Month: September 2016

Since its Amazon debut in 2014, critics have fallen madly in love with the Pfeffermans, a difficult family trying to make sense of their lives in the wake of their father coming out as trans. In anticipation of the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards, for which Transparent nabbed 10 nominations—including a repeat nomination for last year’s Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series winner Jeffrey Tambor—here are 15 facts you might not know about the streaming show, which is returning for a third season on September 23. 

1. A STORY ABOUT COURTENEY COX’S BUTT HELPED JUMPSTART JILL SOLOWAY’S CAREER.

While working her first L.A. writing gigs at The Steve Harvey Show and Nikki (which she called “the worst sitcom in the world”), Transparent creator Jill Soloway had some time on her hands to mess around on a show called Sit ‘n Spin with her friends. The show involved people reading monologues and/or fiction, for which Soloway penned the hilarious “Courteney Cox’s A**hole,” a work of fiction told from the perspective of Cox’s personal assistant. 

Soloway later sent the piece to a handful of literary magazines, while her agent passed it on to Alan Ball, executive producer of HBO’s Six Feet Under. Ball was impressed, telling TIME that the story, albeit a few pages long, was able to “convey the very real pain of a soul yearning to be authentic in a completely inauthentic world.” Also: He felt confident she’d be able to “write the hell out of Claire and Brenda.” Soloway won a spot in the Six Feet Under writer’s room. 

2. SOLOWAY AND LENA DUNHAM COMPETED FOR THE SAME HBO SLOT. (DUNHAM WON.)

This huge victory was not without a series of painful rejections, too. In what The New Yorker called a “downward slide”—the period immediately following her Six Feet Under residency in 2005—Soloway was fired from both HBO’s United States of Tara and Grey’s Anatomy. Then, she was beat out of what seemed to be a promising HBO slot by Lena Dunham (who would go on to create Girls). To add insult to injury, Soloway recalls people would frequently ask her if she was related to Dunham—”People were, like, it’s you, but younger and better.”

3. TRANSPARENT IS EXACTLY TWO PERCENT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.

Soloway knew she wanted to make her own family show ever since working on Six Feet Under. What she didn’t know is that her father would come out as trans at the age of 75—a pivotal moment which would eventually become the central storyline of the hit Amazon series. Speaking to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Soloway called it her “creative destiny.”

Soloway has also gone on record saying that the storyline of Shelly and Ed was informed by the death of her mother’s husband, who had frontal temporal dementia. Nevertheless, Soloway has been resistant to the label of “autobiography” through the years, telling Rolling Stone back in 2014 that Transparent is “98 percent fictionalized.”

“The Pfeffermans are just very real people,” she said. “The reason I wanted to cast Jeffrey [Tambor] is because he’s always reminded me of my parent. They really have a very similar sense of humor and that was just immediate. Other than that, it’s not really autobiographical.”

4. IT’S THE MOST TRANS-INCLUSIVE PRODUCTION IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY. 

Transparent producer Rhys Ernst told OUT that he felt strongly about casting a trans actor to portray a young Maura (Tambor) in season three’s flashback sequences, ultimately bringing 12-year-old Sophia Grace Gianna (who had recently transitioned) on for the part. 

This trans-inclusiveness has been a through line for the show’s three-season production: Ernst said that the show has employed more than 50 trans and gender-nonconforming people in the capacity of “crew members or as actors with speaking roles.” That doesn’t include what he estimates to be “hundreds of extras.”

5. JAY DUPLASS FELL INTO THE ROLE OF JOSH PFEFFERMAN.

During a get-together for directors that Jay and his brother Mark regularly hosted, Duplass got to talking with Soloway, who told him that she was struggling to find someone for the part of Josh Pfefferman. After he’d rattled off a list of actor suggestions, a light bulb went off in Soloway’s head: He was just the guy she was looking for, even though he wasn’t an actor and was already swamped with work on developing Togetherness for HBO. In Soloway’s mind, Duplass was the “wildly charismatic and wildly insecure” Jewish guy in his mid-30s that she’d been looking for the whole time. 

