Month: February 2017

In 2005’s Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play John and Jeremy, two divorce mediators who crash weddings to meet women. The romcom/bromance flick also stars Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher, Bradley Cooper, and Will Ferrell in a memorable cameo role. Here are some facts about the movie to read before you get the meatloaf.

1. IT REALLY ALL STARTED WITH A WEDDING INVITATION.

Producer Andrew Panay (Serendipity, Van Wilder: Party Liason) received an invitation to a friend’s wedding, triggering memories of his college days when he and his friend used to crash weddings. Panay developed the concept with his partners at their production company before hiring Steve Faber and Bob Fisher to write the screenplay. Panay met Faber and Fisher when they were shopping their script We’re the Millers (2013). It was the writers that came up with the idea for one of the crashers to fall for a woman at one of the weddings.

2. IT WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN TO BE SET IN BOSTON AND CAPE COD.

But producer Peter Abrams knew it would be too cold to shoot in Boston or Cape Cod in March and April, so director David Dobkin (Shanghai Knights) suggested Washington D.C., where he grew up. The director added moments from his earlier days into the movie. “Many times in my youth I sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial finishing off a long night with a bottle of champagne or wine as the sun was about to rise over the Washington Monument,” Dobkin reminisced.

3. OWEN WILSON WASN’T COMFORTABLE WITH THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT, SO HE AND VAUGHN CHANGED MOST OF IT.

“When I first read the script, I wasn’t comfortable. It was a funny concept and story, but part felt corny,” the star told New York magazine in 2005. Wilson, Vaughn, and the writers changed the arc of Jeremy’s romance, and got rid of a “Graduate-like” wedding scene with John and Claire (Rachel McAdams).

4. JANE SEYMOUR BEAT OUT RAQUEL WELCH TO PLAY KATHLEEN.

Seymour had auditioned for the first time in 30 years to win the part over the likes of Welch. She said the script was the “funniest thing” she had ever read. Seymour, who was 54 at the time, also took part in her first ever topless scene for the movie.

5. HUNDREDS OF ACTRESSES AUDITIONED BEFORE RACHEL MCADAMS READ FOR CLAIRE.

Dobkin claimed he was one hour from going to the studio to present his top two choices when McAdams arrived in his office. “I was really surprised to get the part because it all happened so fast,” McAdams said.

6. ISLA FISHER WATCHED FATAL ATTRACTION AND THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE BEFORE HER AUDITION FOR GLORIA.

It helped her think about how to make someone “really psycho and funny and aggressive and sexual, but also make her sweet enough that you still like her and think that she’s endearing in some way.” She also used a friend’s “crazy eye” and a “really bad” laugh to get the gig.

7. THE FIRST WEEK OF SHOOTING WAS THE OPENING MONTAGE OF ALL THE DIFFERENT WEDDINGS.

All five of them, as principal photography began on March 22, 2004. McAdams’s first scene was dancing with noted mover-shaker Christopher Walken. “My first scene was dancing with Christopher Walken—no pressure, right?” she said. “I had been practicing with a choreographer during pre-production because I knew he was a really good dancer, but it was so nerve-racking on the day because I assumed there would be a whole bunch of people dancing and it turned out to be a whole ballroom full of people watching us dance the polka. I did encourage him to do some solo work and he broke out a few times, which made it a lot of fun for me.”

8. A WEDDING CONSULTANT WAS HIRED FOR AUTHENTICITY.

Wedding planner Lovelynn Vanderhorst was hired as a technical advisor to ensure accuracy. She admitted in the movie’s official production notes how hard it was to stop people from crashing real weddings. “The hard part for me is usually a client will say, ‘I don’t know who that person is, can you go find out?’ Usually they’re not invited and I have to ask them to leave. But at one wedding, it ended up being the groom’s uncle and the bride was really embarrassed. That’s why, I hate to admit it, but it wouldn’t be as hard as you think to crash a wedding.”

9. OWEN WILSON CAME UP WITH THE ’10 PERCENT OF OUR HEARTS’ LINE.

“You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts” came to Wilson after the whole sequence was finished. “At about the same age as I was interested in petrified wood, I was just fascinated with this dumb idea that we only used 10 percent of our brains,” Wilson explained about the thought process. “I was always thinking, ‘Man, if I could only use 20…'”. Wilson told Dobkin his idea, and Dobkin made a last-second setup to shoot the scene again.

