Author Archives: Carol Edwards

You might want to buckle up, baby. It seems that famed smuggler, gambler, Cloud City administrator and original Millennium Falcon owner Captain Lando Calrissian is returning to the big screen.

That’s according to The Hollywood Reporter, which cited unnamed “sources” — plus the fact that Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando’s later incarnation in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi has had to bow out of the convention circuit due to an unspecified “movie schedule.” 

There’s no doubt that Williams is eager to reprise the role. “No one’s going to play Lando but me,” the actor insisted when I interviewed him in 2013 — at a time when Star Wars Episode VII, the movie that became The Force Awakens, was still being cast.  Read more…

More about Star Wars, Episode Ix, Entertainment, Movies Tv Shows, and Star Wars

Elon Musk is here to save the day, even though it’s probably not necessary. 

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX was  — if his Twitter and Instagram accounts are to be believed — in Thailand on Monday touring the cave where a team of 12 soccer players, aged 11 to 16, became stuck with their coach on June 23. Musk says he’s there to help, and you better believe he brought his kid-sized submarine with him. 

Importantly, as of the time of this writing, eight of the 13 trapped people have already been saved by the heroic actions of rescue divers and support teams. Musk, who has been documenting his efforts to build the aforementioned sub to possibly help in the rescue, still clearly felt like he had something to offer.  Read more…

More about Tesla, Thailand, Spacex, Boring Company, and Tech

You know that dystopia in which income inequality is so extreme that society invents a game show that forces the less wealthy people to fight one other for survival?

Nope, not The Hunger Games. We’re talking about good, old, real-life America in 2018. You know, where unchecked capitalist greed has rendered higher education simultaneously unaffordable and a prerequisite to landing a decent job — leaving 44 million citizens in debt that toals over $1.3 trillion, according to The Washington Post.

Jennifer Lawrence won’t be able to save us from this waking nightmare though. 

More about Entertainment, Politics, Donald Trump, Student Loans, and Hunger Games

Your Uber driver is not your friend. In fact, they may very well be narcing on you right now — and you could get banned from the ride-hail app as a result.

The company’s Community Guidelines strictly prohibit “bringing open containers of alcohol or drugs into the car,” and that apparently includes weed. Marijuana, of course, is recreationally legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, but that doesn’t mean Uber is cool with it. 

One rider found that out the hard way after he got a notification from the company threatening “permanent account deactivation.” The offense? Allegedly bringing some drugs into the vehicle. Read more…

More about Uber, Marijuana, Weed, Ride Hailing Apps, and Tech

A planet and its moon are getting chatty in deep space. 

A new video from NASA shows off the complicated interactions between plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus and back. 

The new video, produced by converting plasma wave data into sound waves, shows that the plasma actually moves along magnetic field lines, like energy moving between the two bodies, NASA said.

“Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn, and we know it is a continuous source of energy,” planetary scientist Ali Sulaiman said in a NASA statement.  Read more…

More about Space, Nasa, Science, Saturn, and Planets

When you think of Snapchat, you probably think of faceswaps and dancing hot dogs. But you might soon have a new reason to think of the messaging app: Shopping. 

Code unearthed by a developer strongly suggests that Snapchat is readying a new feature that will let users shop on Amazon by pointing their camera at objects around them.

The feature, which was first reported by TechCrunch, is called “Camera Search” in the app’s code. From the text within the code, it sounds like camera search would function similarly to the app’s current Shazam integration. Read more…

More about Tech, Amazon, Snapchat, Apps And Software, and Snap Inc

This article contains spoilers for the ending of Sorry to Bother You

Sorry to Bother You is one of the wildest rides in theaters this summer. The movie not only defies all genre convention, but seemingly reality itself.

Both an office-comedy about the soul-sucking nightmare of entry level desk jobs, and a reality-bending sci-fi horror depicting the uprising of a half-horse half-human hybrid species — it is designed to make you ask questions.

And the final act of the movie introduces the most WTF elements of all.

More about Entertainment, A24, Boots Riley, Lakeith Stanfield, and Sorry To Bother You

Hundreds have ditched their robes in Melbourne, Australia for an epic mass nude photoshoot. 

U.S. artist Spencer Tunick, famed for his mass nude shoots, staged one of his signature installations atop a Woolworths supermarket car park in the suburb of Prahran on Monday. 

Although the temperature was sitting at a chilly 9-10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), various media outlets reported somewhere between 300 and 500 participants showed up. 

The nude installation, dubbed Return of the Nude, was commissioned by Melbourne’s PROVOCARÉ arts festival, and saw the crowd don rather Handmaid’s Tale-like translucent red cloaks before their moment of exposure. And it almost didn’t happen, thanks to Woolworths originally denying the artist permission for use of the site. Read more…

More about Photography, Art, Nudes, Nude, and Nudity

The brightest (and fiercest) witch of her age is back.

Performer Kelsey Ellison reprised her viral “dancing Hermione” outfit for a magic moment during Saturday’s Pride event in London.

The YouTube personality and self-proclaimed Harry Potter enthusiast gained fame when she appeared at MCM London’s ComicCon, stupefying all with a casually fierce dance while dressed up as Hermione Granger.

On Saturday, she brought the magic to Pride in London, voguing her way through her celebrated routine, backpack and all, and finishing with a casual split — all in a casually steamy summer temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). Read more…

More about Lgbtq, Viral Video, Pride, Hermione, and Pride Month

Put away that Rolex, because there’s a new conspicuous consumption totem on the block. 

A June paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looking at, in part, common predictors of wealth, found that owning an iPhone is a strong sign that someone is in fact straight ballin’. Or, at least “high-income.”

“We measure cultural distance between two groups as the ability to infer an individual’s group based on his or her (i) media consumption, (ii) consumer behavior, (iii) time use, or (iv) social attitudes,” notes the study abstract. 

The paper, by Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, has some interesting details. For example, while in 1992 using Grey Poupon Dijon was 62.2% indicative of being high income, by 2016 that fanciest of mustards had been replaced by the iPhone.  Read more…

More about Apple, Iphone, Tech, and Iphone