An illustration of Brittania, the female personification of Great Britain, taken from page 12 of ‘The New British Traveller, or, modern panorama of England and Wales’. Courtesy of the British Library on Flickr.
Over the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of working for io9 and Gizmodo from my home here in England. Aside from the occasional purging of superfluous letter ‘u’ from my posts, where that cross-cultural divide comes up the most is confusing my mostly American co-workers with strange words they’ve never heard before. Here’s a few that have baffled them the most.
Pants
Meaning 1: Underwear
Meaning 2: A bit rubbish
Thankfully the classic pants/trousers mixup between British English and American English doesn’t happen all that often, but the amount of times that I’ve described something as being so aggressively average or just a little bit terrible as being “pants” has lead to confusion as to why, say, the appearance of Supergirl’s Red Tornado had anything to do with trousers.
Yonks
Meaning: Ages, a long time
See also: Donkey’s years
Look, I don’t know why we say donkey’s years either, but it’s kinda fun? Also, the secret to mastering British slang: string complete nonsense words and sounds together and it’s probably something we say like it’s second nature to us.
Swish
Meaning: Impressively fancy
One thing I have learned in my time among American people is that they have a stunning capacity to make anything into either innuendo or a slur—and that’s coming from someone who lives in a country with a dessert called Spotted Dick. I recently attempted to describe Star-Lord’s new uniform in his comic as being swish, only to find that in the U.S., “swish” is a derogatory homophobic slur:
And also the sound of a basketball falling through a hoop? What is wrong with you people?
Fluffed
Meaning: To fail at performing a task, to bungle something
Speaking of you guys making everything weirdly sexual. While the concept of a fluffed line is cross-continental, the concept of fluffing and certain genres of adult media has a decidedly lewder meaning in America.
I handled the embarrassment of this particular goof particularly well, If I do say so myself:
Really well.
Christ on a Bike
Meaning: General exclamation of shock
The land of the free, home of the “OMG” doesn’t have seemingly have a lot of exclamations, but let me tell you, we Brits do like expressing shock in a variety of weird ways. I just like this one a lot because it’s silly. And, according to a quick search of io9's Slack archives—which Katharine dug through yesterday, to much delight—I use it quite a lot.
Aces
Meaning: To be great, delightful
The second secret to mastering British slang: sound like you’re perpetually stuck in a BBC drama circa 1956.
Bonce
Meaning: Head
Sometimes I do admittedly push my US/UK verbiage too far. But really, you guys are no fun sometimes.
Brexit
Meaning: Portmanteau of “Britain” and “Exit”, to refer to the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union
Ah yes, the Brexit—something I have somehow managed to write about multiple times in the past few months despite working for a science-fiction and fantasy pop culture blog. There were innocent times when everyone just thought it was a terrible word, like above, but then as the inevitability of the actual vote for Brexit sunk in, a chance to brainstorm some British-themed-internet content:
God save the Queen, and my co-workers for putting up with my transatlantic nonsense.
I’m from Kentucky, a state which, when people think about it at all, conjures up images of rednecks, moonshine, and Hee-Haw. But I grew up in Lexington, the second-largest city in the state, which is made up almost entirely of suburbs—there’s no sense of “country” heritage, no accents, and (until well after I left to make my fortune in the world of professional nerdery) almost nothing to distinguish it from similar cities in the Midwest other than the fact there were horse farms nearby.
I’m from Kentucky, but there’s been very little in my life that clearly marks me as a Kentuckian other than two things: a love of bourbon and the fact that my dad has met Colonel Harland Sanders.
Colonel Sanders is the mascot of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, thanks to the fast food chain employing a variety of comedians and actors to portray the white-suited, goateed gentleman who was as Southern as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. I’m sure some of you might be surprised to learn that Sanders was a real person—he created the restaurant and the recipe of “11 herbs and spices” that made it into a worldwide chain. And he really did wear that white suit and have that white goatee virtually every day or his adult life.
