The Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey hit theaters 51 years ago this month. People either loved it or hated it, and it became a classic. The story of how the movie came about is pretty interesting. It had more input from famous people than you probably realized, and then there are some bizarre bits of trivia you might be surprised to learn.

5. Kubrick tried to take out an alien insurance policy.

Kubrick was paranoid that he’d put all this work into getting as close to reality with the concept of extraterrestrial life as he possibly could and then aliens would be discovered just before his expensive sci-fi movie was finished. In order to literally insure his movie wouldn’t become obsolete, Kubrick attempted to take out an insurance policy at Lloyd’s of London to protect himself against losses in case extraterrestrial intelligence was discovered before the film’s release. Lloyd’s declined the policy because they figured the probability of discovering extraterrestrial intelligence in such a short period in the mid-1960s was too small.

That seems like a strange rationale for not selling a policy, but it's par for the course in this list of fascinating facts about 2001: A Space Odyssey you can read at Mental Floss.

This map shows a neighborhood in Vienna, Austria, where many of the key political characters of the last century happened to live, work, and/or hang out. All those shown were there in 1913, and many crossed paths in one way or another. The discussion at reddit tells us more.

Stalin was in Vienna for a month or so.

Tito worked in a factory.

Trotsky lived there 1907-1914.

Hitler 1908-1913.

Freud 1860-1938.

Further confirmation is found in the history of Café Central, a popular meeting place for young intellectuals, including several from the map. While Vienna has long been a cultural Mecca, you have to wonder if there was anything odd added to the water supply in 1913. -via Strange Company

We have posted videos from Big Cat Rescue in Florida for years, but who knew that they also have a domestic cat shelter? Recently, two mother cats came into care of the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, with ten kittens between them. They all appear to be the same age, and both mother cats care for all the kittens, so it's not all that clear which kittens belong to which cat, although five of them are black like one of the mothers.

There was no way the HSTB could imagine separating this new “Brady Bunch-esque” family, but they needed human help.

Big Cat Rescue and it’s foster program was the purrfect solution for the unique situation. There were plenty of staff, interns and volunteers to watch over and care for the entire brood while they grow. They were brought to BCR on February 16th by assistant manager Karma Lynn Hurworth, better known as Kitten Karma.

The kittens go home with various Big Cat Rescue workers at night for socializing, but during the day, they stay together with their mamas at the Kitten Cabana. Visitors to Big Cat Rescue can watch the kittens through windows. You can follow them on the Kitten Cabana livestream. Read the story of the big family of cats at Cole and Marmalade. -via Fark

(Image credit: Tanya Chute/Kitten Karma/Elizabeth Detrick/Big Cat Rescue)

What would Batman be without the unlimited wealth he inherited? This video posits that if the Caped Crusader was cut loose from Wayne Enterprises, he would have to get creative to raise funds for "all those wonderful toys." Welcome to the real world, Batsy!  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Considering the human fascination with death and what comes after, it's no surprise that we've concocted so many "what-if" stories about the dead coming back to life to tell us about it. Zombies don't really count, as they are monsters made of corpses that have no connection with the soul that once inhabited them. There are numerable other Hollywood takes on the idea of re-animation after death; some you may have never heard of, like Frankenhooker.

Cult movie director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case) quite obviously used Frankenstein as a loose inspiration for this ghoulish and yet weirdly sweet 1990 horror comedy, which is about an electrical whiz named Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) who turns to mad science to resurrect his fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), after a tragic lawnmower accident turns her into a “tossed human salad.” But he doesn’t rob graves as part of his scheme; instead, he puzzles together body parts culled from sex workers he subdues using...his own blend of super-crack...that makes them explode.

The twist in this story is that the resurrected girlfriend takes on the traits of the body parts she is composed of. Quite a few other possibilities for bringing back the dead are explored in this movie list, but most come with the lesson that you will regret messing with the natural order.

We are at first horrified to think that a full-size man is going to attempt to ride a miniature horse. Poor horse! But Pontus Hugosson has his own stylish method of getting the horse to project the two of them forward without crushing the equine down.  -via Boing Boing

Biosphere 2 was an idea that was born in the 1970s. What if we could recreate the systems that supported life on earth in miniature? Then we could study those systems and learn better how to care for our planet, or else survive its destruction. The idea of the self-contained ecosystem itself was attractive to those considering how to maintain human life while traveling to and exploring other planets. The private company Space Biospheres Ventures built Biosphere 2, and in 1991, they put eight people inside for two years. It was quite a few more years before the full story of what went on inside became known to the public.  

It soon became clear that raising food in Biosphere 2 was a major challenge. The weather was cloudy for the first few months of the mission, stunting the growth of crops. The Biospherians had to break into a three-month supply of food that had been secretly stored away before the doors had closed.

Then Biosphere 2 began to lose oxygen because the soil had spawned an explosion of oxygen-gulping bacteria. The crew felt as if they were living at 14,000 feet. A truckload of liquid oxygen finally saved them; as soon as the gas began spraying into Biosphere 2, they began racing around in joy.

The company running Biosphere 2 had its own problems outside. A management shakeup, lawsuits, and sabotage followed. Biosphere 2 was considered a failure. However, in science, even failures teach us something. Here, we learned a lot of things about how difficult it is to scale a planet-wide ecosystem into a small community. Read the story of Biosphere 2 as told by Carl Zimmer at the New York Times. -via Strange Company

In August of 1955, 14-year-old Emmitt Till was kidnapped, beaten, and shot in Mississippi. His mother insisted upon an open casket so Americans could see the damage. The story was a critical point in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly when the perpetrators were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Rod Serling, a 30-year-old rising star in a golden age of dramatic television, watched the events play out in the news. He believed firmly in the burgeoning medium’s power for social justice. “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”

Soon after the trial concluded, Serling, riding off the success of his most well-received teleplay to date, felt compelled write a teleplay around the racism that led to Till’s murder. But the censorship that followed by advertisers and networks, fearful of blowback from white, Southern audiences, forced Serling to rethink his approach.

