Whoa! Woah?! Whoah. - How do you spell it?

“Whoa” is hardly a new word; it dates back to at least the early 17th century. At that time it was used mostly in shouted form and was intended to garner the attention of someone in the distance. Around the the mid-1800s, people began using “whoa” to halt forward-moving horses, and by the latter half of the 20th century it had morphed into an expression for conveying alarm, surprise, or advanced interest. (Messrs. Bill and Ted solidified the strength of this usage in 1989, Joey Lawrence sealed the deal during the ’90s, and Keanu Reeves reappeared without Bill S. Preston, Esq. to help usher the word into the new millennium via The Matrix.)

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Facebook Is ‘Dead and Buried’ to Teens, and That’s Just Fine for Facebook

In a recent article for academic clearinghouse The Conversation, Miller shares preliminary findings from a 15-month ethnographic study of social media in eight countries, and explains that Facebook is “so uncool” to teens because their parents and other family members are using it to keep tabs on them.

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WGAW to Honor 'The Simpsons' Co-Creator Sam Simon With Valentine Davies Award

It's noteworthy that none of Simon's own civic and charitable foundations accept outside donations and are funded solely by Simon himself. Earlier this year, he was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and later revealed that he plans to donate nearly all of his sizable Simpsons royalties -- which he has said earn him "tens of millions" annually -- to charity.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt really is making Sandman into a movie

“Sandman adaptation” and “Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a comic-book movie” are two of the Internet’s most pervasive rumors. But ... last night, Deadline reported that Gordon-Levitt really is finalizing a deal to not only star as Morpheus, the personification of dreams ... but also to direct, moving from the shouting Jersey clan of his debut Don Jon to a slightly more terrifying family.

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An inventive comic about the human need for storytelling.

We are creatures of narrative, makers and consumers of stories. And the things we don’t understand about the world and our place in it—the areas that remain dark to our scientific sapience—have always provided fertile territory for that narrative inventiveness.

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Simon Doonan Plays Window Dresser For Small Business Saturday

Doonan added his signature whimsical style to the windows of Surfing Cowboys, which relocated to L.A.’s Mar Vista neighborhood in March after 17 years on Abbot Kinney in Venice.

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Martin Scorsese wants to make Roger Ebert doc

The Oscar-winning director shares his thoughts on film critic Roger Ebert and the upcoming documentary on Ebert’s life and legacy, Life Itself. Directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters), the documentary is based on the well-known critic and film lover’s eponymous memoir. It chronicles his life as an advocate for great cinema and his inspiring battle with cancer.

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Amazon Can’t Save the Post Office

The Postal Service is failing despite being good at what it does, because its underlying financial model and mission are totally outdated. The institution could be saved in any number of ways, but all of them involve it fundamentally becoming something other than what it primarily is—an organization dedicated to delivering daily first-class mail.

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Real True Actual Stories of America

Here’s something neat! I was contacted by Audible.co.uk and asked if I’d like to help promote the new book by historian and memoirist Bill Bryson, One Summer: America 1927. TURNS OUT it’s a really interesting book filled with factoids and stories about the personalities and social movements of the 1920s — Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Al Jolson, and many others whose names are less familiar to us now.



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The Second-Chance Dog

I heard the barking as soon as I pulled into the gravel driveway of the sprawling old farmhouse on a country road about five miles from my farm. The noise was coming not from the house but from a barn behind it.

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Bart Simpson Actress Remembers Marcia Wallace

"Marcia would come in, and she was always a ray of light," Simpsons star Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, tells The Hollywood Reporter of her late co-star. "She’s in 178 episodes -- a lot more than people might think. That’s more episodes than most standard shows. Marcia was always a very big part of the group. Always a treat. The room was always a little bit better with her in it."

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The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic

The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.

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Which of These Haunted Places Is Real?

Check out some real-life haunted places, Just try to keep the panic off your faces. Six are offered up for your take, But three are real and three are fake.

Take the quiz.

How Actors and Lighting Designers Halloween Up Their Homes

With Halloween offering the perfect excuse to exercise their talents, Tinseltown's creatives, from lighting designers to actors, unleash their bag of tricks on their own homes. Reaching far beyond store-bought decorations -- costs run from $7,000 to $30,000 (sometimes offset by donations and contributions) -- they're treating their neighbors to elaborate Halloween haunts featuring dancing skeletons, eerie lighting and ghostly tableaus. From Santa Monica to the Valley, here are some of the best.

