Wakanda is a beautiful, hidden, fictional country that exists mainly on computers and film. You didn't really think they staged a life-or-death battle in a pool of water at the edge of a high cliff, did you? Of course not, but you might be surprised at how much of the scenery in Black Panther was purely digital, since the finished product was so smooth. Creating digital water is no picnic. ScanlineVFX lets us in on the secrets behind the visual effects that made the movie magic. -via io9
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We once posted a short version of the story of Alexis St. Martin, who suffered a gunshot wound in his stomach that never healed, and thus became the subject of experiments in which his doctor observed the process of human digestion. However, the full story of St. Martin's life is quite harrowing. As an indentured servant in 1822, he had no money and no power. Unable to pay his hospital bill, he was at the mercy of Dr. William Beaumont.
As such, Beaumont offered to sign St Martin as an indentured servant to himself, primarily working as a laborer for Beaumont but also with the agreement that Beaumont would be able to experiment on St Martin in pretty much any way he wanted. And, given the terms of the agreement and St Martin’s extreme lower class status, this really was very much “any way he wanted” with seemingly little regard for St Martin’s feelings about things once the contract was signed.
While the terms of this initial contract are not known today, a later contract he signed with Beaumont has survived and in that one, in return for St Martin being a servant to Beaumont and his guinea pig, Beaumont would cover St Martin’s room and board and would also pay him $150 per year (about $2,800 today).
After a few years of this, St Martin broke his contract and left without permission, heading up to Canada where he started a family. Perturbed, but nonetheless still wanting to study St Martin, Beaumont spent a considerably sum of money tracking St Martin down and then convincing the fur company St Martin was then working for to allow him to return. He then offered St Martin things like a huge increase in pay, land granted by the government, and money to relocate his family (or better yet even more money to abandon his wife and kids). However, privately, he darkly wrote, “When I get him alone again into my keeping, I will take good care to control him as I please.” He also variously referred to St Martin’s children in a letter as “live stock” and in a letter to the U.S. surgeon general lamented St Martin’s “villainous obstinacy and ugliness”. Beyond all this, when writing about St Martin, he generally referred to him as “boy” rather than calling him by his name.
The medical procedures and experiments St. Martin endured were not only invasive, they were often painful and downright creepy. Read about St. Martin and the hole in his stomach at Today I Found Out.
We're not surprised by a car backing up a highway ramp, which is dangerous and illegal, yet not all that uncommon. But this one keeps backing up, through intersections and all the way to a parking lot! He's just lucky he didn't cause a multi-car accident. We assume that the transmission failed, and the only gear that would work was reverse. Still, it would have been much safer (although more expensive) to just call a tow truck. This video is from the Ohio Dept of Transportation. -via Digg
The most implausible fictional worlds have real-world inspirations, often many of them. Writers draw from what they know, and mundane events from everyday life can grow and change into something completely different. in Cracked's latest pictofacts gallery, we find out some of the more odd inspirations that led to details in fictional worlds we all know and love.
Yeah, if you can't sleep at night because of the terror of your imagination, you may as well write it down and sell that story. See 22 entries that give us some insight into where the most creative storytellers on earth can find inspiration.
When the question in the title is posed, they aren't talking about the laugh track, the jokes, the plot, or even the sets. This is about the three-camera technique, which was developed by German filmmaker Karl Freund, and worked so well in TV shows that eventually all sitcoms used it. It's not just the cameras, but also the studio audience and the lighting that give it a particular style. Vox explains the three-camera technique, why it works, and how it became so ubiquitous. -via Laughing Squid
When cooking with other people, you sometimes have to stop and explain what you mean when you say "pepper." There's black pepper, ground from peppercorns, and then there's the various vegetables that originated in America: bell, banana, jalapeño, etc. Black pepper originated in Asia, so why do we call the other plants "peppers"? It was due to Christopher Columbus trying to find a new route to Asia. He didn't, but he still tried to make the best of it by bringing back spices to enrich King Ferdinand. A little misnaming would do.
Black pepper (Piper nigrum) had been a culinary mainstay of fine cuisine since the Roman Empire, beating out prior spicy compounds such as horseradish, mustard, and the arguably better long pepper. It was a valued addition to both food and medicine, yet getting it from Asia was expensive and difficult. Columbus was so eager to find pepper that he carried peppercorns with him. When he landed, he showed them to locals. They were similar enough to the allspice berries growing wild in Jamaica that Columbus also likened them to pepper: pimienta de Jamaica. Marjorie Shaffer writes in Pepper: A History of the World’s Most Influential Spice that Columbus was likely smart enough to know what he had wasn’t pepper, but that he probably didn’t care. Allspice and hot peppers headed for Europe.
