A 25-year-old Swedish man who's spent thousands of dollars extending his first name to 63 words claims to have the world's longest first name. Kim-Jong Sexy Glorious Beast Divine Dick Father Lovely Iron Man Even Unique Poh Un Winn Charlie Ghora Khaos Mehan Hansa Kimmy Humbero Uno Master Over Dance Shake Bouti Bepop Rocksteady Shredder Kung Ulf Road House Gilgamesh Flap Guy Theo Arse Hole Im Yoda Funky Boy Slam Duck Chuck Jorma Jukka Pekka Ryan Super Air Ooy Rusell Salvador Alfons Molgan Akta Papa Long Nameh Ek has changed his name six times (at approximately $134 per change).
A gift has arrived for you. It's a small gift, but it's a kind and thoughtful gift, handpicked just for you: A company called Metail has finally created the outfit-selecting computer program from Clueless that Cher uses to select her clothes.
Yes, in all its computers 1.0 glory, this virtual closet is yours. You can upload a photo of yourself and overlay this image with a yellow-plaid skirt and matching vest until you are blue in the face. And this present comes just 19 years after you first desired it. But you know, true love waits.
Recently, word got out about a herd of sheep living in a Silver Lake backyard. If you found that story intriguing, you might be even more interested to know that the Silver Lake shepherd/shepherdess is now seeking a tenant with whom to share his/her quirky property. Per the Craigslist notice: "Furnished studio space available in my home, with private entrance, your own complete kitchen and shared full bathroom. Lots of outside space. Deck with beautiful views. $1500 excluding utilities, but we could share the bills and the laundry too. Open for barter. Babysitting, handyman work, cooking...anything that can free up some of my time. I have two babies, ten sheep one dog. But all animals not in house or in your private area of the property. And bathroom only shared with humans." The ad then goes on to say rather mysteriously, "My chickens are on roadtrip, but they might be back soon, then you will have fresh eggs everyday included too." Sounds like a pretty good deal to us (and the chickens are awfully adorable, to boot)!
Sliding Goats Will Be Your #CutenessBreak For Today
There is nothing more adorable than really happy animals who are loving life Take a break and play with these kids.
Big thanks to the wonderful kind souls at Edgar’s Mission Farm who live by the philosophy:
“If we could live happy and healthy lives without harming others… why wouldn’t we?” Edgars Mission
Here’s how rough Hollywood can be on older women: In the new comedy Tammy, Susan Sarandon is cast as Melissa McCarthy’s grandmother, despite the fact that only 24 years separate them in age. This isn’t the first time an actress has seemed way too young to sire her screen kin (in one classic case, Anne Bancroft was only eight years older than her The Graduate screen-daughter Katharine Ross), and it’s not even the most egregious example in Tammy, where McCarthy also cast the 11-years-older Allison Janney as her mother. This sort of thing happens all the time to actresses — once they reach a certain age, it's like they're filed away in a folder simply marked "old" — and it’s a problem their male counterparts rarely have to contend with. To prove it, we’ve rounded up some recent examples of age-inappropriate casting, then imagined what would happen if some of these believability-busting pairings got a gender flip.
Tammy grandmother: Susan Sarandon (b. October 4, 1946) mother: Allison Janney (b. November 19, 1959) daughter: Melissa McCarthy (b. August 26, 1970)
Susan Sarandon is an incredibly well-preserved 67, as her recent viral selfie made abundantly clear. Even if you throw a white wig on her for a movie like Tammy, she’s still going to seem more like Melissa McCarthy’s mother than her grandma. (It only compounds the believability issues when Allison Janney somehow represents the generation between the two women.)
Male Equivalent: If the 34-year-old Jason Segel starred in a comedy … where his father was played by the 48-year-old Ben Stiller and his grandpa was played by the 57-year-old Tom Hanks.
Forrest Gump mother: Sally Field (b. November 6, 1946) son: Tom Hanks (b. July 9, 1956)
Sally Field ages several decades during Forrest Gump, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s barely ten years older than her screen-son Tom Hanks. Just a few years earlier, when they had starred in the 1988 movie Punchline, Hanks played a character who wanted to bed Field.
Male Equivalent: Let's flip it, and cast Hanks as the father to someone ten years younger than him. That role could actually be filled by his co-star Robin Wright, who plays his same age in Forrest Gump but was really born in 1966, a full decade after Hanks.
Mean Girls mother: Amy Poehler (b. September 16, 1971) daughter: Rachel McAdams (b. November 17, 1978)
In Mean Girls, Amy Poehler’s “cool mom” wants nothing more than to be regarded as a peer to her daughter, and rightly so: Only seven scant years separate Poehler and Rachel McAdams in age. Though Poehler was playing the mother to a teenage girl in the film, Mean Girls was made five years before Poehler would even give birth to her first child.
Male Equivalent: If the 1968-born Owen Wilson, who has played love interest to McAdams twice, had been cast as her dad instead.
Little Miss Sunshine mother: Toni Collette (b. November 1, 1972) son: Paul Dano (b. June 19, 1984) He played the silent 15-year-old son in Little Miss Sunshine, but when the movie came out in 2006, Paul Dano was actually 22 years old, and his screen-mom Toni Collette was only 33. Then again, Collette was still in her early 20s when she was cast as the mother of a 9-year-old in The Sixth Sense. Maybe there’s just something about her that screams “teen mom”?
Male Equivalent: For parity, they could remake Little Miss Sunshine today with 24-year-old Daniel Radcliffe as the son and 35-year-old Chris Pratt as his father.
