In the 1950s and '60s, families gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Disney himself would introduce the show, often promoting Disneyland's attractions as he did so. Jack Plotnick has edited himself into those clips, boosting the entertainment value while highlighting the more problematic behavior of that era. SFgate talked to Plotnick about the series.

Plotnick isn't a Disney hater; in fact, he's been a lifelong Disney fan, taking family trips to Walt Disney World starting when he was very young. “I always wanted to be an Imagineer,” he says. “I've always been fascinated with them.”

“I really wanted to see what would happen if I put myself into the videos,” Plotnick says. “People were watching the videos to escape into another world, and that's kind of what I ended up doing.” So, he made himself an Imagineer — several of them, actually, in videos teasing the openings of everything from the Haunted Mansion to the Plaza Inn.

Plotnick's first video in the series has to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The auction scene in the attraction was not changed until 2018. See his videos about the Haunted Mansion, It's a Small World, and the Plaza Restaurant as well. -via Metafilter

Sayaka Mitoh and Yoichi Yusa of Nara Women’s University in Japan have observed whole-body regeneration in sea slugs, specifically the species Elysia cf. marginata. The sea slugs pulled their own heads off, discarded their bodies, and eventually regrew a new body from the head!

On close inspection, the researchers found that sea slugs have a slight groove looped on the back of the head region that seems to work as a break-here zone. The bodies left behind can still move on their own for days or even months. An abandoned body, however, doesn’t regrow its head. The leaf-shaped remnant instead turns pale and weak and eventually dies.

Mitoh and Yusa believe that this extreme behavior is a method of getting rid of parasites, although the phrase "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" may occur to you. You can see a video of a slug's head wandering away from its body in the story at ScienceNews. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: S. Mitoh)

This video of Bryant-Lake Bowl and Theater in Minneapolis makes the place look like a fun place, but to see that, you first have to get over your awe of the cinematography in this video. This is what drones have made possible. (via reddit)

When water was often unsafe to drink, people turned to wine. But beer takes a lot less time to make, and is somewhat nutritious besides. Brewing beer is akin to cooking, so making beer became one of the household chores that women performed.  

From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale – and, later, beer – was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins. Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks.

Some enterprising women took this household skill to the marketplace and began selling beer. Widows or unmarried women used their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money, while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business.

The difference between making beer at home for the family and selling beer is that one is profitable, so you can see where this is going. Some men thought women should spend their time at home instead of selling beer. Others wanted in on the money to be made. Read how women brewers came to be accused of witchcraft at The Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: John William Waterhouse)

The most notable difference between a Hollywood explosion and a real explosion is that a movie explosion does not kill the protagonist. That's a given. We've seen how our heroes can casually walk away from explosions without even feeling the blast force -and it looks good because of the bright flames behind them. And that's the next difference- those colorful flashes do not happen in most real explosions of the same size. Nuclear bombs may be the exception here. Tom Scott shows us what's done to make them look so appealing. -via Digg

The rejected script for episode nine of the Skywalker saga, written by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, leaked online a year ago. It was an intriguing story, especially considering how poorly the script that replaced it was received. Star Wars fans read it and imagined what might have been if Disney hadn’t fired Trevorrow and enlisted JJ Abrams to do the last film. Imagine a Star Wars universe in which Palpatine is dead, Leia is not, and Luke's Force ghost haunts Kylo Ren.

Hey, Star Wars fans. I've been working the past year on a comic book adaptation of Colin Trevorrow's Star Wars Episode IX script "Duel of the Fates" and I'd like you to check it out! (It will be 7 issues total when completed.)
Hope you enjoy it!https://t.co/XfrNX5wHvQ pic.twitter.com/2Ay070L9oS

— Andrew Winegarner (@AndyWinegarner) March 4, 2021

And now Andrew Winegarner has taken that script and rendered it in webcomic form! Read Duel of the Fates online, at least in part. It’s a work in progress, which explains why only part of it is in color. Bookmark the link so you can read the whole thing as it is drawn. -via Boing Boing

Lent is the 40-day period, not including Sundays, leading up to Easter. It is a time of fasting and reflection, and in the Catholic church, part of that fasting means no meat on Fridays. However, fish is not considered meat, so the Friday fish fry has become traditional. But fish is still animal flesh, so why is it not considered to be meat?    

