Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2011 July 27

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July 27

Penn & Teller questions

1. Is it true that there has been more than one Teller over the years and that the original guy died (I don't think that's true but I've heard people saying that)? 2. Can Teller actually talk? Looking for a definitive answer here... 3. Any truth to the rumour that P+T really hate each other's guts in real life?

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.108.120 (talk) 00:06, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Have you looked at the articles Penn & Teller (there's an extensive history of the duo, and a section entitled "Off-stage relationship") and Teller (entertainer) (goes into length about his ability to talk)? -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 00:29, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Regarding #2: I have spoken to him. I have been to several shows, and Penn and Teller often meet people in the lobby and give autographs and chat with people. Teller has a quiet voice, but he's not particularly "shy" when off stage, he seemed quite personable when I spoke to him. I have also seen him on more than one TV show without Penn, and he speaks freely then as well. The whole "silent" bit on stage is part of the act. The quiet, reserved Teller "character" is supposed to be a foil for the bombastic Penn "character". Most comedy duos are built this way (think Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy) with two polar opposite personalities. You will rarely find that the on-stage persona of a performer matches their off-stage personality; it may be influenced by it, but many performers affect on-stage personas for purely entertainment purposes. --Jayron32 02:38, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

In one of their Simpsons appearances, Teller says he's "not the first Teller", implying that Penn has possibly killed earlier Tellers. So that's probably where that part comes from. Adam Bishop (talk) 03:59, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course, because when I want scholarly facts, quality journalism, and reliable information, I go to the Simpsons. --Jayron32 21:08, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

It's a perfectly cromulant source. APL (talk) 21:59, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Go get embiggened... --Jayron32 22:06, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Well I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but can you imagine someone watching that episode and then repeating that bit, and then people believe it as fact without realizing it's a Simpsons joke? I can imagine it. I'm sure it happens all the time (how many people think Sarah Palin said she can see Alaska from her house, which was an SNL joke?). Adam Bishop (talk) 06:22, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Did you mean to type "Russia" rather than "Alaska" there? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.2 (talk) 13:52, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

There's a few videos on YouTube in which Teller speaks (search for 'teller talks', or 'teller speaks') - this one is a good example (note the woman exclaiming "WHOA! HE'S TALKING!" at about 1min in). I guess it's easy to imagine that famous duos are the best friends forever (BFF) and do everything together in real life, or even live together (no, not in *that* way) - but it *is* funnier to imagine that as soon as the cameras stop rolling, or the curtain goes down, the smiles fall from their faces, they glower at each other with outright hate in their eyes and then walk in opposite directions, never to speak to each other again until the next performance necessitates it. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 22:42, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Actually, neither of those facts is true either. They have both talked about their off-stage relationship. They have a good, friendly, and productive working relationship. They just don't hang out together off the job. Many many many people are like this; it is quite possible to get along with your coworkers and not hang out together with them, and just because you don't hang out with your coworkers doesn't mean you hate them either. --Jayron32 23:09, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Na, I was talking about famous double-acts in general there (or at least that's what I meant to be doing), not P+T specifically. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 23:19, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The Flying Karamazov Brothers are another example of this. I don't think they even live near each other. From what I recall, they figure out their shows through phone/internet, organize time to get together, do so, and then take it on the road. (I've been to a few of their shows and take the opportunity to go meet them after the show.) Dismas|^(talk) 23:24, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

"Teller" is Teller's surname from birth (and now, legally, his only name). So it would be really odd for Penn to have had "another Teller" unless Teller is either lying about his entire life history or it was his brother. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:25, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

documentary films showing bad effects of chemistry

Hi, I would like to the titles of a few documentary films that show the evil effects of science, especially chemistry or the evil uses it is put to. Can somebody suggest? --Ppppoep (talk) 02:40, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

What do you mean by "evil"? --Jayron32 03:12, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

certainly nothing grandiloquent. The destructive use of science as well as the ecological depredation caused by the technology is my concern. Also, I am not looking for the conspiracy theory things propagated by the alternate and pseudo science guys. --Ppppoep (talk) 04:41, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The BBC recently did a series of documentaries entitled "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". Not strictly about chemistry, but each of the three parts looks at a particular area of scientific and social advancement of the 20th century and the terrible consequences. The third part should only be watched behind depression-proof glass, as it is incredibly sad and made me have to sit quietly and think hard about stuff for a good long while. Pascal (talk) 06:32, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I think I would feel much more comfortable if this topic was renamed to "Documentary films showing effects of bad chemistry" It reads now as if all chemistry is bad. HiLo48 (talk) 08:08, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

There's a number of documentaries about the Bhopal disaster: One Night in Bhopal, Tragedy at Bhopal. 3 Billion and Counting[1], about the history of DDT and whether its goods outweigh its evils, is more complex. There's also the short Haber (film) about Fritz Haber, who developed chemical weapons and fertilizer; a lot of other films show the bad effects of chemical weapons (from episodes of The Great War (documentary) to Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre). --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:24, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

While not a documentary, Doomwatch is concerned with the effects of dumping chemical waste. --TrogWoolley (talk) 15:44, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Angel/Charmed convention

"Is there an upcoming convention in 2012 about Angel_(TV_series) Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_(TV_series) or Charmed in the United States? I'm asking about 2012, not this year 2011. Neptunekh2 (talk) 02:59, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I have not the slightest idea what the answer is, but I've taken the liberty of severely reducing the number of words in the header. To quote the entire question verbatim in the header when it's as long a question as this one is is as inappropriate as having just "Question" in the header. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 10:57, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Does this site help? By the way Google is your friend here. --TammyMoet (talk) 16:53, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Other pictures of Earth after 2012??

