Friedkin Returns
William Friedkin: ‘You don’t know a damn thing, and neither do I’
The Exorcist director returns to his demonic roots with a new documentary, but he’s not interested in discussing your skepticism
A video clip featuring William Friedkin recently experienced a small level of virality among online film circles, in which the film-maker dresses down Nicolas Winding Refn after the younger director declares his own film Only God Forgives to be a masterpiece. Friedkin repeatedly calls for a medic, compares Refn’s film unfavorably to Citizen Kane, and most memorably, uses a vivid metaphor that puts the “anal” in “analogy”.
Friedkin, speaking on a drizzly afternoon in his suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, wants to make it clear that he bears no ill will to Refn. “I like him! He’s a nice guy. I like him very much.” But the larger truth underlying their charged exchange persists: William Friedkin simply does not give a damn.
He’s aged 82 now, and seven years out from the release of his last film. (That was 2011’s chicken-fried neo-noir Killer Joe, a classically Friedkinian work in its marriage of extreme, lurid material with tightly controlled aesthetic rigor.) He’s on the press circuit once again because he’s finally got a new film to promote, an entirely self-funded documentary titled The Devil and Father Amorth. The project dips back into Friedkin’s past as the man behind The Exorcist, chronicling the real-life purging of a demon by a Vatican higher-up. Skeptics will be tempted to place the words “real-life” in scare quotes, and the film doesn’t mount a particularly convincing case as to why they shouldn’t have that caveat. It’s here that Friedkin’s blithe disregard for what the general public thinks emerges as the source of all his power; believe him or don’t believe him, it’s all the same as far as he’s concerned.
4 ’68 Radicals
Four radical and radically original pieces of music that blew up the modernist status quo in 1968
By MARK SWED
On a cold Berkeley morning early in December 1968, I cut class and joined a queue on Telegraph Avenue, waiting for Discount Records to open. The line wasn’t as long as the one I’d joined for the Beatles’ White Album a week or two before, but it was sizable and included many of the same fans. This time our impatience was for the first recording of Terry Riley’s transformative “In C.”
“In C,” which had premiered in San Francisco four years earlier, would ultimately be credited with formulating the Minimalist movement in music that Steve Reich (who performed in the “In C” premiere), Philip Glass and later John Adams would further pioneer and eventually make mainstream. Minimalism would herald an unexpected inventive return to consonance, traditional harmony and pulse, all of which had little appeal to modern music, academic or avant-garde.
I later carried the LP, which came with the score of the piece (a first) into a class on fugue writing. I hadn’t known at the time that Riley had taken the same class with the same professor, composer William Denny, a dozen years earlier when he was a student at the University of California.
Denny was a refined and mild-mannered musical conservative who could bring himself to teach in the afternoon only after he had a few cocktails with lunch. He required us to write only in ink using fountain pens equipped with music nibs. We studied the same 19th-century French textbook that Debussy railed against at the turn of the 20th century.
Riley’s “In C” violated all that Denny held holy. It is simply a collection of 53 melodic motives, all in or around the key of C. Any instrument or vocalist — and any number of them — can play or sing. Each motive is repeated, over a pulse, as long as each performer wants before moving on.
When he saw my recording of “In C,” Denny became startlingly apoplectic. Riley, he said, had been a brilliant student, and now look what he had done! Centuries’ worth of contrapuntal development that led to Bach’s sublime fugues and Bartok’s wondrous string quartets was seemingly discarded by the stroke of a musical anarchist. I was told not only that I couldn’t bring that sacrilege into the classroom, but to get it out of the music building and that the only place for it on campus was the trash can.
That’s when I knew the revolution had begun.
Dead Black Market Hummingbirds
Inside the Black Market Hummingbird Love Charm Trade
By
There’s a witch in San Diego who casts spells to “trap a man” and “dominate him” so “he’ll always come back.” She has a shop on San Ysidro Boulevard, one mile from the busiest Mexico border crossing in the United States, near a pawnshop, a liquor store, a furniture market, and the Smokenjoy Hookah Lounge, where DJ music thumps on Friday nights.
But you don’t need to go to her shop for magic—you can join the tens of thousands watching her on YouTube. Like a wicked Martha Stewart creating potions instead of potpourri, she provides step-by-step instructions for her spells.
