A group of scientists are testing a new kind of sticky trap. To get accurate information on its effectiveness, they sent various types of humans across a 20-foot section of the material. First, a scientist as a baseline, then a sprinter, then a sumo wrestler. I was hoping the sumo wrestler wouldn’t get his loincloth caught in the sticky stuff. He does.
Of course, this is an ad, for a Japanese cockroach trap. For such products, we’d hope they do their testing on actual cockroaches. -via Tastefully Offensive
A hundred years ago, automobiles were a new and fairly untested idea, so why would someone buy a car when they had a perfectly good horse, which was safer? Enter the marketing department.
While the poor horses got slandered, there were definite advantages to driving cars, especially in cities. Car manufacturers didn’t have to be so nasty about it, but even when they’re right, business trumps the common good. The campaign against the horse wasn’t nearly as bad as the battle against pedestrians or the campaign to design American infrastructure around the automobile. -Thanks, Phil Edwards!
The title of this list is really 20 Movies Every Real Estate Agent Should Watch, but that’s too narrow. While they feature real estate professionals, the subject of where to live affects us all. There’s at least one movie in here that relates to the travails of home buyers, homeowners, home sellers, renters, roommates, homeless people, landlords, neighbors, and yes, real estate agents. I’ve lived through the movie The Money Pit. Twice.
This 1980’s comedy focuses on a young couple who moves into a huge and expensive house that appears to be perfect right up until they purchase it, at which point it starts to fall apart in an absurd manner. Real estate agents are probably going to appreciate the number of lessons in real estate that the movie subtly delivers, such as the importance of looking past the surfaces when deciding on a house. The couple partly got into the mess in the first place because they were seduced by the promise of a bargain home and by a seller’s sympathetic sob story, which happens frequently in real life.
Barnaby Dixon shows off his new puppet design, and it’s quite clever. It combines the articulation of a marionette with the direct action of a hand puppet. Of course, the skill of the operator is key to making it move realistically, and he’s pretty good at that, too.
The only drawback I see is that necessarily long loincloth, which could create design problems in making a specific puppet, but I’m sure that can be worked around.
Marvel movies are action films: Good vs. evil, superpowers, and special effects. But each has some kind of romantic pairing going on, for better or worse. maybe it’s part of the formula that all Marvel movies much adhere to. I guess we should consider it a good thing, because otherwise there might not be any women in those movies at all! But while some romance subplots are hot, others seem to be phones in. Den of Geek counts down the ten romances in Marvel movies, ranked from worst to best.
While the artists who make rock concert posters for venues in San Francisco in the 60s became famous, John Moehring was doing the same thing in Seattle with little fanfare. Fifty years later, he is famous among poster collectors, those who really appreciate the psychedelic art of the era. Moehring produced posters for appearances by The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and other monsters of rock. Collectors Weekly has an exclusive interview with Moehring about those days.
“Lots of bands playing at Eagles came to the house to partake of the Alice B. Toklas-inspired chewies and hang out before or after concerts,” Moehring says. “It was a safe environment for rock ’n’ roll road warriors often quite a distance from home.”
Naturally, Moehring had his favorites. “I have special memories of Pink Floyd’s visits,” he says. “They were fun people to spend some time with. And Alice Cooper, in spite of his appearance, was just a down-to-earth guy who liked to play golf. Go figure. People weren’t really stuck-up about their fame back then,” Moehring adds. “Everybody was interested in meeting new people and hearing what they thought and had to say.”
One of Moehring’s fondest memories is of an evening spent with English rocker Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus Rex—his second band, T-Rex, and its big hit, “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” were still a few years away. Accompanying Bolan on this particular evening was his then-girlfriend and future wife, June Child.
“Marc wanted to go out and have some real American French fries,” Moehring recalls, “so we piled into whatever ramshackle vehicle I had at the time and drove to a restaurant, where we ate French fries and just talked and talked. Eventually Marc got tired, so I drove him back to where they were staying, but June was still raring to go. We stayed up the entire night driving all over Seattle. I showed her all my favorite little places.” For example, one stop on this after-midnight tour was an old water tower way out on the Magnolia Bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. “The tower had these real cool cross braces all around it,” Moehring says, “and if you shook one of the braces that was down close to the ground, the whole thing would start to vibrate and reverberate. It was just a lovely, lovely evening.”
In a wonderful example of how to reuse Olympic venues, the city of Montreal converted the velodrome from the 1976 Olympics into an indoor zoo, with five distinct ecosystems, plenty of sunlight and vegetation, and animals from all over. Juergen Horn and Mike Powell visited recently to enjoy the environment and take pictures.
