There’s nothing quite like the passion little kids have for the things they love. Best of all, their interests can vary from something you’d expect to… well, nothing you’d expect at all. In an interview for Recess Therapy, a little boy discusses why, exactly, he’s obsessed with Komodo dragons. At first, his answer may not come across as that unusual. Lots of kids love animals, after all. But this is Recess Therapy, a web series that has host Julian Shapiro-Barnum chatting with some of the most hilarious kids. In other words, if you see a kid being interviewed by Julian, you’re guaranteed to be surprised and delighted. You truly never know what will come out of their mouths! See for yourself in the video below. @recesstherapy SANK YOU xoxo, – Komodo D. #recesstherapy #komododragons ♬ original sound – Recess Therapy When Little Boy Starts Talking About Komodo Dragons, He Can’t Stop! Did you know that Komodo dragons can eat people? Because I certainly didn’t! You might would think this fact would deter this kid’s love for the creatures but the opposite is true. In any case, there’s something so wholesome about his passionate rant — he just loves Komodo dragons so much! Needless to say, as soon as this kid’s interview with Recess Therapy was posted, it went viral! People from all over can’t help but love his passionate rant, even if most of us don’t share that same love for Komodo dragons. “He’s overcoming natural enemies with empathy and love so I’m here for it,” someone in the comment section shares, with another adding, “The look on his face after he tells Julian that Komodo dragons eat people.” “‘Are you afraid of them?'” a third person writes, quoting Julian, “If anything he’s afraid of how much he loves them.” You can find the source of this story’s featured image here! The post Little Boy Goes Viral For His Passionate Rant About Komodo Dragons appeared first on InspireMore.

Check your air quality before leaving the house

The photo in the post predates the assassination by two years

'Not once'

Are you ready to hear how "folksy" Tim Walz is for the next 90 days? 

'Surprised and disappointed by this choice'

