Archive Category: Entertainment
The Mickey Mouse Cartoon Banned in America
Mickey Mouse? Banned? You must be kidding!
No, I’m not. Mickey Mouse, that ultra-safe, conservative, harmless, beloved, world-famous cartoon character was banned -in the United States, no less. Or, to be exact, one of his cartoons was. The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Shindig was officially banned in America. But why?
Well, for one, in a scene in The Shindig, Clarabelle Cow is shown in the stable reading a book entitled Three Weeks.
It was reported by TIME magazine in 1931 that the state of Ohio banned The Shindig because it showed a cow’s udders. While TIME noted that many moviegoers didn’t min viewing Clarabelle Cow’s udders, many others were very offended. That was reason number one.
Reason number two is a bit more esoteric (although equally ridiculous).
The book Clarabelle was reading, Three Weeks, was a notorious book written by Elinor Glyn, a British novelist and screenwriter who pioneered women’s mass market erotic fiction. It was Elinor Glyn who coined the word “it” to mean “sex appeal.” This was considered very racy and suggestive by 1920s Middle-American standards.
Her book Three Weeks was declared obscene and banned in Canada in 1907. It was condemned by religious leaders in the United States. How it came to be included in the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon is a mystery to this day.
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Excuse Me Sir, But Your Trash Can Just Doesn’t Fit In
Yes, this is the most epic Mario-themed bathroom ever created. No, I still don’t recommend trying to crawl through any of the pipes in this house to go looking for extra lives and gold coins. All you will find is a terrible smell and tons of bacteria.
Oh, and just joking about the trash can, it just happens to be sitting in a bad part of the room for the theme to work. As it turns out, the rest of the room is decorated with Donkey Kong and Pac Man, you can see more pictures over at the link.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
How Toy Story 2 Was Almost Lost Forever
(Video Link)
While Toy Story 2 was in production, someone at Pixar accidentally typed in a command that erased the drives on which the animation files were stored. Most of the film vanished in 20 seconds.
A whole year of work. Just…gone.
This is the story of how Pixar employees rescued the movie.
-via io9
Engraved Science Fiction Ring
Harpuahound, a member of the Engraver’s Cafe forum, made this wonderful ring with the TARDIS in the middle, the Starfleet logo on one side and (not shown) the space shuttle on the opposite side. Is the shuttle an Armageddon reference?
Link -via The Mary Sue
Neon Pegasus
Feeling down today, Bronies? This one is for you: Neon Pegasus by Parry Gripp (previously on Neatorama), who said "No matter how insane or ridiculous, you must follow your dreams ..."
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] to hear something about "genetically modified salamander with a face just like George Clooney"Spread your wings Neon Pegasus
And go flying through the night
They can take your glitter
But they can't take away your sparkleAnd the thousand arm robot octopus
Will try to grab your golden reins
But your wings are strong from the battle
Over Cupcake Mountain[...]
(Yeah!
When I first saw you defeating the Gummy King's
Gluten powered armada in the darkness of space,
I knew you were no ordinary pegasus!)
Censorship, Medieval Style
Before the era of Big Brother, censorship was alive and well. LiveScience explained how two censors took about their work in making sure that work critical of the church by Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus never saw the light of day:
In contrast to the newly discovered glued-up book, another example of Erasmus' writing, held at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto, reveals a censor who took to his task with an artistic flourish.
Published in Basel, Switzerland, in 1538 this book contains essays by Erasmus introducing the writing of St. Ambrose, a fourth-century saint who was the bishop of Milan.
"It is one of the most exquisitely beautiful examples of censorship, with the offending passages obliterated using vibrant watercolors framed in baroque scroll frames with attending putti (an image of a male child)," Carefoote writes in his 2007 book. While the censor blanked out the prefaces by Erasmus he left the saint’s work alone. It's not known what Erasmus said that got him censored.It's also not known why the censor, probably a librarian, approached his job with such artistry.
If Star Wars Had Cell Phones
Sending a secret holographic message with an astromech droid? That's so outdated!
Brian Gordon illustrates how Star Wars would've looked like had they employed today's mobile technology in this cute Chuck and Beans webcomic: Link - via Nerd Approved
You’ve Never Heard A Music Box Like This
The Music Box is a project in New Orleans that consists of nine shacks made of reclaimed building materials. But they’re constructed to create sounds, which the group of artists, musicians, and engineers who made them call “musical architecture.”
The new instruments inside are Rube Goldberg contraptions that bring to mind the ingenuity of Southern jug bands. There’s a twisting staircase that pumps out tones from organ parts retrieved from a church flooded during Hurricane Katrina; a giant stand-up bass with a weed-whacker line for a string and a bathtub for a resonator; a tall, weather-vane–like structure hooked up to an analog synthesizer. “It reacts to rain, sunlight and wind velocity and uses those variables to modulate an ever-present, droning E major chord,” explains its inventor, Quintron, a New Orleans musician who conducts Music Box performances. The concerts attract hundreds who wait in line for a chance to sit in a small set of bleachers.
