Bruce Yang had one of those raucous Vegas bachelor parties that are best remembered selectively. Unfortunately, his social media profiles, and those of his groomsmen, made that difficult. Yang, a former LinkedIn engineer, spent the morning after cleaning up after himself on Facebook, WeChat, and WhatsApp instead of choking down the greasy breakfast to which all post-bachelor party grooms are entitled.
The experience, foggy as it was, left Yang with a clear idea: There should be a social network that supports the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" mindset, one that erases digital footprints we'd rather not leave behind.
Smartphone owners' appetite for new apps wanes
So was born Sobrr, a social networking app that deletes everything posted to it within a day. Photos, messages, even friends and new connections all disappear after 24 hours, a spin on the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. The idea, summed up by Sobrr's catchphrase, is to help users experience "life in the moment."
Tim Denison | E+ | Getty Images
Since launching with 200 beta users in early July, Yang says Sobrr has taken off. It now has a user base of about 10,000. The app, which relies heavily on geo-location, generates a personal stream of photos and updates collected from the 500 users closest to you geographically. By swiping right on an update, you "cheer" it — the equivalent of a Facebook Like. Swiping left calls up the next update or photo in the stream. Users can comment on photos and connect with one another. But those connections are temporary — unless both users agree to make them permanent.
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Sobrr's 24-hour limit does two things. First, it offers users a social media safety net. That photo of you doing a keg stand? Share it! It'll be gone before you sober up. Second, it encourages users to repeatedly check Sobrr for new content they know will soon be deleted.
Yang has big plans for Sobrr. He's in the process of finalizing a $1 million-plus seed round for it led by IDG Ventures, and he's expecting a big spike in usage when students return to college in the fall. While revenue isn't a focus yet, Yang envisions bars and restaurants someday using Sobrr to offer coupons and discounts to nearby partiers — all with a 24-hour expiration, of course.
In the meantime, Yang is simply hoping to appeal to a more social media savvy party crowd, one hell bent on documenting nights that are sometimes best forgotten. "Sobrr is the morning after pill after a night of craziness," he says. "We want to help people stay sober online, while they have all kinds of craziness offline."
After all, what happens in Vegas …
—By Kurt Wagner, .
CNBC's parent NBC Universal is an investor in Re/code's parent Revere Digital, and the companies have a content-sharing arrangement.
Pinterest will start selling ads to marketers on New Year's Day, the New York Times reports.
Facebook has laid a foundation for entering China, but it could morph its product to Chinese government standards.
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More tech companies will opt to accumulate huge rounds of private funding, a venture capitalist said.
Moet & Chandon's bubbles will rise as the ball drops on New Year's Eve at Times Square at the stroke of midnight.
IPO momentum should continue into 2015 after an active 2014 when huge offerings hit like "mammoths from the sky," an analyst said.Wizard of Oz secrets: Dwarf orgies, drunken brawls, knives, flattened boobs and stars almost killed - Mirror Online
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Unbelievable: The filming of the Wizard of Oz was far stranger than anything in the movie
When Judy Garland’s innocent Dorothy Gale ran off to save her dog Toto, she embarked on an -adventure that has enchanted generations of families, But behind the tender magic of The Wizard of Oz lay real-life escapades that would shame even today’s movie stars.As the classic Hollywood children’s fantasy
the Sunday People has dug up some of its bizarre behind-the-scenes secrets.And it is the midgets who played the Munchkins whose antics amaze most.In the studio they earned between ?200 and ?500 a week in 1939 – and they had giant party appetites.Tales of drunken dwarf love-ins and an “unholy assembly of pimps, hookers and gamblers” emerged from the Culver Hotel where they stayed during filming.After the movie was finished, producer Mervyn LeRoy recalled: “They had orgies in the hotel and we had to have police on about every floor.”He admitted: “To make a picture like The Wizard of Oz, everybody had to be a little drunk with imagination.”
