The Weeki Wachee mermaids were magical creatures to me as a child, even though I was old enough to know they were real women. Women with awesome jobs, in my eyes. Like many little girls, I wanted to grow up to be a mermaid. But not badly enough to move to Florida as an adult. I had no idea they were still putting on shows three times a day in 2018!
Tom Scott takes us on a tour of Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Florida, and gives us a bit of the history of the famous -and now gloriously retro- mermaid show.
Making s'mores out of Peeps is the true fusion of spring and summer confections. You can do that without even going outside with the Peeps S’mores Skillet Dip! A hot cast iron skillet under a broiler replaces a campfire, and a rainbow of Peeps provide the eye candy. That won't last long, as you swish a roasted, melty Peep with the melted chocolate using a graham cracker. Or maybe a fork, if you want a neater s'more. Since Easter is the last of the candy holidays until Halloween, you might want to stock up on Peeps so you can have this again and again. Get the complete recipe, with a video, at Hello Giggles. -via Pee-wee Herman
In late 2016, Sam Garland (Poem_for_your_sprog) wrote a funny poem that spawned an entirely new genre of poetry, now called bredlik. You can see many examples in the subreddit /r/ilikthebred or at Twitter. For World Poetry Day last week, O. Westin had the wild idea of fusing bredlik with the iambic pentameter of a classic sonnet. The result is a poem about poetry.
My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail I am my best / when formats are not mix’d Wen poits play / subversions often fail
Notice you can read the left side by itself and get a completely different poem. You can also read the right side alone, but the real effect comes by reciting it as a whole. There are four stanzas with a twist at the end. You can read the poem, and the thinking behind it, at Micro SF/F. -via Metafilter
Robert E. Jackson found and compiled a collection of Easter bunnies from back when you expected them to look weird and creepy -and we liked it! Yeah, back in the day, we didn't have any of these 3D printed bespoke furry costumes. We just had papier-mâché heads from someone's kitchen and recycled pajamas.
Or people just put on bunny ears and did the Bunny Hop. Or we skipped all that nonsense and put our kids on ten-foot rabbits and took their picture. See all 16 images at Flashbak. -via Boing Boing
Before YouTube, before websites, and even before computer graphics made advertising as in-your-face as it is now, movies at your local theater were advertised in newspapers. Newspapers were printed with hand-set type, and graphics required their own custom-made print blocks. KB Typesetting was one of the companies that made new print blocks for movie advertising images, which were send out to newspapers around the country, and then usually thrown away after the run of the movie was over locally. As movies became immortal and advertising became ephemeral, the rare print blocks that survived became highly collectible.
That quaint little world of finite supply and demand was blown to smithereens—as thoroughly as the planet Alderaan—in November 1998, when DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner of Omaha were invited into the back room of a local store called Franx Antiques and Art. That’s where they first encountered a cache of 400-plus cardboard boxes filled with more than 50,000 assorted-sized print blocks, plus another 8,000 or so printing plates, all featuring advertisements for movies produced from 1932 to the early 1980s. It was literally tons of stuff, and it had been sitting in that back room, undisturbed, for roughly two decades, when Franx purchased it for several thousand dollars from its Omaha neighbor KB Typesetting.
Naturally, Ginsberg and Wagner had to have it all. So, they scraped together the money to purchase the collection from Franx and find a place to store it, and proceeded to load all those boxes, albeit a few at a time, into Ginsberg’s car.
“My poor Corsica got beat to death,” Ginsberg tells me when we spoke over the phone recently. But the Corsica was the least of Ginsberg and Wagner’s worries: Like the proverbial dog chasing the milk truck, the bigger question confronting the two friends was what to do with their prize now that they had caught it.
The collection included print blocks for everything from The Mummy through Star Wars. Appraisers were astonished, and their estimates of the collection's value have grown over the years. It's even had a documentary made about it. The story of how the collection of movie history came to be and what will happen to it is told at Collectors Weekly.
As The Last Jedi rolls out on home video, it's not a moment too soon for an Honest Trailer! Screen Junkies repeats a technique they used for The Force Awakens, in using both the current announcer Jon Bailey and their original Honest Trailer voice, Gannon Nickell. Why? Because any Star Wars movie can only be discussed by arguing whether the old ones or the new ones are better.