“This is the honey jar,” she tells viewers while introducing the ingredients on her workbench: photographs of two would-be lovers, a piece of paper with their names written on it three times, a small glass jar—and a dead hummingbird. She rolls the tiny animal inside the photographs and wraps the cigar-shaped bundle with hot-pink yarn nearly the same shade as her long, fake fingernails.
Showing only her arms and lower body on camera, she shields her identity as she swaddles the package in a sarcophagus of tacky flypaper, dips it in cinnamon spice, squeezes it into the jar, and spritzes it with perfumes and oils—pheromones—“so he’ll stay sexually attracted.” Restless balm “so he’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, I need to call her.’” Sleep oil “so he’ll be like a zombie.” Attraction oil “so he’ll be like, ‘Goddamn, you so beautiful, you so fine.’” Dominating oil “so you dominate his thoughts.”
Finally she fills the jar with a thick pour of golden honey and tops it with a sprinkle of rose petals. “I love this,” she says. “I’m already getting a really good vibe.”
Worms On The Moon
China plans to grow flowers and silkworms on the dark side of the moon
by
China hopes to create a ‘mini biosphere’ on the dark side of the Moon, with flowers and silkworms sustaining each other as they grow on the lifeless lunar surface.
The unprecedented plan to create life in outer space is the most intriguing part of China’s lunar probe mission later this year, and could be a major boost for dreams that humans will one day live on the Moon.
The insects, plants, potato seeds and arabidopsis—a small flowering plant belonging to the mustard family – will be taken to the Moon on board the Chang’e-4 lander and rover in December.
They will be placed in an 18cm tall bucket-like tin made from special aluminum alloy materials, together with water, a nutrient solution, and a small camera and data transmission system.
A small tube will direct natural sunlight into the tin to help the plants and potato seeds grow. Although known figuratively as the “dark side” as it is unseen, the far side of the moon receives almost equal sunlight to the near side.
The next stage of the mini-econlogical system will see the plants emitting oxygen, which will feed the silkworms hatching from their cocoons.
The silkworms will them create carbon dioxide and produce waste that will allow the plants to grow, Chinese scientists say.
Miloš Forman Gone
Miloš Forman, Oscar-winning Czech director of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ dies at 86
By GINA PICCALO
Miloš Forman came of age as a filmmaker under the watchful eyes of the Soviets in postwar Czechoslovakia. And though he blossomed in exile in 1970s America, his memory of totalitarianism would forever be his muse.
In every one of his films, from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Ragtime” and “Amadeus” to “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon,” Forman celebrated real-life outsiders and eccentrics who challenged the establishment with heroic self-expression.
Forman died Friday at age 86 at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Conn., according to a statement released by his agent. A winner of two Academy Awards for directing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Amadeus” (1984), Forman was nominated again in 1997 for “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” His earlier films “The Fireman’s Ball” and “Loves of a Blonde” were nominated for best foreign language film.
Born Feb. 18, 1932, outside Prague, Forman was the youngest of three brothers. His father, a Jewish army reservist from World War I and university teacher, was arrested for disseminating banned books to his students. His Protestant mother was arrested after shopping at a local grocery where anti-Nazi propaganda was found. Both died in concentration camps, making Forman an orphan at age 10.
What Exactly Happened To The Phuds?
Never Solved, a College Dorm Fire Has Become One Man’s Obsession
The 1967 blaze at Cornell University killed 9, including members of a fast-track Ph.D. program. No one was ever charged, but an amateur investigator thinks he knows who set it.
Students awoke to what they thought was the murmur of children playing. They awoke to what they assumed was a pesky classmate banging on the door to borrow a textbook. They awoke from a lifelike dream that they were at a barbecue, could even smell the smoke. There was smoke. It was just after 4 in the morning. The dorm was on fire.
It had ignited in the basement lounge of the Cornell Heights Residential Club, a repurposed motel on the northern fringe of the expansive Cornell University campus in Ithaca, N.Y. Its principal residents were in the initial class of an experimental program inviting gifted students to earn a Ph.D. in six years. There were 50 of them (a few were elsewhere that night), and they called themselves Phuds or Fuds. The building also housed two dozen women on the second floor who were seniors or graduate students, plus three faculty counselors, a student adviser and a cook.