The Fighter mother: Melissa Leo (b. September 14, 1960) son: Mark Wahlberg (b. June 5, 1971)
Do filmmakers realize how old Mark Wahlberg is? Certainly Michael Bay didn’t seem to when he cast Wahlberg and comedian T.J. Miller as high-school pals in the new Transformers movie, even though Miller is a noticeable ten years younger. But the ballsiest misapproximation of Wahlberg’s age came when David O. Russell approached Melissa Leo to play the actor’s mother in The Fighter, despite the fact that she’s only 11 years older than her screen-son. "I said, 'Aren't I too young to play [the] mother?’” recalled Leo, who nevertheless committed to the role. “If the actor believes it themselves,” she told NPR, “they can make you believe it.”
Male Equivalent: If they'd cast a male actor 11 years older than Wahlberg to play his dad, they could have drawn from a pool that includes Kenneth Branagh, Hugh Grant, and David Duchovny, all born in 1960. But would any of those three been able to make you believe it?
Star Trek mother: Winona Ryder (b. October 29, 1971) son: Zachary Quinto (b. June 2, 1977)
Winona Ryder may appear ageless, but it still stretches credulity when she’s onscreen next to Zachary Quinto as Spock and we’re meant to regard them as mother and son despite the fact that she’s just five years older than him. We could accept a lot of contrivances in J.J. Abrams’s fun Star Trek reboot, but that one pushed us a little too far.
Male Equivalent: Jared Leto (also born in 1971, the same year as Ryder) could have been cast as Spock’s dad, but would audiences ever buy someone like Leto as a paternal figure to Zach Quinto?
Alexander mother: Angelina Jolie (b. June 4, 1975) son: Colin Farrell (b. May 31, 1976)
There are a lot of things that feel not-quite-right about Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great epic — including Colin Farrell’s hideous blond wig, which looks like it came out of a Fred-from-Scooby-Doo costume kit at Party City — but foremost among them must be the casting of Angelina Jolie as Farrell’s mother. She’s only a year older than her screen-son; compare that to who Stone cast as Alexander’s father, the 16-years-older Val Kilmer.
Male Equivalent: If Colin Farrell’s father had been played by Bradley Cooper, born in 1975 — the same year as Jolie.
White Bird in a Blizzard mother: Eva Green (b. July 5, 1980) daughter: Shailene Woodley (b. November 15, 1991)
Eva Green has delivered delicious work in Casino Royale, The Dreamers, 300: Rise of an Empire, and Penny Dreadful, but that doesn’t mean she can play everything: In Gregg Araki’s upcoming White Bird in a Blizzard, this highly theatrical French actress attempts to convince the audience that she gave birth to naturalistic hippie ingenue Shailene Woodley, despite the fact that barely a decade separates them in age. Welcome to your 30s, Eva Green: You’ll now be offered roles where you play the housewife mom to a 17-year-old high-school senior. Thanks, Hollywood!
Male Equivalent: If Woodley’s Fault in Our Stars co-star Ansel Elgort (20) made a movie where the nine-years-older Dave Franco (29) played his dad.
Bethany Townsend never expected that a bikini photo she posted on Facebook would go viral, or that the support she received from thousands of people would reignite her dream to become a model. Townsend lives with Crohn's disease, which requires her to use colostomy bags, so when she posted the photo she did it because she was tired of hiding, not because she expected so much fanfare.
How’s your day going? Don’t worry, it’s about to get better. This is a video of Dolly Parton playing “Yakety Sax.” Really. It’s not a dub. It’s not a drill. As she explains, she learned it after watching The Benny Hill Show. So, when she was asked to play England’s Glastonbury Festival, she knew she had to bust it out. Seriously, why are you still reading these words? Go watch Dolly Parton play “Yakety Sax.”
Taking a peg out of Beyoncé's book, "Weird Al" Yankovic announced via Twitter that he plans to release eight videos from his new album Mandatory Fun over a period of eight straight days, starting July 14th. We know that Weird Al has already made plans to parody Iggy Azalea's "Fancy", but could this Mrs. Carter-style release be a really meta hint that we'll be hearing "Fartition" come mid-July? Fingers crossed!
On June 10, Wroclaw Zoo welcomed a female South African Fur Seal. This is the first offspring for the zoo's Seal group and keepers are pleased to report that the pups mother is taking great care of her newborn. Mother and child have been behind the scenes to allow the pair space and time to bond. After two weeks, keepers checked the sex of the pup and administered a medical examination. The female pup is healthy and curious about her surroundings, including her keepers.
On Thursday, Shia LaBeouf, an actor known for his roles in Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon was arrested for disrupting a performance
of Cabaret at Studio 54. (Honestly, I'm not a fan, but I'm plain worried about the guy.) In response, Liza Minnelli's publicist Scott Gorenstein sent him the best gift: a DVD of the 1972 film version in which she starred. DAMN.
Studies show that the vast majority of house fires take place in the home. Get out of the house with this GrouponLive deal.
The Deal
General admission to The LA Feline Film Festival
When: Sunday, September 21, at 1 p.m.
Where: Christmas Tree Lane, Exposition Park
Ticket values include all fees.
Ticketing Options
$10 for one adult ticket (for ages 13 and older) (up to $15 value)
$18 for two adult tickets (up to $30 value)
$22 for two adult tickets and two child tickets (valid for ages 4–12) (up to $44 value)
Children 3 and younger are regularly admitted for free.
The LA Feline Film Festival
Highlights from the 2013 festival
Is it what it sounds like?: yes
The festival's centerpiece: a collection of the best cat videos the internet has to offer
Cat and cat-related celebrities attending: Lil' Bub, and Steve from I Want To Draw A Cat For You
Who to bring: your cat, if he or she is okay with crowds and comes on a leash or in a carrier; litter boxes, water bowls, and endless adoration will be available
The dress code: cat costumes are optional, but costumed attendees can walk down the Cat Walk for the Cat Crazy costume contest
What else will be there: cats and kittens up for adoption from no-kill shelters and rescue groups, a fleet of food trucks and a beer tent, and live bands probably singing about cats
Who it benefits: a portion of all proceeds goes to cat rescue and adoption organizations
Carl's Jr. is on a mission to create the next big culinary hybrid with the Bisnut. It's a mix of the fast-food chain's signature biscuit and a doughnut.