Serling was impelled to change the script of the resulting story until it was about an old white man from an unnamed country killed in a small town in New England. How Serling's disappointment with "Noon on Doomsday" led to The Twilight Zone is a story told at Smithsonian.


See also: Black and White: The Twilight Zone

Guy biking across the world finds a kitten he can't leave behind pic.twitter.com/6NASfQxqHy

— The Dodo (@dodo) April 1, 2019

Last year, Scottish welder Dean Nicholson quit his job to seek adventure biking around the world. Four months ago, near the border of Bosnia and Montenegro, he encountered an abandoned kitten. The kitten demanded his attention and then stole his heart. Now Nicholson and Nala are traveling together, with Nicholson pedaling and Nala riding on either his shoulder or in the front bike bag.  



You can follow Nicholson and Nala's adventures at Facebook and Instagram.

When someone says "Bless your heart," or in the third person "Bless his little heart," the meaning behind it can vary greatly. The phrase has been appropriated outside the South because it just seems nice, but that's not at all what's going on in the conversation if you're a Southern woman. And Southern women originated the phrase, so they should know.  

Bless your heart is not really a compliment. It sounds sweet as pie, and sometimes is said affectionately about pitiable situations, but it’s often acid-tongued because you’re pitiful and did something you shouldn’t’ve but were too dumb to know better, which is why it’s a perfect saying to export from a region that has hung on for dear life to its manners because it has little else to boast about that isn’t problematic, like the food, or the music. Hell, the manners are problematic, too. Some people call it “nice meanness,” but the ability to sound proper while being awful is a central tenet of Southern identity, and you see it best these days in their holdover sick burns.

The first time I read about outsiders using the phrase incorrectly, the example of proper Southern use was, "He don't have the sense God gave a goose, bless his heart." It's like jargon, slang, or a dog whistle in that the real meaning is only clear to those who know the culture well. Read about the misunderstanding of the phrase "Bless you heart" as it spread outside the South, at Mel magazine.  -via Digg

We know that aquatic mammals (whales, dolphins, manatees, etc) evolved from land animals who returned to the ocean. Here's a new example of what the in-between version may have looked like. The fossil remains of a 42-million-year-old quadruped whale have been found in Peru. The find is significant because scientists say early whales swam from Africa to South America, and this one shows they made it to the Pacific, too. The new species, Peregocetus pacificus, appears to have been equally adept at walking and swimming.

Analysis of the Peregocetus fossil shows it was well adapted to both land and sea, bearing characteristics similar to modern otters and beavers. This animal was relatively large, measuring around 4 meters (13 feet) in length, which is more than twice the size of otters living today. Peregocetus’s terrestrial abilities were evidenced by small hooves at the tips of its fingers and the orientation of its hip bones, suggesting a quadrupedal gait on land. At the same time, it had tail bones similar to those of beavers and otters, which means its tail played an important role in its aquatic abilities. Finally, the size of its fingers and feet suggests webbed appendages, according to the researchers.

Read more about Peregocetus pacificus and what it tells us at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Alberto Gennari)

You've seen the acronym FOMO. That's the fear of missing out. You can't experience everything going on everywhere, so yes, you are missing out on some things, but is it really that important? Casually Explained talks about it, but doesn't really give you the courage to chill. That will come with age.

Science now has data on something that cat owners knew all along -especially if you make an effort to use your cat's name a lot. A team led by Dr. Atsuko Saito of Sophia University in Japan studied cats' reactions to a string of words that included their names, all spoken in the same intonation. Cats do recognize their names, even when spoken by someone they don't know. It was also made apparent that this information is more important to humans than to cats.

But while a cat might pick up on its owner’s coos, the research adds to previous evidence that felines were seemingly reluctant to make much effort in return. Research by the team has already shown that while cats could tell apart their owner’s voice from a stranger’s, they often paid little heed.

Saito added that the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, sheds light on the human-cat relationship. “Cats understand human cues better than many people think,” she said, although she added that did not mean they would respond as their owners might hope.

Another thing cat owners already knew: cats know what's going on, they just don't care. Read more about the study at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

In the video called Six, YouTuber Top Screen edited together clips from a whole bunch of Avengers films to show the evolution of the six original MCU superheroes. Well, their looks have changed, but a constant theme is the incredible angst that comes with the responsibility of welding super powers in the fight against evil. Watch them kick ass and express their feelings over about a dozen movies so far. -via Geeks Are Sexy
 

Czech linguist Jakub Marian created a map of European capitals that presents familiar English written phonemes to show us how residents of those countries pronounce their capital city. It's an interesting task to go through and figure out that Kiyoo is Kiev, Var Shah Vah is Warsaw, etc. Since he posted it on April Fool's Day, he included some questionable explanations for the city names.

The Norwegian capital, Oosh Loo, was named in silent protest against the Swedish occupants after the Swedish–Norwegian War. In the very concise Norwegian language, “Oosh Loo” means roughly “Shoo, that’s not your loo”.

The Finnish name Hell Sing Key, in contrast, relates to its metal music scene.

See the map and more jokes about it at Marian's site. -via Laughing Squid