Planning a post-election move to Canada? Don’t dig out your passport just yet. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that easy to emigrate North. For Americans to become Canadian residents, they pretty much either need to land a job offer, or marry a Canadian citizen. But if you’re really determined (and single), Business Insider reports that a dating app called Maple Match will pair you with a paramour from the land of snowshoes and syrup.
Maple Match launched in May 2016. After a seven-month beta period, the iOS app was officially released on November 5—just in time for the presidential election. For the most part, Maple Match is similar to other dating apps, like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble. But in addition to filling out a profile and selecting a picture, users are provided with the option of listing their citizenship, and stating which citizenship they’re looking to marry into. There’s also a survey designed to gauge users’ political views, and which ones they desire in a partner. Once your personal information is all filled out, Maple Match selects potential matches, and you can message the ones you’re most interested in.
Long-distance dating is hard, but plenty of people seem up for the challenge: As Vice reports, more than 4000 people signed up for Maple Match during its first week, and about 70 percent of those love-seekers were Canadian. There’s currently a waitlist.
Oscar-Claude Monet is beloved for his series of oil paintings depicting water lilies, serene gardens, and Japanese footbridges. The French painter manipulated light and shadow to portray landscapes in a groundbreaking way, upending the traditional art scene in the late 19th century. In honor of his birthday, here are 11 things you might not know about the father of French Impressionism.
1. HIS ARTISTIC TALENT WAS EVIDENT AT AN EARLY AGE.
Born in Paris in 1840, Monet began drawing as a young boy, sketching his teachers and neighbors. He attended a school of the arts and, as a young teenager, sold his charcoal caricatures of local figures. He also learned about oil painting and en plein air (outdoors) painting, which later became a hallmark of his style. Monet’s mother encouraged his artistic talent, but his father, who owned a grocery store, wanted him to focus on the grocery business. After his mother died in 1857, Monet left home to live with his aunt and, against his father’s wishes, study art.
2. HE SERVED AS A SOLDIER IN ALGERIA.
In 1861, Monet was drafted into the army. Forced to join the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry, he left Paris for Algeria, a territory that was then controlled by France. Monet’s father offered to pay for his son’s discharge if he would promise to give up painting, but Monet refused to abandon art. After serving one year of his seven-year military commitment, Monet got sick with typhoid fever. His aunt paid to get him released from the army, and she enrolled him in art school in Paris.
3. HE WAS SO FRUSTRATED WITH LIFE THAT HE JUMPED INTO THE SEINE.
In his late 20s, Monet was frustrated with the Académie, France’s art establishment. He hated creating formulaic artwork, copying the art that hung in the Louvre, and painting scenes from ancient Greek and Roman myths. Although he tried to get his paintings into the Academie’s art exhibits, his art was almost always rejected. Depressed and struggling to support himself and his family financially, Monet jumped off a bridge in 1868. He survived his fall into the Seine and began spending time with other artists who also felt frustrated by the Académie’s restrictions.
4. RENOIR CREATED A META PAINTING OF HIM.
Renoir’s “Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil.” Public Domain // Wikimedia Commons
In 1873, Monet was spending his summer in a rented home in Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris. His friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited Monet to spend time together and paint outdoors. The two men connected over their mutual dislike of the traditional style of the Académie. During his visit, Renoir painted Monet painting in his garden, creating a painting within a painting. The painting, straightforwardly called Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, depicts Monet standing outside as he paints flowers.
5. HE INDIRECTLY HELPED COIN THE TERM “IMPRESSIONISM.”
Monet created a community with other frustrated artists, a group that included Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne. The group, which called itself The Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc., organized an exhibition in 1874. The exhibition included groundbreaking artwork featuring bright, vivid colors and loose, seemingly spontaneous brushwork. After a critic compared one of Monet’s paintings—”Impression, Sunrise”—to an unfinished sketch (or “impression”), the term “Impressionists” caught on to describe the artists who displayed these radically different, new paintings.
6. HIS SECOND WIFE WAS IRRATIONALLY JEALOUS OF HIS FIRST WIFE.
Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son,” a painting of his first wife Camille Monet and their older son, Jean.
