India is a big country, and yet when it comes to food, fashion, music and movies the entire country gets lumped together as one.

But there's actually two Indias, North and South, Hindu and Muslim, and the two regions have very different tastes in food, music and fashion, although they both enjoy Bollywood films.

But the focus of this film by Jovita George is on fashion, bridal makeup to be exact, and Jovita shows us the difference between Hindu and Muslim bridal makeup in a really cool way- by applying the styles to each side of her face and becoming a living side-by-side comparison. 

(YouTube Link)

-Via Boing Boing

Cats are like that. You think they are just being persnickety, but they are plotting to lead you to your doom. If it's not yet time, they'll just chalk it up to practice. OR... if you are a cat lover and prefer to think of this in more benevolent terms, the cat is trying to warn you that there could be something dangerous behind the door. Thank you, kitty. He did his best, and since you aren't using the chair anyway... This is the newest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble. 

Iconic movie quotes don't need to be translated because no matter what language a movie lover speaks, and no matter what language an iconic film has been translated into, the quote is always best known in its original form.

Ever fascinated by the power of Google Translate those mythical video guys Rhett & Link of Good Mythical Morning fed famous movie quotes into Google Translate over and over again until they got weird.

Then they had their friend, famous actor Jimmi Simpson, join them in acting out the terrible translations, which really showcased his acting skills!

(YouTube Link)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

Psychopaths are commonly seen as people who do not consider the thoughts and feelings of others. Or when they do, they don't care about those thoughts and feelings. Arielle Baskin-Sommers of Yale University has been studying psychopaths for ten years. She works with inmates in a maximum-security prison, where 106 volunteers were divided into psychopaths, non-psychopaths, and those with some psychopathic tendencies. What she found was that psychopaths can and do put themselves in another person's place, but that is a deliberate decision for them, while normal people learn to see other people's perspectives automatically as we mature.

Most of us mentalize automatically. From infancy, other minds involuntarily seep into our own. The same thing, apparently, happens less strongly in psychopaths. By studying the Connecticut inmates, Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues, Lindsey Drayton and Laurie Santos, showed that these people can deliberately take another person’s perspective, but on average, they don’t automatically do so to the extent that most other people do. “This is the first time we’re seeing evidence that psychopaths don’t have this automatic ability that most of us have,” Baskin-Sommers says.

The researchers found this out by doing innocuous experiments that pinpoint how difficult a subject finds separating their own viewpoint from another person's viewpoint. Those experiments are explained at The Atlantic.

I never tried online dating. I looked at Yahoo Singles once many years ago, and found quite a few guys I knew. I also knew why they were single, because their ex-wives had already told me. That's life in a small town. It's probably better for younger people. Redditor keongmanja, who is from the UK but lives in Indonesia, tried Tinder for a month and kept stats on how it worked for him. Then he turned his data into a chart. He doesn't tell how many times he swiped right to get 53 matches, but the consensus of commenters is that four actual dates in a month is pretty good. There were a few quibbles about his terms.



-via Mashable

Get Happy by Bubbleknight 

Not everyone is a fan of that perpetually bubbly and cheerful flying cat named Happy, but even those members of the Fairy Tale Guild who can't stand the sight of his smilin' mug all agree on one thing- his happiness is infectious. And when he cries out "Aye Sir!" even the biggest sourpuss can't help but smile, if only because his silly schtick can be downright laughable at times. Happy succeeds in making others feel joyful in the darkest of times, but the weight of the magical world does weigh pretty heavily on him so he doesn't always have cheer to spare. But when he's feelin' good and brimming with magical might Happy is an unstoppable force for positivity in an otherwise bleak world.

Spread happiness wherever you go by wearing this Get Happy t-shirt by Bubbleknight, it's the perfect shirt to put a smile on people's faces whether they're anime fans or just think Happy the cat is a cute character.

Visit Bubbleknight's Facebook fan page, Twitter and Instagram, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more delightful designs:

View more designs by Bubbleknight | More Cartoon T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Gianni A. Sarcone designed this star illusion, using the Müller-Lyer Illusion principle. The length of a line stays the same, while its appearance can stretch or shrink because of its context, meaning the arrows attached to it. Check out this star. The blue and black radials seems to stretch and shrink, but they actually remain the same length.  