Bleary students scrambled to escape, some barefoot and one hobbling on crutches. Blinding smoke made it virtually impossible to reach the front doors, and few did. Students used shoehorns and grapefruit knives to detach screens and squirm out windows, or stumbled out a basement exit into the stabbing cold. A few jumped or knotted sheets together to shimmy down. Those on the second floor mostly backed down the ladders of firefighters or ones Phuds appropriated from a fraternity house. The cook was carried out unconscious by a muscular fraternity member and a Phud. John Finch, an associate English professor, got out, then sprinted back in to alert students, smacking furniture and screaming for them to run.
Afterward, many of the residents assembled at a nearby sorority. The mood darkened when the unimaginable news filtered in. Eight students died from asphyxiation. So did the heroic Mr. Finch. Three students were Phuds — Martha Beck, Jeffrey Smith and Peter Cooch — while the others were women from the second floor: Jennie Zu-wei Sun, Meimei Cheng, Anne McCormic, Carol Kurtz and Johanna Christina Wallden.
Nice Save
All Hail HAL!
What ‘2001’ Got Right
By Michael Benson
FRANKFURT, Germany — It’s a testament to the lasting influence of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which turns 50 this week, that the disc-shaped card commemorating the German Film Museum’s new exhibition on the film is wordless, but instantly recognizable. Its face features the Cyclopean red eye of the HAL-9000 supercomputer; nothing more needs saying.
Viewers will remember HAL as the overseer of the giant, ill-fated interplanetary spacecraft Discovery. When asked to hide from the crew the goal of its mission to Jupiter — a point made clearer in the novel version of “2001” than in the film — HAL gradually runs amok, eventually killing all the astronauts except for their wily commander, Dave Bowman. In an epic showdown between man and machine, Dave, played by Keir Dullea, methodically lobotomizes HAL even as the computer pleads for its life in a terminally decelerating soliloquy.
Cocooned by their technology, the film’s human characters appear semi-automated — component parts of their gleaming white mother ship. As for HAL — a conflicted artificial intelligence created to provide flawless, objective information but forced to “live a lie,” as Mr. Clarke put it — the computer was quickly identified by the film’s initial viewers as its most human character.
This transfer of identity between maker and made is one reason “2001” retains relevance, even as we put incipient artificial intelligence technologies to increasingly problematic uses.
29 Pastas
The Sky Is Falling Sometime In The Next Few Weeks
China’s Tiangong-1 space station will crash to Earth within weeks
Experts say it is impossible to plot where module will re-enter the atmosphere, but the chance is higher in parts of Europe, US, Australia and New Zealand
The Tiangong-1 space station, which is expected to come crashing to earth within weeks.
China’s first space station is expected to come crashing down to Earth within weeks, but scientists have not been able to predict where the 8.5-tonne module will hit.
The US-funded Aerospace Corporation estimates Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere during the first week of April, give or take a week. The European Space Agency says the module will come down between 24 March and 19 April.
In 2016 China admitted it had lost control of Tiangong-1 and would be unable to perform a controlled re-entry.
The statement from Aerospace said there was “a chance that a small amount of debris” from the module will survive re-entry and hit the Earth.
Sandwiches Top Cause of Global Warming
Is the humble sandwich a climate change culprit?
by David Szondy
Sandwiches have a surprisingly large carbon footprint(Credit: Taden1/Depositphotos)Scientists at the University of Manchester have found a surprising global warming culprit – sandwiches. In the first study of its kind, the researchers carried out an in-depth audit of various sandwiches throughout their life cycles and found the triangular meals could be responsible for the equivalent annual carbon emissions of 8.6 million cars in Britain alone.
In 1762, or so the story goes, the fourth Earl of Sandwich rocked the culinary world when he couldn’t be bothered to leave the gambling table to eat and ordered the servants to just stick some meat between two slices of bread for him. Since then, the modern sandwich has become one of the most popular of food formats.
According to the British Sandwich Association (BSA), the United Kingdom spends £8 billion (US$11.3 billion) annually on 11.5 billion sandwiches, with half made at home and the other half bought at shops, supermarkets, kiosks, and service stations. To better understand the environmental impact of all these sarnies, the Manchester team looked at over 40 different sandwich types, recipes, and combinations as well as how they are made, packaged, transported, and stored. In addition, they considered the waste produced in making them, as well as the stale, rotten, or simply outdated sandwiches that are thrown away.
What the researchers found was that not all sandwiches are created equal and that some varieties have larger carbon footprints than others. The highest footprint was found in premade, prepackaged, all-day-breakfast sandwiches. These contain eggs, bacon, and sausage and are kept packaged and refrigerated until sold and eaten – all of which is estimated to add up to 1,441 g (3.18 lb) of carbon dioxide equivalent, or roughly the same as driving a car for 12 miles (19 km).
