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Why Does Seeing Food Make Your Mouth Water?
Today’s Big Question: Why does seeing food make your mouth water?
The Best Time to Buy a Plane Ticket
You can save up to 30 percent on your plane ticket if you book at the right time. Here’s when to buy those tickets for optimal savings.
A Brief(ing) History of the White House Press Secretary
The official position of White House Press Secretary is more recent than you might think—in the 19th century, the press had no regular presence at the White House. Theodore Roosevelt changed all that.
A hiring manager won’t notice your slick suit, sterling resume, or clever conversation if they’re turned off by a weak handshake or poor eye contact. Created by UK loans company On Stride Financial (and spotted by Lifehacker), the infographic below lists seven non-verbal behaviors that bug prospective employers during job interviews, and—even more importantly—advises how to avoid them.
[h/t Lifehacker]
January 26, 2017 – 6:30pm
Every year since 1981, the Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, have taken place the day before the Academy Awards to celebrate the worst in cinema. Ironically, on several occasions actors have won both a Razzie and an Oscar—sometimes in the same year (we’re looking at you, Sandra Bullock). Yet the Razzies never cease to amaze with their picks. Here are 12 surprising winners.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s first film after the juggernaut Titanic was the 1998 swashbuckling remake of The Man in the Iron Mask. He played twins King Louis XIV and Philippe, and apparently neither one of them gave a very impressive performance. In 1999—five years after he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape—DiCaprio defeated Spice World to win for Worst Screen Couple at the Razzies, which means he won twice.
In 1991, more than a quarter-century before he was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump won a Worst Supporting Actor Razzie for playing himself in Ghosts Can’t Do It. The movie’s IMDb description reads: “Elderly Scott kills himself after a heart attack wrecks his body, but then comes back as a ghost and convinces his loving young hot wife Kate to pick and kill a young man in order for Scott to possess his body and be with her again.” Anthony Quinn plays Scott, and Bo Derek plays Kate (Leo Damian played the young man, not Trump). Trump won the award at the 11th annual ceremony, held on March 24, 1991. If it’s any consolation, John Derek won Worst Director for the movie, Bo Derek won Worst Actress, and the movie tied with Andrew Dice Clay’s The Adventures of Ford Fairlane for Worst Picture. In his category, Trump edged out Gilbert Gottfried (who was nominated for three movies), Burt Young, Wayne Newton, and his own co-star, Leo Damian.
Eddie Redmayne’s 2016 Razzie win is yet another example of an Oscar winner alternating the high with the low, because the previous year he won a Best Actor Oscar for The Theory of Everything (and was nominated in the same category again last year, for The Danish Girl). Redmayne beat out Chevy Chase, Josh Gad, Kevin James, and Jason Lee to take home the Worst Supporting Actor award for Jupiter Ascending, which received additional nominations for Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Channing Tatum), Worst Actress (Mila Kunis), and Worst Director and Screenplay (the Wachowskis)—though Redmayne was the film’s single award winner.
Michael Moore’s controversial 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 treated both former president George W. Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as villains. In 2005, for the first time ever, the Razzies nominated a movie that was both critically-acclaimed and a financial success (it grossed $222 million worldwide). Bush beat out Ben Stiller, Ben Affleck, Colin Farrell, and Vin Diesel—actual actors—for Worst Actor, while Rumsfeld was named Worst Supporting Actor over perennial favorite Val Kilmer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jon Voight, and Lambert Wilson. Bush also won for Worst Screen Couple: “George W. Bush and either Condoleezza Rice or his Pet Goat,” the book Bush read to Florida schoolchildren the morning of the 9/11 attacks. Fahrenheit 9/11 won a total of four Razzies, including one for Britney Spears, who made a tiny cameo in the film (as herself).
