MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is a 2011 romantic comedy fantasy film written and directed by Woody Allen.[3] The plot centers on a small group of Americans visiting the French capital for business and pleasure. The protagonist, a screenwriter, is forced to confront the shortcomings of his relationship with his fiancée and their divergent goals due to his magical experiences in the city beginning each night at midnight.[4] The movie explores themes of nostalgia and modernism.

Produced by Spanish group Mediapro and Allen’s Gravier Productions, the film stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Carla Bruni, Adrien Brody and Michael Sheen. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was released in North America in May 2011.

The film opened to widespread critical acclaim and has commonly been cited as one of Allen’s best films in recent years.

In 2012, the film won both the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Screenplay; and was nominated for three other Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction.

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Writing
Allen employed a reverse approach in writing the screenplay for this film, by building the film’s plot around a conceived movie title, ‘MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. [15] Allen originally wrote the character Gil as an east coast intellectual, but he rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson for the role.[9] “I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so eastern at all in his persona,” says Allen. Allen realized that making Gil a Californian would actually make the character richer, so he rewrote the part and submitted it to Wilson, who readily agreed to do it. Allen describes him as “a natural actor”.

Filming
Principal photography began in Paris in July 2010.[16] Allen states that the fundamental aesthetic for the camera work gave the film a warm ambiance. He describes that he likes it (the cinematography), “intensely red, intensely warm, because if you go to a restaurant and you’re there with your wife or your girlfriend, and it’s got red-flecked wallpaper and turn-of-the-century lights, you both look beautiful. Whereas if you’re in a seafood restaurant and the lights are up, everybody looks terrible. So it looks nice. It’s very flattering and very lovely.”

To achieve this he and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, used primarily warm colors in the film’s photography, filmed in flatter weather and employed limited camera movements, in attempts to draw little attention to itself. This is the first Woody Allen film to go through a digital intermediate, instead of being color timed in the traditional photochemical way. According to Allen, its use here is a test to see if he likes it enough to use on his future films.

Allen’s directorial style placed more emphasis on the romantic and realistic elements of the film, than the fantasy elements. He states that he “was interested only in this romantic tale, and anything that contributed to it that was fairy tale was right for me. I didn’t want to get into it. I only wanted to get into what bore down on his (Owen Wilson’s) relationship with Marion.”

Locations
The film opens with a 3½-minute postcard-view montage of Paris, showing the usual and iconic tourist sites. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times describes the montage as a stylistic approach that lasts longer than necessary to simply establish location. According to Turan, “Allen is saying: Pay attention — this is a special place, a place where magic can happen.”[18] Midnight in Paris is the first Woody Allen film shot entirely on location in Paris, though both Love and Death (1975)[19] and Everyone Says I Love You (1996) were partially filmed there.

Filming locations include Giverny, John XXIII Square (near Notre Dame), Montmartre, the Palace of Versailles, the Opéra, the Sacré-Cœur, the Île de la Cité itself, and streets near the Panthéon.

Conceptually similar to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour is Slate‘s Culture Gabfest. Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Dana Stevens talk about the latest movies, television, and books.

They sometimes cover topics that verge on the esoteric, but they do it in such an engaging and articulate matter that they keep me engaged.

My favorite part of the show each week is a segment called “Endorsements”, where each panel member talks about a pop culture item that is bringing him or her joy in that particular week.

Website of The Culture Gabfest.

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play recent episode below

NASA’s collection of Earth-from-space imagery dates back to the Apollo 8 mission, when astronauts snapped a picture of Earth rising over the moon. Simmon and NASA scientist Gene Feldman explain how the modern “Blue Marble” images are made and how they relate to scientific study of the Earth. Video comes from those smart geeks at Science Friday.

You can use SuTree to:
1. Watch thousands of free video lessons and tutorials from all over the web.
2. Join or create video-based courses and invite people to your course
3. Meet people who share your interests: Ask, answer and get smarter…

What does SuTree mean?
The name SuTree comes from the combination of the words:
Sutra (from Sanskrit) – which literally means a rope or thread that holds things together, and more metaphorically refers to a collection of knowledge in the form of a manual, and Tree – symbolizing the growth of knowledge.

Feel free to use SuTree to learn (almost) anything you wish:
How to fix stuff at home, how to solve math problems, how to improve your golf or basketball skills, how to prepare a cheesecake, how to speak Chinese, how to choose your next holiday destination, or anything else you like.