Geeks On Acid
LSD is ‘harmonizing’ for the brain — and can change your personality for years, studies find
BY JOSH MAGNESS
Two recently released studies show how LSD can affect the brain. Wikimedia Commons
Your brain on LSD is kind of like jazz improvisation.
That’s according to Selen Atasoy, a research fellow at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. She was among the authors of a study published in the journal Scientific Reports that found the psychedelic drug can reorganize your brain in a “harmonizing” way.
“Just like improvising jazz musicians use many more musical notes in a spontaneous and non-random fashion,” she told PsyPost in an interview, “your brain combines many more of the harmonic waves (connectome harmonics) spontaneously yet in a structured way.”
Twelve people were examined for the study, with some taking LSD and some a placebo drug. Researchers examined their brain with an MRI scan both during and after the subjects listened to music.
Iconic Book Covers
16 iconic book covers
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Rodrigo Corral is the creative mind behind the cover for James Frey’s novel about a recovering addict. Inspired by some cupcakes he saw at a bakery in NYC, Corral wanted to imagine how addiciton would look like running “through the human body.” The cover has become one of the most recognizable in recent years.
Get it here.
Dark Age Sex
The salacious Middle Ages
Medieval people feared death by celibacy as much as venereal disease, and practiced complex sexual health regimens
In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. Those who fell short of the high moral standards that church, state and society demanded of them faced ostracism and punishment. Then in the mid-20th century things changed forever when, in Philip Larkin’s oft-quoted words, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’
In reality, the history of human sexuality is far more interesting and wild. Many prevailing presumptions about the sex lives of our medieval ancestors are rooted in the erroneous belief that they lived in an unsophisticated age of religious fanaticism and medical ignorance. While Christian ideals indeed influenced medieval attitudes to sex, they were rather more complex than contemporary prejudices suggest. Christian beliefs interacted with medieval medical theories to help shape some surprising and sophisticated ideas about sex, and a wide variety of different sexual practices, long before the sexual revolution.
The case of the French cleric Arnaud de Verniolle illustrates the sophistication of medieval sexuality. One day in the early 14th century, when Arnaud was a student, he had sex with a prostitute. Several years later, he confessed this lapse to the Inquisition, explaining that:
At the time they were burning the lepers, I was living in Toulouse; one day I did it with a prostitute. And after I had perpetrated this sin my face began to swell. I was terrified and thought I had caught leprosy; I thereupon swore that in future I would never sleep with a woman again.
Arnaud’s tale is not unusual. Many medieval men found themselves with undesirable symptoms after a brothel visit, and attributed their plight to their sexual behaviour. Among the various medical miracles attributed to St Thomas Becket, for example, was the cure of Odo de Beaumont, who became leprous immediately after a late-12th-century visit to a prostitute. Much has been made of the medieval tendency to interpret disease as a product of sexual sin. Too much. In fact, the medieval tendency to see disease as sexual sin was not solely based on moral judgments – there were also strong medical elements.
E=MCwhat?
The Three Meanings Of E=mc^2, Einstein’s Most Famous Equation
by Ethan Siegel
The particle tracks emanating from a high energy collision at the LHC in 2014. Composite particles are broken up into their components and scattered, but new particles
For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: that in any reaction occurring in the Universe, mass was conserved. That no matter what you put in, what reacted, and what came out, the sum of what you began with and the sum of what you ended with would be equal. But under the laws of special relativity, mass simply couldn’t be the ultimate conserved quantity, since different observers would disagree about what the energy of a system was. Instead, Einstein was able to derive a law that we still use today, governed by one of the simplest but most powerful equations ever to be written down, E = mc2.
There are only three parts to Einstein’s most famous statement:
- E, or energy, which is the entirety of one side of the equation, and represents the total energy of the system.
- m, or mass, which is related to energy by a conversion factor.
- And c2, which is the speed of light squared: the right factor we need to make mass and energy equivalent.
What this equation means is thoroughly world-changing. As Einstein himself put it:
“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.”
Here are the three biggest meanings of that simple equation.
