How awesome is this? She is dressed up as the Dumbo ride! #D23Expo pic.twitter.com/yAIvOacYVp

— Arvid - Travel to the Magic (@travelttmagic) September 9, 2022

Dumbo the Flying Elephant is a classic amusement park ride available at various Disney parks around the world, including Disneyland in California, where it debuted at the park's opening in 1955. It's entertained millions of children and adults for three generations.

Now it's a cosplay.

Tina Elliot loves all things Disney, especially the rides at the parks. Her cosplays include wearable recreations of the Alice in Wonderland ride and the Haunted Mansion. The one displayed above is a mechanical recreation of the Dumbo ride. In this video, she's displaying its full majesty at the D23 Expo in Anaheim.

It bears an astonishingly close resemblance to the real thing.

-via Super Punch

Riley Stearns, a filmmaker, wrote, directed, and produced a recent film called Dual. It's a satirical film in which a woman must fight her own clone in a duel. A few days ago, he shared the above image about a human-canine duel in a viral tweet.

Stearns did a lot of reading to prepare his story, including reading Gentleman's Blood: From Swords at Dawn to Pistols a Dusk by Barbara Holland, which is a history of dueling in Western civilization. Holland's text includes this fascinating and perhaps true story of a duel fought in Fifteenth Century France between a man and a greyhound.

The dog won.

It's an amazing story. But as a librarian, I have a duty to verify if it's true. To summarize my investigation: the story is so poorly sourced that it's unlikely to be true. To be more specific, this story does not appear to date back prior to the Nineteenth Century.

But it's probably okay to share with your dog anyway.

This brief gem buried in the bowels of YouTube shows an outtake from the set of Mary Poppins.

The actors recorded their songs in an audio studio for clarity and then lip-synched them on the set. Here, Julie Andrews mouths the lines of Bert and Dick Van Dyke does those of Mary Poppins. "Chim Chim Cher-ee" gets delightfully weird as the costumed actors switch roles.

This is the sort of gag reel that I'd like to see from more television shows and movies. Just have the actors switch their lines and see how convincing they can be.

-via Laughing Squid

The Secretary of State of New Mexico informs us that her state has an official question. It is, simply, "Red or Green?" This is to say: do you prefer chile peppers that are red or green?

In Smithsonian, Doug Mack unpacks the complicated history of this simple question. It began with a debate in the state legislature of what should be the official state food. In 1964, high school student Helen Loera proposed to her history teacher, Arcenio A. Gonzales, who was also a member of the state legislature, that chile peppers be the official state vegetable. When the legislature was next in session, Gonzales did precisely that.

Despite partisan bickering over the issue, the motion was passed and the chile pepper became the official state food. But the law was ambiguous because it did not state precisely which color chile pepper claimed official status.

In 1995, a bipartisan bill (red and green parties) passed a bill that decided to accept the ambiguity and assert that "Red or green?" is the official state question. Governor Gary Johnson considered it to be a waste of time and vetoed it. The next year, the legislature sent the bill to the governor's desk again and he gave in. Now New Mexicans can remain patriotic while disagreeing over the correct color, which is of course green.

-via Marilyn Terrell

At one point, perhaps 6,000 years ago, a First Nations hunter in North America discovered that the tasty beaver he had killed had internal sacs positioned near its anus that extrude a fluid that we call castoreum.

Beavers use these glands to mark their territory with a scent that is vaguely like vanilla. It's now used as a food additive and a base for perfume production.

Tamworth Distilling in Tamworth, New Hampshire, a producer of small batch whiskeys with fanciful names and flavors, is betting that beaver anal gland extract -- which is to say, castoreum -- is a good starting point for a whiskey dubbed Eau de Musc. This bourbon has a "leathery, raspberry taste."

I'll take a double.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Tamworth Distilling

It was 1990 and across Eastern Europe, communist governments were collapsing. Albania had had a rough go of it even by Cold War standards because it had split from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and aligned itself with China. Then China distanced itself from Albania in the early 1970s, leaving a deeply isolated nation with no allies and few friends. Albania had a bunker mentality in the most literal sense possible.

Atlas Obscura tells us that in 1990, the communists knew that the end was near and that their government would fall. It was necessary to get rid of documents detailing their crimes that had accumulated during 46 years of tyranny and murder.

Paper shredders were not available, so government officials liquefied the incriminating files with water and the mixing machines used to knead dough. Once the documents were reduced to a slurry, they were surreptitiously dumped in rivers and in the countryside.

29,000 files were turned into this uncooked dough, leaving only about 10% to survive the democratic revolution of 1991-1992 to the present day.

Photo: Adam Jones

"The Lick" is a musical meme consisting of 7 notes. It appears frequently in jazz as a sort of stock phrase that musicians play easily and naturally.

As a professional musician, Luke Pickman can, of course, play it. As a collector of musical instruments, he has a lot of performance options. In this video, he plays the lick on 92 different (sometimes very different) instruments.

