The buddy cop movie is a standard in cinema these days. The contrast between two very different police partners is a template for tension, comedy, or a complementary system that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. And the more diverse the two are, the better, because you know they'll end up either bonded for life by their adventures, or else they'll kill each other. Which police duo is your favorite? I was always partial to Cagney and Lacey, but that's TV. See who made the list of great cinematic police partners (with video evidence) at TVOM.
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One thing we know about Simon's Cat is that he doesn't like to share. That's been apparent ever since the kitten showed up. This time, it's the scratching post that's causing a problem between the two.
Another thing we know: when Simon Tofield is around, the cat always comes out ahead. When Simon isn't around, the kitten always gets the better of the cat.
With a new Star Wars film comes new characters, and most importantly, new toys for Christmas. Fans fell in love with BB-8 from The Force Awakens, and Disney hopes that The Last Jedi will make BB-9E a star as well. The new gray and black droid, described as "BB-8's evil twin," rolls around on a ball like BB-8, but has a flat head and a glowing red eye. The app-enabled toy is made by Sphero, along with BB-8 and R2D2.
"We saw some imagery and [learned] how it sounds and behaves in the movie," said Sphero CEO Paul Berberian.
The Boulder-based startup -- whose partnership with Disney began through a tech mentoring program -- created a robotic toy version of BB-8 in 2015, which sold more than million units.
Like the BB-8 toy, BB-9E is also a 4.4-inch app-controlled robot. It has the same ball-shaped body that moves without wheels. It comes with a magnetically-attached head. It features blue and red lights that illuminate when the head is attached to the body.
BB-9E retails for $149.99. It's the most-talked about new Star Wars toy debuting today for Force Friday, but there are a lot more products hitting the market today. If you want to do your Star Wars Christmas shopping early, check out the hot new Star Wars toys, and a list of all kinds of Star Wars merchandise unveiled for Force Friday.
For those who have grown up with the Harry Potter books and movies, today is the day you start to understand what it is to feel old. In the epilogue of the final book/movie of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry and his wife Ginny are shown sending their son Albus off to Hogwarts, 19 years after the story ended (and 26 years after Harry and his friends began their education at Hogwarts). Ron and Hermione are also sending their daughter Rose to wizarding school. In the Potterverse, that date is September 1, 2017. JK Rowling sent a Tweet to remind fans of the date.
Today's the day Albus Severus Potter boards the Hogwarts Express at King's Cross for the first time #19yearslater
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 1, 2017
You can join in with other Potter fans to mark the occasion at Twitter.
today harry, ron and hermione's story together came to an end and their children began theirs...all was well #19YearsLater pic.twitter.com/Y5vL9IDfMs
— edgelord allan poe (@haarleyquin) September 1, 2017
-via Buzzfeed
Talking with family members about the floods in Houston, the phrase came up: "Houston, we have a problem." I started to wonder what was going on at the Johnson Space Center. How did they operate during the hurricane? They can't shut down, because they literally run the ISS from there. Flight controllers send somewhere around 50,000 commends to the space station every month, many of them to keep it on course. They could have bugged out to an alternate location, but that location -Round Rock, Texas- was just as liable to be affected by Hurricane Harvey. So they stayed.
But the team also knew they had to prepare. “Where you don’t want to find yourself is just a single flight controller in any position who can’t leave because there’s no one to replace them,” says Scoville. So the flight controllers were told to come into work early and to make sure they had a way to both enter and leave the center safely. Many showed up Friday night with “big, monstrous climbing backpacks,” says Scoville. Meanwhile, cots were set up in a nearby room and in a building that serves as an astronaut quarantine facility, where astronauts quarantine before launch to avoid getting sick in space. “We have training rooms that are a mere copy of the flight control room,” says Scoville. “They have the same consoles and same screens, but we turned off the lights and put some cots in there. It was interesting to see these rooms usually lit up with all these screens blacked out for people to sleep.”
Read an account of running NASA's flight operations during a hurricane at The Verge.
