If you look closely, you'll see a dentist in this scene. Dr. J. Steven Abernathy commissioned an ad for a laser root canal treatment offered by JS Abernathy Dental, with six location in Arkansas and Florida.
The floss is strong with this one. Whether or not the laser technique takes the pain out of root canals, it's clear they have taken the pain out of watching a root canal ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II was a neurologist who was impressed with the idea of using brain surgery to alleviate the debilitating symptoms of mental illness. In 1936, he and neurosurgeon James Watts developed a surgical technique called the prefrontal lobotomy, in which neural connections were severed in the brain's prefrontal cortex. The surgery helped calm anxiety and reduce violence in some mental patients. Years later, they simplified the technique by going through the eye socket, using an ice pick to sever the nerves. Freeman went on a crusade to promote the new transorbital lobotomy, a surgery that could be done in ten minutes or so, and which he believed could be performed easily by non-surgeons like himself. He was so enthusiastic about the surgery that Watts left him.
Everything Freeman did was geared toward economy, speed, and publicity. In 1952 he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period for state hospitals of West Virginia; charging a mere $25 per operation, he worked without surgical mask or gloves. During marathon surgery sessions, he would often talk to journalists he’d invited in to promote his crusade, occasionally showboating with a “two-handed” technique, hammering picks into both eye sockets simultaneously. In 1951, one patient in an Iowa hospital died during the procedure when Freeman allowed himself to be distracted by a photo op for the press.
Despite the showboating, it eventually became evident that a lobotomy was not the cure-all that Freeman believed it to be. Read the story of the man who gave us lobotomies at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Wellcome Library, London)
Modern life has it's own horrors, I suppose. Still, there's nothing wrong with a good, scary yarn told around a fire. You've got your back to the dark, your best friends are close by, the night is full of wildlife sounds and dark shapes flying by… it's the perfect time for a bit of a thrill. No one expects the tales to be true, but fact-checking only ruins the fun on such an occasion. My guess is that the stories will grow better now that his batteries are running down. Pass the s'mores, please! This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
Add another species to the many who are entranced watching a video screen. The spider crawling across the phone screen is a game designed for cats, but the praying mantis sees a potential dinner.
Sorry, bud, that spider wouldn't be very filling, even if you could catch him. This little guy belongs to German insect breeder Adrian Kozakiewicz. -via Laughing Squid
Neatorama is proud to bring you a post by Andrew Egan, courtesy of Ernie Smith of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
How movie theaters nudged film-goers out of their seats with short clips designed around the hard sell.
As we’ve noted before, long-running traditions in movies are slowly dying as media becomes digitized. But one routine feature of any movie-going experience, the snipe, still continues. Most theater goers don’t immediately know what a snipe is but they certainly have taken cues from one. Why do we have an impulsive need to go to the lobby of our movie theaters? Let's find out.
“I will never be comin’ back to your ‘Alamo Drafthouse’ or whatever. I’d rather go to to a regular theater, where people are actually polite.”
— A quote from a somewhat famous clip created by Alamo Drafthouse, a Texas institution known for curating a better movie watching experience. The movie theater chain made headlines around the world when it used an angry customer’s recorded complaint in one of its snipes. Running before the trailers (or previews), the snipe is any material that runs before a feature and is typically promotional information for a specific theater. The infamous Drafthouse snipe sought to inform patrons not to use their phones during the movie, which has become a common use for snipes in recent years (see this example featuring the stars of Minions).
The evolution of Filmack Studios, a Chicago-based production company founded in 1919, is very much tied the evolution of the snipe. The studio took a bit of a left turn compared to other studios of the era; the company avoided traditional feature fare and concentrated on the burgeoning trailer market, while also producing newsreels, animated shorts, and other promotional materials. The animator chairs were particularly busy; Walt Disney is said to have done freelance work for the studio in the 1920s, according to the Chicago Tribune, while animator Dave Fleischer worked with the company in the 1950s, decades after he and his brother, Max, had attained fame with the Popeye cartoon.
