If you are a horror movie fan and subscribe to one (or more) of the many streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or HBO, you are in for a great October. The hard part is deciding how to want to use your embarrassment of riches. You can select a new movie (or two) for every evening. You can spend a weekend (or two) smuggled up with your significant other binge-watching until you are a quivering mass of fear. Or you can plan a Halloween party with a film festival theme and invite all your friends! Check out the list of the 31 Best Streaming Horror Movies at Den of Geek.
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For most of us, the charm of cold weather can be enjoyed only because we know there will be an end to it next spring. But if you really hate fresh fruit and lawn mowing and swimming pools, if you prefer polar bears to penguins, there are places above the Arctic Circle you can go and live. And there are places even further north that you can't, unless you are assigned to duty there.
Half as Interesting gives us a short delightfully snarky tour of the world's most northern settlements and how you might want to join them. We also learn how to pronounce Thule. -via Laughing Squid
The 1996 movie Space Jam will forever mark the generation of people who were children when it was released. They love it; no one else does. The film featured a disparate cast of characters that included NBA stars, animated Looney Tunes characters, and Bill Murray. There are aliens from outer space, too. If this cavalcade of weirdness is part of your childhood, you'll want to learn some trivia about the movie.
9. Michael Jordan had his own basketball court.
Jordan was actually given his own court to shoot on between takes.
8. It’s the first animated film to be edited for content.
There’s no really bad language in Space Jam, I mean come on it’s a kid’s cartoon. But when Daffy Duck says “We’re getting screwed” that was deemed to be too much for TV and it was cut out.
Read the rest of the trivia list about Space Jam at TVOM.
It seems like just yesterday when we found out the Lunarbaboon family was going to welcome another child, and now she's old enough to have role models. I can attest to the importance of role models for little girls. Every time we met a woman pediatrician, she'd soon find another position in a larger city. So my youngest decided she wanted to grow up to be a waitress, because that's the job she saw women doing. Luckily, she discovered Jane Goodall during grade school. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.
The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy.
More than 50 years ago, a group of experienced skiers met a gruesome end on a snowy mountain range. And to this day, no one knows for sure what happened to them.
INTREPID EXPLORERS
In January 1959, 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov led a group of 10 college students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute on a two-week cross-country ski trek across the northern Ural mountains of Russia (then the Soviet Union). To reach their destination, the eight men and two women first had to ski over a mountain pass known as Kholat Syakhl. In the language of the Mansi people native to the area, the name means “Mountain of the Dead.” But as far as Dyatlov’s team was concerned, that was just folklore.
Just three days into the trip, one of the members, Yuri Yudin, felt sick, so he left the group and returned home. The remaining nine continued on… and no one ever saw them alive again.
Tyler Hudson looks at life through the eyes of his dog Mosby. Mosby's got life all figured out, and it's a pretty cool life.
To be honest, there's a lot we can learn from our pets. They take life as it comes, they don't stress, they're just happy. That's because they have one thing we don't have: someone who loves them who will always take care of them. And they trust in that. -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image credit: Flickr user Dennis Skley)
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.
The calendar may say Friday the 13th, but remember, there is good luck as well as bad luck waiting for us out there. More proof that this weird, weird world of ours works in mysterious ways…
HANGNAIL
Jan Madsen was fixing the roof of his home outside of Berlin when he tripped and started sliding toward the roof’s edge. As he scrambled to grab onto anything that might prevent his fall, Madsen’s nail gun accidentally went off and shot him through the knee. It was excruciatingly painful, but the nail pinned his leg to a wooden support beam and held him there until rescue workers arrived an hour later to free him.
BABY SAVES THE DAY
The John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has a centaur on exhibit, displayed as it was found in an archeological dig. J.W. Ocker had to go see it.
The exhibit was of a half-excavated horse-man skeleton in a death pose, like you’d see at a natural history museum for one of the smaller dinosaurs. Embedded around it were shards of ceramic pottery. On the other side of the display were more shards of pottery, each one bearing distinct shapes reminiscent of the hooved humans. A placard explained the history of centaurs, their culture, and how this skeleton was one of three that had been pulled from the muck near Volos, Greece, causing historians and biologists and LARPers to rethink the mythical status of the creature.
We don't know how many former and current UT students have even noticed the exhibit at the library, or how many assume it to be a scientific exhibit instead of an art installation. It's called The Centaur Excavations at Volos, and it was built by artist and biology professor Bill Willers in 1980 (with real bones). UT purchased it a few years later, and it's been on display in the library ever since. Read about the exhibit and see more pictures at OTIS.
(Image credit: J.W. Ocker)
National Geographic Explorer Jonathan Kolby was in the jungle in Honduras researching amphibians when he spotted a spider with a spectacular rear end. The spider (Micrathena sagittata) is red, except for an abdomen that resembles the head of the Pokémon character Pikachu. It's not a rare species, just tiny and hard to spot even if you're looking for them. But why the coloring that acts like a safety vest? A 2002 experiment on similarly colored spider in Australia hints that standing out actually attracts prey.
