Author: Jennifer M Wood

When Victor Collins was found dead in a friend’s hot tub in Bentonville, Arkansas last November, there were few bystanders on the scene—other than his friend and accused killer, James Andrew Bates. But prosecutors are insisting there was another witness that night with potentially valuable information: an Amazon Echo.

According to ABC News, the Benton County prosecution has requested “audio recordings, transcribed records, text records, and other data” from an Echo smart speaker belonging to Bates with the hope that it will provide clues to Collins’s death. Collins died of apparent strangulation and drowning on November 22, 2015 at Bates’s home, after the pair spent the evening watching football and drinking with two other friends.

Benton County prosecutor Nathan Smith isn’t sure what—if anything—they might find on the Echo, an internet-connected speaker that listens for user voice commands and speaks back as the AI assistant “Alexa.” He simply sees it as “a question of law enforcement doing their due diligence.” But for Amazon and its users, that question is not so simple.

While Amazon has provided Bates’s basic account information, the company has not released the Echo data. For the tech giant, it’s a matter of protecting its customers’ privacy. Amazon spokeswoman Kinley Pearsall said in a statement that the company “will not release customer information without a valid and binding legal demand” and maintained that Amazon rejects “overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course.”

Privacy advocates like Nuala O’Connor, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, are similarly concerned about what this case could mean for evidence rules regarding internet-connected home devices moving forward. She worries that if this case sets a precedent, police could build a circumstantial character sketch from a suspect’s smart thermostat or light dimmer. But for now, legal and privacy experts will have to wait until March 17, when Bates is scheduled for his next court hearing.

[h/t ABC News]

Between his modest comic book hits Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, imaginative Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro made a film that was darker and more in Spanish: Pan’s Labyrinth, a horror-tinged fairy tale set in 1944 Spain, under fascist rule. Like many of del Toro’s films, it’s a political allegory as well as a gothic fantasy. The heady mix of whimsy and violence wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it won enough fans to make $83.25 million worldwide and receive six Oscar nominations (it won three). On the tenth anniversary of the film’s release, here are some details to help you separate fantasy from reality the next time you take a walk in El Laberinto del Fauno.

1. IT’S A COMPANION PIECE TO THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE.

Del Toro intended Pan’s Labyrinth to be a thematic complement to The Devil’s Backbone, his 2001 film set in Spain in 1939. The movies have a lot of similarities in their structure and setup, but del Toro says on the Pan’s Labyrinth DVD commentary that the events of September 11, 2001—which occurred five months after The Devil’s Backbone opened in Spain, and two months before it opened in the U.S.—changed his perspective. “The world changed,” del Toro said. “Everything I had to say about brutality and innocence changed.”

2. IT HAS A CHARLES DICKENS REFERENCE.

When Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) arrives at Captain Vidal’s house, goes to shake his hand, and is gruffly told, “It’s the other hand,” that’s a near-quotation from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, when the young lad of the title meets his mother’s soon-to-be-husband. Davey’s stepfather turns out to be a cruel man, too, just like Captain Vidal (Sergi López).

3. DUE TO A DROUGHT, THERE ARE VERY FEW ACTUAL FLAMES OR SPARKS IN THE MOVIE.

The region of Segovia, Spain was experiencing its worst drought in 30 years when del Toro filmed his movie there, so his team had to get creative. For the shootout in the forest about 70 minutes into the movie, they put fake moss on everything to hide the brownness, and didn’t use squibs (explosive blood packs) or gunfire because of the increased fire risk. In fact del Toro said that, except for the exploding truck in another scene, the film uses almost no real flames, sparks, or fires. Those elements were added digitally in post-production.

4. IT CEMENTED DEL TORO’S HATRED OF HORSES.

The director is fond of all manner of strange, terrifying monsters, but real live horses? He hates ’em. “They are absolutely nasty motherf*ckers,” he says on the DVD commentary. His antipathy toward our equine friends predated Pan’s Labyrinth, but the particular horses he worked with here—ill-tempered and difficult, apparently—intensified those feelings. “I never liked horses,” he says, “but after this, I hate them.”

5. THE FAUN’S IMAGE IS INCORPORATED INTO THE ARCHITECTURE.

If you look closely at the banister in the Captain’s mansion, you’ll see the Faun’s head in the design. It’s a subtle reinforcement of the idea that the fantasy world is bleeding into the real one.

6. IT MADE STEPHEN KING SQUIRM.

Del Toro reports that he had the pleasure of sitting next to the esteemed horror novelist at a screening in New England, and that King squirmed mightily during the Pale Man scene. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life,” del Toro said.