I saw one picture of Africa at the end of the Roland Emmerich flick. However, I didn't get to see what the rest of the world looked like after the apocalypses of 2012. Are there other pictures of other parts of the world (maybe as an "extra features" extra on some official promotion site, etc.?) Because I'm so curious about how those cataclysms will reshape the planet. Thanks. --70.179.165.67 (talk) 04:37, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

You talk as if the film is a documentary about what will actually happen in 2012. Are you aware of the background to the doomsday prediction regarding 2012? It's nothing more than the end of the Mayan long count, a remarkably long calender, which is probably comparable to the end of a millennium in western culture. Before the year 2000, many thought that the new year would herald the end of the world or the second coming, neither of which happened, and the year 2012 will go without a hitch too. Except for the Olympic Games which the UK will bugger up. Pascal yuiop (talk) 05:43, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

We still have to get through 2011. (Yawn.)--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:14, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't remember how accurate the image of Africa in the film is.

However, you might be interested in this : GlobalFloodMap.org.

It's an interactive map, so you can see which cities of the world will be under water in various rising sea levels scenarios. So if you put in a ridiculously large number of inches of sea-level rise, I suspect you'll get a map similar to the entirely fictional images in the movie. APL (talk) 08:48, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

A link like that one is what I was about to suggest to the OP when I got caught by the edit conflict. Too bad that you can't just set that map to "polar ice caps melt". Dismas|^(talk) 08:55, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Surely that won't cause major flooding at all. When an ice cube floating in a glass of water melts, the level of the water doesn't go up. Same with icebergs and the ocean, surely? I thought the greeks figured out the whole displacement thing. Pascal (talk) 09:01, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there's that and the idea that Antarctica (and Greenland, etc) will be able to rise once the huge ice cube isn't sitting on top of it. But "polar ice caps melt" would mean a bit more to the average person that X number of inches. Yes, 1000 inches is interesting to look at and say "Huh!" but it's not real meaningful to a lay person. Dismas|^(talk) 09:07, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Another major factor in the current sea level rise is the expansion of the volume of the oceans, due to temperature rising. Ghmyrtle (talk) 09:27, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The presence of ice at the poles is the definition of an ice age. We're getting off topic here. Pascal (talk) 09:48, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Also the definition of "Conditions we need so that our largest cities are not underwater." APL (talk) 01:50, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Pascal, your analogy of an ice cube only holds true for the Arctic ice cap: the Antartic is over a land mass. Surely that would add greatly to the volume of free water in the oceans?--TammyMoet (talk) 16:51, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I suppose. But it's not like we're going to wake up one day and find ourselves flooded. And I wonder about the places that are currently experiencing drought. I better they're just waiting for the ice caps to melt. 81.110.30.81 (talk) 09:32, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

If the icecaps melted, that and the even greater effect of the thermal expansion of the oceans' water (as Ghmyrtle mentions above) would inundate (not, I agree, instantly) most of the world's major cities, which tend to be situated on coasts. The massive deleterious effects this would have on the world's population and economy would do nobody any favours. Meanwhile, the likely large but currently unpredictable-in-detail changes to weather patterns which would accompany such a scenario might well make some current drought-stricken areas even dryer, and some wet areas even wetter (hello, even bigger seasonal floods). While some other areas might also experience notional improvements to their weather, even adapting to those changes would involve significant costs: remember the old proverb "Three removes are as good as a fire." [Translation to currentspeak - "Moving house three times costs as much as having one house burn down."] {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.2 (talk) 12:47, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

_{That's fair. But I'd rather we stop killing each other for stupid reasons and disagreeing over pointless things first. Pascal (talk) 18:20, 28 July 2011 (UTC)}

_{I'm not sure what your statement has to do with the topic under discussion (You'd rather we stop having pointless wars before our coastal cities flood? Well sure, but one isn't waiting for the other.), but that'll probably happen in a manner of speaking. The economic problems that will come with climate change will have us fighting each other for important reasons. It's not pointless at all to fight over food sources, fresh water supplies, or new trade routes. If the oil supply keeps going in the direction it's heading we might be fighting over that at roughly the same time. The next one or two hundred years should have lots of interesting history in them. APL (talk) 00:21, 30 July 2011 (UTC)}

Japanese Horror TV show

This is probably a long shot, but I guess I've nothing to lose by asking.

I'm wondering if anyone can help me name a TV show I saw when I lived in Japan. I saw it in 2004 - probably between August and September/October. It aired in the evening, and would have been on one of the regular (non-cable) channels. It has stuck in my mind as being quite terrifying, despite the fact that it seemed to be aimed at children (or teens).