According to Jane Seymour, Wilson also came up with the idea for her character to call him a “pervert” at the end of her seduction scene. Wilson also added to the two rules mentioned in the original script. “…I noticed over the course of the movie that whenever Vince was on one of his rants, he would throw in rules to support whatever argument he had,” Owen told IGN. “And so I started to figure that out and I started to throw my own rules into the mix. And eventually it got to rule 87: Don’t quote a rule to another. Don’t go throwing rules in another wedding crasher’s face.”

10. MCADAMS LISTENED TO FLEETWOOD MAC BEFORE EMOTIONAL SCENES.

She played “Landslide” on her iPod to prepare. Wilson and Vaughn heard and sang it, straight-faced, before Jeremy and Gloria’s wedding scene. McAdams said, “It totally took me out! But whatever works.”

11. THEY MADE FAKE PURPLE HEARTS AVAILABLE FOR PRINTING ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE.

After some complaints from a congressman, producers took it down. “If any movie-goers take the advice of the ‘Wedding Crashers’ and try to use fake Purple Hearts to get girls, they may wind up picking up an FBI agent instead,” said Rep. John Salazar, D-Colorado.

12. JOHN MCCAIN GOT IN TROUBLE FOR HIS BRIEF CAMEO.

McCain and James Carville appeared briefly in the first Cleary wedding. He donated the $695 salary to charity, and his aides claimed he had “little idea” of what the film would be like when he agreed to make his cameo. McCain, who was awarded an actual Purple Heart, didn’t comment on the Purple Heart controversy, but commented on the criticism he got for appearing in an R-rated film after earlier hosting congressional hearings that criticized Hollywood for marketing R-rated movies to kids. “In Washington, I work with boobs every day,” the senator joked on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

13. IT CHANGED BRADLEY COOPER’S CAREER.

Cooper (Sack) said as much on his Inside the Actors Studio appearance. “On Alias, I played the nicest guy in the world and then I would try to audition for movies after that and the feedback was like ‘Wow, Bradley’s such a nice guy,’ ‘Yeah, I don’t really see him in that part,’ and after Wedding Crashers, ‘Bradley? Yeah, he’s an a**hole.’”

14. NO, VINCE VAUGHN DOESN’T HAVE THAT PAINTING OF JEREMY MADE BY TODD.

“I’m not sure where that painting is. But it will always be in my heart,” Vaughn wrote in a Reddit AMA in 2013, despite it being claimed elsewhere on the internet that Vaughn had kept it. He also said the running gag of his character getting referred to as “baba ghanoush” stemmed from an inside joke.

15. THERE WAS BRIEF TALK OF A SEQUEL.

Vaughn, Wilson, and David Dobkin came up with an idea where John and Jeremy would compete with an “ultimate wedding crasher” played by Daniel Craig. But nothing came of it. “Wedding Crashers came out at a time when people weren’t doing lots of sequels,” Dobkin explained.

Sitting quietly at a desk may be the preferred behavior for elementary-school students, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way for them to learn. Researchers in Denmark have found that integrating whole-body movement into math lessons can significantly boost kids’ test scores. They published their research in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. 

We all know that being active is good for our whole bodies. Recent studies have shown that those benefits reach all the way into the brain for both adults and kids. Intense exertion—the kind that gets your heart rate up—may improve alertness, and is linked to improved motor skills, sharper thinking, and better grades.

So we know that exercise can boost our brainpower. But can it help us learn? To find out, health scientists at the University of Copenhagen created a movement-centric, six-week math curriculum for elementary students. They recruited 165 pupils, all around the age of 7, and divided them into three groups. Some classes were given math lessons three times a week that required them to use their whole bodies (gross motor skills). They jumped, skipped, and crawled around the classroom, all while solving math problems.

Classes in the second group were sedentary but added fine motor skill activities to their lessons—that is, the students were asked to use LEGO bricks to help them solve math problems. 

Kids in the third group, the control group, had their normal math instruction.

All the students were given standardized math tests before, immediately after, and eight weeks after the experiment. (Standardized test scores are not necessarily the best way to measure kids’ understanding, but they do provide a quantitative baseline by which to gauge improvement over the course of an experiment.) 

Over the course of the six-week study, all three groups’ scores improved, but there was a clear winner. Kids in the crawling-skipping-jumping group saw the biggest boost in their scores, improving twice as much as students in the LEGO classes. The upswing in the gross motor skills group’s test scores was modest—about 7.6 percent—but still significant.