Over the course of his more than 50-year career, Marlon Brando earned eight Oscar nominations and won twice. But that didn’t prevent him from starring in a few stinkers. Brando received his first Razzie nod at the very first Razzie Awards, in 1981, when he was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor for The Formula. He was nominated in the same category again in 1993, for Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and then again in 1997, when he won for playing Dr. Moreau in the critically panned The Island of Dr. Moreau. He beat out co-star Val Kilmer, Burt Reynolds, Steven Seagal, and Quentin Tarantino to win the not-so-coveted award.
Neil Diamond segued into film acting when he starred in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer. The movie grossed a middling $27 million, but the Diamond-penned and performed soundtrack sold 5 million copies. The odd thing is, in the same year that Diamond won a Worst Actor Razzie for The Jazz Singer, he was nominated for a Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy Golden Globe for the same role.
Long considered one of the world’s greatest actors, Sir Laurence Olivier fell from grace in 1981 when he, like his co-star Neil Diamond, won a Razzie for The Jazz Singer—in Olivier’s case, it was a Worst Supporting Actor award, which he ended up sharing with John Adames from Gloria (so at least he wasn’t alone in his shame). It’s a head-scratcher how the Shakespearean actor—who won three Oscars, three Golden Globes, and five Emmys—ended up with not one, but two Razzies (he won a Worst Actor award in 1983 for Inchon, besting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of Conan the Barbarian). But the Razzies weren’t the end of Olivier’s lauded career: In 1984 he won an Emmy for King Lear.
In 1989, McDonald’s iconic mascot, Ronald McDonald, won a Worst New Star award—beating out then-newcomer Jean-Claude Van Damme—for playing himself in Mac and Me. The movie, about a wheelchair-using young boy and his alien friend, was also nominated for Worst Director, Worst Picture, and Worst Screenplay. Today, Mac and Me is probably best-known for finding its way into movie clips whenever Paul Rudd appears on Conan.
Sylvester Stallone is a three-time Oscar nominee, and a Razzie veteran. He won his first Golden Raspberry in 1985, for Worst Actor in Rhinestone. He has been nominated for dozens more Razzies since then, and won 10 of them, including a Worst Actor of the Century in 2000 and the Razzie Redeemer award in 2016, which is about as nice as the Razzies get, as it was for his move “From All-Time Razzie Champ to Award Contender for Creed” because of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod he received last year for Creed.
Oscar-winning screenwriters Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) and Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) won a Razzie in 1998 for adapting the book The Postman into a terrible Kevin Costner movie. Their script, according to the Razzies, was worse than the screenplays for Anaconda, Batman & Robin, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Speed 2: Cruise Control. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Roth and Helgeland weren’t the only members of The Postman team to earn some attention from the Razzies; the film also won for Worst Picture (Costner), Worst Actor (again, Costner), Worst Director (again, Costner), and Worst Song (not Costner). The day after the Razzies, Helgeland and writer/director Curtis Hanson won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for L.A. Confidential. Roth, who had won an Oscar in 1995 for writing Forrest Gump, shook off his Golden Raspberry win and went on to win three more Oscars (and counting).
January 26, 2017 – 6:00pm
There’s strong evidence that babies inherit their gut microbiomes from their mothers, but it’s been unclear if the microbiome transmission takes place in the womb, at birth, or after birth; there are likely multiple paths of transmission unfolding over time. Microbial diversity is crucial to building up many functions, including the immune system, digestion, and even combating complex diseases. Recent research has found a connection between our gut microbiomes and our mental health as well.
However, studying the direct transmission of these microbes and identifying the strains of bacteria has been difficult until recently. Now researchers at the Centre for Integrative Biology at the University of Trento (UoT), Italy, have developed methods to track this microbial “vertical transmission,” as it’s called, and made some new discoveries in their methodological study, published in mSystems, an open access journal from the American Society for Microbiology.
“We know the infant increases [its] microbial diversity after birth and will continue doing so until being an adult,” senior study author Nicola Segata, an assistant professor at UoT, tells mental_floss. “We needed to understand from where microbes are coming in the first place.”
