Tuesday 5/14/24
Celebrate:
The Stars and Stripes Forever Day
Dance Like a Chicken Day
National Brioche Day
National Buttermilk Biscuit Day
Underground America Day
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Roger Corman, the fabled “King of the B’s” producer and director who churned out low-budget genre films with breakneck speed and provided career boosts to young, untested talents like Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Gale Anne Hurd and James Cameron, has died. He was 98.
The filmmaker, who received an honorary Oscar in 2009 at the Governors Awards, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica.
Corman perhaps is best known for such horror fare as The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and his series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, but he became celebrated for drugs-and-biker sagas like The Wild Angels (1966), which was invited to the Venice Film Festival as the Premiere Presentation.
Read the full obit from the Hollywood Reporter here.
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Liam and Olivia were the top baby names in 2023, according to the Social Security Administration. Liam for the seventh year in a row, and Olivia since 2019.
Boys names
2. Noah
3. Oliver
4. James
5. Elijah
6. Mateo
7. Theodor
8. Henry
9. Lucas
10. William
Girls
2. Emma
3. Charlotte
4. Amelia
5. Sophia
6. Mia
7. Isabella
8. Ava
9. Evelyn
10. Luna.
They also looked at the trendiest baby names. Meaning the ones that saw the biggest gains over the past year.
The Top Five for boys are Izael, Chozen (possibly because of a character in Cobra Kai), Eiden, Cassian, and Kyren.
The Top Five for girls are Kaeli (TikTok star??), Alitzel, Emryn, Adhara, and Azari.
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Non-Americans find certain things weird in our movies and TV shows. Buzzfeed put together a list of things non-Americans don't understand when they see them in our media.
Our obsession with Halloween. Yes, it's real.
The use of the word 'like'. One person asked if it's just a "reality TV thing." Sadly it's not. Although it does appear that the type of people who end up on reality shows are among the most egregious abusers of the word.
How we never say 'goodbye' when we hang up the phone. This is really just an artistic choice. It eliminates needless words. In real life, we say goodbye. Unless we're mad.
The 'fake baby' school assignments. I can't speak for the whole country, but I've never known anyone who had to take an egg or a bag of flour or a baby doll home with them and try to keep it in one piece.
The way kids play trees and other inanimate objects in school plays. Another thing I've never seen, unless the tree was a character who had actual lines.
The way we try to stop natural disasters. As one person Tweeted, "It amuses me when Americans in movies try to stop a natural disaster ending the world because they're Americans and they just have to try."
All the guns. Well yeah, that's a thing here.
Sending Christmas card family photos. There are literally 10 of them on my fridge at any given moment.
The way we compare the length of things to football fields. I get this one . . . although American football is starting to worm its way into other countries.
Today's Useless Fact of the Day - Rugby pitches (often called fields) are bigger than American football fields. They also vary in size, just like soccer pitches, something that Americans on my teams have always found weird. An American football gridiron is always the exact same shape and size. It is 100 yards long and 53 1/3 yards wide, with two 10 yard end zones on the end. This means that no matter if you are in high school, college, or the NFL, you are going to be playing on the field with the same dimensions regardless.
A rugby pitch is 112-122 meters (122.5-133.4 yards) long and 68m (74.3 yards wide). Attached to the ends of this pitch are a pair of in-goal areas, the equivalent of an end zone, which can be from 5-22 meters (5.4-24.1 yards) deep.
See their full list here.
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Whether you work in an office, a hospital, or even a bar, sometimes it's more tolerable when you have a show to relate to. "Entertainment Weekly" put together a list of some of the best workplace comedies on TV through the years.
Here they are in chronological order:
"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (1970 to 1977)
Taxi" (1978 to 1982)
"Cheers" (1982 to 1993)
"NewsRadio" (1995 to 1999)
"Just Shoot Me!" (1997 to 2003)
"Scrubs" (2001 to 2010)
"Reno 911!" (2003 to 2009, 2020 to present)
"The Office" (2005 to 2013)
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (2005 to present)
"30 Rock" (2006 to 2013)
"Abbott Elementary" (2021 to present)
See the full list here.
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