When we think of expensive movie flops, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate come to mind. However, a lot of movies have been made since those two earned headlines for losing money. Production budgets are bigger and promotional budgets are astronomical in the 21st century, and neither historic flop made the list of the ten biggest financial turkeys. Coming in at #7 is The Lone Ranger.
Production budget: $225 million | Loss: $98 million
The 2013 western from Disney reunited the dream team of Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp after numerous, highly profitable Pirates of the Caribbean instalments.
This should be box-office gold, right?
Not quite. The production ran into trouble, costs escalated and the whole thing was nearly shut down before it was completed. When it finally hit cinema screens, The Lone Ranger was slammed by critics and shunned by audiences.
The film wasn't a total wash-out though – it received two Oscar nominations (for 'Visual Effects' and 'Makeup and Hairstyling').
While the list is based on dollar amounts, the top ten only changed by one movie when the numbers were adjusted for inflation. Check out the list of the ten biggest financial flops at Digital Spy. You might be embarrassed to see one or two of your favorite films in there. -via The Mary Sue
This is pretty neat. Amanda Moor shows us how to make a pretty gift box out of a sheet of paper. You'll need paper, a round dish, a straight edge, a pencil, a protractor, and scissors. And it will help to have some ribbon to tie it shut with.
Since I have forty years' worth of nice boxes of all sizes saved from previous gift-giving occasions, there is zero chance that I will ever need to do this. Still, I found the process interesting and clever. This would be a neat project to do with kids. -via Boing Boing
The polio epidemic of the 1950s devastated Americans. Thousands died, many more were paralyzed, and everyone was terrified until a vaccine became available in 1955. Those stricken by polio also had to deal with possibility of post polio syndrome, in which paralysis develops, resurges, or worsens years later. The paralysis can remove a patient's ability to breathe, which is why many sufferers lived in iron lungs, often temporarily but sometimes for the rest of their lives. Today, very few people who depend on iron lungs are left. Jennings Brown of Gizmodo found three of them, possibly the last three people in iron lungs. Martha Lillard uses a portable positive pressure device to breathe during the day, but sleeps in an iron lung because the negative pressure it provides is less damaging to her lungs. She let Brown try it out.
Being in an iron lung was the most relief and discomfort I have ever felt at the same time. I slowly got used to the mechanical rhythm and began feeling a little relaxed. I tried closing my mouth, and air still rushed in through my lips. I felt like a vacuum cleaner.
As I climbed out, Lillard warned me to be careful and not break any of the switches or pulleys. If I damaged anything, and she wasn’t able to get someone to repair it within a few hours, she might not have made it through the night. A few weeks earlier, the collar-opener broke and she was trapped inside. Fortunately, her housekeeper was there to help her force it open, and a friend who does custom metal fabrication for motorcycles, planes, and other machines, Tony Baustert, came a few hours later to repair it.
Paul Alexander has become increasingly paralyzed from the polio he contracted over 60 years ago, and spends almost all his time inside his iron lung. He recently got a newly refurbished model.
Alexander had been in the refurbished model for about a couple months when I first met with him in September. To him, it was like a new skin. “Once you live in an iron lung forever, it seems like, it becomes such a part of your mentality. Like if somebody touches the iron lung—touches it—I can feel that. I can feel the vibration go through the iron lung,” he said. “If there’s a slight bit of a vibration that occurs as the result of the mechanics—worn out the fan belt or it needs grease or anything like that—it tends to change the breath slightly. Yep, the iron lung’s a part of me, I’m afraid.”
Mona Randolph also relies on an iron lung. What all three have in common, besides polio, is the difficulty of getting parts and service for their iron lungs, which few modern technicians are familiar with. The last such devices were built 50 years ago, but their operation means the difference between life and death for those who depend on them. Read about the lives and struggles of the last remaining iron lung users at Gizmodo. -via TYWKIWDBI
Batman sings, if you can call that hoarse growl singing, in a song parody set to the tune of "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. The song tells an almost-coherent story of the Caped Crusader fighting against crime and villainy in the streets of Gotham City. As usual.
Batman is played by a variety of actors: Ben Affleck, Christian Bale, Adam West, Michael Keaton, and a few others. The villains? There's a whole fleet of them making appearances in this video from How It Should Have Ended.
Kathy Hollenkamp is a kindergarten teacher in Illinois. Every year, the class discusses Thanksgiving, and then the children make a recipe book where they explain how to make their families' traditional dishes. The books are then given to their parents, who no doubt get a kick out of them as much as you will. Click the pictures in this Tweet to bring up more pages from the 2017 cookbook. Do not skip Jayden's Carrots.
As requested: 2017 Kindergarten Thanksgiving Cookbook
Dealing with an airline trip for the holidays (and back) can be a pain, but if you were to travel to some superlative airports, you'd have a story to tell your relatives when you get there. Forinstance, imagine having to time flights to low tide, as they do at Barra, UK.
At the Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the tide determines the landing time. It’s the only airport in the world where the planes land on the beach. When high tide isn’t hiding the runway beneath a layer of water, passengers can depart the aircraft and stretch their legs on the golden-white ground, often to the applause of curious spectators who’ve stopped to watch takeoffs and landings.
