LOLcats are much older than the internet, and even older than current copyrights. The children's book Kittens and Cats: A First Reader (1911) was written by Eulalie Osgood Grover. The simple captions tell the story of a cat throwing a party for all her friends.
The images are attributed to the Rotograph Company, which lead us to believe they were the work of a young Harry Whittier Frees before he began selling cat pictures under his own name. His talent for posing cats in clothing would develop far beyond what is contained in the 1911 primer.
Two parents were carrying laundry into a laundromat in Galveston, Texas, when a carjacker jumped in their vehicle and took off -with their baby in the back seat! The thief eventually realized the baby was in the car and left her and the car seat in a parking lot about ten blocks away. Stephen Ward found the 4-month-old and called police. The baby has been reunited with her parents, but the car and carjacker have not been found. Ward was reluctant to take full credit for finding the child.
Ward said he credits his love for chicken and biscuits for leading him to the baby.
"The real hero hit here is Church's Chicken because if it wasn't for those honey biscuits I probably wouldn't have even gone down that way," he said. "I probably would've gone home."
As weird as the characters (and settings, in the above case) of the Star Wars universe are, they all have an origin of sorts. The creators have been asked time and time again where they got their ideas, and the answers range from goofy (literally) to sublime. A few come from previous movies, which makes sense for movie makers, like the cantina in the wretched hive of scum and villainy. Others were inspired by real people, although we'd like to know what those people thought about it.
Debt in collections includes past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged-off on their books as well as unpaid bills reported to the credit bureaus that the creditor is attempting to collect. For example, credit card accounts enter collections status once they are 180 days past due.
At the site, you can click on counties to get a breakdown of the percentage of people in collections, how much they owe, and what percentage owes medical debt. My county shows 52% of households have debt in collections, and 33% have medical debt in collections. If only we could all be like Minnesota. -via Digg
Wait, what? It was enough of a shock to realize that I am talking to the robot instead of the guy, but the underlying implication of that last line is a bit ominous. Am I one of those friends he finds boring? Does that explain the contrast in happiness lately? And here I was, getting a bit jealous because I don't have my own personal assistant robot. Now I just want to go sulk. This is the latest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
How many Christmas horror movies can you name? There's a lot more than that. Would you believe that Film School Rejects found and critiqued 79 Christmas horror films? Yeah, there are quite a few that you've never heard of, but you might want to look them up if you're into that sort of thing. Of course, in an age when people are vehemently arguing over what is or is not a Christmas movie, there was the initial problem of defining a Christmas horror movie.
We decided on the following criteria. A Christmas horror movie should be feature-length, set on or around Christmas day, and feature some combination of terror, villains, and/or the threat of death. We also put no limit on tone so horror comedies count every bit as much as torture porn. A handful of titles that fit these guidelines still managed to slip by us due to a lack of availability, but those stragglers aside this remains a holiday miracle and the most comprehensive ranked list of Christmas horror movies ever assembled.
Sequels help a lot. When you have Bikini Bloodbath and its sequel Bikini Bloodbath Car Wash, the next step is to produce Bikini Bloodbath Christmas, which is a real movie. It's a long way from that one to the upper-tier films like Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (shown above). Check out the full list at Film School Rejects. -via Metafilter
Psychology professor Kohske Takahashi of Chukyo University in Japan presents a new optical illusion called the Curvature Blindness Illusion. The first thing you should know is that all the lines across the page are exactly the same shape. You can see that in the corners with the light and dark contrasting backgrounds. But in the gray background, some seem to be curvier, while others seem to be more angular. That's because of how the colors (actually shades of gray) of the lines are segmented. When the colors break at the top and bottom of the curve (in the line perceived as a zig zag) we see a corner where they meet. The lines with colors that continue over the upper and lower curve makes us perceive a gentler curve when the background contrast is low.
This illusion has two implications. First, the percepts of a gentle curve (wavy line) are impaired by discontinuity of contrast polarity at the turning point, while the percepts of an obtuse corner are not; this implies that the mechanisms of the gentle curve and obtuse corner detection are separable in terms of contrast polarity. Second, the illusory percepts of an obtuse corner (zigzag line) appears and replaces the gentle curve, which indicates the imbalanced competition between these two percepts.
Jay Swingler and Romell Henry of Fordhouses, Wolverhampton, UK, do dangerous stunts for their YouTube channel TGFbro. When you continue to amp things up for the audience, sooner or later something will go wrong.
