It's gotten to the point where plot doesn't matter when The Rock stars in your movie -all you need is action! Rampage was the movie that came out earlier this year, before Skyscraper, where The Rock saves the day by performing superhuman feats of strength and ...suspension of disbelief. Just like the other movies starring Dwayne Johnson. It was apparently based on a video game. Screen Junkies gives us a proper Honest Trailer for Rampage. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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Liquid Ass is a foul-smelling spray that was launched in 2005 for pranking purposes, although it was developed many years earlier, when the inventor was a high school student. People bought it, used it, and declared the unpleasant smell was worth it for the stories they were able to tell about it. But the spray is also in demand at medical schools and teaching hospitals because of its accuracy in replicating the smell of certain medical conditions and procedures.
That’s why Kata Conde, an assistant nursing professor at MidAmerica Nazarene University in Kansas, started buying Liquid Ass for the simulation lab she runs for her students. It’s the only product she’s found that accurately captures the smells that come from our bowels, and she would know: she had a 30-year career as a nurse before becoming an instructor. Conde now uses Liquid Ass in teaching scenarios in which a patient has soiled themselves while trying to get out of a hospital bed, complete with chocolate icing to set the scene. It’s also good for practicing bowel surgeries, like colostomies, where surgeons divert some of the large intestine to a new hole in the abdomen.
“The smell hits you like a huge wall,” she says. “It’s something people react to when they first experience it. We see all kinds of faces.” In a real-life scenario, any kind of reaction to a stench like wrinkling or covering your nose would make a patient understandably embarrassed and uncomfortable. To successfully complete the simulation, students have to demonstrate that they’re capable of giving adequate care while maintaining professionalism.
Liquid Ass is also used by scientific labs and even the military. Read about the practical uses for the product at Quartz. -via Metafilter
This video from College Humor contains some NSFW language.
Everyone has nodded off to too many wedding speeches, and then when they need to deliver one, they promptly forget everything they ever hated about wedding speeches. People talk too long, they tell jokes that aren't funny, they make it about themselves, and they get too tipsy before they start. If you are ever obligated to deliver a toast at a wedding, remember to keep it short. If you do that, then you won't have time for the other awful mistakes most people make. I gave a wedding speech just last week, but I lucked out in that it was on video, so I did it over and over until I was actually happy with it. Sixty seconds, sweet, and sober.
The good news is spreading that all twelve members of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach have been rescued from a flooded cave in Chiang Rai, Thailand.
Bangkok sisters Aruni Aunhawarakorn and Jantima Manasviyoungkul have been working on an illustration of the many people and entities involved in the rescue operation. They've updated their work several times, and above is the latest version. See the image full-size at Facebook. The 12 soccer players and their coach are represented by boars. Notice the last one out of the cave is larger than the others -that's the coach. The other animals are representative of:
White Elephant - Former Chiang Rai governor Narongsak Osatanakorn
White Horse - The royal family and various Thai government agencies
Red Cross Horse - Medical team and nurses
Seals - Navy SEALs
Frogs - Other divers
Duck - The geography team
Blue Lion - British rescue team
Black Yellow and Red Lion - Belgian rescue team
Red White and Blue Lion - Netherlands rescue team
Kangaroo - Australian rescue team
Panda - Chinese team
Crane - Japanese rescue team
Moose - Swedish rescue team
Tiger - Myanmar rescue team
Brown Elephant - Laos rescue team
Eagle - American rescue team
Bear - Finnish rescue team
Rooster - French rescue team
Hawk - Rescue teams from the Philippines, Germany, and the Czech Republic
Beaver - Canadian rescue team
Swan - Danish rescue team
Cobra - Israeli rescue team
Iron Man - Elon Musk
Dog - K9 teams
Swallows - A team of climbers from Libong, Thailand
Dragon - Water pumping and drilling teams
Pig - Local farmers
Birds - Reporters
One Crow - Problems and those who would sow discord
Notice one of the seals has a halo and wings. That represents former Thai Navy SEAL Saman Gunan, who died in the rescue effort. Read more about this illustration at Buzzfeed.