Column Science Fiction Film Club The Time Machine: Victorian Storytime With Cave Creatures and Camp Adapting H.G. Wells’ classic tale, George Pal imagines humanity’s future through the lens of Cold War-era anxiety. By Kali Wallace | Published on August 7, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share The Time Machine (1960) Directed by George Pal. Screenplay by David Duncan based on the 1895 novella The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Starring Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux. It’s a snowy night in London, just a few days after the dawn of the 20th century. A group of men gather at the home of their mutual friend, an inventor by the name of George, who has invited them over for dinner but is currently absent. The men drink their friend’s booze and grumble about his lack of punctuality. It’s only after they’ve been ushered into the dining room and seated at the table that their host finally makes an appearance. George (Rod Taylor) stumbles into the room, dirty and bedraggled, and asks for a drink before explaining where he’s been. That explanation goes something like this: Remember how you were all over here a few days ago? Remember how you all made fun of me? Well, guess what, suckers! I invented a time machine. I’m paraphrasing, but only a little. This is the framing device that introduces The Time Machine (1960), which is based on the H.G. Wells novella of the same name. The protagonist of the book is only ever called the Time Traveler; in the movie he is winkingly named H. George Wells. George Pal, the film’s director, was a dedicated H.G. Wells fan. He had already adapted The War of the Worlds (1953) and would later acquire the rights to (but never produce) Wells’ 1899 novel The Sleeper Awakes. He also produced Destination Moon (1950), which was among the first films to aim for a practical, realistic portrayal of space travel. (Yes, it’s on the Film Club list.) And this isn’t really relevant to The Time Machine, but it’s fun to know anyway: Pal had begun his career as an animator. Specifically, he got his start using replacement animation, the type of stop-motion animation where, instead of changing the model frame by frame, a series of hand-carved wooden puppets are filmed frame by frame to give the appearance of motion. He started out with dancing cigarettes in an advertisement and went on to make an entire series of animated ads and films; all of these films are collectively called the Puppetoons series. You can take a look at some examples: a Philips radio ad from 1938, a clip from a version of Dr. Seuss’s “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberrry Street,” and in The Puppetoon Movie (1987), which Pal’s friend Arnold Leibovit produced to showcase Pal’s work. Let’s leave the puppets and go back to London in 1905. Around that dinner table, and in the film’s voiceover, George recounts where he has been. He reminds his friends that just a few days ago, on New Year’s Eve, he invited them over to witness a demonstration of a miniature version of his time machine. The miniature version of the time machine looks exactly like the large version, right down to having a plush red armchair for the driver to sit in. (Does this mean the armchair is a necessary component of the time travel mechanism? This is the first of many questions that go unanswered in this film.) At that previous get-together, the small machine vanished right in front of them, but George’s buddies were skeptical that it actually traveled through time. I don’t blame them for that; I too would require rather more proof. What I do blame them for is encouraging George to put his considerable imagination and intellect toward something more commercially profitable, like helping with the Boer War. I’m just saying, if a friend tells you he has invented a time machine, maybe don’t go immediately to, “How about colonial war profiteering instead?” As the friends leave, Filby (Alan Young) advises a thoroughly demoralized George not to do anything rash. So George goes back inside and immediately does something rash, because that’s what intentional time travel is all about! I’m using “intentional” to distinguish the kind of story typified by The Time Machine from other kinds of time travel stories. Time travel is broad, flexible, multifaceted concept that has (probably) been around for as long as humans have been telling stories. There are myths from cultures around the world about people who find themselves in situations where they are taken out of their own time and returned years or centuries later. Sometimes they travel to another land where time passes differently; more often they simply fall asleep. Such journeys usually happen thanks to the meddling of gods or demons or supernatural creatures, or purely by chance, as opposed to being something the time travelers choose for themselves. Intentional time travel in fiction comes along a bit later—it’s been around for a few centuries, but trying to pinpoint any precise origin is a lesson in historical futility—and more specifically the shift from utilizing magic to constructing purpose-built machines had to wait for the Industrial Revolution to come along. H.G. Wells wasn’t the first to write about a machine invented to travel through time, but he was among the earliest, and he was definitely the one who popularized the idea of purposeful, exploratory time travel as a specific science fictional trope. George is upset that his friends don’t support his dreams and aspirations, so he hops into his full-size time machine to test it out. He starts small, and his delight grows as he sees the world pass more and more quickly around him. He watches the candle burn down, the seasons change, the fashions on a storefront mannequin evolve. This sequence is the best part of a film that is, on the whole, a rather mixed bag. The time machine itself is a lovely, ornate prop; it was designed by Bill Ferrari and built by Wah Chang. You have 100% without a doubt seen Chang’s work before. Working on Star Trek: The Original Series, he was the man responsible for the tribbles, the Gorn costume, the Vulcan harp, as well as the communicator that Motorola engineer Martin Cooper cited as inspiration for the world’s first handheld mobile phone. Gene Warren and Tim Baar won the Academy Award for their special effects, but I also want to call attention to the cleverness of Paul Vogel’s cinematography. The simulated time-lapse flow of George’s trip through time is accomplished by means of a mechanical lighting effect: circular shutters with segments of different colors to simulate the changing sky. Unfortunately, there are also examples where the rushed production and low budget really do show: spots where you can see how the matte paintings don’t line up with the foreground; some odd discrepancies in the depth field of certain scenes; the regrettable choice to use chunky oatmeal as lava. (In all fairness, they had 29 days to film and less than $1 million to work with.) George makes a stop in 1917, where he’s both excited about being able to visit the future and meet Filby’s grown son (also played by Alan Young). But he’s also dismayed to learn that the future means war and the death of his friend Filby. His next stop, right in the middle of the Blitz in 1940, does little to convince him that humanity is on the right track. So he travels ahead a bit more to 1966, where he finds that the unknown-to-him but known-to-the-audience Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon are coming true, as an “atomic satellite” detonates