Yes, he plays the tenor sax, the piano, and the cello. But he also pulls out some more unusual choices, including castanets, a conch shell, and mayonaise.

Pickman personally owns 90 of the instruments. I'll assume that the mayonaise is one of them.

-via Laughing Squid

Or, to put another way, if Yoda was from Bavaria instead of spending his years in Dagobah.

Nick Alfieri is an American football player who plays for Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns in a German football league. He's also a filmmaker who has produced a documentary about how he and a few other Americans came to a small town in Germany to build a great football team.

Alfieri has gotten to know Germany and speak German. Although his native English language is a Germanic language, there are notable differences between it and modern German. In this video, he converses with his girlfriend in an English that uses conventional German word order. It's intelligible, but weird.

-via Boing Boing

The best pizza maker in the business!@BestPizzaChef @M5kkkkk#InspireAD | @InspireADWres

Show available on: https://t.co/8Eqmx66UZ7 pic.twitter.com/zSnWI2rDCc

— WWU Clips (@W_W_U_Clips) August 26, 2022

Luigi Primo is both a wrestler and a pizza chef and he's stepping into the ring to deliver his finest to your face.

This professional wrestler in Austin, Texas has a unique gimmick: he wrestles while tossing around a circle of fabric that closely resembles a ring of pizza dough. He spins the fake dough as he tosses his opponents around and dodges their grabs.

You can read a 2021 interview that Primo gave in character to Wrestle Inn. He describes his immigration journey to America, how to make top grade pizza dough, and how to thrash opponents inside the ring.

-via Super Punch

The above video shows a complete and riveting story in a minute in just a half.

Fox News reports that, on August 5, Lori Keeney of Kingston, Oklahoma was swimming her backyard pool when she had a seizure and sank into the water. Her 10-year old son, Gavin, saw what was happening and rushed to jump into the water and keep her head above the water.

That's a big job for such a small boy and Gavin called out for help. His father rushed over, got into the pool, and helped lift up the woman until the seizure ended.

In the final few seconds of this compelling slice of time, the family embraced.

-via Instapundit

You don't see this everyday in Philadelphia! 🐊 Onlookers at Love Park were in for a surprise when they saw a girl taking an alligator for a splash in the fountains. Local reports say the reptile is her emotional support alligator. https://t.co/7qkneeaepJ pic.twitter.com/Q6IaWmHV1M

— ABC News (@ABC) August 27, 2022

This is Wally. He's not just any alligator, but an emotional support alligator. On Friday, his owner, Joie Henney of York, Pennsylvania, brought Wally to LOVE Park in Philadelphia.

Wally was leashed but, notably, not muzzled when he met the local humans. A young girl escorted him through the fountains. Wally permitted the humans to pet him (presumably he would have had the means to prevent such petting if he didn't care for it).

You can see more photos and videos taken by passerby at USA Today. My favorite part of the above video comes when Wally simply drops down heavily onto the bricks to enjoy the experience. We've all had Fridays like that.

-via Super Punch

I built a machine that plays songs by popping bubble wrap. pic.twitter.com/43dTrxPPB7

— Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) August 12, 2022

This doesn't even count among Simone Giertz's wierdest inventions, like her toothbrushing robot or her proud parent robot.

Popping bubble wrap is fun, but it's also a force that can be controlled and distributed. The puff of air that comes from the popped bubble can be channeled into a tube, which will play a note. Grouped together these tubes form a pan flute. To play multiple notes in rapid succession, you need to mechanize this process like a music box with a barrel containing adjustable pegs to pop the bubbles precisely.

That's the concept stage. The implementation stage took much, much more effort because getting the bubbles to pop reliably and the sheet of bubble wrap to stay aligned required a lot of redesign and precision engineering. You can see Giertz's 15-minute build video here.

How can you tell if a song is a classic? I propose when a cover in a different genre is as strong as the original. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns 'N' Roses is such a song and has inspired musicians since its release in 1988.

In the past, we've seen it on an accordion, by a mariachi band, and as New Orleans jazz song. Now Robyn Adele Anderson and Anthony Vincent offer this bluegrass cover. Drums, a string bass, and banjos contribute, but it is the fiddle version of Slash's opening guitar riffs that make this adaptation work so well.

-via The Awesomer

Rajacenna van Dam, an artist in the Netherlands, is talented and successful. But she can do a lot more than just draw well. Although most visual artists will use just one hand, Van Dam can use both and both of them at the same time.

Oh, and her feet. Also at the same time.

Also upside down.

In this time-lapse video of a 40-minute drawing session, Van Dam completes 6 realistic portraits of celebrities, working on four with her hands and two with her feet through her transparent desk. It looks like she occasionally dips the ink brushes in her toes into a pool of ink on her left side.

-via My Modern Met

The bacon project- part 1. pic.twitter.com/EGae4xjKEm

— Jess Pryles (@jesspryles) August 17, 2022

Jess Pryles is a graduate student in meat science at Iowa State University and the founder of Hardcore Carnivore, a company that produces meat seasonings. She developed those seasonings after careful, scientific experiments.