Better not think about it too deeply. If there is a multiverse, there is probably an alternate you who is much better than the you that you turned out to be. If that's too depressing, remember that there may be worse versions of you. Of course, that's pretty depressing, too. This is the latest comic from Stephen Beals at StBeals. Check out more of his work; I think this one may be my favorite so far. -via reddit
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Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer began working on an idea in 1978 that would eventually become the movie This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. They performed music gigs and made a 20-minute demo, but were rejected by studio after studio until the movie was finally made on a budget of $2 million, and released in 1984. This Is Spinal Tap performed modestly in theaters, but found success on home video, and is now a classic. As the 30th anniversary of the movie approached, Harry Shearer realized that neither he nor the other three principles had been paid any residuals, despite conceiving, writing, performing music, and acting in the film.
Sometimes it takes a malcontent to disturb something as intractable as Hollywood accounting practices. By the terms of the contract they signed in 1982 with Embassy Pictures, the four creators of Spinal Tap are entitled to a portion of income from the film, including merchandise and music, provided certain benchmarks are hit. Given the wild afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap, it seems impossible that anyone with a piece of the movie hasn’t made money. And yet this is Hollywood, where studios have claimed that some of the highest-grossing films—hits such as Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy—somehow haven’t turned a profit. As David Zucker, one of the creators of Airplane!, once said of his own sleeper hit, “It made so much money that the studio couldn’t hide it fast enough.”
With Embassy out of business, the theatrical rights to Spinal Tap bounced around from Coca-Cola to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group to a L’Oréal property named Parafrance to, around 1990, Studiocanal, a subsidiary of the French company Vivendi SA. The home-video rights followed a separate path and landed with Sony Music Entertainment. None of those companies paid the four creators, and no one did anything about it until Shearer finally lost his patience. “We were approaching the 30th anniversary,” he says, “and this low-burning lightbulb begins to go off—‘Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ ”
An investigation into the film's accounting showed that the four were owed $81 in merchandizing income and $98 in album income. Smelling a rat, Shearer filed a $125 million lawsuit last year. In 2017, Reiner, McKean, and Guest joined the lawsuit and raised the amount to $400 million, plus reversion of the copyright to the name Spinal Tap.
Vivendi, in its response to the lawsuit, argued that the creators made the film as a work for hire, and were hence not entitled to the copyright. It seems crazy, given that there’s plenty of evidence the four of them invented the band years before making their deal with Embassy, but calling a contribution work-for-hire is fairly common in copyright cases. In Shearer’s latest filing, he calls Vivendi’s position on the copyright a threat to scare him away from pressing his profit case. He also says it’s hypocritical for the company to cling to a film’s copyright while suggesting, based on what it claims is the film’s poor performance, there’s no money to be made with it.
You can read the details of the story, and some background on Hollywood accounting, at Bloomberg. -via Digg
(Image source: reddit)
The March For Science took place on Saturday, with demonstrators converging on Washington DC and almost 500 other cities in the U.S. and around the world to advance science-based policies and funding for science. Considering the subject of the march, you would expect to see a lot of clever, nerdy, pun-filled signs. There were plenty of them.
Sine game pic.twitter.com/S81UrJpY24
— Alison Griswold (@alisongriswold) April 22, 2017
See roundups of the best signs at CNN, the Washington Post, Time, Mashable, and the nerdiest of all at the Boston Globe.
#marchforscience Salt Lake City pic.twitter.com/vNCyhcmzuM
— Wayne Padgett (@ecodude2) April 22, 2017
Buzzfeed had a list of humans with signs and another of dogs with signs.
See more pictures of signs being added constantly at Twitter. -via Metafilter, where you'll find even more.
Cakeguy555 made this awesome 5-tier Star Wars wedding cake for a couple who were renewing their wedding vows. It features Han, Leia, R2-D2, and text that looks like one of the opening crawls from the movies, but the actual words are about their love for each other (good luck reading them). The cake was not easy to make, as we can assume from another picture he posted about it. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Women's fashions in the 19th century went through many changes, as different designers tried out the ways they could make a woman look the way she should. The crinolines of the Civil War era didn't really work in cities that were becoming more and more crowded, but heaven forbid that a lady could dispense with overly-engineered undergarments that sculpted her into the latest fashionable silhouette. The bustle was patented in 1857 and became all the rage until about 1888.
An 1888 anonymous writer to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal voiced concerns about the fashion of the time in a letter headed simply “Bustles.”
The writer reels off the numerous health problems they see with everyday women’s fashion: corsets squeezing organs, shoes too small and pointed at the toe deforming the foot and particularly the bustle. “The woman with a bustle can never sit down in a natural position,” the letter records. “It is absolutely impossible for her to rest her back against the back of any seat of ordinary construction. I have no doubt some of the severe backaches in women whose duties keep them seated all day are due to, or at least aggravated by, this disability.”
Read about the rise and fall of the bustle and other 19th-century undergarments at Smithsonian.
Orson Welles broadcast his radio play "War of the Worlds," about an alien invasion, on October 30th, 1938. Some folks missed the disclaimer at the beginning that assured listeners that it was a work of fiction. Now, if they'd listened longer, these folks would find that out soon enough. But as luck would have it, a transformer blew in Concrete, Washington, during the broadcast. What would you do?
This short film by Patrick Biesemans for Dust follows a curious young boy out on his own on that fateful night. -via Nag on the Lake
In this video from space, we see what happens to a spinning handle in low gravity. The gyroscopic force is strong with this one. What we are seeing is the Dzhanibekov effect, also called the Tennis Racket theorem.
