We know that many of you have spent the entire day yawning at your desk, struggling to keep your heavy eyes open and bravely refusing to give in to your hangover. This is the problem with having the Super Bowl on a school er, work night. Anyway, that’s why we want to apologize ahead of time for showing you this short HD film by Simon Christen, a San Francisco-based photographer who spent a year shooting time-lapse footage of the waves of fog that envelop the city each night. It’s basically a soothing visual lullaby, and the fact that it’s set to one of Nick Cave’s lush instrumentals from The Assassination of Jesse James soundtrack is just icing on the cake. Sweet dreams everyone!
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A few months ago, we rounded up some of the strangest day jobs of beloved authors had before they were famous — and in the process discovered that William S. Burroughs was once an exterminator in Chicago, William Faulkner served as the postmaster at Ole Miss, and John Steinbeck ran a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe. Today, we discovered that if Joan Didion had possessed the necessary science credits, she would have preferred to probe the depths of the ocean as opposed to those of the human psyche.
“I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually,” she reveals to Sheila Heti in in the February issue of The Believer. “And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, run by the University of California, and I asked them what I would have to do to become an oceanographer. And basically they said I would have to go back to high school, you know. I hadn’t taken any of the science courses that would enable me to take the science courses that I would need to take in order to go to… any place. So I abandoned the idea of being an oceanographer, but I can see myself still as an oceanographer, if I could get to that point.”
So, in case it ever comes up, now you know the one thing that Joan Didion has in common with 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy.
Back when you were a kid, picking out Valentines was a much simpler task. Now that we’re all older — and in many cases, selecting a card for a very special person, as opposed to an entire classroom full of people who, let’s be honest, really only cared about the candy — finding the right one can prove tricky. To make things easier, we’ve rounded up 20 solid options for you after the jump. While the sentiments they convey run the gamut from “you’re my best friend forever” to “I love you even more than my iPhone,” these tiny missives have one thing in common — they’re all incredibly adorable.
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Making its US debut at New York City’s Fred Torres Collaborations later this month, Earth Laughs In Flowers, a new series of 10 large-scale photographs by David LaChapelle, is shockingly devoid of celebrities. Rather, these painterly images take their inspiration from the floral still life paintings of the 1600s — think Jan Brueghel — and playfully subvert the tradition, modernizing the scene a bit with the inclusion of discarded cigarette butts, cellphones, Starbucks cups, and Barbie dolls. Click through now to preview the colorful, chaotic works which “explore contemporary vanity, vice, the transience of earthly possessions and, ultimately, the fragility of humanity,” and be sure to see them in person beginning on February 23rd.
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1. If you blinked during last night’s Super Bowl half-time show, then you might have missed MIA flipping off the crowd while performing “Gimme All Your Luvin” with Madonna and Nicki Minaj, but now it’s all that anyone is talking about. The official apology from NBC: “Our system was late to obscure the inappropriate gesture and we apologize to our viewers.” [via THR]
2. Chronicle, Fox’s low-budget new movie about a group of teen boys with superpowers, topped the Super Bowl weekend box office (which is usually a total wasteland), taking in an estimated $22 million. Daniel Radcliffe’s thriller Woman in Black surprised everyone by coming in second place with $21 million, followed by The Grey, which made about $9.5 million. Not so lucky? That Drew Barrymore saves the whales movie. [via ArtsBeat]
3. The @CormacCMcCarthy Twitter account, which counts Margaret Atwood and Jack Dorsey among its followers, has been exposed as a hoax — news that isn’t entirely surprising given the famed novelist’s belief that “anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” [via Guardian]
4. Harrison Ford is in talks to resurrect his Rick Deckard character in Ridley Scott‘s new Blade Runner film. Does this mean that it’s going to be a sequel as opposed to a reboot? [via Vulture]
5. Here is that slightly-extended version of The Avengers trailer that debuted last night. There’s not a lot of new footage, but you do get a better look at Mark Ruffalo’s take on the Hulk and the army that Loki has amassed.