Risky: Judy Garland had a date with one of the randiest dwarf Munchkin actors
went on a date with one of the most randy midgets, -accompanied by her mum because she was only 17.But that only prompted the little lothario to quip: “Fair enough, two broads for the price of one.”By the time filming was over, Garland had seen enough of the Munchkins’ unsavoury amorous antics to go right off the idea of anything like a relationship.She said: “They were drunks. They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.”The film’s make-up artist Jack Dawn recalled later how one German midget who called himself The Count even had to been rescued from a toilet bowl.He said: “You had to watch them all the time. Once when he was due on set, he went missing. Then we heard a whining from the men’s room. He had got plastered during lunch, fallen in the toilet and could not get out.”Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, said: “Many Munchkins made their living by panhandling, pimping and whoring.&Midgets brandished knives and often had passions for larger personnel.”
Scary: But nothing compared to behind the scenes
Buddy Ebsen, the first choice Tin Man, had an extreme -reaction to aluminium dust in his make-up and nearly died.Jack Haley, who took over the role, had an eye infection from aluminium paste, which turned out to be poisonous.The Wicked Witch’s make-up was also toxic.
-swallowed some and had to live on liquids for days. Her face stayed green for weeks after -shooting because of copper-based ingredients.And it took a year for marks left by a mask to fade on Scarecrow actor Ray Bolger’s face.More than 3,200 -costumes were made for the movie but the -shabby coat worn by Frank Morgan’s Professor Marvel/The Wiz was found in a charity shop.It had belonged to Wizard of Oz -author L. Frank Baum.Bert Lahr’s Lion costume weighed seven stone and was made with real lion pelts. And Judy Garland had to wear a corset to appear more childlike Second favourite for the role behind 11-year-old Shirley Temple, Judy was ordered to lose 12 pounds.
Staying green: Margaret Hamilton's make-up wouldn't come off for a month
In the 1900 novel Dorothy’s slippers were silver. They became “ruby” to take advantage of new Technicolor film.Her blue and white gingham dress was -actually blue and pink because true white looked dull on the big screen because of the Technicolor process.The materials used meant -temperatures in the studio regularly hit 100F.The witch’s slaves, called the Winkies, wore costumes of such heavy felt that some of them nearly died of heat stroke.The Winged Monkeys, who hunted down Dorothy and Toto in the Haunted Forest, were more small men wearing suits made of hair and facial prosthetics to look like apes.They nearly roasted alive in the heat.Yelping Toto, a Cairn terrier called Terry, was making ?500 a week for her owner – more than most of the Munchkins.
Change of colour: Dorothy's slippers were originally silver
Paint used on the Yellow Brick Road had to be made industrial strength -because it appeared mint green on film.Flavoured jelly powder coloured the horses for the Emerald City scenes. But it had to be a quick shoot because the animals tried to lick themselves clean.Judy Garland had a giggle fit in the scene where she slaps the Cowardly Lion. To snap her out of it, director Victor Fleming slapped her before they filmed another take.Many scenes with the Wicked Witch and her jutting chin and hooked nose were cut or edited as being too scary for children.But the scare factor didn’t just apply to the witch. Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow, Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, and Jack Haley, Tin Man, were banned from the MGM canteen as they were alarming.Over the Rainbow
-because execs thought it made the film too long. But it won the Best Song Oscar.Oz was beaten to the Academy Award for best picture – by Gone with the Wind.Like this? Did you know we have a dedicated TV and Film page on Facebook?
