When the movie The Sting came out in 1973, I was pretty excited to see it, since Paul Newman and Robert Redford looked really good in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting was charming in its dedication to the 1930s movie aesthetic. The plot was complicated (to a 14-year-old), but believable since it was based on a true story. And Newman and Redford still looked good. If you enjoyed The Sting, you'll want to learn some trivia about the movie. Some of it is painful.
7. Robert Shaw had to incorporate a knee injury into his role.
The actor took a bad spill on a wet patch of ground before filming and as a result tore all the ligaments in his knee. He had to add a hobbling walk to his character to keep it looking natural.
5. Robert Redford broke his thumb before filming and had to work around it.
He broke his thumb during a skiing incident and as a result had to find a way to use his hand without further injuring his thumb.
John Banvard is the most successful American artist you've never heard of, probably because his chosen medium was a 19th-century show business gimmick. Banvard was a talented painter at the time when panorama exhibitions were hot. The shows were mechanical moving pictures, in which a canvas painted with interesting scenes was scrolled in front of an audience. Banvard painted and sold these scenes, but he wanted to become his own boss, so he decided to create the biggest and best panorama of them all: a production showing the entire Mississippi River.
In the spring of 1842, he set off in a skiff to capture on canvas some 1200 miles of river, from St. Louis to New Orleans. It took him two years of dealing with blistering heat and yellow fever in the summer, rain and cold in the winter. While he worked, he made a threadbare living by selling and trading whatever small items he could find. It was an arduous adventure, but he did it, and when he was finished, he knew that what he had was very, very good. It may not quite have been, as the advertisements boasted, three miles long, but it came damn close. It was the largest painting in the world.
His next necessity was to create an entirely new system of spools and levers capable of handling this unprecedentedly huge canvas. He succeeded so well that he patented the device. Finally, in 1844, he was able to present his leviathan of a panorama in Louisville. He accompanied the exhibit with his own narration, giving highly-colored but immensely entertaining anecdotes about his travels down the river. He was not only a born panorama painter, but a natural showman. Within a few days, it was a huge success.
Banvard's panorama later went to Boston, New York, and London, where crowds flocked to see it. Banvard became one of the richest men in America, so he built a huge mansion on Long Island and retired from showing his panoramas. But he had other interests, and managed to blow his entire fortune. Read the many ways John Banvard destroyed his bank account and his legacy at Strange Company. Hint: P.T. Barnum was involved.
Every state has places that are said to be haunted by the spirits of those who met an untimely death. Some are legends that grow in the telling while others are enhanced by a historical record of the tragic and violent deaths. And we imagine that some were just made up out of whole cloth. But they are fun to tell people who visit your area. Here's one from Mississippi:
At the center of the historic section of Glenwood Cemetery, Yazoo City’s public burial grounds, there’s a grave surrounded by a chain link fence. Local lore claims that the grave belonged to a witch who lived along the Yazoo River, who used to lure fishermen to the shore to torture them. When the Yazoo County sheriff came to arrest her, she fled into the swamp and fell into quicksand. The sheriff found her half sunk. Before she drowned, she swore to take revenge on Yazoo City. No one thought much of her threat, but they fenced in her grave just in case. Then, on May 25, 1904, a fire nearly wiped out the entire city, spreading quickly on unusually fierce winds. After the fire, Yazoo City residents found the chain link around the witch’s grave cut open.
In 1953, a spate of one-eyed sheep baffled farmers and scientists alike. Almost 60 years later, in 2012, the result of the investigation gave us a new skin cancer treatment. Tien Nguyen connected the seemingly unrelated dots from one event to the other in this TED-Ed lesson.
If cyclops sheep isn't weird enough, the story includes hedgehog genes and a protein called smoothened. But it will all make sense as you watch it. And you'll gain more appreciation for all those lab people who spend years working to isolate one protein and will never get credit for curing cancer. -via Laughing Squid
They did the monster math. What's the difference? One has variance, the other has scariance. One is bell curve, the other a boo curve. I think this may be an example of Boo-lean algebra. And it explains why math can be so frightening for some folks. -via reddit
How superstitious are you? Did you want to go back to bed when you realized that today is Friday the 13th? Would you turn down a job if it meant working on the 13th floor? Would you change your route if you saw a black cat cross your path? Strangely, black cats are considered good luck in the United Kingdom. And not everyone believes in those old superstitions. Whether you do or not, you'll appreciate the story of how the Savoy Hotel in London confronted a superstition and in the process gained its mascot.