Think that you can offer a course in something?
Are you a really good social networker? This is your time to shine. Offer a course in social networking. Are you a really great cook? Offer a course in cooking. Create a name for yourself and a fan base.

As a wise man once said: “I only know that I don’t know anything”.
SuTree is your place to learn something.

I’ve made the rounds and tried most of them, and the recipes are nearly identical. That is, except for this one. Houston’s makes their spinach dip special by using a blend of sour cream, Monterey jack cheese and Parmegiano Reggiano — the ultimate parmesan cheese. Parmegiano Reggiano comes from Italy and is usually aged nearly twice as long as other, more common parmesan cheeses. That cheese makes the big difference in this dip. So hunt some down at your well-stocked market or gourmet store, and find out why Houston’s spinach dip is one of the most requested. Recipe is courtesy of  Todd Wilbur.

When gas prices rise at a rapid rate, large price discrepancies in a region become more prevalent. Right now GasBuddy is showing that there’s over a 40 cent price differential within a couple of miles of me. Fill up a tank and that adds up.

This free app easily finds the lowest prices right where you happen to be, via gps. Or you can plan ahead to where you’re going to be by typing in a zip code. I’ve found it has about a 90% accuracy which ain’t half bad. Give my dear buddy a try and save a buck or ten.

Even though I never even liked horseracing, this drama, set in that world, has got me hooked and betting the farm. I was a little skeptical and sometimes confused in the early going. It’s tough juggling a big cast of characters, and there’s a lot of racing lingo to decipher, and the plot is almost non-existant.

But it all starts to come together in episode four with an especially stirring race that will send your heart racing and your eyes misting. My TV pal and fave reviewer, Alan Sepinwall (see my post about him here) tipped me off to the show and can describe it much better than I, so I’ll turn the show over to him…

Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte head to the track in HBO’s LUCK

by Alan Sepinwall

One of the great things about art, if you’re good at what you do — and few in TV history have been better at it than David Milch and Michael Mann, the chief writer and director, respectively, behind HBO’s horseracing drama “Luck” — is that you can use your art to take something you care deeply about and make other people care deeply too, even if they never expected to.

I have no sentimental attachment to horseracing and could only vaguely follow many of the show’s early storylines about Pick Six line-ups and claiming races. Yet I became caught up in the world of the track, and the passions of the people who gravitate towards it, thanks to the artistry of Milch (“Deadwood,” “NYPD Blue”), Mann (“Miami Vice,” “Crime Story”) and their many gifted collaborators, including a cast headed by Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte.

“Luck” (which begins its 9-episode season Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO) is a show about a sport that has seen far, far better days. The Santa Anita racetrack where most of the action takes place is usually 3/4 empty. The people who hang around the track — trainers and vets, gamblers and owners, reporters and jockeys — all can tell that they should probably be plying their trade somewhere else, and yet there is nowhere else they would rather be.

(Some mild spoilers follow, but most of them refer to the show’s first episode, which HBO aired as a sneak preview in mid-December and will be airing again on Sunday night.)

Hoffman plays Chester “Ace” Bernstein, legendary fixer who has just emerged from a prison stretch determined to get revenge on the men who robbed him of three years of his life, but only inasmuch as his scheme doesn’t interfere with Pint of Plain, the beautiful, gentle horse he bought to race at Santa Anita.

Because Ace is on parole, he’s not legally allowed to own a horse, and we learn that he engineered an elaborate, costly ruse so that his driver/bodyguard Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina, who was discovered by Mann for “Thief” and later fronted “Crime Story”) could buy Pint of Plain for him. And the longer “Luck” goes on, the more obvious it becomes that most of the people hanging around Santa Anita have contorted themselves in some irrational way to get there and stay there.

When a quartet of degenerate gamblers led by expert handicapper Jerry (Jason Gedrick) and his dyspeptic friend Marcus (Kevin Dunn) wins big one day, they pour their cash into subsidizing a lifestyle that barely acknowledges the world away from the track. Former Kentucky Derby-winning jockey Ronnie (played by real-life champion jockey Gary Stevens, who continues on the promise he showed as an actor in “Seabiscuit”) has turned to booze and painkillers to deal with the countless injuries and heartaches of his profession, but he can’t walk away.

Neither can Walter Smith (Nolte), an aging trainer still tortured by the death of one of his horses, and who has now poured his entire mind, body and soul into getting its son, Gettin’ Up Morning, ready to race. Nolte gets to deliver a number of riveting speeches to the horse (as we saw on “Deadwood,” Milch is fond of characters monologuing to animals, objects and/or people that can’t talk back), and he gives himself over so physically to the role that it appears on a number of occasions that Walter may keel over dead in an instant if things go poorly for his prize animal.

