Abraham Quiñones

Lighting candles to extend my policy twitter.com/BackRowBaptist…

We're so back. An entrepreneur is restoring Pizza Huts to their former glory.

Broncos vs. Seahawks Week 6 on Thursday Night and football fans deserve this uniform matchup:

@RobertMSterling Wife: "Really!!!! YOU GAVE HIM CHOCOLATE PUDDING AFTER I GOT HIM DRESSED" Husband

An Ohio 16-year-old once lifted a 3,000-pound car off his neighbor's chest. The most he could lift in the gym was 400 pounds. The car weighed almost eight times that. He couldn't do it again the next day, or since. It has a name. Hysterical strength. And scientists have a pretty good idea why a kid can suddenly do something no trained athlete can match. Your brain controls how much muscle you are allowed to use. Even when you push as hard as you can on a normal day, you are using only a fraction of what your muscles can do. The rest is locked away on purpose. If your body fired everything at once, you would snap your own tendons and burn through your energy in seconds. When your brain decides someone is about to die in front of you, it stops holding back. The part of your brain that watches for danger lights up first. It tells another part to flood your bloodstream with stress chemicals. Adrenaline is one of them. Adrenaline alone is slow though. By the time it reaches your muscles, the emergency might already be over. Adrenaline has a faster cousin called norepinephrine. It fires straight from nerves already wired into your muscles. It hits in about a second. Your heart pounds. Blood rushes to your arms and legs. And your brain briefly lifts a safety limit it normally keeps on your body. South African scientist Tim Noakes named this limit the "central governor." Think of it like a speed limiter in a car. In an emergency, the limiter switches off. The biggest, fastest muscle fibers fire all at once. Endorphins block pain so well that you can tear muscles, dislocate joints, and crack bones without feeling a thing. In 2006, a 41-year-old mother named Lydia Angiyou took on a polar bear, unarmed, to save her 7-year-old son in northern Quebec. Seven years later, two sisters in Oregon, aged 14 and 16, lifted a 3,000-pound tractor off their pinned father. In 2015, a 120-pound Air Force Academy student named Charlotte Heffelmire lifted a burning pickup off her dad in Virginia, then drove it out of the garage on three wheels before the gas tank could blow. People are not lifting these cars and trucks completely off the ground. Most carry more weight up front, where the engine sits. Rescuers usually pry up one end while the other stays planted, lifting maybe 40 percent of the total weight. USC exercise scientist Robert Girandola has done the math. A spike of fear does give you extra strength. The boost is in the hundreds of extra pounds, not thousands. And it only works once. Many find out hours later that they tore something or broke a bone during the rescue, and never felt it happen. Jack Kirby, the comic book artist, once watched a mother lift the back of a car off her child in 1962. That moment gave him the idea for the Hulk.

They’re going to make it to church on time. Have the toddler pour orange juice down his pants.

Bill Maher: I don’t believe in God. Me: cool. Bill Maher: Israel was promised 3,000 years ago. Me: by who? Bill Maher: by God.

George Lucas was so impressed by Frank Oz's performance as Yoda in "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back" (1980). So, he spent thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign to try and get him an Oscar nomination for "Best Actor in a Supporting Role". George Lucas's campaign ultimately failed because it was felt that a puppeteer wasn't an actor. Lucas felt this wasn't fair to Oz, who honestly didn't care. Lucas said, "After Frank Oz did "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), I tried to get him nominated for an Academy Award; but we heard back that puppetry wasn't an art. I think it is an art — and Yoda represents the highest level of that art. Acting is acting. Whether it is a human actor, a CG character, or a puppet. It's all the same. Most people think of Yoda as being real, because he is the height of puppet artistry." (Source: "Why The Oscars Refused To Nominate Star Wars' Frank Oz For His Yoda Performance", Rafael Motamayor, Slashfilm, 2023 & IMDb) P.S: On this day, 46 years ago, Irvin Kershner's "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) premiered in Washington, D.C, USA.