and triggers—please imagine me tearfully trembling and clinging to my PhD in geophysics as I type this—a volcanic eruption that engulfs London. It’s curious that at no point does George consider going back. He escapes by going forward again: forward as he and his time machine are encased in lava, forward as he waits for the stone to erode away. In the year 802,701, he finally stops again. This time he finds a pleasantly lush landscape with nice weather, abundant fruit trees, and a cheerful population of people who appear to live a life of complete leisure. George thinks it’s very swell that humanity has reached the point of being able to laze about on idyllic rivers instead of laboring and warring—until he sees a young woman drowning in the river, and he realizes with horror that nobody is trying to help or even seems to care. He only grows more appalled as the young woman, Weena (17-year-old Yvette Mimieux, in her first role), tells him more about her people, the Eloi, and their ignorant, uncurious way of life. George, a proper Englishman in his dedication to the Great Man theory of history, fully believes that the Eloi just need somebody to show them how to be better, and they will be. All the while we are trying not to think too much about the movie’s choice to develop a romance between George and the childlike Weena. George does grow a bit more sympathetic toward the Eloi when he learns that they are always in danger from the Morlock, who are furry, subterranean, and have stolen his time machine. He learns that the Eloi and Morlock both evolved from humans in the past, thanks to a centuries-long war that drove part of the population underground. And, yes, we all have a great many questions about this scenario, but we shan’t be asking them here, because they have no answers within the film. Everything that happens after that point is a bit silly: Weena and several other Eloi are taken by the Morlock, George goes to save them, there’s a fight that involves a lot of whips and fur suits catching on fire. George rescues the Eloi and does great damage to the Morlock caverns, and there is some drama over whether he’ll be able to leave before he finally gets his time machine back and has to return to the past to escape the Morlocks. This ending is one place where the otherwise quite faithful movie diverges from the book. In the book, the Time Traveler keeps traveling into the future, in some passages that are eerily beautiful in how Wells describes Earth’s strange and frightening far future, when the Sun is dying and life on Earth has changed beyond recognition. In the movie, he heads right back to the year 1900 and the dinner party, where he recounts his tale to his highly skeptical friends; he then leaves again, presumably (back) to the same future. The book’s Time Traveler also disappears into his travels, with a promise to the narrator that he’ll be back with proof in half an hour, and is never seen again. The narrator speculates that he could have gone anywhere in the past or future; there is no suggestion that he’s returning to the Eloi’s world for any purpose. All in all, the first part of the movie feels charmingly old-fashioned, with its Victorian protagonist marveling at the wonders and horrors of the 20th century as he travels through the future. But the second half feels not old-fashioned but outdated, and I’ve been thinking about some reasons why that is. What I keep coming back to is that there is literary and political context to H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel that I think does not translate well into a Cold War-era film—even though, at the same time, I think that thematic misalignment is interesting. There was another very popular time travel story published toward the end of the 19th century, this one of the “fell asleep and time passed” variety, and that was John Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward. Bellamy’s book is an example of utopian fiction: a book that exists to imagine a more perfect world from a philosophical, political, or sociological point of view. (The professor of my college “Utopian Fiction” philosophy class would be so proud that I’m finally using what she taught us.) These days we’re used to interpreting portrayals of a perfect world as dystopian, but Looking Backward was fully in earnest in its description of a socialist future. So too was William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890), because socialist utopian thought experiments in the form of fiction were quite popular around that time. Wells’ The Time Machine is a bit of an oddball, in that it was born of the same socialist literary tradition as Looking Backward and News From Nowhere, but it’s also an early example of the now-common sci fi premise of an apparently utopian world that is in fact deeply fucked up. He wasn’t the first to write about an apparent utopia disguising an actual dystopia, but he was influential in a larger shift that was taking place across literature—the shift away from those thought experiments about better worlds and toward thought experiments about worlds that have gone very wrong in attempting to be perfect. By the time George Pal made The Time Machine in 1960, the world was already familiar with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (the English translation was published in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and well as with films such as Metropolis (1927) and Things To Come (1936, written by H.G. Wells himself). That is—with the caveat that this is a generalization and there are always counterexamples—by 1960, fiction about failed or dystopian societies tended to be based on the very real political problems writers were seeing in the world around them. And that is captured in the first part of The Time Machine, when we see the prediction of Cold War paranoia in the volcano-inducing destruction of War World III. But the film never achieves any depth when it comes to exploring the society of the Eloi and Morlocks, which is noticeable only because George says several times that he wants to learn more about the societies of the future. I don’t always like to spend so much time comparing a film adaptation to its source material, but I think The Time Machine is an interesting case because it’s so easy to see the ways in which science fiction—in both books and film—changed after, around, and in response to H.G. Wells’ novel. The result of adapting the tale in the midst of that ongoing cultural evolution is imperfect, with a promising beginning but sort of falling apart toward the end. It exists as a sort of patchwork example of the different ways we imagine what the future might look like, if we ever get a chance to visit. What do you think about The Time Machine and its place in the history of time travel fiction? I didn’t mention the 2002 remake. I actually saw it when it came out, but I realized as I was reading through the Wikipedia article that I remember absolutely nothing about it, not even that Jeremy Irons was in it as the Morlock leader. So I can’t offer much comparison—anybody who remembers more, or wants to mention other adaptions and interpretations, is invited to chime in! Next week: Another take on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine with Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s Aditya 369. This time we’re starting in Hyderabad, India in the ’90s and heading to both the past and the future. Watch it on Amazon.[end-mark] The post <i>The Time Machine</i>: Victorian Storytime With Cave Creatures and Camp appeared first on Reactor.

