Cinefamily TV is putting together a mega-project for the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, featuring 70 minutes of the most bonkers Star Wars-related footage possible. The trailer gives us a little taste, and although it's less than two minutes long, it's weird enough to enjoy on its own.
Forty years is a long time to be obsessed with one franchise, but plenty long enough to amass tributes that will make us laugh and feel nostalgic at the same time. The full version will be shown May 25th at the Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles. -via Gizmodo
The Japanese manga series Tokyo Ghoul is getting a live-action film version hitting theaters this summer. As part of the promotion for the movie, a cafe will be open May 27 to June 28 in Toshima, Japan, serving ghoulish themed food. The cafe's website is in Japanese, but you can get a glimpse at some of the creepy menu items at TVOM.
The new series Star Trek: Discovery takes places slightly before the events of the original series with Kirk and Spock, but somehow the Starfleet crew is way more diverse, well-dressed, and armed with better special effects.
The CBS All Access series will be available online through a subscription service this fall. For details on the characters and trailer scenes, check out this article at Den of Geek.
The new movie Alien: Covenant (the fifth Alien movie, if you don't count Alien vs. Predator) is opening this weekend, so Screen Junkies went back to take another look at the second movie in the series, Aliens. While the first movie was a horror film, the second was an action movie. How will they tear this one down?
Omar is a Maine coon cat living in Melbourne, Australia. He is 47 inches long and weighs 31 pounds. His favorite food is raw kangaroo meat. Omar towers over the sheltie dog he lives with. His owner Stephy Hirst started Omar an Instagram account, and he was soon featured on Cats of Instagram. Representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records were intrigued, and contacted Hirst to ask for his measurements. Hirst's measurement placed Omar at about an inch longer than the current record holder!
Hirst says she had thought about Omar being a record-breaker, but she didn't say anything before because she's not sure if he has even finished growing. Read more about Omar the four-foot-long cat at the Telegraph. -via Mental Floss
The transition from being a student to working full time is significant. I saw two comics within just a few minutes that tell the story of the difference, each with an emphasis on a different aspect of life. The husband and wife artists of Anemonelost appear to miss the carefree days of school. -via reddit
While at the same time, Sarah Andersen of Sarah's Scribbles remembers the less-fun parts of being a student. Here's hoping you relate to the one that shines a better light on the life you have now.
People buy trailers to go camping in or to live in more permanently, but while the two living styles have diverged, the trailers they use overlap a lot. Tiny campers are used as permanent homes, while vacation travel trailers can be bigger than many site-built homes. Mike Closen and John Brunkowski are such trailer enthusiasts that they've written seven books on the subject, the latest being Don’t Call Them Trailer Trash: The Illustrated Mobile Home Story. Closen tells the story of how Americans fell in love with trailers.
Closen: In the late 19th century, we started having campgrounds and campsites in the U.S. and Canada, and tent campers were often delivered to the site via train. The wealthiest people in Canada and England continued to go on extended tours of the countryside by rail up until the late 1930s and early ’40s. Instead of using a travel trailer or tent, they would hire an entire lavishly appointed train car, and they brought their servants to attend to them. Their train car would be towed along, and then placed on a railroad siding for a period of time so the tourists could see the sights. Then the car would be picked up by another train and towed to the next location for a sizable sum of money. It was, again, a sort of mobile home. At least temporarily, these rich folk were living out of a train car.
When automobiles were first mass-produced in the United States around 1900, Americans who could afford vehicles began auto camping. You used your car as part of the camper. People would drive their car down the road, stop somewhere remote on the roadside, and then set up a tent-like contraption. Sometimes they attached a canvas sheet to the top of the car and then propped the other side up with poles. Sometimes they’d park two cars next to one another and stretch a canvas between the tops of the cars.
On the very earliest truck chassis, people would build shelters that had fold-out devices similar to today’s slide-outs that could be covered in tent canvas. By the 1920s, Americans were making their own trailers they could attach to the back of their cars and tow. These early trailers tended to be very short because you didn’t have a very powerful vehicle to pull it. They were rickety contraptions, built of every conceivable material, mostly wood and the sort of canvas that would have been used on a covered wagon.
Collectors Weekly: Where did the campers go?
Closen: They’d show up in established parks or pull over to the side of the road and camp on empty-seeming farmland, although certainly they were trespassing on private property. By the 1920s, a lot of municipalities figured out that all these people traveling along the roadways needed a place to go. Several thousand parks or camps sprang up along the highways of America. Those would’ve had primitive outhouse facilities, but not much more than that. With each passing year and decade, those facilities expanded and improved. Almost immediately, as building trailers to camp and reside in caught on, there was an instant parallel growth and development of places for them to go. They were called tourist parks, trailer parks, tourist camps, and fish camps—which, by the way, didn’t help. That was more of the trailer-trash stereotype: “Oh, there’s a fish camp down the road where you can stay.”
Along the way, the tourism industry grew up to serve the campers, and communities were established for more permanent mobile homes. Read the story of the trailer at Collectors Weekly.
It’s a scientist’s mantra: Correlation does not imply causation. But sometimes wrong feels so right.