Like me, my dad Leonard Bricken grew up in Lexington; he was born in 1951, a year before Sanders would license his first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Utah, turning the real-life Colonel (although I should mention his “colonel” title was an honor granted by the state, and not a military rank) into a very rich man. In a few years he had franchised KFC restaurants across the country and found himself in charge of a burgeoning business empire as opposed to a single restaurant. Sanders would eventually sell the chain in 1964, having grown beyond his capacity to manage, but our story takes place in 1957 or so, when the Colonel was still was on the rise. He still lived in Kentucky, and could be seen throughout the state, basking in his status as a local legend and fried chicken magnate.
My dad would have been six years old or thereabouts, and as he tells it he would often be dragged downtown by my no-nonsense grandmother when she did her shopping. He was mainly miserable because Gran (as I knew her) was shopping mainly for boring, functional items like clothes—but eventually, tired of vocal misery, Gran would drop him off at the Citizens Union Bank building, where my great-grandmother worked, and where his day brightened considerably.
Here’s where my story gets exceedingly ‘50s.
Because his doting grandmother would treat my six-year-old dad to a delicacy scarcely to be believed—a bottle of Coca-Cola. Which was purchased for five cents. At the drug store down the street.
You may recognize a variation of this scene from oh, pretty much every TV show, movie, comic, etc. about kids in the ‘50s ever. But it’s a cliché because this actually happened everywhere, all the time. My great-grandmother would walk my dad to the McAdams & Morford drug store, which had a tiny lunch counter at the back, as was the custom at the time. And she would buy my dad a Coke—“so cold it hurt your teeth” he says—and my dad was in bliss, scarcely able to imagine a greater delight.
That is, until the day he met Colonel Harland Sanders.
When my dad and my great-grandmother walked to the drug store, they passed in front of the Lexington courthouse, which Sanders was exiting. Although Lexington was a reasonably sized town, it was still the ‘50s, so everybody knew everybody, including the Colonel. He walked over to my great-grandmother and said hello, it being the polite thing to do.
My dad froze in terror.
My dad did not know of Kentucky Fried Chicken; fast food was an extravagance my grandmother would never even consider as an option. So my dad had no idea he was looking at a restaurant spokesman or a Kentucky Colonel or anything. He just knew a man clad entirely in white, from his shoes to his suit to his hair, had suddenly appeared before him. My dad thought he was some kind of clown, which petrified my father. (Although whether his fear predated or began with this encounter has been lost to the mists of time. I will say, though, imagine any circus clown where all his bright colors are instead completely white. Terrifying.)
When my dad first told me this story, he stressed that Sanders was huge; a brief Google check says that Sanders stood 5’10”, not that impressive, but certainly he would have towered over my pint-sized dad, who quickly ducked behind my grandmother’s leg as this strange, ominous man in white approached the two of them.
(For those of who don’t remember the horror of any strange adult when you’re that young, let me show you this clip from a 1986 Japanese anime movie named Project A-ko. In it, the titular A-ko and her friend are watching another movie, which is a parody of another actual anime movie. That’s not important. This is what’s important:
There’s something inherently creepy about Colonel Sanders, and the fact that this encounter took place in broad daylight didn’t mitigate this in the slightest.)
My dad was certain that this scary, unearthly ghost-clown-man was going to kill him, or eat him, or some kind of combination of the two. He remembers being unable to look at Sanders, because he was just so scary. Which proved to be a problem when my great-grandmother introduced her grandson to the Colonel… and the Colonel leaned down over my tiny, frightened dad.
A dramatic reenactment:
My dad ran away. As fast as his little legs would take him.
He doesn’t remember what happened after that; I’m certain he’s repressed the memory. I’d like to think my great-grandmother still bought him that bottle of Coke, assuming she caught up to him.
This wasn’t the last time my dad would see Colonel Sanders; he appeared in Lexington with some regularity, but even as he grew up, my dad went out of his way to avoid conversation with the man. And every time he did spot that white suit and white head of hair, a shudder went down his spine.
