“Don’t tell Mom!”
Oklahoma redditor hinkster81 has five children. Here he is with the three youngest. He’s learned a bit about parenting by now, specifically how fun it can be. Or maybe he is trying to convince his wife to never leave him alone with the children again. -via reddit
It’s rare that Screen Junkies puts out an Honest Trailer for a movie that’s this recent, but their fans really bugged them about it. The movie is not yet available on home video, so if you plan to watch it, you’ll want to skip this for possible spoilers. What am I talking about? It’s Ghostbusters. You already know the story.
Ghostbusters seemed to be set up for failure, since the 1984 movie was a masterpiece and still doesn’t feel outdated. It sold a lot of tickets this summer, but didn’t make a profit since it was expensive to make. The reviews were okay. The planned sequels probably won’t materialize anytime soon. -Thanks, Andrew Valdes!
A stray cat secretly enters local studio, pops up on TV show in Denizli province, surprising the presenter, audiencehttps://t.co/7IOd1Q6gT7 pic.twitter.com/Wwe9QbyV22
— DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) October 18, 2016
Kudret Celebioglu kept his cool when a strange cat jumped up on the news desk as he was live on air. The cat even sat down on the computer keyboard like he owned the place! Celebioglu finished the story he was doing, but took a moment to announce that it was getting colder outside, and people should take in the stray cats that roam the streets. Afterward, the TV station adopted this cat. -via Buzzfeed
Remember twenty years ago, when we thought dinosaurs were terrifying reptile monsters that we could make movies about? In such a short time, we’ve learned they were feathered, not as cold-blooded as once thought, and they couldn’t even sing. What else are we going to find out that will ruin our childhoods? This analogy is the latest from Randall Munroe at xkcd. See the hovertext punch line there.
In the latest adventures of Tiny Hamster, several hamsters are resurrected from the dead by a mad scientist. The zombie hamsters crawl out of their graves and go on a rampage, wreaking havoc on a tiny town of Barbie dolls and action figures!
Can the scientist reverse the spell before it's too late? Watch for yourself and see! -Thanks, Jake Wyatt!
The British government established workhouses in 1834 as a cheaper alternative to “outdoor relief,” or the practice of giving food or money to the poor. Instead, they would be offered “indoor relief,” a chance to work for their keep. Workhouses were meant to be intimidating places, a deterrent to becoming so poor that one had to ask for help there. Northwich Workhouse was one such institution that has since been converted to a museum. While the workers’ dormitory has been demolished, visitors can get a glimpse of what life was like for those destitute enough to work there.
Men, women and children were separated on arrival, partly as a means of maintaining order, but also to prevent what was often referred to as ‘pauper breeding’. Families who had arrived together were only permitted to see each other for a few hours a week, while husbands and wives ate, slept, worked and exercised independently of each other in separate parts of the building.
Clothing and possessions were removed, washed and then placed in storage. Inmates were given a brief health check by a medical officer, issued with a workhouse uniform – and made to take a bath. For many, this was a terrifying prospect. In 1891, a newspaper reporter who had visited the workhouse wrote: “The state as to filth and vermin in which some old neglected people arrive, on their entering the house is indescribable. To have not washed the body for years and years is a common state of things with them...”
Read more about the Victorian workhouse experience at History Extra from the BBC. -via Digg
If you’ve ever purchased a costume fashioned after a pop culture character, the odds are good that it came from Ruble’s. The company started selling costumes at a small shop in Queens in the 1950s and now has licenses to produce costumes of characters from Mattel, Marvel, DC Comics, Playboy, Nickelodeon, Star Trek, and Star Wars, among others. Howard Beige, who runs Ruble’s with his siblings, tells us how they prepare for Halloween by anticipating what costumes and masks will be popular a year ahead of time, so customers can get exactly what they want.
But figuring out what that mask should be, and how many to make, isn’t easy. More people are dressing up for Halloween, but they’re doing it differently, picking costumes in early October based on news events, movies, or internet memes that went viral only a few weeks or months before. Rubie’s tries to anticipate Halloween trends a year in advance, but it’s constantly adjusting its plans as expected blockbusters flop (The Legend of Tarzan), beloved actors die (Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka costume will be popular this year), or millions of people get swept up in the Pokémon Go craze and Beige finds himself mass-manufacturing last-minute Pikachu costumes to fill thousands of back orders. Pokémon will break into Rubie’s 10 best-selling costumes this year, which didn’t happen when it was popular the first time around. “Thank God we already had the license and the designs for that one,” he says. “Otherwise, it would’ve been a disaster.”