The Greatest Sport Ever
Degas On The Bus
Stolen £700,000 Degas painting found on a bus near Paris
Edgar Degas was a leading Impressionist. CREDIT: HERVE LEWANDOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
French customs officers making a random check on a bus at a motorway layby found a painting by 19th century Impressionist master Edgar Degas that was stolen nine years ago from a museum in Marseille.
The 1877 painting Les Choristes, or The Chorus Singers and sometimes called The Extras, was found in a suitcase in the vehicle’s luggage compartment during a stopover in Marne-la-Vallée to the east of Paris.
Its value is estimated at €800,000 (£700,000).
But when the officers asked passengers who the case belonged to, they were met with a stony silence, the culture ministry said in a statement.
“Its disappearance represented a heavy loss to the French impressionist heritage,” said Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen, who issued a statement saying she was delighted at “the happy rediscovery of a precious work.”
“Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers!”
The Last Word: George Clinton on Alien Encounters, Trump’s Lack of Funk
The Parliament-Funkadelic legend also discusses the perils of LSD, the death of doo-wop and how to find great musicians
By Brian Hiatt
Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton talks to Rolling Stone about the essence of funk, his alien encounter, the dangers of LSD and more. Mark Summers for Rolling Stone
Parliament-Funkadelic founder George Clinton is an irreplaceable walking museum of American musical history, with a career that began in Fifties doo-wop (the Parliaments were originally a Newark, N.J., singing group), and continues all the way to Kendrick-era hip-hop and beyond. Clinton put out an excellent, memorably titled memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, in 2014, and he suggests he’s already done enough additional living for another book – though he’s more focused on an upcoming documentary and a new album. He called in for a characteristically amusing and enlightening Last Word interview while on the road for his latest tour, which is set to run through April.
Who are the funkiest people who ever lived?
When I’m just tryna funk, it’s gonna be the Staple Singers, man – Pop Staples. And Ray Charles. Ray could take “Eleanor Rigby” and make that funky. He ends up doing that to anything – to me, that’s raw funk. And then [Motown session bassist] James Jamerson – that is a musician.
And who is the least funky person alive?
Oh, my God! [Laughs] Probably Trump. Can’t be no funk in the Trump! [Pauses] He ain’t gonna like that.
Roman Boxing Gloves
Roman boxing gloves unearthed by Vindolanda dig
Image copyrightVINDOLANDA TRUST
Image captionThe gloves were “skilfully made” about 2,000 years ago
Roman boxing gloves unearthed during an excavation near Hadrian’s Wall have gone on public display.
Experts at Vindolanda, near Hexham, in Northumberland, believe they are “probably the only known surviving examples from the Roman period”.
Dr Andrew Birley, Vindolanda Trust director of excavations, described the leather bands as an “astonishing” find.
The gloves were discovered last summer along with a hoard of writing tablets, swords, shoes and bath clogs.
Made of leather, they were designed to fit snugly over the knuckles and have the appearance of a protective guard.
Super Cow
Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake
Local politician reportedly agrees to let animal live after its ordeal captures public attention
Wczoraj zamieściłem wpis o krowie-bohaterce, która zwiała z transportu do rzeźni i od trzech tygodni przemieszcza się w okolicach Jeziora Nyskiego. Uciekała bohatersko i wpław przedostała się na wyspę na środku jeziora, gdzie pozostaje do dziś. Nie uległa strażakom, którzy chcieli ja przetransportować łodzią i wciąż trwa na polu walki. Nadmienię, ze Pan Łukasz- właściciel krowy- od trzech tygodnie codziennie dostarcza na wyspę żywność dla zwierzęcia. Nie jestem wegetarianine…
A cow has been living alone on an island, attacking anyone who comes near, after staging a miraculous escape on its way to a slaughterhouse.
The animal made its bid for safety last month after it refused to get into a lorry taking it to be killed for meat. Instead it rammed a metal fence before making a dash for the nearby Lake Nysa, south Poland.
After the cow’s owner, known only as Mr Lukasz, attempted to get it back to the farm, the cow broke one of his worker’s arms, according to Polish news show Wiadomosci.
It then entered the water and swam to one of the islands in the middle of the lake. Mr Lukasz said he even saw it dive underwater on its way.
Bubble Ice
Why Curling Ice is Different Than Other Ice
There is a science to preparing ice for the shuffleboard-like sport. It’s all about the pebbling
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An ice maker pebbles the 2014 Olympic curling rink in Sochi. (Rich Harmer)
Let’s be honest: the fervor around curling in the 2014 Olympic Games has been mostly driven, so far, by the return of Team Norway’s outrageous pants.
