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1 week ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
Not even Steven Spielberg is above lending a hand (or getting one). Fans of the 1985 adventure film The Goonies recognize Richard Donner (Superman: The Movie, Lethal Weapon) as the director. But fewer realize that Steven Spielberg also sat in the director’s chair—technically, the second unit director’s chair.
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1 week ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
The long-running trivia show gave away more jokes than prizes. Plenty of celebrities had an agreeable attitude about being featured on The Hollywood Squares, the long-running and often-revitalized game show that originated on NBC in 1966. John Wayne was not one of them. After a joke answer to a question about what Wayne’s children might call him (“Sir”) in 1975, the Western film icon dashed off an angry note to the show’s host, Peter Marshall.
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2 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
Environmental pollution is making it much harder for bees to do bee things. The dangers of microplastics seeping into water, soil, and other locations along the environmental chain are well known by now. But researchers are increasingly sounding the alarm on the effect of the ubiquitous material on one of the most important cogs in Earth’s machine: bees.
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2 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
The practical tote packs in a lot of history. Whether you’re going away for a weekend or smuggling illicit goods in and out of the country, at some point, you’ve probably grabbed a duffel bag. These cylindrical totes are typically made of heavy-duty canvas or some other durable material and make for a more portable packing solution than conventional luggage. But why is it known as a duffel bag? The History of Duffel BagsWhat’s the Difference Between a Duffel Bag and a Gym Bag? Duffel Bag vs.
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2 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
Human-generated trash can get tossed with a community effort. Most people visit national parks expecting to see natural wonders like forests, waterfalls, and animals. What they don’t anticipate are mounds of trash left by tourists with no regard for how cigarette butts and soda cans impact the environment. Now, there’s an app to not only track this waste but eliminate it.
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2 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
The two-man crew vanished during a patrol that was anything but routine. Mrs. Horace C. Appleton could hardly believe her eyes. There, just above her house in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City, was a nearly 150-foot-long naval blimp slowly descending over the neighborhood. Appleton quickly ran inside and yelled to her husband: “Look, a balloon is falling on our house.” She heard the wheels scrape the shingles of their roof.
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3 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
Is a busted ceramic pot really valuable? It depends on who made it. When it comes to art, antiques, and other collectibles, condition is everything: Few will pay handsomely for a piece that arrives in pieces. But one recent auction demonstrated an exception to the rule. A broken flower pot managed to fetch over $60,000. According to The Times, UK-based Chiswick Auctions fielded the sale of a 4-foot-tall ceramic pot that was found split into two pieces and missing a large chunk of its upper portion.
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3 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
Animal vocalizations can change depending on their environment. Back in 1986, researchers Bob Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney took infant rhesus and Japanese macaque monkeys and switched them shortly after birth. Each was placed in a socially similar but acoustically different environment. The question: Would the monkeys develop regional vocalizations that were contrary to how their species normally communicated?
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3 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
One author had the temerity to write a follow-up to Margaret Mitchell’s problematic classic. Roughly 300 people were lined up outside B. Dalton Bookstore in Atlanta, Georgia, anxiously waiting for the store to open at midnight. Once inside, they were greeted by employees wearing costumes that harkened to the antebellum South, serving pecan tarts and mint julep punch.
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3 weeks ago | 
mentalfloss.com | Jake Rossen
A climate-controlled Technicolor print of the space opera is about to surface for the first time in decades. Few films have undergone as many post-release revisions as Star Wars. George Lucas’s blockbuster has been altered in ways both major and minor over the past half-century, obscuring how audiences experienced it when it opened in May of 1977. If you weren’t there, you still have a chance to see it without the tweaks.