Last week, the Transformers Hall of Fame — which is, believe it or not, a real thing — inducted two fictional robots, but only one human: a 60-year-old Los Angeles resident named Stan Bush. When the emcee uttered that human's name, cheers and applause erupted from the throngs of Transformers fans in the audience at the Pasadena Convention Center. Bush was brought on stage and he wore a grin of elation and surprise. "You're the best," he said, gesturing to the crowd. "You got the Touch!"
That capitalization is intentional, because Bush wasn't referring to just any touch. He was talking about the Touch: a metaphorical blessing of strengththat is the central topic of a song Bush wrote and recorded nearly 30 years ago, a power ballad called, simply, "The Touch." It's undoubtedly the greatest piece of music to come out of the Transformers franchise, and it's had a truly bizarre pop-culture journey.
Even if you're not a Transformers diehard, there's a very good chance that you've heard this strange musical artifact. To jog your memory, here's its extremely low-budget official music video:
As you might infer from the video's green-screen mise-en-scène, the track originally accompanied 1986's animated, feature-length The Transformers: The Movie. In fact, it's much more likely that you visually associate that song with the way it was used in the film (or the way it was used in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, which we'll get to in a minute). It provides backing music for a knock-down-drag-out between Optimus Prime and Megatron — the show's paternalistic hero and bitter villain. It's sublimely ridiculous and instantly memorable:
Listening to it, one might think, With lyrics like "it's in the mighty hands of steel," this must be a song written about Optimus Prime. But no. Bush says he had never even heard of the Transformers until after the song was already finished. Bush had written it with visions in his head of other iron bodies: Sylvester Stallone and Lou Gossett Jr.
In the mid-'80s, Bush was a musician and guitarist with a couple of albums to his name and no breakout hit. Inspiration struck when Bush and the song's co-writer, Lenny Macaluso, found themselves discussing Iron Eagle, a better-off-forgotten Gossett Jr. vehicle about jet pilots.
Bush recalled the origin story to me in an interview: "There's a scene in the movie where Gossett turns to this young pilot and says, 'Kid, you've got the touch,' and we were like, Yeah! What a great song idea!"
They wanted to write something anthemic enough to meet one goal.
"We wrote the song with the Stallone movie Cobra in mind," Bush said in his amiable southern drawl, picked up during his childhood in northern Florida. "We wanted to get it on the soundtrack. But the record label, they got it in the Transformers movie instead. We thought, What in the hell is that? An animated movie about robots? Really?"
Nevertheless, the song is adaptable to any of the aforementioned movies. The lyrics are emotive, but vague:
After all is said and done You'll never walk, you'll never run You're a winner
You got the moves, you know the street Break the rules, take the heat You're nobody's fool
And the chorus:
You got the touch You got the power When all hell's breaking loose You'll be riding the eye of the storm
You got the heart You got the motion You know that when things get too tough You got the touch
The song (also released the next year on Bush's album, Stan Bush & Barrage) didn't top the charts, though it did get airplay on rock radio. It fit right in next to other wailing guitar releases from acts like Rick Springfield or Survivor. But its most important legacy was making an impression on a soon-to-be-powerful generation of nerds.
I talked to Randall Ng, a 42-year-old animator who was a teen Transformers fanboy when the 1986 movie came out. "You'd hear that song and your blood starts pumping," Ng said. "I bought the cassette. You just had to have it." If he'd wanted, he could have also picked up a Transformers figure that would play "The Touch" when you pressed a button, or a copy of the song's release as a single.
Some of Ng's peers would go on to be filmmakers and game-makers in the decades to come, and would respectfully resurrect "The Touch" in their own narratives. Outside the entertainment industry, it still provided inspiration. "I still listen to it often," said Ng. "I hear it and it still gives me goose bumps." Bush told me of a recent letter from a fan who said he was a lawyer and listened to the song on headphones before each trial appearance.
But while Ng's generation was drooling over "The Touch" in both VHS and cassette form, Bush had already moved on. In 1988, he got one step closer to his beat-'em-up action-movie dreams when he got to record songs for the Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks Bloodsport and Kickboxer.
Bush's career then encountered a bumpy few years. He released five albums that received little to no attention. "The '80s rock thing had fizzled out with the grunge movement," Bush recalled with a sigh. In 1997, he had the boon of winning an Emmy for "'Til I Was Loved by You," a song he recorded for the TV show Guiding Light. But no matter where he thought he was heading, it seemed to him that "The Touch" was just a distant, decade-old memory.
That's when the song got an extremely high-profile second chance through the combined efforts of Mark Wahlberg and Paul Thomas Anderson. In 1997, Anderson released Boogie Nights, his critically beloved tale of the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler, a fictional porn star. Anderson had been fascinated by "The Touch" since its early days. In 1988, he had made an extremely low-budget early version of Boogie Nights, a half-hour-long piece called The Dirk Diggler Story. In it, he'd depicted Diggler attempting to branch out into music by (terribly) performing "The Touch." When it came time to make the big-screen version nearly a decade later, Anderson kept the scene almost entirely intact. Bush, however, had no input about its use.
"Boogie Nights, that was all set up through the publisher," Bush said. "It was an after-the-fact thing on my end. I just went to the theater and saw the scene. I guess it's the old axiom about any exposure being good."
The scene is certainly memorable. After his porn career collapses, Diggler (played by Mark Wahlberg in a career-altering performance), tries to pay for his coke and meth habits by recording a vanity single. The song he anachronistically picks (given that the scene is set in 1983, three years before the song's real-life origins in 1986) is none other than "The Touch." Wahlberg has claimed Anderson wanted to accentuate the actor's inability to carry a tune, and the scene certainly bears that assertion out:
(And thus, you have proof that Wahlberg's starring role in this weekend's Transformers: Age of Extinction is, in fact, the second time his fate has been intertwined with the Transformers.)