When it comes to knowing as much about the sport, plenty of people fall a little short. And if you don’t know the rules, odds are you aren’t thinking much about the actual surface across which athletes push 44-pound stones for a shot at Olympic glory.
It’s just a hockey rink, right?
Well, not quite. Trying to curl on untreated ice “would be like a pro golfer going from putting at Augusta to putting on his back lawn,” says Derek Brown, USA Curling’s director of high performance.
If curling ice was flat, the stone would move barely halfway across the “sheet,” or curling lane. And that’s assuming the curler is hurling it as hard as possible. Friction would halt the rock within seconds. So, to make the ice more amenable to the sport, devoted ice makers employ a technique called “pebbling.” More or less what it sounds like, pebbling involves freezing small droplets of water across the playing surface between each match.
Supervolcano Surging
Yellowstone ERUPTION: Supervolcano under ‘STRAIN’ – experts find magma chamber pressure
YELLOWSTONE is “under strain” according to a group of seismologists who are monitoring the potentially catastrophic volcano, prompting fears an eruption is imminent.
By SEAN MARTIN
GETTY
Yellowstone will erupt again one day.
A process known as deformation, where subsurface rocks subtly change shapes, is occurring beneath the surface of Yellowstone which alerts experts.
Researchers state deformation occurs when there is a change in the amount of pressure in the magma chamber and experts are keeping an eye on the development.
Seismologists from UNAVCO, a nonprofit university-governed consortium, are using “Global Positioning System, borehole tiltmeters, and borehole strainmeters” to measure minute changes in deformation at Yellowstone.
In an article for the Billings Gazette, David Mencin and Glen Mattioli, geodesists with UNAVCO, say “the strain signal is larger than would be expected if the crust under Yellowstone were completely solid”.
Sneak Attack
Why the Asteroid Approaching Earth Was Only Spotted 5 Days Ago
By
Almost exactly five years ago, a truck-size celestial rockunexpectedly exploded in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. As town officials dealt with broken glass and hundreds injured, people worldwide asked why nobody spotted the 51-foot-across (17 meters) object sooner, in time to warn residents.
The same question could be asked of another asteroid that will whiz harmlessly past the Earth today (Feb. 9). NASA said this object, nicknamed 2018 CB, may very well be bigger than one that broke up over Chelyabinsk. The asteroid was only spotted on Sunday (Feb. 4) by the Catalina Sky Survey. Early estimates of 2018 CB’s size range between 50 and 130 feet (15 and 40 m) in diameter. The object will fly by Earth at about 5:30 p.m. EST (2:30 p.m. PST) at less than 20 percent of the distance from the Earth to the moon. That’s about 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from us.
“Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet — maybe only once or twice a year,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement from the agency.
Mr. Ventimiglia
He’s America’s TV dad. Get to know ‘This Is Us’ star Milo Ventimiglia
Actor Milo Ventimiglia, from the NBC hit, “This Is Us,” is photographed at his Los Angeles home with some of his hat collection, including the show’s Big Three Homes. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
It’s just after 1 a.m. and Milo Ventimiglia, finally settling into his Minneapolis hotel room after a climactic Super Bowl night, can at long last sleep with one less secret to keep.
“I’m happy everyone is in the know,” he says by phone.
As flawed-but-nearly-perfect patriarch Jack Pearson on NBC’s megahit “This Is Us,” Ventimiglia has joined the roster of TV’s most beloved dads. So beloved, in fact, that the character’s death, revealed in the show’s debut season, and the mystery surrounding it, kindled the question, “How did Jack die?” It quickly became a pop culture phenomenon rife with conspiracy theories.
On Sunday, the answer came. (This is … where the spoilers start.)
KATERINA UK
New James Frey novel from John Murray
by Katherine Cowdrey
James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (John Murray), is publishing a new novel with John Murray called Katerina.
Katerina, pitched as a sweeping love story that alternates between 1992 Paris and 2017 Los Angeles, will be published in September this year. John Murray acquired UK and Commonwealth rights through Jenny Meyer of Jenny Meyer Literary Agency on behalf of Eric Simonoff at WME.
At the centre of the novel is protagonist Jay, who is 21 when he moves to Paris to live the artist’s life, and falls in love for the first time. Cut to 25 years later: he is a middle-age family man living in California when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years before.
