At this point, you're probably familiar with the most common health conditions, from diabetes to cancer to heart disease, and their risk factors. But how about a syndrome that causes you to suddenly start speaking with a foreign accent or a disorder that literally turns your skin blue? These rare health conditions affect people across the world. In fact, one in 10 Americans has a rare disease. Here are weird-but very real-medical conditions you should know about. www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/these-medical-conditions-are-so-bizarre-you-wont-believe-theyre-real/ss-BBTOYLg?li=BBnba9O#image=1
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It's almost here! The 91st Academy Awards finally airs this Sunday, February 24th, and we're counting down the minutes.
We've already given you some fascinating Oscars stats, and now we're bringing you some of the best (and, um, craziest) facts about Hollywood's biggest awards show. From the first Best Actor winner, to the "one dollar" Oscar rule, here are 25 things you (probably) don't know about the Oscars. 1. The youngest Oscar winner was Tatum O'Neal (above), who won Best Supporting Actress for "Paper Moon" (1973) when she was only 10 years old. Shirley Temple won the short-lived Juvenile Award at just 6 years old. 2. After winning Best Actress for "Cabaret" (1972), Liza Minnelli became (and still is) the only Oscar winner whose parents both earned Oscars. Her mother, Judy Garland, received an honorary award in 1939 and her father, Vincente Minnelli, won Best Director for "Gigi" (1958). 3. Nameplates for all potential winners (meaning, every nominee) are prepared ahead of time; in 2014, the Academy made 215 of them! 4. The first Academy Awards were presented in 1929 at a private dinner of about 270 people. It was first televised in 1953, and now the Oscars ceremony can be seen in more than 200 countries. 5. Only five women have received Best Director nominations -- Lina Wertmüller (1977), Jane Campion (1994), Sofia Coppola (2004), Kathryn Bigelow (2010) and Greta Gerwig (2018) -- while Bigelow is the lone winner for "The Hurt Locker" (2009). Interestingly, Bigelow beat out ex-husband James Cameron, who was nominated for the technological wonder "Avatar." 6. At 82, Christopher Plummer (above) is the oldest person to win an Academy Award. He received the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in "Beginners" (2010), opposite Ewan McGregor. 7. Peter Finch ("Network") and Heath Ledger ("The Dark Knight") are the only actors to be awarded an Academy Award posthumously. Ledger's Oscar -- and his entire fortune -- was gifted to his young daughter, Matilda. 8. With her nomination for "The Post," Meryl Streep has been nominated a record 21 times. She won Best Supporting Actress for "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979), and has two Best Actress Oscars, one for "Sophie's Choice" (1982) and one for "The Iron Lady" (2011). 9. Katharine Hepburn won a record four Academy Awards -- all Best Actress Oscars -- the last for "On Golden Pond" (1981), which starred another Hollywood legend, Henry Fonda. 10. The first Oscars were held at the famous Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Today, the ceremony takes place at the Dolby Theatre (around the corner from the Roosevelt), its tenth venue. 11. Jack Nicholson (above) is the most-nominated male actor, receiving 12 Oscar nominations beginning with 1969's "Easy Rider." His three wins tie him with Walter Brennan and Daniel Day-Lewis. 12. Oscar statuettes are technically property of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As a result, before an Academy Award winner or his/her estate can sell an Oscar, they must first offer to sell it back to the Academy for one dollar (yes, one dollar). This, of course, is to discourage winners from selling the award for financial gain. Oscars awarded before 1950, however, are not bound by this agreement. In 2011, Orson Welles's 1941 Oscar for "Citizen Kane" was sold at auction for over $800,000. 13. Only three films have won all of the "Big Five" Academy Award categories: "It Happened One Night" (1934), "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991). The "Big Five" categories are: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay (either adapted or original). 