"What do you mean, I can't book an earlier flight because the tide will be in?" There's also an airport with a runway made of ice, one lined with houses where people store their own planes, and one below sea level, all in a list at Atlas Obscura.
The delicious cake called baumkuchen was once a staple of German weddings and Christmas celebrations. It comes in a peculiar shape, likened to a cross-cut slice of a tree trunk. A disc of baumkuchen reveals concentric circles, like the rings that show a tree's age. How do they do that?
Achieving this is a feat of unlikely cake engineering. The original method involves a spit turning over a fire. Thick batter is scooped, in heaping spoonfuls, directly onto the spit and spread across its length. As the batter drips and rotates, it creates craggy ridges, like the bark of a tree. When the batter turns golden brown, another scoop of batter is heaped on top, and the spinning continues. After 15 to 20 repetitions, the accumulating layers have formed rings that are imperfectly round and alternate between pale yellow and a toasty brown. The cake gets a glaze of warm apricot jam to seal in the moisture and prevent it from drying out, and then sometimes a crackly shell of chocolate or vanilla icing.
You can see a picture of that process here. Making baumkuchen over a fire for commercial use doesn't work well, as it is slow and produces inconsistent results. Specially-built ovens were used, but bakeries that make the cake are disappearing, because new ovens cost $100,000 and used ovens are hard to find. Read about the history and future of baumkuchen at Taste. -via Digg
The 1984 film The Natural starred Robert Redford as a talented baseball player working against a corrupt team owner. That's a major simplification of the complicated plot that resulted in a totally satisfying sports film. And Redford looked really good in it. But the story that inspired the book and then the film was insane.
1. The movie was inspired by a real story
In 1949 a woman who was stalking one of the baseball players in Chicago, actually shot a player with a gun. This inspired Bernard Malamud to write a book about it in 1952. The book and the story served as the inspirations behind the 1984 film “The Natural.”
2. The woman who committed the crime disappeared
For many years, the woman who committed the crime of shooting the ball player seemed to disappear off the radar. The incident seemed to be forgotten until somebody noticed that her obituary appeared in a Chicago Tribune Newspaper. Ruth Ann Steinhagen passed away at the age of 83.
But no, in this video from Sakon Nakhon, Thailand, the pack of dogs recognizes the man underneath. It's their owner, and they are giving him their customary enthusiastic greeting as he returns home from work. It's very possible, though, that they appreciate his attempts at fitting in with them. -via Tastefully Offensive
Jenn, who has more than 8k followers on Twitter, asked people to "Please show me pictures of weird stuff in your parents house." She followed up with "I want to see the seashells in the bathrooms people". To be honest, seashells in the bathroom is not all that odd for older folks, just an outdated decor style. But soon, submissions got really weird, like Karen Cravens Karen's pictures of a guest bathroom above. Oh, we saw a lot of seashells, and quite a few bizarre collections on display. Like this set of animal traps from The Blogess.
OK Go has a new song. For this group, the song itself is pretty much an extraneous detail, just a reason to put together an innovative video that will make people say, "How'd they do that?" The gimmick of this one is printers, which they use for intricately-programmed background choreography. The video comes with a warning for those susceptible to seizures due to flashing lights, and a recommendation to watch it in high definition.
Watch this, and think about all the trouble you've have with printers in your life. It's a miracle the paper feeds worked as well as they did. Oh, yeah, the name of the song is "Obsession." It's a pretty good song, but like their other songs, overwhelmed by the visuals. -via reddit
In this holiday cartoon from Simon Tofield, the cat and the kitten double-team Simon when he's merely trying to enjoy his Thanksgiving meal. They've adapted the methods of a gang of common street thieves: distract the target and swipe the goods.
You might think it sad that he's eating alone with just his cats, but this one is not based on a real Thanksgiving meal- Tofield is British, after all. That doesn't mean he can't make a treat for his American fans. But an aromatic savory bird is attractive to cats all over the world. I hope he cooked enough for all of them!
Crew members Danielle and Graeme of the Queensland Ambulance Service in Australia reported a detour they took on the way to deliver a patient to hospice care. From the Facebook post:
A crew were transporting a patient to the palliative care unit of the local Hospital and the patient expressed that she just wished she could be at the beach again.Above and beyond,the crew took a small diversion to the awesome beach at Hervey Bay to give the patient this opportunity – tears were shed and the patient felt very happy. Sometimes it is not the drugs/training/skills – sometimes all you need is empathy to make a difference!
It's not the first time the ambulance service has granted a last wish. The top-rated comment underneath from Darren Booker is also worth sharing.
Years ago a fellow crew member and I had a situation where the patient was taking her last ride home. She asked to see the beach one last time. After going tthe beach and opening the rear door, we asked her if would like an ice cream, to which she replied yes with a giggle of delight. A short time later the hardly licked ice cream fell to the floor. The patient had passed away. As she lay there still smiling at the last view that she ever saw, we had a minutes silence for her. Although the memory is an old one, it is still vivid. Great work by this crew, well done guys and girls.
The Thanksgiving episode of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 featured Jim Henson and his Muppets through the whole show. This clip has Cavett's monologue, some ads from 1971, a musical number, and an interview with Henson at nine minutes in.
