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, that teacher was Robin Williams. And it takes someone very different to make studying poetry in prep school inspirational. William's character John Keating ecourages his students to think (and act) outside of the box, which draws the ire of school administration. Dead Poets Society was both critically acclaimed and a box office hit. Maybe you'd like to learn more about the making of Dead Poets Society.
6. The director gave the actors materials from the time period so that they knew how to alter their mannerisms.
Try to recall that this film was based in the 1950’s when the term “teenager” was first being used on a wider scope. It helped to understand just how such adolescents would act back in this time.
5. The film was based partly on the writer’s own experience in prep school.
This could be why it seems fairly accurate and doesn’t stray too much from the true experience of being in a prep school.
Of the nearly 70,000 elevators in New York City, there remain a few that are manually operated, left over from the early days when riding an elevator was a unique experience, complete with operators who will take you to the height you desire. Some are as opulent as they day they were unveiled, adorned with colorful art and piloted by operators who wear white gloves. Others are utilitarian, just a cage through which you can see floors flying past. And some have been remodeled to resemble modern elevators, although they still require an operator.
Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock. No one knows how many there are, exactly. The city Department of Buildings offered a list of more than 600, but spot checks indicated that most had gone push-button long ago. On the other hand, officials at Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to which most doormen and elevator operators belong, said they knew of only one or two.
A non-exhaustive field survey this fall turned up 53 buildings with manual passenger elevators. There are undoubtedly dozens more, but probably not hundreds.
Why they still exist in such relative profusion, when the city is down to its last few seltzer men and its final full-time typewriter repair shop, when replacement parts are no longer made and must be machined by hand, is a question with many answers. But sentiment plays a large part.
There are also architectural reasons for keeping 100-year-old elevators in some buildings. The people who make a living operating these elevators have quite a few stories to tell. Read about the remaining manual elevators of New York City at the New York Times. -via Metafilter
Children are wonderful. Parents have a blast seeing the world through their eyes, and they rejoice at all the new things they learn. Every milestone is a triumph, until that time comes when their milestones no longer involve their parents at all. It's normal, and it's painful, but trying to fight against it won't make you a winner. Your children are learning to gradually separate themselves from you. This instinct to become their own person makes itself evident in several ways, none of which you can do anything about.
A couple of years ago, millions of young parents had the mortifying experience of taking their kids to see a brand-new Star Wars movie, only to see said kid trying to surreptitiously watch YouTube prank videos on their phone the whole time. "Don't you get it? This isn't just a cool sci-fi movie, this is the film series that raised me! It's special!"
Then, suddenly, those new parents had a flashback to all of the lame, boring stuff their parents dragged them to or made them watch. And no amount of reminding kids of what it's supposed to mean to them is going to change the fact that even though it's a sacred family tradition that the family cuts down a Christmas tree every year, they're still tired, cold, and doing the same old thing they did last year. "I know for a fact that there are easier ways to do this!"
Once upon a time, we did things ourselves. Then we made software and told it what to do. Now we have software with algorithms, that learn what to do on their own. They still need input, but what they learn from their input is much more than what we've programmed into them. Before we even realized it, these machine programs know more than we do.
CGP Grey makes sense of all this for those of us who don't program computers, much less design software or build artificial intelligence algorithms. Still, making machine smarter and smarter brings up more questions than it answers. First off, is that really a wise thing to do? -via Metafilter
In May of 2016, four mountain climbers from India went up Mount Everest with four local guides (sherpas). When the group ran into trouble near the summit, the sherpas left. Only one of the climbers from West Bengal, woman named Sunita Hazra, made it back alive while the three men lay frozen on the world's highest mountain. A team of hired sherpas found and recovered the body of Subhas Paul just before the mountain was closed for monsoon season. That left the remains of Goutam Ghosh and Paresh Nath to stay on Everest as other frozen bodies do, some dating back as far as 1924. The Indian climbers were not rich. They had saved up for ten years to climb Mount Everest, and ended up cutting corners, which may've contributed to their deaths. An expedition retrieve Ghosh and Nath would be much more expensive than their original expedition.
There were three major reasons the Ghosh family desperately wanted Goutam’s body returned. The first was emotional. The idea that he lay near the summit of Everest, alone, exposed to the elements, left to serve as a tragic tourist marker for future climbers, was nearly too much to bear. And they wanted answers about what happened. Maybe his body could provide those answers. Maybe that video camera around his neck, if it was still there and still worked, held clues. Maybe there were memory cards from his camera in his pockets or backpack. Maybe a message for the family. Something.