Many microbes are likely transmitted from mother to infant at birth and just after birth through direct contact with the birth canal, the skin, and through breast milk, but they had not yet done thorough investigations of the strains of bacteria to corroborate this. This is also important in the case of identifying the transmission of microbes that are dangerous to the infant’s health, such as Group B Streptococcus, which can cause an infection, and even death, in infants.
Segata explains, “Our contribution is really tracking which bacteria are moving from mother to infant. It was already known that certain microbes were present in the mother and infant but each had a different strain of, say, E. coli or Bifidobacterium. We looked to see if mothers and infants had the same strain of E. coli, or if it was a different strain from other infants and mothers.”
Taking fecal and breast milk samples from five mother-infant pairs when the infants were 3 months, 10 months, and, for one pair, at 16 months of age, Segata and his team used a technique called shotgun metagenomic sequencing of 24 microbiome samples of either fecal or breastmilk samples to determine which microbes were present. (This technique makes it possible to sample genes from all organisms in a sample.) Then they used another method known as metatranscriptomics to study RNA in fecal samples to identify active microbes.
“Each mother and infant pair had different strains of bacteria, but when you match each mother and her infant, they have the same strain, so this is strong evidence of the strain coming from the mother,” Segata says.
Another important discovery, Segata says, is that “these strains acquired from the mother are also active in the infant gut, they are alive. It’s important that the strains moving from mother to infant are active, colonizing.”
While this study allowed them to say confidently, “We can track microbe transmission from mother to infant,” Segata says their next study will allow them to identify which microbes, and whether they will survive in the infant gut.
January 26, 2017 – 5:30pm
iStock
The town of Flint, Michigan, passed an ordinance in 2008 barring residents from wearing saggy pants that drop below the buttocks.
Screenshot via Orbitz
In 1900, eleven years after Michelin was founded, the tire company released its first city guide as a way to promote travel to its customers. In the spirit of the guide’s origins, Orbitz has published a map plotting the fastest way to visit every Michelin-starred restaurant in the U.S. by car.
America is home to a number of areas with the most Michelin-starred restaurants on Earth—including the San Francisco area, which boasts more than 50 stars spread out across more than 30 establishments, and is where this road trip starts. After knocking out the California spots, drivers take a 2111-mile trip to Chicago, where 26 Michelin-starred eateries await them. After that, there are two culinary destinations left to visit: New York City, which has more stars than any other city in the U.S. (with 77), and Washington D.C., which received its first Michelin guide this year. Even though the restaurants are concentrated in just four states, the sheer number of restaurants on the list means that if you ate at a different one each night, it would take you five months to try them all.
The road trip is 3426 miles in total, with the optimal distance calculated by road trip wizard Randy Olson (you may be familiar with his epic National Park route or his “Where’s Waldo?” search algorithm). You can check out an interactive version of the map, complete with each restaurant’s name, address, and total number of stars, at Orbitz.com.
January 26, 2017 – 4:30pm
Decades ago, Hollywood used to put previews of their coming attractions after the conclusion of their theatrical releases. The teasers earned the nickname “trailers” because they followed the feature film.
Today, trailers aren’t such an afterthought. Studios spend millions of dollars stirring up anticipation for their big-budget movies by releasing trailers that promise consumers something worth the hassle and expense of a ticket. The responsibility for taking the most dazzling 120-odd seconds from hours of footage and splicing it into a coherent—and compelling—mini-movie falls on trailer editors, who screen films months in advance in order to create previews that will build the viral buzz filmmakers look for.
To better understand the job, mental_floss spoke with several editors at three of the most highly respected firms in the business. Here’s how they get you excited about the next blockbuster.
If you think studios are worried about rough cuts of their films falling into the wrong hands, you’d be correct. As some of the few pairs of eyes outside of the production to see a movie months before release, trailer houses must make sure their offices can’t be tapped by potential pirates. Ron Beck, the owner and creative director of Tiny Hero, says that only employees at Fort Knox might be able to relate to the level of security that trailer editors deal with. “There are cameras everywhere,” he says. “We have sensors that record everyone who goes in and comes out of a door.” Rough cuts of movies typically get delivered on encrypted hard drives and are edited only on hardware that’s inaccessible to an open network.
