We know it's tasty and delicious but who knew flavor could be so beautiful? This audio visual installation by Schwartz Flavour Shots riffs off the explosion of flavors one tastes with spices by literally exploding those flavors. Several tons of black pepper corns, cardamom, turmeric, paprika, cumin seeds, ginger, chili and coriander were placed in explosive bags, rigged to explode on certain notes. Looks delicious.
There aren’t many who could beat Tony Stark in a fair fight, but Katniss Everdeen is one of them. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has just become the highest-grossing release of 2013, narrowly beating out Iron Man 3. Which is pretty remarkable in itself, but is even more impressive when you consider that it’s the first female-led film to come out on top since The Exorcist in 1973. Hit the jump for more on Katniss’ box office supremacy.
Journalist Mark Harris pointed out this (depressingly unsurprising) factoid in a tweet.
Remarkable stat: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the first movie with a solo female lead to be the year's #1 film since The Exorcist.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) January 10, 2014
While it’s more common to see #1 films with female co-leads, as Harris takes pains to point out, even those are rare. Films like The Avengers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and Toy Story 3 (the last three winners) have significant female characters, but only in supporting roles; Hermione may be crucial to the Harry Potter saga, but no one thinks of her as the face of the franchise. To even find a top film with true female co-lead, I’d say you’d have to go back to 1997, when Titanic dominated.
Within the 2013 box office, however, Katniss has more company. Frozen was the year’s fourth biggest film, and is proving surprisingly resilient. It topped the box office last week in its sixth weekend, becoming the first film since Avatar to achieve such a feat. And Gravity was the #7 film of the year despite being everything conventional Hollywood wisdom says won’t make money — an original film starring a woman.
Looking ahead, it’s tough to guess how 2014 will fare in comparison. There’s a real chance the next Hunger Games, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 could clinch the top spot again, while Maleficent also has the potential to make big bucks. And although it remains to be seen whether The Hunger Games will finally convince studio execs that yes, female leads can sell, the fact that the Shailene Woodley-starrer Divergent will try to follow in its lucrative footsteps later this year is an encouraging sign.
Today, I realized I willingly support my boyfriend's alcoholism, because the only time he says "I love you" is when he's blind drunk. FML
A man takes his toddler daughter to visit his identical twin brother for the first time. She knows what Daddy looks like and sounds like, but now there's suddenly two of them! She has no trouble going to her uncle, but keeps looking back and forth at both guys in adorable confusion. -via Viral Viral Videos
The title of Quentin Tarantino‘s next film might have just been revealed. Late last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed his follow-up to Django Unchained would be an unrelated western and Deadline is reporting the working title to that film is The Hateful Eight. They also report Tarantino has begun to circulate an early draft of the script to some actors he’s interested in appearing in the film. The first is no surprise. It’s his Oscar-winning muse Christoph Waltz. The second is current Oscar-contender Bruce Dern. Filming might take place this summer.
Deadline broke the news and the mention The Hateful Eight might just be a working title as Tarantino has yet to finalize anything. Tarantino has long spoke of doing a film in the mold of The Dirty Dozen or Magnificent Seven and while Inglourious Basterds took that idea to World War II, maybe The Hateful Eight will finally see Tarantino take his band of misfits idea to the Old West.
We’ll let you know when we hear more about Tarantino’s next film but, for now, what do you think about Waltz and Dern working with the director?
Additional source: THR
(Photo: ABC)
Hendrik Helmer of Karama, Northern Territory, Australia woke up at 2:30 in the morning with a sharp pain in one of his ears--like something was burrowing into his head. He tried to flush it out with water, but that only angered the creature.
So he went to the hospital. Doctors used forceps to remove a 2 centimeter-long cockroach from his ear.
Mr. Helmer now sleeps with headphones or earplugs.
Here's a video of the encounter:
-via Dave Barry
If you thought you dodged a bullet during Target and Neiman Marcus' holiday data breaches, you might want to sit down. According to a Reuters report published early this morning, at least three other well-known U.S. retailers were hacked, too.
Submitted by: Unknown
A new Gallup poll is making me very jealous, because I still have VHS tapes lying around that I can’t watch because my roommate made me throw out my old TV/VCR combo. Anyway! It turns out that 58% of Americans still have a VCR, which yes, is down from the 88% in 2005, but is still remarkable in this age of HD and digital whatnots. Anyone want to watch old taped episodes of My So-Called Life? I’ve got the VHS, if you’ve got the VCR. [Gallup]
Building the perfect battery is a hard problem. Batteries either too inefficient or too expensive or too unstable to power the renewable gadgets of the future. But a team of Harvard scientists just built a new kind of battery with a molecule found in food, and it could solve these problems.
Well, this student is apparently clueless about two things, biology and girls.
It just goes to show you, teachers know a lot more than just the subject they teach.
Submitted by: JoeO
Today, I joked with a pregnant girl in a state juvenile correctional facility where I work that eating a lot of candy would damage the unborn baby's teeth. Without batting an eye, she responded that she would simply "eat some toothpaste after the candy." FML
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's got icons. It's got a shiny bezel. It's got a home button. Seems legit to me.