I cannot verify this story; records are spotty, and if Sanders himself made note of the incident, he did not include it in his again totally-real autobiography Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger-Lickin’ Good. But I tell you this: my family has on several occasions bought Kentucky Fried Chicken, and even my father ate it, because it is delicious.
But if the Colonel’s face was staring at him from the side of the bucket, my dad would always turn it away before he ate a bite.
Just because we’re patiently waiting for its sequel, doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the wonder that is James Gunn’s first Guardians of the Galaxy. And if you’re looking for a striking new way to do just that, check out this poster.
Released by Grey Matter Art, this Guardians of the Galaxy poster is by an artist named Florey. It’ll be available in a regular (blue) and variant (black) editions on Thursday August 11 at 1pm EST On www.greymatterart.com. Here are the posters.
I love that Florey didn’t stress getting all the characters into the poster, instead focusing on one moment from one scene in the film. It makes for a really stand out, good looking poster.
Stormy weather caused the Transocean Winner, a 17,000 ton oil rig, to break free of the tug line that was pulling it out to sea. A few hours later, it ran aground on a Scottish beach.
Fortunately, the tug boat had been hauling the Transocean Winner to a scrapyard, so the rig was empty when it hit the coastline. Still, 280 of those 17,000 tons are pure diesel—and that fact has Scotland’s coastguard warning people to steer clear of Dalmore beach until the rig can be cleared.
The rig is so huge that even from a distance, it was pretty unmissable. Here are some of the best shots local photographers were able to snag.
Image: Murdanie MacleodImage: Ann Marie MacdonaldImage: Nick Wyatt / 360VideoProImage: Nick Wyatt / 360VideoProImage: Nick Wyatt / 360VideoPro
My my, what convenient timing! It was only a few weeks ago at Comic-Con that we got confirmation of Robbie Reyes, the second Ghost Rider, heading to the next season of Agents of SHIELD. Well, to capitalize on the sudden awareness of this take on the character, Marvel is giving Robbie his own comic again.
Revealed by TV Guide today, Ghost Rider will mark the first time Robbie’s had a major role in the comics since his All-New Ghost Rider series finished last year. Written by Reyes’ co-creator Felipe Smith with art by Danilo Beyruth (and back up stories from Reyes’ other creator, Trad Moore), the series will follow Robbie on his quest to clean up the streets of LA—but will also see him occasionally team up with current Hulk, Amadeus Cho and the Wolverine, Laura Kinney.
The timing, according to Marvel EIC Axel Alonso, between the book and Robbie’s arrival on TV later this year is merely coincidental. But if you’re intrigued by the take on Ghost Rider you’ll see alongside Agent Coulson and friends later this year, at least there’ll be a new book to pick up to see even more stories with the character. Ghost Rider #1 hits shelves in November.
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As reporters and editors, we at Gizmodo like to investigate stuff and ask questions. But there comes a time when you’re beat and have to reach out for help.
That’s why we’re coming to you, our readers, with a question we haven’t been able to answer despite weeks of probing.
So:
Did you have sex at Gizmodo’s Star Trek book party?
Because someone had sex at Gizmodo’s Star Trek book party.
Was it you?
Did a discussion on what we can learn about the future economy from Star Trek make you all tingly?
Did you turn the mostly sanitary Gawker Media offices into a splooge-caked sex dungeon where even men risk pregnancy just by sitting on the furniture?
Ugh!
Not an invitation to a sex party
The night of June 13, 2016 started innocently enough. A medium-sized crowd had gathered at Gawker Media HQ to celebrate the launch of Manu Saadia’s book Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, which was being released on Felix Salmon’s imprint, Pipertext. It was a lovely evening. There were snacks, wine, domestic and imported beers. Saadia spoke eloquently on his tome, which reviewers call “a fanciful romp through the economic theories that underpin Final Frontier life in the mid-22nd through late-24th centuries.”
Romp indeed. This shit is catnip.