Legend has it that centuries ago a medieval pope with connections to Europe's fishing business banned red meat on Fridays to give his buddies' industry a boost. But that story isn't true. Sunday school teachers have a more theological answer: Jesus fasted for 40 days and died on a Friday. Catholics honor both occasions by making a small sacrifice: avoiding animal flesh one day out of the week. That explanation is dandy for a homily, but it doesn't explain why only red meat and poultry are targeted and seafood is fine.

For centuries, the reason evolved with the fast. In the beginning, some worshippers only ate bread. But by the Middle Ages, they were avoiding meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 13th century, the meat-fish divide was firmly established—and Saint Thomas Aquinas gave a lovely answer explaining why: sex, simplicity, and farts.

To make sense of all that, you’ll need to read the article at Mental Floss. Of course, the difference between fish and other meats is subject to change- at different times in different places, beavers, capybaras, muskrats, and alligators have been classified as fish.   

A Japanese research team drilled into the sea floor under 6,000 feet of ocean in the South Pacific Gyre and pulled up sludge that had been sitting there for 100 million years. Could anything survive in it? Well, consider this:

The gyre is a marine desert more barren than all but the aridest places on Earth. Ocean currents swirl around it, but within the gyre, the water stills and life struggles because few nutrients enter. Near the center is both the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility (made famous by H.P. Lovecraft as the home of the be-tentacled Cthulhu) and the South Pacific garbage patch.  At times the closest people are astronauts passing above on the International Space Station.

The sea here is so miserly that it takes one million years for a meter of marine “snow”—corpses, poo and dust—to accumulate on the bottom. The tale of all that time can total as little as 10 centimeters. It is the least productive patch of water on the planet.

Against all odds, bacteria cells from the retrieved cores came alive in the presence of nutrients -and started reproducing! Some types of bacteria produce spores that encase the cell to protect it, but this bacteria was not that sort. What kind of bacteria can lay dormant for 100 million years and come to life? And how afraid of it should we be? Read about this experiment at Scientific American. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Arito Sakaguchi & IODP/TAMU)

Queen Victoria, monarch of the British Empire, had nine children, and would have had more if her husband Prince Albert hadn't died in 1861. Those children had varying personalities and relationships with their mother. All nine married into European royal families, even the youngest, who married a prince against her mother's wishes.

The last of Victoria’s children, Beatrice—known as “Baby”—was her mother’s constant companion. Victoria’s affection toward Beatrice meant she was resented by her siblings. From an early age, Beatrice said “I shall never get married. I will stay with mother.” If anyone mentioned the word marriage in front of her, they would be strictly reprimanded by Victoria.

Despite her previous views on the matter, in 1884, Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenburg and became determined to marry him. Victoria refused to speak to Beatrice for over six months, but eventually she relented, on the condition that the couple lived with her.

Read a short biography of each of Victoria's children at Mental Floss.

This is the story of Lily and Bean. And Stan. And Cassidy. A true life soap opera. Is this a case of anthropomorphism, or do cats play complicated mind games the way humans do? Bean is in awe of Lily, who is out of his league. But Lily seems to be on the verge of figuring out what -or who- is good for her. You can see more of Lily and Bean at the Instagram account beautynthebean.

In the movie Finding Nemo, a school of fish snap into a formation that resembles a much larger fish. Photographer James Crombie caught that sort of thing happening in real life, with a flock of starlings over Lough Ennell in County Westmeath, Ireland. Crombie, who was recently named photographer of the year by the Press Photographers Association of Ireland, usually covers sports, but with extra time over the past year, has turned his attention to nature.

“A friend of mine, Colin Hogg, lives near the lake, and he said to me last year that the starlings would make a great picture,” says Crombie, who works for the Inpho photo agency. “They nest in the reeds around the lake, and they move every four or five days, towards sunset, and when they move they make shapes.”

Crombie made, he thinks, about 50 trips to Lough Ennell in the past few months. “I’m usually a sports photographer, so for a while I’ve had a bit of time to think about other things. I had an image in my head,” he explains. “I could see they were making shapes. I kept going back, to get the image I had in my head.”