Still No Press Conference With Kamala?

Luxury Italian brand Dolce & Gabbana has created a “scented mist for dogs” – and it costs upwards of $100, making it some seriously spenny puppy perfume. Outrageous price tag aside, is it really a good idea to be dousing our dogs in this, or any other, fragrance?Fefé – named for Domenico Dolce's beloved pet – is “an olfactory masterpiece”, reads the brand's website. It features “the cocooning and warm notes of Ylang, the clean and enveloping touch of Musk, and the woody creamy undertones of Sandalwood” and is “a tender and embracing fragrance crafted for a playful beauty routine.” It’s easy to forget this is perfume for a pet they’re talking about.Retailing at €99 ($108), the luxury fragrance mist comes in a green lacquered glass bottle, replete with a 24-carat gold-plated paw – just what every hound wants, right? Pampered pups also get a complementary dog collar with every purchase.According to Dolce & Gabbana, Fefé has been certified by Safe Pet Cosmetics, is alcohol-free, “approved by vets”, and “enjoyed by dogs” – but it seems independent veterinarians are less convinced. Though it may not always be harmful, canine cologne has some downsides for pooches and their notoriously sensitive noses.“This is entirely for the owner’s benefit, not for the dogs,” Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln, told The New York Times. “Dogs have a fantastic sense of smell, and changing their odor can cause significant issues.”“Overall, it’s a very bad idea.”These sentiments were echoed by the senior scientific officer at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Alice Potter, who told The Guardian: “Dogs rely on their sense of smell to communicate and interact with their environment as well as the people and other animals within it. Therefore we advise that strong-scented products such as perfumes or sprays are avoided, especially as some smells can be really unpleasant for dogs.”As well as potentially causing social issues and sensory overload, messing with a dog’s natural odor could mask underlying health issues, Anna Judson, the president of the British Veterinary Association, explained to the NYT. Smells can be indicative of skin conditions, for example, and covering them up could result in delays in treatment.There’s also no evidence, of course, that dogs want to smell like ylang ylang, musk, sandalwood, or any other aroma. Ultimately, Mills adds, “we need to be far more respectful of dogs and their wishes.” So maybe cool it with the paw-fume – your bank account will certainly thank you.

The piles of old smartphones, obsolete computers, and broken laptops that are piling up in junkyards are hiding mini mountains of gold, and a new project in the UK is hoping to exploit the invisible riches. The Royal Mint, the UK’s official maker of British coins, has signed an agreement with Canadian clean tech startup Excir to use a “world-first technology” that can safely retrieve and recycle gold and other precious metals from electronic waste (e-waste). Circuit boards within electronic devices contain small amounts of gold in their connections due to its conductivity properties, as well as other useful metals like silver, copper, lead, nickel, and aluminum.Obtaining the metals has previously proved to be a challenge, but the technology developed by Excir is able to secure 99 percent of gold trapped inside e-waste in a matter of seconds. After preparing the circuit boards with a "unique process," they're introduced to a patented chemical formulation that selectively extracts the gold in seconds. The gold-rich liquid is then processed and turned into pure gold that can be melted into ingots. The process also has the potential to recover palladium, silver, and copper."The Royal Mint has thrived for over 1,100 years thanks to our entrepreneurial spirit, and the Excir technology complements our ambition to be a leader in sustainable precious metals. The chemistry is revolutionary and capable of recovering precious metals from electronic devices in seconds. It offers huge potential for The Royal Mint and the circular economy – helping to reuse our planet’s precious resources and creating new skills in the UK,” Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at The Royal Mint, said in a statement. Around 22 percent of e-waste is currently collected, properly stored, and recycled. However, with new technology like this, the scourge of scrapped electronics could be eased.An estimated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste is produced each year globally – enough to fill over 1.5 million 40-tonne trucks. As demand for electronic gadgets increases, that figure is set to rise by a further 32 percent by 2030, making it the fastest-growing solid waste source in the world. The World Health Organization declares e-waste as hazardous waste because it contains toxic materials and can leak toxic chemicals if not treated appropriately. For instance, discarded electronic equipment can pump lead and mercury into the environment, which can disrupt the normal development of the central nervous system during pregnancy, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. What’s more, e-waste isn’t biodegradable and accumulates in the environment.Not only does this pose a substantial environmental problem, but it’s also a massive waste. In total, some $57 billion to $62 billion worth of precious metals could be sitting in landfill sites and scrapyards.