Earlier this year, a video of national treasure and living legend Dick Van Dyke singing “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” at a Denny’s with his a capella group took the Internet by storm:
It’s really just the most recent occurrence of Dick Van Dyke being delightful. The actor, singer, dancer, and nonagenarian is often filmed busting a move or bursting into song whenever the spirit moves him. If you haven’t yet gotten your fill of Van Dyke’s contagious joy, here are a few more instances:
1. WHEN HE CELEBRATED HIS 90TH BIRTHDAY AT DISNEYLAND—AND RAPPED “A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR.”
2. THE TIME HE STARRED IN A MUSIC VIDEO FOR THE DUSTBOWL REVIVAL.
3. HIS IMPROMPTU DANCE PERFORMANCE AT A BERNIE SANDERS RALLY.
4. WHEN HE COULDN’T STOP HIMSELF FROM SINGING ALONG WITH A MARY POPPINS FLASH MOB.
5. HIS RANDOM DANCES TO SONGS PLAYING OVERHEAD AT RETAIL STORES.
6. THE TIME HE STOLE THE SHOW DURING HIS WIFE’S BELLY DANCING PERFORMANCE.
7. HIS SPIRITED DANCE MOVES DURING A MARY POPPINS TRIBUTE.
And here’s a fun, bonus throwback: Van Dyke’s interpretation of various dance crazes from a 1960 CBS special.
The Dick Van Dyke Show may seem dated in some ways, but it broke so much TV ground in an otherwise staid era.
1. It was all Carl Reiner’s Idea
From 1950-54, Carl Reiner cut his show business teeth as a writer/performer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. His fellow writers on the show included the famous (Mel Brooks) and not-so-famous (Selma Diamond, who would later portray bailiff Selma Hacker on Night Court). When Caesar’s show ended, Reiner wrote a pilot script and several episodes for a new TV sitcom which closely mirrored his own life. Called Head of the Family, the show highlighted the daily life of Rob Petrie (Reiner), a TV comedy writer who lived in New Rochelle with his wife and son. Borscht belt comedian Morey Amsterdam was cast as the Mel Brooks-type joke writer, and Rose Marie portrayed the self-deprecating spinster-in-search-of-a-husband Selma Diamond.
2. The Lead Role Almost Went to Johnny Carson
The pilot caught the attention of veteran producer Sheldon Leonard (The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show) who liked the concept and the script, but didn’t care for Reiner’s acting ability. He not-so-tactfully suggested that the lead character needed to be more mainstream American (translation: less Jewish) for the show to be successful with a wide audience. The finalists for the lead role of Rob Petrie boiled down to Johnny Carson and Dick Van Dyke. Thanks to name recognition generated by a successful run on Broadway in Bye, Bye Birdie, Van Dyke landed the job. Of course, the runner-up didn’t do so badly for himself.
3. The Girl with Something Moore
As a teen, Mary Tyler Moore had auditioned for a role as Danny Thomas’ daughter on his self-titled sitcom. Despite her comedic prowess, Thomas rejected her, saying that “no one would believe a girl with a little button nose like hers could be a daughter of mine.” A few years later, when Moore auditioned for the role of Laura Petrie, she not only caught Carl Reiner’s attention, but also jogged Danny Thomas’ memory. While Van Dyke initially objected to her hiring since she was 11 years younger than he, the onscreen chemistry proved magical enough to banish any doubts he harbored. Despite her youth, Moore was no pushover. When initial scripts called for her to vacuum the living room in a dress and high heels à la June Cleaver, the actress put her foot down. Mary was a young mother in real life, and she wore comfortable clothing to perform household chores. Thus was born Laura Petrie’s trademark Capri pants, which simultaneously gave network censors fits and set suburban housewives free of their pantyhose prison.