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Elvis’ ghost helped inspire one of the very best karaoke tracks

Marc Cohn isn’t exactly a household name, but put “Walking In Memphis” on any bar jukebox and watch the whole joint light up with glee.

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In which a Mood is soured

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This Is How Cats See the World

Cats’ visual fields are broader than ours, spanning roughly 200 degrees instead of 180 degrees, and their visual acuity isn’t as good. So, the things humans can sharply resolve at distances of 100-200 feet look blurry to cats, which can see these objects at distances of up to 20 feet.

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How Homestar Runner changed web series for the better

What about something like "Husbands" or "The Guild," which both began as bite-sized chunks of content, then gradually morphed into something more TV-like but still very much uniquely of their medium? They occupy a poorly defined middle ground between “TV” and “web video,” and there are few—if any—attempts to approach them as something other than TV’s weird younger sibling. Web series seem to start out as some very low-budget collection of tiny morsels of content, and then gradually expand as budgets and ambitions grow. In some ways, it looks like what an independent TV scene could theoretically be. In other ways, it’s nothing like television.

So much of this understanding of web video was already present in the works of Homestarrunner.com, the first online provider of TV-like content to see significant crossover success.

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Pumpkin Carving Tools to Get Your Gourd Glowing

Warren Cutlery’s Pro Pumpkin Kit comes with one five-inch long walnut handle and six different serrated blades. Simply pop a blade into the handle, wrench it in tightly, and you’ve got a serious carving tool that won’t bend or shear, unlike its plastic, half-tang, semi-disposable cousins that seem to always come in orange. You even have the option of a smaller blade, for tiny tooth detailing, and larger blades, for more structural work.

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Make Your Embarrassing Old Facebook Posts Unsearchable With This Quick Tweak

Make Your Embarrassing Old Facebook Posts Unsearchable With This Quick Tweak

What Is Truly Perverted?

As a society, we’ve been dawdling over the irrelevant questions of what’s “normal” and “natural” for far too long. To make any real moral traction, we must abandon the rhetoric of righteousness and instead turn our efforts to clarifying, using science rather than scripture, laws, or even (and especially) our own gut feelings, how a sexual act or orientation is harmful to those involved.

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Are We More Squeamish About Portraits of Naked Men Than Women?

Boys won’t watch girl heroines? Turns out that’s not true.

From "Dora" to "Korra" to "WordGirl," there are plenty of shows that have hit gender parity by featuring strong female leads and action-packed storylines. “We have sort of a framework for the development of female characters,” says Lesli Rotenberg, PBS’s general manager of children’s programming, explaining "WordGirl," the language-loving, crime-fighting action heroine. “We want to make sure that they are three-dimensional, that they’re inquisitive, that they’re funny, that they’re proactive, that they drive the plot.”

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Century City - One of the Worst Real Estate Deals in Hollywood History

Today, it is hard to imagine Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, without Century City.

...

The real story of how Century City ultimately came to be is one little known in Hollywood history, and it began in 1956 with a nighttime phone call from then-Fox president Spyros Skouras ...

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Women Really Do Need a Sweater at the Movies

Robert T. Gonzalez of io9 rounds up the research looking into the widespread belief that women are far more likely than men to want an extra blanket on the bed, and the findings largely suggest that yes, there's a real difference in heat perception between men and women on average.

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Say Goodbye to the Tech Sounds You’ll Never Hear Again

The boops and beeps of bygone technology can be used to chart its evolution. From the zzzzzzap of the Tesla coil to the tap-tap-tap of Morse code being sent via telegraph, what were once the most important nerd sounds in the world are now just historical signposts.

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Planning Comic-Con 2014! Solving the line problem

EW got San Diego Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer on the phone Monday to pick his brain about the past five days, and he was pleased to say things had gone “surprisingly well” — but there’s always room for improvement.

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Comic-Con: Winners and Losers From Another Year in San Diego

Superman and Batman, "Gravity," Cobie Smulders and "How I Met Your Mother" wooed and won the day, but other franchises (whither Wonder Woman?) and networks (hello, CW?) missed the mark as THR looks at who won -- and lost -- in 2013.

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Attention, gumshoes: Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? probably returning to PBS

“This is not about new episodes, but will be appreciated by any ‘90s kid.” Lest anyone be mildly confused, the “actual” (read: official) Carmen Sandiego Tweeted, “If I were to re-air my old PBS episodes, would you watch me?”