North American rights have sold to Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, while the film rights to the book have been pre-emptively acquired by Makeready, the new production outfit launched in 2017 by former New Regency c.e.o Brad Weston. Frey will write the script and be executive producer. Guymon Casady is producing through Entertainment 360, the production arm of Management 360. WME negotiated the sale.
Odessa Young To ‘A Million Little Pieces’
‘Assassination Nation’ Star Odessa Young Joins ‘A Million Little Pieces’ (EXCLUSIVE)
By Justin Kroll
CREDIT: STEPHEN LOVEKIN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
After a breakout role in the Sundance hit “Assassination Nation,” Odessa Young is boarding Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “A Million Little Pieces.”
Young will be joining the previously announced cast of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Charlie Hunnam, and Giovanni Ribisi.
The story follows a young man who awakens on an airplane to Chicago with no recollection of his injuries or of how he ended up on the plane. He then heads to a rehab and begins his journey to sobriety. Young will play Lilly, a crack and heroin addict who falls in love with the man.
Vigil For Torched Taco Bell
Alabama residents hold candlelight vigil for Taco Bell that burned down
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WJBK) – Residents of Montgomery, Alabama said goodbye to a beloved landmark
They gathered for a vigil to share their memories of a Taco Bell that is no more. The restaurant burned down last week.
Frequent customers took to Facebook saying they were going to have a candlelight vigil to “Stand together in the loss of our beloved Taco Bell.”
Parts of the planet could be rendered uninhabitable
Earth’s magnetic poles could be about to FLIP sparking chaos and mass blackouts
Parts of the planet could be rendered uninhabitable by the reversal, experts have warned
By Brittany Vonow
GETTY IMAGES
THE Earth’s magnetic poles could be about to flip, sparking chaos and making large parts of the planet uninhabitable, it has emerged.
Experts have warned that the change is extremely likely with the magnetic field weakening by 15 per cent over 200 years.
According to an Undark report, the flip could cause “devastating streams of particles from the sun, galactic cosmic rays, and enhanced ultraviolet B rays from a radiation”.
The report warned that satellite timing systems that govern electric grids could fail, causing a ripple effect that would shut off lights, computers and phones. Even flushing the toilet could become impossible, according to the article.
The article shared concerns from Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who warned “that parts of the planet will become uninhabitable during a reversal”.
Fake Computer How-to
How the Fake but Really Cool Computers in Movies Get Made
Whether it’s a DNA database in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ or the heads up display in Iron Man’s suit, real world user interface designers are hard at work making sure characters have a way to operate their fictional tech.
Images courtesy of Cantina Creative
In the Iron Man films and comics, we’ll often see super-genius Tony Stark furiously churning out lines of code to make sure his latest suit upgrade can fly on auto pilot, harness a deadly new source of power, or pair with Bluetooth speakers. What we never see, however, is Tony mulling over font options, window sizes, and all the other variables that go into designing a user interface (UI) that doesn’t suck.
In the real world, tech behemoths like Apple pour billions into UI development, tweaking countless iterations of text bubbles and screen sensitivity to the point of perfection. But for the creators of fictional UIs of the silver screen who are working with mere slivers of a Silicon Valley budget, the path to a believable, elegant UI design is trickier process. At best, the work of these artists goes by unnoticed, seamlessly propelling the story while maintaining the aesthetic of the universe. At worst, it pulls the audience out of the moment, leaving them to wonder why future humans are using papyrus to announce an airlock breach.
We spoke with Alan Torres, a design supervisor at LA-based VFX studio Cantina Creative, to see what sort of process goes into this under appreciated bit of cinematic artistry. While at Cantina, Torres has helped design the God’s Eye device in the latest Fast and the Furious, created a dystopian DNA database in Blade Runner 2049 and, yes, even put the display in Iron Man’s helmet.
Nothing To See Here
Scientists say rash of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on ‘Ring of Fire’ not connected
By BILL HUTCHINSON
Volcanic eruptions in Japan, the Philippines and Bali. Massive earthquakes in Alaska and Indonesia.
The rash of natural disasters over the past two days have one common denominator: they all occurred along the so-called Ring of Fire, a sprawling horseshoe-shape geological disaster zone.
At least five different events occurred on the Ring of Fire on Monday and Tuesday, including a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that rattled the town of Kodiak, Alaska, and the eruption of Mount Kusatsu-Shirane near a ski resort northwest of Tokyo.