If you've just ordered The Last Jedi for your first viewing, save this trailer for afterward. Not only does it spoil every plot point, it explores why this movie is the most divisive Star Wars movie since the last one. Or the one before that. I got a real giggle out of the cast names, especially Short Round as BB-8. In case you want to take a deep dive into the making of this Honest Trailer, there's a commentary video to accompany this one.
Garfield, the fat cat of comics and movie fame, always craved lasagna. Andrew Rea shows us why that lasagna was so delicious in the latest episode of Binging With Babish. The good news is that Garfield doesn't have to appear in this cooking video, so he doesn't.
All the parts of this lasagna are hand-made before they are assembled. J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for Ragu Bolognese is at Serious Eats. To see Brad Leone make the ricotta cheese, see his video. The instructions for homemade pasta is in a previous video by Andrew Rea. I can guarantee that after going through all this for a pan of lasagna, the cat is not getting it. -via reddit
In Japanese Folklore, the Ashiarai Yashiki is a giant filthy foot that crashes through the ceiling at night and demands to be washed. If you don't wash it, it will rampage through your house pic.twitter.com/MBwalGWFDZ
Japanese monster stories are so bizarre that it's hard to know whether they are old or were made up for some modern manga, but Ashiarai Yashiki is apparently a real legend. According to the Villains Wiki,
The Ashiarai Yashiki is an extremely bizarre Japanese spirit that takes the form of a disembodied leg and foot, many times larger than a normal human and often covered in mud or blood - this frightening being was believed to literally smash its way into the homes of terrified humans and demand them to wash it.
The reason behind this attack was unknown and most likely could never really be understood as spirits such as the Ashiarai Yashiki were believed to be governed by laws far beyond human understanding, yet even by Japanese mythology standards the Ashiarai Yashiki stands out as one of the more unique monsters of folklore and despite being little more than a giant foot it was capable of human speech.
The only way I can picture this happening is in a Terry Gilliam animation. You have to wonder if he was familiar with the legend of Ashiarai Yashiki. -via madamjujujive
Ernest Cline's first novel is a science fiction story called Ready Player One. Steven Spielberg made a movie from it, in theaters this weekend. But Cline's earlier fan fiction, in the form of screenplays, introduced him to Hollywood in a spectacular way. He was the original writer behind the 2009 movie Fanboys. It started when he was grieving the loss of his mother to cancer in the late '90s.
That was right when Lucasfilm announced that they were making more Star Wars – that first clip of George working on the script? StarWars.com would release videos that they were entering pre-production. It was like hearing that a new chapter of the Bible had just been discovered. It became my way to distract myself over losing my mom. I was working tech support and doing web design, so I was in front of the internet all day looking at prequel websites. Then one day it occurred to me: What if I was in my mom's position and I knew I was dying and wasn't going to live to see this movie?
As soon as I had the idea, it occurred to me that's the stupidest thought ever to pass through my head.
But it resonated with Star Wars fans, and the script he wrote circulated for years. The eventual producer and director were in college when they fell in love with the story. Over time, more people got involved and George Lucas even signed off on the project. Fans followed the film's progress online. Harvey Weinstein would be the distributor. Only after a successful preview for fans at the first European Star Wars Celebration in 2007 did Weinstein begin to throw his weight around. He wanted the movie changed.
[Director] Kyle Newman: They owned it. I mean, they paid for it. I respect that's part of the filmmaking culture. I paint, I draw, and I own that stuff. But I made a commitment to the folks at Lucasfilm, to the Star Wars fan community and to my cast and crew about the tone of the film.
Ernie Cline: Weinstein pitched them the idea of taking out the whole plot of the dying friend. They strategically shot scenes that made it so the fanboys were just going on the trip because they wanted to see the movie early. No one's dying. They all are just going because they want to trespass. It robs the movie of its whole call to adventure, and the whole heart of the picture. We actually saw that cut of the movie. They screened that cut with the original cut two nights in a row in Reseda or something, and that was going to be the version that they would have released.
