The 1992 crime film Juice starred Tupac Shakur and Omar Epps in a tug-of-war over their descent into a life of crime along with their other two friends. Bishop (Tupac) goes full-tilt while Q (Epps) wants to pull back. The violent film received favorable reviews that stand up over time. Juice was Tupac's first acting job- he auditioned for it on a last-minute whim. Epps was only 17 when he was cast. Let's learn some more about Juice.
10. Tupac Shakur would often walk off the set between filming.
Fellow cast member Jermaine Hopkins decided to pull a prank on him by telling Shakur that he’d been fired. When the prank was discovered Tupac got into a fight with Hopkins.
9. Shakur wanted people to call him Bishop even when off screen.
He was that intense that he wanted to stay in character as much as possible, which meant that he was also kind of edgy.
Once upon a time, the Super Bowl was all about football. Then it became all about the party ...and the food. Then as ad rates soared, the game became a showcase for advertisers to put their best foot forward, with new and clever ad campaigns that cost millions. Well, that's still true, but those of us who don't want to watch hours of football know that those premiere ads would be easier seen on the internet. And so it is. You can watch the best of them all in one place this morning. See Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman channel Busta Rhymes and Missy Elloit, watch Wendy's diss McDonalds, get a fleeting glimpse of the new Star Wars movie, and see what the Bud Knight does.
Kaplamino gives us look at the project he's been working for three months. It's a chain reaction marble run on a tilt table. There are magnets, levers, fidget spinners, catapults, and all kinds of clever segments all working together to get one blue marble to the end.
Kaplamino (previously at Neatorama) says it took about 500 failures to get this video, but he refined the design along the way. After the design was perfected, it only took about 30 tries to get everything to work in one perfect run. -via reddit
Calling names, now huh? I've got enough problems without appliances getting an attitude. There's a perfectly logical explanation. "Slut" mean "finished" in Danish and Swedish. In Norwegian, it would say "slutt." I don't know how you would say finished in Finnish. -via reddit
It's fascinating (at least to us) to find out how classic children's books were created. There aren't necessarily magical stories behind them; some were conceived in bars or business meetings, some were inspired by hated relatives, and some just evolved out of other books. Still, it's interesting trivia. Here are some examples.
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
In November 1955, Maurice Sendak, a young storybook artist, drew up a draft of a children's story he called Where the Wild Horses Are. The only problem: "I couldn't really draw horses," Sendak said, "and I didn't, for the longest time, know what to use for a substitute. I tried lots of animals in the title, but they just didn't sound right." In 1963, Sendak finally settled on Things, dumping the horses in favor of monsters that were based on the Brooklyn relatives he detested as a child. "I remember how inept they were at making small talk with children. There you'd be, totally helpless, while they cooed over you and pinched your cheeks. Or they'd lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like, 'You're so cute, I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would."
If, for some reason, you will be in the midst of a group of football fans this evening, you might feel a little out of place. You really don't know much about the game, but you don't want to look stupid, either. Help is here! Kayden Hines posted this handy chart to help you get through the evening. She says,
The trick with all of these is to leave the room immediately after you say something and don’t answer any questions
Xena is a Siberian husky, and her buddy Lana is a Malamute. They live together, and most of the time the dogs are best friends, but here they are having an argument. You can see them both trying to get a word in, raising their voices, reaching out, rebuffing, pressing their points, turning their backs to pout, cooling off, and all the behaviors you'd expect in a family dispute.
The two eventually made up, but you have to wonder who won, and what they were arguing about in the first place. You can see more of Xena, Lana, and their other housemate Kiko at Instagram. -via Tastefully Offensive
The sports of the Winter Olympics have us watching mainly to see who slips and falls on the snow and ice. Could we possibly make it more dangerous? Think of this: downhill ice skating. Then give it a winding course with jumps and have a bunch of skaters go all at once. That's Ice Cross Downhill, a sport invented by Red Bull, of course. The video here is a compilation of crashes.
This guy is getting the works: medical check, pressure suit, air supply, mission control team, escort vehicle. He's not an astronaut going into space, but he comes pretty close. This pilot flies a U2S spy plane, cruising at 70,000 feet, so high he can see the limits of our atmosphere.
The U2 is considered the most difficult plane to fly, as it it was designed for minimum weight. At altitude, the pilot must maintain a constant speed, since the difference between the stall speed and the "never exceed" speed is only 12mph. Outside that narrow window, the plane could fall apart. Landing requires contact with a chase car because the pilot cannot see the ground near him, and the slightest angle could drag those wide wings. -via Digg
Liz Climo is offering her cute comic characters in Valentine form for your home-printed holiday cards. She says,
Hey everyone! I love you ❤ so I made you some valentines! Click here to get your free, downloadable Liz Climo Valentines! Print out as many as you’d like, cut them out, give them to friends, keep them for yourself, make a little house out of them.. whatever floats your love boat! (Note - there are two files, front and back, and are meant to be double-sided. For best results, print on card stock - I did that at my local print shop, and they turned out great!) ❤ HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY
That's a neat way to have Valentines for your child's entire class that won't be identical to the discount store cards all the other kids will bring. Yeah, you could hand them out to your co-workers, or make a little house out of them. If you do that, please send us a picture.