Peppers from the New World were a hit, to the chagrin of Dutch spice traders. Read about the initial misnaming of peppers and how that affected world trade at Atlas Obscura.
Remember when KFC made prom corsages out of fried chicken a few years back? This is a step beyond that. You can have a wedding bouquet made of pizza! Villa Italian Kitchen in New Jersey is offering an edible wedding bouquet and a matching boutonniere for the groom. They're even giving some away to affianced couples who enter a contest.
On the one hand, this is a way to save money by combining the expense of flowers with the expense of food for the reception. On the other hand, pizza grease can leave a real mess behind on a wedding gown or a rental tux. Read more about the pizza bouquet at Elite Daily. -via Metafilter
A couple weeks ago in Queensland, Australia, a woman was walking her dog and came across ten kittens along the side of the road. They appear to be weaning age, so they must have been dumped.
"I am a country girl who has lived and worked with animals since I was born and I adore them. I was walking my dog, Koda, on a cold morning in Dalby when on my way home a mob of tiny kittens came out of the grass meowing. I was so shocked and nervous that they would be run over by traffic. Unable to pick all of them up, I started walking back home to get my car. When all ten of the kittens ran after me for at least a kilometre, the tiny one that I will be keeping got really tired, so I had to carry her the majority of the way. I took all ten of them home and fed and rehomed the other nine which have all gone to reliable kind homes. I hope that whoever dumped those babies on the road in winter feels horrible for what they’ve done."
-via Laughing Squid
We’re changing out of our swimsuits and into a whole new era #byebyebikini #MissAmerica2019 pic.twitter.com/08Y7jLFxhs
— Cara Mund (@MissAmerica) June 5, 2018
The Miss America pageant announced some changes this morning. Beginning this year, the competition will no longer feature a swimsuit event. Gretchen Carlson, Miss America 1989 and now chair of the Miss America board of directors, said, "We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance." She said Miss America is no longer a pageant, but a competition.
But the elimination of swimsuits isn't the only change coming to the 97-year-old event. The evening gown competition is being revamped as well. Carlson said contestants will now be able to wear "whatever they choose."
Contestants will also discuss how they would advance their social-impact initiatives during this part of the contest. The talent portion of the competition will remain.
The next Miss America competition will be September 9 in Atlantic City. We'll see a very different show, but the real test of the new ideas will be whether state pageants, er, competitions will change enough to attract a wider variety of contestants, which will only be apparent in in 2019.
As Van Halen and their brown M&Ms have taught us, people tend to skip over the small print. The way to make people actually read things they should, like laundry instructions, is to make them worth the time. Hide a joke inside, and you can change consumer's behavior for the better.
Yeah, some of these might have been designed to go viral, but that ends up being the same thing, don't you think? Maybe now you'll check the tags in your clothes more often. See 25 clothing tags that are worth the time to read them at Geeks Are Sexy.
Thomas J. Beale discovered gold and silver out west nearly 200 years ago. He brought a huge amount of precious metals -and gems- back to Virginia and buried it, then recorded the location in a series of ciphers, a numerical code using three different keys. So far, only one key has been discovered, and it only revealed a description of the treasure -not its location. Ever since, people have been digging for the treasure, because Virginia law says it's finders keepers, whether or not you own the land or even have permission to dig. Virginia landowners are not happy about the occasional invasion.
There’s the Chicago refrigeration contractor, certain he had broken the ciphers in five days, who convinced local officials to dig up a graveless patch of a cemetery, only to find clothes hangers (metal) and horseshoes (unlucky). There’s the Texas man who drove to Virginia, wife and kids in tow, simply to borrow a local roadmap that he believed would lead to the treasure. (It didn’t.) There’s the Massachusetts man who jumped out of bed, jolted by a dream, and drove bleary-eyed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains to test his prophecy. There’s the Oklahoma psychic who surveyed the Goose Creek Valley from a helicopter. There’s the Virginia Supreme Court Justice who scouted the location by bicycle; the Washington state man who hired armed guards; the anonymous man who kept an armored truck idling on a nearby road.
Beale treasure hunters are overwhelmingly male, though locals still chatter about one Pennsylvania woman, Marilyn Parsons, who cashed a disability check in 1983 and rented a backhoe to test her theory that the treasure was buried in an unmarked plot of a church graveyard. When she unearthed a coffin handle and human bones, she was arrested and advised to never step foot in Virginia again.
