Making movies isn’t always fun and games. Actors are often put through the ringer and have to endure extreme conditions. James Cameron famously pushed his actors so hard on the set of The Abyss that they broke down in tears and Ed Harris punched him after a scene in which he almost drowned. Stanley Kubrick…
Author: Ian Fortey
Evolution is a trip in more ways than one. That life can adapt to its environment, to make a series of improvements to help it thrive in the world is amazing. Even more incredible is the way the same destination can be reached from different starting points. It makes sense that more than one creature…
Let there be light. Someone or other said that once and all things being equal, humans and other living things have benefited from having light. There wouldn’t be much life without it. And while the sun was our big provider for a long time before we mastered fire and then electricity, these are far from…
Let’s start this one with an acknowledgement that a characteristic of a lot of fads is that they rarely make sense. Fidget spinners, for instance, were just things that spun. They were huge for about a month and then they weren’t. The Pet Rock was another one. It was legitimately a stone, and you kept…
It’s been said that marketing is more about selling an idea than a product. There’s an early episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper comes up with a way to sell cigarettes by simply saying the tobacco is toasted, even though every brand has toasted tobacco. It doesn’t really matter what you’re trying to…
Sometimes the way we learn about the past colors our impression and understanding of it. Minor events can be made to seem huge and extremely significant ones can be downplayed or totally overlooked. It’s hard to be on the lookout for all the different biases that can color what we learn about events we weren’t…
Bribery is generally viewed in a negative context. There are different levels of bribery, of course. Convincing your child to be quiet by giving them candy is a different bribe than paying off the local police so you can continue to run a drug empire. Shades of gray, you might call it. Despite the mostly…
One of the biggest forged art scams in history resulted in roughly $80 million being spent on “fake” paintings. So the world of scam art is a booming business if you can pull it off. But art is far from the only industry where you can fake someone out and earn big money in the…
Humanity has all kinds of noble qualities. We’ve created art and music, we’ve unraveled mathematical mysteries, we invented tacos. There’s a lot to be proud of. By the same token, we fumble the ball in a lot of ways, too, none more egregious than with our more violent, xenophobic and territorial tendencies. On a mass…
Sampling is what you call it when a musician takes a recognizable piece of music that already exists and incorporates it into their own song. The practice dates back to the 70s and Guinness gave the credit to 1971’s “He’s Gonna Step on You Again” as the first track to sample another. This became hugely…
People talk about the value of a dollar a lot, and these days that usually includes lamenting how a dollar isn’t worth much at all. Things are expensive and they keep getting more expensive because the powers that be know we can’t not have food or fuel or Netflix. But that doesn’t mean a buck…
People want to believe the unbelievable. That truth is stranger than fiction is enticing because we like weirdness and, when it’s true weirdness, it’s somehow more appealing. Unfortunately, and especially in the modern world, this has led to a proliferation of quirky and unbelievable modern myths and weird facts that are not true at all.…
Far be it from us to promote or condone anything illicit, but it’s not out of pocket to point out that people out in the world have, for just shy of forever, been looking for ways to alter their states of consciousness or otherwise get high, as the kids say. And it turns out it’s…
The chat room. A relic of the internet’s past. Once upon a time, chat rooms swarmed the mighty cyber plains like digital buffalo, robust and unmissable. There were chat rooms for every topic imaginable. They were like a furious, real-time group text among strangers who came together to talk about Babylon 5, the Gulf War,…
You get paid royalties if you own the rights to something, whether that’s a physical asset, a song, even a name, and someone else wants to use it commercially. If someone else is making money off of something that’s yours, you are probably owed money for it. But it’s not as cut and dry as…
People like different foods, even foods you might consider weird or unappetizing. You probably like at least one thing someone else thinks is awful. It’s fine that people like different things, the world would suck if we all wanted everything the same. And with that in mind, here are some obscure street food delights from…
Facial recognition technology can trace its roots as far back as the 1960s. The ability to implement it large scale and ubiquitously only really came into being in the modern computer age, of course, and in the present it seems to be nearly everywhere, with fears that it will become even more widespread in the…
When you have a great idea, a patent can help you preserve and secure it so that the world knows it’s yours. Of course, not everyone wants a patent on something they created. For instance, Coca-Cola never patented their original formula because they were afraid someone could check out the patent and reverse engineer their…
If you ever want to waste a few hours of your day on a frustrating task, try to find the last time in history during which no wars were being fought anywhere in the world. It’s extremely hard to do and some folks suggest there actually hasn’t been a time when there was no war.…
Some people see a coincidence and believe it’s a sign of something more. Maybe divine intervention, aliens, fate, or who knows what. They want there to be order in the chaos and to find meaning in seemingly unrelated events. Others see it as just a weird twist of luck, something uncanny that defies the odds.…
Most of us know the Amish exist and think of them as people in old timey clothes who travel by horse and buggy. But there’s a lot more to Amish life than many people realize, not the least of which is the fact they’re often confused with Mennonites who are similar but definitely not the…
Do you think cancel culture is a real thing? Have you gone out of your way to either protest a ban or take part in one? Sometimes it’s good to exercise your right to free speech and share your thoughts on something you think is an injustice. That could mean protesting or just no longer…
Typos can be frustrating at the best of times. So can simply not knowing how to spell a word, even though it’s understandable. There are literally hundreds of thousands of words to know and not all of them are intuitive when it comes to spelling. A bigger problem, however, is when you spell something wrong…
Have you noticed in the last couple of years that the media has explained things with preposterous measurements? Instead of trying the metric system, or even sticking with imperial measurements, they’ll tell you how big a stingray is compared to Travis Kelce. Or that an asteroid is the size of 69 alligators. Humans love a…