Can you guess what year a photograph was taken just by looking at it? Then test yourself with Photo Roulette. The game will give you a picture, and you have ten guesses to get it right. Wrong guesses will give you a hint, but it's not as easy as you might think. If there are people in the photo, you can easily narrow down the era by what they are wearing, but landscapes and buildings are really hard to peg. Once you guess the right year (or run out of guesses), you'll get a "view photo" button that takes you to its Library of Congress page and all the information about the image. The picture above is listed as "between 1900 and 1910," but the game made me use several guesses to get to 1900. Try Photo Roulette here. It could be addicting. -via Metafilter
There are football fans, and there are Jeopardy! fans, and sometimes there is an overlap, but not on this day. Alex Trebek did not hesitate to scorn these nerds about their lack of gridiron savvy. I'm not surprised; I didn't know any of the answers, either. These contestants have spent years learning about authors, geography, and potent potables instead of the NFL.
It's true that American football is losing ground among audiences. I read somewhere that the reasons are mainly 1. that television overall is losing its audience, and 2. concussions and brain damage. -via Tastefully Offensive
If you were a kid in the 1970s, you probably remember the horrors of the health food craze, when carob was said to be a perfectly good substitute for chocolate. So what was wrong with chocolate? It was grown and harvested by mistreated farmers, enriching companies that did other nefarious stuff, and it was expensive. But the word going around was that it was unhealthy, especially the edible sweetened version, for having too much sugar and caffeine. So conscientious mothers made "healthy" cookies, candies, and desserts with carob instead, and we were all cheated of anything resembling the taste of chocolate.
In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a COINTELPRO mission to alienate the left’s next generation. “Delicious in brownies, hot drinks, cakes and ‘Confections without Objections,’ ” the 1968 vegan cookbook “Ten Talents” crowed, noting, too, that it was a proven bowel conditioner. “Give carob a try,” Maureen Goldsmith, the author of “The Organic Yenta,” encouraged, but even her endorsement came with a hedge; in the note to her recipe for carob pudding, she confessed that she still snuck out for actual chocolate from time to time—though less and less often! No one under the age of twelve could stand the stuff. Not the candy bars that encased a puck of barely sweetened peanut butter in a thin, waxy brown shell, nor the cookies—whole wheat, honey-sweetened—studded with carob chunks that refused to melt in the mouth, instead caking unpleasantly between the teeth. My mother—who, to her children’s lasting gratitude, never compromised her pie recipes, even during her peak whole-foods years—told me recently that she was never that fond of carob, either.
Years after the backlash died down, people started to realize that carob was okay if you used it as carob. It's nutritious, has its own taste, and doesn't melt on a long hike. But treating it as chocolate caused youngsters of that time to hate it forever. Read about the rise and fall of carob at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter
Some domestic dog breeds have floppy ears, although the wolves they descended from do not. Charles Darwin puzzled over this as far back as 1869. But what's even weirder is that some domestic pigs, rabbits, goats, and cows have floppy ears, too, even though their wild counterparts do not. Does the act of domesticating animals make them relax their ears? It can't be that simple. And it's not.
Among the gory medical tales from Thomas Morris, here is one about a "lady past middle age" who consulted a doctor in 1853 about pain and constipation. She had been suffering for twelve years already.
Her appearance being thin and haggard, and the statement of her symptoms involving much that was unusual, an examination of the rectum was deemed necessary. On passing the finger into the bowel, a hard uneven substance was encountered, having somewhat the shape of a vase, and being at least fifteen inches in circumference.
Patients have an uncanny habit of sticking the most unsuitable objects inside themselves, so the doctor no doubt suspected that this foreign body actually was a vase.
Its exterior did not in the least resemble that of indurated [hardened] faeces, feeling, indeed, as hard as stone, and being rough, like an oyster shell. Very fortunately its interior was not so hard as the outside, otherwise its removal might have been impracticable. By the use of a pair of long polypus forceps, a hole was gradually made into its centre, and working outwards from this by degrees, the mass was broken down, and extracted piecemeal by means of a scoop.
The patient recovered, and the pieces of the mass that was removed from the woman was sent to a meeting of the Pathological Society of London. The members went to work to figure out what it was, and how it managed to form inside the woman's bowel. Read how she made her own version of concrete at Thomas Morris' blog. -via Strange Company
