You know the animator who goes by PES from masterpieces like Fresh Guacamole and Western Spaghetti and other works of art. Now we see what he looks like and how he works. In this video, he picks up some eclectic finds from a flea market in California and makes a taco out of them.
We don't see a finished animation in this, but maybe we will in the future. -via Boing Boing
Should Hollywood actors be paid 1. a fair wage for the work involved, 2. a percentage of what the movie makes, if they were hired for their star power, 3. whatever it takes to hire that star power, or 4. as little as the studio can get away with? At one time or another, all these methods have been used to set movie stars' pay for a Hollywood film. How much the actor brings to the project sometimes has little to do with their compensation. For example, Marilyn Monroe made $18,000 for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, while Jane Russell made $100,000. Monroe had more star power, but she was under a studio contract. Things are different now, and much more confusing. A recent Hollywood story told how Mark Wahlberg made $1.5 million for the reshoots for All the Money in the World, while Michelle Williams got $1,000 -for a larger role. So how are Hollywood paychecks decided these days?
In Hollywood parlance, an actor’s “quote” means the base amount of zeroes it will take to get above-the-line talent—shorthand for a film’s creatives—to show up on set. (Below-the-line workers, i.e. crew members and those who work on technical aspects like hair, makeup, and special effects, receive a salary based on union rates.) In a communication leaked during the 2014 Sony Pictures e-mail hack, then-Columbia Pictures co-president of production Hannah Minghella mused about what to offer Wahlberg for an un-produced film called Uncharted. “Mark was paid 17M on Transformers but before that his highest quote was 12M (which we paid him on The Other Guys),” the e-mail reads. “We think 12M is the number.” The “M,” naturally, stands for million.
But blockbusters with a $210 million production budget, like Transformers: Age of Extinction, are quote anomalies due to simple box-office math: Transformers brought in more than $1 billion worldwide, while Guys topped out at $170 million. That’s why in this case, Wahlberg was being offered his previous high-water mark of $12 million. Michelle Williams—who favors artier fare and has yet to star in a franchise—likely has a quote well below Wahlberg’s, despite her reputation and four Oscar nominations. Prestige and awards don’t necessarily equal a raise for actors.
But that's only the beginning of negotiations. There's also percentages, points, and perks. Read about the complicated business of assigning value and salary to movie stars at Vanity Fair. -via Metafilter
It looks like Carroll Spinney is playing both ends in this vintage photograph! But you can hardly blame him for not completely changing between scenes when he had to play two roles. Spinney played both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street for years. At age 84, he is only semi-retired now. He started puppeteering when he was only eight years old, and after years of professional work, almost missed the chance to become a Muppeteer.
Spinney first met Jim Henson in 1962 at a puppeteering festival, where Henson asked if he would like to "talk about the Muppets". As Spinney failed to realize the question was an employment offer, the conversation never came to pass.[6]
In 1969, Spinney performed at a Puppeteers of America festival in Utah. His show was a mixture of live actors and puppets but was ruined by an errant spotlight that washed out the animated backgrounds. Henson was once again in attendance and noticed Spinney's performance. "I liked what you were trying to do," Henson said, and he asked once more if they could "talk about the Muppets". This time, they did have the conversation, and Spinney joined the Muppeteers full-time by late 1969.[7]
-via Wil Wheaton
Oh, what a brave new world our inventors and engineers have developed for us! If they can't solve world hunger or bring peace among nations, at least they can scare the living daylights out of us. Programmer Abhishek Singh made an augmented reality program that recreates the iconic scene from The Ring in which Samara/Sadako climbs out of the TV. You know the one. It's pretty creepy.
She's even able to follow the viewer around as you try to escape. While it's not perfect, this does show the terrifying possibilities for the technology and what it can be used for. -via Gizmodo
The Big Short sounds like an oxymoron, but it's also the name of a 2015 film about the real estate bubble that led to the 2007-08 financial crash. Despite the dry and depressing subject matter, The Big Short was both a critical and box office hit and was nominated for five Academy Awards. Maybe it was the star power of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, and quite a few other well-known actors. Maybe it was because it explained complicated financial shenanigans in a way people could understand, and made it funny as well. If you like The Big Short, you'll want to learn some trivia about it.
8. The characters were based on real people.
While the names of the people involved were obviously changed most of them were based on real people that had something to do with the disaster in 2008.
7. The real Michael Burry has a cameo in the film.
There’s a shot of him standing near the front door talking on the phone. He plays the role of a Scion employee for just a brief moment in the film.