Tuesday night, Crombie shot hundreds of frames and captured the amazing image he had been seeking: a murmuration of starlings in the shape of a starling. Colin Hogg caught the moment on video.



Read more on how it happened at the Irish Times. -via Kottke

In the 13th century, two chronicles were written that tell the tale of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a native of Iceland who sailed to Greenland and then the New World, known to Vikings as Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red both tell of events that were passed down orally for a couple hundred years already. According to the longer saga Greenlanders, Gudrid also later traveled to Rome! But was she a real person, an amalgamation of characters, or completely fictional? Author Nancy Marie Brown, as well as some archaeologists, believe the story is plausible.

While some of the Gudrid story handed down in the sagas might be apocryphal—like her husband’s ghost coming back for a chat—Brown and other scholars argue that portions of the narrative are based on actual events.

Archaeology can often verify saga events. “When archaeologists pay attention to the sagas and actually go looking for stuff where the sagas say they should look,” Brown says, “they have often found [what they’re looking for].”

In Gudrid’s case, archaeologists have excavated the Glaumbaer turf house described in the sagas as her final home in Iceland. The structure is unlike any other Viking age turf home in Iceland, most resembling one built hundreds of miles away in a North American Viking settlement—the very settlement Gudrid and her husband supposedly built on the tip of a Newfoundland peninsula.

That's not the only evidence of a real Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir. Read her story and the research confirming it so far at Smithsonian.

Banksy has published footage of the creation of the his latest work, which appeared on the outside wall of HM Prison in Reading, Berkshire, UK. The artwork depicts poet and onetime inmate Oscar Wilde escaping not with knotted bed sheets, but on a long page of typewriter paper. The video uses Bob Ross' television show The Joy of Painting as a framework, and Ross himself narrates in exquisitely edited clips from the show. -via Geekologie

A scheduled flight from Sudan to Abu Dhabi was forced to return to its origin after the cockpit… https://t.co/6lAjjM4NE2

— Simple Flying (@simple_flying) March 1, 2021

A plane bound from Khartoum, Sudan, to Qatar was forced to make an emergency landing earlier this week when a stowaway attacked the pilot. The suspected terrorist was a cat.

According to reporting in Al-Sudani, the kitty was not a happy passenger, and proceeded to attack the captain. While the crew made every attempt to capture the aggressive stowaway, it proved impossible to get near the furry hijacker. Unable to continue the journey, the pilots set about returning to Khartoum, to the surprise of the passengers onboard.

While you might assume the naughty cat was an escapee from a passenger’s on-board belongings, it seems he was more likely to be a feral feline who sought a comfortable place to rest. Al-Sudani reported that the plane was stationary in the hangar overnight for cleaning and preparations. It is believed that the cat crept onboard and found a comfortable spot to rest in the cockpit.

There is no word yet on the condition of the pilot. Read more about this incident and other animal shenanigans on planes at Simple Flying. -via reddit

It's been a year since the Skywalker saga closed for good. The latest Star Wars trilogy grossed $4.5 billion worldwide, outstripping what Disney paid for the franchise, and led to plenty of spinoffs. But how does that compare to the damage it left behind? The arc of the three movies left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the people connected with it. At the top of the list are Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega.  

Lots of great movies had tortuous paths to the big screen, but they tend to be more of the “director and star didn’t get along” variety. The treatment that Tran endured was something uglier and more modern — and she wasn’t alone in the Star Wars universe. Likewise, Boyega had to deal with racist fans on social media, although he was outspoken about his frustrations with how Disney sidelined his character along the way: “They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley,” he said last summer. “Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.” Both he and Tran have reason to complain: By The Rise of Skywalker, they felt like supporting characters that the filmmakers didn’t know what to do with. So much for diversity.

Others were affected, too: Driver and Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Rian Johnson, Mark Hamill, George Lucas, and millions of lifelong Star Wars fans. Read how they feel about the last Star Wars trilogy at Mel magazine.

PS: If you're interested, there's more in a new interview with Kelly Marie Tran at The Hollywood Reporter.

(Image credit: Gage Skidmore)