Google is celebrating its 19th birthday today! The date of the search engine's actual founding, or launch, could be a number of different days, but for the last 11 years, they've celebrated on September 27. Today's Google Doodle is a wheel-of-fortune you can spin to open any of 19 games, quizzes, or generators. They include games that have appeared under Google Doodles before, like Pac-Man, Tic-Tac-Toe, and a Halloween black cat game that I'm still trying to land on, plus a new version of Snake. Go directly to the spinner here.
How often do you come across a comic that is strangely parallel your own life? And on my birthday, too! Earlier this year, I decided to get rid of my long blond hair and wear it short and natural, which is half white anyway. But first, I dyed it blue! Not with permanent blue dye, though, because that would be weird. Duh. I suppose that bit of fun is like drawing on the walls when you have already contracted the room to be remodeled. But what does "semi-permanently tattooed" mean? That is an intriguing idea, relevant to my interests, which I must research. This is the latest comic from Megacynics.
Last year, we looked at actresses who buffed up big time for a movie role. Now we have that list for men! Once you look at the pictures, you realize how much the standards have changed over the years. Twenty years ago, it was enough that an action hero had muscles. Now, he is expected to look like a bodybuilder. For example, Hugh Jackman looked really good in his first Wolverine movie, but that weasn't enough for the later films. Still, some of these actors went from dad bod to Schwarzenegger, which couldn't have been easy. Check out all ten at TVOM.
The highlight of the Kent State-Louisville game Saturday was when an unauthorized player took the field. A squirrel caught the attention of the broadcast team, and the crowd, too. When he took off running down the field, everyone stood up and cheered! Will he score a touchdown?
You'd run pretty fast, too, if a stadium full of giants was yelling at you. Louisville trounced Kent State 42-3, so the squirrel was truly the most exciting play of the afternoon. -via reddit
Scuba Diving magazine holds an annual contest for the underwater photography called the Through Your Lens photography competition. They received more than 2,500 entries, and have announced the winners. The image above won first place in the macrophotography division. Raoul Caprez took the picture of a cleaner fish near a sea turtle's eye off the coast of Ecuador. Look closely, and you'll think of Jabba the Hutt, although the actual subject is more Crush from Finding Nemo. Below is the second place winner in macrophotography, by Eduardo Acevedo. It's a ribbon eel, spotted in the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia. The color is magnificent!
You can see all the winners and read the stories behind them at the magazine's website. -via Digg
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
One of world history's most bizarre coincidences was the uncanny similarities between Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler. Both were born in 1889, just four days apart, Chaplin on April 16th, Hitler on the 20th. Both grew up in extreme poverty. Each man sported a similar toothbrush mustache. And, as we all know, both were to rise to unparalleled heights of world fame, one as a comedian and movie star, the other as a ruthless, tyrannical monster.
The genesis of Charlie Chaplin's 78th movie, a parody and satire of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, was a little booklet the Nazi party published in 1934 called The Jews Are Watching You. This anti-semitic propaganda booklet was filled with photographs of famous Jewish figures, each one accompanied by a hateful caption. Included in the book was a photo of Chaplin (an error, as Chaplin was not Jewish) along with the caption: "This little Jewish tumbler, as boring as he is monotonous..." Chaplin was shown the booklet by a friend who had procured a copy.
The film's other inspiration was a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (1936), which Chaplin viewed in New York with french filmmaker Rene Clair. After viewing the chilling movie, Clair was terrified and declared that it should never be shown. Chaplin, on the other hand, found the film hilarious and laughed uproariously throughout. (Chaplin was later to say that "If I'd ever known of Hitler's actual atrocities I could never have made the film.")
Chaplin prepared the script for The Great Dictator in 1937 and 1938. The film finally went before the cameras in September of 1939.