Public Domain // Wikimedia Commons
Monet frequently painted his first wife, Camille Doncieux, who worked as a model and had been in a relationship with the artist since the mid 1860s (they married in 1870). The couple had two sons, but Camille died, perhaps of uterine cancer, in 1879. Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a businessman and art collector, had been living with the Monets after her husband went bankrupt, and Monet may have started an affair with her while Camille was still alive. After Camille’s death, Hoschedé jealously destroyed all of her letters and photographs. Despite this, Hoschedé (along with her six children) lived with Monet and his two kids, and the couple married in 1892 after Hoschedé’s husband died. (Fun fact: One of Hoschedé’s daughters later married one of Monet’s sons, so the step-siblings became husband and wife.)
7. HE IMPORTED HIS WATER LILIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
From 1883 until his death in 1926, Monet lived in Giverny, a village in northern France. Over the years, he hired gardeners to plant everything from poppies to apple trees in his garden, turning it into a beautiful, tranquil place for him to paint. Finally wealthy from sales of his paintings, Monet invested serious money into his garden. He put a Japanese footbridge across his pond, which he famously painted, and he imported water lilies from Egypt and South America. Although the local city council told him to remove the foreign plants so they wouldn’t poison the water, Monet didn’t listen. For the last 25 years of his life, he painted the water lilies in a series of paintings that showcased the plants in varying light and textures.
8. HE PAID A GARDENER TO DUST HIS WATER LILIES.
As Monet’s garden expanded, he hired six full-time employees to tend to it. One gardener’s job was to paddle a boat onto the pond each morning, washing and dusting each lily pad. Once the lilies were clean, Monet began painting them, trying to capture what he saw as the light reflected off the water.
9. HIS CRITICS MOCKED HIS VISION PROBLEMS.
Circa the 1910s. Getty
Around 1908 when he was in his late 60s, Monet began having trouble with his vision. Diagnosed with cataracts in 1912, he later described his inability to see the full color spectrum: “Reds appeared muddy to me, pinks insipid, and the intermediate or lower tones escaped me.” When he became legally blind in 1922, he continued painting by memorizing the locations of different colors of paint on his palette. Monet delayed getting risky cataract surgery until 1923, and critics mocked him for his blurry paintings, suggesting that his Impressionist style was due to his failing vision rather than his artistic brilliance. After two cataract surgeries, Monet wore tinted glasses to correct his distorted color perception and may have been able to see ultraviolet light.
10. LAST YEAR, THE WORLD DISCOVERED A NEW MONET PASTEL.
In 2015, an art dealer in London discovered an unknown Monet pastel that had been hidden behind another Monet drawing that he had bought at a 2014 auction in Paris. The pastel depicts the lighthouse and jetty in Le Havre, the port in France where Monet lived as a child. Art scholars authenticated the pastel as an authentic Monet artwork and dated it to 1868, around the time he jumped into the Seine.
11. TOURISTS CAN VISIT HIS HOME AND GARDENS.
MIGUEL MEDINA // AFP // Getty Images
In 1926, Monet died of lung cancer. Starting in 1980, his former home in Giverny has been open to tourists to see his gardens, woodcut prints, and mementos. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Giverny to walk through the artist’s famous garden and refurbished home. Besides looking at a variety of flowers and trees, visitors can also see Monet’s bedroom, studio, and blue sitting-room.
For Nutella fans in Europe, there’s now a new way to consume the chocolatey hazelnut spread: slathered between two burger buns. As Business Insider reports, the “Sweety con Nutella” is the latest concoction on the menu at McDonald’s Italy.
The item looks like a burger at first glance, but fortunately beef has been left out of the recipe. The official McDonald’s Italy Facebook page describes the fast food treat as “soft bread with a creamy, indulgent center.”
Instead of serving the product alongside traditional burgers over hot food counters, it will be available at McCafés. The post doesn’t specify how much customers will be paying for the glorified Nutella sandwich, but based on the 75,000 “likes” it has received so far, plenty of people are eager to give it a try. This isn’t McDonald’s first bold attempt to mix sweet with savory: A few years ago, the fast food giant experimented with bubble-gum flavored broccoli aimed at kid consumers. (It didn’t last long.) Time will tell if their latest endeavor has more success.
In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon on behalf of millions of parents whose kids spent money on in-app purchases without permission, on the grounds that the tech company made it far too easy for children to run up unlimited charges without any kind of permission from the account holder. Now, a federal judge has ruled that Amazon needs to set up a payment plan for the eligible customers to begin in 2017, Reuters reports.