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J.K. Rowling's Secret Novel: 4 Fun Things to Know

The news that Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling had secretly published the crime novel Cuckoo's Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith caught the world by surprise.

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This Is How You Die

With the publication of 2010’s anthology Machine Of Death, a one-off webcomics gag became a cottage industry. In addition to the book, there’s a podcast of MOD stories being read, a merchandising line, and a spin-off card game. The latter’s success suggests the popularity of the original story collection—the Kickstarter pitch asked for $23,000, and funded with more than $550,000.

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Stunning Maps of 3 Billion Tweets Reveal iPhone vs. Android Neighborhoods

The visualizations were created by engineers at MapBox, an enterprise mapping outfit, in collaboration with Eric Fischer, the data viz whiz whose maps of racial and ethnic make-up in American cities travelled widely across the web a few years back.

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Marvel's 'Earth's Mightiest Show' Targets Geek Lifestyle

Marvel Entertainment has set its sights on an unexpected new target with its latest web series: Lifestyle programming. Initially announced at this year's SXSW festival in March, tomorrow sees the official launch of Earth's Mightiest Show, in which Blair Butler leads viewers through what's happening in today's geek culture.

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Portraitlandia Confirms and Refutes Everything You Think About Portland

When Kirk Crippens, a photographer from San Francisco, was granted a month-long artist residency at NewSpace Center for Photography in Portland, he wanted to test this dominant narrative and hit the streets to meet real people. Throughout the month of April, for his series Portraitlandia, Crippens made 45 portraits. He expected his work to stand in sharp contrast to the fictions of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, but at the end of it all found that there was significant overlap between their view and his.

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Pass the Light Saber: 'Course of the Force' Race Returns to Santa Monica Pier

Pass the Light Saber: 'Course of the Force' Race Returns to Santa Monica Pier

'Boxtrolls' Breaks Ground by Featuring Same-Sex Parents in Animated Movie Trailer

In the new trailer for The Boxtrolls, the latest 3D animated feature from Portland-based Laika Studios, a sweet-faced toddler stands alone on a street as various combinations of parents in Victorian garb appear and disappear beside him.

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Your MacBook Has a Force Field. This Is What It Looks Like

A recent project from two designers at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design have made the invisible visible. Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray have created light paintings from the EMFs emitting from our everyday electronics.

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How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream

The ice cream business isn’t exactly the natural course for graduates of the West Coast’s most illustrious business school. Getting into venture capital, starting a tech company, maybe dabbling in Wall Street, those are all par for the Stanford MBA course, but starting a company by selling sweet treats from the back of a kid’s little red wagon – not so much.

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ABC's 'TGIF' Comedy Block: Where Are They Now?

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It Is 2013, and Video Games Are Still as Sexist as Ever

Where Is the Daenerys Targaryen of the Video Game World?



E3 2013 makes it official: The gaming industry is as sexist as ever.

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Why Google Reader Really Got the Axe

The announcement shouldn’t have been too unexpected. Google hadn’t iterated on the service for years. It even went down for a few days in February.

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Google Announces New Music Streaming Service

"Google announced the elegantly-named "Google Play Music All Access"..."



Google announced its subscription streaming service, Google Play Music All Access (wow that’s a mouthful), at Google I/O Wednesday. It’s all about harnessing the power of Google to provide you with stellar music recommendations, on your phone, tablet, or on the web.

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From 'Buffy' to 'X-Files': TV's Greatest Writers Rooms of All Time

THR reunites the scribes from four iconic series -- including "The Shield" and "Murphy Brown" -- whose showrunners both incubated and unleashed future superstars into television’s creative stratosphere. Says "Shield" creator Shawn Ryan, "You feel like a proud parent.

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'Star Trek's' Damon Lindelof on 'World War Z' and His Agony Over 'Lost'

"I feel really guilty telling you the truth, and it is the truth," says Lindelof, the humming of the Twilight Zone pinball machine in the corner fading into the background. "The year that Lost started and premiered was, without a doubt, the most miserable year of my life. The level of despair and anguish that I was feeling; I was clinically depressed, and anyone that you talked to who knew me at the time will tell you that."

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Cutting Carbon Dioxide Isn’t Enough

According to data being gathered at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has been monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958, the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere officially exceeded the 400 parts per million mark last week, a value not attained on Earth since humans were first human.

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Star Trek’s History of Progressive Values — And Why It Faltered on LGBT Crew Members

The equality on the U.S.S. Enterprise’s bridge was a watershed moment, both in television history and in Americans’ understanding of social equality.