Cool! It works under gravity, too, although it's harder to see because the object falls down at the same time. There's a complicated formula that explains the phenomenon, but if you don't want to read a complicated formula (or you know that won't help you), Randy Dobson shows us how it works in this video.
Think about tossing a tennis racket, then it makes more sense because most of have played with a racket like this before, or some other object in this way. -via TYWKIWDBI
Here is a lesson in math by trauma. This dad is evil, but he blew my mind with a math trick that I did not know. Thank you, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. However, I find it impossible to hold up my ninth finger by itself. Good thing I memorized my times tables in third grade.
Getting enough sleep is important for everything else in your life. That's hard to deal with when you have deadlines, to-do lists, and people counting on you to take care of business. However, a proper amount of rest will help you do all those things more efficiently than if you are tired.
There are a lot of things that can affect your sleep, and you might have to work on every one of them to get sufficient rest. Our friends from AsapSCIENCE have some facts about sleep and how we can get not only more sleep, but better quality sleep. -via Digg
How much time do you spend worrying about things? Do people tell you that you worry too much? That's not really useful, because that feeling of impending doom (or even just a little discomfort) is difficult to turn off. But are you worrying too much? Maybe, but you shouldn't worry about it. Worrying might actually be a good sign.
Well, maybe because — sometimes, in small doses — worrying can actually be good for you. In one study, for example, worrying was linked to recovery from trauma and depression, as well as increased “uptake of health-promoting behaviors,” like getting regular cancer screenings or resolving to kick a smoking habit. Others have found that worriers tend to be more successful problem-solvers, higher performers at work and in graduate school, and more proactive and informed when it comes to handling stressful events that life throws their way.
In other words, worry means you are being mindful about things that need solving or improvement. The key is to turn that worry into a plan to change what you are fretting about. If it's a problem you cannot change, some stress relief might be in order, or you can turn to worrying about something else that you can change. The Science of Us has more on the positive side of worrying.
(Image credit: Maxwell GS)
Here's a superstition I had never heard of until now. Disposable lighters come in all colors, but the white ones are bad luck. It's supposedly even more unlucky than lighting three cigarettes with one match. At least that one made sense, because you could burn your fingers if you held a match long enough. The white lighter taboo seems to be entirely magical thinking.
Even in 2017, it’s not uncommon to encounter smokers who not only won’t purchase white lighters, but won’t use them to light things even if they belong to someone else. Some people don’t even like being in the room when one is being used. But how did this legend get started in the first place?
The most common origin story behind this myth is actually tied up with another popular urban legend. The so-called “27 Club” includes young artists and musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix—who all died at the age of 27. A number of superstitions revolve around the 27 Club, one of which being that those musicians, as well as a later addition to the club, Kurt Cobain, had white lighters on them when they died. They didn’t.
There are a couple of other possibilities for the origin of this superstition, one that even makes sense, that you can read about at Atlas Obscura. The article is part of their series on luck running all this week.
Pusic was taken in when he was a very sick kitten abandoned in a box. He pulled through, as you can see in this video, and grew up to love the Russian couple who took him in. He especially likes getting picked up by his mommy, as you can see here, and biting his daddy's ear, as you can see in this video. But last fall, Dad went away for twenty days, and that was hard on Pusic.
When he finally came back, it was a joyful reunion for the cat. -via Laughing Squid
Dino Ignacio took his daughter to Star Wars Celebration last week, and they went fully equipped. He made a batch of plastic datacards as the plans for the Death Star for his tiny Jyn Erso to deliver. In case you haven't seen Rogue One, Jyn Erso was the main character, and getting the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance was her mission.
Jyn is actually named Harley, and she and her father Dino attended Celebration in Orlando last weekend with a special goal in mind, to pay tribute to the dearly departed Carrie Fisher. Harley, in costume as Rogue One’s Rebel Operative, would locate as many Princess Leia cosplayers as she could, and hand them a specially-crafted copy of the datacard containing the Death Star plans.
See pictures of Harley and the different incarnations of Princess Leia she found at Star Wars Celebration at io9.
On the very first Earth Day in 1970, Denis Hayes stood on a stage in Central Park, stunned by the number of people who'd come to honor the planet. Now 76 years old, Hayes remembers it was like looking at the ocean—“you couldn’t see where the sea of people ended.” Crowd estimates reached more than a million people.
For Hayes, who is now board chair of the international Earth Day Network, it was the culmination of a year’s worth of work. As an urban ecology graduate student at Harvard University, he’d volunteered to help organize a small initiative by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson was horrified by the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, and wanted to raise awareness about environmental issues by holding teaching events similar to those being held by civil rights and anti-war activists.
Senator Nelson saw a growing disconnect between the concept of progress and the idea of American well-being, Hayes tells mental_floss. “There was a sense that America was prosperous and getting better, but at the same time, the air in the country was similar to the air today in China, Mexico City, or New Delhi," Hayes says. "Rivers were catching on fire. Lakes were unswimmable.”
Hayes talked to mental_floss about the process that led to the first Earth Day, and how the movement took off afterward and grew into a global initiative.
Cats love boxes, but some boxes are better than others. To determine which is the best, they must all be thoroughly checked out. Simon's Cat and the kitten are channeling Maru and his sister Hana in the latest animation from Simon Tofield.
If he fits, he sits …and if he doesn't fits, he sits anyway. In color, no less. -via Tastefully Offensive
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