It’s a race involving that horse in the show’s fourth episode that brings the series together. Like a lot of HBO dramas — including the all-time great ones like “Deadwood,” “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” — “Luck” takes a few hours to establish its world, characters and rules, and there are some stumbles in the early chapters.(*) But when Gettin’ Up Morning races in front of the small crowd, “Luck” — and its love of this dirty, obsolete, addictive world — comes to life. The writing, direction, editing and acting all come together to paint a beautiful picture of why these people don’t want to leave, and why you should stay there, too… (more)

All through his childhood, Alan Sepinwall’s relatives told his parents, “All that boy does is watch television! How’s he going to make a living doing that?” His career as a TV critic has been 15 years and counting of his attempt to answer their concerns. “What’s Alan Watching” is a blog whose title is self-explanatory: Alan watches TV shows, then writes about what he watched.

Here’s an excellent article about Sepinwall from Slate.com’s editor, Josh Levin.

Alan Sepinwall changed the nature of television criticism. But can you be both a rabid fan and a thoughtful reviewer?
By Josh Levin

Alan Sepinwall started writing about television in 1993, as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. He stank at it. In 2004, Sepinwall characterized his early work thusly: “Misspellings, bad grammar and, even worse, observations that make me cringe and wonder exactly when (or if) I stopped being such a dumbass.” He soon outgrew his dumbass ways. By the end of his undergrad years, Sepinwall had parlayed his role as the leading NYPD Blue fanboy of the newsgroup era into a gig as the Newark Star-Ledger’s TV critic. “[W]ithout Blue,” he wrote in 2004, “I wouldn’t have the career or the life that I currently do.”

Television, and television writing, have transformed since Dennis Franz’s bare butt launched Sepinwall’s career. Upon NYPD Blue’s early ’90s debut, it was heralded as one of the best shows ever made. In comparison with The Sopranos, The Wire, and even Lost, David Milch and Steven Bochco’s cops-and-perps procedural now looks prehistoric. Today’s more ambitious shows demand more ambitious commentary. In 2002, Sepinwall wrote his first post-episode Sopranos breakdown. This was a new form, a hybrid of the inside-joke-laden episode recaps pioneered by Dawson’s Wrap (which later expanded under the name Mighty Big TV, then was re-renamed Television Without Pity) and the NYPD Blue disquisitions from Sepinwall’s dorm-room days. If you wanted to understand the subtext and symbolism of HBO’s epic mob series—the long-ago motivation for one of Tony’s murders, the meaning of an end-of-episode quacking sound—you had to read Sepinwall’s sprawling write-ups.

After 14 years at the Star-Ledger, Sepinwall left the paper in 2010 to blog for HitFix.com. The style of TV criticism he helped invent is now ascendant. Gawker, New York’s Vulture, and the Onion’s A.V. Club employ teams of recappers to parse the previous night’s dramas, sitcoms, and reality fare. Slate supplements Troy Patterson’s criticism with weekly dialogues on shows like Lost, Mad Men, and Friday Night Lights. Sepinwall, though, is the acknowledged king of the form. As the A.V. Club’s Steve Heisler explained last year, “he’s an inspiration to TV critics throughout the country. His recaps appear online in record time, typically bursting with incisive commentary and wit.” Sepinwall’s output is also legendary: He’s currently reviewing between 10 and 15 shows each week, which he says is “a fairly light schedule for me.” (Advance screeners help on that score.)

Sepinwall-style criticism has obvious strengths. Week-to-week coverage reflects how people actually watch their favorite shows—we rehash the best lines, parse the meaning of weighty moments, and anticipate plot twists. At its best, new-school TV writing is brainy and inquisitive, thoughtful commentary borne out of a fanatical attention to detail. But hypervigilant criticism, written by obsessive fans for obsessive fans, isn’t necessarily an unmitigated force for good. Is it possible that today’s TV writers are sitting too close to the screen?