1. EAT ENOUGH CHOCOLATE AND YOU'LL WIN A NOBEL.
If you want to boost blood flow to your brain and (potentially) slow cognitive decay, consume flavanols. The plant compounds, found in green tea and cocoa, are great for getting blood into your noggin. That made New York doctor Franz Messerli wonder: Would a nation of bonbon–eaters be more intellectually accomplished than a country that didn’t consume as much cocoa? In a tongue-in-cheek 2012 paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine, he found that countries that ate a lot of chocolate also won the most Nobel Prizes. Messerli published the study with a wink, but some media outlets took the news seriously, failing to see that a confounding variable was at play—wealth. A richer country (like Switzerland, which has 26 Nobel winners) will have more quality scientific research—and well-stocked shelves of chocolate, too.
2. THE NIGHT-LIGHT BIZ IS IN CAHOOTS WITH YOUR OPTHALMOLOGIST.
Nearsightedness has been increasing worldwide for decades. In some Asian countries, up to 90 percent of adults can’t see distant objects clearly, and in 1999, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia thought they’d found the cause: night-lights. The evidence suggested that kids who slept with a light developed myopia later in life. But two groups of researchers argued that the study failed to see the evidence in front of its nose—myopic parents have myopic kids. And myopic parents, who can’t see well in the dark, are more likely to install night-lights in their children’s rooms.
There was talk last year of Deadpool deserving a Best Picture Oscar (or at least a nomination), because the film took risks, broke new ground, and was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. Naw, the Academy isn't having any of that. But what if all the humor, action, and special effects were stripped away? All that would be left would be a relationship drama of the type that the Oscars love.
In 1945, an excavation of a Native American mound in Illinois revealed around a thousand shell and pearl beads, and 22 beads iron beads. Where did those come from? The people that lived there 2,000 years ago, as the artifacts were dated, did not have a culture of metallurgy. They came from a meteorite, one the rare meteors that contain iron. Only three such meteorites have ever been found in North America.
A piece of one of those three meteorites, the Anoka meteorite, was first discovered in 1961, next to the Mississippi River in what is now Anoka, Minnesota. Its surface didn’t show evidence of people trying to remove bits and pieces of it, and its chemical makeup was just different enough from the beads to convince scientists it wasn’t the source. Another chunk of the Anoka turned up in 1983. A new analysis of that piece, which was found just across the river from the original, showed the researchers, from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the same internal structure observed in the Havana Hopewell beads. Mass spectroscopy then confirmed that the two pieces of iron have the same chemical composition as well. One mystery might have been solved, but another popped right back in its place.
The Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park bit right through a Ford Explorer. But what about the real dinosaurs? It turns out that T. rex really had jaw power to make up for those useless little arms. They chewed through the bones of their prey, which is unusual even among dinosaurs.
Bone crushing—extreme osteophagy in the scientific parlance—is a trait exhibited by just a handful of mammalian scavengers and predators today, including the spotted hyena and the gray wolf. Osteophagy is almost unheard of in reptiles; their long, conical teeth don’t tend to clamp together to deliver the crushing forces needed to shatter bone. And yet Gregory Erickson, FSU paleontologist and co-author of the new study published today in Scientific Reports, has long observed that the bite marks on the brutalized carcasses of T.rex lunches indicate a bone-chewer.
Heroes are much more interesting when they have a few of the flaws we normal people deal with -or just bad luck. That's why Superman will never be as interesting as Batman. And why Deadpool captured the moviegoing audience's attention so well -he's far from perfect, and we can relate. When filmmakers throw a bolt into the machinery of a daring caper, it provides us with an unexpected gasp or laugh or something to keep us from falling asleep during the heroic actions we expect.
This image is from a photoshoot by Brian Griffin, taken back in 1982 for the movie Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. They weren't used at the time, and have only been seen sporadically in the years since. You can see a gallery of the nine images featuring Luke, Leia, Han, Darth, and Chewbacca at TVOM.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
The recent passing of Don Rickles on April 6th left many of us sad, wistful and perhaps even a little worried. Known around the world as "the merchant of venom" and "Mr. Warmth" (a nickname bestowed on him by Johnny Carson), Don was, apparently, the last of the insult comics.
Don insulted everyone, he was an equal opportunity insulter. He insulted presidents, royalty, the biggest celebrities in the world, as well as commoners, nonentities, hicks, yokels, and rubes. But no one ever objected or took any offense. Heck, it was a badge of honor to have Don Rickles insult you.
And with the age of political correctness closing its humorless noose around our collective necks, somehow we sensed that the end of an era had arrived. And Don Rickles, one of the funniest guys in the world, was the last of a dying breed. Okay, here are 18 facts you may not have known about the great Don Rickles.
1. He served in World War II.
After graduating from Newtown High School in New York, Don Rickles served on the motor torpedo boat tender USS Cyrene, he was a seaman first class. He was honorably discharged in 1946.
2. He graduated from the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Among his classmates were Jason Robards, Anne Bancroft, and Grace Kelly.
3. He became an insult comic almost by accident.
After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Don wasn't getting any acting gigs, so he switched over to stand-up comedy. But he found that his stand-up act wasn't getting many laughs from the customers. So he started insulting them. He quickly discovered that the paying crowds liked (and laughed more) at his insult shtick than his stand-up routine, so he stuck with it.
Different languages have different names for colors, that's given. But some languages identify more colors than others, and some have rather few terms for colors. Research into those languages reveals that when there are fewer color names, they are the same colors across the world. This gave rise to the theory that cultures identify colors in the same order the world over. That is a fascinating concept, but it needs more than a few words to understand clearly.
By the way, languages with fewer words for colors were once thought to be from people who are color blind. Not true at all, because languages have different ways of distinguishing colors besides a dedicate term for the color. -via Laughing Squid