There are real questions about the treasure. Is it still there? Was it ever there? Could the whole story be a hoax? Was there even a man named Thomas Beale? And even if the treasure isn't real, how about the code? Archives have plenty of information about the treasure hunt, but no definitive answers, and every inquiry brings up more questions. Read the story of Beale's treasure and the folks who've searched for it at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Virginia Hill)
Mount Kīlauea on the big island of Hawaii has been spewing lava for over a month now. Thousands of acres have been covered by new molten rock, and it's flowing out into the sea. When that happens, lava will cool, harden, and can create new land, sometimes hundred of acres at a time. Who owns that new land?
These areas are called “lava extensions,” and were central to a 1977 Hawaii Supreme Court case in which Big Island residents Maurice and Molly Zimring sued the state over 7.9 acres of new land formed by a 1955 Kilauea eruption.
Since the 1955 lava abutted property purchased by the Zimrings, they assumed it belonged to them.
“The deed for the property...described the original pre-1955 parcels and contained no description of the new land… The Zimrings paid property taxes, planted trees and shrubs, and even had a portion bulldozed, fully believing they owned the 1955 lava extension,” the USGS explained in a 2008 blog post:
After the 1960 Kapoho eruption, the state ordered the Zimrings to vacate the lava extension, and they took the issue to court, winning the initial trial. The decision, however, was eventually overturned by State Supreme Court Chief Justice William Richardson.
The decision means that "new" land created by lava belongs to the state. So if you ever consider purchasing oceanfront property in Hawaii, take into account the odds that someday that property might not have an oceanfront. The concept of land ownership itself is relatively new to Hawaii, as you can read at Motherboard. -via Digg
"Deep Note" is the name of the THX theme that everyone remembers from the 1980s and '90s. It starts out creepy, then resolves into triumphant. Last month, THX Ltd. shared the sheet music for Deep Note. It looks like a mess, but Mach Kobayashi saw it as a challenge. Could he sing it?
I’m not a great singer but most of the notes were more or less in my range. So I went into GarageBand and for each note at the end, I picked some random notes in that G2 to G3 range, and sorta glissando-ed to the final note. I doubled the tempo because it seemed a little too slow as written. There were 30 tracks in all (3 tracks each for most of the final notes and 2 each for the bottom 3 final notes) so that took a little while. I dropped the top note by an octave and raised the bottom 3 notes by an octave so I could sing them a bit better. (I think the bottom notes are outside the range of human vocal chords.) And then I recorded me singing with each of those 30 tracks playing in my earbuds, pitch corrected the 4 notes in Final Cut Pro X, and edited the whole thing together.
What do you think? It's not perfect, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for someone to do it better. It's a bit reminiscent of Duck Army. -via reddit
The original condiment called ke-tchup was a fermented fish sauce from China. It became popular among sailors for spicing up bland food on long ocean voyages, and folks in other parts of the world then tried to duplicate it for themselves. The recipes varied widely until any fermented and/or vinegary sauce was called ketchup.
But ketchup became truly American once it was wed with the tomato and bottled industrially. While an early ketchup recipe with tomatoes appeared in Britain in 1817, calling for “a gallon of fine, red, and full ripe tomatas [sic],” and also anchovies, shallots, salt, and a variety of spices, it was Americans who really invented tomato ketchup.
The American tomato, with its origins in what is now Mexico and South America, was introduced to Europeans and North Americans by the Spanish conquistadors, and by the 19th century had become a ubiquitous garden plant. (Earlier it had been considered unhealthy and even poisonous.) Tomatoes became the base of many a sauce or stew, and before long were bottled as concentrated, fermented ketchups, preserved with vinegar and spices much the same way housewives would make a mushroom ketchup.
Tomato ketchup was a sensation, but recipes still varied until a company called Heinz started tweaking the recipe to balance shelf life and taste. That's when the story really takes off, and the success of Heinz ketchup led to other milestones in American agribusiness and cuisine. Read the story of ketchup at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Visitor7)
Faa Mai the elephant grew up at Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, where sanctuary founder Lek Chailet would sing lullabies to her. Years later, the park welcomed a new rescued baby elephant, Thong Ae, and Faa Mai took the youngster under her wing. Now keep track of this: Lek Chailert is the human. She has a lot to do, including showing visitors around the park. That's what she was doing when 9-year-old Faa Mai interrupted her last week.
Faa Mai clearly didn’t care that her friend was busy, and began to playfully push Chailert out into the field, tapping her with her trunk or even wrapping it around her whenever Chailert tried to stop.
“I wondered what it was that she really wanted,” Chailert said.
Chailert knows the pachyderms well, and figured it out. Faa Mai wanted her to sing a lullaby to the baby elephant, just like she did when Faa Mai was young. An elephant never forgets. -via Metafilter
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