Bonus Buzz: The Single Most Awkward Photo Of Madonna During Her Halftime Show
We’re all familiar with the idea that all couples eventually begin to resemble one another. There have even been scientific studies about why these similarities in appearance seem to grow over time. If anything, this series by New York-based photographer Bobby Neel Adams proves that this concept might not be entirely true; rejecting Photoshop in favor of a manual technique that he calls “photo surgery,” Adams marries together images of romantic partners, fusing them to create one figure. The results, while absolutely fascinating, aren’t necessarily pretty, and in a few cases are actually rather disturbing. Click through now to see the full selection of Franken-couples, and head to Adams’ website to see him do the same thing with close family members and photos of people as children and adults.
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If you’re like us, then you’ve probably been curious if and how Honda managed to get the rights to use one of pop culture’s most beloved characters in its much-discussed (including by us!) Super Bowl ad. As Brooks Barnes at Media Decoder points out, while the plot of the spot closely mirrors that of the 1986 comedy, and even includes a few of Ferris Bueller’s signature lines, it “seems intended as a parody, which would seemingly allow Honda to avoid paying a usage fee to Paramount.”
Oddly enough both RPA, Honda’s ad agency, and Paramount are refusing to comment on the matter, but according to an anonymous studio executive, the company did in fact license the concept to the carmaker. Which leaves us with even more questions! How much do you think Ferris Bueller was worth? Do you think that this means there’s a possibility that we’ll be seeing a followup? If so, do you think there’s any chance that the guy who played Cameron Frye is available? We always found him so much more relatable. [via Pop Culture Brain]
How do you imagine that you’d look after climbing to the top of Mount McKinley, the tallest peak in North America? How would you feel once you finally managed to make your way back to the base camp? Anchorage-based photographer Tim Remick, a climber himself, attempts to summarize the experience in a series of large-format, close-up portraits that he snapped mere moments after his subjects’ return from the top. The journey’s toll on their bodies is evidenced by their wind-chapped cheeks, blood-shot eyes, and sweaty brows — but there’s also a common thread of endurance that unites these images.
“I wanted to document that point where the human body goes past exhaustion, where people hit that wall and push beyond it,” Remick told MSNBC. “There were all sorts of responses based on the environment, the weather, whether their experience was positive or negative. It was all reflected in their faces.” Click through for a few of our favorite photos from the project, and head over to Remick’s website to check out the entire series, which is currently on view at the Anchorage Museum.
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According to the USDA, the Super Bowl is second only to Thanksgiving when it comes to the average amount of calories Americans consume in one day. And we can’t blame it all on the beer — beloved game-day snacks snacks like pigs in a blanket, buffalo wings, and jalapeno poppers also play their part. But seriously, those unhealthy eats seem tame when compared to some of the stuff that we found floating around the Internet, things like cheese-filled mugs made from bacon and deep-fried cheeseburgers. Click through and peruse these banned foods at your own risk.
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1. Last night Madonna released a sneak preview of her music video for “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” which she’ll be performing at the Super Bowl this weekend– presumably with some help from Nicki Minaj and MIA, who co-wrote the song. Watch the full-length version of the football-inspired clip here.
2. Not to be outdone by Madge, MIA dropped the new video for “Bad Girls” — a remix of the track that appeared on her Vicki Leekx mixtape — this morning too. Do you prefer her in a cheerleader costume or a metallic jumpsuit? Watch it here and decide.
3. There’s a rumor floating around that Simon Cowell has offered Beyoncé $500M — or $100M a year for five years — to be a judge on The X-Factor. We wonder how Mariah Carey feels about that. [via MediaTakeOut]
4. After filing the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission last month, Roseanne Barr has formally announced that she’s running for the Green Party’s presidential nomination. If she can only convince Aunt Jackie to be her running mate, we don’t see how she could possibly lose. [via Deadline]
5. Apparently, Chris Rock is writing a romantic comedy for Melissa McCarthy “in which he envisions the Bridesmaids breakout playing his wife as the pair indulge in some boisterous dysfunction — a ‘Jerry Springer couple,’ as Rock put it.” [via Vulture]
Bonus Buzz: Four Breakfast Cereals Inspired By TV Characters