By sheer coincidence, that same year, Bush was invited to the fourth-ever "BotCon" convention for Transformers fans, held in Rochester, New York. To his surprise, fans had been revering "The Touch" for more than a decade, and he was asked to perform at the convention. At first, he was a little thrown off and irritated that everyone was focusing on this one-off song from so long ago.
"It's a double-edged sword," he said. "You have to thank goodness that there's something you're known for, I suppose. At least it's a positive song."
But he quickly made his peace with it and threw himself into the loving arms of his fans. He started to become a regular at BotCon, doing shows to bigger and bigger crowds as the convention became more of a destination.
"I know the song's right on the line of cheese and corniness and whatever, but I started to get all this fan mail and messages from fans saying these songs really helped them as kids," he said. "It helped them face adversity. There's enough negativity out there, so it's nice to have something that's just uplifting."
The song started popping up elsewhere in pop culture too, as the geeks of the '80s started infiltrating the entertainment industry. It was used in an episode of the NBC action-comedy Chuck. It was featured in an episode of American Dad. It even made it into Guitar Hero.
But then came the great change, something Bush could never have anticipated: the high-profile 2007 reboot of the Transformers franchise at the hands of Michael Bay. That's when Bush embarked on an odd, unprecedented attempt at recapturing his cinematic glory — with varying degrees of success.
In 2007, he rerecorded "The Touch" (with almost identical instrumentation). He says it was at the behest of Paramount, the studio behind the movies, and that they were planning to put it on the official soundtrack. I contacted Paramount and they couldn't independently confirm that, but an email thread Bush showed me seems to suggest that there was at least some communication with executives. Either way, Bush was left in the lurch: The song never made it into the movie or the soundtrack.
Undaunted, Bush tried another angle. In 2009, with the release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on the way, he rerecorded it again, this time as "Sam's Theme" (referring to the protagonist, Sam Witwicky). It was a strange re-envisioning of the song: It was done in a mournful minor key and featured, of all things, some random rapper doing a verse in the middle.
"I wanted a more Linkin Park–ish, modern thing," Bush recalled. "A dark sound, really. We thought that might possibly be more in line with what [the studio] would want."
Bush self-released the song, but the call from Paramount never came. "It's one of those things where it's hard to find and reach out to these people in charge," he said.
But all was not lost. Bush's loyal Transformers diehards started using "Sam's Theme" (as well as the original "Touch") in fan-made music videos incorporating footage from the movies. They made high-energy remixes of the track. And finally, he made his triumphant return to official Transformers merchandising in 2012: a remixed version incorporating the original and minor-key renditions was used in the video game Transformers: Fall of Cybertron.
And now Bush has a new dream about the next step. He wants to perform a duet of the song with a man whose fate is uniquely interwoven with Bush's, despite the two having never met: Mark Wahlberg.
The odds aren't in Bush's favor. Wahlberg has occasionally made references to the song and sung it in public, but always with tongue placed firmly in cheek. In a January 2013 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, for example, he did a piss-take performance of it at Jimmy's behest. In the interview afterward, he was a real jerk about the song.
"When Paul Thomas Anderson sent me the song, he actually sent me the original, along with the lyrics, and I was like, 'This is really bad,'" Wahlberg said on the show. "For Boogie Nights, it was an intentionally terrible song. But I don't think it was for the original Transformers ."
But Bush remains optimistic, even tweeting the following at Wahlberg a few days ago just before this year's BotCon, where — unbeknownst to him at the time — he was about to get his Hall of Fame induction:
Hey @Mark_Wahlberg, how'd you like to join me onstage at Universal this Friday to sing "The Touch" for Transformers fans?
Alas, when Bush took the stage for a BotCon concert last weekend, Wahlberg was nowhere to be seen. But it didn't matter. "Throughout the show, everyone was like, 'Is he gonna play it? Is he gonna play it?'" recalled Ng, who was in the crowd at the show. "And then he finished up the show by playing it. It was so wonderful to be part of that positivity and togetherness."
"I know people say, 'Oh, it's such '80s rock, but for me, if it's good music, it just inspires," Ng said. "'You got the touch, you got the power.' Why not be empowered by those things?"
A Florida mom was arrested on Tuesday after she reportedly refused to allow her newborn baby to be admitted to a hospital or to be treated with non-vegan medicine.
"Several people stopped to help the father, who the witness claims has been shouting 'what have I done? What have I done?' throughout the ordeal."
A toddler died in his car seat today after an Atlanta man accidentally left him in a locked vehicle for eight hours. Authorities allege that the temperature in the car could have reached up to 130 degrees.
You probably know Eli Wallach's work, even if you don't know his name. The prolific American actor died on Tuesday at age 98. For his 60 years in film, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Wallach a special honorary Oscar in 2010, lauding him as "the quintessential chameleon, effortlessly inhabiting a wide range of characters, while putting his inimitable stamp on every role," The New York Times reports.
Wallach played Italians (Godfather Part III, Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll), Mexicans (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and The Magnificent Seven), a Javanese warlord (Lord Jim...
Scarlet the Pudu fawn at Edinburgh Zoo has been keeping her keepers busy with around the clock bottle feeds.
The newborn Southern Pudu sadly lost her mother at two and a half weeks, but her dedicated keepers stepped in to hand-rear the tiny fawn. Hoofstock keeper,Liah Etemad, said: “Sadly Scarlet lost her mother at a really young age after birth exasperated an underlying untreatable condition. It was touch and go for a while for the fawn as she was being mother reared, but her keeper’s have worked around the clock to nourish and nurture the little fawn and she is doing so well now.