“We need to keep this in mind when developing new forms of instruction,” lead author Jacob Wienecke said in a statement.

Unfortunately, the score bump was not universal. Kids who struggled with math at the beginning of the study were still struggling afterward.

“Individual understanding must be taken into account,” Wienecke said. “Otherwise, we risk an unfortunate combined outcome in which those who are already proficient advance, and those who have not yet mastered concepts cannot keep up.” 

Since Google Maps first debuted on February 8, 2005, users have been able to explore far-off locations without ever leaving their computers. To celebrate the 12-year anniversary of the service, filmmaker Matteo Archondis uploaded a hyperlapse video created with 3305 Google Maps screenshots taken around the world.

In this video spotted by Sploid, viewers pay visits to Rome, Verona, Venice, Paris, London, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, New York, Greenland, Mount Everest, and Kyoto. Each location transitions seamlessly into the next, thanks to the sheer amount of stills Archondis used. It took him two days to capture the screen grabs, and two weeks of post-production to create the smooth time-lapse effect. You can check out the result below—no passport required.

[h/t Sploid]

Bring the hedgehog’s likeness to your next tea party with this hedgehog tea infuser. The food-safe, silicone kitchen gadget keeps loose tea in its stomach, while small holes allow the tea to seep into the mug just like a regular tea bag. So far, the infusers only come in brown, but we wouldn’t blame you for stocking up for any upcoming hedgehog-themed events you might be hosting. (By the way, a group of hedgehogs is called an array.)

You can pre-order your own on Perpetual Kid for $14.99. If you’re still browsing, we also have a full list of fun infusers to consider.

15 Popular Comic Book Characters That Started As Jokes. Turns out they were pretty good jokes.  
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10 Superstitions About Stars. Those lights in the night sky must be magical, right?
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What Happened When a Swedish Town Tried a Six-Hour Work Day. In the U.S., that would be called a part time job.
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Revenge of the Lunch Lady. She performed a miracle by serving good food, that kids like, that meets federal nutrition standards, within a budget, in a school kitchen.
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What Would Happen If You Just Left Your Stove Burner On? The answer depends on the exact situation.
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This foster father takes in only terminally ill children. Mohamed Bzeek has loved and lost the neediest kids for more than twenty years.
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How Uber could become a nightmarish monopoly. That’s a possibility when a trade war eliminates the competition.
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15 Amazing Things Aluminum Foil Can Do. A wad makes a pretty good cat toy, too.

Textile artist and knitter Ruth Marshall has found a way to show the stunning beauty of animal pelts—without harming any animals.

Aiming to reduce pollution and expand his country’s limited housing options, a South African inventor has created Nubrix, a brick made of recycled paper, France 24’s The Observers reports.

@EDjanic and his brick #Nubrix #StepUpAwards2016 #StepUpBootcamp pic.twitter.com/60wtvCOGSW

— Primestars SA (@primestarsSA) December 4, 2016

Elijah Djan, 21, is an industrial engineering student at the University of Pretoria. His innovative construction material has been years in the making: As a kid, Djan witnessed his father, a lecturer, burning old textbooks, and was inspired to take action. “I knew that it was bad for the environment, but my dad said he wouldn’t stop doing it unless I had a better idea for how to use the paper,” Djan says.

Djan watched a documentary on South Africa’s low-income housing shortage (as of 2011, nearly 2 million of the nation’s families lived in shacks and informal dwellings), and a business plan was born. A prototype for his brick scored Djan, then 11 years old, a national science prize; later, he tested the design and even built a still-standing wall from the bricks in his own backyard.

To turn Nubrix into a viable commercial product, Djan says he needs a regulatory board’s official certification of approval. For this to happen, the bricks need to be tested for fire resistance, water penetration, thermal capability, durability, and acoustics. Djan now has both the money and the opportunity to see if his product can meet requirements: In late 2016, the student won first place in the Gauteng Accelerator Programme (GAP) Innovation Competitions. The prize was €14,000 (nearly $15,000), and the chance to collaborate with mentors on his project.

“For me, these bricks are just a start. Eventually, I want to create all different construction materials made from recycled products,” Djan says. Considering that South Africans produced 108 million tons of waste in 2011 [PDF], and less than 10 percent of it was recycled, his ambition couldn’t be more timely—or necessary.