7. IT REFLECTS DEL TORO’S NEGATIVE FEELINGS TOWARD THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Del Toro told an interviewer that he was appalled by the Catholic church’s complicity with fascism during the Spanish Civil War. He said the priest’s comment at the banquet table, regarding the dead rebels—”God has already saved their souls; what happens to their bodies, well, it hardly matters to him”—was taken from a real speech that a priest used to give to rebel prisoners in the fascist camps. Furthermore, “the Pale Man represents the church for me,” Del Toro said. “He represents fascism and the church eating the children when they have a perversely abundant banquet in front of them.”

8. THERE’S A CORRECT ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF WHETHER IT’S REAL OR ALL IN OFELIA’S HEAD.

Del Toro has reiterated many times that while a story can mean different things to different people, “objectively, the way I structured it, there are clues that tell you … that it’s real.” Specifically: the flower blooming on the dead tree at the end; the chalk ending up on Vidal’s desk (as there’s no way it could have gotten there); and Ofelia’s escape through a dead end of the labyrinth.

9. THE PLOT WAS ORIGINALLY EVEN DARKER.

In del Toro’s first conception of the story, it was about a married pregnant woman who meets the Faun in the labyrinth, falls in love with him, and lets him sacrifice her baby on faith that she, the baby, and the Faun will all be together in the afterlife and the labyrinth will thrive again. “It was a shocking tale,” Del Toro said.

10. THE SHAPES AND COLORS ARE THEMATICALLY RELEVANT.

Del Toro points out in the DVD commentary that scenes with Ofelia tend to have circles and curves and use warm colors, while scenes with Vidal and the war have more straight lines and use cold colors. Over the course of the film, the two opposites gradually intrude on one another.

11. THAT VICIOUS BOTTLE ATTACK COMES FROM AN INCIDENT IN DEL TORO’S LIFE.

Del Toro and a friend were once in a fight during which his friend was beaten in the face with a bottle, and the detail that stuck in the director’s memory was that the bottle didn’t break. That scene is also based on a real occurrence in Spain, when a fascist smashed a citizen’s face with the butt of a pistol and took his groceries, all because the man didn’t take off his hat.

12. DOUG JONES LEARNED SPANISH TO PLAY THE FAUN.

The Indiana-born actor, best known for working under heavy prosthetics and makeup, had worked with del Toro on Hellboy and Mimic and was the director’s first choice to play the Faun and the Pale Man. The only problem: Jones didn’t speak Spanish. Del Toro said they could dub his voice, but Jones wanted to give a full performance. Then del Toro said he could learn his Spanish lines phonetically, but Jones thought that would be harder to memorize than the actual words. Fortunately, he had five hours in the makeup chair every day, giving him plenty of time to practice. And then? Turns out it still wasn’t good enough. Del Toro replaced Jones’s voice with that of a Spanish theater actor, who was able to make his delivery match Jones’s facial expressions and lip movements.

13. NEVER MIND THE (ENGLISH) TITLE, THAT ISN’T PAN.

The faun is a mythological creature, half man and half goat, who represents nature (it’s where the word “fauna” comes from) and is neutral toward humans. Pan is a specific Greek god, also goat-like, who’s generally depicted as mischievous, harmful, and overly sexual—not a creature you’d be comfortable seeing earn the trust of a little girl. In Spanish, the film is called El Laberinto del Fauno, which translates to The Faun’s Labyrinth. “Pan” was used for English-speaking audiences because that figure is more familiar than the faun, but you’ll notice he’s never called Pan in the film itself. “If he was Pan, the girl would be in deep sh*t,” del Toro told one interviewer.

14. DEL TORO WROTE THE ENGLISH SUBTITLES HIMSELF.

After being disappointed by the way the translators handled The Devil’s Backbone (“subtitles for the thinking impaired”), the Mexican filmmaker, who speaks fluent English, did the job himself for Pan’s Labyrinth. “I took about a month with a friend and an assistant working on them, measuring them, so that it doesn’t feel like you’re watching a subtitled film,” he said.

Additional Sources:
DVD features and commentary

After years of either plain chocolate or peanut, M&Ms have been on a roll introducing new flavors into their candy-coated lineup. While some varietals—like peanut butter, pretzel, mint, almond, crispy, and dark chocolate—have stuck around, other flavors have been short-lived. (Sometimes for the better.)

After introductions of such limited-time flavors as pumpkin spice latte, white butterscotch, and pecan pie, the iconic candy brand clearly has no plans of stopping there. Junk food blog The Impulsive Buy recently shared its latest find: White Cheesecake M&Ms, made especially for Valentine’s Day, and spotted by one of their readers at Walmart. No word yet on how close it comes in taste to the real thing, but we’ll be looking forward to giving them a try.