“Scarlet started on seven to eight bottled feeds of milk each day, getting her first feed early in the morning, throughout the day and then into the early hours. She is steadily gaining weight each day. During the first week after mum died she was cared for solely by her keepers, but then at four weeks she was reintroduced to her dad Normski. We were all delighted how well it went and the two were soon cuddled up together in the evenings and he maintains a watchful eye over her during the day. The fact she and her father have bonded so well means that he is teaching her natural Pudu behaviour."
“It has taken a lot of time and commitment from keepers, and at seven weeks old we are still giving her a small number of bottles during the day, but we could not be happier to see little Scarlet thrive. She has done so well that visitors are able to see her with dad at our Pudu enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo.”
Southern Pudus are normally found in southern Chile and south-western Argentina and are actually the world’s smallest deer. When fully grown they stand only at 38cm high and weigh around 9 to 15kg. Adults are reddish to dark brown and fawns have spots until they are a few months old. Females tend to give birth to a single fawn weighing around 1kg, which is weaned at around two months. Pudu are classified as a vulnerable species as their numbers have declined due to their primary rainforest habitat being destroyed and cleared for cattle ranching and other human developments.
The Offbeat Bride: Marita, Mortgage Counselor and Aspiring Esthetician and Makeup Artist
Her offbeat partner: Loren, Social Worker
Date and location of wedding: Loren's parents' home in Ferndale, WA — August 18, 2013
Our offbeat wedding at a glance: When Loren and I started planning our wedding, we wanted our celebration to be as much about the community that brought us together and supports us day to day as it was about us. With the exception of our incredibly talented and fun photographer, Jenny Jimenez, everyone involved with the planning and facilitation of the weekend was friend and/or family to us. Everything from the food to the flowers to the décor to the officiant to the day-of-coordination to the reception performances — all of that was the result of the generosity of our friends and family.
We wanted everyone to feel as comfortable and welcome as possible, so we really focused on making sure our wedding was accessible for all of our guests. This manifested in a couple of ways: asking all who attended our wedding to be fragrance-free and letting everyone know that there would be no alcohol on our wedding day. Many people have fragrance and chemical sensitivities, so in our invitations, we included a fragrance-free request, information, and how-to resources, and asked our friend, Casey, to act as Accessibility Coordinator in case anyone had questions or access needs that day. I have been sober and in recovery from alcoholism since 2004, and we made the choice to have a sober wedding. In addition to having many friends in recovery as well, alcohol is neither a big part of our daily lives nor is it how we celebrate milestones as a couple, so having an alcohol-free wedding felt authentic and important.
Loren and I met through mutual friends in community, namely in poetry and queer/trans community. We wanted our wedding weekend to reflect that. While the whole day was a poem in and of itself, we asked some of our close friends to perform poetry that they wrote specifically for us during our reception. Getting to share those moments with our families of origin and bring all of our worlds together was really special.
Tell us about the ceremony:
We had a very simple processional. Loren walked each of his grandparents down the aisle, then came back to meet me while our flower girl, Marcella, walked down the aisle. Loren and I then walked down the aisle to Etta James' "A Sunday Kind of Love." We wanted our ceremony to mimic our own journey to one another, so we started with each of our parents sharing words about marriage — what they had learned along the way and what they wanted to share with us as we begin our marriage. Two of our closest friends, Anne and Foley, shared a story and a poem, which symbolized and narrated how we connected to each other through mutual friends and our shared love of words. Next, our community made vows to help support and witness our marriage in the years to come. Then our officiant, Patch Avery, shared words he had written for us on our wedding day:
Most of us look for the fairytale, the pixie dust — everyone wants the grand ballroom, that last dance. The moral of the story isn't about a forever that is sweet shop easy.
The weight of the glass slipper, second star to the right, the rabbit hole.
On this day, in your best clothes, in front of these people, I can only offer you
what I know you have already offered each other. The chance to become explorers.
Loren and Marita, you have cuffed your sleeves, put on your best lipstick, and the pirates, and the crocodile, are coming for you. The beanstalk is epic, the Cheshire Cat is grinning his most troublesome grin. Something new, what you find, outside of any castle, longevity, the breath after this wake up kiss,
how the mistakes will rust in the corner and remind you of all those times
you fell down the hillside, ran through the forest.
Today we get to celebrate all the ways you will become a beautiful classic bedtime story,
we get to watch the new chapter unfold. On this day, the fairytale is very real,
the moral of all these stories is to find home, which is why we are here, for all that you have beautifully blue printed, and the commitment in breaking ground. – Patch Avery
Loren and I then shared individually written vows and our rings before we turned toward all our friends and family and Patch invited everyone to pronounce us married.
Our biggest challenge:
While we had been out as queer and/or trans to most people in our lives, there were some relatives and old friends that we needed to tell before our big day. We spoke early on about how we wanted everyone to be fully aware and supportive of us as individuals and as a couple, so Loren and I wrote separate letters to be sent with some Save the Dates or had individual conversations with people. For the most part, this invited people into deeper conversations with us, allowed us to feel more supported as well as let go of any lingering fear or shame we had. Of course, there were some people who probably would have shown up had they not been made aware that we identify as queer and that Loren is transgender, but we wanted to be with the people who loved us unconditionally — people who would show up and witness our marriage even if they didn't fully understand.
My favorite moment:
The night before the big day, a couple of our dear friends, Erin and Liz, facilitated an intention-setting and ring-blessing ceremony. Our immediate families and close friends gathered around the firepit and Loren and I got to soak up all of their intentions for us as a married couple. We received poetry, visual art, cross-stitch, stories, and heartfelt looks. We both cried more that evening than on our wedding day. There was something very sacred, vulnerable, and nostalgic about standing in a circle in casual clothes, listening to our beloveds speak intentions and hopes for us as we move forward together.
