A superlative show like Game of Thrones has a lot of numbers involved. How much does it cost? How many characters are in it? How long does it take to put it together? Those are some big numbers!
Season six finally starts this coming Sunday, so enjoy a little Game of Thrones trivia to get you in the mood for a rousing season opener! -via Tastefully Offensive
Looking at the top picture, I feel the same way I do when I watch a first-season rerun of The Walking Dead. I want to point and say, "You're dead, you're dead, you're dead, you're dead, and you're dead, too."
Last year, the U.S. Treasury announced that a woman’s face was in consideration to replace Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill. It was nothing against Hamilton; the ten was the next denomination of paper currency due for a redesign. But while the public was open to a woman on currency, they decried losing Hamilton. After all, he created the Treasury Department and set up our financial system. And Hamilton is undergoing a popularity revival because of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show Hamilton. The public had a better idea: replace Andrew Jackson, who was not only a slave trader and signed the Indian Removal Act, but also hated the very idea of paper money. It was a lot for the Treasury Department to think about, and they made the logical decision.
“Today, I’m excited to announce that for the first time in more than a century, the front of our currency will feature the portrait of a woman, Harriet Tubman, on the $20 note,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told reporters during a conference call Wednesday afternoon.
Harriet Tubman was a slave who escaped and returned to the South again and again to guide other slaves to freedom. She was a scout and a spy during the Civil War. Toward the end of her life, she campaigned for women’s suffrage. This story shows how appropriate it will be to have Tubman on the twenty.
The Treasury also plans to incorporate heroes of the women’s suffrage movement on the back of the ten-dollar bill and leaders from the civil rights era on the back of the five-dollar bill. As for the twenty, Andrew Jackson will be moved to the back of the bill. The new $20 bills are expected to be ready by 2020. -via Metafilter
You’ve heard about artists suffering for their work. Lily Simonson had to work fast, before her subjects swam away or before her paint froze. Simonson spent several months in 2014 as the only artist in Antarctica. It wasn’t the weather that drew her there, but the beauty of the continent and its wildlife, which she saw in photographs a scientist brought back.
"When he showed me photos of life under the sea, i just knew immediately that to me, that was the most beautiful place in the world," she says. "I thought, I have to see it for myself."
After an early foray with a geologist who "needed an extra pair of hands," Simonson found another patron: the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which has shipped poets, photographers, filmmakers, and historians to the bottom of the world since the 1980s. Creatives who make the cut spend three months living alongside scientists at McMurdo Station, the continent's (relatively) bustling metropolis.
Think you know everything there is to know about James Bond? Au contraire! The iconic Bond theme song was recycled from a completely different production, Steven Spielberg wanted to direct a Bond film, and plenty of pop stars contributed songs to the film series that were ultimately not used. Elliott Morgan has plenty of trivial tidbits about agent 007 and his movie series in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.
When an actor plays more than one role in a movie, it’s not because they’re trying to save on salaries; it’s to show off their acting skills. The first such actor that comes to mind is Peter Sellers, in my case, but there are plenty of movies with a lead actor playing multiple roles. There are probably some that you haven’t seen, like Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Before he was knighted, and before he donned the robes to play the legendary Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness played now fewer than eight (!) roles in King Hearts and Coronets, including the role of a woman. He was only 35 when he played all these roles, and I guess you could say he played 8.5 roles: he sat for a painting of one of his character’s ancestors, too. Almost everyone in our generation thinks of Guinness as Obi-Wan only, and I think that’s a disservice. The man was mad talented.
A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Apr 18, 2016 at 12:17pm PDT
Chris Hemsworth had a bite to eat in a “rough area” of Los Angeles and lost his wallet. With little hope of getting it back, he considered it gone for good. But his business manager called a few days later to tell Hemsworth that his wallet had been found. Tristin Budzyn-Baker, a 17-year-old Eagle Scout candidate, looked through the wallet to figure out how to return it, and was shocked to realize it belonged to the Marvel superhero Thor! He didn’t ask for anything in return for the wallet, but put in a request for tickets to The Ellen Show, which Hemsworth was scheduled to appear on. Not for himself, but for his mother. Who’s the hero now?
If his name wasn’t right there in the Tweet, you might not realize who’s sitting in the artist’s chair. Yes, that’s Sir Patrick Stewart, proving his thespian reach by dolling up in drag to promote his Starz show Blunt Talk. Stewart and co-star Adrian Scarborough (also in drag) attended Starz’s Blunt Talk Emmy Panel Monday night.
During the event, everyone's favorite "Star Trek" captain (sorry, William Shatner) defied conventional wisdom by saying that one of the best things about filming fellow panelist and showrunner Jonathan Ames' sitcom was the number of times he's been able to say "I've never done that before."
His drag getup was the latest example, but it was preceded by several others: snorting cocaine for a scene, shooting a post-coital reaction. A fan shouted that Stewart resembled Cate Blanchett; Professor X politely disagreed, going so far as to apologize to the two-time Oscar winner.
Although movie producer/director Ed Wood was passionate about his work, his movies resembled children’s backyard films starring willing friends, reciting lines they could barely remember and using props from the kitchen drawers. He produced the 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space on a shoestring budget and declared it his life’s magnum opus. After his death, it became famous as the worst movie ever produced. Whether that’s true or not, we’ve all seen at least part of Plan 9, and now we can learn more about it with a trivia list. Here’s a sample:
6. MAILA NURMI (A.K.A. VAMPIRA) DEMANDED A SILENT ROLE.
Plan 9 is filled with classic lines like “Future events such as these will affect you in the future” and “All you of Earth are idiots!” (Eat your heart out, Shakespeare!) From start to finish, though, the movie’s biggest star is dead quiet. TV’s first horror host, Maila Nurmi had gotten her big break on the Los Angeles station KABC as “Vampira.” Alluring and ghoulish, the character’s weekly show earned huge ratings during the 1950s. In Plan 9, Nurmi plays a similar role. Yet whereas Vampira had a silky, seductive voice, Nurmi's Plan 9 character (a revived cadaver) never makes a peep. The actress later claimed that Wood had given her some dialogue at the onse, but she didn’t like the material he’d written, so insisted on staying mute.