6. PEOPLE HAVE A HARD TIME SEPARATING JAY DUPLASS FROM JOSH PFEFFERMAN.

Living in Eagle Rock—a neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles, and the same general area where Transparent is filmed—has created a host of funny situations for Duplass. Particularly because people can’t seem to separate his on-screen character as the “roving male id” from his off-screen one as a father and husband when they bump into him at a Trader Joe’s. (Yes, he’s been known to have locals tell him not to “mess things up” with the rabbi—as if that were something he had control over.)

The differences don’t end at father and husband, either. Duplass told Gold Derby that he grew up going to Catholic school and “being overly responsible to everyone around [him].” Also, the sex: “I think Josh Pfefferman has more sex in season one than I’ve had in my entire life,” he said.

7. SOLOWAY EMBRACES IMPROVISATION ON SET. 

Season two of Transparent opens with a four-minute scene so perfect and categorically “Pfefferman,” it likely did not occur to you that the whole thing was predicated on a mistake. The whole family is gathering for a wedding portrait and we hear the photographer mis-gender Maura. Maura doesn’t let the flub go unnoticed, snapping back, “Did he just call me sir? This is over.”

Gaby Hoffman told Vanity Fair that this scene began as a “one-line moment in the script.” That is, Soloway stepped back and let “everybody [say] whatever the hell he or she was saying.” It was Tambor who made the snap decision to incorporate this mistake into the scene. 

Michaela Watkins (Yetta and Connie in season two) echoed Hoffman’s sentiments in an episode of WTF with Marc Maron, telling Maron that she remembered Soloway encouraging her to just use the script as a “roadmap.” “Throw it out, you know what happens. You do it.” Coming from such an accomplished writer, these words left an impression. 

“She’s not ego-driven,” Watkins said. “She didn’t do it because she needed to be revered. It’s how she does every single scene—whether it’s with two people or 100 people. She just horse-whispers you before it. And then you shoot it, and you’re operating from this other place.”

8. CHERRY JONES’S CHARACTER IS BASED ON POET EILEEN MYLES, WHO IS SOLOWAY’S GIRLFRIEND.  

Among Transparent’s slate of new cast members introduced in season two is Leslie (Cherry Jones), an intense feminist scholar who lures Ali in with her sexual confidence and wisdom. 

Soloway’s writing staff had encouraged her to read up on the work of Eileen Myles while fleshing out the character. Later, the two met while speaking on a panel at a museum event in San Francisco. When the opportunity presented itself, Soloway asked Myles what she meant by a line in one of her journals. “Whoever falls in love with me is in trouble,” that line read.

“It could also be true that anybody who falls in love with Jill is in trouble—deeply, deeply in trouble,” Myles responded. “If you both have strong wills, you’re always pushing the boundaries. Love is trouble, you know, which is one thing that is so great about it.”

(Funnily enough, the real Eileen Myles later appears as an extra in a scene opposite her “copy.” Her poetry is recited by many different characters throughout the season.) 

9. CARRIE BROWNSTEIN WAS ORIGINALLY SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROLE OF TAMMY.

As the story goes, Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein was so adored on the set of Transparent that a role was created just for her. “Originally, when we were trying to cast Tammy, her name came up,” Soloway said. “But I always felt Tammy was really tan and blonde, like Lady Diana or someone who spent some time in her childhood on a ranch. And Carrie just seemed too Jewy to play Tammy, but I really, really wanted to work with her, so in the writers’ room we created this character of Syd for her.”

10. SOLOWAY HAD GABY HOFFMAN IN MIND FOR THE PART OF ALI AFTER SEEING HER IN LOUIE.

In the season three premiere of Louie, Gaby Hoffman is introduced as Louis C.K.’s girlfriend just as the relationship is about to end. Though brief, her role in the larger arc of the series is vital, forcing C.K. to confront his introversion head-on. Soloway was blown away by the performance, telling Rolling Stone:

“I just loved the way she was talking the whole time and he’s trying to get a word in edgewise and he lets her break up with him. I just loved the way words rolled off her tongue and nothing seemed written. I loved how free she was. I was just like who is this really cool, Jewish lady? And she’s not even Jewish.”