Our other favorite moments of the wedding were the in-betweens: the quiet morning of getting ready together with our close friends, the moment right after the ceremony when we hugged behind the house — crying and laughing with the gravity and joy of it all, smiling and dancing with friends and family, and hanging out with the dogs and the kids.
My funniest moment:
What started out as a joke during the rehearsal became the best way we could have ended our wedding ceremony. I like to run and jump on Loren every once in a while just to see if he'll catch me, so we were joking about doing that as the recessional. Loren and I demonstrated this for everyone during our rehearsal and they all said that we just had to do that for the real thing. So as Phillip Phillips' "Home" began to play, Loren walked to the end of the aisle and I kicked off my bright floral heels and ran to him. Our guests were cheering and laughing and he caught me and twirled me as I jumped in his arms.
Have you been married before and if so, what did you do differently?
So many things. I had been married before, but Loren hadn't. It was important that this weekend felt like a completely new adventure for both of us. We were so intentional about building something that felt reflective of both of us and our families. We only used wedding customs that felt appropriate and genuine, we created rituals, and we let go of the rest. Instead of filling the blanks in a template, we hand-crafted our very own celebration.
What was the most important lesson you learned from your wedding?
Build a strong support system around you, before, during and after your wedding day and know when to let go of the details so you can be as present as possible. Since it was such a community effort, we were both involved in a lot of the planning up until the night before. Our friend Stefanie was our day-of-coordinator, and having someone we trusted to facilitate the day really helped us relax as much as possible that morning and focus on each other. We asked our friends Claire and Jen, who got married the year before, to be with us as we got ready that morning. They cooked us a delicious breakfast, made sure we stayed hydrated and really helped us stay calm with their steady and supportive energy. We laughed a lot on our wedding day, which was important and reflective of us as a couple. Find ways to make sure your day feels like home.
Amherst, Massachusetts, police received a call Sunday from a woman who claimed her neighbor gave her the business for cheering too much while watching the World Cup, according to MassLive.com. And as if the standard whining about the World Cup wasn't enough to make said neighbor sound like a stereotypical sports jerk, the specifics of the incident read like a Bingo card of 'merica-loving, soccer-hating xenophobia:
Later that night, police received a call from a woman who had received a call from her neighbor scolding her for taking jobs away from Americans.
On a hot, humid day in Ellar Coltrane’s last spring as a teenager, nothing is going as planned. The star of Richard Linklater’s new film, Boyhood, a feat of conceptual daring that tracks a fictional boy over episodes spanning 12 years, shot in bursts spanning 12 actual years, Coltrane has just returned to Austin after a month of “adventuring” through the Southwest with his father, a rock musician, and leaves tomorrow for a film festival in Australia. Now on the precipice of not just adulthood but a level of fame that plainly terrifies him, he has one afternoon to see his mother, a dancer and equine therapist; retrieve a printer from a friend’s landlady; indulge a reporter’s questions; lie in wet grass for a photo shoot; and, if he can manage it, take his first swim of the year in Barton Springs Pool. “They switched my flight a day ahead without telling me,” Coltrane says, while picking out a $5 pair of silver swim trunks at the Goodwill on South Lamar Boulevard. “But, you know, it’s fine.”
Coltrane, who will turn 20 in August, has spent almost all his life here in “keep it weird” Austin — mostly home-schooled except for three years of high school, followed by a GED; landscaping work for his stepfather; photography and painting in the trippy vein of Alex Grey; and the slow-burn emotional time bomb of a movie formerly known as “The 12-Year Project.” Linklater’s deep-focus, pseudo-vérité coming-of-age story was designed to capture a fictional family in messy real time — the mutable boy, Mason (Coltrane); his straight-A sister, Samantha (Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei); and their divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette). Every year before the usually four-day-long shoot, Linklater would hold a week of rehearsals, dinners, and collaborative rewrites — a process also used in Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. Hawke, who was in those too, compares it to the improv-plus rewriting approach of Mike Leigh. “We all used this fictional family as a crucible,” he says, “in which to pour our collective thoughts on growing up.”
But Linklater’s film isn’t just an aesthetic gambit. It’s also a psychological experiment, absorbing the personalities and dramas of its stars and, 12 years later, showing them — and then the world — a fictional doppelgänger of their lives. That might feel like a small step for grown-up actors accustomed to the perils of self-exposure, but for Coltrane, raised to treat “career” and “celebrity” like four-letter words, it’s a giant leap.
“It’s completely mind-bending,” says Coltrane, while navigating us from the passenger seat to Barton Springs, the three-acre spring-fed pond where half of under-30 Austin seems to spend its summer evenings. Vegan-thin, he wears a black T-shirt, black pants, sandals accented in maroon, and an omega-shape nose ring through his septum. “I try not to worry about my appearance as much as possible,” he says. Hawke may marvel at the luck of his co-star’s “growing up to look like James Dean,” but Coltrane seems anxious to leave behind the self-conscious look-at-me phases that typify any interesting adolescence — and which gave the meandering Boyhood its rhythm and narrative structure, punctuating annual scene changes with both clarity and pathos. “Everyone wants to be cool, but I just don’t, I really fucking don’t,” he says, his voice rising. (“I rant a lot,” he’ll say later.) “It’s just this kind of physical appearance–based thing that I’ve been striving for, for so long, and it doesn’t bring me happiness! You should get in the left lane.”
He rubs his eyes with double fists. “As soon as they’re not admiring me, then I’m just left with however I feel about myself. You should take a left here. But it gets better every day. Yeah, yeah, keep going and — ” He reads a posted sign: “Pool is closed for maintenance. God fucking damn it, that’s some bullshit. How lame is that?” He sighs. “Well, I mean, we could just sit in the park.”