4. Breaking Color Barriers
From a 21st-century point of view, it seems ridiculous to praise a series for using African-American actors in roles other than maids or railroad porters. But when The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered, the world of prime-time sitcoms was a different place. Even though the Civil Rights movement was slowly progressing, TV was still dragging its feet when it came to change. As a result, one of the most popular episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show—”That’s My Boy?”—almost didn’t make it to film. In the episode, exhausted and overwrought new dad Rob was convinced that the hospital had sent him and Laura home with the wrong baby. A couple named Peters had welcomed a baby in the same hospital on the same day, in a similar hospital room number, and the Petries had even received some of the Peters’ gifts in error. The comedic (and controversial) payoff to the episode arrived when Mr. and Mrs. Peters visited the Petrie household and were revealed to be a black couple, played by Greg Morris and Mimi Dillard. The positive response from the studio audience gave producer Sheldon Leonard the confidence to sign Bill Cosby for a co-starring role in a new series he was producing, I Spy.
5. The Drama behind the Laughter
Behind the scenes, all was not always well. Dick Van Dyke was a self-confessed “people pleaser” and was loathe to reveal any unhappiness or frustration, either on the set or when meeting fans. Instead, he found solace after hours with a good friend named Jack Daniels. (Years later, Van Dyke publicly announced his alcoholism and checked himself into a facility for treatment.) Meanwhile, co-star Mary Tyler Moore began to experience strange unexplained medical complaints on the set, including dizziness, weight loss, and blurred vision. Presuming she was overworked, she ignored the warning signs which she later found to be attributed to Type 1 diabetes. Then, during the series’ fourth season, Rose Marie’s beloved husband of 20 years passed away. She was so overcome with grief that she wanted to quit the show, but director John Rich coaxed her into staying.
6. Words behind the Music
The opening to The Dick Van Dyke Show is certainly memorable (and not only for Dick’s famous stumble over the ottoman). But what most folks don’t know is that lyrics were written to go along with the program’s instrumental theme. In fact, they were written by co-star Morey Amsterdam, who also penned the words for the hit “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Memorize the following lyrics and think of them as you watch the traditional Dick Van Dyke introduction:So you think that you’ve got trouble.
Well trouble’s a bubble.
So tell old mister trouble to get lost.
Why not hold your head up high and
Stop cryin’, start tryin’.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
Approximately 120 years ago, a student at Hereford Cathedral School in the UK checked out a library book he never got around to returning. Arthur Boycott is no longer alive to deliver the book back to its rightful home in person, but recently, his granddaughter was able to clear his name for him, the BBC reports.
Alice Gillett stumbled upon the University’s copy of The Microscope and Its Revelations by Dr. William B. Carpenter while rifling through her family’s collection of some 6000 volumes. Even though it was about a dozen decades overdue, Gillett decided to return it after spotting the HCS library stamp inside. Fortunately for her, the school agreed to waive the late fee, which would have amounted to something close to $9361.
Despite his apparent lack of respect for their library system, Boycott went on to become a source of pride for the school, earning a name for himself as an accomplished naturalist. And he’s in good company when it comes to epically overdue library books: A book George Washington borrowed from the New York Society Library went unreturned for 221 years.
Forget chocolate chip cookies, holiday spice, or freshly washed linen. These unconventional candle scents are unexpected—but kind of amazing.
1. NEW MACBOOK
Every tech nerd loves a top-of-the-line gadget, but now your home can smell just like one. Twelve South’s “New Mac” scented candle is infused with notes of mint, peach, basil, lavender, mandarin, and sage, which is apparently what your freshly opened computer smells like.
Bibliophiles (and anyone wishing to make their home library smell a little more authentic) will be drawn to the scent of this candle, which smells of paper, dust, vanilla, and just a hint of fresh grass.
Infuse your home with the entire animal kingdom—or at least “the telltale scents of the tangy grizzly bear, the pungent rhinoceros, and the regal, yet completely stinky tiger.” (And if that doesn’t float your boat, the site also offers candles in the scents of skunk, fart, and chlorine.)
