At one time, it was a staple in movies and cartoons. Step in quicksand, and you'll never get out -unless the hero saves you! That trope has fallen out of favor in the last couple of decades because it was perceived as overdone and became a cliche. It didn't help that Mythbusters and other sources debunked the idea of certain death if you step in quicksand.
In any case, it's trivial to say that science has "debunked" quicksand. If anything, recent work on unstable granular media has revealed a far more diverse and complex set of phenomena than anyone imagined. Traditional scientific accounts describe just one type—the classic "artesian quicksand" shown in the MythBusters episode. That's ordinary sand that has been saturated with upwelling moisture: Given enough water, the sand liquefies, and the grains start to flow like a viscous fluid. But in the past 10 years or so, physicists have started looking at more interesting formations of sediment, in places where grains of sand or clay are assembled in delicate, latticelike structures. Step in one of these, and it collapses like a house of cards—before reforming in a dense pack around your feet.
Quicksand survives in movie fan clubs and fetish groups who avidly collect footage featuring quicksand. Daniel Engber put together a look at the phenomena of quicksand itself, quicksand fans, and a history of quicksand in the movies. Link
How much attention did you pay to Crayola crayon colors when you were a kid (or parent)? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, will test your memory, or maybe your guessing skills! Match the crayon scrawl to the color's name. I scored 100%, which is totally due to my guessing skills. Link
Lola just wanted to make friends, but ended up stuck in a trash bin for 15 hours before her owners, Darryl Mann and Stephanie Andrews-Mann found her. Their CCTV footage shows how she got there. Link -via reddit
Update: The woman in the video has been identified. -Thanks, oezicomix!
Flickr user Beniah Brawn has many sets of fascinating vintage photographs. Russian Types is a collection of early portraits of Moscow and St. Petersburg residents.
During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian 'types.' These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.
When you're traveling down the road with kids who are playing the alphabet game {wiki}, you would be extremely fortunate to happen upon this sign. Does anyone know if this is a real sign, and where it might be? Link
An article at the Guardian makes the point that the trend of screw top caps replacing wine corks may endanger the few remaining cork tree orchards as farmers move to more profitable crops. Along the way, we get a fascinating lesson in how cork is harvested and turned into bottle stoppers.
Deep into one of the 350 remaining cork oak forests (in my case Herdade dos Fidalgos, near Lisbon) sometime between June and August you'll suddenly come across a team of about 20 men, ranging in ages from 16 to 70, striking huge twisted trees with axes. Then, with a sensitivity you would not associate with an axe, they prise the juicy bark from the tree and it is levered from the trunk in great, satisfying pieces. From the base, right up to the beginning of the branches, it is peeled away to reveal the oak's red, nude surface underneath.
When the tree is completely harvested, the axeman takes a swig from his water barrel and moves on to the next. Periodically, a truck comes to collect the pieces of cork and take them to nearby sheds where they will be weathered for months before being processed. The truck is the only obvious exception to a process that hasn't changed since the 18th century, when montados (open cork oak woodlands) and forests here in Portugal, in southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Turkey began to be exploited commercially to produce wine corks. A white number is painted on the tree. It will be nine years before it's disturbed again.
Judge Joseph Wapner, who gained fame on the TV show The People's Court, is alive and well at age 90 (he even made a guest appearance on the show last year). He's lent his name to a drink company, so you, too, can enjoy a Judge Wapner Root Beer. Link -via Rue the Day
This color footage was filmed even before movies had sound, and 13 years before a color feature film was released.
George Eastman House is the repository for many of the early tests made by the Eastman Kodak Company of their various motion picture film stocks and color processes. The Two-Color Kodachrome Process was an attempt to bring natural lifelike colors to the screen through the photochemical method in a subtractive color system. First tests on the Two-Color Kodachrome Process were begun in late 1914. Shot with a dual-lens camera, the process recorded filtered images on black/white negative stock, then made black/white separation positives. The final prints were actually produced by bleaching and tanning a double-coated duplicate negative (made from the positive separations), then dyeing the emulsion green/blue on one side and red on the other. Combined they created a rather ethereal palette of hues."
http://1000words.kodak.com/post/?ID=2982503 -via Nag on the Lake
Imagine the boy next door trading in his Levi's for fishnet stockings, his all-American sister sporting a sexy French maid's outfit. It's a scene that's played out at movie theaters around the world every Saturday at midnight-all because starving actor/playwright Richard O'Brien needed to pay the rent.
DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT
In the early 1970s, Richard O'Brien had just been fired as a chorus boy in a musical on London's version of Broadway, the West End.With no money and a wife and child to support, and lots of time on his hands, O'Brien penned a bizarre musical about cross-dressing, sex-starved aliens. He called it The Rocky Horror Show. And somehow this weird show actually got produced. It opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1973 and was an amazing success; it was even named the best musical of the year.
Shortly after its debut, producer Lou Adler bought the play and moved it across the Atlantic to Los Angeles' Roxy Theater, where it met with critical and audience acclaim. It also caught the eye of filmmakers at 20th Century Fox, who were sure they could transform it into a hit movie. The film version starred newcomers Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and the singer Meat Loaf. It took eight weeks to shoot and cost $1 million to make. But before the movie was released, the play opened in New York...and flopped.