[h/t France 24 The Observers]

Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s monumental artwork along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, is getting farther and farther away from the lake itself. Though Smithson designed it in 1970 with the idea that the red-hued water on the lake’s northern shore would ebb and flow, ongoing droughts are likely to make it permanently dry, according to Hyperallergic.

The sculpture—a 1500-foot-long, 15-foot wide coil of rocks—has been completely obscured by the lake’s saline waters before. It was created during a low-level time in the lake’s history, and when the lake returned to normal levels just a few years later, it was completely submerged. It was invisible, viewed only through photos and videos taken during its creation. But since 2002, continued droughts in Utah have brought it above the water line for the long term. Rather than reddish water, the black basalt rocks that make up the sculpture are now covered in salt crystals.

The water is not going to come back to the sculpture anytime soon. The lake currently is experiencing its lowest water levels in recorded history. Between October 2015 and October 2016, the shoreline of the lake’s northern arm fell by almost 10 inches, from 4190 feet above sea level to 4189.2 feet. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a drastic difference from the lake’s historic high-water mark, at 4211.2 feet above sea level.

Smithson may have actually been pleased with the development. According to the Dia Art Foundation, the museum that now owns the piece, Smithson was “fixated on the chance operations of nature that lead to a state of transformation.” As the shoreline continues to recede, the sculpture will continue to transform.

[h/t Hyperallergic]

by Kenny Hemphill

You might already know that in 1947, U.S. test pilot Chuck Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 named the Glamorous Glennis. But aircraft aren’t the only things that break the sound barrier. Here are a few other items that may surprise you.

1. PEOPLE

When Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a balloon 24 miles above New Mexico in 2012, he broke more than the world record for the highest-ever freefall. About a third of the way down, Baumgartner reached Mach 1.25 or 843.6 mph, and in doing so became the first person to break the sound barrier while in freefall.

Having beaten a freefall record that had existed for 52 years, however, Baumgartner only held it for two years, when it was beaten again by Google exec Alan Eustace. He also broke the sound barrier, though he didn’t hit as impressive a maximum speed as Baumgartner, reaching a measly 822 miles per hour, or Mach 1.23.

2. PING PONG BALLS

Anyone who’s watched the top table tennis players in action knows they hit the ball hard and that it travels almost too quickly for the eye to see. But even that pales in comparison to the air-powered cannon built in 2013 by students at Indiana’s Purdue University, which fired ping pong balls at more than 900 mph. “You can get really, really high accelerations, the ball comes out of the barrel intact and doesn’t break until it actually hits something,” mechanical engineer Mark French Inside Science. The cannon used a vacuum pump to suck the air from a sealed tube, the air rushed to a nozzle shaped like an hour glass, and the nozzle propelled the ping pong balls at supersonic speed—about 919 mph. Remarkably, given their light weight and poor aerodynamics, the ping pong balls delivered as much energy to their target as a brick falling several stories.

3. WHIPS

You know that crack a bullwhip makes when it’s wielded in anger by an expert? That’s a sonic boom, the shockwave created when the tip of the whip breaks the sound barrier. Or at least, that had been the presumption until researchers at the University of Arizona spoiled it for everyone.

They were puzzled as to why, if the crack is a sonic boom, it doesn’t occur until the whip’s tip is traveling at almost twice the speed of sound. It turns out that the cracking noise is actually created by a loop traveling along the whip, picking up speed. And when it reaches the speed of sound, it creates a sonic boom.

4. A TOWEL

Snapping a towel in the changing room is dangerous—you could, in all seriousness, take someone’s eye out. The reason it’s so dangerous has partly to do with the speed the end of the towel is traveling. Like a bullwhip, it goes very fast indeed.

In 1993, a group of students at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics set out to prove that a properly whipped towel could break the sound barrier. They rigged up a high-speed photography kit that would allow them to measure the distance the tip of the towel was traveling at the moment they thought the barrier would be broken. After the experiment, it seemed like they had managed to break the barrier—but the students felt their results were inconclusive.

So they tweaked the experimental setup (and, according to some sources, swapped the towel for a cut down bedsheet) which eventually allowed them to break the sound barrier. But there was another caveat: The team cautioned that they still got snaps when it didn’t appear that they had broken the barrier. The theory was that their camera wasn’t fast enough to catch subsequent supersonic moments, but it remains a mystery.

5. AIR

Here’s an odd one to finish with. According to one study, when a rock or other such object is dropped into water, an hourglass-shaped cavity of air is created, which then ejects the air at speeds faster than the speed of sound.