Sunday, October 16, 2011

Crushable

Crushable

Some Proposed Plots for the Texts From Last Night Television Show

Posted: 16 Oct 2011 10:20 AM PDT

You're all familiar with Texts From Last Night, right? That hilarious and often uncomfortable website dedicated to preserving for all of time those embarrassing texts that probably wouldn't have been sent were it not for the consumption of rather a lot of one or more substances? Good. Because they're going to make a television show out of it, and I need your help figuring out how this is going to work.

According to Deadline, Fox has tapped Ugly Betty creator Silvio Horta to develop a show based on Texts From Last Night. Oddly enough, this isn't the first time Fox has tried to turn TFLN into a show; two Steve Holland, who wrote for The Big Bang Theory and Kenan & Kel among other things, was tasked with bringing the website to the small screen, and the season following, Marc Abrams and Michael Benson of The Bernie Mac Show took over.

Will Horta make it work? Who knows. Honestly, I just want to know what the pitches for the actual premise of the show are going to be like. Oh! I know! How do these ideas sound?

  • CSI: TFLN: This procedural follows edgy detectives Molloy (Sean Patrick Flannery, in a move to revive his career) and Simms (Michelle Trachtenberg, in an effort to finally be seen as an adult) attempt to solve the most difficult of crimes through the careful analysis of the debauched texts sent by the victims the night before.
  • Whose TFLN Is It, Anyway?: An improv comedy show hosted by Adam Sandler wherein the prompts for each scene have been assembled from the audience's most embarrassing texts. Bonus points if you can identify which audience member your prompt came from.
  • Desperate TFLN: Only their texts reveal exactly what the ladies of Petunia Path get up to in their free time…
  • Mad TFLN: A stylish period piece that follows the lives of the employees of a well-known ad agency during the high-flying, text-happy 1960s. What's that, you say? Texting didn't exist in the '60s? LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
  • Battlestar TFLN:This sci-fi epic employs futuristic technology in each person's cell phone to prevent the sending of unfortunate text messages before the messages have even been thought up. But what happens when the cell phones start turning against their makers?
  • TFLN, MD: A crotchety doctor played by British actor Stephen Fry in his first turn as an American solves medical mysteries with the help of his patients' cell phone records.
  • TFLN: The Sitcom: Essentially, How I Met Your Mother. With even more texting.

 

Hmmm… none of these are really doing it for you, are they? Ah well. I'll keep thinking. You keep thinking, too; the only way to make this work is if we all get it on the conversation. But I mean, hey, it's going to be on Fox, so it won't really matter if it's any good; it'll just get cancelled after the second episode anyway. Carry on!

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12 Assorted Actresses and Other Things Who Have Played Marie Antoinette

Posted: 16 Oct 2011 08:45 AM PDT

Do you know what today is? Besides Sunday, I mean? It's October 16, which means it's the day that, 218 years ago, Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold to the guillotine, stepped on her executioner's foot, told him, "Sorry, didn't mean to do that," and then subsequently lost her head. To mark the occasion, let's take a look all of the actresses and other things (you'll understand what I mean by "things" in a moment) who have played her over the years, shall we?

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Sunday Cute: Baby Monkey Gets a Bath

Posted: 16 Oct 2011 07:14 AM PDT

I don’t know what it is about baby creatures getting baths, but I find them unfailingly adorable. Seriously. Like this one. This is baby Nala. I should probably also note that I don’t really find monkeys cute once they’ve grown up; but Nala? Nala is the GREATEST MONKEY BABY EVER. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she’s clutching oh so tightly onto that blue fuzzy dog thing. I think my parents’ puppy has a toy like that, though he’s not nearly as fond of it as Nala seems to be.

The commentary by the person doing the washing, by the way, is also hilarious. We don’t spank our monkey. Do we?

Happy Sunday!

[Via Buzzfeed]

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Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren’t: The Montauk Project

Posted: 13 Oct 2011 04:01 PM PDT

Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren't is a series that explores modern urban legends, bringing you a new tale each week.

At the eastern end of Long Island's southern point, there is an abandoned air force base. In the base sits an enormous radar dish. The dish, which had been installed by the government many years ago, was intended to provide warning of incoming Soviet threats from the Atlantic during the height of the Cold War. But as is the way with such things, as technology advanced, the dishes were rendered obsolete, and the site was closed in 1969. The area, called Montauk Point, has since become a public park.

But the radar dish is still there. And there are… stories. Tales of something going on, something bigger than the ghosts, real or metaphorical, that haunt every abandoned air force base and army site. Because you see, the experimentation with electromagnetic shielding hadn't ended with the Philadelphia Experiment. It continued. And that continuation was known as THE MONTAUK PROJECT.