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Meet The Adorable Baby Harbor Seal Born At Aquarium Of The Pacific

Weighing in at about 30 pounds, the adorable pup was born May 1 and is the first-ever male harbor seal born at the aquarium.

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CoolHaus and Golden Road Brewing Collaborate for Beer Pretzel Ice Cream Sandwich

CoolHaus will be making a pretzel beer ice cream that plays on the elements of salty and sweet. They'll be making scoops with Golden Road Brewery's Russian Stout to make the ultimate beer/pretzel combo.

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Watch a Baby Leopard Playing

Video: Watch a Baby Leopard Playing in His 'Urban Jungle'



We've got this quickie of the San Diego Zoo's fierce little furry one Haui-san, a Clouded Leopard cub, who was caught on camera exuberantly jumping from limb to rock inside his exhibit area, which is called the Urban Jungle.

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Stunning Killer Whale Attack on Dolphin

Photographer Captures Stunning Killer Whale Attack on Dolphin



Earlier this year, a pod of killer whales in the Monterey Bay was on the hunt for dolphins. Aboard a boat following the pod was photographer Jodi Frediani. Over roughly 45 minutes, she and the others observed the killer whales pursuing and catching a long-beaked common dolphin, with Frediani taking some stunning photographs of the high-speed hunt.

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RIP, Hotmail, and Thanks for All the Spam

RIP, Hotmail, and Thanks for All the Spam



This awkward web service from Silicon Valley altered the world’s notion of fair exchange (and later on, what privacy we were willing to throw away). Most people didn’t know it at the time, but we had become the product.

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Free Comic Book Day: Here

are the 10 Titles You Need to Grab



Saturday, May 4th is Free Comic Book Day, the very special day each year when comic book shops around the world give away, well, comic books. There will be dozens of free books up for grabs at participating shops--find one near you here--and figuring out what to grab when you get there can actually be a bit overwhelming.

But don't panic. We're here to help.

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Iron Man 3 Director: Hollywood’s Hottest Screenwriter

Why Iron Man 3 Director Shane Black Was Once Hollywood’s Hottest Screenwriter



Though his scripts are practically soaked in ironic distance, Black knew when to snap to attention and surprise the reader (and the audience) with something authentic.

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Kickstart a documentary about Dr. Demento!

Kickstart a documentary about Dr. Demento!



A group of filmmakers is working to make a feature-length documentary about the good doctor, but has only about $60,000 raised with four days to go. Under The Smogberry Trees would provide a sanctioned look into the life, works, and massive record collection of Barry “Dr. Demento” Hansen.

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Bob’s Burgers became TV’s most enjoyable show

Bob’s Burgers became TV’s most enjoyable show by channeling early Simpsons



There are plenty of superficial similarities between Bob’s Burgers and The Simpsons, right down to the number of kids in both families, but what unites the two series at this point is tone. It may be tough to remember after the show hit such a peak by doing anything to get a laugh in seasons four and beyond, but The Simpsons started out as an often deeply realistic portrayal of a blue-collar family doing its best to get by in a world that seemed to have increasingly less room for it. At the time, the show prompted nattering from cultural commentators about how its realistic portrayal of the struggling American working class depicted a country falling headlong into a recession. (Not for nothing did the president suggest America needed more families like the Waltons and fewer like the Simpsons.)

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xkcd: Embodying Nerd Culture to Rule the Web Comics Universe

xkcd: Embodying Nerd Culture to Rule the Web Comics Universe

Geek humor and the web go together like airline jokes and comedy clubs. One of the first tech-themed comics, NetBoy, debuted in 1994 and featured stick figures commenting on Internet culture. Nineteen years and countless binary jokes later, the most popular comic on the web is xkcd, a strip featuring … stick figures commenting on Internet culture.
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RIP Bobby ‘World’s Greatest Wino’ Brown

I will never forget "Jingle bell, jingle bell, help me get drunk..."



RIP Bobby ‘World’s Greatest Wino’ Brown

Born in Georgia, Bobby grew up in Florida and spent time in New York City before moving to Hollywood. Shortly thereafter he brought his “show” to the Venice Boardwalk.

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Unhappy New Yorkers Are The Worst Thing About L.A.

Chloë Sevigny Video Proves Unhappy New Yorkers Are The Worst Thing About L.A.


She runs through the laundry list of complaints you've heard from every dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who deigned to transplant to the other coast

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