It wasn’t until almost all of the guests had left that Gawker Media’s Victor Jeffreys II realized some shenanigans were afoot. As the last security guard left, she told Victor she suspected there was still someone in the second floor’s female toilets. Victor walked over, heard some rustling going on inside and knocked. The rustling stopped.
Two minutes went by. Then five. Then ten. Nothing. Then more rustling. The office was empty and the party was over. Time to go.
But Victor wasn’t about to go barging in. Luckily, Jezebel’s Julianne Escobedo-Shepherd was still hard at work upstairs and Victor tapped her to give the errant guest a nudge. “I dip my head in and there’s obviously someone in the first stall,” Julianne told me. “I hear a little shuffling. I’m like ‘Hey ma’am sorry but we have to get everyone out of here’. She’s like ‘Ok, just a minute.’”
More shuffling. Five minutes go by. Victor and Julianne retire around the corner to give the guest some privacy and they hear the the bathroom door close. The long dark-haired woman is followed by a taller man with short-cropped hair. They’re grabby, re-arranging themselves, “Canoodling,” as Julianne describes it. Giggling and apologetic, they stop to take a selfie in Gawker’s lobby, then continued walking down the stairs, only to stop for a mid-flight face-suck. Not that Julianne and Victor looked, they assure me. They could hear everything.
It’s only been six years since Voyage of the Dawn Treader limped into theaters and then dragged itself back out again, so of course now’s exactly the right time to finally make that Silver Chair movie!
We last heard about this project back in January, when producer Mark Gordon said there was “active” development on it. He said a lot of other obfuscating BS about it being a “brand new franchise,” which was repeated with today’s news that TriStar is funding the movie with eOne and the Mark Gordon Company. To be clear this is a new franchise only insofar as new people are funding it. It’s still just moving on to the next book in the series, not starting over.
The real thing distinguishing this movie from the three predecessors is that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian were made by Disney. Voyage of the Dawn Treader came from Dune Entertainment and Fox. And now a whole new company is going to try to make lemonade from these lemons.
I loved these books growing up. And I owned giant VHS copies of the BBC miniseries. So I hope to god a third studio’s the charm when it comes to making the movies work. We’ll have wait and see.
I blame Nancy Drew. I think my obsession with true crime may have started with her mysteries—specifically, those hardbacks with the yellow covers, in which the young detective pieced together inheritance scams while dodging kidnappers and car thieves. But it may have also begun with a 1986 TV movie about Ted Bundy.
It was probably both. Those Nancy Drew books, for all their vintage charm and predictably happy endings, hinted at darkness—crooks who stole from elderly River Heights residents, treasure hunters who kept chloroform on hand in case nosy teenagers started poking into their business, etc. I read them all, multiple times, clutching my library card with one hand and pushing up my glasses with the other.
All those sleuthing stories could have led me down another path. I could have become a film noir scholar, dressing like a femme fatale and spouting off Raymond Chandler quotes. I did not. At a crucial moment, I happened upon the broadcast of a mini-series about Ted Bundy called The Deliberate Stranger. My brain was never the same again.
The Deliberate Stranger first aired in May 1986; I was in the fifth grade and didn’t really understand what a serial killer was. (I knew what murder was, though; two girls around my age had been killed in the previous years in my smallish town, and there was no avoiding the fear those terrible crimes brought to the community.) My memory has me watching The Deliberate Stranger, made the year before Mark Harmon starred in Summer School, all by myself... scared, but totally stoked.
After The Deliberate Stranger, Nancy Drew and V.C. Andrews and whatever else I was reading went back on the shelf. I got a copy of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me—about the friendship she had with Bundy, long before anyone knew he massacred women in his spare time—and thereafter started amassing stacks of paperbacks with lurid covers and, if I was lucky, a section of black-and-white crime-scene photos tucked within. The old rule is true, and there’s nothing scarier or more gruesome than what the imagination can come up with—especially when guided by a few clinical images of a murder weapon, or a victim’s school photograph, or a crude diagram of a house with Xs marking where the bodies were found.