Dwarfed by the Olympic Stadium to which it’s adjacent, the Biodôme doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, an illusion of immense space has been created, and each of the five ecosystems are surprisingly spacious. After leaving the Biodôme, I looked back on the building in confusion. How did they manage to fit everything into that cycling dome?
The five zones are Tropical Rainforests, Laurentian Maple Forests, Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Labrador Cliffs, and the Antarctic. See more of the Biodôme at For 91 Days.
The more high-tech your devices are, the faster they become obsolete. That’s heartbreaking for thrifty people who don’t like to replace something that still works, even if it doesn’t work for your needs anymore. Most households have obsolete but still-working gadgets stored somewhere “in case I ever need it.” You probably won’t, but there's a fuzzy line between obsolete and collectible. As older devices become rarer, they may be worth something for that alone. Take the Atari VCS:
Before it was called the Atari 2600, it was called the Atari VCS, or video computer system. If you got one of these early generation machines from 1980-1982 and still own it, you’re in luck: they’re going for around $100 on eBay. And if you’ve got some games to go with it, you’ll pull in even more depending on which titles you can offer. Air Raid is the most expensive, with one selling for over $30,000 a few years ago, while ET is the most interesting in that it is widely considered one of the worst games for the console. A few years ago, a massive collection of ET games was dug out of a landfill in New Mexico, so owning one is like owning a fun bit of video game history.
Burger Fiction’s latest supercut is a welcome change. It’s nice to be welcomed. I think you’ll recognize the majority of these films, not least because many of them have the title in the clip. The word “welcome” will sound really silly by the time this is through. You’re welcome. -via Tastefully Offensive
NASA equipped the two Voyager probes with information about Earth in the form of Golden Records, analog discs that contained images, music, and the sounds of Earth. Forty years later, the probes are headed out of the solar system, possibly to be found someday by alien beings who will learn what Earth was like …in 1977, which we all know now was a particularly weird time. The records are more of a time capsule than an encyclopedia. They are just a couple of the many time capsules humans have constructed to be found by someone far in the future. William Jarvis, author of Time Capsules: A Cultural History, says the concept of time capsules goes back thousands of years, at least to Assyria in the 7th century BCE, when king Esarhaddon recorded his exploits and embedded it inside a wall.
“One of the functions of time capsules is glorified advertisement or boasting,” says Jarvis. To ensure their brag sheets’ longevity, the Assyrian kings ended messages by asking future finders to hype up their accomplishments, like an old-school reblog request. Many courted populist cred: In what Jarvis describes as an early PR move, Mesopotamian time capsules found hidden in walls specifically mention the high wages of the wall-builders. Esharhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, wrote in one of his missives that his subjects were so excited about the whole thing, they threw their amulets en masse into the capsule's burial site. (How he managed to include this information without time-traveling himself remains a mystery.)
In the 20th century, the Golden Records had to be crafted to please everyone, from those who objected to the depiction of human anatomy to powerful men who wanted their names included. An article at Atlas Obscura gives us the history of time capsules, the dos and don’ts of burying one, and a close look at the Voyager recordings and how they misrepresent Earth only forty years later.
Jonathan Lawrence was the third director hired to shoot the film Empires of the Deep, but the first of three to direct the actual shooting. In 2010, filming began in China, a co-production of the sort Hollywood is actively seeking in order to take advantage of the massive Chinese movie audience.
The offer to direct a fantastical adventure movie was a dream come true. Empires of the Deep would be China’s Avatar—a reportedly $100 million production featuring mermaid sirens, Greek warriors, pirates, and sea monsters, complete with cutting-edge special effects and an international cast. The film’s producers hoped that it would break through the cultural barrier that had frustrated producers on both sides of the Pacific for years: a Hollywood-style blockbuster made in China that would captivate audiences around the world.
But the offer came with strings attached. Massive strings. The film’s producer was Jon Jiang, a billionaire real estate mogul and film fanatic who had written Empires and put up much of the funding himself. On set he gave actors preposterous and contradictory directions. But mostly he deployed his assistants to watch Lawrence’s every move and report back to him.
The beach location, which would stand in for Mermaid Island, home of an ancient race of mer-folk, had much of what Lawrence required—a long stretch of coast, endless ocean beyond it—but a few weeks earlier, when he inspected the location, he couldn’t help but notice the row of luxury resort buildings at the edge of the sand. A bit modern for Mermaid Island, he thought.