The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, has a half million toys from all eras. Games, dolls, building kits, arcade machines, sports equipment, and more, including fads that soared and flamed out fast. In this video, Great Big Story gives us an overview of what the museum has to offer. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Tunes Into TV.
TV’s Star Trek franchise was a four-decade-long roller-coaster ride, beginning with two different shows helmed by two very different men- Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman. Here’s their behind-the-scenes story.
Macho Man
In his youth, Gene Roddenberry was a lot like Captain Kirk- always looking for adventure. As a teenager, he wanted to be a cop and even volunteered for the FBI. In World War II, he became a decorated bomber pilot who completed 89 missions in the Pacific. After the war, Captain Roddenberry was piloting a Pan Am passenger jet over the Syrian desert when the plane lost an engine and crashed. He fought off looting nomads to keep his passengers safe until help arrived.
One day in the mid-1950s, Roddenberry, now a motorcycle cop, walked into a Hollywood restaurant and interrupted a group of TV producers at a lunch meeting. He dropped one of his scripts on the table and said, “You’ll want to read this.” It was an unconventional, swaggering way to get his foot in the door… and it worked.
Wagon Trek
By 1964, Roddenberry was a successful TV writer, having written dozens of scripts for successful TV Westerns (Have Gun – Will Travel) and police dramas (Highway Patrol). But his goal was to get a show he created on the air, and he already had the first piece of the puzzle- a great idea. From his official pitch:
Star Trek is a new kind of television science fiction series. The format will be “Wagon Train to the Stars”- built around characters who travel to other worlds and meet the jeopardy and adventure which become our stories.
Studio after studio said no. “Too risky,” one executive said, “too smart. And way too expensive to produce every week.” In the 1960s, TV sci-fi was more fantasy than science-fiction; there was little attempt at realism- with either the science or the storylines. Combining a space adventure with serious drama was unheard of. But Roddenberry knew there was an audience for it.
Millennials will take over the world someday, sooner than you think. So what are we doing to help them find gainful employment, pay for their educations, buy homes, and raise families? Nothing. But someone is paying very close attention to those millions of young adults -ad agencies. That what the generation is good for: marketing!
The point of advertising is to make all those millions of Millennials feel special or unique if they buy your product. Too bad they are not all the same! And even worse, they don't have unlimited funds to buy your products, whatever they are. They are too busy working their 30-hour a week service jobs and trying to pay off their student loans. -Thanks, gwdMaine!
The 105-carat Koh-i-Noor Diamond is part of the British Crown Jewels, and is on display at the Tower of London. The sign next to it says the gem was a gift from India to Britain, which doesn't tell the entire story. The nominal ruler of India was forced to give the diamond to his British overlords. But the history of the diamond goes back much further. It may be much older than the earliest records, which tell how the Indian diamond was embedded into the Peacock Throne built for Mughal ruler Shah Jahan in 1628. The Persians later took it when they invaded India. It changed hands several times, often violently, before it returned to India. There, it changed hands by violence again. When the British Empire took possession of India, the Koh-i-Noor Diamond was sent to Queen Victoria, and it's been in the British royal family ever since. But who does it really belong to?
“Post-colonial collections is a big topic everywhere,” says Jane Milosch, the director of Smithsonian’s Provenance Research Initiative. “There can be a reassessment for certain objects of, ‘we may have legal ownership, but does it make sense to keep this material?’” She cites a 2014 case in which the British Museum returned two bronze statues from Benin to Nigeria (they were taken during an attack in 1897 after British officers were killed during a trade mission).
But returning pillaged art and treasure from World War II, as complicated as that can be, is still far less complex than unraveling colonial history. “You’re dealing with countries that existed when the object was acquired, but they may not exist now—and countries who we had trade agreements with that may have different export laws now,” Milosch says. “Provenance is very complex and people aren’t used to processing a chain of ownership. By the time you hit the second or third owner over time, the information can get more difficult to research. This is why I say it’s important that these things not be yanked out of museums, because at least people have access and can study them until we know for sure if they were looted.”
