The 1957 Disney family drama Old Yeller scarred a generation of children, with its heartwarming relationship between two young boys and their heroic dog. It was more brutally realistic than most adult films in depicting the struggles of pioneer life. Sixty years later, Old Yeller has a 100% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Baby Boomer whose eyes don't well up just thinking about the movie. While you're at it, you may as well check out some trivia about Old Yeller.   

5. This was the Disney debut of Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcoran.

They would both on to star in The Swiss Family Robinson and The Shaggy Dog, but would also explore other movies throughout their careers.

4. The ‘wolf’ was actually a German shepherd.

The shepherd was made up to look like a wolf and both dogs were taught how to play-fight. During these bouts they were always muzzled so as to avoid any accidental damage.

Read more about Old Yeller at TVOM.

WillieB87's wife loves succulent plants, is pregnant, and yesterday was her birthday. So these cupcakes are perfect for her! And that's frosting, not fondant. Someone offered congratulations for getting them home in one piece, and then we found out that he made them himself! That's some good work. And a man who will go that distance to surprise his wife for her birthday, well, he's a keeper.  

Michael Callaghan decided it was time that he got to know his neighbors, and he came up with a genius way to do it: ask them for a favor, and make it fun! He went door to door and asked each neighbor to come over and dance with him for a music video. He didn't mention if anyone refused, but plenty of them said yes.

(YouTube link)

While you're doing something  like this, you get to know their names, interests, and how friendly they are. Or at least how well they dance. When he throws a party, he'll know exactly who to invite. He's trying to start a trend with #NeighborDanceChallenge. We'll see how that goes. -via Tastefully Offensive

Meowsondeck posted a picture of a friend's cat that had been playing with a lizard. I believe the lizard won that game. SchnoodleDoodleDo had to write a poem about it. 

my name is cat

i play wif liz

i don tink he

knoze wat fun is -

you bite my lip

il getchu back

n eatchu for

a little schmack

don test my skills

i fas n punctual

how qwik youl be

a reptile disfunctual

You'll have to forgive her for the lack of capitalization and punctuation. Cats are not good at those things. Of course, she's referencing an earlier meme.

The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Tunes Into TV.

What kept TV alive through its birth and early decades of life? Beer and cigarette commercials.

Belly up to the Bar

In 1946 a 10-inch, black-and-white RCA television set cost $400. Today, that’s about $4500, enough to buy a few very large flat screen TVs and Blu-Ray players. Most post-World War II Americans wanted to own a TV, but few could afford it. Besides, there weren’t many TV shows to watch in 1946.

In those early days, networks found that sports were a cheap way to fill up air time. All they had to do was train a camera on a baseball game, boxing match, or roller derby bout, and people would watch. And bar owners realized that a TV over the bar would pay for itself (and then some) when patrons showed up to watch sports and buy beer. Neighborhood taverns all over the country posted signs promising, “We have TV!” In 1946 and 1947, half of all televisions sold in the United States were to bars.

The first major sporting event to air on TV took place on June 19, 1946: a heavyweight title bout between Joe Louis and Billy Conn (Louis knocked out Conn in the eighth round.) The boxing match set a TV viewing record: 140,000 people watched, most of them in bars. A year later, that record was shattered when a million people watched the Joe Louis/”Jersey Joe” Walcott title fight. When the 1947 World Series aired on TV, bars around the nation reported lines winding around the block. Television had found its first mass audience.

In the early 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Turkey when her husband was made England's ambassador to that country. She wrote extensive letters about the exotic city of Constantinople and the lives of the Turks. She was particularly fascinated by the way they controlled smallpox: by a process called variolation. Fifty years before Washington inoculated his troops with the method, Lady Montagu convinced doctors back in England to experiment with the process, on prisoners and orphans. To her credit, she also had her own children inoculated against smallpox.  