While filming this crucial scene in "No Way Out" (1987), Kevin Costner had disagreement with the director on staging of the scene & how Gene Hackman's character reacts to Costner's character. Costner was pissed when things didn't go as he had hoped. When the director asked what Gene Hackman should do, Costner replied, "Gene can do whatever he wants, it's up to Gene what he wants to do." After the shoot for the day ended, Gene Hackman met Costner in the parking lot & asked if he could talk to him. Costner feared that Hackman was going to say, "if you ever do that to another f**ing director in front of me again, I'll ki!! you." Instead Hackman said, "I watched you today and I have been through a divorce and for three years, I've been doing a lot of shitty movies and I've been trying to pay for this divorce. I kind of didn't feel about acting the way I felt for a long time. I watched you today & [I remembered] I used to feel like that. I was really happy to see you do that." He then drove off. Costner considers this conversation with Gene Hackman an important moment in his life. ["Kevin Costner on Working with Gene Hackman | Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation", 2025]

When a rabbit's partner dies, the surviving rabbit can be dead within a day. Just from grief. The stress physically shuts its stomach down. Vets call it GI stasis, and it's a known killer of bonded partners. What you're watching might be the first hours of it. Rabbit vets actually encourage letting the survivor stay with the body. They tell owners to give the rabbit time with its partner, sniffing, nudging, lying next to her, sometimes for a few hours. Without that goodbye, the survivor can spend weeks searching the home for a partner who never comes back. With it, they're more likely to eat the next day. More likely to live. In 2008, researchers at the University of Edinburgh built an unusual cage to measure how much rabbits need each other. It had weighted doors at both ends. On one side, food. On the other, a few minutes of contact with another rabbit. The doors got heavier over time, so the rabbit had to really want it. The rabbits worked nearly as hard for the friend as they did for the food. Watch a bonded pair and you see why. They follow each other around all day. Sleep pressed together at night. Groom each other's face, head, and ears in long, careful sessions. When their partner is close they make a soft clicking sound with their teeth, called tooth purring. It sounds like a cat's purr. When one of them dies, the survivor's body reacts before its mind catches up. Rabbits are prey animals. Almost everything in the wild wants to eat them. Their bodies evolved one survival rule: when something scary happens, drop everything and run. So a rabbit's stress system is wired to switch hunger off in a crisis. Run first, eat later. That same wiring kicks in when a bonded mate suddenly disappears, except now there's nothing to run from. The rabbit hunches into itself, stops eating, and pulls away from everything around it. Some spend weeks searching the spot where their partner used to be. Rabbit welfare groups have documented cases of surviving partners who simply stopped eating after their mate died. They sometimes call it dying of heartbreak. The brown rabbit in the video is doing what a bonded rabbit does when his partner is suddenly gone. He stays close to her body. He keeps watch. He says goodbye the only way a rabbit can. If he survives the next two weeks, it will be because someone notices he has stopped eating and gets him to a vet who knows rabbits. If he doesn't, his stomach will give out before anything else does. A bonded rabbit's body is built around being with another rabbit. When that other rabbit is gone, the body itself starts to fall apart.

