10 Well Known Movies With Bizarre Backstories 10 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film from the visionary Stanley Kubrick. Considered by many to be one of the most ambitious films of all time, it attempts to tell the story of evolution from the time of primitive apes to the future of space travel. The first ten minutes of the film show the daily lives of prehistoric hominids going about their existence until an alien monolith appears before them....

With that being said, there was a news item or two that offered a little bit of hope in this ever-worsening crisis. COVID-19 does continue to dominate the news landscape, but it’s not the only thing happening right now — it’s just the giant elephant in the room that enjoys sitting on people. Here’s some stuff that happened you may have missed, and happily, it does include some good news....

Top 10 Most Wicked Popes 10 Benedict’s Book As you likely know, there are currently two living Popes. Although this isn’t the first time in history that there have been multiple Popes, previous instances were more like power struggles over who the “Real Pope” was. When Benedict XVI stepped down, he was not declared illegitimate, which has led to a situation where we have two people with an apparent direct line to God....

Psychokinesis Psychokinesis is also known as Telekinesis and mind over matter, and it is the ability to move or manipulate objects with the mind. This, in combination with pyrokinesis (item 5) is the ability that Carrie White had in the excellent book and movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Of all the items in this list, I would say this is the one that most people would love to have....

10 Traditional? Given how almost 80 percent of couples in the United States today propose with a diamond ring, you would think that this is an old tradition. After all, it seems like we have been doing it forever. In actuality, while the giving of a ring is an old tradition going back to at least the Romans, diamonds are another story. Around 1900, almost no one proposed using diamond rings....

David Cronenberg creates the ultimate body horror with his retelling of the 1958 film. Casting Jeff Goldblum as tortured scientist Seth Brundle, and Geena Davis as the woman who loves him, was a stroke of genius (seeing as how the two were, at the time, a couple); Davis manages to convey the horror that the man she loves is becoming a gigantic human/insect hybrid with sincerity and believeability, so that we as, an audience, are feeling her pain....

With horror movies, it gets even worse, especially left to the creative minds of sick Hollywood types. Characters are cut into little pieces when pushed into a barbed wire fence or have their eyeballs pop out during laser surgery. Not to mention getting squashed by a flying car engine or having their heads popped open by falling weightlifting equipment. And this is all from just one movie franchise. On this list are 10 more over-the-top horror movie deaths that (hopefully) wouldn’t happen in real life....

10 Unsettling Premonitions That Came True 10 Neighbors Poison Halloween Candy Ronald O’Bryan ruined everyone’s fun. Cautious parents inspect their children’s Halloween haul to make sure no nefarious prankster tainted it. They usually test this by courageously eating some portion of the candy themselves. Only one recorded child has died from poisoned Halloween candy. It was not done by a demented boogieman, but the child’s own father. In 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan went trick or treating....

Like many other styling features on this list, spare tire humps were attempts to mimic the custom-bodied cars of the early 20th century. The first Lincoln Continental sported a covered spare, which was both functional and attractive. Lincoln designers pushed this feature on many Continental models over the years, even when they were no longer used for housing a spare and looked awkward, if not tacky, on more modern luxury cars....

10 Gruesome And Shocking Facts About Victorian Surgery 10 Farming Farming as a job for children remains, to this day, a big part of life on family-owned farms, but in the past children would work wherever they could and for whomever they could. That meant back-breaking laborious hours under the blistering sun being paid a pittance. Without parents in charge, little leniency was offered when a boy fell ill or was overwhelmed by the job....

10 Movies Based On Common Misconceptions Unfortunately, Hollywood still gets a lot of things wrong about society. In theory, that should be fine because the goal of many movies is to portray the world as we want it to be—not as it really is. These inaccuracies become a problem, though, when they lead to ignorance about certain issues in real life. 10 War Is a Glorious Affair War is one subject that filmmakers have a social responsibility to portray accurately....

Einstein’s quote is relevant in many other ways. Not just cosmologically speaking (as most of those things have little effect on our everyday lives), but biologically as well. This indicates that everyone may have his own perception of reality. Sometimes, your reality overlaps those of other people. Other times, your reality is yours alone. Here are 10 revelations that should make you question everything you think you know about the universe....

10 Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes For a very long time, vampires were as common in Greece as in Romania. And although they scared Greeks out of their minds, they were quite able to walk about in full Greek sunlight. As any Greek could tell you, the only time vampires were compelled to remain in their coffins was ‘between the hours of Vespers on Saturday and the end of the liturgy on the Sunday morning’....

Granted, most of the deadliest animals in the world are relatively large. While they are certainly interesting, the smallest killer critters can be far more fascinating. These ten animals are two fundamental things: they’re small and horrifically deadly. Since they could all kill a person, they are arranged from the largest to the smallest deadly critter. Also, no vectors here, so don’t expect to see mosquitoes or fleas — only animals that can kill a person through direct contact....

Quantum computers have existed since way before you think. The first quantum computation was carried out in 1997, using NMR on chloroform molecules.[1] Nowadays, we’ve been trying to slap the “quantum” buzzword on just about anything. Even then, there are still a few applications—in the endless list of quantum technologies—that are really mind-boggling. 10 Improving Cancer Treatment Cancer is one of the leading causes of death around the world. In fact, according to a recent survey from the World Health Organization (WHO), respiratory cancers alone claimed 1....

President Xi Jinping, now the “president for life,” is harnessing the country’s technological superiority to keep his people in line. The repressive regime has introduced a social credit score that punishes dissident behavior. Each score is calculated using a wealth of “big data,” including a person’s internet search history, criminal records, and shopping habits. A number of socially undesirable behaviors can cause a score to plummet. These include insincere apologies in court, traffic violations, posting fake news online, protesting against the CCP, or failing to visit elderly relatives....

Well, sometimes, the fates align in such a way that people actually end up making money for doing little more than existing. Let’s count down 10 different ways that people have made money for doing next to nothing. 10 Paid To Stand In Line Nobody likes waiting in line, but what if you could make money by holding someone’s spot? It may sound crazy, but it might make good economic sense....

It inspires awe with massive and bizarre storms, swirls, clouds, and even stranger molecules and quantum secrets. From the oldest water ever found to the mystery of where H2O originally comes from, this life-giving liquid can be scary and magnificent enough to belong to the realm of fantasy. 10 Fire Clouds Flames and water do not mix, but a rare kind of cloud forms over fiery events like wildfires. Most recently, these so-called pyrocumulus clouds appeared during Hawaii’s 2018 Kilauea volcano outburst....

Many of these difficulties arise from the fact that English is based on a combination of different languages. Sometimes, we can easily see the similarities between English words and the languages from which they are borrowed. Other times, this can be a little harder. The following 10 English words have rather strange origins that may surprise you. Top 10 Silliest English Words And Their Origins 10 Lesbian The word “lesbian,” which is used to describe women who love other women, is derived from the Greek island of Lesbos....

10 Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin joined the antislavery movement toward the end of his life even though he had owned slaves when he was younger and ran advertisements for the sale of slaves in his Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper. To be fair, though, he also ran antislavery advertisements sponsored by the Quakers in the same newspaper. In 1787, he became the president of The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which was formed as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in April 1775....