Learn more about The Big Short at TVOM.
(Image source: Parker Molloy)
Now that sonograms for pregnant women are common, a new tradition has evolved called the "gender reveal party," in which the family, and often the parents, find out for the first time whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. The person entrusted with this information devises a way to make the surprise happen, often with a cake. The cake inside is tinted either pink or blue, completely covered with frosting or fondant until the ceremonial cutting. Some of these cakes are rather strange. The cakes above took advantage of a joke, while others take gender stereotypes to the max for a slogan.
See a roundup of some of the strangest gender reveal cakes at Buzzfeed.
The Walking Dead returns this Sunday night, after a three month break in the middle of season eight. If you've ever heard the show's opening theme, you know that it's not the sort of song that lends itself to lyrics. The Warp Zone took that as a challenge.
The lyrics they used, if you can keep up with them, bring to mind the growing theory that our heroes are actually the bad guys of the series. Not that we'd ever root against them, but they do tend to leave a wide path of destruction in their wake. On reflection, that's to be expected. When you have a big special effects department working hard on zombies all the time, you have to reward them with the opportunity to burn things down and blow things up occasionally. -via Tastefully Offensive
Brooke Swanson was always color blind, but of course she didn't know that as a child, because you don't miss what you've never had. Still, it was difficult for her to use crayons if the labels were torn off. When she was diagnosed, she didn't understand. And as she grew up, she encountered new problems.
Aside from the whole crayon wrapper thing, color blindness didn’t start to really impact my daily life until high school. That’s when you start going shopping with friends, makeup becomes important, your mom isn’t dressing you anymore and you need to wear clothes that match. It wasn’t until I started making mistakes with that stuff that I realized this is kind of a big deal.
We moved when I was a junior in high school. Here I am, 16 years old, at a brand new school, and I just want what every other 16-year-old wants: to fit in. I was leaving English class when this boy Thomas came up to me and said, “I think your eyes are bleeding.” I thought it was a prank, or a weird joke, and I just kind of laughed and shrugged it off.
When I got home later the makeup I’d put on that morning was still out on the dresser. My red lip liner and my brown eyeliner were both Clinique brand, and I’d mixed them up. Thomas thought my eyes were bleeding because I’d been wearing bright red lip liner on my eyes all day. I was mortified, and I never wanted to make that mistake again. To this day, I make sure my lip and eyeliner are always different brands.
Swanson writes eloquently about the struggles of colorblindness, but her story takes an amazing turn when her boyfriend bought her a pair of Enchroma glasses. She describes discovering an entirely new world as an adult, down to seeing her son through new eyes. You'll see color differently after reading her story at The Cut. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Justin Morgan)
The age old question, "How fast can you run?" is answered logically by "It depends on what's chasing me." But sometimes even that motivation isn't enough. What could possibly lead to this scenario? Could it be a nagging idea that you've let your body go to pot by sitting all day? You sit at work, you sit in the car, you go home and sit while watching TV or playing on the internet. No wonder your legs have no loyalty. And no taste, either, according to the monster. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
(Image credit: Wellcome Images)
Dear A.J., I’m in a friend’s wedding this fall, and she’s requested that all the bridesmaids wear Spanx. Do I have to? I hate the way they feel. -Sarah in Baltimore
Here's my advice, Sarah: Tell the lovely bride to cut out the crazy talk! If I’m reading it correctly, our Constitution guarantees the inalienable right to love handles. That said, if you do decide to honor and obey her wishes, take comfort in knowing that in the entire agonizing history of women’s fashion, Spanx is pretty benign.
Consider its 16th-century Spanish equivalent: an iron corset that squeezed the woman’s waist to the size of an Eggo waffle. In the centuries that followed, women slipped into something only slightly less excruciating: corsets made of whalebone, wood, and steel. Lacing up these duds required a brawny servant who stood behind the lady, often lodging a foot in her back for leverage!
Even though we've all seen the pictures, only 556 people in all of history have looked at our Earth from the vantage point of space orbit and came back to tell us about it. Only 24 have seen it as a pale blue dot from lunar orbit. National Geographic talked with several of those people. Some of them expressed how limited our language is in describing how it felt.
Kathy Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first American woman to perform a space walk, returned with an abiding awe for the intricate systems that come together to make Earth an improbable oasis. “The thing that grew in me over these flights was a real motivation and desire … to not just enjoy these sights and take these pictures,” she says, “but to make it matter.”