Read more about The Music Box at Smithsonian. Link -Thanks, Perrin!
The Abbey Road Hustle
(YouTube link)
The Beatles have been walking across that street for forty years now, and they still haven’t reached the other side! -via Arbroath
Who Said It: Jose Canseco or Gertrude Stein?
You might think you could easily distinguish the pithy wisdom of a baseball player from that of a feminist literary figure. Or can you? You’ll be given a quote, and you decide whether it came from Jose Canseco or Gertrude Stein. That’s the challenge of today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. What’s really confusing is how nonsensical the quotes are! In the end, I only scored 56%, which is what you’d expect from not knowing any of the answers. I hope you do better! Link
Meanwhile, in Russia
In Russia, even the dogs stop and and gather to sing when they hear the national anthem! However, as a commenter said elsewhere, their accents are so thick I can’t make out the lyrics. -via I Am Bored
Applying to Join the Chinese Communist Party
If it weren’t for the English subtitles, you’d think this was an everyday pop song, possibly about family. It’s more like a love song to the Chinese Communist Party, the ultimate in this young man’s aspirations. The propaganda music video is both amusing and unnerving. -via Metafilter
The Strangest Review Of The Avengers Ever
Want to know what two googly eyed chins thought about the blockbuster movie The Avengers? They loved it, and if you have a strange sense of humor you’ll love watching them talk about The Avengers, and other weird stuff, like a pair of real life chinigans.
Spoiler alert: the chins talk about something that happens within the first ten minutes of the film, so if you’re worried about going in to see the movie without knowing anything about it don’t watch. Otherwise, enjoy the madness review!
–via Best Week Ever
Cool Behind The Scenes Photos From Back To The Future
If you know and love the Back To The Future trilogy, but you’ve never understood how they filmed the hoverboard scene, or made a Delorean fly through the air, then this set of behind the scene photos might help.
Some are candid portraits, others show the crew hard at work getting the shot to look just right, and they all show the cast and crew having a genuinely good time filming the iconic trilogy.
And with 65 pics in this collection, it’s nerd-stalgia at its finest!
Link –via Geek Tyrant
Vinyl Record Star Wars AT-AT Clock
Tyler Garcia found a vinyl record of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and, like Michelangelo and the stone, saw an AT-AT inside. Also, a clock.
Each one of his handcrafted vinyl cuttings, most of which do not have Star Wars themes, is made to order.
Nine Circles of Hell in LEGO
Photo: mihaimariusmihu/Flickr
Abandon all hope (of reaching the same level of awesomeness), ye who see Mihai Mihu LEGO Nine Circles of Hell. The Romanian LEGO sculptor spent 7 months converting Dante's Inferno brick by brick into 9 frightfully fantastic dioramas.
The Brothers Brick has the gallery: Link - via io9
A Better Battleship Strategy
With the movie coming to theaters soon, there is a renewed interest in the board game Battleship. If you are cutthroat about winning, you’ll want to check out a tutorial on Battleship by Nick Berry of DataGenetics, the guy who brought us A Better Hangman Strategy. Be warned: there is math involved.
Mathematically, the chances of playing a perfect game with random firing are easy to calculate and are:
355,687,428,096,000 / 2,365,369,369,446,553,061,560,941,772,800,000
(This equates to, on average, once in every 6,650,134,872,937,201,800 games!)
But you can raise those offs with …more math! And lots of graphs. Link -Thanks, Nick!
What Were They Really Snorting?
Hollywood has given us lots of movies about drugs, drug dealers, and drug users. But they can’t use the real thing on the set: it’s expensive, illegal, and the actors would have died on the set of Blow or Scarface. Wired magazine looked up what movies and TV shows use to depict various drugs on film. Link -via Gizmodo I Mean
I mean, I’m sure I’m not the first person who’s noticed this, right? I mean, everyone’s saying it, right? I mean, everyone! Even Megan Draper in the 1960s is saying it. Did you notice? I mean, it was only once, a couple episodes ago, not last night’s. But, I mean, she said it! She woke Don up to tell him she wanted to pursue her acting career and quit the agency. And suddenly, I mean… And it was the literal usage, as in “What I mean is…” it was the modern-day equivalent of ummmm or what the French might call, ehhhhhhhh. And you know it wasn’t in the script. She just said it because that’s what modern-day actors/real people say today. And no one, not the editors or producers or directors caught it. Or if they did, the rest of the take was perfect so they just figured, no one is going to notice, right? I mean, why would they?
I mean, what’s going on folks? When did I mean take over from like as the most-used meaningless word of the times and are we all okay with this? I mean, like was less intrusive, wasn’t it? I mean, like, it was, wasn’t it?
The comments are now open below. I mean, go ahead and discuss amongst yourselves. Really. I mean, I mean it.