As a wise, ruby slipper-clad girl once said, “There’s no place like home.” And there is definitely no place that smells quite like home, but thankfully these candles, in the scent of each of the 50 states, aim to make your home-away-from-home a little more familiar.
There truly is a candle for every occasion. And, apparently, this one captures all of the complexities of the dissolution of marriage: “Part happy, part sad, a little relieved, and unsure of your future financial stability.”
Yep, someone spent hours researching the scents that should go into this one. And, in case you’re curious, those scents are “the perfume counter at your local department store times a thousand … plus some baby powder.”
Since the mid-1960s, scientists have argued about an apparent contradiction in our understanding of the early years of planet Earth. At issue was the overwhelming evidence for a warm Earth in its first billion-ish years, alongside evidence that the Sun would have been something like 25% dimmer then than it is today. How could Earth be warm if our star was dim? This is known as the faint young sun paradox.
One possible explanation has to do with greenhouse gases, and that’s what Carl Sagan and George Mullen suggested in 1972. Over the decades since, multiple models have been developed that could explain the contradiction, though it’s hard to be certain which (if any) of our current theories is correct.
As a recurring feature, we share some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. These items were the ones that were the most popular with our readers this week, and they’re still available.
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!
Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 23 things you might not have known about the hit 2003 film.
1. The airport opening and closing was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crewmember would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from the film.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl with a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of the movie is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s part was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the love interest to the Prime Minister that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he’d auditioned for the film.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.”
6. Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents. “I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ‘Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?'”
7. The actors had their own trailer park village during production.
Nighy told The Guardian, “We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast. There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.” Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.” In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband is unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and weeps. “We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,” Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.” He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though he and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the Prime Minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting the dance number, which Grant refused to rehearse. “He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,” Curtis explained. “We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!” It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Real PM Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Grant’s fictional one.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.”
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for the film.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,” Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).”
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,” he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly, and revealed, “It is my handwriting! It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.”
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.” Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful” with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.”
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,” and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.” This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex.
21. Olivia Olson was too good for the role of Sam’s crush.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olson won the part with aplomb. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and the other Joanna reunited on kids’ television.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. Love Actually has been remade three times already.
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a trio of films. The first is the Indian offering A Tribute To Love, an unofficial remake in the Hindi language. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to St. Nicolas. The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You, which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
Cattle were first domesticated from wild aurochs about 10,000 years ago, as a portable source of wealth for our ancestors, and have proliferated alongside us ever since. There are now about 1.5 billion cattle on Earth, making a lot of milk and meat for human consumption, but in the process, creating a tremendous amount of waste.
Not only do cows pollute groundwater with their excrement, they also produce a lot of gas. Headlines are fond of discussing the issue of cow farts, but in reality, the gas that scientists are concerned about—methane—comes mostly from cow burps. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with a climate change impact 25 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Earlier this year, researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University launched a four-year study to gauge whether adding a potent type of Greek oregano to cow feed could reduce methane emissions from dairy cow belches. Earlier research led by Penn State scientists suggested that oregano could cut cows’ methane emissions up to 40 percent.
Now, Australian researchers have found even more promising results from a beach staple (or nuisance, depending on your perspective): seaweed. Scientists on the Agriculture and Food team at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) showed introducing a particular kind of seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, to livestock feed can reduce the methane production in sheep by more than 80 percent. Some of those researchers also did experiments with artificial cow stomachs, which found even higher potential reductions.
“Seaweed’s been fed to cattle since farming began,” agricultural scientist Robert Kinley, part of the CSIRO team, told mental_floss. Anywhere it washed up on beaches near where cows grazed, the animals would eat it, so it’s long been a natural food source. But after a farmer on Prince Edward Island in Canada noticed in 2006 that his cows that ate seaweed were healthier than those that he kept inland, researchers—including Kinley, then at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University—began investigating.