The FTC alleged that, beginning in 2011, Amazon’s lack of parental permission guards resulted in $86 million in unauthorized charges for mobile games targeted toward kids like “Ice Age Village,” and subsequent updates to the in-app purchase process did little to fix the issue. According to the FTC, “kids’ games often encourage children to acquire virtual items in ways that blur the lines between what costs virtual currency and what costs real money.” A 2012 update to the charge system limited the amount of money kids could spend without parental permission, but still allowed charges of up to $20 without any kind of approval from a parent’s account. Internal communications from Amazon show that employees knew the extent of the problem, and likened the situation to “near house on fire.”
A U.S. district judge in Seattle found the company liable in April 2016, and has now ordered the company to begin paying out eligible customers. Regulators had argued for a $26.5 million lump-sum payout, but the judge found those damages to be too high. Instead, the company will have to alert customers who are eligible starting next year, and begin reimbursing them in cash (not gift cards, as Amazon requested).
Amazon is not the first tech company to be held accountable for profits reaped from kids buying digital goods without their parents’ knowledge. Apple and Google have previously been targeted by the FTC over similar issues, and began paying refunds out in 2014.
As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, November 14.
Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!
Set in 1951 in the fictitious tiny Indiana town of Hickory, Hoosiers (1986) starred Gene Hackman as Norman Dale, a man whose promising career coaching college basketball was forever ruined when he hit one of his players. After spending more than a decade in the Navy, Dale gets a second chance at coaching with the Hickory High School Huskers, where he quickly discovers how important even high school basketball is to the town and to the Hoosier state.
Slowly, Dale manages to win over the town and its former star player, Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis), when his seemingly unusual tactics begin to yield positive results on the court. By changing Jimmy’s mind and helping to get the local drunk, Shooter Flatch (Dennis Hopper), on the wagon with the promise of an assistant coach position, Dale also impresses his world-weary colleague, Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey). In honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, here are 10 facts you might not have known about the Oscar-nominated sports classic.
1. NORMAN DALE WAS BASED ON BOBBY KNIGHT.
First-time feature film writer Angelo Pizzo and equally-green director David Anspaugh grew up in Indiana and were roommates at Indiana University, so naturally they wanted to make a movie about the state and its love of basketball. But while they had heard and been inspired throughout their lives by the story of the tiny 1954 Milan High team that shocked everybody by winning the state championship, Pizzo discovered they were “too nice” and had “no real conflict,” so instead he made the team out of five of his friends from high school, created an assistant coach from scratch, and made Dale with Bobby Knight, Indiana University’s longtime—and legendarily volatile—head coach in mind.
“I wondered what would happen if Knight punched a player,” Pizzo said. “I utilized Knight’s offensive philosophy: four passes before a shot. I also created an arc for him where he actually listened to a player.” (In real life, Knight was accused of several acts of violence, and eventually dismissed from his position at Indiana for what the school’s president described as a “pattern of unacceptable behavior.”)
2. JACK NICHOLSON WANTED TO PLAY THE COACH.
After reading the script, Nicholson told Pizzo and Anspaugh, “I have to play this character.” However, he was unable to take the role because he was serving as a witness in a lawsuit, which sidelined him for six months. After the film came out, Nicholson said to Anspaugh that the movie and its stars were great, but that it would have been a “megahit” if he been its star.
3. HARRY DEAN STANTON WAS APPROACHED TO PLAY SHOOTER.
Venerable character actor Harry Dean Stanton was offered the role of Shooter, but passed. In 2013 he expressed regret over saying no to the film, and couldn’t remember his reasons for declining it. Dennis Hopper was also reluctant to play Shooter, as he had “just stopped drinking,”but eventually signed on and earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts.
4. SEVEN OF THE EIGHT PLAYERS WERE FROM INDIANA.
The lone non-Hoosier was David Neidorf, who played Shooter’s son Everett. (He auditioned at the Beverly Hills Y.) The rest were picked from an open casting call in Indianapolis for anyone who could play hoops. Estimates on how many people auditioned range from 400 to 800 hopefuls.
The athletes studied 1950s game film and trained and rehearsed for over two months. “We’d spent all our lives learning to play one way, and then we had to start shooting a completely different way,” Steve Hollar, who played Rade, said. “No behind-the-back passes, no hand-checking.”