***
“I could talk your ears off for hours about the way reality works,” says Coltrane, his mood lifting a bit as we settle on a shady hill opposite the pool, in the ruins of a long-ago koi pond still encircled by a low wall of striated rock. He talks with an autodidact’s passion about his latest interests — geology, meditation, David Foster Wallace — and all the things he did and didn’t learn in the course of his own fascinating boyhood.
His parents, he says, are “strange people, and they took a very bizarre approach to parenting, but they supported me unconditionally, which is something a lot of parents fail at.” Coltrane is Ellar’s middle name; he decided to use it professionally as his last name when the film wrapped, “because Salmon is a family name. It just feels too personal to put on the screen.” His father, Bruce Salmon (stage name: Brewski Sal Mineo), grew up in a conservative, wealthy New Orleans family — “lovely people but very closed-minded, and not at all supportive of my father dropping out of college to be a musician.” Whereas Boyhood’s Mason bristles at authority figures — mainly a couple of stepfathers he calls “a parade of drunken assholes” — Coltrane got his rebellion secondhand. “I didn’t have my parents to rebel against, but I had society, and that definitely is what they taught me. Just: Trust nothing.”
The casting process felt, to Linklater, like a high-stakes gamble. “It’s a bit like getting the new Dalai Lama — I remember staring at him and wondering, Who are you? Are you the real one?” he says. “Ellar seemed like the most interesting of them all, kind of ethereal — a lot like now. There were other kids who were a little more straitlaced, future athletes and class presidents.” Coltrane’s aunt was a fashion model, and a scout had discovered him in an agency waiting room and put him up for a few commercials that led to an indie movie. For Boyhood, Coltrane recalls many callbacks — no line readings, just chats (he was only 6). He remembers bringing in a drawing of a monkey in a tree; on the back was a poster for a rock show featuring Bruce’s 1990s band, Joe Rockhead. Linklater was a fan. “I have a suspicion he cast me because my dad’s cool.”
Linklater laughs when I relay the idea but doesn’t dismiss it. “It helps when you think the parents are cool,” he says. “The nightmare is to go four or five years in and they’ll say, ‘We don’t think this is good for Ellar.’ Artists get it — storytelling over 12 years. Money people balk and think of all the bad things that could happen. Artists tend to think of all the good things.”
Boyhood begins with young Mason staring at clouds. He forgets to turn in finished homework, “technically” flunks first grade, and is dabbling in graffiti by the second scene. He’s a minor rebel but still a blank slate; he watches wide-eyed as his mother fights with a boyfriend, a deer caught in the headlights of working-class, broken-home America.
Ellar’s boyhood bore little resemblance to Mason’s — his strikingly free-range adolescence was more of a millennial update on the Austin slacker archetype familiar from Linklater’s other movies — but young Ellar didn’t always distinguish between the set and the world. Only after seeing the movie did he realize that he’d watched one particularly exciting Astros game, complete with a serendipitous home run, not with his own dad but with Ethan Hawke. He also began to see how deeper currents in his own life were reflected in Mason’s — especially his own parents’ divorce and tensions with a stepfather. “I don’t know how much I talked to Rick about that, but I’m sure he saw it,” says Coltrane.
“I was very angsty from a very young age,” he adds. “The way people start acting when they’re 15, I started being at 8.” Hawke remembers one of his first meetings with Coltrane: “He told me that Waking Life” — Linklater’s animated, plotless, metaphysical fantasia — “was his favorite movie. There’s not a lot of 7-year-olds that have seen Waking Life.”
“He was like a little rock star,” says Linklater. And as he grew older, the film adapted to him, even as Ellar adapted to the fact that he was playing a character who went to school every day and devoured Harry Potter instead of Tolkien. Linklater would give him extracurricular assignments: “When you find yourself alone talking to a girl in an intimate situation, go home and write it up.” Two write-ups — about Star Wars and the evils of Facebook — made it into the movie. A painting from a “graffiti camp” Ellar had attended soon adorned Mason’s wall. And when Ellar came in one year wearing purple nail polish, Linklater used it as fodder for Mason’s stepfather’s mockery.
As Coltrane grew older, he experimented — with drugs, with haircuts, with unusual piercings — and though he asked Linklater before making cosmetic changes, he says the director never objected. There was, however, a clash over his hair; when he was around 11, a producer demanded that he grow it out to shoulder length so that it could be shaved in a crucial confrontational scene. Ellar resisted: “I was just like, ‘Fuck you, I’m living my life!’” But he did it anyway. Onscreen, the shaving of his head is a traumatic, almost abusive moment. It was Coltrane’s first acting triumph. “That look of despair,” he says, “that was put on.”
For Coltrane, the annual shoots were both a reality check and a life raft. “It was surreal to step out of my own existence and see how most American children experience things,” he says. It was also a way of learning about something concrete and long term. “I didn’t learn anything academic, ever,” he says. The film shoot “taught me discipline and patience. It was my school.” “How much did the movie shape Ellar, and how much did Ellar shape the movie?” Linklater wonders. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to answer that.”
***
Back on the road with Coltrane, in search of a raw vegan restaurant called Beets Café, I’m missing one left turn after another and getting intermittently lost. “The traffic, man, it sucks,” says Coltrane.
My phone’s GPS might help, but I’m reluctant to let robotic commands intrude on our conversation, particularly with someone who suspects the web is turning us into automatons. Coltrane recently disconnected his iPhone from the internet. “I’m trying to teach myself not to rely on that,” he says. “It’s really hard. I get lost so much.” By the time we manage to find Beets, it’s closed for the day — another plan botched. “Are you serious?!” Coltrane says, before reverting to slacker forbearance. “It’s cool,” he says. “I’ll just have dinner with my mom.”