“Nobody really cared about seaweed until 10 years ago, but since then there have been various seaweeds on the market because it improves animals’ reproductive success and makes for healthier, happier animals,” says Kinley. Cows that eat seaweed have more efficient digestion, with 10 to 20 percent fewer methane emissions. Methane only persists in the atmosphere for about 10 years, as opposed to carbon dioxide’s hundreds of years, so cutting how much methane cows produce could help immediately address climate change impacts.
For farmers, better cow digestion creates economic benefits by making the cost of feed more efficient. So supplementing feed with seaweed has recently become a trend, and that’s where Kinley got involved—he wanted to make sure seaweeds were safe for cows to eat regularly. As he was testing different types of seaweeds, he wondered if there was one that might cut methane even more than 20 percent. He reached out to a group at CSIRO “who already had some ideas about the unique chemistry of seaweeds,” he says. They began collaborating. “We wanted to find seaweeds that would benefit animals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.”
They found what they were looking for in Asparagopsis taxiformis, a red seaweed. It aids digestion as other seaweeds do, but has an additional gas-reducing function. “The big punch comes from an enzyme inhibition. The seaweed chemistry debilitates the methanogen process so the pathway to form methane can’t be completed,” says Kinley. This leads to cows producing much less methane—a reduction of 99 percent in preliminary tests on the artificial cow stomachs. However, that reduction was dependent on a constant supplementation of the seaweed to keep the methane-reducing benefits going. Once the supplementation was stopped, methane production went right back up.
Kinley and his colleagues are now working on health protocols to establish the seaweed is safe for long-term consumption; next up is a feedlot trial with cows to determine what minimum amount of seaweed supplementation is needed for methane reduction.
Kinley sees an opportunity to create jobs by cultivating seaweed farming in places where A. taxiformis grows, which is pretty much everywhere; it’s a cosmopolitan species with multiple lineages (and is considered invasive in some locations). Right now, no one’s farming it, which presents a barrier to scaling up. “The biggest barrier isn’t animals or time, it’s how much seaweed can we get?” says Kinley. “Right now, I need 25 tons of seaweed just to do a feedlot trial with 1000 animals.”
But if cultivation takes off, the seaweed could be a quadruple win—helping clean wastewater and remove runoff nutrients and carbon dioxide near reefs, growing happy cows, aiding farmers, and mitigating climate change.
Fans of the LEGO Ideas website know it’s an outlet where LEGO hobbyists can share ideas for potential designs made from the plastic toys. Once 10,000 different fans support a submission, it becomes eligible for review to become a real-life, licensed LEGO product. One new member of the so-called “10K Club” is Nathan Readioff, who goes by the username “NathanR2015.” A physics PhD student at the University of Liverpool, he created a miniature version of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Readioff drew inspiration for the design from real life experience: As part of his PhD, he’s worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, using data from the ATLAS particle detector to study the Higgs boson. Readioff helped run the ATLAS detector, and he also observed experiments conducted on all four of the LHC’s particle detectors, which, in addition to ATLAS, include CMS, ALICE, and LHCb.
The LEGO model came about because “I thought it would be fun to have a model of ATLAS sitting on my desk at work,” Readioff told the LEGO Ideas blog. The physics student found an ATLAS detector model on the LEGO Ideas blog, but it didn’t pass muster, so he “simply hauled out LEGO Digital Designer and started work on my own version,” he says. “Once my own little ‘baby’ version of ATLAS was finished though, I couldn’t stop until I had built the full set of experiments and built a model of the entire LHC.”
Around a year and a half ago, Readioff decided to share his creation with the world, and he posted it on the LEGO Ideas website. Now, if the toy company execs give the go-ahead, the tiny LHC may become a real-life, commercially sold design.
Readioff’s LHC model uses nearly 500 bricks—“373 bricks in the LHC ring, and a further 86 in the control room,” he says. Watch him talk about (and show off) the tiny model in the video below.