11. JEFFREY TAMBOR USED MORE OF HIMSELF FOR THE CHARACTER OF MAURA THAN ANY OTHER ROLE. 

Jeffrey Tambor anticipated the biggest challenge of playing a trans character would be the physical transformation, though this was quickly proven incorrect. He told Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview that that part turned out to be “very, very easy” for him. The hardest part? Coming to terms with his true self. “I got to use more of Jeffrey than I’ve ever used in any role. Probably even in playing Jeffrey,” he said.

12. TAMBOR WENT “METHOD” TO WARM UP TO HIS ROLE AS MAURA.

Ahead of shooting the pilot episode of Transparent, Tambor was taken on a field trip by producers Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker. To get to the heart of his character, Maura, Tambor was encouraged to put on his full wardrobe and go out in public for the first time. The scariest part wouldn’t be the club-hopping but, in fact, the inevitable walk through the hotel lobby. 

“I can remember my legs were shaking, literally trembling—not so much because we were going to a club, but I was so nervous about the walk through the hotel lobby,” Tambor told the Los Angeles Times. “And I remember telling myself: ‘Remember this. Don’t forget this. Let this instruct every single one of your shots and your days.’ And it did. It has nothing to do with the entirety of what being a transgender person is, by any means, but it informed me.”

13. JUDITH LIGHT WAS VERY NERVOUS ABOUT SHOOTING THAT NSFW BATHTUB SCENE.

Two-time Tony Award-winning actress Judith Light’s reaction to reading the now-iconic bathtub scene in “Flicky-Flicky Thump-Thump” for the first time went something like this: “Oh my god, I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” Upon further encouragement from her manager Herb Hamsher, as well as castmates Amy Landecker, Gaby Hoffman, Kathryn Hahn, and Jay Duplass (all quite experienced with the art of the sex scene), she agreed to the intimate scene with her ex, Maura (Tambor). 

“When it was done they wrote me and said, ‘That was so beautiful.’ That’s the kind of working circumstance we have,” Light said.

She continued: 

“Jeffrey texted me afterward and I believe the text was something like, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this and thank you.’ Thanking me. He’s the most remarkable man. I’ve known for forever how incredibly talented he is. But this really just allows him to shine in a way he has long deserved. For my friend, I rejoice. He was there for me every single second of that scene. We were so present for each other and I think it comes across in the scene.”

14. FAITH SOLOWAY, JILL’S SISTER AND SHOW WRITER, WAS HARI NEF’S CAMP COUNSELOR. 

One of Transparent‘s breakout stars is the 23-year-old trans actress, model, and writer Hari Nef, who plays Gittel. Faith Soloway, who is a writer on the show (and also Jill’s sister) evidently knew of Nef because she had been her camp counselor at the Charles River Creative Arts Program in Dover, Massachusetts. Nef recalled that she received an email seemingly out of the blue from Jill asking if she’d be interested in being her date to a New York gala. “So I showed up, we hit it off, and she wrote me a part,” Nef said. 

15. TRANSPARENT‘S EMMY AWARD-WINNING MAIN TITLE THEME MUSIC WAS COMPOSED ON AN 80-YEAR-OLD PIANO.

Do not underestimate the power of a man and his 80-year-old piano. The nostalgia-inducing composition at the beginning of each episode is the work of Dustin O’Halloran, who is largely responsible for setting the “understated” tone of the rest of the series. Speaking with Song Exploder, O’Halloran described coming up in a “hippie Methodist church” community and learning to play the piano there. 

O’Halloran said that he used a Swiss piano from the 1930s for the theme song, the same piano he had recorded Piano Solos Vol. 2 on. He also admitted that he’d composed an earlier version to be used for the show but felt that it wasn’t right. “I was probably thinking too much about it being an opening title piece—more of a statement, like ‘the show is beginning!‘” O’Halloran’s secret for the finished tune: A “fuller” but still understated sound. Also, some killer harmonium. 

All images courtesy of Amazon.

We often think of space as something that happens Way Out There, but our planet is in and of the cosmos—and vice versa. The Moon, for one, was once a part of the rock we call home, and chunks of interstellar metal stud the globe. Now scientists in Argentina may have found one of the biggest chunks yet: a 34-ton meteorite fragment nicknamed “Gancedo.”

