Today is the day that the population of the earth was expected to reach seven billion people. By the year 2045, we may have nine billion! How is the earth going to handle so many? To mark the occasion, the Neatorama Spotlight Blog looks at National Geographic's year-long series on world population. The images are from National Geographic magazine’s new “7 Billion” app, based on its year-long series on world population, now available as a free app for iPad. http://www.neatorama.com/spotlight/2011/10/31/7-billion/
Ryan Matthew Cohn is an artist, antique collector, blogger, and a buyer for the store Obscura Antiques and Oddities in New York City. He makes art objects from human and animal bones. Read about Cohn's collection and creations, and see some clips of his appearances on the TV show Oddities at Collector's Weekly. Link
The Google Doodle team carves giant pumpkins on the lawn at their Mountain View, California, headquarters. The finished product is today's Google Doodle.
Remember the 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China? Kurt Russell spent the entire movie without a clue. He is just plain confused. They obviously didn't let him read the script. -via The Daily What
How do you make costumes designed around a 20-year-old movie work? You get all of your friends involved! The gang at Intense Individuals did just that last year, and dressed as almost the entire cast of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. See more pictures at their site. Link -via Buzzfeed
Sean Faulkner of Ross Township, Pennsylvania was arrested for a bizarre theft that "seemed like a good idea at the time." Faulkner was apparently tired of carrying a case of beer, so he took a forklift from a construction site. He drove about a mile to a sandwich shop, where he ordered a Reuben, but fled before paying for it.
“He said he was gonna go eat it in the corner and he ended up running out the front door, down the parking lot with the sandwich,” said Kelly Donatelli, who served him. “Just very bizarre. It was weird.”
That’s when he tried to make his getaway in a forklift. Ross Township police caught him.
“Apparently he was tired of walking and he saw the forklift with the keys in it and seemed like a good idea at the time,” Detective Brian Kohlhepp said.
Faulkner faces theft charges for both the sandwich (a misdemeanor) and the forklift (a felony). Link -via Breakfast Links
Boy, October flew by in a hurry, didn't it? Halloween is Monday, and then we get into November and what we call "the holiday season." Daylight Saving Time ends next weekend, then Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving aren't far behind. While you're enjoying Halloween parties and horror films this weekend, take some time to catch up on all the wonderful things that have been going on here at Neatorama!
From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, The Lost Masterpiece is about the better, Spanish version of the 1931 film Dracula. The post includes the movie, too!
We got a sneak peek at The Physics Book by Clifford A. Pickover, now available at a bookstore near you.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us The Effect of Television on Sexual Behavior.
The Grand Wizards of Elementary School came to us from mental_floss magazine.
NeatoBambino has some Halloween posts on costumes for babies and children and even mothers.
We had a real puzzler for this week's What Is It? game. No one guessed the correct answer! According to the What Is It? Blog, this is a raisin seeder. How effective it was in real use, I do not know. Most raisins these days are made from seedless grapes. As for the funniest answer, Thomas said this is a pair of salad tongs designed by M.C. Escher for his ‘Relativity’ salad. If you noticed the odd way the ends of this thing would match up, you’d think that, too! So Thomas wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop.
You are also invited to check out past articles on all kinds of subjects at The Best of Neatorama. Join in the discussions at our Facebook page. And be sure to follow Neatorama on Twitter!
The following is an article from Bathroom Readers' Institute's Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader.
The werewolf is one of the most recognized movie monsters in history, thanks in large part to the 1941 film The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the making of that classic film.
FRIGHT FACTORY
The early 1930s was the golden age of movie monsters. In 1930, Universal released the classic Dracula, starring Bel Lugosi; a year later it had another huge hit with Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. Inspired by their success, Universal decided to make a movie about a werewolf.
In 1931, they handed writer/director Robert Florey a title -The Wolf Man- and told him to come up with an outline. A few months later, Florey submitted notes for a story about a Frenchman who has suffered for 400 years under a witch's curse that turns him into a werewolf during every full moon ...unless he wears a garland of wolf-bane around his neck. The studio approved the idea and scheduled the movie as a Boris Karloff vehicle for 1933. A shooting script was written ...and rewritten ...and rewritten several more times. By the time it was finished, the script was about an English doctor who was bitten by a werewolf in Tibet, then turns into one himself on his return to London. Universal renamed the pictures Werewolf of London.