14. In 1940, the LA Times broke the Academy's embargo and published the names of all the Oscar winners prior to the ceremony. As a result, the Academy introduced the sealed envelope tradition that's still used today. 15. The legendary Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for Best Director, but never took home the Oscar. In 1968, though, he took home the Irving J. Thalberg memorial award. His acceptance speech consisted of two words: "Thank you." 16. "Ben-Hur" (1959), "Titanic" (1997), and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003) (above) are the most successful films in Oscar history, each winning a whopping 11 Oscars. "Return of the King" is the only one to win every award for which it was nominated. 17. Composer John Williams is the most-nominated living person, having earned 50 Oscar nominations throughout his storied career, beginning with 1967's "Valley of the Dolls." 18. The longest Oscar acceptance speech ever delivered was five and half minutes, and it was given by 1943 Best Actress winner Greer Garson, who won for "Mrs. Miniver." 19. Oscar statuettes were made from painter plaster during World War II due to metal shortages. After the war ended, these Oscars were replaced with traditional statues. 20. Bob Hope hosted the ceremony a whopping 19 times, the most of any host in Oscars history. 21. With his Best Actor nomination for "American Sniper" (2014), Bradley Cooper (above) has been nominated for an acting Oscar three years in a row. That's one shy of the record for most consecutive acting nods, held by the late Marlon Brando. 22. The first Best Actor awards were given to Emil Jannings for "The Last Command" and "The Way of All Flesh" (yes, both!). 23. At the 29th Academy Awards ceremony held in 1957, the Best Foreign Language Film category was introduced. Previously, the best foreign language film was acknowledged with a Special Achievement Award. 24. In 1999, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench were both nominated for playing Queen Elizabeth in "Elizabeth" and "Shakespeare in Love." Dench won Best Supporting Actress, despite only appearing in the film for a total of eight minutes. Meanwhile, Blanchett lost the Best Actress Oscar to Gwyneth Paltrow -- also for "Shakespeare in Love." 25. "O.J.: Made in America," nominated this year for Best Documentary Feature, has a running time of 7 hours and 47 minutes, making it the longest film ever to nab an Oscar nom. Mathias Svold 1 day ago Where the state of Nevada folds in half—from the elbow on its western arm at Lake Tahoe across to its Utah border—you’ll find the most direct route across the state. It crosses several communities, a handful of mountain ranges, a national park, and one reservoir, where bobcats, foxes, and wild horses roam free. There’s life, yes, but not a familiar way of life for many. It’s a place where the lines between John Wayne Westerns and everyday life blur, where ghost towns bleed into living ones. This is Route 50, the Loneliest Road in America. Or so says Life magazine. In July 1986, the publication honored the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday and highlighted American superlatives: On one page, the “Cutest” (a toddler actor) appears alongside the “Loneliest Road” below a photo of a seemingly endless highway that reaches across the desert toward the mountains, a lone cowboy on horseback crossing from one side of nothingness to the other. An anonymous AAA counselor is quoted in the article: “We warn all motorists not to drive there, unless they're confident of their survival skills.” Rather than keep motorists away, however, the moniker piqued curiosity—thanks in part to the Nevada Commission on Tourism. The public relations director at the time saw an opportunity in the article and released a Highway 50 survival guide the same month the Life article came out, rewarding visitors to the area with a certificate of survival signed by the governor. Highway signs touting the qualifier went up along the route at the same time, and it graduated from opinion to slogan. Before it was known as the Loneliest Road in America, Route 50 was anything but. In the 1850s, the Gold Rush sparked a caravan of wagons to head West along the thruway. According to the Highway 50 Association, the Roaring Road (as it was called) became so congested at times that hopeful