Television criticism used to be like restaurant criticism: A writer would sample a few episodes and then issue an informed recommendation. Today, it’s more akin to visiting the same restaurant every week, then reporting back on the mood of the wait staff, the condition of the silverware, and what dishes might appear on the new fall menu. In a fantastic A.V. Club dialogue about the state of TV criticism, Noel Murray argues that since weekly critics “aren’t primarily engaged in telling people whether they should or shouldn’t watch a show … we get to kick around symbolism, character development, and real-world connections to what’s on the screen.” Rather than tell you what to watch, Sepinwall, Murray, and Time’s James Poniewozik, among many others, validate your interest in the shows you’re already watching. (more)

Edward Aites submitted this video to NPR’s Science Friday and I’m glad he did. Aites, a photographer and videographer specializing in time-lapse imagery, said he was looking for something to explore in his studio during the winter months and started playing around with ice. His play turned into art and I think what he crated and captured is beautiful and fascinating.

Chili’s smokes their ribs in-house over pecan wood so they’re fall-off-the-bone tender with a bold and savory flavor that’s impossible to resist. Choose from Original BBQ Sauce, Shiner Bock BBQ Sauce or Memphis Dry Rub. This recipe is courtesy of my favorite food spy Todd Wilbur and check out his appearance on GMA with the ribs and other recipes.

Todd Wilbur on Good Morning America

Chili’s Baby Back Ribs recipe

The Ides of March is a 2011 American political drama film directed by George Clooney from a screenplay written by Clooney, along with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon. The film is an adaptation of Willimon’s 2008 play Farragut North. It stars Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright, and Evan Rachel Wood.

Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is the Junior Campaign Manager for Mike Morris (George Clooney), Governor of Pennsylvania and a Democratic presidential candidate, competing against Arkansas Senator Ted Pullman (Michael Mantell). The candidates are campaigning in Ohio. A win for Morris would all but guarantee him the nomination; a win for Pullman would give him vital momentum. Both campaigns are also attempting to enlist the endorsement of North Carolina Democratic Senator Franklin Thompson (Jeffrey Wright), who controls 356 convention delegates, enough to clinch the nomination for either candidate.

After a debate, Meyers is asked by Pullman’s Campaign Manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) to attend a secret meeting. Meyers calls his boss, Senior Campaign Manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who doesn’t answer. Meyers leaves a message that something important has come up. Meyers meets with Duffy who offers him a position in Senator Pullman’s campaign. Meyers refuses, and asserts that he believes in Morris. Duffy tells Meyers that his optimism won’t last, and that Morris will eventually be cynical and corrupt like the other candidates. Zara calls Meyers back and asks what was important but Meyers says it was nothing to worry about.

Meyers starts a sexual relationship with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), an intern for Morris’ campaign and daughter of Jack Stearns (Gregory Itzin), the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Late one night when Molly is in his room sleeping, Meyers discovers that Morris is trying to call her. She and Morris had a brief sexual liaison at a campaign stop in Iowa several weeks previously, and Molly is now pregnant with Morris’ baby. Meyers helps her with money for an abortion but warns her not to tell anybody. Meyers also fires Molly from the campaign, telling her she “f****d up.” He drives her to the clinic, promising to pick her up afterwards, but fails to do so. She repeatedly phones him, telling him the clinic is closing, but then is forced to find her own transportation back to her hotel.

Meyers admits to Zara that he met with Duffy, who told Meyers that Pullman will offer Senator Thompson the position of Secretary of State, guaranteeing his victory by bringing hundreds of delegates with him. Ida (Marisa Tomei), a reporter for the New York Times, reveals that an anonymous source leaked his encounter with Duffy to her and that she will publish unless Meyers gives her all of the information about his meeting with Thompson. Meyers comes to Zara for help. Zara reveals that he leaked the meeting to Ida and fires Meyers from the campaign for showing a “lack of loyalty” in meeting with Duffy.

Meyers offers his services to Duffy but Duffy now insists that he can’t and won’t hire Meyers. In a Machiavellian scheme, Duffy admits he only met with Meyers in order to influence his opponent’s operation. He suspected that Meyers would tell Zara about the meeting which would lead Zara (in his paranoia) to remove Meyers from Morris’ campaign. Should this happen, Duffy correctly surmised, the Morris campaign would be weakened and, as a result, Pullman’s would be strengthened. Before dismissing Meyers, Duffy encourages the younger man to quit the business, predicting that should he continue in the business, he will end up manipulative and cynical like every other political operative—indeed, like Duffy himself. Meanwhile, Molly learns that Meyers has been fired and, fearing that her secret will now be exposed, she overdoses on pills and alcohol and dies. Meyers feels guilty about this, as he did intend to expose Morris’ affair (and likely implicate Molly) in exchange for a job on Senator Pullman’s campaign.