Reshoots and negotiations took another couple of years, and Fanboys was ultimately released in only ten theaters, with almost no promotion. Cline learned his lesson and wrote Ready Player One as a novel instead of a screenplay. Read the story of what happened to Fanboys from the folks who made it at Thrillist.
I knew something was off about this scene from the less-than-symmetrical eyes on the left person's face. Then the robotic word selection in the second panel confirmed it. But it can't be a robot, because a robot would never say "returning back." That's redundant. I thought all this before reaching the second row, which took a totally unexpected turn, but it fits the setup perfectly. Those birds didn't have the greatest disguise, but our victim was too busy on his phone to even notice. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble, who thinks through all the details.
Furball Fables shows us how to celebrate Easter as a crazy cat person. You don't really have to be crazy, just have cats and no children to make baskets for. I really like how she puts catnip into eggs and then has the cats hunt for them. It won't take long for an apex predator to find them by smell!
One part of the Cat's Guide to Easter is making the greeting card. That appears to be the most difficult task, since there are five cats and getting them to pose for a picture is like... well, it's like herding cats.
Common sense tells us that we cherish rain more after a drought, we appreciate a steady paycheck more when we know what financial stress is, and we take more pride in accomplishments that don't happen often. The same is said for happiness; how can we be truly happy if we never experience unhappiness? We sometimes employ psychological tricks to tell ourselves we are happy, but the real rush comes from novelty, meaning a change in happiness level. We know all this intuitively, but it's nice to have a breakdown from a neuroscientist. Professor Indira M. Raman explains that this novelty factor goes all the way down to our neurons. They don't so much measure all incoming stimuli equally, but the changes in those signals at the molecular level. When a stimulus is equal over time, it tends to be ignored.
The ability to get used to and ultimately ignore incoming information that is static, familiar, predictable, and non-harmful turns out to be helpful behaviorally; in other words, it offers an evolutionary advantage. Continuing to notice sensations like the light touch of our clothes on our arms or the mild fragrance of the laundry detergent we used to wash them would be distracting, to say the least, and might even interfere with our ability to detect and respond to a signal that mattered, like a tap on the shoulder or our toast burning. In fact, an inability to predict and thereby adapt may be a contributing factor to conditions like autism spectrum disorders.12 Besides, it’s wasteful to send brain signals to report information we already know about. When all those ions flow in and out of cells to send signals within our brains, they cannot just remain on the opposite side from where they started. It literally consumes energy to pump sodium back out of neurons and potassium back into them, so it is most efficient not to generate action potentials that don’t carry worthwhile information.
A surefire formula for a viral video is to put all the cool things you can think of in a hat and pull two out. Combine them, and you've got a hit. Jetpack Samurai surely fills the bill.
Japanese designer Shota Mori came up with the sport he calls Jet Samurai and gives a demonstration of it to his technology class. While it seems like it may be a little dangerous, Jet Samurai could instantly have leagues and tournaments if jetpacks were a bit more available. -via Laughing Squid
Finnish YouTuber Lauri Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) spends a lot of time dreaming up new ways to impress us with cool machinery. In this video, he checks to see if a jackhammer is better to break through a frozen lake than the usual chainsaw. But you know what would be cooler? If he heated up the hammer part. If you want to skip ahead to the fun part, the heating-up is at about four minutes in.
I don't want to give anything away, but it doesn't go exactly as he thought it would. Vuohensilta follows that with more ice stunts with the jackhammer, chainsaw, and axe. -via Digg
April Fools Day falls on Easter Sunday this year, not a day you want to wet someone's clothing, hide the dinner entree, or mess with a child's Easter basket. But if you are determined to pull a fast one on someone, somehow, let's try some ideas aren't harmful or permanent to prank family and friends with. However, they can be temporarily annoying. For example, this person "subscribed" their friend to Daily Llama Images, which may or may not exist, but in this case it's just something they cobbled together for April Fools Day. It appears that the prankee didn't mind much; he'd just prefer his llamas to wear hats. I wonder how long they kept it up. There are 16 other April Fools Day prank suggestions at Buzzfeed.