Best illusion I've seen, maybe ever. The blue and black lines are NOT moving. Insanely good. pic.twitter.com/gHGx5u3vTO

— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) March 10, 2018

Read more about the Müller-Lyer Illusion at Sarcone's site. -via Digg

These doggos are very good boys. They've been spending plenty of their time practicing their instruments and composing an original tune.

(YouTube link)

Okay, maybe they got a little help from the editing powers of YouTuber Smoothes. And some backing tracks from Chunk Funko. But they are still very good dogs. -via Digg

You may have heard someone describing a chewing-out as "...then he read me the Riot Act." Or maybe your parents threatened to read the Riot Act to you. We kind of know what it means when they say that, but what's behind the idiom? At one time, it had to have made perfect sense to everyone, or else it wouldn't have fallen into common usage.

The idiom, which has been in use for centuries, is generally thought to mean the admonishment of a person or persons who have committed an error in judgment. But the origin of the term "riot act" concerns a very particular wrongdoing—an unlawful public assembly that peace officers of the 16th century fought with a pre-written warning to disperse or face serious repercussions. Like death.

So, it was a legally-worded warning. Strange that an act from England in 1715 would still be used as a common metaphor in the USA today, considering the First Amendment and all. Read how the Riot Act came about and what happened to it at Mental Floss.

The villains are often the best part of any fiction (not so much in non-fiction). We don't necessarily "like" them, but we love to watch them. In comic book movies, they are so over the top that we can't turn away. Robert Jones found the best clips of comic book villain in film and made us a delicious mashup.  

(YouTube link)

Maybe we love villains because they let us vicariously indulge in our more selfish instincts. We can see what is possible when ethics go out the window. It's safe because in comic book movies, we know that eventually justice will be restored. The song used in the video is "Saints of the Sinners" by The Faim. -via Laughing Squid

Even cool moms have their limits. The secret is in knowing where the real danger is. I forbade my kids from reading my online publications years ago by telling them I posted inappropriate things. So they never started, even though they are now adults. Sigh. My blogging has become more family-friendly over the years, yet they still avoid bookmarking any site where I post, no matter how many links I send them. This comic is from Dami Lee as As Per Usual.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dale Mastin)

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research About Two Geographically Beloved Foodstuffs
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Vegemite and National Identity
“Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity,” Paul Rozin and Michael Siegal, Gastronomica, vol. 3, no. 4, Fall 2003, pp. 63–67. The authors, at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Sheffield, UK, report:

The preferences of the Australianborn subjects are shown in Table 1, based on a scale ranging from 1 = dislike extremely to 9 = like extremely. These individuals liked Vegemite quite a lot, and the taste for Vegemite was higher in females than in males.... Liking for Vegemite did not correlate substantially with a liking for any of the other sampled foods [chocolate, apples, milk, steak, carrots, etc.]; the highest correlation, not surprisingly, was with Marmite.

The folks from Bad Lip Reading have been making songs out of their ridiculously loose lip readings lately, and here's another one. This song is based on (but not limited to) the early scenes in Star Wars Episode IV, also called A New Hope, and focuses mostly on Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin.  

(YouTube link)

It's not complete gibberish, but it's nonsensical enough to be funny in the parts that must line up with someone's lips. If you didn't know the story by heart, it would be totally incomprehensible.   

Look at all that hair! Fashion in the 1970s was all about the hair. When high school and college students went all out for their formal dances or homecoming courts, some of the women reverted back to the earlier bouffant styles for the special occasion, but most let it all hang out. You'd see long formal dresses, but there were also mini skirts, hot pants, and bellbottoms. For the guys, it was mainly rental tuxes, so the hair was what made you stand out. Unless you were already a star, like this popular athlete at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1970.

See more images that showed how students in the 1970s dressed up for their most important formal occasions at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort 

Ah, what a lovely fantasy, to ride a tulip-covered rabbit on an adventure to a verdant land featuring nothing but the best nature can offer. It's magical! The description of this video says,

Based on actual events. More or less.

(YouTube link)

This lovely video very badly wants to be a Studio Ghibli film, but it's a tourism ad for Travel Oregon.  Now we know why Alex moved there. I still have a sneaking suspicion that they left a few things out. The animation is from Sun Creature Studio in Denmark and Psyop in Los Angeles, with music by the Oregon Symphony.  -via Boing Boing

PS: Matt 252 found the real-life landscapes that are illustrated in the video. See them side-by-side here.