“All of [the studios] are careful, but Marvel leads the pack,” Beck says. “Their stuff is super-strong. That’s why you rarely see their movies pirated.”
In order to begin work on marketing campaigns, trailer firms are usually given extremely early footage that has yet to be polished and edited. Rough cuts might emphasize plot points or characters that wind up getting minimized by the time the picture is done, or “locked.” David Hughes of the UK-based firm Synchronicity says he’s seen a few movies that he barely recognized once they hit theaters. “Bridget Jones’s Diary was quite dark at one point,” he says, “and I recall a totally different opening to Bowfinger where the film-within-the-film was called Star Wars rather than Chubby Rain because the accountant who wrote it was so stupid he didn’t know a film called Star Wars actually existed.”
Since films continue to get pared down right up until release, it’s also common to see scenes in trailers that don’t ultimately make the final cut. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels [is] my favorite example, because someone wrote to complain that they had waited the whole film to see Steve Martin push an old lady into a swimming pool, as seen in the trailer, only to find that the scene wasn’t in the finished film.”
Because editors see films so far in advance, they’re often looking at footage full of green screens and unfinished effects work. But if an editor feels like a scene would bolster the trailer’s impact, they can request the studio fast-track the CGI. “We can’t ask what they shoot first, because productions usually revolve around an actor’s schedule,” Beck says. “But we can ask for visual effects stuff we need to be done first.”
Dan Lee, who spent 10 years at Mark Woollen and Associates before migrating to the buzzed-about firm Project X, says that editors are often called upon by directors or producers to splice together a “sizzle reel” made out of stock or existing footage in order to sell a studio on a movie. “It’s becoming increasingly common to do,” he says. “It’s an inexpensive way to sell someone on the vibe of a movie.” Director Joe Carnahan commissioned a reel when he was looking to direct a theatrical version of Daredevil (above).
For last summer’s Terminator: Genisys, fans who viewed the trailer were slightly annoyed to learn—spoiler—that perpetual victim John Connor was a Terminator in yet another revision of the franchise’s confusing canon. But those edicts usually come down from the studio, according to Beck. “I like to tease, not tell,” he says. “In certain movies, though, you have to give it up, or the trailer won’t even be good. Revealing a twist is ultimately the studio’s decision, though.”
Trailers are often the result of other trailers that studios noticed were particularly effective in engaging an audience emotionally. One example: the preview for 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. “The one that always comes to mind is the trailer for the Michael Bay-produced remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where black frames were inserted off the beat to disorienting effect,” Hughes says. “This technique has been borrowed for many horror trailers since, including some that we’ve made.”
Another trend-making trailer: the one for 2010’s Inception, with its thunderous “braam” sounds that seemed to influence every heavy action/drama film that followed.
Because trailer content is subject to many of the same ratings restrictions as the feature film itself, editors often have to cut around some of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) mandates. If a trailer is a “green band,” or suitable for general audiences, that means no threatening people with firearms. “There’s a lot of minutiae, like where a gun can be pointed,” Beck says. “You can’t have someone pointing it straight at the camera, for example, or at anyone in the same frame. Sometimes we blow up [zoom] a frame to hide stuff like that.”
Studios looking to reach the widest possible audience sometimes like to hedge their bets on campaigns and enlist two different trailer vendors to create edits for the project. They’ll focus-test each and back the one with the most support. That’s not unusual, but what irks editors, Lee says, is when a studio’s marketing department decides to split the difference and create a trailer based on ideas from two different creative entities. “They might combine trailers,” he says. “We call that Frankensteining.”