Valentine’s Day candies are popping up on shelves! White Cheesecake M&M’s anyone? This was spotted by reader Robbie at Walmart.

A photo posted by The Impulsive Buy (@theimpulsivebuy) on Dec 18, 2016 at 4:58pm PST

[h/t: The Impulsive Buy]

Vending machines are awesome! For a few coins or dollars, you can quickly buy just about anything from a can of Coca-Cola to random used books or even Holy Water. Now a new California-based startup called Byte Foods is looking to reinvent vending machine food by keeping theirs fully stocked with fresh, healthy, locally sourced food and drinks, according to TechCrunch.

Internet-connected vending machines aren’t new, but Byte is taking the next step forward by adding RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) technology and smart analytics software. Byte’s vending machines—which are filled with mostly organic beverages, iced coffee, sandwiches, soups, salads, and even burritos—look like the refrigerated displays and kiosks you’d find at any convenience store, only the units are locked and come with a touchscreen menu with a list of item descriptions and pricing. When you’re ready to buy, simply swipe your credit card through the reader and just take your items and go.

Each item features an RFID tag, so you can take as many items as you’d like once you’re inside the unit. If you change your mind, simply put the items back and you won’t be charged; your credit card will only be billed after you close the door. The vending machines also feature software that allows vendors to know which items are proving to be particularly popular and are in danger of becoming out of stock for a faster turnaround. It also features surge and dynamic pricing on items that are in demand or products that are about to spoil.

“Byte is fine tuning their food offering and variety, which is important in attracting repeat customers,” Jin Park, a Byte Foods board member, told TechCrunch. “There are many opportunities here to partner with various local food providers. One key revenue driver will be expanding the number of refrigerators.”

Byte Foods just raised $5.5 million in seed funding and plans to add more smart vending machines in offices, hotels, college campuses, and hospitals around the San Francisco Bay Area before expanding to new regions in 2017.

[h/t TechCrunch]

If the holiday season has taught us anything, it’s that you can fit just about anything in a box—scarves, Power Rangers, grandma’s favorite toffee. Now, Smithsonian Magazine reports, two agricultural entrepreneurs are putting an entire two-acre farm “in a box.”

By “box,” they really mean a modified shipping container. But Brandi DeCarli and Scott Thompson promise everything you need to build a sustainable farm in one $50,000 toolkit with their new venture, Farm From a Box.

The concept originated in 2009, when DeCarli and Thompson were working on a youth center in Kisumu, Kenya. The construction called for several shipping containers to be placed around a soccer field, which housed items and services designed to further the education and health of local kids. Inspired, DeCarli and Thompson wondered if they could replicate this scheme to help communities boost their food production.

Now, one Farm From a Box prototype (known as “Adam”) can be found at a school in Sonoma County, California—and the company is set to expand into West Sacramento and Virginia next.

So what do communities get when they order up this box? It’s not seeds and shovels. As DeCarli told Smithsonian Magazine, the contents “can be narrowed down to an off-grid power system, a complete water system with a solar-powered pump and drip irrigation system, and connectivity.” There’s also a training program that comes with the container, and customers have the option to add items that are essential to their area, like a water purification system or internal cold storage to keep produce fresh.

Of course, those extras factor into Farm From a Box’s normal price range of $50,000 to $60,000. But that cost may change as DeCarli and Thompson continue to experiment with smaller models—which would be ideal for urban farms or refugee camps—in the new year.

[h/t Smithsonian Magazine]

As beautiful as a winter snowfall can be, the white stuff is certainly not without its irritations—especially if you have to get into your car and go somewhere. As if shoveling a path to the driver’s door wasn’t enough, then you’ve got a frozen windshield with which to contend. Everyone has his or her own tricks for warming up a car in record time—including appropriately-named meteorologist Ken Weathers, who works at WATE in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Earlier this year, Weathers shared a homemade trick for defrosting your windshield in less than 60 seconds: spray the glass with a simple solution of one part water and two parts rubbing alcohol. “The reason why this works,” according to Weathers, “is [that] rubbing alcohol has a freezing point of 128 degrees below freezing.”

Watch the spray in action below.

[h/t: Travel + Leisure]

You’ve still got a few days to go until that New Year resolution to indulge in fewer sweets kicks in—and Starbucks wants to help its customers end 2016 on a (sugar) high note. So they’ve introduced the Tuxedo Beverage Collection—a trio of chocolatey espresso drinks—at select locations across the U.S. and Canada.

For espresso lovers, there’s the Tuxedo Mocha, which is a mix of mocha and white chocolate sauces with espresso and steamed milk; the Tuxedo Hot Chocolate has also got a bit of white chocolate at the base and is topped with whipped cream, a drizzle of mocha, and dark chocolate curls; and the Tuxedo Mocha Frappuccino is yet another chocolate and white chocolate flavor combo, this time blended and frosty.