Welcome to Life
Sometime in the future, your consciousness may be salvaged after your body dies and stored digitally in cyberspace. What could possibly go wrong? Tom Scott speculates on the computer world called “Life.” The subtitle is “the singularity, ruined by lawyers.” Link -via Metafilter
Bandwiches
If bands were sandwiches, they would have some interesting ingredients.
AC/DC: Beer-battered kangaroo sausage, sliced hard-boiled egg, low-calorie port cheese, Dutch crunch.
The Pogues: Gin-fed lamb, whiskey-marinated turkey, beer-braised pork shoulder, mustard, soda bread.
Van Halen: Grilled 17-cheese sandwich on white bread; side of nacho cheese soup.
Ted Nugent: Cubed Grizzly bear, white buffalo brisket, unicorn haunch, Jim Beam barbecue sauce, white bread.
Oh there’s lots more of these at McSweeney’s. Link -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Flickr user Marshall Astor)
Animated Short – Apocalypse Pizza Video
It’s good to know that if we ever find ourselves in the midst of a zombie apocalypse we’ll still be able to order out for pizza and a video!
The team behind Apocalypse Pizza Video are hoping to turn their project into a feature film, and by the look of this trailer it could be a lot of fun to watch! (NSFWish due to coarse language and humor)
–via Nerd Bastards
Why Disco Happened
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music.
Love it or hate it, disco music will always be associated with the 1970s. But did it all begin and end in that decade? Not by a long shot- It actually had its roots in World War II Paris.
LE RÉSISTANCE
When you think of disco, what comes to mind? Probably polyester, mirror balls, and lines of dancers doing the Hustle. But surprisingly, the seeds that would one day grow into disco were first planted by the Nazis.
During their brutal occupation of France in World War II, the Germans outlawed any form of art and music that they deemed “impure.” The American jazz movement, which had experienced a renaissance in Paris in the 1930s, was high on the Nazi’s cultural hit list. In 1940 Hitler’s army began to shut down any cabaret that featured the “rhythms of belly-dancing negroes” and sending offenders to internment camps. (At the same time, however, the Nazis formed their own jazz band called Charlie and his Orchestra to broadcast taunting, satirical propaganda songs to the Allies over the radio.)
THE BEAT GOES ON
Unwilling to give up their beloved jazz, partying Parisians formed secret nightclubs that required passwords to get in, changed locations frequently, and tried to stay as quiet as possible. And without any jazz bands left, their only choice was to play records. The most famous club, Le Discotheque (French for “The Record Library”), opened on rue de la Huchette in 1941. With a discaire, or disc jockey, spinning jazz records all night long, the main attraction was dancing. Thumbing their noses at the occupying Reich, Le Discotheque and other underground clubs opened their doors to blacks and homosexuals, the same groups who would first embrace disco music 30 years later. The main ingredients that would result in disco in the 1970s were now in place.
LET’S DO THE TWIST!
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We’re Trekkies And We Know It
This parody of LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy and I Know It” starts a little weak and gets better as it goes. Just beam me up, Scotty! -via I Am Bored
Because Drinking and Gaming Are A Great Combo
If you’re a geek who loves both alcohol and gaming, then you’ll certainly love Arkeg. The system is pretty sweet as it comes with 69 games, a 5 lb CO2 tank, a 24″ hi-def LCD, a sweet sound sound system and, of course, a nice big cabinet to store the keg of your choice. On the other hand, for almost $4000, a few six packs and an X Box could be just as good.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
The Avengers As Nicktoons
Sure everyone loves The Avengers right now, but for anyone in the nineties, Nicktoons will always hold a place in their heart. That’s why this mashup is just so delightful, it provides us with two great things that are even better when together -the ultimate mashup goal.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Your Case Mod Wants to Step Out On the Town
I’ve seen my share of case mods, but this one is seriously impressive. Of course, while it looks amazing, it also seems like a huge pain in the butt to actually use on a real basis. I mean, who has room for this thing on their desk?
Link Via Geekosystem
Custom Made Gears Of War Replica Shotgun
Show your fellow cosplayers that you mean business with this DIY Gears Of War replica shotgun, which lets you load actual shells and scare the crap out of anyone suckered in to believing it actually fires live ammo.
Built by Mike Iverson of Blind Squirrel Props, the end result is stunningly realistic, and Mike was kind enough to include exhaustive step by step photos of the process, and basic plans so you can build one of these bad boys for yourself.
Now that’s one good looking boomstick!
Link –via Nerd Approved
Ask A Grown Man Starring John Hamm
Oh Mr. Hamm, is there anything you can’t do? You’re one hell of an actor, a funny guy, and ladies across the globe start drooling at the sight of you. And now you’re handing out some much needed, and spot on, advice to the young folks.
Hollywood-if you’re looking for the next Superman, you’ve found him!
–via Reddit
“I’m a Doctor, Not a….”
(Video Link)
Leonard McCoy, Julian Bashir and the Emergency Medical Holographic program from Star Trek are doctors. They are not many, many things. This video lists all of those disclaimed occupations.
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