Using a black marker, the researchers "erased" the spiders' bright yellow color. The spiders whose colors had been thus muted were on average less successful at catching prey. Like arrow-shaped micrathenas, the Australian spiders are "sit-and-wait" predators that ensnare prey in large webs.
Maybe when insects see this, they don't think "Pikachu" as much as they think "flower." Read more about the PIkachu spider at National Geographic News.
(Image credit: Jonathan Kolby)
George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch Impressionist painter, a contemporary of Van Gogh, who he painted alongside in France for a while. Breitner began taking photographs to use as a reference for his paintings, but also used photography itself as an art medium.
Like his paintings, Breitner’s photos are concerned less with sharpness and fidelity than with motion and atmosphere.
The haphazard snaps never seem still, recording huddled and hurried pedestrians in the rain, the play of light on cobblestones, and the endless rush of working people from one task to another.
See a collection of Breitner's photographs of Amsterdam from the Dutch National Museum, taken between 1890 and 1910, at Mashable.
The latest video from AsapSCIENCE gives us some tips on how to learn something faster. The secret is to knwo what is meant by "learning." Sure, you can study in a hurry, but you want to understand the subject, or master the task, not just get through the book. You want to make that knowledge your own.
Lucky for us, there has been quite a bit of research on the subject of effective learning. Quite a few tips are about involving your whole body, not just your eyes and brain. Study and practice efficiently, and you'll find it comes faster than it would otherwise. -via Geeks Are Sexy
When his younger brother assassinated President Lincoln, Edwin Booth's career as an actor was over. He immediately retired at the height of his popularity, but more than 20 years later, he found another claim to fame when he founded The Players, a private club in New York City. The Players drew the elite of the art world: actors, authors, artists, and celebrities of other stripes. Along the way, the building where it all began has become an archive of relics from the many members who joined during the different eras of the club's long life. It started out as an ambitious project in the exclusively posh area of Grammercy Park in New York City when Booth bought a building in 1888.
The other, well heeled residents of Gramercy Park were less than thrilled at the prospect of a club for actors being on their doorsteps. For the acting profession in the 1800s was not quite the same as it is today; actors were often seen as louche second class citizens, often not well paid, and involved in a somewhat bawdy profession of dubious morals.
But this was one of Booth’s main aims : to raise the profile and respectability of the acting profession. For number 16, Gramercy Park South was not just to be his home, but a sparkling new, private club for actors set right in one of Manhattan’s most prestigious addresses.
The Players wasn’t created to be a seedy, drinking den for actors; from the beginning, Booth opened membership to all those in society who loved the arts. It was to be a lavish but comfortable clubhouse where actors might mingle with elite Victorian society. It was to be a certain club as Booth put it, “for the promotion of social intercourse between the representative members of the dramatic profession and the kindred spirits of literature, painting, sculpture and music, and the patrons of the arts.’ Founder members included such high calibre names as Mark Twain to General Sherman.
The club is still thriving in the same place it opened more than a hundred years ago. Take a look inside The Players, including Edwin Booth's private apartment, which is kept under lock and key, and exists exactly as it did when he died there in 1893, at Messy Messy Chic.
(Image credit: Beyond My Ken) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Players_Club.jpg
The folks from You Suck at Cooking prepare a delicious Italian meal for a date while cranking out one double entendre after another about said date. There's also advice about keeping your expectations low. Not about the food, but about the date.
While enjoying the video, I was a little bothered by the fact that he finished the pasta dish before he even started on the salad dressing. That's not the way you make a meal come together in real life. I understand that each recipe should be shown in its entirety so that the viewer understands, but the hot food should be finished at exactly time to put it on the table. You do the cold food while you are waiting for the hot food to cook. Maybe that's why he needed to keep his expectations low.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, when we heard the first radio reports of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, many people assumed it was a small private plane, as that had happened several times before. We were completely shocked to hear it was an airliner big enough to damage the building. But it wasn't the first time a large plane crashed into a New York skyscraper. On the morning of July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber was looking for Newark Airport, but was lost in the fog. It crashed into the Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world.
Eleven people in the skyscraper died. The three crew on the plane also lost their lives. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver, 19, survived despite falling 75 stories to the basement in her ‘office’.
Weegee, aka Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968) knew what to do: photograph the crowd looking up.
You'll find a gallery of Fellig's photographs and a roundup of quotes from witnesses to the disaster at Flashbak. -Thanks, Tim!
Since you are wondering, here's more on Betty Lou Oliver.
The movie It is officially the top grossing horror film of all time now, and is expected to the the number one film again this weekend. Going into October, it's becoming clear that the It clown character Pennywise will be the most popular Halloween costume of 2017. The look can be easy or difficult depending on how much work you want to put into it. The character will be recognizable with just white face, red hair, and a couple of well-placed red lines. A mouth full of sharp teeth is a bonus, and a red balloon is an easy way to complete the look. But there's so much more you can do with it! If you want to go with illusion makeup, like artist Jordan Hanz does here, you can dispense with fake teeth, but remember you won't be able to turn it off around small children. She has a Pennywise tutorial at YouTube.
Uproxx has a gallery of Pennywise cosplayers, costume tips, and links to tutorials that will help you put your best It forward for Halloween.
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