The second was religious. Hindus believe the body is merely a temporary vessel for the soul. Once the soul is severed from the body through cremation, it is reincarnated in another body. Like most in West Bengal and across India, the Ghoshes were devoutly Hindu. To them, closure required a cremation, and all the ceremonies that came with it.
The third reason, as important as the others, was financial. Legally, in India, Ghosh was considered a missing person. Only when a body was produced, or seven years had passed, would the Indian government issue a death certificate, which the Ghosh family needed to gain access to his modest bank accounts and to receive financial death benefits like life insurance and the pension he had earned as a police officer.
Indian government officials said they would consider funding a recovery expedition, but only if they had proof that Ghosh's or Nath's remains had been located. Gosh's family pressed on, without adequate funds, to bring his body home. Nath's widow couldn't even begin to raise the necessary funds. Recovery would require many sherpas at the height of the climbing season. Read the story of what happened to the expedition and how the last bodies were brought home a year later at the New York Times. -via Kottke
Improbable, stimulating investigations compiled by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Shoehorn Data “Can Shoe Size Predict Penile Length?”, J. Shah and N. Christopher, BJU International, vol. 90, no. 6, October 2002, pp. 586–8. (Thanks to Edward Crutchley for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are at St. Mary’s Hospital, and Institute of Urology, University College Hospitals, London, U.K., confirm the work of 1998 Ig Nobel Prizewinners Jerald Bain and Kerry Siminoski. Shah and Christopher summarize their work thus:
SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Research involving, or said to involve, centrifugal force compiled by Katherine Lee, Improbable Research staff
Far-Flung Centrifugal Distribution of Fresh vs. Aged Poultry Litter
“Centrifugal Spreader Mass and Nutrients Distribution Patterns for Application of Fresh and Aged Poultry Litter,” W. D. Temple, M. Skowrońska, and A. A. Bomke, Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 139, 2014, pp. 200–7. (Thanks to Marcin Klejman for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of British Columbia, Canada and the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Poland, report:
We've often posted pictures of intricate, amazing, and beautiful gingerbread houses, the kind that inspire you to try one yourself. But not all of us are master food artists, or even competent food artists, and gingerbread houses present a variety of challenges. Icing is not as easy to work with as Pinterest would have you believe. Structural integrity is an art in itself. Cookie slabs break. And when things start to go awry, you get a sudden urge to revel in your failure by adding all the leftover icing and candy to the mess you made. See 21 examples of gingerbread houses gone wrong at Buzzfeed. They will make you feel better about your own half-baked efforts.
Young Rebel pilot Luke Skywalker is about to do the trench run when he gets sucked through a wormhole and flung 30 years into the future. Instead of the Death Star, he is on a collision course with Starkiller Base! Yeah, the X-wing allies and the enemy Tie fighters are familiar to him, but his target is not what he had studied. Will the Force be with him?
This mashup of the first Star Wars movie (known to young folks as A New Hope) and The Force Awakens from Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) is a masterful edit, but also highlights how very similar the two films were. -Thanks, Fabrice!
Harry Houdini became the most famous escape artist and magician in the world, but who remembers his brother Theo Hardeen? Theo was an accomplished escape artist in his own right, and was even ahead of Harry Houdini in some measures of the art. The brothers worked together as teenagers, but it was a woman who came between them.
They soon took their took their act on the road, and toured to Coney Island, where Theo began courting Beatrice, a young perfomer in a vaudeville act called The Floral Sisters. This Beatrice would later become Bess Houdini, aka Harry’s long time wife and future worldwide sensation. Within a month, they were married, and Bess quickly usurped Theo’s place in the traveling show.
That doesn't mean the brothers were estranged, or even separated for any length of time. Theo had his own successful stage career even as he was eclipsed by his brother, and his life later intertwined with Harry's in several ways. Read the story of Theo Hardeen at Messy Nessy Chic.
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation hit theaters in December of 1989 as the second sequel to National Lampoon's Vacation. Unlike many sequels that used a "Christmas version" to tell the same story again, this one had legs. Christmas Vacation became a holiday classic that stood on its own feet. Are there any more body part analogies we could make about the movie? Let's head into some trivia about Christmas Vacation and get knee-deep into the story behind the film.