Despite the guilt he feels upon hearing Molly’s anguished voicemails to him, in the face of disappointment with Morris and a career that will (in the short term) be tarnished, Meyers decides to go on the offensive using Molly’s suicide. Unbeknownst to the Morris campaign, he meets with Senator Thompson to arrange for Thompson’s delegates in exchange for a spot on the Morris ticket. He then uses Molly’s phone to call Morris, inducing the candidate to meet him. At a secret, late-night rendezvous, he confronts Morris, telling him that he will expose the affair with Molly if Morris does not accept his demands: fire Zara, rehire Meyers, place Meyers in charge of the campaign, and offer Senator Thompson the Vice Presidential spot on the ticket, thus securing Thompson’s delegates and guaranteeing the nomination. Morris resists, but Meyers claims that he has a suicide note found in Molly’s room.

After a back-and-forth in which either or both men appear to bluff a final show of cards, Morris relents and meets all of Meyer’s demands. Later at Molly’s funeral, Zara compliments Meyers on his skill in using secrets to his advantage. Having accepted Thompson’s endorsement and his delegates, Morris shows himself to be the sort of old-school, professional politician he and Meyers had long disdained. Morris becomes the nominee despite losing the Ohio primary election to Pullman, and despite all of his high-blown lip service to integrity and uncompromising devotion to ideas and higher ideals.

Now Senior Campaign Manager, Meyers attends a remote TV interview with the voice of John King in his ear. The scene is intended to harken to the opening scene in which a playful, plucky, relatively naive Meyers is depicted prior to the events that transform him into a hardened, even bitter, political operative. Just prior to this interview, an encounter with Ida serves to demonstrate Meyer’s deepening isolation, his radical personal transformation. Reprising earlier interplay with the reporter, Meyers refuses to respond to her inquiries. When she plaintively says “Aren’t we friends anymore?”, Meyers says, not without a trace of irony that “you’re my best friend, Ida.” Meyers instructs the guards that Ida is press and the press are not allowed beyond that point—another demonstration of the development in his character; a move farther into himself, beyond the wall separating him from a world of trust and public access. The movie ends as he takes his seat for a television interview inside Xavier University’s Cintas Center and is asked for insight as to how the events surrounding the election unfolded.

So I was rushing from a shoot inside one building and on my way to the inside of another building. No time to spare. But there was a fountain along the way. There was sunshine behind it. There was me stopping in my tracks.

Here’s a few shots from my fifteen minute pause. Love me some moving water.

click image to enlarge

written by Los Angeles photographer & writer ©Gregory Mancuso

This mighty fine Fido Factor, a free app, digs up and fetches a big user-generated list of dog-friendly locations. Simply get your opposable thumbs tapping, search for a location type (i.e. restaurant) and you’ll find a list of locales which welcome canines, along with ratings, reviews, photos, and a filled-in Google map.

Enzo with his girlfriend - photo ©GregoryMancuso

It’s a lot like Yelp, but for dog lovers. And we know dog lovers are the best lovers : )

click to enlarge screenshots

You can browse around by category, name, or do a proximity search for cool canine hotspots right around you.

Recently I was a hound outta town, exploring the Bay Area. So I find myself prancing around San Fran and Greg, my personal valet, (he hates when I call him that, but that’s what he is) wanted a beer. So I told him to take out Fido Factor and find a bar that has the good taste to allow canines in to have a taste too.

This is what we got…

In two shakes of a terrier’s tail, Fido fetched over 47 bars for us to consider. We sorted by ratings–which go from one to five bones. We considered a five-bone rated place, the Dirty Trix Saloon.

My valet read the reviews and I checked out the pics. Since we were told it had water bowls and treats and dog-loving owners–I was in. Greg read the reviews, which are from dog fans like your own selves, who have hung out there before.

Greg liked the reviews, free pool and Richmond neighborhood. So off we galloped and we had a barking good time there.

But my Fido friend ain’t just good to use when you’re out of town. It’s works well for exploring and discovering places right in your own neighborhood. I just smacked my paw on “Restaurants” – “Los Angeles” and “3 Square Café + Bakery” jumped up. It’s right in my Venice hood and a reviewer said the three magic words–”Very dog friendly”. Yeah! I’m gonna bark out marching orders to my personal valet, uh, chauffeur, and take off pronto.

Remember Fido Factor also has a big bunch of Pet Services in its brain: Boarding, Dog Daycare, Dog Sitting, Dog Training, Dog Walking, Dog Washing, Grooming, Holistic Health, Pet Food, Pet Photography, Pet Transportation, Shelter/Rescue, Veterinarians. That pretty much covers it, huh?