For me, and I’m not alone in feeling like this, being scared from a safe place is incredibly fun. An obvious side effect of my true-crime geekery is that I’m also an insane fan of horror and science fiction. (Or maybe it’s the other way around; I definitely started watching slasher movies in their 1980s heyday, which was right around the Deliberate Stranger era.) Both are genres that play on real-life fears and horrors—sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not, sometimes both—and amplify them to fantastic heights.
In the same way that I rooted around used book stores, satisfying my desire to learn more about John Wayne Gacy (or Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Lizzie Borden, Ed Gein, Richard Speck, the Zodiac Killer, the Manson Family, Charles Whitman, and all the other all-stars), I also prowled the local video store aisles, looking for horror movies new and old that promised eye-popping frights. Even better are scifi movies that meld the two genres, like Aliens and The Thing.
Over time, I started poking into the deepest, strangest pockets of true crime. I engaged in eBay bidding wars to get my hands on, for instance, a hardback of Child of Satan: Child of God by Susan Atkins, because who doesn’t need a prison tell-all from a bloodthirsty Manson girl who found religion behind bars? For several months, I tried my own hand at writing on the subject—right here on io9, for the now-defunct sub site True Crime. Some io9 readers loved it. Others hated it and weren’t afraid to let me know. Going on my own desire to read about more unusual cases, I did my best to steer clear of anything too famous and to dig into the weirdest old cases I could find.
Many terrible crimes, especially the ones that grabbed headlines when they occurred, were just as bizarre as they were tragic. Many are still unsolved. Some of them gave me nightmares, which had never happened before, over years of reading books with titles like Milwaukee Massacre and Die for Me and Say You Love Satan. The fact that the tragic stories were true, and in many cases had been largely forgotten, clearly spooked something deep inside me. It left me with a constant reminder that evil doesn’t just exist in cases that get written about in books, or made into TV movies. It is incredibly common and even when it happened 50 years ago, it’s still scary as hell. And that’s not always a fun feeling to grapple with.
But true crime sleeps for no fiend. Right now I’m reading Bill James’ Popular Crime, a true crime book about true crime culture that very refreshingly argues that an interest in lurid stories is no less legitimate than an interest in any other type of story. “If people refuse to look at what really happens because ‘well, you know, we are not the kind of people who take an interest in that kind of thing’… I find that more offensive than anything I have ever run across in a crime book,” James told The New Yorkerback in June.
And pop culture is totally on my level right now: The Jinx, Making a Murderer, and The People vs. OJ Simpson were all huge hits; coming up, there are multiple shows about JonBenét Ramsey in the works, as well as Menenzez brothers showcase Law & Order: True Crime. I always wanted to start a true crime book club. Now may be the perfect time.
This ol’ chap was pulled from the sands of a diamond mine in Siberia earlier this week. (Image: Siberian Times)
Diamond miners in the remote Siberian town of Udachny received quite a shock this week, when instead of pulling shiny rocks from the sand they unearthed a bizarre mummified creature that looks more than a little like the escaped spawn of that three-jawed dog monster in The Thing. Is anything ever normal in Siberia?
According to the Siberian Times, the animal was found in a diamond-rich sand bed that people have been mining since the 1960s. The miners who unearthed the beast speculate that it could be a previously unknown type of dinosaur, given that the sands were deposited from the early Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period.
Image: Siberian TimesYes, that dog monster. (Image: Wikimedia)
Scientists say we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and that the creature could be something as pedestrian as a wolverine, a sable, or a marten. But since these “experts” have yet to furnish us with their boring scientific answer, what do you think? Does this demon baby portend the impending apocalypse? Is it proof that reptilians walk among us today? Share your deranged feelings about the unknown in the comments below.
In 1991, Steven Spielberg told us what happened when Peter Pan grew up. The film, Hook, was a big hit and garnered a huge legion of fans who saw it as kids. It hasn’t aged too well, to be honest, but these photos will make you either insanely nostalgic or incredibly depressed.
Hook’s actual 25th anniversary isn’t until December 11 but the team at 22 Vision got all the original Lost Boys back together and dressed them up in their original costumes.