miners and their families would have to wait days before they could access it—a Panama Canal of sorts, standing between the new frontier and the old. By the turn of the century, the road became California’s first State Highway and eventually connected the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. To this day, the California Department of Transportation calls Route 50 the “backbone of America.” And yet, as photographer Mathias Svold sat in his car along a network of dirt roads surrounded by miles and miles of yellow-and-red desert grass and the rattlesnake he had just narrowly avoided stepping on, it didn’t feel like that. “I was overwhelmed,” the Copenhagen-based photographer recalls. “On one side, with the beautiful nature, but also the snake reminded me that this is a dangerous environment. It was just me alone in the desert—with a snake.” That sort of isolation follows Route 50 for almost the entirety of its 400 miles across Nevada, but it’s particularly pronounced along this stretch, the 287 miles between Ely and Fernley designated by Life as the Loneliest Road. Here, you can’t count on cell service or gas stations, on places to eat or even people to wave at as you pass—anything to replace the eeriness of the hungry red desert around you. Even its small towns seemingly materialize and then fade into the distance like a mirage. (Meet the man who has lived alone on an island for 28 years.) “From an economic development standpoint, we’re not considered rural,” says Dee Helming, chairwoman of the Pony Express Territory, which works with the state tourism authority to promote the towns along Route 50. “We’re considered frontier.” That’s precisely the draw for some of its residents. “There's just a mystique about Nevada,” says Helming. She moved to Austin, one of the few towns along the highway, in 1981 and today owns a laundromat, a bed and breakfast, and a cafe with her husband, Kip. “For us, it’s that freedom of living old school, I guess. It’s a whole different way of life. Your community is more dependent on each other. You have to understand, you’re 112 miles from the nearest Walmart; you're 110 miles from the nearest stoplight. You learn a lot of independence.” She encourages her B&B guests to discover the outdoors, get intimate with the history, and wander the ghost towns—to experience the very life that she and others along the highway live every day. “They either love it or they're so intimidated that they'll never come back.” (She arrived a tourist. The island inspired her to become its sole nun.) But Svold discovered that isolation wasn’t the only challenge to overcome. Nevada is the only state in the U.S. where prostitution is legalized, and in Ely, he came across Big Four Ranch, a historic brothel that dates back to the 1880s. Even knocking on the door took courage—he feared the unfamiliar. “Then I met Bobby,” says Svold, “and he is like a teddy bear.” Bobby McShane, head of maintenance, has worked at Big Four for the better part of two decades. After welcoming Svold inside and grabbing a beer, he pointed out paintings of a woman that hung all around the barroom. According to McShane, a customer fell in love with one of the women working at the brothel—the same woman who looked down at them from her many frames. He spent all his money on her. “He painted these really beautiful paintings of her to pay the debt,” Svold says. “In Denmark brothels are not illegal, but they are taboo. But Bobby was romanticizing the stories from there, telling them like love stories.” Perhaps, thought Svold, the Loneliest Road in America isn’t so lonely after all. It’s big and vast and seemingly endless, and in that there’s solitude, yes, but not sadness. “Anybody can go there and look around and say, ‘Wow, this is lonely,’ and then leave and go back to where they came from,” says Svold. “But people who live there, it’s a permanent mindset. The difference is in having the solitude inside you, instead of it being a temporary feeling.” Americans are notoriously bad at saving money, which explains why the majority live paycheck to paycheck, and why only 60% of U.S. adults have the funds to cover a $400 emergency. If your savings are in a sorry state, it's crucial that you take steps to improve. Here are a few reasons you might be neglecting your savings -- and how to address them.