Meanwhile, he’s got an errand to run. His friend David had bought a printer from him, then moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and now Coltrane has to take it off the hands of David’s landlady, Cindy. “I’m sorry about this,” he says. “I forgot I had to do this, and I thought I’d have tomorrow, but I don’t have tomorrow.” Cindy actually needs a ride to her house from another house — a predicament she explains from the back seat after we pick her up. “I’ve got a father, cancer, hospital, Houston, appointment, emergency room, pack him up, get him moved here, he’s doing well, but my house is filled with boxes and boxes, it was my grandmother’s house.” Struck by the easy intimacy, I ask how long Ellar has known Cindy. “We’ve never met.”
Over the course of “The 12-Year Project,” Coltrane appeared in just a handful of other films, including Linklater’s Fast Food Nation in 2006. But when Linklater put him up for another part, he just said, “I’m not working this summer.” Soon he fired his agent. “I didn’t want to be an actor anymore,” says Coltrane. (Los Angeles, for one thing, “scares the shit out of me.”) But in the wake of Boyhood, he’s reconsidering. During his road trip, he used a friend’s house in New Mexico to shoot an audition tape for a famously innovative director he won’t name on the record. He’s even got a manager now.
“Ellar’s a good actor,” says Linklater, but he isn’t so sure he’ll go the distance. “You’ve got to have some bad qualities, too. Like something to prove. You’ve got to want it bad.” Linklater cites one exception, Matthew McConaughey, whose breakthrough was in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. “I remember him saying, ‘You know, I’m thinking about maybe going out there.’ He went out to L.A. The first thing he went up on, he got. It was meant to happen.”
Hawke, who began acting in his teens, has counseled Coltrane to take his inevitable fame in stride — light advice that comes from a dark place. “I’ve lost two of the best actors of my generation to heroin,” says Hawke. “River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. So one has to look at it all with perspective. I’m really encouraging Ellar to take his time and be gentle with himself. And to keep his sense of humor, that’s the key.” Before signing off, Hawke says, “Take care of Ellar. It’s a delicate moment for him.”
Coltrane has now seen Boyhood eight or nine times across as many cities, putting a lot of mileage, physical and emotional, between himself and Mason. But Linklater had refused to show Ellar or Lorelei any footage before the film was complete. Already protected from the worst part about being a child actor — the surge of praise and criticism that comes with a film’s release — they were also sheltered from the painful self-consciousness of seeing their gawky adolescence immortalized in real time. When the movie was finished, Linklater gave copies to Ellar and Lorelei and told them, “Watch this alone. You’re going to have to build your relationship with this movie before others start jumping in.”
On that first, solitary viewing, Coltrane’s boyhood flashed in front of him for the movie’s full 2:45 — haircut by haircut, growth spurt after growth spurt. He felt almost nothing. “But then,” he says, “as soon as the credits roll, it’s just waterworks.” He pins it all to the last scene. Filmed among the majestic mesas of Big Bend on Texas’s southwestern border, it’s the culmination of both Coltrane’s childhood and the most important single project of his life so far. On the surface, it’s just a tripped-out conversation between Mason and a girl he met that day, gazing out at the sunset vista and talking about the importance of not just this moment but “the moment.”
“That’s what really gets me,” says Coltrane. “This is the beginning of my life, and that movie is the fucking beacon of that. That was my life for the last 12 years. That’s over. And now, now what?”
He doesn’t think he’ll ever leave the movie behind. “It’s a huge part of me,” he says. “It’s a gift that Rick gave me. It’s kind of proof that I’m real.”
A source has come forward to Page Six bearing the horrible, horrible details of Lady Gaga's scrapped "Do What U Want" video, which features alleged child rapist R. Kelly and was shot by alleged sexual predator Terry Richardson. How did this video even come into being?
Doritos lovers, get ready to have your minds blown. 7-Eleven is giving Angelenos a first look at its new Doritos Loaded warm nacho cheese snacks Friday.
Japan's parliament on Wednesday finally banned the possession of child pornography, making it a crime punishable by up to a $9,800 fine and a year in prison. However, the law has a loophole permitting cartoon depictions of child pornography in anime and manga, an exception that came at the request of publishers who said a blanket ban would violate their right to free speech.
The move makes Japan the last nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to ban the possession of child porn. And though Japan previously outlawed the making of child porn, it did not punish...
A rolling pin is a standard tool in the baker’s kitchen. They’re usually smooth cylinders of wood with only slight variations in shape. They’re used to flatten dough quickly and easily, and they’re definitely known for their functionality before their style. Valek Rolling Pins makes some fantastic laser-engraved rolling pins in a variety of designs that are sure to add some flair to your baking. Each beech rolling pin is hand-cut with a creative design that makes it a work of art as much as a kitchen tool The patterns range from detailed Robot Rolling Pins to Cat Rolling Pins and rolling pins that offer holiday greetings. For a bit extra, you could even have your own completely custom rolling pin made with a design of your choosing.
The trick to using these is that you need to use a dough that does not rise at all in order to get the best results. Shortbread cookie dough, some butter cookie doughs and cracker doughs are the best choices. A dough that rises or spreads will lose the definition of the embossed shapes, and in something like a bread dough, it is unlikely that you will be able to see any of the design in the finished product. In a way, however, this makes the pins a little more versatile, since it means you can have a little fun using them for some of your regular baking projects in place of a standard rolling pin, even when you don’t need to see the design in the end.
In open defiance of the will of the free market — which roundly rejected the first two installments — Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who is John Galt? is slated for release later this year. But the film's marketing team has just unveiled a secret weapon: former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, who will make a special cameo alongside conservative commentators like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
"It's much more than a story," says Paul in a promotional video for Atlas Shrugged Part III. "Of course, it's influenced millions of people already, and because of its greatness it's...
Oh, remember the Situation? He's still a person! And as fascinating as ever: Today he was arrested for fisticuffing with his brother in the tanning salon they own together. OOH, TELL ME MORE.
Take a break and play with these kids.
