As you can see from the above tweet, the track is hugely successful. So, appropriately, the couple are offering the track for sale on Amazon.
Personally, having listened to both, I prefer the original to the instrumental. DaveApnea's snoring brings in a depth and power to the melody that should not be missed.
I love this magnificent dress by cosplayer Lauren of @dressesandcapes. It perfectly blends the Mystery Machine with Scooby-Doo himself. The perfect replica of Scooby's collar is a nice touch.
Lauren's whole Instagram feed is filled with similarly classy, original approaches to your favorite characters.
British electronic composer Anna Meredith brings us the song "Paramour" with the help of video director Ewan Jones Morris. For five minutes, a camera mounted on a toy train circles through an elaborately laid track, moving around obstacles and band members.
The whole sequence is perfectly timed, with performers entering frame just as their instruments become central to the composition. The visual and musical flow is perfect.
They are fascinating to browse through. For example, Quest for a Job is the story of Native Americans who live on a reservation making an effort to acquire gainful employment.
Minnesotastan, the blogger behind TYWKIWDBI plays Scrabble avidly. At his home, players operate under unusual and unofficial rules:
The "house rules" are that Scrabble will be the "open book, double bag, triple return, blank start and recycle" version. This means that each player starts with a blank, and after it is played as a given letter, anyone with that letter in their rack can play the letter and pick the blank up for reuse (that's the "recycle" part).
The "double bag" refers to the fact that we keep consonants and vowels in separate bags. When you draw your letters you can do so from either bag in whatever proportion best balances your rack. If you get three of a letter, you can exchange one of them for a different letter. This prevents winding up with the dreaded IUIUCIW-type rack.
The "open book" part is fairly common among recreational Scrabblers. We have not only several dictionaries available, but also a variety of word building books, and sometimes a laptop logged on to an anagramming website.
And finally we spin our racks around to ask the other person (I wouldn't use the word "opponent") for advice/suggestions.
Who was this woman who has captivated admirers for centuries since Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli placed her in the center of The Birth of Venus? Her name was Simonetta Vespucci. She was popularly celebrated as one of the greatest beauties and personalities of her age. Messy Nessy Chic tells us about her famous life:
History has seen many great muses. But Simonetta reached some next-level celebrity in both life and death as a woman who didn’t just look like the Venus, but totally embodied and, ultimately, transcended her. Even Simonetta’s biography has become inseparable from the Venus’ origin story: It begins on the rocky shores of Porto Venere (literally, “Venus Harbor”), where Simonetta was born in 1453 – a rather serendipitous fact, considering the Romans believed it was also where the Venus was born from the waves. Some historians say Simonetta might’ve come from the city proper of Genoa, but others stick to Porto Venere on the Ligurian Coast. Especially given the glowing declaration of a Florentine poet named Politian that there “in that stern Ligurian district up above the seacoast, where angry Neptune beats against the rocks…There, like Venus, [Simonetta] was born among the waves.”
What comedian Dave Barry found remarkable about this news story about a sinkhole was how the journalists used a washing machine as a unit of measurement:
A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri.
It does make sense. If the reporter had written that the sinkhole was about 163 cubic feet, it would take some mental calculations to picture the size. Six or seven washing machines is a lot easier to mentally frame.
When measuring things in general, it's best to use units that are easily grasped. For example, here at the Neatorama office, if a co-worker asks, "How much do we need today, John?" I might answer, "About 3-4 Alex Santosos." And all is understood perfectly.
Filming for the 2020 movie Clifford the Big Red Dog is underway. It will be a live action film, aside from Clifford himself, of course. The role of the giant pup will be digitally animated. To facilitate his placement during filming, directors are using this rig. Just Jared has more photos of the faux dog here.
Artist Iantha Naicker uses Lyra and Karat watercolor pencils to create cute images of plants, animals, and people that almost leap off of her left hand. They're transitory art pieces that vanish to make room for new creations.
Gather around, millennials, and I shall tell you a tale: there was once a time when there were no Big Mouth Billy Bass fish plaques on the walls of every home.
