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Spoiler Alert!
- Vader is Luke's dad – The Empire Strikes Back
- Rosebud was his sled – Citizen Kane
- She's her sister and her daughter – Chinatown
- Norman is the killer (in drag) – Psycho
- Verbal is Keyser Sze – The Usual Suspects
- Doc is dead – The Sixth Sense
- Earth, in the future – Planet of the Apes
- Dog gets put down – Old Yeller
- Soylent Green is people! – Soylent Green
- He dumps her – Gone With the Wind
- Life is a simulation (whoa) – The Matrix
- Husband is in on it – Rosemary's Baby
- She is a he – The Crying Game
- Dave disconnects HAL – 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Split personality – Fight Club
- Citizens paint town red – High Plains Drifter
- Wife's head in box – Se7en
- Maggie shot Mr. Burns – The Simpsons
- Mistress shot J. R. – Dallas
- Laura Palmer's father did it – Twin Peaks
- Double suicide – Romeo and Juliet
- 42 – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Boys are rescued – Lord of the Flies
- Whale destroys boat, lives – Moby-Dick
- Shark destroys boat, killed – Jaws
- He buries himself – The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
- Gatsby is murdered – The Great Gatsby
- A-P-P-L-E – The Da Vinci Code
- John commits suicide – Brave New World
- Burned books are memorized – Fahrenheit 451
- Mark Felt is Deep Throat – Watergate
- Greek soldiers in horse – The Trojan War
- Samus Aran is a woman – Metroid
- Prisoner is saved – The Pit and the Pendulum
- She's an actress – Lonelygirl15
- They're all in on it – Murder on the Orient Express
- There is no Santa – Christmas
- Steven Leckart
Got a Second? Here's How to Make It Count.
15 seconds You are: In the elevator after work With your: Blackberry Text 466453 (GOOGLE) for the address to that cool new bar, then head to HopStop at 47867 (HSTOP) for directions. Both services are free.
30 seconds You are: Waiting in line With your: PSP Fire up that Heroes minicomic you downloaded from NBC's site (www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels) and use Bookr - a home-brew PDF reader - to save yourself from boredom.
2 minutes You are: At the gym With your: iPod Watch a fitness video from Strength Radio (www.strengthradio.com) for tips on training and technique. The clips, which run about two minutes, cost $2 each.
5 minutes You are: In the loo With your: Cell phone Catch up on news, sports, and the week's top-rated YouTube videos - all delivered by Verizon's V Cast service. It's more discreet than walking in with a newspaper under your arm.
15 minutes You are: At the dentist's office With your: Treo Calm your jitters: Scroll through the biggest Reddit stories, using live feeds from FreeRange's FreeNews mobile RSS app. - Sean Cooper
Fine Art - Now Reduced!
In the '60s, Andy Warhol took boxes of Brillo and turned them into high art. Now Tiny Showcase is doing the opposite. The online gallery is turning fine art into cheap nibbles: Twenty bucks buys you a digital archival print (about 4 by 6 inches) of an original piece that can be worth thousands... if the artist ever snags those 15 seconds of fame. Tiny Showcase's editions top off at 200, making these works affordable enough to sample yet limited enough to be worth collecting - you decide whether it's a very cheap objet d'art or a very fancy postcard. New prints go up every Tuesday night and often sell out by midnight. (Laura Park's "Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em," above left, vanished in five minutes.) All we need now is a mini Met. - Sonia Zjawinski
Talk to Your Teen About Textual Intercourse
OMG, incessant IMing is turning kids into illiterate slackers, right? Wrong. A recent study by American University linguistics professor Naomi Baron found that college students largely avoid such cutesy locutions as "c u l8r" while IMing. And they use instant messaging to overclock their multitasking - while participating in an average of 2.7 IM conversations at a time, they're also surfing the Web (70 percent of respondents), writing a paper (39 percent of respondents) or talking on the phone (22 percent of respondents). Illiterate? Nah, just unfocused. - Jake Swearingen
10-Word Memoirs
A collector of postcards captures the essence of our lives.
Like a good autobiography, a soulful secret can allow brave readers to recognize hidden truths in themselves. And for that purpose, a short postcard may have advantages over a long book.
In just over two years, people have sent me more than 90,000 private confessions on artful postcards. Some of these anonymous communiqués reveal not only individual secrets but also universal experiences or feelings. Each Sunday, I post a collection of them at www.postsecret.com. Since a 4- by 6-inch card is not big enough to hold a complete story, writers must use just a handful of words and images to share a tale they might have kept concealed for decades. This forces the correspondent to include only the most crucial elements. The reader is then free to fill in the details, drawing upon their own experiences, values, and imagination to better understand the human story on each card. - Frank Warren, founder of Postsecret
The T-Shirt Is the Message
Your own pint-sized billboard, just $19.99 a pop.
Fashion used to be an intricate affair, with layers of shirts, suits, and subtexts. Now it's just a T-shirt. True, as shorthand fashion statements, T-shirts have long been the simplest way to signify your identity and allegiances. James Dean wore his underwear as outerwear, and a rebel look was born. Rock bands found gold in the I-was-there vibe of the concert T.
But as blogs turned your uncle into a publisher, companies like CafePress, Spreadshirt.com, and Zazzle have turned your sister into a T-shirt designer by making production and distribution simple and cheap. Result: T-shirts can create cultural memes, not merely follow them.
Spontaneous T-shirts for Nintendo Wii accidents and SNL skits have turned your humble Fruit of the Loom into a form of micromedia. T-shirts today broadcast the news: Less than 24 hours after Dick Cheney shot a man in Texas, satirical T-shirt designs were uploaded to CafePress. They predict it too: The STEWART-COLBERT '08 T-shirt anticipates our boredom with an election cycle that has barely begun.
In an age of media saturation, T-shirts are a tight-knit nano-statement. - Rex Sorgatz
Celebrity Junk Food
Was it Voltaire - or Pink is the new Blog - who said, "Every age gets the celeblog it deserves"? Couldn't have been the latter: too many words. For this degraded age, the formula is thus: A pornographically humiliating paparazzo shot (all the better if it's literally pornographic, e.g., Britney's wilted womanhood) overlaid with a catty mot juste in a scrawl once reserved for ransom notes and the yearbooks of bipolar teenagers. Anti-context, anti-narrative, and practically anti-culture, the "new blog" is a morphine button for schadenfreude-starved cubicle depressives.
But can "words" and their "meaning" explain Paris Hilton, the ultimate cipher? The tangled verbosity of "Page Six" (30 words an entry!) or E! Online (maybe 100?) just gets between us and our payoff - the orgasmic OMFG. The celeblog delivers star ugliness unfiltered by editorial pusillanimity: Not a single fat roll or labial nuance is denied us. But don't feel guilty; it's irony. "The subject matter might be trashy," says Pink founder Trent Vanegas, "but my goal is to take a witty approach." Congrats, Trent. OMFGisthenewwit. - Scott Brown
Snack Attack!
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An Epic History of Snack Culture
Culture
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