About 4000 to 5000 years ago, a meteor shower peppered the soil in the region that would become South America. Most of the action happened over a region northwest of Buenos Aires called Campo del Cielo (“Field of Sky”). The field was left pockmarked with craters, which have yielded more than 100 tons of space debris (some of which has a tendency to walk away). The largest lump ever found in the field is a whopper named El Chaco, which was said to weigh in at more than 40 tons when it was first discovered in 1980. Newer estimates have slimmed El Chaco down substantially, putting it at just under 35 tons.

Its challenger, the 34-ton Gancedo, was discovered on the border of the Chaco province. Scientists knew they’d found something good, but had no idea just how big Gancedo would be until it had been completely dug out.

Mario Vesconi is president of the Astronomy Association of Chaco. “While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 [metric] tons,” he told Argentinian newspaper Clarín. “The size and weight surprised us.”

Immense as both Argentinean fragments may be, they’re still vying for a silver medal. The title of Largest Meteorite rests comfortably with a 66-ton Namibian giant called Hoba, discovered in 1920.

Gancedo’s journey into posterity is just beginning. “We will weigh it again,” Vesconi told Télam. “Apart from wanting the added confidence of a double-check of the initial readings we took, the fact that its weight is such a surprise to us makes us want to recalibrate.”

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The Whole Shabangs are the most popular potato chip you’ve never heard of. Produced by the Keefe Group specifically for America’s prison inmates, the potato chips aren’t sold in stores—they’re sold in prison commissaries. But the potato chips, which blend barbecue, salt and vinegar, and a range of other mysterious flavors, are so popular that former inmates often seek them out once they get out of jail.

In the video below, NBC News reports that word of The Whole Shabangs is spreading: What started out as a prison snack is now sought after, not only by former prisoners and their friends and family members, but by other snack aficionados who have caught wind of the crunchy, flavorful chips. In fact, though you still won’t find The Whole Shabangs at your local supermarket, the Keefe Group recently began selling them online.

Check out the clip to find out more about the history of The Whole Shabang, and learn how prison inmates use the popular chip to make a delicious, sodium-filled soup.

[h/t Digg]

Banner Image Credit: iStock

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There’s an old saying, “Feed a cold, starve a fever.” But according to a recent study in the journal Cell, it might be more accurate to say, “Feed a viral infection, starve a bacterial infection.” That is, when you’re sick with a bacterial infection, fasting may be more effective than feasting, while viral infections may be alleviated by reaching for some chicken soup.

New Scientist reports that researchers at Yale wanted to determine the impact food has on illness recovery, so they rounded up a group of lab mice for some tests. They infected some mice with inflammation-triggering molecules from bacteria, and others with inflammation-triggering molecules from viruses. Then, they observed the effects of food (in this case, sugar glucose) on mouse recovery. They found that for mice with viral inflammation responses, consumption of glucose helped speed recovery. For mice with bacterial inflammation responses, however, glucose wasn’t just ineffective—it actually made them sicker, triggering seizures and even death.

Researchers believe glucose helped protect the brain cells of mice with viral infections from inflammation. In the case of bacterially infected mice, however, glucose digestion generated free radicals that ended up damaging neurons within the brain. Meanwhile, chemicals called ketones, produced by the bodies of fasting, bacteria-infected mice, seemed to protect these mice against neuronal damage.

Researchers still need to conduct more research to determine the exact implications of the study for humans. The next step, lead researcher Ruslan Medzhitov says, is to study the effects of eating or fasting on patients with sepsis (a complication of an infection that can cause organ failure). But for now, Medzhitov claims, it’s a good idea to listen to your body when you get sick: If you’re feeling feverish and famished, it’s likely you have a viral infection and should eat. But if you’re sick and lack an appetite, you may have a bacterial infection and might want to cut down on your food intake. As Medzhitov explains, “We think during illness one changes food preferences to support the appropriate metabolic program.”

[h/t New Scientist]

Technology has changed a lot in the past four decades, which means that kids today sometimes don’t know what to make of the gadgets their parents grew up with. Video game fans might remember the Atari 2600 (originally called the Atari VCS), the retro home console that helped rec room gaming go mainstream after its initial release in 1977. At the time, the bulky Atari 2600 was the height of sophistication. Now, as YouTube channel Fine Brothers Entertainment captures in its latest “Kids React” video, it’s simply a puzzling relic from the past for Generation Z.

