You see babies in movies and TV shows, but they aren't really actors. They don't take acting classes or join a union. But they are considered employees, and the legal bodies that oversee movie productions have specific rules about infants on the set, or at least they do in some states. It's pretty complicated.
To get babies onto the silver screen, Hollywood came up with a lot of workarounds to existing child labor laws. Some are more ethical than others. Let's just say that if you give birth to premature triplets, there's a way of making them earn their keep. -via Tastefully Offensive
One thing you can say about Star Wars is that it brought us the coolest weapon ever in the laser sword they call a lightsaber. Both high-tech and medieval, it's perfect for hand to hand combat and for slicing your enemy in two. And they come in cool colors! Walt Hickey and Rachael Dottle researched all the lightsabers mentioned in both the Star Wars canon and the Expanded Universe and plotted them by how common the colors are. This chart made me want to see a turquoise lightsaber, but I was really curious about a black lightsaber. Read about the research that went into this chart at FiveThirtyEight. The links there are liable to send you down a Star Wars rabbit hole. -via Digg
This guy chose a peculiar block to remove in a large Jenga tower. If it were me, I'd go for the second or third layer from the top, but I am not a Jenga wizard. However, I think we've found one.
Or maybe he's just lucky. Anyway, you're not going to see another move like this for a long time. And everyone in the family is there to witness it, at least one of whom has a camera going. -via Digg
Chris Poole spends a lot of time recording videos of his cats Cole and Marmalade, but he also works to bring awareness to the plight of homeless cats and big cats, too. Watch some big cats opening their Christmas gifts, wrapped up in boxes, bags, tires, and dangling toys on a string! Like house cats, they enjoy the wrapping as much as they enjoy the food inside.
Lucky the cockatiel has learned to sing what he hears more than anything else: the Apple default ringtone. For me, this is the FaceTime alert. Lucky sings whenever he feels he's not getting enough attention, like when his human gets ready to leave the house. After all, it works for that device he carries!
That video went viral this week, and we have a followup video of Lucky seeing (or rather, hearing) his own singing. He is not at all impressed. What can he do to stop this madness?
Moko Jumbies are stilt walkers who dance and perform amazing feats on stilts that are a highlight of the Carnival season in Trinidad and Tobago, although they can be seen on other occasions. Jonadiah Gonzales, Adrian Young, and Stephanie Kanhai are moko jumbies who perform with their crew Touch D Sky, and also teach the art to a younger generation. Their skill, balance, and artistic sense are breathtaking as they perform atop 9-foot stilts.
If you've not seen the newest Star Wars film, the article linked here will reveal some (often humorous) surprises from The Last Jedi, but there are no plot spoilers. If you've already seen the movie, you'll want to learn the proper names of some new and weird alien creatures like the fish nuns, the galactic racehorses, and the crystal critters. There's also some background on the unfamiliar species that you won't get from the film. We already know about porgs, but they are included in the list, too. Read about five new alien creatures from a galaxy far, far away at The Daily Dot.
As someone who types in anagrams, I can assure you that it's an easy mistake to make. You write a letter to Santa, and a simple transposition of letters means it goes to Satan instead. The filmmakers at Anomaly London went with it and speculated on what Satan would do when he got one of those letters. This story is not for children.
Hope constructed her letter well, beginning with admiration for the recipient. That threw him off-kilter immediately. Even Satan can be vulnerable to the power of love. Enjoy this peculiar vision of hell, with an ending that will make you laugh and then feel guilty about it. -via Tastefully Offensive
Fans had high hopes for the live-action movie Josie and The Pussycats, based on the singing group in Archie Comics and a Hanna-Barbara animated TV series. When the film was released in 2001, it bombed miserably, with a box office take less than a third of its production budget. But the soundtrack album did pretty well. The disconnect between the film and the music was evident early in the production.
9. Rachel Leigh Cook’s singing voice was dubbed.
Kay Hanley did the singing parts for RLC since none of the girls really had that much musical talent, at least not enough to be passable.
8. The girls had to go to band camp to at least make it look like they knew what they were doing.
None of them were able to play with any proficiency after the camp but their music was dubbed by Kay Handley and her band, Letters to Cleo.
No, now that I think about it, I really don't want an explanation of the good kind of diarrhea. We often say the first thing that comes to mind before thinking about how silly our words can seem, especially to someone who is in distress already. Yeah, the pharmacist his speaking in relative terms, but honestly, how much specific information does he want about this case? This cringe-inducing comic is from Jim Benton. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
"Screw you. I'll make an album you'll wish you'd been on."