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Transfer VHS & camcorder recordings to PCDrunken Arctic Goes Head Over Heels&|&Michael E. Mann
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Drunken Arctic Goes Head Over Heels
Even in a warmed world, winter can be cold. But is the Arctic wintering down south?Over the past couple of months, the U.S. has seen the return of something many believed had been lost for good: cold weather.Although the current temperatures in the eastern U.S. may seem unusually cold, in the context of our history they really aren't. In fact, most of the cold that has made the news lately hasn't been all that chilly compared what was "normal" for the 20th century. The AP explained our short-term memory loss in this article, "," the nerdy web comic
captured the sentiment even more concisely.The bottom line? Because the last decade was the hottest on record (and just a year ago, the U.S. saw its warmest year ever) Americans have grown accustomed to warmer winters that make normal cold feel extreme.Some then wonder why this winter has been so (normally) cold and why temperatures in Peoria this winter have not been warmed by climate chang eto, say, a balmy 60 degrees F. The climate denial bubble claims that the cold winter weather means that surely CO2 cannot be warming the atmosphere. How can there be global warming if it's snowing outside, after all?Well, the short answer is that cold winters still happen even in a warmed world, but that doesn't mean it's cold everywhere. In fact, we don't even have to leave the U.S. to find a very striking image of warming. We just have to shift our attention from the East to the West Coast. Alaska, usually snowy and frigid, has had two weeks of record high temperatures. , the second half of January has averaged 40 degrees F above normal during some days in the central and western parts of the state.The persistently jagged jet stream we have witnessed in recent weeks has led most recently to what some have termed a "." Stumbling south with polar winds and snow, this unexpected meteorological event seems to have caught our collective attention. And why shouldn't it? It is an unusual enough, if not unprecedented, event. And it has rekindled curiosity over how human-caused climate change may be impacting the jet stream and the weather systems associated with it.So, is there a climate connection to this strange occurrence? While more study is certainly needed, I have been increasingly impressed by the
of evidence supporting the hypothesis that climate change may lead to more
in the jet stream. In a world without global warming, the temperature difference between the freezing Arctic and warmer lower latitudes creates a pressure field that confines the jet stream to a relatively tight band around the Arctic, with wave-like meanders characterized by ephemeral "ridges" and "troughs." As the Arctic melts and warms, however, that temperature difference is reduced, and the meanders of the jet stream potentially become more pronounced and more sluggish. The more sluggish and persistent those meanders, the more persistent the patterns of regional warmth where the jet stream pulls warm air northward, and the regional cold where it pulls arctic air south. Looking at this image of temperature deviations we can see how the Arctic, in its "drunken" meandering, has fallen head over heels, hitting the southeastern U.S. like an over-enthusiastic reveler face-planting in the gutter shortly after closing time. The large purple region over the eastern U.S. represents weather 20 degrees F colder than the
average. Compare that to the massive red expanse over Alaska and Canada, which indicates weather 20 degrees F warmer than the same baseline.Perfectly encapsulating the upside-down, hung-over Arctic is this remarkable observation, courtesy of
of the popular Weather Underground blog: At 10 p.m. on Jan. 26 the temperature in Homer, Alaska (54 degrees F) was warmer than any other place in the contiguous U.S. except southern Florida and southern California.As we approach Groundhog Day, celebrated in the iconic nearby town of Punxsutawney, the question we're all asking here in central Pennsylvania of whether or not we'll see an extended winter may in fact depend on what is happening instead thousands of miles to the north in the melting Arctic.And the very same jet stream configuration responsible for the southward plunging Arctic air mass that chilling the eastern U.S. is associated further to the west with a "ridge" of high pressure that is pushing the warm, moist subtropical Pacific air masses that would normally deliver plentiful rainfall (and snowpack) to California well to the north.Climate scientists were beginning
a decade ago that the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice might alter the jet stream in precisely this way, favoring conditions eerily like what we are seeing right now in California: unprecedented and devastating drought.So to conclude, I propose a toast to the Arctic, whose instability should serve as a wake-up call to those steeped in denial. When it comes to kicking our "fossil fuel addiction" (as former president George W. Bush referred to it), let's hope we're not much further from hitting rock bottom. Because when a drunken Arctic leaves Alaska warmer than Georgia in mid-winter, and California as high and dry as it has ever been, we should know we may have a problem. This commentary was originally published at
is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and author of
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