But the idea of purposely giving someone a disease was not an easy sell, especially since about 2 or 3 percent of people who were variolated still died of smallpox (either because the procedure didn’t work, or because they caught a different strain than the one they had been variolated with). In addition, variolated people could also spread the disease while they were infectious. Lady Montagu also faced criticism because the procedure was seen as “Oriental,” and because of her gender.

Read about Lady Montagu and her campaign to protect England against smallpox at Mental Floss.

Four-year-old Nathan Mezquida tells a story he made up about dinosaurs. His dad, Allen Mezquida, animated his drawings to tell it.

Nathan spends hours drawing every day, mostly dinosaurs. He also loves watching BBC documentaries about dinosaurs. Next thing I knew, we were working on this short film together. Nathan was very clear about the story he wanted to tell and how he wanted it to look. He said he wanted it to be very real, "never cartoony." I did my best to stay true to his vision.

(vimeo link)

-via Laughing Squid

As the Empire strikes back, so does your significant other. So... what if Han and Leia weren't selfless and mature individuals putting the greater good above their own feelings? What if they were just normal petty humans like most of us? You know, like that kid they produced? Then a little misunderstanding could turn into a snit for the ages, enshrined in both cinema and in carbonite. This comic is the latest from Pedro Arizpe at Port Sherry Comics.

Photolocation is when a creatures harnesses sunlight through specialized organs to see how to get around. Three fish have this power: deep-sea dragonfishes, lanternfishes, and flashlight fishes. However, they can only do it when conditions are right, and it just happens. Now scientists have identified a species that can not only emit light to see, but can control when to use it.

But as new research published today Royal Society Open Science shows, there’s at least one other fish endowed with the powers of photolocation, namely Tripterygion delaisi, otherwise known as triplefin. Unlike the three aforementioned fish, however, triplefins can actually control when their eyes light up, and they redirect incoming sunlight using a different method. The Tuebingen University scientists who conducted the study aren’t sure if the on-demand headlights help the triplefin to catch prey (though they think it’s highly likely), saying further research is needed. But they’re fairly convinced that triplefin are capable of switching their eyes on when the need arises, a never-before-seen feature dubbed “controlled iris radiance.”

Controlled Iris Radiance would make a good band name, for sure, but it could also be the basis of a horror film. In this case, the triplefin fish are tiny, only a couple of inches long, and their prey is even tinier. Read more about the brilliant adaptation of the triplefin and its headlights at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Nico K. Michiels/Tuebingen University)

People get together and drink socially and then start throwing things. Let's hope that in most circumstances, it's in a socially acceptable drinking game like beer pong, or in a pub sport like darts. In ancient Greece, among the wealthy classes, those games would involve throwing wine itself! That's fine, as long as you aren't in danger of running out of wine. It wouldn't go over too well in modern establishments where carpet cleaning can be a hassle. The game was called kottabos, and it involved flinging the dregs of wine from your own cup at objects to hit a target.   

Critias, the 5th century academic and writer, wrote about this “glorious invention” stemming from Sicily, “where we put up a target to shoot at with drops from our wine-cup whenever we drink it.” While a handful of modern academics question the game’s Sicilian origins, kottabos definitely spread throughout parts of Italy (as the Etruscans played it) and Greece, too. The kottabos craze even resulted in industrious people building special round rooms where it could be played, so all competitors could be equidistant from the target.

If you were good at kottabos, you could be a winner. If you were bad at it, you'd still provide entertainment to other partiers. There was both a musical and a quiet version of the game, and precise techniques for the act of flinging. Read all about kottabos at Atlas Obscura. Some images may possibly be NSFW.

This looks really odd. Flooding left a garden path underwater in Brazil, and the water is so clear you can see every detail.