5. GENE HACKMAN’S AGENT TRIED TO GET THE DIRECTOR FIRED.
Hackman and Anspaugh clashed throughout most of the production. “Gene had me on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Anspaugh told Vulture. “He gave me my first anxiety attack: One morning I woke up and I couldn’t walk, the room was spinning. I thought every day on the film was going to be my last because Gene’s agent was trying to get me fired.“
According to Anspaugh, the only thing that saved his job was the dailies. “The producers said, ‘Look, David’s not getting fired,'” the director recalled. “And we showed a half-hour of dailies to Gene’s agent and he saw that what we were making was actually pretty good.”
6. HACKMAN TOLD DENNIS HOPPER THAT THE MOVIE WAS GOING TO SINK THEIR CAREERS.
During a happy montage of Hickory winning a string of games, Dale was shown saying something to Shooter on the bench that made Shooter laugh. It wasn’t until years later that Anspaugh learned what Hopper was laughing at: Hackman had told him, “Hopper, I hope you’ve invested well, because you and I are never gonna work after this movie. This is a career-ending film for both of us.”
7. HOPPER USED JAMES DEAN AS INSPIRATION.
Hopper had acted alongside James Dean in both Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). For a scene where he needed to act drunk in the latter film, Dean asked director George Stevens for 30 seconds so that he could spin around to better feel the inebriation. Remembering this, Hopper asked Anspaugh for the same 30 seconds.
There’s another connection between Hoosiers and Dean: in 1951, the Marion, Indiana-born actor had played basketball against the Milan High School team.
8. HOPPER FOUGHT TO HAVE A SCENE CUT FROM THE FILM.
In the original script, Shooter leaves rehab to watch the state championship. Hopper, who had just gotten sober, thought it was detrimental to the story. “We sat down over coffee, and he said, ‘Guys, I wish I had brought this up earlier. I knew there was something that bothered me about this scene. It doesn’t work. It can’t happen. It would suggest Shooter didn’t take his sobriety seriously. And I know from experience that Shooter made a real commitment, and there’s no way he would leave that hospital,'” Anspaugh recalled. “And Angelo and I had been living with that scene in our heads for years. And we really argued against [cutting] it. And Dennis said, ‘No, trust me.’ And we trusted him, and he was absolutely right.”
9. ORION MADE THE FILMMAKERS CUT ALMOST A FULL HOUR FROM THE FILM.
Anspaugh and Pizzo wanted to release their two-hour-and-48-minute version of the movie. The studio insisted that they needed to cut it down to 114 minutes. Among the many scenes excised was Buddy (Brad Long) asking back on the team and two scenes that developed Norman and Myra’s budding romance more. Anspaugh said “the audience really got cheated and robbed” over the cuts.
10. HACKMAN ENDED UP BEING IMPRESSED WITH THE FILM, AND ANSPAUGH.
Hackman insisted on viewing the movie before he agreed to go in to re-record some of his audio. “Angelo and I knew that if he didn’t like the movie, he wouldn’t show up at the studio to re-record his dialogue,” Anspaugh said. “But he showed up. He walked in to the room, took his glasses off, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘How the f*ck did you do that?'”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Image credit: TightsShop
The words of Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson are immortalized in their classic novels and poems, and now, book lovers can take them off the page and turn them into fashion statements. These bold tights, featured over at My Modern Met Selects, incorporate passages and illustrations from history’s most beloved texts into their designs.
The artist behind the Jerusalem-based Etsy store TightsShop got into apparel by printing designs on baby clothes, and has since moved on to pantyhose and tights. A few of the items in their inventory include texts from Romeo and Juliet, Winnie the Pooh, “Annabel Lee,” The Secret Garden, and Anne of Green Gables. Other designs feature no words at all, only illustrations from books like The Little Prince, Where the Wild Things Are, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Printed tights range in price from $21 to $29 and are available in a variety of sizes. If you don’t see something you like, the shop also offers custom-printed tights for $34—all challenges are welcome.
I love a good brain teaser. I’m not sure this is a good brain teaser, but I spent way too long trying to figure it out, so I’ll toss it out here for you guys. What goes in the box? It’s not six.
While you think about it, here’s a different kind of puzzle. Can you spot the Oscar statuette hidden among the 3-CPOs?
OK, did you come up with the answer? If you’ve never driven a car with a manual transmission, it might have stumped you.
That was fun. Here are some other quizzes and puzzles:
While today we can get machines to write for us, for most of human history, writing was a manual endeavor. And there are people who are super passionate about keeping it that way. Some schools are building handwriting requirements into their curriculum, although even the positive research results on the benefits of handwriting over typing aren’t big enough to be super conclusive, and some studies find that cursive, in particular, probably isn’t any better than other methods of putting words to paper. But handwriting has a long and storied tradition in human history, and if only for that reason, it’s not going away anytime soon. Here are nine facts about handwriting through the ages, courtesy of Anne Trubek’s recently published book The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting.