The show, as I remember it, went as follows:

It opened with a short dramatic film about a couple (or family) driving through a tunnel at night. Every so often in the tunnel the man driving would see a load of clothes by the tunnel wall at the side of the road. He'd turn a corner in the tunnel and see the same clothes again. By the end of the tunnel the clothes were there again, this time with a man inside them, lying down. They left the tunnel and the guy saw in his rear view mirror a figure in the same clothes as in the tunnel running behind their car. He said something to his wife, looked back and the figure had disappeared. Then the camera view switches so we can see outside the passenger window from inside the car, and the man from the tunnel is running alongside the car with a twisted hideous lifeless smile on his face.

This just lasted a few minutes. Then the show was in a studio that had been made up to look a bit like a research laboratory. The host (possibly a member of SMAP, if I remember correctly, though I can't see anything mentioning this in their individual pages) seemed to be putting a group of kids through various challenges. They involved showing the kids photos where they'd have to point out the supernatually weird things in them (like, old photos in which the people have mysteriously disappearing limbs, that kind of thing). The back of the studio mimicked windows to the outside world, with the sillhouettes of shuffling zombie-like creatures moving about.

The show switched between the studio segments, with the kids genuinely screaming when being shown various scary photographs, and other short horror films. The second one I recall had a girl in an apartment who noticed scratch marks in her tatami mat. One night she stayed up and saw a hideous crone trying to make her way into her room through a hole from the next apartment, scratching her fingers on the mat to pull herself through.

That's pretty much all I remember about it. Does anyone recognise it (or the format)? I've tried searching specfic details on the net but without a name I'm coming up blank. Any suggestions gratefully received!

Phileas (talk) 17:16, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Movies get digitally remastered. Can't movies that take place in the future get updated with actualities?

On A.I. (film), the WTC towers still stand in the permaflooded Manhattan. Every so often, there's a digital remastery of films, so would the remasterers videoshop out the twin towers to replace them with the Freedom Tower complex, the next time they remaster this film?

Then there's Back To The Future II. In just 4 years, Princess Diana won't be resurrected to become Queen Diana. Hoverboards won't be invented in time, phone booths aren't commonplace, and etc. Therefore, if there's a remastery in 2016 or later, could references to Queen Diana be CGI'd to show King William instead (if Queen Liz is no longer around?) Also, how about phone booths being videoshopped out, and the original actors being CGI'ed over with new ones in scene reenactments, this time holding cellphones.

Also, to say nothing about fashion. Could everyone be CGI'ed or reenacted to wear the fashion that'll be true of 2015?

Overall, when a future movie becomes the present, then the past, why do I NEVER hear of digital remasteries rewriting the movie's small details to make them reflect the actualities of what really happened that year?

Even though I've never heard of these, that (probably) doesn't mean they don't happen. Therefore, what movies had this happen in their remasterments? --70.179.165.67 (talk) 19:20, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Could it be done? Pretty sure its possible. But I highly doubt it would be, CGI is very expensive, and doing so wouldn't really improve the films in any real way, and its unlikely it would increase sales or anything. In fact its pretty common to hear fans raging about lucas's changes to the original trilogy, if it started happening to the classics it would just annoy more people. If they went back and changed bttf2 and changed the fashions, took out the hoverboards etc it would be practically criminal--Jac16888 ^Talk 19:42, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I know nothing of the technicalities of which you speak. But as for there being a King William on the British throne, that may happen in about 35 years. In between, for about a quarter of a century we can expect a King Charles (or perhaps a King George). All the media hype around Prince William has had the effect of pushing his father Prince Charles into the background, but he's still there, still the heir to the throne, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to get quite a shock when he becomes king when Queen Elizabeth dies. The media have been blithely referring to William as "heir", but that's completely wrong. At best, he's the heir to the heir to the throne. That's the media for you. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I can't begin to imagine what you would do with 2001: A Space Odyssey... Adam Bishop (talk) 20:26, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

We'd just have to retitle the year to 2051. We could keep the Pan Am nameplate, in case it resurrects much like how Indian Motorcycle did after being dead for 50 years. Many other dynamics would still need updates though. --70.179.165.67 (talk) 02:31, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure it'd be a good thing. Remastering movies from the original film-stock is great, but I already find it distracting when they add new special effects. A slick, modern computer animation doesn't seem to "fit" with Star Trek's obviously ply-wood and cardboard sets. APL (talk) 21:56, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

APL, they kinda already refurbished Star Trek in 2009, with the reasoning behind it being that they are now in a forked timeline, where events happen differently, and (as a consequence?), technology appears to get developed a whole lot faster. --70.179.165.67 (talk) 02:31, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't mind entire new films. I was referring to the Original Series episodes, that are now available on BluRay or Netflix. They've taken the original film and remastered the show in HD, which is nice, but they've also re-done many of the special effects, which I find distracting because the new effects miss-match the footage so badly. APL (talk) 03:38, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Editing out the Twin Towers from history is as morally repugnant as destroying them in the first place. Moreso. One is an act of murder, the other willing complicity in one's own destruction. μηδείς (talk) 22:11, 27 July 2011 (UTC)