(YouTube link)

A machine translation from the YouTube page says,

Faced with the repercussion of the video released on February 15, in social networks, in which appears a submerged track, we would like to pass some clarifications. The fact really happened at the Rio de Prata Ecological Recanto (Jardim-MS) on February 02 and was recorded during the monitoring carried out by the tour's Waldemilson Vera. When it rains a lot, the river of the Silver runs of slower form, causing its damming, thus increasing the water level of the river Olho D'Água. Despite the flood, on the day the video was recorded the waters of the river Olho D'Agua remained crystal clear due to their conserved ciliary forest and being inside a Private Reserve of Natural Heritage - RPPN, a type of Conservation Unit. This was a rare episode, and by the end of the day the river had returned to its normal level. We would like to inform you that on this date the tour operated normally until the 1st stretch, which, although it is also above normal, all the tourists left satisfied because they experienced a different and special day in the attraction!

-via reddit

Reese Witherspoon stars as a young woman who follows her ex-boyfriend to law school in the 2001 comedy/courtroom drama Legally Blonde. The twist is that, although Elle Woods comes off as a ditzy blonde, she is super intelligent and discovers she has a real talent for law. The plot is a standard comedy formula, but the movie was a big hit because it was well done and honestly funny. You might want to learn some of the things that went on behind the scenes of Legally Blonde.

9. Reese Witherspoon spent some time with actual sorority girls to get the part down right.

She didn’t want to play the role like a stereotypical, bubbly airhead sorority girl as has been seen on film so often. She spent time with a real sorority and therefore gained a better perspective on the role.

8. Reese goes through 40 different hairstyles in the movie.

That sounds like a lot of time just doing her hair. I’m sure they had hairstylists on call at all times to come up with a new style and apply it.

Check out more movie trivia about Legally Blonde at TVOM.

This graph made me laugh because Lent began last week and a friend said they were giving up watermelon. That doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice in February. Michelle Rial is a designer who is really into charts. Some of her charts include real-life objects that illustrate the subject of the chart. 

Rial began using everyday objects—which includes everything from food to office supplies to wine stains to floss—after a neck injury forced her to step away from her computer and away from the types of illustrations she had been doing previously. Using found objects cut down on some of the physical pain of illustrating for Rial and has resulted in some really cool, unique pieces of art with a great sense of humor.

See more of Rial's charts, with found objects or without, at Instagram.

Han Solo: lovable rogue, smuggler, Rebellion hero, scruffy-looking nerf-herder. He definitely shot first, no matter what Lucas' re-editing tried to convince us. Solo had plenty of talents, and first among those was the ability to deliver a line perfectly. He did it again and again in four different films so far, with another one coming in May (albeit without Harrison Ford). Put those lines together with cadence, make them rhyme somewhat, and you've got an enjoyable tribute remix from Eclectic Method. 

(YouTube link)

Eclectic Method (Jonny Wilson) has done quite a few of these Star Wars remixes, compiled here. -via Tastefully Offensive

For almost 40 years now, movies about the Vietnam War set the tone with songs from Creedence Clearwater Revival. It started with the movie Who’ll Stop the Rain in 1978, then became forever connected with Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979). You'll also hear various CCR songs in 1969 (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Air America (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), Tropic Thunder (2008), The Sapphires (2012), and The Post (2017), among others. The sound has become a shortcut for placing the viewer into Vietnam during the war.

Most Creedence songs contain no direct reference to the war (though “Run Through the Jungle” is frequently misinterpreted as such), but they do evoke a period when the war dominated American life. “That was when the band was popular,” says bassist Stu Cook. “Creedence was part of the soundtrack of the time.”

Creedence’s career was a model of speedy efficiency: seven albums in four years. The band recorded at an absurd pace, releasing three LPs in 1969 alone, and disbanded less than five years after adopting the Creedence name. But the brevity of the band’s career seems to have contributed to its longevity as a cultural avatar of one hyperspecific era—a particularly tumultuous period that’s constantly depicted onscreen. If you’re soundtracking a movie set between 1968 and 1971, why not go with the iconic band whose hits were entirely clustered between 1968 and 1971?

But there's another, even more practical reason you hear Creedence music in movies about the era, which you'll find out about in the story at Pitchfork.   -via Digg