But for their latest video, Swingler took the experimentation to a whole new level of idiocy when he put his head in a microwave and filled the appliance with Polyfilla, a spackling paste that’s supposed to fill holes in walls. To be “safe” (nothing about this is safe) Swingler included a flimsy breathing tube. But that tube became blocked as the material hardened and expanded, and Swingler began to panic, which no doubt made him require more oxygen. His friends attempted to dismantle the microwave and chip away around his head using a knife (!?), but thankfully called emergency services before Swingler suffocated to death.
Read the full account of the disaster at Gizmodo. The article contains the YouTube video, which is age-restricted and has been demonetized. That means that YouTube won't allow advertising on the video because it violates community standards.
If Star Wars were an opera, or even a Broadway musical, the producers could do much worse than to hire Whitney Avalon to write the tunes. In this song, she narrates what is going through her head as she struggles to harness the Force to pull off a Jedi mind trick in The Force Awakens, even though the title is a reference to The Last Jedi, out in one week.
Yeah, it's a hokey idea, but it's also clever and well-done. You might recall Whitney Avalon from the Princess Rap Battles. Her wish is for Daisy Ridley to see this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy
What's the best way to disable an AT-AT? It's elementary! Tie a rope around the machine's feet until it trips, while riding your unicycle and playing a Star Wars tune on your flaming bagpipes. We learned that secret in The Empire Strikes Back. Since we know from the trailers that there are AT-ATs in the new movie The Last Jedi, the Unipiper donned a rebel pilot uniform to demonstrate the tactic for the new generation of Star Wars characters.
Stavanger Foto is a photography store in Norway. They do funny Christmas cards every year. This year, the staff recreated the painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp that Rembrandt painted when he was only 26 years old. The photo store guys didn't have a corpse, so they made do with Christmas packages.
What's the best way to promote a film? Show a small portion of it to movie fans! And where are those movie fans? In the theaters! That's how trailers got started. Now you see them on TV and online, too, and probably on one of those gas pumps with screens. But it took a long time for the movie trailer to become the art form that it is now.
Granger Willson of Vulture takes us on a historical ride through how movie trailers have changed from the beginning of theater runs 100 year ago to today. -via Laughing Squid
Once again, Beutler Ink has produced a year-end poster paying tribute to the newsmakers, celebrities, trends, and memes of the closing year, titled Here's to 2017. This year, that involves a lot of details. I'm happy that Wonder Woman is front and center. Among the politicians and protesters, you'll see plenty of pop stars, athletes, and fictional characters -and a crowded RIP section. That's a lot of people, which makes it hard to see at this size. Enjoy a much larger -and enlargeable- version at Beutler Ink, where you'll a link to purchase the poster if you choose. -via Nag on the Lake
Being a cat lady is not something you can turn on and off like a light. It's a lifestyle. My older daughter used to carry a camera everywhere. When she visited friends, she didn't take pictures of the friends, or what activities they enjoyed; she brought home pictures of their cats so she could remember them, even though we had plenty of cats at home. This comic from Yasmine Surovec at Cat vs Human reminds us that if the things you want to do are the things you already do, life is good.
Anthony Daniels is 71 years old, and still playing the droid C-3PO in the Star Wars saga. C-3PO is one of the few elements of the series that never changes, since he is mechanical and is as good as new with replacement parts (even if his new arm is red). And while his creator Anakin can grow up, rule the galaxy, die, and then be called "Grandfather," C-3PO is still there to be all fussy about protocol and translate what R2D2 says.
In 1976 Daniels was appearing in a London stage production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and was determined not to take a job on a trivial sci-fi film. Then he saw Ralph McQuarrie’s concept sketch for C-3PO. He saw something in that face. The first three Star Wars films (1977, 1980, 1983), all narrative drive and swashbuckle, still hold up. Fast-paced and funny, they repackaged an archetypal quest for revenge and reconciliation as an outer space western. Good versus evil, dark against light. Simple. R2-D2 and C-3PO are the mismatched comic relief, an intergalactic Odd Couple as Greek chorus: Threepio the neatnik Felix to R2’s slovenly Oscar, reminding the audience what’s at stake and how the principals really feel.
“You need a balance of elements in all these films. It’s a fairy story, it’s a romp. So there’s serious bits, the dangerous bits, whatever, and then occasionally the refreshment of a character who doesn’t really fit into the environment,” Daniels says. “That was another brilliance of George [Lucas], that you come back to the protocol and etiquette thing, these are the last skills ever to be required in a horrible desert surrounded by ghastly people.”