It's true! Now the animatronic singing fish is part of the decor of every refined home owned by sophisticated ladies and gentlemen. But Big Mouth Billy Bass began as a mere fad in 2000, after it had been invented by product developer Joe Pellettieri. The Hustle takes you on his journey:
As a new transplant in the product development world, Pellettieri hadn’t quite figured out the best way to find inspiration. Then, toward the end of ‘98, he took a fateful road trip with his wife, Barbara.
During a pit stop at a Bass Pro Shop Outlet, Barbara turned to him with an unusual proposal. “She goes, ‘How about a singing fish on a plaque?’” he recalls.
Most people would scoff at the idea. But Pellettieri sensed it had promise.
“I always come from a place of what makes me laugh,” he says. “The idea of a fish on a plaque singing ‘Take Me To The River’ was hilarious.”
In the Hero's Journey, this stage is known as "The Call to Adventure." Read on as Pellettieri, like Prometheus seizing the fire of the gods, sets to work.
In 1861, the Peruvian government undertook a daunting task: to build two warships on Lake Titicaca--the highest navigable lake in the world. The lake formed part of Peruvian-Bolivian border and Peru wanted to be prepared for any future hostilities.
Peru contracted two British shipbuilders for this purpose. There were no modern roads leading up to the lake. So the builders brought the ships' components by mule 225 miles through a desert up to the lake for assembly. No piece could weigh more than 392 pounds--the maximum weight a mule could carry.
The shipbuilders completed the Yavari in 1870 and the Yapura in 1872. The Yavari is now a museum ship. But the Yapura, which is pictured above, is still in service. For a long period of time, its engine was powered by llama poop, although I have been unable to determine if it still is.
Vanessa Barragão, a textile artist from Portugal, hand-wove this enormous tapestry. Botanical Tapestry is on public display at Heathrow Airport in London.
The project took Barragão 520 hours of work using 18 pounds of jute and cotton and 93 pounds of wool. It's richly textured to show not only the topography of the regions, but also endangered plant and coral species. You can find more photos of this marvel at My Modern Met.
The stylites were Christian monks who, as acts of ascetic piety, spent their lives on top of poles in prayer and fasting. Such mortification of the flesh is not the object of this modern Dutch sport, which involves remaining sitting on a pole longer than anyone else in a competition.
Allegedly, those who first participated in paalzitten--pole sitting--were probably trying to alleviate boredom by sitting on poles in canals.
Don't ask me to explain that reasoning.
Oddity Central has more information about this thrilling sport, including how it inspired what is considered to be one of the worst movies in Dutch history:
Called “Sportsman of the Century“, it tells the story of an avid Paalzitten practitioner training to break the fictional record of 250 days sitting on a pole since early childhood. He even fathers a baby while sitting on the pole, and proceeds to lose his love interest after refusing to cancel his participation in a Paalzitten competition to help her. He ultimately dies as an old man, sitting on a pole, obviously. In 2006, the film was nominated for two Golden Onions, in the categories Worst Film and Worst Director.
What is it about breasts that heterosexual men find attractive? From one perspective of evolutionary psychology, the fat reserves of breasts represent material prosperity. So it follows that men who lack resource security (meaning that they're poor) are more likely to find larger breasts attractive compared to men who are wealthier.
This led psychological researchers Viren Swami and Martin J. Tovée to conduct studies about how men at varying levels of socioeconomic prosperity and varying levels of hunger rated the attractiveness of women with varying breast sizes. From the abstract to their 2013 journal article:
In Study 1, 266 men from three sites in Malaysia varying in relative socioeconomic status (high to low) rated a series of animated figures varying in breast size for physical attractiveness. Results showed that men from the low socioeconomic context rated larger breasts as more attractive than did men from the medium socioeconomic context, who in turn perceived larger breasts as attractive than men from a high socioeconomic context. Study 2 compared the breast size judgements of 66 hungry versus 58 satiated men within the same environmental context in Britain. Results showed that hungry men rated larger breasts as significantly more attractive than satiated men. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that resource security impacts upon men's attractiveness ratings based on women's breast size.
Citation:
Swami, Viren, and Martin J. Tovée. “Resource Security Impacts Men’s Female Breast Size Preferences.” PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 3, Mar. 2013, pp. 1–7. Academic Search Complete, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057623.