The actors are Ryan J Francis, Raushan Hammond, Isaiah Robinson, Thomas Tulak, Dante Basco, Brett Willis, Ahmad Stoner, Bo Gheorghe, Bryan Willis and James Madio. The photos were taken by Bradford Rogne.
Here are a few of our favorites.
You can see more at the 22 Vision Facebook, including individuals of all the guys. Glad to see Rufio, Thud, Don’t Ask and the crew still doing well in their 30s and 40s.
The TCH-laced gummy rings served at the birthday party. (Image: San Francisco Department of Public Health)
San Francisco police are investigating an incident at a quinceañera that sent 19 people, including a six year old, to the hospital after they unknowingly ate marijuana-laced gummies. Sadly, it’s not an isolated incident—and it’s a problem that’s only getting worse.
The incident happened on Saturday in San Francisco’s Mission District and highlights a growing problem now that TCH is being infused in everything from smoothies and cookies right through to cupcakes and gummy worms. The kids were attending a girl’s 15th birthday party when it happened, but it’s not known if the candied edibles were served deliberately or accidentally, or where the highly inappropriate party favors came from.
In all, 19 partygoers were sent to the hospital, 13 of whom were between the ages of six and 18. They must have ingested copious amounts of the candied gummy rings, because their symptoms were indicative of marijuana poisoning. The San Francisco Department of Public Health said the partygoers were exhibiting signs of rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, dilated pupils, dizziness, light-headedness, nausea, lethargy, and confusion.
There was initial uncertainty over whether or not the candies were laced with THC, but subsequent tests confirmed the suspicions. All patients were released from area hospitals on Monday.
“[This] event is a strong warning about the dangers of edibles, which can be very potent and hard to control dosage in the best circumstances,” noted Tomas Aragon, the Health Officer for San Francisco, in a statement. “A situation like this, where they were consumed by unsuspecting people, and many children, is greatly concerning.”
The San Francisco police are now investigating the incident, and they’re likely going to talk to the Oakland-based company that catered the quinceañera.
As noted in STAT, poisoning of children by accidental marijuana ingestion is rising in the US, particularly in states where the drug is legal. Across the country, rates are increasing by an average of about 20 percent a year. In Colorado, where the drug has been legal since 2014, the figure is closer to 34 percent each year. In more than half of all pediatric poisoning cases, edibles were involved.
It’s obviously not good that kids are accidentally getting sick from marijuana. The effects of the drug may be fun for consenting adults, but for children—who likely don’t know what’s happening—it can be a terrifying experience. Compounding the problem is the fact that the amount of THC in edibles are inconsistent, and that kids often like to binge-eat their candies. Finally, it has been shown that marijuana is not good for the developing brain; accidental ingestion of these edibles could have lasting neurological and emotional consequences.
So for parents who like to indulge in their edibles, whether they be cookies or gummies, please be sure to store them in a place where your kids can’t get to them.
A lot of good and decent people like seltzer water. My friends like seltzer water, people I love dearly enjoy gulping down the fizzy drink that is sometimes flavored. I am here to deliver a devastating truth. Seltzer water is very bad. In fact, I would go as far as to say that seltzer water sucks, and does not deserve the praise bestowed upon the bad drink by many a millennial.
I want to be unequivocal here: Seltzer water comes in many forms, and all of those forms are uniformly and uniquely bad. Perrier? What am I, a Formula 1 driver? San Pellegrino? Repulsive. La Croix? Get that shit out of my face you filthy yuppie.
If you are someone who takes pleasure cracking open a cold La Croix, stop yourself and ask: am I really enjoying this? Does this really taste good? I’m writing this blog to try and help you. It doesn’t taste good, and you don’t have to drink it.
Here is the story of my experience with the Bad Drink. At my former employer, we were receiving an order of groceries to stock the office fridge. Among this order was a case of La Croix. When the news of the addition of the expensive water spread through the office, you could feel the buzz. People were excited. It felt as if everyone had just learned they were receiving a raise. It was fucking La Croix day, baby, and people were ready to slurp down some of this supposedly yummy drink.