You can keep track of the best places within the favorites tab and even store pictures of your best beast at those prime locations within the app. The listings on Fido Factor are constantly updated by app users and visitors to the website, FidoFactor.com. I give it four paws up. Bark on!

Inception features an international ensemble cast starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine. DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a specialised corporate spy and thief. His work consists of secretly extracting valuable commercial information from the unconscious minds of his targets while they are asleep and dreaming.

Wanted for murder and unable to visit his children, Cobb is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of an original idea into a target’s subconscious.

Development began roughly nine years before Inception was released. In 2001, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream stealers, and presented the idea to Warner Bros. The story was originally envisioned as a horror film inspired by concepts of lucid dreaming and dream incubation.[6] Feeling he needed to have more experience with large-scale films,[7] Nolan opted to work on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). He spent six months polishing the script for Inception before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009.[8] Filming spanned six countries and four continents, beginning in Tokyo on June 19, 2009, and finishing in Canada in late November of the same year.

Inception was officially budgeted at $160 million, a cost that was split between Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures.[3] Nolan’s reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film’s $100 million in advertising expenditure,[3] with most of the publicity involving viral marketing. Inception premiered in London on July 8, 2010, and was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters on July 16, 2010.[9][10] A box office success, Inception has grossed over $800 million worldwide and is currently one of the highest-grossing films of all time.[4] The home video market also had strong results, with $68 million in DVD sales.

Inception received wide critical acclaim, with numerous critics praising it for its originality, cast, score, and visual effects.[11] The film received eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction and won the awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Cinematography.

This amusing video features Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Ron Howard, Jim Carrey, Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond, Dan Aykroyd, Maya Rudolph and Dana Carvey.

This recipe is courtesy of my favorite top secret food spy Todd Wilbur. Check out Todd’s video episode about his undercover adventure sneaking into P.F. Chang’s to uncover their secrets.

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Todd’s Secret Mission To P.F. Chang’s

This week Todd is in Scottsdale, Ariz.,, the home of P.F. Chang’s and one of the most popular appetizers around, Chang’s Chicken Lettuce Wraps. Todd learns at P.F. Chang’s test kitchen that in Chinese cuisine, you need to have a seasoned wok, which he does not have. He also learns that the biggest secret to the recipe lies in the sauce. Todd decides to try a whole new approach to his detective work this time, and gets himself hired as a waiter at a local P.F. Chang’s, gaining valuable access to the kitchen. Hilarity ensues as Todd tries to balance waiting tables and running back to the kitchen to try and uncover cooking secrets from the master chefs. Todd manages to get a meeting with the restaurant’s founder, Philip Chiang, only to learn that the recipe is Philip’s mother’s. Todd pulls a sneaky move to land her number and actually gets her on the other line. The problem is she only speaks Chinese! Will Todd crack this recipe or be forced to cut thousands of lettuce cups for a restaurant dinner shift?

P.F. Chang’s Chicken Lettuce Wraps Recipe

Yes, our own brains seemingly enjoys tricking us sometimes. I think I hear mine snickering at me right now. Or do I?

An optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality.

The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a percept that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source.

When we experience a visual illusion we may see something that is not there or fail to see something that is there or even see something that’s different from what is there!

Because of this dissociation between perception and reality, visual illusions demonstrate the ways in which the brain can fail to recreate the physical world. By studying these failings, we can learn about the computational methods that the brain uses to construct visual experience.

TYPES OF OPTICAL ILLUSIONS
There are 3 main types of optical illusions: Literal Optical Illusions, Physiological Optical Illusions, Cognitive Optical Illusions

LITERAL OPTICAL ILLUSIONS
Literal optical illusions are those illusions that create images that are different from the objects that make them.

PHYSIOLOGICAL ILLUSIONS
Physiological illusions are presumed to be the effects on the eyes or brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type – brightness, tilt, color, movement, etc. The theory is that stimuli have individual dedicated neural paths in the early stages of visual processing, and that repetitive stimulation of only one or a few channels causes a physiological imbalance that alters perception

COGNITIVE ILLUSIONS
Cognitive illusions are assumed to arise by interaction with in-built assumptions or ‘knowledge’ of the world, leading to “unconscious inferences”, an idea first suggested in the 19th century. Cognitive illusions are commonly divided into: Ambiguous Illusions, Distorting Illusions, Paradox Illusions Or Fiction Illusions.