1. You don't have a budgetMany folks don't save money because they assume that they can't afford to. And the reason they think that way is because they have no idea where their money keeps disappearing to -- all they know is that somehow, by the end of each month, there doesn't seem to be anything left. If that's been happening to you, here's an easy solution: Start following a budget. That way, you'll see what you're actually spending money on, and where there might be room to cut back so you can boost your savings rather than ignore them completely. To create a budget, list your recurring monthly expenses, factor in one-time bills that pop up randomly throughout the year (think roadside assistance service, warehouse club renewals, and the like), and compare your total spending to your total earnings. If the difference is $0 -- meaning, you're spending down your entire paycheck month after month -- then you'll need to reduce your spending, and having that budget will help you pinpoint the expense categories to tackle first. 2. You're not paying yourself firstHaving a budget is all fine and good, but what happens when you're tempted to spend $200 in a given month on leisure when you're really only supposed to be spending half that amount? Suddenly, you might fall short on your savings goal, and the reason boils down to not prioritizing it. A better bet? Get into the habit of paying yourself first. Doing so is a simple matter of signing up for an automatic transfer and having a portion of each paycheck land in your savings account before you get the chance to spend it. In the aforementioned scenario, you wouldn't be able to spend an extra $100 if that money wasn't available to you, so think of that automatic transfer as an insurance policy of sorts. 3. You've never experienced a financial emergencyMany people don't save for emergencies because they're convinced that they don't need to. If that's how you feel, then it's probably because you've never had a catastrophic bill upend your finances -- or at least not yet. But know this: No one is immune to emergencies. You could wake up one day to find water pouring down through your ceiling, or go into your driveway to start your car only to have it die on you. Similarly, you might get hurt or sick and get slapped with a series of disastrous medical bills, or get laid off at work out of the blue. All of these scenarios could leave you on the hook for a boatload of money you just don't have, and that's when you'll really run into trouble, because without savings, you'll be forced to rack up costly debt. Rather than wait for an emergency to strike, assume that one will happen eventually, and plan for it accordingly. If you're lacking in savings in a really big way, step up and make some changes. Reduce your spending to free up cash to save, and consider getting a side job to help your progress along. No matter your age or income level, you should always aim to have a minimum of three months' worth of living expenses in the bank, so if you're nowhere close, stop making excuses and start saving more. By Christina Sterbenz Contrary to popular belief, commas don't just signify pauses in a sentence. In fact, precise rules govern when to use this punctuation mark. When followed, they lay the groundwork for clear written communication. We've compiled a list of all of the times when you need the mighty comma. 1. Use a comma before any coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet) that links two independent clauses. Example: "I went running, and I saw a duck." You may need to learn a few grammatical terms to understand this one. An independent clause is a unit of grammatical organization that includes both a subject and verb and can stand on its own as a sentence. In the previous example, "I went running" and "I saw a duck" are both independent clauses, and "and" is the coordinating conjunction that connects them. Consequently, we insert a comma. If we were to eliminate the second "I" from that example, the second clause would lack a subject, making it not a clause at all. In that case, it would no longer need a comma: "I went running and saw a duck." 2. Use a comma after a dependent clause that starts a sentence. Example: "When I went running, I saw a duck." A dependent clause is a grammatical unit that contains both subject and verb but cannot stand on its own, like "When I went running ..." Commas always follow these clauses at the start of a sentence. If a dependent clause ends the sentence, however, it no longer requires a comma. Only use a comma to separate a dependent clause at the end of a sentence for added emphasis, usually when negation occurs. 3. Use commas to offset appositives from the rest of the sentence. Appositives act as synonyms for a juxtaposed word or phrase. For example, "While running, I saw a mallard, a kind of duck." "A kind of duck" is the appositive, which gives more information about "a mallard." If the appositive occurs in the middle of the sentence, both sides of the phrase need a comma. As in, "A mallard, a kind of duck, attacked me." Don't let the length of an appositive scare you. As long as the phrase somehow gives more information about its predecessor, you usually need a comma. "A mallard, the kind of duck I saw when I went running, attacked me." There's one exception to this rule. Don't offset a phrase that gives necessary information to the sentence. Usually, commas surround a non-essential clause or phrase. For example, "The duck that attacked me scared my friend" doesn't require any commas. Even though the phrase "that attacked me" describes "the duck," it provides essential information to the sentence. Otherwise, no one would know why the duck scared your friend. Clauses that begin with "that" are usually essential to the sentence and do not require commas. 