BAT MAN
By now, however, Boris Karloff was too busy to take the part ...So it went a Broadway actor named Henry Hull. Werewolf of London hit theaters in 1935. The movie wasn't very good: One critic has called it "full of fog, atmosphere, and laboratory shots, but short on chills and horror." That was largely because Hull didn't look scary. He refused to cover his face with werewolf hair, complaining that it obscured his features. Makeup man Jack Pierce -already a legend for creating Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein- had no choice but to remove most of the facial hair, leaving Hull looking like a demonic forest elf. Werewolf of London was a box office disappointment. It was also Hull's last werewolf film.
SECOND TRY
In the early 1940s, Universal launched a second wave of horror films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, and other classic monsters. They decided to give the werewolf another try, too. This second werewolf film started the same way the first one did: with the title The Wolf Man. This time the scriptwriter was Curt Siodmak. He started from scratch, researched werewolf legends himself, and used what he learned to write the script. The story he concocted was about an American named Lance Talbot who travels to his ancestral home in Wales and is bitten while rescuing a young woman from a werewolf attack.
Once again, the studio wanted to cast Karloff in the lead ...and once again he was too busy to take it. They considered Bela Lugosi, but he was too old for the part. So they gave it to newcomer Lon Chaney, Jr., son and namesake of the greatest horror star of the silent movie era. Chaney, Sr. was known all over the world as the "Man of 1000 Faces," for his roles in The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Chaney, Jr. had recently starred in Man Made Monster, and Universal thought he had potential in horror films.
The Wizard was a 1989 movie that was entirely made of product placement, mainly for Ninento's Power Glove. I have never heard of this film that was catnip for kids (it's about video games!), but it sounds like the most bizarre mishmash ever. It involves a road trip across the country for three runaways, one who has escaped from a mental institution, in which no police are involved and the people they meet don't find anything odd about unaccompanied minors.
The trek to California is accomplished primarily by gambling — a series of double-your-money hustles instigated by the queerly parentless Haley. We actually get to see Haley’s trailer home at one point, though her father (a trucker) is on the road. In addition to video game-related hustles, the trio end up at one point in an actual casino, wherein Haley’s skill at craps allows an adult (“Spankey,” a mentally challenged “trucker friend” of her father’s, played by Frank McRae) to win hundreds. It’s later revealed that Haley’s deceased mother had a gambling problem, which apparently led to Haley’s hustling skills. Corey’s mother is also dead. And Jimmy’s sister/Corey’s half-sister? She’s dead, too. What?! Never mind that now. We have to get to California.
The climax involves a video game tournament, so you can guess the ending. It doesn't make any sense, either. Read more about how a favorite movie from a writer's childhood becomes completely nonsensical when he watches it again as an adult. Link
I haven't spent this much time watching a clock move in ...a long time. Hans Andersson, who gave the Rubik's Cube-solving robot, built this clock called the Time Twister.
Time Twister consists of two LEGO Mindstorms bricks communicating via Bluetooth. The master brick keeps track of the time and handles the minute digits. The slave brick handles the hour digits and the second indicator.
Allie Brosh is back at Hyperbole and a Half after six months with what is believed to be an explanation for her absence. Her post is an honest and illustrated account of what it's like to experience depression. In the comments, many others corroborate her experience. Link
If you are interested in the global folk tale we know as Cinderella, and you have a lot of time on your hands this weekend, you might want to check out a mega-post at Metafilter. From the original Chinese version in which a king becomes obsessed with a tiny bound-foot slipper to modern feminist interpretations, there are links for anything and everything to do with Cinderella, including books, film, poetry, opera, advertising, variations, and literary criticism. Link
Relax, the video is only a few seconds long. Five minutes is the subject matter. A reporter covers a building demolition, but failed to synchronize his watch. -via The Daily What