Every Honeycrisp apple is a clone of a single tree planted at the University of Minnesota in 1962. Every one. Apple seeds are random. Plant a Honeycrisp seed and the new tree produces a small, sour apple that’s usually inedible. So apple growers do something old and clever. They cut a small branch off the original Honeycrisp tree, slot it into a slit in a young apple sapling, wrap the joint, and wait. The branch fuses to its new host and starts producing Honeycrisps. About 20 million Honeycrisp trees exist worldwide, every one a piece of that 1962 tree on different roots. Same goes for Gala, Fuji, Pink Lady, Granny Smith. Every Granny Smith on Earth traces back to a seedling found in 1868 by a woman named Maria Ann Smith in Australia. She’d thrown French crab apple cores onto her compost heap, one of them sprouted, and the apples it bore were unusually tart and good for cooking. That one tree is the ancestor of every Granny Smith in every grocery store on the planet. Wine has the bigger story. In the 1860s, a tiny aphid called phylloxera caught a boat from America to France, hidden in some grapevine cuttings. It eats grape roots. French vines had no defense and started dying everywhere. Within 15 years, French wine production crashed from about 11 billion bottles a year to 3 billion. The blight then tore through Italy, Spain, and Germany, and European wine was on the edge of collapse. The rescue came from Missouri and Texas. American grapevines had grown up with phylloxera and were immune to it. So growers chopped French grape varieties off at the trunk and joined them to American roots. Above the soil: still French grapes. Below the soil: aphid-proof American root. It worked. Today, almost every bottle of French, Italian, Spanish, Australian, and Californian wine you’ve ever drunk sits on top of an American root. The technique is ancient. Chinese farmers were grafting trees by 1000 BCE. A Greek medical text from 424 BCE describes it casually, like it was already old news. It works because plants don’t have a rejection system the way animals do. Cut two branches. Match the green layers just under the bark. Wrap them tight. In a few weeks the plumbing has fused into a single plant. A Syracuse University art professor named Sam Van Aken has spent 18 years building a single tree that grows 40 different fruits: peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, nectarines, almonds. In spring it blossoms in pink, white, and crimson all at once. He’s made more than a dozen. They sell for up to $30,000 each. Without grafting, there would be no commercial apple industry, no global wine industry, and most of the heirloom fruits humans have bred over the centuries would have gone extinct. One clean cut, and you’ve kept entire species alive.

So good

Christopher Nolan was originally hired by Warner Bros. to direct Troy (2004). Wolfgang Petersen reclaimed the project after his Batman vs Superman was cancelled. Nolan was offered Batman Begins (2005) as the so called consolation prize.

Spotted in the NYC subway. “Zero screen time.” An iPod Shuffle ad in 2026. When we built the iPod, the goal was the technology disappeared and you could have your music wherever you were. 1,000 songs in your pocket. Now we’re living through a moment where people are actively looking for ways to disconnect from the infinite feed, algos, and constant notifications. That doesn’t mean technology is bad. It means the best technology understands when to step back. Not every problem needs another screen, another menu, or another layer of complexity. Constraints create freedom (read: @DavidEpstein new book Inside the Box). And often removing features creates a better product than adding them. The future of technology shouldn’t just be more engagement. It should help us be more human.

Before Christmas 2011, Christopher Nolan screened the first six minutes of The Dark Knight Rises for Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, and Jon Favreau. The goal was simple: prove to his fellow directors that IMAX 70mm delivered a superior image to digital.

MAGA when Trump fixes a problem he created in the first place:

What we lose when the Bible is only on a screen: 1. You remember where the verse lives on the page and aids memorization. 2. The page shows you much more at once. You see the context, not just a few verses at once. 3. The page keeps your notes. Years from now they will still be there, in your own hand. 4. The page cannot distract you with a notification. It only asks to be read. 5. The page is something your children watch you open and they know it’s the Bible. The screen gives much. The page gives more.

The untold true story of D-Day. PRESSURE is only in theaters May 29, from the producers of DARKEST HOUR.

Name a movie scene that instantly became iconic the moment you saw it.

Anton Ego tasting the ratatouille in Ratatouille (2007) is one of Pixar’s most beautiful moments. The film spends all this time building Ego up as intimidating, then completely disarms him through pure memory and emotion.

Remembering the legendary Spanish surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí, on his 122nd birthday! Alfred Hitchcock on why he chose to work with Salvador Dalí in "Spellbound" (1945): "I requested Salvador Dalí for the scene in "Spellbound" (1945) Selznick, the producer had the impression that I wanted Dali for the publicity value. It wasn't it at all. What I was after was "The vividness of dreams". All of Dalí's work is very solid, very sharp, with very long perspectives and black shadows. Actually, I wanted the dream sequences to be shot on the back lot; Not in the studio at all. I wanted them shot in the bright sunshine, so the cameraman would be forced to what we call 'stopdown' and get a very hard image. This was again the avoidance of the cliché, "All dreams in movies are blurred". It isn't true. Dalí was the best man for me do do the dream scene because that's what dream should be."