The story of Kaspar, the Savoy cat, began in 1898 when another table of thirteen didn’t end very well. Woolf Joel, a South African businessman who often stayed at the Savoy hotel, had a dinner party for some friends. There was supposed to be fourteen of them, but at the last minute one of them was unable to attend. This reduced them to a party of thirteen – an unlucky number. They enjoyed their meal, but at the end, one of the guests brought up the superstition that the first one to leave a table of thirteen would die within a year. They all laughed a bit nervously, then Mr. Joel, the host, got up saying that he didn’t believe in superstitions and that he would gladly be the first to leave.
He left for Johannesburg the next day where he was shot and died within a few weeks. This made people believe even more in the “unlucky thirteen superstition.” The Savoy Hotel was convinced too, and they wanted to make sure it never happened again at their establishment.
The hotel staff eventually came up with a clever workaround. Read the rest of the story at The Curious Rambler.
For a long time, both scientists and the general public assumed that skin color evolved to adapt to local conditions. While that idea hasn't been completely debunked, genetic research tells us skin color is a lot more complicated. Until recently just about all genetic research on skin color came from studies done on people of European descent. A new study, led by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the genomes of over a thousand volunteers from ten ethnic groups in Africa, the most genetically diverse continent. The results upend the traditional idea that dark skin evolved to protect a person from the sun near the equator, while light skin evolved further north to let in scarce sunlight for vitamin D production.
But most of the variants that Tishkoff’s team identified, for both light and dark skin, have an ancient African origin. They likely arose in hominids like Homo erectus long before the dawn of our own species, and have coexisted in balance for hundreds and thousands of years. In many cases, the older variant is responsible for lighter skin, not darker. That’s consistent with an idea from Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist from Pennsylvania State University, who thinks that the ancient ancestors of humans—much like other primates—had pale skin. “As our ancestors moved out of the forest and into the savannah, they lost their hair and evolved darker skin,” says Nick Crawford, a researcher in Tishkoff’s lab.
One of the secrets to a happy life is to take pleasure in the small things. A cozy chair and a good book are comforts that many folks would take for granted, but taking just a moment to think about how nice the moment is goes a long way toward enjoying it more. And the cat? Well, cats are the cherry on top of a nice evening of relaxation. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.
Baby pandas quickly learn the art of falling down, because they aren't all that great at climbing, walking, or even standing still. They soon become very good at falling down. The Toronto Zoo put together a compilation of falling down clips from their panda-cams, accompanied by a wonderful performance of The Barber of Seville from the Davis High School Symphony Orchestra.
Apparently, pandas are built for falling, being so roly-poly and all. From the YouTube page:
In 2003, scientists from Zoo Atlanta, Chengdu, and the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding published a study that described trends in the behavior of giant panda cubs. Among other findings, this study confirmed that falling was a normal and expected part of the play of the giant panda cubs being reared by their mother. The researchers suggested that the natural play experiences of growing cubs with their mothers and siblings may significantly contribute to the panda cubs’ development into reproductively successful adults.
The Dance Macabre, or Dance of Death, is an idea that's been handed down for centuries. The image is of skeletons escorting people through death and to their final fate in the afterlife. The message is that no matter who you are in life, you will face death one day. While the dance has evolved over time, the message remains.
Though a few earlier examples exist in literature, the first known visual Dance of Death comes from around 1424. It was a large fresco painted in the open arcade of the charnel house in Paris’s Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. Stretched across a long section of wall and visible from the open courtyard of the cemetery, the fresco depicted human figures (all male) accompanied by cavorting skeletons in a long procession. A verse inscribed on the wall below each of the living figures explained the person’s station in life, arranged in order of social status from pope and emperor to shepherd and farmer. Clothing and accessories, like the pope’s cross-shaped staff and robes, or the farmer’s hoe and simple tunic, also helped identify each person.
Located in a busy part of Paris near the main markets, the cemetery wouldn’t have been a quiet, peaceful place of repose like the burial grounds we’re used to today, nor would it have been frequented only by members of the clergy. Instead, it was a public space used for gatherings and celebrations attended by all sorts of different people. These cemetery visitors, on seeing the Dance of Death, would certainly have been reminded of their own impending doom, but would also have likely appreciated the image for its humorous and satirical aspects as well. The grinning, dancing skeletons mocked the living by poking fun at their dismay and, for those in positions of power, by making light of their high status. Enjoy it now, the skeletons implied, because it’s not going to last.