Lawrence joked to the assistant director that they’d have to build a wall to hide the resort from view.
One shouldn’t make such jokes in China. When Lawrence was ready to shoot on the beach, there was a 15-foot wall hiding most of what they went to the beach for. That was just one of the many problems with the production of Empires of the Deep. Most of the main characters were played by Americans (the exception being the producer's girlfriend), the extras were Russian, and the crew was Chinese, which caused communication problems and left little time for actually filming the drama. The settings were dangerous, the weather uncooperative, and eventually everyone stopped getting paid. One American actress quit and had to sneak out a window with her boyfriend after the producer refused to return her passport. After Lawrence quit, two more directors gave it a shot, each with a different vision of what the finished movie should be. Six years later, the epic still hasn’t found a distributor, but the story of what went on behind the scenes at Atavist magazine is a fascinating look at how culture clash can suck millions of dollars down the drain. -via Digg
Okay, this premise is guaranteed to be funny. There’s really no reason that Australians should know these things about the United States, but they have a few drinks and give it their best shot anyway. Need I say this contains NSFW language? It does.
Anyway, some of these folks know more about America, even drunk, than Americans know about Australia. Honestly, can you name the capital of Australia without looking it up? -via Buzzfeed
Everyone loved Calvin and Hobbes, and they still do, even though the comic ceased over twenty years ago. What is it that made the strip so special? Bill Watterson never phoned it in. He held his comic to the highest standard until he ran out of things to say …and then he quit. The strips never had a chance to become repetitive or cliched. But that’s not all there was to it.
Even all these years later, seeing a Calvin and Hobbes strip is a delight. Little boys with vivid imaginations will always be with us, as well as the philosophical questions they have about our confusing world.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
The Andy Griffith Show ran for 8 seasons on CBS (1960-1968). It remains with us, not only in our hearts, but in reruns, the world over. Perhaps more so than in any other familiar "classic" television show, Sheriff Andy, Deputy Barney Fife, Opie, Aunt Bee, Goober, Gomer, Floyd the barber et. al. seem more like friends to us than fictional characters. And although Mayberry may be a fictional town, I think, in times of stress, angst, and overwhelm in our own world, we all like to close our eyes and wish it were a real place.
Let's take a look at a few facts behind the beloved classic The Andy Griffith Show.
1. The characters were introduce on another show.
Sheriff Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) and his son Opie (Ronnie Howard) were first seen in a February 1960 episode of Make Room for Daddy. Aunt Bee (Francis Bavier) was also featured in this episode, but was introduced as Harriet Perkins.
2. The opening theme song was called "The Fishin' Hole."
It was composed by Earle Hagen and Herbert Spencer. That's Earle you hear whistling the song himself on the show's opening and closing credits. Everett Sloane composed the lyrics to the song, which were never used on the series. Andy Griffith actually made a record of the words to the song. You can hear it on YouTube.
3. Andy's homage to his dad.
At the beginning of the show, where you see Andy and Opie walking down the road together, you will see Opie throwing a rock and Andy nodding or shaking his head in acknowledgement. This was Andy's personal tribute to his own father, who he said would shake his head in the same manner to tell him "nice work" or "good job."
Alabama A&M student Rodney Smith Jr. didn’t own a lawnmower himself when he started volunteering to mow lawns for elderly people last year. He ended up mowing 100 lawns in 2015 and, with Terrence Stroy, launched an organization called Raising Men Lawn Care Service. The group of volunteers mow lawns for the elderly, disabled, single parents, or anyone in need. They have become quite popular in Huntsville, Alabama.
His service receives recommendations through Facebook of people in the Huntsville area who need their lawn mowed. He and Stroy often post photos on the organization's Facebook page of boys in their program, smiling with the person whose lawn they just mowed.
"A lot of people, they can't afford it," he said. "They're on social security, barely making it, and they're happy we can do this every two weeks for them."
That's another thing. The lawn-mowing isn't just a one-time thing. The lawncare service visits its clients every two weeks to make sure their lawns stay tidy.
Smith said he's seen clients cry tears of joy when they see their lawns. "One lady had bone cancer and couldn't afford to pay someone to cut her grass. So many people have fallen on hard times and it feels good to be able to help them."
About 20 boys, ages 7 to 17 participate in the program. Their parents or friends contact the service through Facebook, and Smith sends them the sign-up forms.
The group has received support from law mower companies, hardware stores, and donors. Smith hopes the concept will catch on another communities. -via reddit