Read about the history of Ruble’s Costumes, and how they operate today, at Bloomberg Businessweek. -via Digg
(Image credit: Emiliano Granado for Bloomberg Businessweek)
Sweden is a lovely country. They’ve also given us modern design like no other country, although some of it stays in Sweden, like architecture, so you might not be familiar with some of the more distinctive buildings there. Emporia, a shopping facility in Malmo, can’t help but draw attention.
Emporia’s giant gold chasm is the second building on this list to be featured from the design studio at Wingårdhs. It is a bold design, with a long golden glass structure seemingly cut in two by a big chasm in the middle. As a shopping centre it certainly amazes and shocks. It is certainly not what you usually expect to see when you go shopping. It was built in 2012 and is part of a much larger urban planning project in Malmo. The project aims to regenerate part of the city and bring mixed development together, where commercial, business and residential can come together.
See nine other Swedish buildings that defy traditional design at Housely.
Rhett & Link have a new song about their fear of the dark, appropriate for the Halloween season. The song is not bad, and the lyrics are pretty goofy. The video is downright cool, with all the fluorescent touches. So what are they afraid of?
They are afraid of the same things you and I are afraid of: athlete’s foot and fractions. -via Tastefully Offensive
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 about smells of sociological interest
compiled by Otto Didact, Improbable Research staff
(Image credit: cometstarmoon)
Political Ideology Stinks, or Smells Agreeable
“Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues,” Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, and Peter K. Hatemi, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 58, no. 4, October 2014, pp. 997–1005. (Thanks to Tony Tweedale for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Brown University, Harvard University, and The Pennsylvania State University, explain:
[RESULTS:] individuals find the smell of those who are more ideologically similar to themselves more attractive than those endorsing opposing ideologies....
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
(Image credit: Flickr user Kevin Dooley)
Being gatekeepers, music charts have a massive influence on the songs we hear on the radio. And that influence isn’t exclusive to Billboard, by the way.
As a fan of the underdog, I love reading the bottom half of music charts. Forget Billboard’s Hot 100; I wanna see what’s happening on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, if that indie band I’m digging actually has a chance of breaking into the top half. (Oh, who am I kidding? I spent the last week listening to Hüsker Dü and American Music Club. My taste is off the grid these days.) Forgotten in the age of modern pop charts is the fact that Billboard has never been the only game in town.
1940 was the first year Billboard had a music chart of any kind. The magazine, founded in 1894, spent much of its early history focused on billboard advertising. (Hence the name.) The first music chart, called the “National List of Best Selling Retail Records” and topped by Tommy Dorsey in its initial edition, quickly gave way to more common charts like the Billboard 200 and Hot 100.
Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu created a data visualization of ten royal families of Europe. The screenshot here is just a portion; it actually goes back to around 1100 A.D. You can manipulate it to show how the royal families are related to each other. The largest dots are the current monarchs. Just place your cursor on a dot to identify the royal family member. If you hover over a dot long enough, you’ll get a colored visual showing how closely that person is related to other royals across the chart. If you click on two dots, you get the shortest connection between the two. I found out the royal families of Monaco and Liechtenstein don’t marry into other royal families that much, while King Harald V of Norway is related to just about everyone, including second cousin Queen Elizabeth II.
If you can find Queen Victoria of England, she appears to have the most royal descendants of all. You can read more about the data and how the project was done at Bremer’s website and Data Sketches. -via Digg
The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards recognizes wildlife photography that, while displaying excellent camera skills, also gives us a dose of derp and LOL. The 2016 finalists have been announced, and you can see them at the awards website.
The winner will receive a trophy and a weeklong safari in Kenya for two. See all 40 finalists here.
The work that goes into making a scary movie monster has changed considerably over the past 10 years. No matter the era, there’s one that sticks in the audience’s minds and lives forever. And whether they are working with greasepaint or CGI, special effects teams always have a challenge before them. I mean, who knew that Boris Karloff was less than six feet tall? Frankenstein’s monster was certainly huge!
Jack Pierce is something of a legend in monster movie lore. The make-up artist was responsible for fixing the faces of the Mummy and Wolf Man, but one of his earliest hits was the 1931 horror flick Frankenstein. Pierce made Boris Karloff into the mutant by smearing green greasepaint all over his face. Karloff’s fingernails were painted black, and his eyelids were stiffened. Pierce gave him a flattop head with a combination of cotton and gum. Then the costume department got to work making the 5’11” Karloff into a looming terror. Karloff was given platform boots, each one weighing about 13 pounds, as well as a jacket that was too short and a doubled set of pants. The camera crew went the extra mile by filming Karloff at a low angle, so he looked all the more intimidating.
Read about nine other movie monsters and what went into making them, plus video clips of those movies you know so well, at mental_floss.