4. Use commas to separate items in a series. For example, "I saw a duck, a magician, and a liquor store when I went running." That last comma, known as the serial comma, Oxford comma, or Harvard comma, causes serious controversy. Although many consider it unnecessary, others, including Business Insider, insist on its use to reduce ambiguity. There's an Internet meme that demonstrates its necessity perfectly. The sentence, "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin," means the speaker sent three separate invitations: one to some strippers, one to JFK, and one to Stalin. The version without the Oxford comma, however, takes on an entirely different meaning, potentially suggesting that only one invitation was sent — to two strippers named JFK and Stalin. Witness: "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin." 5. Use a comma after introductory adverbs. "Finally, I went running." "Unsurprisingly, I saw a duck when I went running." Many adverbs end in "ly" and answer the question "how?" How did someone do something? How did something happen? Adverbs that don't end in "ly," such as "when" or "while," usually introduce a dependent clause, which rule number two in this post already covered. Also insert a comma when "however" starts a sentence, too. Phrases like "on the other hand" and "furthermore" also fall into this category. Starting a sentence with "however," however, is discouraged by many careful writers. A better method would be to use "however" within a sentence after the phrase you want to negate, as in the previous sentence. 6. Use a comma when attributing quotes. The rule for where the comma goes, however, depends on where attribution comes. If attribution comes before the quote, place the comma outside the quotations marks. The runner said, "I saw a duck." If attribution comes after the quote, put the comma inside the quotation marks. "I saw a duck," said the runner. 7. Use a comma to separate each element in an address. Also use a comma after a city-state combination within a sentence. "I work at 257 Park Ave. South, New York, N.Y. 10010." "Cleveland, Ohio, is a great city." 8. Also use a comma to separate the elements in a full date (weekday, month and day, and year). Also separate a combination of those elements from the rest of the sentence with commas. "March 15, 2013, was a strange day." Even if you add a weekday, keep the comma after "2013." "Friday, March 15, 2013, was a strange day." "Friday, March 15, was a strange day." You don't need to add a comma when the sentence mentions only the month and year. "March 2013 was a strange month." 9. Use a comma when the first word of the sentence is freestanding "yes" or "no." "Yes, I saw a duck when I went running." "No, the duck didn't bite me." 10. Use a comma when directly addressing someone or something in a sentence. My editor often asks, "Christina, is that article up yet?" Another clever meme shows the problem with incorrect placement of this comma. "Stop clubbing baby seals" reads like an order to desist harming infant mammals of the seal variety. The version with a comma, however, instructs them to stop attending hip dance clubs. "Stop clubbing, baby seals." 11. Use a comma between two adjectives that modify the same noun. For example: "I saw the big, mean duck when I went running." Only coordinate adjectives require a comma between them. Two adjectives are coordinate if you can answer yes to both of these questions: 1. Does the sentence still make sense if you reverse the order of the words? 2. Does the sentence still make sense if you insert "and" between the words? Since "I saw the mean, big duck " and "I saw the big and mean duck" both sound fine, you need the comma. Sentences with non-coordinate adjectives, however, don't require a comma. For example, "I lay under the powerful summer sun." "Powerful" describes "summer sun" as a whole phrase. This often occurs with adjunct nouns, a phrase where a noun acts as an adjective describing another noun — like "chicken soup" or "dance club." 12. Use a comma to offset negation in a sentence. For example: "I saw a duck, not a baby seal, when I went running." In this case, you still need the comma if the negation occurs at the end of the sentence. "I saw a baby seal, not a duck." Also use commas when any distinct shift occurs in the sentence or thought process. "The cloud looked like an animal, perhaps a baby seal." 13. Use commas before every sequence of three numbers when writing a number larger than 999. (Two exceptions are writing years and house numbers.) For example, 10,000 or 1,304,687. |
AuthorKeith Kelly currently lives in Rio Rancho New Mexico. Archives
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