[Image credit: Samout3] ...
At this point, nobody's surprised to hear that the authorities can track your cell phone. But what you might not realize is just how easy and how incredibly cheap it is.
Over the past few weeks dozens of DVD screeners have leaked onto the Internet. This happens every year around the holiday season, when movie studios send out their entries for various awards, the Oscars included.
The pirated screeners are a thorn in the side of Hollywood, and over the years the movie studios have implemented strict security procedures to prevent leaks. These efforts have been moderately successful, but the problem remains.
Yesterday a pirated screener copy of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty leaked onto the internet via various BitTorrent sites. While this isn’t something out of the ordinary, the fact that the screener displays a watermark with a Hollywood star’s name on it is quite unique.
The pirated copy in question is linked to Ellen DeGeneres, which is all the more painful, since she is the host for the upcoming 2014 Oscars.
As can be seen below, the leaked screener clearly lists DeGeneres’ name, suggesting that the DVD was sent to her in November. The watermark is displayed right after the opening credits, around the one minute mark.
While it’s technically possible that someone edited the screener to implicate DeGeneres, this seems unlikely. All copies of the screener that are circulating on the Internet include the same watermark, suggesting that they came from the same source.
Thus far, there has been plenty of interest in the pirated screener. Data gathered by TorrentFreak suggests that within 24 hours of its release, an estimated 250,000 copies have been already been downloaded , all with DeGeneres’ name on it.
Neither Ellen DeGeneres nor Fox have commented on the leak thus far, and it also remains unclear what the screener was intended for.
Andy Baio suggests that it could be connected to Ben Stiller’s appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show early December, for which she may have received an advance copy of the film.
This is not the first time that a celebrity has been linked to a leaked DVD screener. In 2011 a pirated copy of the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Super 8′ surfaced online with Howard Stern’s name all over it. This leak made plenty of headlines, but as far as we know Stern nor his colleagues were never investigated.
For Ellen DeGeneres the leak may perhaps serve as inspiration for a piracy joke or two at the Oscars ceremony later this year. That is, if she’s not in jail by then.
Update: Twentieth Century Fox confirmed that the copy was sent to the Ellen DeGeneres show.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.
Briefly: In years past, when a director had a film that was likely to be in contention for a Best Picture Oscar, you wouldn’t hear about him signing on to do a TV project. But the reputation of TV has changed and regardless, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen isn’t your typical director.
And so, McQueen has announced development efforts to create a series for the BBC that will chronicle several decades of black experience in London. The director told the Daily Mail that he’s going to workshop the series with a set of actors, and that the drama will be set in West London. Calling it “epic in scope,” he explained that it will follow a set of people from 1968 to 2014. ”I don’t think there has been a serious drama series in Britain with black people from all walks of life as the main protagonists,” he said. Speaking to Deadline, Ben Stephenson of the BBC called it a “major drama.”
There’s a lot of work to be done on this one yet, so we might not see it for a while. Will it incorporate any stories of the ’81 Brixton riots, which McQueen was said to be exploring for a film some time ago? That’s something we don’t know at this point.
Homer has a little too much to drink and finds himself in an anime world in The Simpsons' tribute to director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. How many references can you spot? You may have to watch more than once. If you've seen Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, and Princess Mononoke, you'll be well covered here. How will this work into an entire episode? We'll likely find out this weekend. -via Viral Viral Videos
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fatbobthese are good, but not half as good as the crwfish ones zapps make, cant find em around here though, la/tx has em
[Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger]
I ate spectacularly well during my last trip to New Orleans, but how could I not? Fried chicken at Willie Mae's Scotch House. A muffaletta at Central Grocery and Cochon Butcher. A soft shell crab Po' Boy at Parasol's. And, if I'm being completely honest, I need to include a bag of Zapp's Voodoo Potato Chips. How could a simple bag of chips be so good? Well, I'm not completely sure. All I can say is that my wife and I finished an entire bag of the chips after we'd already eaten an incredible dinner at Sylvain.
Zapp's is kind of vague about the exact flavors, only mentioning on its website that the flavor was the "result of an accident," when "an employee was moving a pallet of spices off the top shelf, and dropped it." Fortunately, Kenji also fell under the Voodoo spell, and I think his description is spot on:
It starts off with the vinegary nose of a salt and vinegar chip before settling down with the smoky sweetness of sweet barbecue sauce. There's a sharp, fresh, jalapeño-like finish, and perhaps a touch of that Old Bay aroma that lingers after you've made it about halfway through the bag.
Sounds great, right? But what does this have to do with eating in Chicago? Well, I've been trying to track down a bag of the chips since I returned, which I thought would be easy because Zapp's chips are sold at every Potbelly in town. But the couple I checked had never heard of the Voodoo flavor, and I eventually gave up the search. That is, until I was waiting for my food the other day at Bon Bon Sandwiches, only to look over and see Zapp's Voodoo Potato Chips staring back at me. Now, why the Vietnamese cafe was stocking the chips is beyond me, but who really cares? Go check them out.
Oh, and if anyone else knows where to find the flavor, please let me know!
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