1. THE MOVIE IS BASED ON A SHORT STORY.
Like the 1983 original, Christmas Vacation is based on a short story, “Christmas ‘59,” written by John Hughes for National Lampoon in December 1980. Its literary predecessor is paid tribute to when Clark is trapped in the attic and pulls out a box of old home movies, including one labeled “Christmas ’59.” (Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that when Clark is watching the film, it actually says “Christmas 1955.”)
3. JOHN HUGHES WASN’T A FAN OF SEQUELS.
Though many of Hughes’ films have spawned sequels, the man himself was not a fan of retreads. “The only sequels I was involved in were under duress,” Hughes once stated in an interview. Though he’s credited as a writer on European Vacation, he said that was only because he had created the characters. “But the studio came to me and begged for another [Vacation movie], and I only agreed because I had a good story to base it on. But those movies have become little more than Chevy Chase vehicles at this stage. I didn't even know about Vegas Vacation until I read about it in the trades! Ever since it came out, people have been coming up to me with disappointed looks on their faces, asking ‘What were you thinking?’ ‘I had nothing to do with it! I swear!’”
The 1984 film Purple Rain appears to encapsulate everything about Prince, yet it came out near the beginning of his reign at the top of the music charts. The story is somewhat autobiographical, but Prince never let us know exactly how close it was to his real life. How like him. If your memories of the first time you saw Purple Rain are as vivid as mine, you'll want to read more about the making of the movie.
9. The symbol Prince changed his name to is found in a couple of different locations.
It can be found printed on the gas tank of his bike and on an overpass that he rides under during the movie.
8. There were only three professional actors in the cast.
Everyone else was an unknown at that point or had come without a great deal of credentials to their name.
The Serbian a cappella choir Viva Vox (previously at Neatorama) perform a medley of Star Wars themes with just their voices. All the orchestral parts are there, and they are wonderful.
Fidel Castro ruled communist Cuba for 58 years. In that time, the United States made plans over and over again to take him out, and deprive the country of its revolutionary icon and leader. He died last year at age 90 of natural causes.
According to one 2006 documentary for Britain’s Channel Four, the government of the United States hatched no fewer than 638 separate plots to kill “the Beard.” Of course, not all those plots got out of the planning stage, and it goes without saying that none of them succeeded (unless they finally got him at 90), but some of the ones that did get within striking distance were absolute clinics in how not to kill a communist strongman.
Some of these plans failed because of bad luck or planning, some failed for unforeseeable reasons or sudden changes of circumstance, and some of them failed because they were just stupid. These are five of the most ridiculous.
Tuesday will be the 20th anniversary of the release of James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic. The movie was over three hours long, cost $200 million to make, and everyone already knew how it ended, since it was based on the real-life sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. Studio executives expected a flop of epic proportions, not because the movie was bad, but because they had sunk so much money into it that it had seemingly impossible hurdles to jump before it could break even. It was a miracle that Cameron got the chance to do the movie in the first place.
Cameron asked for $125 million to make Titanic. Fox Chairman Peter Chernin balked, and told Cameron he could make the movie he had first pitched as “Romeo and Juliet on a boat” if he could have it ready for a July 1997 release, and keep the budget to $110 million. Cameron, perhaps believing this might really be possible at the time — and perhaps also figuring it was better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission — said he could do it, offering to forfeit $4 million of his own salary to squeeze under the line.
Almost as soon as Titanic went into production, it began to go over budget. In 1996, shooting a typical action blockbuster — a Batman Forever or a Tomorrow Never Dies — cost an average of $100,000 to $150,000 a day. Titanic averaged between $225,000 and $300,000 — and this was after construction ended on the brand-new 40-acre movie studio Cameron needed to film it. He had considered locations all over the world, and ultimately decided on a spot 15 miles south of the border, in Rosarito, Mexico. Workers needed 10,000 tons of dynamite to blast a hole in the coastline big enough for the 17-million-gallon open-air tank — the largest ever built — that Cameron needed to hold his ship.
That's just the beginning of the spending bill for the production of Titanic. The finished film spent months in theaters and made a billion dollars, mainly due to repeat viewings. Read how Titanic went from Cameron's obsession with the ocean to a pop culture phenomenon twenty years ago, with input from Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and others at Buzzfeed.