For the uninitiated, “Kids React” is a “weekly show where kids aged 5-14 give their raw honest opinion about viral videos, politics, movie trailers, pop stars, YouTube stars and more,” according to its creators. If you’re really in the mood to feel old, you can watch even more episodes online.

[h/t Fine Brothers Entertainment]

Banner image: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons

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The low fuel warning light on your car’s dashboard is a familiar sight to many drivers, and if you’ve ever allowed the needle to dip below “E” on your gas gauge, you already know that “empty” doesn’t necessarily mean your tank is bone dry. But depending on your vehicle, it could be barely enough fuel to make it to the nearest gas station, or it could get you home with some to spare.

The auto repair service YourMechanic put together a handy chart detailing what the low gas light really means for various makes and models. As you can see below, the featured cars cover a wide range. Motorists behind the wheel of a Chrysler 200, for example, can squeeze as many as 108 miles out of their tank after the light turns on. The owners of a Chevy Silverado don’t have as much room to press their luck: The warning light means they only have 25 miles until their tank runs dry.

Just because your car can run past the empty line doesn’t mean you should pull a Cosmo Kramer and push it as far as possible. The fuel pump of a near-empty tank burns hotter than it does with a full tank of gas, so the more you drive your car down to the last drop, the greater the risk becomes of burning out the pump. Keep the chart in mind for emergency situations only.

[h/t YourMechanic]

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This mailbox may look ho-hum, but when it was strapped to a missile and fired from a submarine on June 8, 1959, the only hum was that of a Regulus I missile hurtling a hundred miles with important letters in tow. That’s right—this missile was the first (and last) of an ambitious, abandoned plan to send mail across the U.S. using Cold War-era weaponry.

That weaponry wasn’t exactly in short supply in 1959. That year, despite Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, East and West were still in a tense stalemate. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, tons of nuclear weapons were produced, and each side had a vested interest in showing just how terrifying its arsenal could be.

Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who helped Dwight D. Eisenhower win the presidency, was steeped in postwar American exceptionalism. It’s no wonder, then, that he dreamed of helping the country’s abundant nuclear technology go postal. Inspired by stories of the accuracy of the United States’ new missiles, Summerfield dreamed up a way for the Post Office and the Department of Defense to collaborate to make the mail even more efficient. Why not use the fast, targeted missiles being developed by the U.S. military to deliver mail?

Summerfield’s idea wasn’t exactly new—people had been experimenting with mail delivery via rocket for decades. In 1936, an experimental rocket-powered glider delivered mail from Greenwood Lake, New York to Hewitt, New Jersey in the first successful American attempt, and the idea was repeated in Germany and other countries through World War II. And just months before this mailbox made its fateful mission, naval officers had shown off the capacities of their new guided missiles by loading them with letters.

New or not, Summerfield was determined to make an official attempt to prove that missile mail was viable. At his suggestion, a grandiose experiment was undertaken by the Post Office Department, as it was then known, and the U.S. Navy.

Two special metal mailboxes were designed to hold a total of 3000 letters and be strapped onto the side of the Regulus I missile, a formidable weapon and the United States’ first nuclear deterrent to be entirely sea-based. The 42-foot-long missile weighed about seven tons and was designed to be guided and shot from submarines.

On the assigned day, the mailboxes were stuffed with 3000 identical letters from Summerfield to a slew of dignitaries, including the president, his cabinet, each member of Congress and members of the Supreme Court. The missile was fired from the USS Barbero, one of the subs assigned to patrol the Pacific and Atlantic and threaten Soviet targets, while it was off the coast of Florida. Twenty-two minutes later, it landed at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida, about 100 miles away [PDF].

The letters were given special postmarks, the formerly secret experiment was publicized, and missile mail was declared a success—not least because it not-so-subtly suggested that messing around with the United States’ hyperaccurate guided missile system wasn’t wise.

“Before man reaches the moon,” Summerfield gloated, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India, or Australia by guided missiles.” But he spoke too soon—apparently no serious consideration was ever given to his idea, and by the time his successor took office the idea was dead in the water. Today, one of the 11×11.5-inch mailboxes sits in the collection of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., a reminder of the first and only time the United States used guided missile to deliver mail … and a message.