When the romantic comedy Look Who's Talking came out in 1989, it was up against some heavy hitters: Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Back to the Future Part II, Ghostbusters II, and Driving Miss Daisy. The John Travolta/Kirstie Alley movie still became a hit, grossing $140 million and ranking at #4 for the year. Now you have an opportunity to learn more about the making of Look Who's Talking.
9. Three studios passed on the idea outright.
Warner Bros., Disney, and Orion all passed on the film. It was TriStar that finally picked it up.
8. Olympia Dukakis got a pay raise thanks to her Oscar.
Dukakis was told that if she won an Oscar for her role in Moonstruck she would receive $50,000 to play Kirstie Alley’s mother in the film. She won obviously.
Did you know playing with a Slinky can be a performance art? This vendor makes his Slinky do things you can't, because it takes practice. This kind of juggling would really screw up the old school metal Slinkys, and probably wouldn't look as good, either.
Wouldn't you love to see this in fluorescent colors under a blacklight? The guy would probably be pretty good with a yoyo, too, if he gave it a day or so. Now I really want a plastic rainbow Slinky. -via Metafilter
There are more than 4,600 colleges and universities in the U.S. They are spread across the nation, and many are in small towns. Where did they come from? There was a boom in college founding in the 19th century, mainly of small private institutions along the frontier. As Americans moved west, more schools were planted, and by 1880, while France has 16 colleges, Ohio by itself had 37. They weren't regulated at all, and accepted anyone who would pay the tuition.
The rationale for starting a college in the 19th century usually had less to do with promoting higher learning than with pursuing profit. For most of US history, the primary source of wealth was land, but in a country with a lot more land than buyers, the challenge for speculators was how to convince people to buy their land rather than one of the many other available options. (George Washington, for instance, accumulated some 50,000 acres in the western territories, and spent much of his life unsuccessfully trying to monetise his holdings.) The situation became even more desperate in the mid-19th century, when the federal government started giving away land to homesteaders. One answer to this problem was to show that the land was not just another plot in a dusty agricultural village but prime real estate in an emerging cultural centre. And nothing said culture like a college. Speculators would ‘donate’ land for a college, gain a state charter, and then sell the land around it at a premium, much like developers today who build a golf course and then charge a high price for the houses that front on to it.
Of course, chartering a college is not the same as actually creating a functioning institution. So speculators typically sought to affiliate their emergent college with a religious denomination, which offered several advantages. One was that it segmented the market. A Presbyterian college would be more attractive to Presbyterian consumers than the Methodist college in the next town. Another was staffing. Until the late-19th century, nearly all presidents and most faculty at US colleges were clergymen, who were particularly attractive to college founders for two reasons. They were reasonably well-educated, and they were willing to work cheap. A third advantage was that the church just might be induced to contribute a little money from time to time to support its struggling offspring.
Today, American schools account for 52 of the top 100 universities in the world, and even small colleges draw students from around the world. How did that happen? An article at Aeon explains how the flexibility born of the system's ragged beginnings helped make the American higher education business what it is today. -via Digg
On a Dallas-bound flight in1979, Roger Shuy, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, struck up a conversation about his work with a lawyer sitting next to him. Shuy had spent a couple of decades studying dialect differences, the effects of context on meaning, and how social norms shape language. He explained that, essentially, his job was to tape-record how people talked. “Wow,” the lawyer said, “my partner has a case involving tape-recorded evidence. Would you be willing to look at the tapes?”
Shuy agreed- and became an expert witness in a case of attempted murder-for-hire. A Texas oil millionaire was accused of arranging to kill his estranged wife and the judge overseeing his divorce proceedings. While the oilman claimed he had hired one of his employees to tail his wife and collect evidence of an affair, the employee told police he had been asked to find someone to kill the pair.
Shuy analyzed recorded conversations, and found that the oilman’s answers of “good” and “all right” to suggestions about wanting people dead -crucial evidence for the prosecution- had strange intonation and timing. Shuy showed, with the help of an FBI video, that the “good” and “all right” weren’t responses to his employee at all, but discourse fillers related to a different thread of the conversation. The oilman was acquitted. The experience led Shuy into a career as a forensic linguist.
In the latest installment of Cracked's Honest Ad series, Roger Horton is back to sell you a "pocket box" called the iHorton BS8. I think you know what they are parodying.
Is the new pocket box worth upgrading from your iHorton BS7? You betcha! It's newer, has some features you may or may not care about, and most of all, it's more expensive. That's why you need one right now. This is, of course, aimed at people who use a phone for everything, like a computer in your pocket (hence "pocket box"). As a satisfied flip phone user, I found this quite amusing. -via Geeks Are Sexy