Of course, I didn’t want to feel left out, so I engaged in the seemingly ritualistic experience of sipping the Reportedly Good Drink. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “This is bad.” Why is the water bitter? Why is the flavoring so weak? This shit sucks, and I don’t want to drink it.
I took another sip of the Devil’s Drink.
Yup, this is still bad. At that point, I placed the liquid filth on my desk and turned back to my laptop. My colleagues did not feel the same way, and rejoiced that they finally had some modified water to enjoy in the workplace.
Here’s something I think deep down but am revealing for the first time in this blog. Brace yourself, because it is an idea so crazy that it may just shatter everything we know about the world.
Everyone who drinks seltzer water knows it is bad, but drinks it anyway, for one reason or another. Think about it.
My editor told me to add something about how it makes people have gas and how she likes to drink it after having a glass of wine on Monday or something. As she was talking I was typing what she was saying then she stopped and asked “are you quoting me?” The end.
In an extended clip from Morgan—about a synthetic human who turns violent, thanks to the organic humans around her—we get a closer look at a scene from the very intriguing trailer. Paul Giamatti plays a doctor whose psych evaluation of the title character (The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy) turns spooky, fast.
Watch the trailer, linked above, if you want to see a hint of what happens when the screen goes black at the end of the clip.
Morgan is the debut feature of writer-director Luke Scott—son of Ridley Scott—who cut his teeth as second-unit director on The Martian and Exodus: Gods and Kings. He’s assembled quite the cast for Morgan, which is out September 2. Besides Giamatti and Taylor-Joy, the film also stars Kate Mara, Toby Jones, Rose Leslie, Michelle Yeoh, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Wolverine 3 won’t just be the swan song for Hugh Jackman’s take on Wolverine—apparently it’ll be the last time his co-star Patrick Stewart takes on the Xavier mantle, too.
Speaking to British reporters earlier today about the film, due out next year, Patrick Stewart noted that it will likely be the last time he plays Professor X on the big screen:
I would imagine this is probably the end of this franchise for me. But the thing about science fiction and fantasy is that you can never, ever say it’s the end, it’s over.
Stewart has played Professor X on and off since the very first X-Men movie in 2000, so it’s been a decade and a half of sitting in a wheel chair and pretending to move stuff with his mind. Even with James McAvoy stepping in as the younger Charles, it’s gotten to the point that it’s hard to separate Xavier from Stewart’s portrayal. He was perfect casting then, and has been so for the past 16 years.
Like Stewart says, there’s always a way to come back in scifi. In fact, he’s already defied death in the X-Men films once already, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. But regardless of how it turns out, it’ll be sad to see two of the most iconic portrayals of comic book characters in this influential era of superhero movies bow out in Wolverine 3.
Superhero movies aren’t ending, far from it, but this is a little bit of an end of an era for them if it really is the last time we see Stewart and Jackman as these characters.
The Olympic diving pool on August 8 (left) and the Olympic diving pool on August 9 (right) Image: AP
As the women’s synchronized diving teams took to the pool in Rio de Janeiro today, they were greeted by a strange sight. The diving pool had turned green overnight, while the neighboring water polo pool remained a crystal clear blue. This confused the Olympic organizers, media, and the internet profusely. Long story short: it’s most likely an algae bloom.
Some of the more far-fetched and disgusting reasons as to why the Olympic pool changed to a puke-green hue include Brazil’s national pride, a possible Ghostbusters advertising tie-in, and yes, urine. But there’s likely a much more scientifically sound answer. As chemist Raychelle Burks said on Twitter, “Algae or oxidized copper is typically the thing—No alien goo or ectoplasmas.”
Olympic divers report that the water is so cloudy, they can’t see their diving partners. This side-by-side view from Deadspin supports the claim that the pool’s water is pretty damn murky. According to a handbook on pool chemistry (yes, that actually exists), oxidized copper usually leaves behind a pool with clear green water, rather than cloudy water. Cloudy water usually indicates that an algae bloom is to blame.