Because editors have precious little time to communicate the theme or premise of a movie, having a line or two of dialogue that summarizes a character’s motivation can make all the difference. Unfortunately, not all movies come stocked with exposition. If a trailer needs a clarifying line and the actor isn’t available to record dialogue, Beck can go in and splice together sentences from words he’s already said. “We might use a sound-alike actor, or we might see if we can form whatever sentence with the lines we have. We could make ‘I need to find her’ from someone saying ‘Find her’ and ‘Need to.’”
If all else fails and an actor is needed, Hughes says there’s one relatively quick fix. “If you’ve seen a film in the last five years, you’ve probably seen a film in which at least one line of ADR [Additional Dialogue Recording] was done on an iPhone after the actor had left the set.”
Studios love when fans of film franchises dissect trailers to spot hidden references or clues. So do editors, but sometimes the Easter eggs they drop in are going to be hard for anyone outside of their family to catch. “I know a few editors, myself included, who try to slip in their voice in a piece,” Lee says. “That’s only if you have enough time to fiddle with it.” Lee’s two kids lent their voices to a sound mix for 2016’s Warcraft. “I don’t know if they made the final cut, but they’re in there.”
Of all the film genres he’s overseen, Hughes believes comedies that don’t hit the mark are his worst assignment. “I’ve made trailers for comedies where there were literally not enough jokes in the film to fill a trailer,” he says. “Going back in the mists of time, I remember the trailer for Beverly Hills Cop III having one joke in it, Serge saying something sarcastic about Axel Foley’s shoes, and then they cut that joke out of the film.”
Fall down the YouTube rabbit hole and you’ll find thousands of movie trailers cobbled together by hobbyists outside of the industry. While many might underestimate the work and craft involved in doing it professionally, a few have been able to use it as a launching pad to get noticed. “I know one or two editors who got careers because of their YouTube channels, where they were uploading stuff completely as a hobby,” Lee says.
Beck believes the majority of a trailer’s impact can be chalked up to how the images fit with the music selection. “Music is at least 50 percent of any trailer,” he says. With access to unreleased tracks from music labels, Beck will go jogging with his earphones in to sample tunes, even though he might not find a perfect visual fit for a song for months. “I’ll picture a scene and maybe see something like it a year or so later. And then I’ll go, ‘Oh, I’ve got just the song for this.’”
Ever since voiceovers for trailers largely went out of style, editors have needed to keep viewers oriented in other ways. But that doesn’t mean they can’t cheat a little. Beck says that editing a trailer for anything containing Morgan Freeman is like having a narrator. “We did Now You See Me 2 recently, and when I knew we had Morgan Freeman in the movie, I knew the whole trailer was going to be driven by him saying his lines. He’s like the voice of God.”
Another go-to performer: Ryan Gosling. Why? “He just nails it,” Beck says. “He can convey a meaning or moment so quickly that you can use it in the trailer. You’re trying to do so much in a short amount of time, and when an actor is emotive, it makes my job easier.”
January 26, 2017 – 4:00pm
If you’ve ever been alarmed to see prices for airline tickets spike within minutes of checking them, you’ve probably wondered if you’re missing out on a sweet spot for purchasing.
The answer is yes—and it’s on a Sunday. According to Conde Nast Traveler, a joint study by travel site Expedia and the Airlines Reporting Corporation used data [PDF] from billions of personal-travel bookings to decipher when travelers were getting the best airline deals. Passengers who booked flights on Sundays saved an average of 17 percent on domestic flights and 30 percent on European travel.
There is a caveat, though. In order to have a chance at the best pricing, Expedia found it’s best to book a minimum of 21 days in advance. (A ticket between Europe and the U.S., for example, was an average of $669 less expensive when booked more than three weeks before travel.) And you’ll want to avoid attempting any bookings on Friday, since you’ll be jockeying for seats with business travelers.
The companies found one other airline hack: Trips that include a Saturday night stay are generally cheaper (up to 19 percent for travel within the U.S.). Combine that with a 5 percent price drop for an average ticket in 2016 from the year before, and flying in 2017 could be easier on your bank account than ever before.
[h/t Conde Nast Traveler]
January 26, 2017 – 3:30pm