The idea was born of the surviving researchers from the Philadelphia Experiment. In 1952, they met together and discussed their desire to continue their work. This time, though, they had a new goal in mind: Rather than using the technology to cloak ships, they wanted to investigate its use as a means of psychological warfare.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when the scientists appeared before Congress for approval and funding, they were denied. But the scientists weren't willing to give up that easily, so instead, they went directly to the Department of Defense. Where Congress had been wary of the experiments due to the possible danger involved, the Department of Defense was intrigued. How, asked the scientists, would you like to have a weapon in your arsenal that would be capable of causing the enemy to surrender before a battle had even begun? We can do that, they said. We can develop a weapon that would, at the flick of a switch, allow you to render the enemy helpless. The Department of Defense said yes. And so the project began in earnest.

The project was initially housed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the town of Upton, New York on Long Island. Known as the Phoenix Project, it made good headway; however, its scientists soon discovered that they had need of equipment the Brookhaven National Laboratory couldn't provide. Furthermore, the extremely public location of the lab allowed for governmental watchdogs to keep a closer eye on the project than the scientists—or, for that matter, the Department of Defense—would have liked. What to do?

As luck would have it, the government had a solution: Not far away, there was an old air force base that was set to be decommissioned. The base housed a Semi-Automatic Environment, or SAGE, radar system. The radar system and dish were exactly the type of equipment the scientists needed to carry out their experiments; furthermore, the nature of its location would keep it far from the prying eyes of those who would try to shut the project down. Beneath the surface of the base, you see, was an immense government facility that stretched downward for miles. And so the researchers moved to the sleepy town of Montauk—not yet the vacation destination it would one day become—and the project gained a new name: The Montauk Project.

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This Is a Picture of Justin Bieber Singing with Shrek.

Posted: 15 Oct 2011 01:14 PM PDT

Tumblr is a strange and wonderful and sometimes terrifying place. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of those adjectives best describes this creation.

[Via Buzzfeed]

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5 Facts About New Game of Thrones Cast Member Rose Leslie

Posted: 15 Oct 2011 11:50 AM PDT

We don't know about you guys, but we got really excited over the summer when casting for the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones just kept rolling out, and rolling out, and rolling out. You know what was curious, though? Among those casting notices, the character of Ygritte was nowhere to be seen. Why? Ygritte is awesome! A redheaded Wildling from beyond the Wall, Ygritte factors prominently in Jon Snow's (Kit Harrington's) story, and besides Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), she just may be the coolest female character in the entire series.

But finally– finally!– the wait is over: Ygritte has been cast! In the second and third seasons of Game of Thrones, this super awesome character will be played by Rose Leslie. We may have been pulling for Bonnie Wright or Lily Cole when we were putting together our dream cast back in July; but now that the verdict is out, we can't think of a better choice than Rose Leslie. If you're a fan of British period dramas, you may have caught Rose in the glorious Downton Abbey; she played Gwen, the plucky young maid determined to make more of herself, in the first season of the show. We’ll miss her in the second season, but we won't be missing her that much if we know she'll be taking on Game of Thrones.

But who exactly IS Rose Leslie? Here are five need-to-know facts about the actress:

1) Her full name is Rose Eleanor Arbuthnot-Leslie.
She was born on February 9, 1987, which makes her 24 years old, and she's from Aberdeen, a city in the northeast of Scotland. I wonder if she likes haggis?

2) She's trained in theatre.
This may not come as a surprise, since almost every well-known screen actor to come out the United Kingdom trained at its best drama schools; but Rose has a pretty good pedigree: she trained at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, aka LAMDA. She graduated with honors in 2008, too, and she tackled such meaty roles as Yelena in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet while she was there. Furthermore, she graced the stage of none other than Shakespeare's Globe in Nell Leyshon's new play Bedlam about the notorious London lunatic asylum last fall. Critics described Rose in Bedlam as "genuinely poignant as the beautiful country girl driven mad by lost love."

3) Rose is good with accents.
She may be Scottish by birth, but since Rose spent her school years in England, her natural accent these days is closest to what those "in the business" call "received pronunciation," or RP: the standard BBC accent. However, for Downton Abbey, Rose not only had to learn a Yorkshire accent, but moreover, she had to learn the 1912 version of the Yorkshire accent. In an interview about the show, she said that "All accents now have become quite sloppy," whereas "in 1912, it was more acute and there were no long bits at the end of the word, where the mouth drops open." She got it in the end, though! It will be interesting to see what sort of accent she ends up using in Game of Thrones– the farthest north we've gone in the show so far is the Wall, but Ygritte is from beyond the Wall, so it could get quite interesting-sounding indeed.

4) She already has an award under her belt.
Rose made debut in a 2009 television film called New Town, for which she took home the Scottish BAFTA for Best Acting Performance – New Talent. Not too shabby for her first time out!

5) She digs physical roles.
Rose has said that she really hopes Ygritte will be a physically demanding role: She wants to be running up and down mountains, shooting a bow and arrow, and generally kicking arse. She got certified in basic stage combat while at LAMDA; now, though, she might have the chance to kick that basic certification up a notch. Knowing what the books tell us about the Wildling, it's pretty likely she'll be getting plenty physical!

I have just discovered, by the way, that "Ygritte" is pronounced "EYE-grit," which is not at all how I've been reading it all this time. Weird. Anyway, catch Rose saying "Ygritte" and talking about a whole bunch of other Game of Thrones stuff here:

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