Star Wars fans may have thought that the "old guard," meaning characters from the original trilogy, would be completely gone from Episode IX. It was supposed to be Leia's movie, but Carrie Fisher's unexpected death in December of 2016 changed those plans. But now there's Lando Calrission. Yes, Billy Dee Williams will be reprising his role from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
Chatter about Williams joining the production, which is set to begin later this summer, increased in recent days when the actor bowed out of an upcoming sci-fi and pop culture convention citing a conflict with a movie schedule. Sources confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Williams will indeed be returning to the Star Wars film franchise for the first time since 1983’s Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: Episode IX has yet to be named, but is scheduled to open December 20, 2019. -via The AV Club
The canals of Amsterdam have been winding their way through the city for 800 years. Construction of a new metro line made it necessary to clean them out, and an amazing variety of items have been dredged up from the bottom. Those items have been collected, analyzed, sorted, and put on display in a digital archaeological database.
The associated website, book and documentary set titled Below the Surface has been years in the making. This project catalogues everything from bits of ceramic, metal and glass to fully intact artifacts. Some finds predate the city’s founding — there are medieval coins and even pieces of sharpened stone from as far back as 4,300 BCE.
“Rivers in cities are unlikely archaeological sites,” explain the organizers and curators of the project. “It is not often that a riverbed, let alone one in the middle of a city, is pumped dry and can be systematically examined. The excavations in the Amstel yielded a deluge of finds.” The resulting website is an amazing interactive museum, allowing visitors to dynamically connect various artifacts by type, material and time period.
Read about the project at 99% Invisible, and take a look through the database here. You can even use the artifact images to make your own display! -via Digg
Escaramuza is a competitive sport performed by women riding sidesaddle in elaborate traditional dresses in homage to the Adelitas, the female soldiers who fought in the Mexican Revolution. It's a drill team event, part of charrería (Mexican rodeo) culture, judged on horsemanship and timing that come together in an impressive performance.
Because escaramuza costumes are based on historical uniforms worn during the revolution, there are strict guidelines for all costumes. Adelita dresses must be cotton or cotton-based, and always in traditional colors. Embroidered details must be sewn by hand, and accessories, like the pins the women wear near their necks, must be sterling silver and pinned in one particular place. Sombreros worn with both charra and Adelita costumes are also highly embellished, and secured by leather straps that sit on the chin just so. Dressing for a competition can take more than two hours.
Read more about escaramuza and see photographs of the riders and their costumes up close at Vogue. -via Everlasting Blort
You see this baby squid looking back at you, and it hasn't even hatched yet! Redditor rockyroo529 says his nephew found a seashell with squid eggs inside. There were about 16 eggs with developing squid, and evidence that some eggs had already hatched.
They took few pictures and then put the shell back into the water so the little ones can go about their squid business.
Kittens are cute, baby goats are cute, and this video has both! Hector is a newborn Nigerian dwarf goat at Sunflower Farm Creamery (previously at Neatorama). He was a single birth, and the first of the season, so there are no other kids for him to play with yet. But there is a litter of barn kittens! Hector wants to make friends, and even learned to climb up on a bale of wood shavings to join them. He'll have plenty of company soon -the farm has a live webcam set up to catch more goat births. -via Tastefully Offensive
Quick, when did movies start to make money? You've probably never thought about it, but the earliest experimental films were hard to monetize. They were an amazing technology at the time, but you could get the same entertainment from a live stage show, with color and sound. The breakthrough came with an 1894 Edison kinetograph film of a boxing match between James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, and New Jersey champion Peter Courtney. The only people that actually saw the fight live were the film crew and a few staged audience members for ambience. Everyone else had to pay to see how it turned out.
Regular fight fans had to adapt to a new way of catching all the action from the 1894 bout. They lined up with hard-earned nickels and waited for their turn to watch the bout through the Kinetoscope, another Dickson invention, which had a peephole window on top for viewing the flickering films made with the kinetograph.
The playback of the boxing match made money — the first film to do so, according to the 1968 boxing documentary The Legendary Champions. That means it was also the first financially successful boxing pay-per-view. Better yet, it helped launch the career of the sport’s first movie star, Corbett, the fighter who had defeated the legendary John L. Sullivan to win the world title. “He was a celebrity — a pop culture figure in the very early days of mass media,” says Jeremy Geltzer, who has written several books on early film history.
Suddenly, more people could see a particular fight than could fit into an arena, and boxing continued to make so much money that Floyd Mayweather is the world's highest-paid athlete today. Read how the first boxing film came about and where it led at Ozy.
When you think of Tom Hanks' early career, you recall the TV show Bosom Buddies, and then his starring roles in the movies Splash and Bachelor Party, which both came out in 1984. His first film was He Knows You're Alone in 1980, but he only had a small part. You probably don't recall his starring role in the 1982 TV movie Mazes and Monsters. The film rode the wave of moral panic surrounding role playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, which few people understood at the time.