7. TOR JOHNSON’S PHONY SCARS KEPT MIGRATING.
After Inspector Clay (Johnson) is killed off, his semi-mangled corpse rises up and attacks some hapless police officers. For these sequences, makeup wizard Harry Thomas gave the actor some hideous-looking fake bruises. “The scars were created on Tor’s face with cotton spirit gum and collodion,” Thomas said in the 1992 documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The ‘Plan 9’ Companion. “You have to be careful because sometimes collodion will burn, especially if it’s used over the same area more than once.” Throughout the shoot, Thomas was constantly moving the false scars slightly to the left or right. In doing so, he prevented Johnson from getting any real ones.
There’s more, including the story of how the film broke out from obscurity in the 1970s and became the classic it is today. Read about Plan 9 From Outer Space at mental_floss.
If you recall anything about the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken,” it is the last three lines.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Strangely, taking that part out of context changes the entire meaning of the poem. Dave Hiskey of Today I Found Out explains how the poem is really about the difficulty of making choices. Notice he titled the poem after the road he didn’t take.
The poem later influenced Frost’s friend Edward Thomas in making a fateful decision that would lead to his death. Listen as Hiskey tells that tale, or read it at Today I Found Out. -Thanks, Daven!
When you watch a wide-screen movie on a TV set (or on your computer), you often get black bars across the top and bottom to “letterbox” the film, which makes it seem small. It makes you want to go buy a bigger TV! Why did movie formats become so incompatible with TV formats? It started in earnest in 1953 when movie producers wanted to make the theater experience better than watching TV at home. We got Cinemascope, Cinema, and Panavision, all glorious wide-screen formats that became all the rage before Hollywood confronted what happens when those movies were later shown on television.
Many television networks decided to tackle the issue by using "pan-and-scan" versions of the films, which basically involved a film engineer selectively focusing on small parts of the screen and shifting the layout so as to match what was happening on the screen.
This technique, as you imagine, has some really negative effects on the films that used it. If a film was framed so that two people were standing far apart, for example, one would inevitably be cut off. Panning-and-scanning could hide moments of tension or even remove key characters from a scene.
There are videos that compare the pan-and-scan with the original versions that make this clear. After you get a glimpse at what you miss in the movies, you don’t mind the more modern letterboxing so much. Read about the history of letterboxing at Atlas Obscura.
We all know that Freddie Mercury was a phenomenal singer. Was he physically blessed with a larynx that wouldn’t quit? Was his music the product of inborn talent? A new study published in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology determined that Mercury’s singing voice was most likely the result of hard work and discipline. Respect. A team led by Austrian voice scientist Christian Herbst said Mercury had a normal human range and he was most likely a baritone, although he sang tenor. The study included analysis of Queen’s music plus comparison with another rock singer performing with a camera down his larynx (what fun that must have been). What they found out about Mercury was pretty impressive.
What they discovered was that he likely employed subharmonics, a singing style where the ventricular folds vibrate along with the vocal folds. Most humans never speak or sing with their ventricular folds unless they’re Tuvan throat singers, so the fact that this popular rock vocalist was probably dealing with subharmonics is pretty incredible.
What’s more, Mercury’s vocal cords just moved faster than other people’s. While a typical vibrato will fluctuate between 5.4 Hz and 6.9 Hz, Mercury’s was 7.04 Hz. To look at that in a more scientific way, a perfect sine wave for vibrato assumes the value of 1, which is pretty close to where famous opera singer Luciano Pavarotti sat. Mercury, on the other hand, averaged a value of 0.57, meaning he was vibrating something in his throat even Pavarotti couldn’t move.
Add to that the precise control he had over his voice, and you’ve got the phenomenon that was Freddie Mercury. You can read the entire study here. -via Uproxx
Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) held an internet poll to name their newest research ship. The final results had “Boaty McBoatface” winning with 124,109 votes, which is four times the number of votes the runner-up received. But as you knew would happen, the powers-that-be have nixed the name.
Appearing to drown all hope that the U.K.'s new $300 million research vessel will be named "Boaty McBoatface," Science Minister Jo Johnson says the ship needs a more "suitable" name.
We have yet to hear what that “more suitable” name will be. Former BBC radio host James Hand, who submitted the name “Boaty McBoatface,” said his favorite was “Clifford the Big Red Boat.” I prefer the RRS “Pee-Eee Cee Tee.”
(Image credit: Natural Environment Research Council)
Many of you remember the first Bendito Machine video and how wonderfully trippy it was. Now Zumbakamera has the fifth episode ready, and it’s just as marvelous! The series is scheduled to end with the sixth chapter.
Bendito Machine is a series of simple-minded organisms and their dazed relation with machines. Gentle creatures that survive in a state of perpetual dependence, where artifacts mark the passage of a glorious future.
This chapter brings us to a fairly-modern age, and is slightly NSFW. If everything goes as it has before, we’ll see the final chapter in about three or four years. -via Metafilter
A very many movies feature ghosts, because it’s the perfect medium for fictional stories and special effects. Which ghosts are the most memorable? TVOM has compiled a list of the best, which is quite a subjective subject. Not all of them are from horror films; in fact, several are comedies. Check it out and see if your favorite cinema ghost made the cut.