1. THE WORLD’S FIRST WRITING SYSTEM WAS TINY.
Cuneiform, the Sumerian writing system that emerged from Mesopotamia 5000 years ago, was usually etched into clay tablets that were often only a few inches wide. Trubek describes most of the Cuneiform tablets she handled at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York as being only half the size of her iPhone (though who knows if she has a 5 or a 6S). “Find the second portrait of Lincoln on the penny,” a Morgan Library curator told her. “You know, the one of his statue inside the Lincoln Memorial on the obverse? That’s how small the script can be.”
2. MEDIEVAL WRITING WAS REGIONAL.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, different scripts developed regionally as writers embellished and tweaked existing systems to create their own styles. However, this made books a little hard to read for those not educated in that exact script. All books were written in Latin, but the letters were so different that many scribes couldn’t read writing from other regions.
3. THERE IS AN ENTIRE FIELD DEVOTED TO READING HANDWRITING.
Don’t feel bad if you can’t decipher other people’s writing easily. “The truth is, most of us already cannot read 99 percent of the historic record,” Trubek writes. Paleographers study for years to specialize in particular scripts used in a certain time and certain context, such as medieval book scripts or 18th century legal documents. “In other words,” Trubek points out, “even someone whose life work is dedicated to reading cursive cannot read most cursive.”
4. CHARLEMAGNE WAS A STICKLER FOR HANDWRITING.
The emperor—who was largely illiterate himself—decreed in the 9th century that the same script be used across the Holy Roman Empire, an area that covered most of Western Europe. Called Carolingian minuscule, the uniform script dominated writing in France, Germany, Northern Italy, and England until the 11th century. The Gothic script we associate with medieval times today is a derivation of Carolingian minuscule that popped up during the 12th century. It was later revived in the 15th century, and became the basis for Western typography.
5. MONKS WERE NOT FANS OF PRINTING PRESSES.
The 15th century monk Johannes Trithemius defended the need for handwriting in his essay “In Praise of Scribes.” He claimed that while scripture could last a thousand years, the printed book was “thing of paper and in a short time will decay entirely.” Printing would make books unsightly and introduce spelling errors, and he predicted that history would judge “the manuscript book superior to the printed book.” It had nothing to do with him losing his once-steady job to a machine, no.
Indeed, Martin Luther complained of books much like people today complain about the quality of writing online, saying “the multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this form of writing.”
6. THE FIRST FONT WAS VERY SCRIPT-LIKE.
The first printed books were designed to look a whole lot like the manuscripts of that day, so as not to shock people with newfangled design. Johannes Gutenberg and his hired craftsmen hand-carved an elaborate Gothic script into 290 unique characters for the printing press, allowing the printer to recreate every letter in upper- and lowercase, as well as punctuation, so that the type looked just like what a scribe would make. The first letters of every section were even red, just like manuscript style dictated.
7. HISTORICALLY, HANDWRITING PROFESSIONALS WERE QUITE UPWARDLY MOBILE.
When printing put scribes out of work, they instead became teachers, tutoring and writing books on penmanship. These writing masters became wealthy professionals in a way that they had never been as simple scribes. When businesses and governments began hiring secretaries for the first time, who would take dictation and have a working knowledge of several different scripts, it became an unusually effective way to rise up the class ranks in medieval Europe. The papal secretary was the highest position a commoner could occupy in society.
8. IN THE 17TH CENTURY, HANDWRITING WAS PERSONALLY REVEALING
In the 16th and 17th centuries, different scripts became more than just a sign of where you learned. Specific scripts were established for classes and professions, and even for gender. Wealthy Europeans would use one script for their personal correspondence and another for their legal and business correspondence. A whole host of scripts in England were developed just for court use, making many documents completely illegible to anyone not trained in that specific style of writing.
9. PUNCTUATION WAS RARE UNTIL THE 18TH CENTURY.
Before literacy became widespread, spelling varied widely from person to person, and nothing was standardized. It became uniform over time, and the first dictionaries weren’t published until the 17th century. Even then, standardized spelling didn’t become regular for another century. Punctuation was even worse, remaining “largely nonexistent or nonstandardized,” according to Trubek, until the 18th century.