COLD FEET
Because the play had bombed, 20th Century Fox spent little on publicity for the film, and it played in very few theaters. The movie initially had about as much success as the Broadway show-critics hated it and audiences stayed away in droves. It appeared that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was dead in the water.
But because of the play's early success at the Roxy, the movie did well in Los Angeles, so Adler was convinced that the film just hadn't found its audience. In 1976 he persuaded New York's Waverly Theater, in the heart of Bohemian Greenwich Village, to begin midnight showings. The tactic was tried in a few other select cities across the country as well. The hope was that it would catch on with cult audiences, just as offbeat films like El Topo and George Romero's horror classic Night of the Living Dead had done.
JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT
Within months, a phenomenon began to take hold. Audiences decided to tear down the invisible wall that separated them from the on-screen action. They weren't content just watching the movie from their seats-they began to dress as their favorite characters and perform along with the film, creating a show within a show. Seeing the movie became an interactive adventure, the Rocky experience was now part movie, part sing-along, part fashion show, and all party. Being in the audience at The Rocky Horror Picture Show now involved shouting lines at the screen, covering up with newspapers during scenes with rain, squirting water pistols to simulate rain in the theater, throwing rice during the wedding sequences, and dancing in the aisles doing the "Time Warp", the film's contagious anthem.
The Rocky phenomena spread across the United States, giving birth to a midnight movie industry that spanned from major metropolitan areas right through to the straightlaced suburbs of America's heartland.
Almost 30 years after its initial debut in the attic of London's Royal Court Theatre, Rocky still plays every weekend at midnight in dozens of theaters across the United States and around the world. And in November 2000, The Rocky Horror Show returned to Broadway...this time to critical praise and commercial success. It was nominated for several Tony Awards, including best revival.
Launching Pad
Can you picture Russell Crowe in high heels and a black bustier? In the 1980s, the Academy Award-winning star of Gladiator toured Australia and New Zealand singing and dancing through more than 400 performances of The Rocky Horror Show as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
A family of giant armored turtles called meiolaniid flourished millions of years ago and was thought to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago. But now evidence from an archaeological dig on the island of Vanuatu shows a species called Meiolania damelipi survived until about 3,000 years ago.
The shell of one early meiolaniid species, known from fossils recovered in South America and named Stupendemys for its size, was 11 feet long and seven feet wide. The more modern Meiolania platyceps, found in Australia and Melanesia, had a relatively small five-foot-diameter shell, and weighed an estimated half-ton. All had armored club tails and horned heads.
(One species is even named Ninjemys, in honor of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though M. platyceps looks much more like Super Mario Brothers 3-vintage Bowser, the King Koopa).
According to the fossil record, Meiolania damelipi flourished 3,000 years ago and were extinct 200 years later, possibly because of human hunting. The size of the newly-discovered species is not specified in the article. Pictured is Meiolania platyceps. Link -via Unique Daily
Eight-year-old Teresa Juniso mailed off $12 to the Wil Wheaton fan club and never received anything she was promised. Twenty-one years later, she wrote about the experience. That made Wheaton look like a bad guy, even though Juniso meant it as a humorous post. But he made it right by sending the promised fan club items and a letter from himself as the 15-year-old Star Trek: TNG actor to the 8-year old Teresa. So the story has a happy ending after all. See the letter and a transcript at Letters of Note. Link -via Codename: Beryllium
We don't usually go see martial arts movies because of the plot, but there are a few that stretch credibility to its utmost limits. Cracked investigated these movies. Take, for example, Heart of the Dragon, one of two movies in this list about mentally-challenged martial arts experts.
...when we first meet Danny, he's goaded into ordering all kinds of food from an expensive restaurant for his friends, none of which he can pay for. He's embarrassed and wants to go home. This is a mentally challenged man who's been taken advantage of by people he thought he could trust. Tragic.
At least, it would be if the staff at the restaurant didn't respond by instantly kung fu-ing the ass of a clearly disabled man, complete with wacky sound effects--every punch to his stomach sounds like Moe beating up on Curly.
Cyriak Harris made an animation for the BBC speculating as to what goes through Simon Cowell's mind as he stands in judgment of everyday people chasing their dreams of performing fame. -via Arbroath, who wonders what goes through Cyriak's mind.
Star Wars fans now have a way to find love, or at least a compatible Jedi -in a hurry. Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando hosted three days of speed dating sessions for conventioneers, the first ever speed dating event just for Star Wars fans.
The ages of the speed-dating participants at Celebration V ranged from 18 to 54, but most appeared to be in their mid-20s. The women were, by and large, attractive; most wore street clothes. Of the men, no more than three were openly carrying lightsabers, and in general, they looked less like Jabba the Hutt and more like Luke Skywalker than might have been expected.
"The women who show up are looking for someone to make a connection with," Glitch explained. "Most of the guys are just like, 'I get to talk to a girl! Fabulous!' "
Some attendee really hit it off, and made trips to the Star Wars Commitment Chapel, conveniently provided by the convention planners. Link -via Fark