-Paul McCartney
It was 1973 and Paul McCartney had by now been a solo artist (ex-Beatle) for four full years. He had released four albums since the Fab Four's split, two solo and two with his band Wings. His four albums McCartney, Ram, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway had each sold well, even reaching high spots on the Billboard charts, but had mainly been considered disappointing, from a critical viewpoint, at least.
In a fairly general consensus, since leaving the Beatles, Paul had "lost it;" he didn't have that sharp edge he had when he was writing songs with John Lennon. Not to mention in the eyes of the three people whose opinions Paul considered most important.
About Paul's first solo album McCartney, George Harrison opined: Paul has "isolated" himself, so that "The only person he's got to tell him if a song is good or bad is (his wife) Linda." John called Ram, Paul's follow-up album, "Paul's granny music," and describing it as "awful." Even the mild-mannered Ringo chimed in on Ram: "I don't think there's a tune on it."
But the worst of all was John's vicious 1971 song "How Do You Sleep?" a merciless attack on his ex-writing partner, motivated by a few subtle jibes Paul had put in on a few of his songs. Describing Paul's post-Beatles output as "Muzak in my ears" and saying "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead," "A pretty face may last a year or two," and "The only thing you done was 'Yesterday,'" John proceeded to tear Paul apart, in a song.
In the mid-20th century, families had a lot of fun designing holiday greeting cards in which printers would cut and paste photographs, often combining them with hand-drawn illustrations. Just like today, their pets were considered part of the family, and often were the most photogenic member.
Check out a collection of holiday greeting cards featuring pets, gleaned from the extensive vintage photo collection of Robert E. Jackson. While dogs and cats are front and center, they aren't the only beloved family pets that made it to the Christmas cards. There's a monkey, a chicken, a couple of horses, and a lion!
Behold, an Imperial Star Destroyer made completely out of gingerbread and icing! This was made by the folks who have the Instagram account Star Wars Bakery, who I believe are in Sweden. The ship is not life-size, but it's really big for a Christmas baking project. It's on display at the EA Dice office in Stockholm, along with other gingerbread creations that cannot hold a candle to this piece of art. -via reddit
You've made a list of all the bad things about your job and decided to make the leap to some other company. Will things be better, or just more of the same? You can't know until you try, but you do know what's going on where you are now. Of coure, there's always the chance that the new job could be even worse. One thing we know from statistics is that hopping to a new job is more likely to bring you a better paycheck than asking for a raise where you are now. Maybe that will be enough to make you feel better about going from the frying pan into the fire. This comic is from CommitStrip.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
How the music industry’s TV-driven direct marketing strategies revived vintage hits, salvaged floundering careers, and brought us Zamfir’s epic pan flute.
When I grew up, I listened to a lot of John Denver. Well, not really full songs, so much as the 10-second snippets of tunes that played during his commercials on late-night cable TV. “You fill up my senses like a night in the forest,” Denver sang to the masses, even though he was really only singing to Annie, his first wife. But those choruses and hooks had a way of bleeding together into one super-song. Just listen to the commercial. Don’t watch a fortysomething Denver miming his tunes, and ignore the spokesperson’s voiceover. Just focus on this work as if it’s a single song. It’s a killer hook-bomb, perhaps the most powerful musical concoction outside of Max Martin’s studio. It probably sold millions. Let's ponder the phenomenon of selling music on TV.
“It’s tricky all right. Sometimes we’ll have $2 million spent before we sell one record. You’ve got to know when to sell what for how much where for how long.”
— Mickey Elfenbein, a senior vice president of K-Tel, the marketing company that popularized the music-by-mail approach to selling albums in the 1960s and 1970s, discussing the challenges of finding the right musical product to sell. The company, founded by Canadian farm boy Philip Kives in the early 1960s, wasn’t really built to sell music, but stumbled into the business in 1965 as the firm was looking to diversify. The company, known for its hard-pitch sales approach, figured out that people really loved songs on the radio from a variety of labels, and it compiled those songs onto a single record. It was a hugely effective model. (Kives, widely considered a business genius, died last year.)
The story of Heartland Music, the TV-commercial juggernaut that specifically aimed for older audiences
It makes sense that the greatest source of televised schmaltz ever created came from Lawrence Welk’s family tree—specifically, his son Larry.