Hanks stars as Robbie Wheeling, a university freshman who joins his new friends Jay Jay (Chris Makepeace), Kate (Wendy Crewson), and Daniel (David Wallace) in games of Mazes and Monsters. Like most teenagers, the four have tensions with their parents - Jay Jay's mother's a control freak, and Daniel's father doesn't want him to become a videogame designer. Robbie, on the other hand, is more troubled than the others realized; he's already been forced out of one school for playing roleplaying games too much. When Jay Jay invites Robbie to join his Mazes and Monsters group, Robbie reluctantly agrees.
The trouble begins when Jay Jay decides to take the RPG a step further: "I propose we play Mazes and Monsters in a real setting," he says. "Naturally, I'll be the maze controller."
You can see where this is going- Robbie (Hanks) steps into a nightmare. Read about Mazes and Monsters and the news that led to its production at Den of Geek.
This flip is obviously not impossible, because world class Australian skater Jackson Pilz did it before your very eyes, but it is a trick that skaters call "the Impossible." Physics Girl collaborated with Rodney Mullen, who is credited with creating the Impossible, to explain the physics of the trick. The Impossible flip is shown at five minutes in, but the background leading up to it is interesting, too.
-via Boing Boing
When humans first crossed Beringia and populated the Americas many thousands of years ago, they brought along their dogs. These pooches were domesticated, descended from Siberian dogs and not American wolves. Then, as Europeans began exploring and conquering North and South America, the PCDs (pre-contact dogs) died out, as did the vast majority of their human owners. A new study compared DNA of modern domestic dogs to the remains of American dogs that died as long as 10,000 years ago.
“Although greater degrees of PCD ancestry may remain in American dogs that have not yet been sampled, our results suggest that European dogs almost completely replaced native American dog lineages,” according to the study. “This near disappearance of PCDs likely resulted from the arrival of Europeans, which led to shifts in cultural preferences and the persecution of indigenous dogs. Introduced European dogs may also have brought infectious diseases to which PCDs were susceptible.”
That said, these indigenous dogs did secure one genetic legacy—a sexually transmitted venereal tumor. Originating from American dogs that lived around 8,000 years ago, the cancer was passed on to the European dogs, who still carry it to this day.
That legacy would seem almost like karma, if it weren't about man's best friend. Read more about the research into ancient American dogs at Motherboard. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Del Baston/Center for American Archeology)
The Polish historian & political scientist Jerzy Targalski remained completely unruffled during our interview when this happened pic.twitter.com/4dLi16Pq1H
— Rudy Bouma (@rudybouma) July 7, 2018
Jerzy Targalski, political expert and cat lover, was being interviewed in his home for a Dutch news show. The subject was the ousting of a Supreme Court judge in Poland, but that meant nothing to his cat Lisio. Cats have their own priorities. Targalski didn't skip a beat in giving his opinion of the news, but neither did he bother to remove the cat. So Poland is short a judge, and Lisio has become a global viral star. -via Mashable
We've posted a lot about the Three Stooges, but there's always more trivia to learn because A. there were more than three of them -quite a few Stooges, eventually, and B. they led quite interesting lives. Here's a sample:
4. THEIR SIGNATURE EYE POKE WAS CULLED FROM A REAL-LIFE INCIDENT.
In Stooge body language, nothing says “I despise you” more efficiently than jutting out the ring and index fingers in a “V” formation and jabbing them into someone’s eyes. This trademark maneuver was apparently based on a real incident. Once, when the gang was playing cards, Shemp became enraged when he believed Larry Fine was cheating. Shemp stood up and poked Larry in both eyes. An observant Moe filed it away for future use onscreen.
5. THEY WORKED CHEAP.
Despite their incredible popularity starring in a series of shorts for Columbia Pictures—they worked a total of 23 years for the studio—Columbia boss Harry Cohn was notoriously stingy. Every year, the Stooges would be forced to renegotiate their one-year contract, with Cohn asserting that the shorts division of the company was not profitable. Believing the spin and fearing Cohn’s alleged criminal connections could be problematic if they made waves, the Stooges worked for a relative pittance most of their careers. When Columbia shut down their shorts department in 1957, the men were fired.
Read more trivia about The Three Stooges at Mental Floss.
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