Algae blooms can be sparked by changes in a pool’s chlorine level, and a common way to avoid this is to use chlorine shock overnight to kill any algae in the pool. If that’s the case, someone is going to get fired. The International Olympic Committee will reportedly releasing an official statement on the green pool this afternoon, although officials are apparently stumped at the moment.
“Water tests at Maria Lenk’s Aquatic Park were conducted and there was found to be no risk to the athletes’ health,” an official reportedly said on Thursday afternoon. “We’re investigating what the cause of the situation was, but we are happy to report that the competition was successfully completed.”
We’ll update this post with the official explanation when we find out what it is. In the meantime—green water or not—Olympic athletes are still diving into the pool, so they must not be too worried about the safety. It’s still a very bad look for the Rio Olympics, which has already seen a torrent and anxiety over sewage in its natural bodies of water. Now it looks like even the pools aren’t 100 percent clean, either.
[Update - 10:00pm ET] The IOC remains tight-lipped to the official cause of the pool’s discoloration, but a Canadian diving coach is blaming algae as the sole perpetrator, according to AP. Strangely enough, some divers actually see the icky hue as a plus .
We keep getting information about the ways in which the new timeline and the old timeline in The Flash will be different. There are the big changes, obviously. But the fact that it didn’t take Barry’s powers away but did make him forget them? Is kind of a problem.
Grant Gustin, Bambi in human form, told DC All Access, “In the same sense that he’s forgetting a lot of memories, it means he’s forgetting his powers, too. So, it’s like he’s having a full Back to the Future moment, where essentially his hand is disappearing in front of him.”
The reason for all of that: his memories from the regular timeline are being replaced by the memories of the new one. “And when he realizes those memories are replacing other memories,” said Gustin, “that’s when he stars to realize how selfish of a decision this kind of was and that maybe he should find a way to try, at least, to put things back the way they were.”
Gonna be hard to do if he can’t remember he’s the Flash.
Author Ben Mezrich is no stranger to finding a cool story and seeing it become a movie. He wrote the books that got turned into The Social Network and 21, and now his upcoming work has already been picked up by Hollywood. It’s about the potential return of the woolly mammoth.
Mezrich’s upcoming book is called Woolly: The True Story of the De-Extinction of One of History’s Most Iconic Creatures. It’ll be published next fall by Simon & Schuster, but Fox and Temple Hill have already picked up the film rights.
While we don’t know what the movie will entail, the book is about geneticist George Church at Harvard University. In 2015, he successfully extracted DNA from an extinct woolly mammoth and fused it with an elephant. We covered it at the time, so read much more about the real life inspiration here.
Considering Temple Hill has made movies like The Maze Runner and The Fault in Our Stars, you can imagine the factual basis of Mezrich’s book is probably going to be used and exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Deadline went so far to ask if this could be the next Jurassic Park. That seems like a stretch, but, we’re all about any movie featuring woolly mammoths.
It was surprising enough when your vacationing editor-in-chief discovered last Thursday that Donald Trump was also in Portland, Maine and was about to give a speech a few blocks away. It was even more surprising when the people picketing outside the rally turned out to include a guy dressed as a Captain America villain.
The Trump rally drew supporters and protestors, of course. As you’ll see and hear in the video above, it also drew a cosplayer dressed as The Red Skull. He didn’t want to give his real name or reveal his political persuasion. But he did want to make a little scene.
Why wasn’t he on the other side of the street with the pro- and anti-Trump protestors? He said a friend had told him that Homeland Security probably wouldn’t permit him to protest while wearing a mask.
So he picketed from afar.
If you’re trying to get a flavor for the afternoon...
Here’s some pro-Trump folks that were outside. (Most of the pro-Trump people were inside of the sold-out venue where the Republican candidate was speaking).
Here’s the anti-Trump crowd, very few of whom got inside.
Bonus: Here’s a guy who showed up cosplaying as FDR.