Film historians rightfully credit the Three Stooges with the first Hitler-Nazi cinematic parody. The Stooges short You Nazty Spy was released in January of 1940. But one must note that The Great Dictator was actually in production months before the Stooges' movie.
Originally, the film's title was simply The Dictator. But Paramount studios had the rights to an unrelated novel by that name written by Richard Harding Davis and demanded a $25,000 fee from Chaplin to use the title. To avoid this unnecessary expense, Chaplin, always a man tight with a dollar, simply added the extra adjective.
Star Trek itself is 50 years old, and the second TV series The Next Generation is 30. The show was supposed to capitalize on Star Trek mania years after the original series, but improve the stories with a real budget for special effects and decent acting. And it was a real improvement, up to a point. However, looking back from the present, we can tell that TNG had its own faults multiplied by the many years it ran.
In their latest Honest Trailer, Screen Junkies explores the many tropes, catch phrases, and repetitive scenes the show relied on as it entered yet another year of feeding our Star Trek addiction. There's plenty to work with here. Just like the original series, TNG was fun while it lasted, and is pretty funny to look back on now.
When the Birth Control League was founded in 1921, the organization focused on women, their health, and their right to birth control information. The birth rate declined, but that was probably due more to the effects of the Great Depression and World War II than the League's efforts. Then, when soldiers began to return home from the war, everything changed. Women relinquished their wartime jobs to the veterans, and the returning soldiers wanted to settle down to a normal civilian life, with a home, job, and a wife. The League changed its name to the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939, and then started focusing their efforts on men as well as women. And then less on women altogether.
In 1942, the Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and began focusing on family planning and spacing out births, rather than women’s rights.
By the end of the war, the organization had “largely abandoned the women-centered approach of the earlier birth control movement,” writes Peter Engelman, in A History of the Birth Control Movement in America. This new message “appealed more to men and the male-dominated public health departments, hospital, legislatures, and government agencies that were integral to the future success of the movement.”
To this end, Planned Parenthood issued booklets discussing family issues aimed at men. They were partly humorous, but emphasized the importance of family planning to one's continued happiness. Take a look inside those booklets at Atlas Obscura.
(Image from the New York Academy of Medicine Library)
Some Kind of Wonderful was a 1987 teen romance starring Eric Stolz, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Lea Thompson. Thirty years later, you probably recall the movie -if you saw it- but you most likely don't know what went into getting it produced. But we have a trivia list! So let's go back 30 years and see how the movie fits into the cinematic landscape of the 1980s.
9. [John] Hughes wrote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he was supposed to be writing Some Kind of Wonderful.
Hughes stayed up all night while presumably writing Some Kind of Wonderful, but by morning had written fifty pages to the Ferris Bueller script.
3. One of the directors and Lea Thompson eventually fell in love.
After the film wrapped up they got together and are still happily married to this day. His name is Howard Deutsch.
Read the rest of the trivia about Some Kind of Wonderful at TVOM.
Just the idea of another Terminator movie made fans slap their heads after the disaster of Terminator Genisys. But an as-yet-unnamed film set in the Terminator universe gives us hope because of the people who are connected to the project.
Here’s what we already know about the movie everyone will inevitably call Terminator 6 (though Cameron would prefer we didn’t) until the official title is released. We first learned that Cameron (who directed the 1984 original and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) would be returning to the franchise, and teaming upwith director Miller, back in January. Schwarzenegger, whose performance was the only thing we liked about 2015's Terminator Genisys, revealed his involvement in May. Last week, we learned that Linda Hamilton would be reprising her iconic role as Sarah Connor, now a “seasoned warrior,” per Cameron, in part six.
That's the great thing about a story that involves time travel: you can plop down a tale into the middle of the saga, or before it begins, or even after we thought it ended and still use the same characters. We've seen it happen, with mixed results. What really matters is whether the story is good and makes even a little sense. While we don't know much about the next movie yet, Cheryl Eddy at io9 explains some ways that the Terminator franchise can return to its innovative roots.