After retiring from NASA, Sullivan led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for three years, using the robotic eyes of orbiting satellites to pursue her passion. She says Earth from above is so captivatingly beautiful, she never grew bored looking at it. “I’m not sure I’d want to be in the same room with someone who could get tired of that.”
A significant number of those who've flown in space later went into professions and projects to study, improve, and protect our Earth. Read their stories at National Geographic magazine. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: NASA)
In the midst of the Cold War, the US build a military base under the ice in Greenland. They dug tunnels under the glacier that covers the island, thinking that the ice would be permanent. The ice wasn't permanent even back then. Glaciers shift, and that made the Camp Century unstable, and ultimately unusable. But that was after it had been in use for ten years.
By the time the base was abandoned in 1967, it had its own library and theater, an infirmary, kitchen and mess hall, a chapel, and two power plants (one nuclear, one run on diesel). When the base closed, key parts of the nuclear power plant were removed, but most of the base’s infrastructure was left behind—the buildings, the railways, the sewage, the diesel fuel, and the low-level radioactive waste. In the 2016 paper, which Colgan worked on as well, the researchers suggested that the radiological waste was less worrisome than the more extensive chemical waste, from diesel fuel and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) used to insulate fluids and paints.
Overall, the researchers estimated that 20,000 liters of chemical waste remain at the Camp Century site, along with 24 million liters of “biological waste associated with untreated sewage.” That’s just at Camp Century; the military closed down bases at three other sites in Greenland, too, and it’s unclear how much waste is left there. Over the next few decades, the researchers found, melt water from the ice sheets could mobilize these pollutants, exposing both the wildlife and humans living in Greenland.
For 50 years, military officials assumed that the abandoned base would remain buried. But now that the Greenland ice sheet is receding under ever-warmer climate conditions, what's left behind could be an environmental disaster in the making. Read more about Camp Century at Atlas Obscura.
The Star Trek universe covers several centuries, a lot of outer space, and a bunch of TV shows and movies. In that universe, the icon starship Enterprise gets around. It's been crashed and disabled and shot at and retired, but it always bounces back, often as a new (and improved) ship with the same basic design and the same name. The canon as we know it has eleven versions so far, and a new one has been teased for an appearance in the series Star Trek: Discovery. That Enterprise is not included in a ranking of all eleven Enterprises at io9, but only because we don't know enough about it yet. If you're a Star Trek fan, you'll want to go see if your favorite made #1.
Burger Fiction is getting ready for the Academy Awards with another supercut, this one featuring all the winners of the Best Animated Feature Oscar and the nominees for this year's award.
The Oscar for Best Animated Feature has only been awarded since 2002, so this supercut won't plunge you back into childhood (unless you're pretty young), but you might have fond memories of watching these films with your kids. In fact, I can pinpoint the year that my kids started going to the theater without me (2009), because I didn't seen any of them beyond that point -in theaters. I can also pinpoint the year my kids learned to torrent films. -via Laughing Squid
The campaign to extend voting rights to women in the US took more than 70 years, from the Seneca Falls meeting to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Tennessee became the state that sealed the deal in the summer of 1920. Author Elaine Weiss talked about the battle for 36 state ratifications in promoting her forthcoming book The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.
How did the battle for women’s suffrage all come down to Tennessee?
By 1920 we’re talking about no longer getting resolutions or referenda in the states to allow women to vote state by state. It’s finally come down to an amendment to the Constitution. In January 1918, the House passes the federal amendment, but the Senate refuses to, and it takes another year-and-a-half until World War I is over. It’s in June of 1919 that the Senate finally relents [to consider the amendment]. They actually reject it twice more and then finally June of 1919 it is passed by Congress and it goes through the ratification process. Three-quarters of the states have to approve the amendment. There are 48 states in 1920, so that means 36 states have to approve it.
It goes to the states, and it’s a very difficult process because one of the things that the [U.S.] senators did to make it harder for the suffragists, and very purposefully so, was that they held off their passage of the amendment until it was an off-year in state legislatures. At that time, most state legislatures did not work around the calendar. Lots of governors didn’t want to call special sessions. But there’s a Supreme Court decision around this time that says amending the Constitution has its own laws and they take precedence over any state Constitutional law. The legislature has to convene to confront whatever amendment comes down to them.
Since ten states had already rejected the ratification, every remaining vote counted dearly. All in all, the fight was much dirtier than we ever learned in school. Read about the final push for the 19th Amendment at Smithsonian.