If you want to get your hands on one of these limited-time treats, you’d better act fast; after January 1, 2017, they’ll disappear as quickly as you can say “Where’s the aspirin?”

Just days after suffering a heart attack aboard a flight en route to Los Angeles, beloved actress, author, and screenwriter Carrie Fisher has passed away at the age of 60. Though she’ll always be most closely associated with her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars, Fisher’s life was like something out of its own Hollywood movie. Born in Beverly Hills on October 21, 1956, Fisher was born into show business royalty as the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds.

In addition to her work in front of the camera, Fisher built up an impressive resume behind the scenes, too, most notably as a writer; in addition to several memoirs and semi-autobiographical novels, including Wishful Drinking, Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma, The Best Awful, Postcards from the Edge, and The Princess Diarist (which was released last month), she was also an in-demand script doctor who counted Sister Act, Hook, Lethal Weapon 3, and The Wedding Singer among her credits.

Though she struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness, Fisher always maintained a sense of humor—as evidenced by the 30 memorable quotes below.

ON GROWING UP IN HOLLYWOOD

“I am truly a product of Hollywood in-breeding. When two celebrities mate, someone like me is the result.”

“I was born into big celebrity. It could only diminish.”

“At a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do. She called Cary Grant.”

“I was street smart, but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive.”

“If anything, my mother taught me how to sur-thrive. That’s my word for it.”

ON AGING

“As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don’t.”

ON INSTANT GRATIFICATION

“Instant gratification takes too long.”

ON THE LEGACY OF STAR WARS

“People are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit. Yes, we all knew. The only one who didn’t know was George.”

“Leia follows me like a vague smell.”

“I signed my likeness away. Every time I look in the mirror, I have to send Lucas a couple of bucks.”

“People see me and they squeal like tropical birds or seals stranded on the beach.”

“You’re not really famous until you’re a Pez dispenser.”

ON THE FLEETING NATURE OF SUCCESS

“There is no point at which you can say, ‘Well, I’m successful now. I might as well take a nap.’”

ON DEALING WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

“I’m very sane about how crazy I am.”

ON RESENTMENT

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

ON LOVE

“Someone has to stand still for you to love them. My choices are always on the run.”

“I’ve got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience, and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture.”

“I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.”

ON EMOTIONS

“The only thing worse than being hurt is everyone knowing that you’re hurt.”

ON RELATIONSHIPS

“I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting, I would rather watch TV. Of course this becomes eventually known to the other person.”

ON HOLLYWOOD

“Acting engenders and harbors qualities that are best left way behind in adolescence.”

“You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.”

“It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.”

ON FEAR

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”

ON LIFE

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”

“No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.”

“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.”

“I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.”

“My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.”

ON DEATH

“You know what’s funny about death? I mean other than absolutely nothing at all? You’d think we could remember finding out we weren’t immortal. Sometimes I see children sobbing at airports and I think, ‘Aww. They’ve just been told.’”

There are two types of travelers: those who want to hit up the most popular tourist attractions of their intended destination, and those who would rather avoid the crowds and long lines that usually come with a highly trafficked hotspot. In either case, the map above—courtesy of vouchercloud and Thomson Vacations, with travel data compiled from TripAdvisor’s most popular “Things to Do”—can help.

In addition to citing the most popular tourist attraction in each country, the map is color-coded in order to easily highlight the type of attraction it is—be it a historic spot (like China’s Great Wall), a natural wonder (like Niagara Falls in Canada), a religious destination (like Russia’s Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood), or a regular old tourist spot (like New York City’s Central Park, which is America’s most popular attraction). How many of them have you visited?

[h/t: Thrillist]

The Afternoon Map is a semi-regular feature in which we post maps and infographics. In the afternoon. Semi-regularly.

by Jeva Lange

Singer George Michael had “wanted to be a pop star since I was about 7 years old,” but you have to be careful what you wish for. Michael rocketed to fame at 21 when Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” flew up the charts and he publicly balked at the cost of celebrity. “I’m … sure that most people find it hard to believe that stardom can make you miserable,” Michael told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, giving similar statements to several other publications. “After all, everybody wants to be a star. I certainly did, and I worked hard to get it. But I was miserable, and I don’t want to feel that way again.”

Frank Sinatra—who himself once tried to wave off fame—set Michael straight in a humbling letter. “Come on, George,” Sinatra wrote. “Loosen up. Swing, man. Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.”

Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael pic.twitter.com/LXDpjiXqdD

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) December 26, 2016

Michael died at his home in Goring, England, on Christmas, at the age of 53.

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