So while art stolen during World War II and Egyptian tomb treasures are returned to their rightful owners, the Koh-i-Noor Diamond has a history of ownership changing hands by looting going back hundreds of years. Read the sordid history of the diamond and the controversy surrounding its ownership at Smithsonian.
We once assumed that Neanderthals were just dumb cavemen because they looked so different from modern humans. But as scientists uncover more and more information about them, we learn that while they were primitive, they were no dummies. They were using tar to glue objects together 200,000 years ago, which enabled them to design and manufacture tools. That was way before the invention of ceramics, much less the forging of metal pots. So how did they manage to cook the necessary ingredients to make tar? A group of researchers from Leiden University tried to recreate the possible scenario for the Neanderthal's discovery of tar, using the materials (birch bark, pine) and methods (fire) thought to be available to them at the time. By repeating the process and varying the conditions, they were able to reproduce the kind of tar Neanderthals used.
“What this paper reinforces is that all of the humans that were around 50,000 to 150,000 years ago roughly, were culturally similar and equally capable of these levels of imagination, invention and technology,” explained Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, who wasn’t involved in the study, in an interview with Gizmodo. “Anthropologists have been confusing anatomy and behavior, making the inference that archaic anatomy equals archaic behavior, and ‘modern’ behavior [is equivalent to] modern human anatomy. What is emerging from the human fossil and Paleolithic archeological records across the Eurasia and Africa is that, at any one slice in time during this period, they were all doing—and capable of doing—basically the same things, whatever they looked like.”
By the way, even the way Neanderthals looked has undergone a lot of revision since we first discovered their skeletons. Read more about the Neanderthal glue experiments at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Biglari/ICHTO)
People who grow vegetables in their backyards learn early on that you don't give one person two dozen tomatoes unless they have an explicit reason to use that many. Even if someone likes fresh tomatoes, they are not liable to eat more than one a day, and tomatoes don't keep that long. Zucchini is a different story -if you grow it, you end up with so much that you give it away to people who clearly don't want it, just so you don't have to discard massive amounts all by yourself. I give my family members vegetables, but only in amounts that won't hurt my feelings if they don't use them. This is the latest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
Sarah Verney was traveling near Kokadjo, in northern Maine, when the car had to slow down because there were two lynx in the road. Lynx usually do whatever they can to avoid humans, so it seemed odd that they didn't get out of the road. It turns out these cats had very important business with each other. They stopped traffic while they had a bit of an argument.
Verney wanted to record what they sounded like, so she rolled down the window. The terrifying wildcat screams we expect turned out to resemble two old women arguing. Redditor stanfan114 nailed it.
They sounds like the old ladies from Monty Python with the penguin on top of the television set.
When I saw the title of this post, I thought, "If Dirty Rotten Scoundrels isn't on the list, I'll plotz." Then I figured I was being too dramatic, because I don't watch nearly as many movies as the internet generation does. The movie is there, but since every character in it was a con artist, who made the cut? See the list, and check out clips of great movie con men at TVOM. Is your favorite movie con artist represented?
More than 25,000 people attended the Tokyo Int'l Funeral & Cemetery Show 2018 last weekend. It's an industry convention and exposition for funeral professionals across Japan. The expo included a competition between the top funeral dressers. In the Shinto religion, dressing the deceased is a ritual that cleanses them before they enter the afterlife. It's usually done by family members, but some 2,000 or so undertakers have become experts. The top four competed in front of judges and convention attendees.
The winner was 23-year-old RinoTerai, who said,
“I practiced every day to prepare for this competition,” said a smiling RinoTerai after her win over three other finalists. “I took videos and made improvements by asking myself, does this look beautiful? Am I treating the deceased kindly?”
-via Mental Floss
When your job is to provide commentary on the action, that's what you do, no matter what the action is. During a lull in a game between the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees, announcers had a little fun with a spectator who was carrying way too much food.
This is the best call of 2017. "The humanity!" cries Michael Kay pic.twitter.com/6Ou7r4UWqX
— Ben Diamond (@_BenDiamond) August 30, 2017
Now imagine if your everyday life was narrated by sports commentators. The video was posted by sportswriter Ben Diamond on Twitter. -via Digg
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