Here's a little tune that confirms what we've always known, but rarely admit: the beat is the most important thing in a song. The latest mashup by Bill McClintock (previously at Neatorama) just dropped today. This work of art combines the hard rock of Drowning Pool and their song "Bodies" with the 1978 disco hit "Get Off" by Foxy. That's not all, because the bridge is from the song "Strutter" by Kiss. McClintock calls this "Let the Bodies Get Off" by Drowning Fox. While the title may sound dirty, the song isn't. I'm sure you will enjoy it, and it might inspire you to dance. 

Still, when mixing rock with disco, the undisputed champion is this song.

There was a time when the hundreds of thousands of condoms handed out at the Olympic games would have been a scandal, but that doesn't even make the cut anymore. Since the modern Olympics began in 1896, the international sporting event has seen plenty of cheating, injuries, politics, fighting, terrorism, drugs, and one-upmanship. Some are news stories we'll never forget if we are old enough to remember, like the Israeli hostages taken during the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Others you've never heard of, or else you'll say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that one." And these scandals are just from the summer games, so you won't hear about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. But you'll relive the awful moments in ten historic Olympic scandals of the summer games at Mental Floss. The opening ceremonies for the 2024 Olympics in Paris are this Friday, but some qualifying events start tomorrow.

Imagine if aliens landed on earth to find out what residents of this planet were all about. It would be easy for them to figure out that humans are the dominant species, even though we've seen jokes that say otherwise. If a guy in a flying saucer were to land at a ballet school, he would probably enjoy the experience, but would leave with a skewed view of humanity. Before you know it, there would be green men pirouetting across the galaxy. Would that be such a bad thing? But the bigger question is, has there ever been a science fiction ballet before?

Tutu Academy is an ad produced by Dean Alexander Productions and ad agency Design Army for the Hong Kong Ballet. It's only two minutes long, followed by a long list of credits. A lot of people put a lot of work into this! -via Nag on the Lake

We know that the world's first computer program was written by Ada Lovelace in 1848. It would have run a theoretical computer called the Analytical Engine designed by Charles Babbage, but he never actually built the computer. However, computer programs are made up of data, flow charts, and calculations. People understood those things, at least some smart people did, long before the algorithms they produced were usable.

For example, if you had enough data, you could forecast the weather. British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson compiled the necessary data in 1913 and worked out how to calculate the weather of the future. The problem was that the calculations took so long that the "forecast" had passed before it was predicted. If he had a computer, it would have worked much better. Various people worked out the same types of algorithms for playing chess, tabulating the census, and generating random numbers. They worked, but not well, because human calculation just isn't fast enough. Read about the algorithms that predated the computers that would make them work at Cracked.

National Geographic gives us a film about the wolverine. It is the largest member of the weasel family, but that's about all we learn about it, because the narrator got bored, and so the film is unexpectedly short. He does give us some hints about they way a wolverine smells. The narrator is Deadpool, or actually Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool. Is this really an ad for Deadpool & Wolverine, which opens this weekend? That would explain why the subject is a wolverine, but this was really released by National Geographic. It turns out this is an ad for a National Geographic show, and the Deadpool & Wolverine movie was just a convenient opportunity for a collaboration that people would actually watch. If you ever get an opportunity for Ryan Reynolds to write your advertising copy, go for it. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Rolling Stone published a list of the 50 worst albums covers of all time. For young folks, an album cover was a 12-inch square cardboard sleeve that covered a vinyl recording of songs. The artwork on the cover was very important, and often involved a team of designers trying to make a statement that would sell records. But sometimes that design went very wrong. The music may have been wonderful. The album may have sold millions of copies. Or it might have tanked and ended up in the discount bin because the cover art looked so bad.

Rolling Stone didn't bother with small town studios or self-published album covers, which can be hilariously bad. No, these are from major record labels, featuring at least some artists you know well. Some of the selections seem like a case of laziness. Others are trying too hard, or the aesthetic was off-putting, or an idea they though was edgy turned out to be just plain silly (it could have been the drugs). The examples above are from the list, but they are far from the worst. I don't want to make anyone queasy if they decide not to see the entire list.  -via Metafilter

No, these aren't the latest jeans from a luxury fashion house selling for thousands of dollars, but considering some we've posted before, you would be forgiven for thinking so. About six years ago, the fashion reseller behind Darn Vintage came across a unique pair of jeans at an estate sale. Click to the right to see them from all angles. From the Instagram thread we learn that they had been left outside for twenty years and all the organic material (cotton) had degraded and left nothing but the metal zipper and the synthetic fibers. It's amazing what people will save and sell. A textile artist believes these are the Lycra or spandex fibers left behind in stretch jeans.

It's somewhat ironic that 100% natural fiber jeans last longer/wear harder than synthetics but also break down completely whereas synthetics lose their elasticity quickly but last 100+ years in a landfill.

@darnvintage tells us that the Wrangler company bought these and is keeping them in their historical archives. -via Nag on the Lake

Less than a week to go until the opening ceremonies for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, and fashion is at the forefront. The stunning uniforms that the team from Mongolia will be wearing at the opening ceremonies have gone viral for their opulent elegance. Designed by Michel & Amazonka, it took 20 hours of work to craft each uniform, but the result caught the eye of the world already. Get a closer look at the details.



Take a look at what a few other countries will be wearing at the opening ceremonies. The USA is going with Ralph Lauren, as usual, with red, white and blue blazers over blue jeans. Britain's uniforms look like a 1950s sock hop. And the French uniforms are very French, although I don't understand why the women are wearing blazers with no sleeves. Vogue give us their picks for the best Olympic uniforms from a fashion designer's perspective, not limited to the kits for the opening ceremonies.

Every place developed a staple crop that serves to keep a population from starvation: Europe grew wheat, Asia has rice, North America has corn, Africa has yams, and South America is where we got potatoes. Successful societies learn to allocate those crops to bolster their population. The potato allowed the Inca Empire to build its armies and those massive cities. When potatoes were first exported to Europe, it made all the difference in several nations for feeding people (potatoes are more nutritious than wheat) and for a nation's defense. Defense? It all came down to the fact that potatoes are grown underground, and they can stay there until they are needed, while wheat must be harvested and stored for future use. This fact threw a wrench into the military strategies of invading nations. Read how the strategy of growing potatoes changed the history of the world at JStor. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Maja Dumat)

Some feuds start with a petty slight that turns into a war of resentment, betrayal, backstabbing, and animosity that can last for years. Here we learn about ten personal spats that had long-term consequences. Some were instigated by things that might not be petty at all, like when a guy you love marries your rival or a war destroys your business, but that fact that it got our into the public means it got out of control. And when a friendship ends over sincerely-held but disparate beliefs, that's not really petty. Some of these you've heard of, like the Dassler brothers who split their family shoe company because they couldn't get along, and the two paleontologists who turned their rivalry into intense hatred.

This video has a 90-second skippable ad at 4:54. At that point, I had to abandon the closed captions, because they were way ahead of the video. Your mileage may vary.

People sometimes wonder out loud why artificial banana flavoring doesn't taste like the bananas you eat fresh. It's because banana flavoring was developed in the mid-19th century, even before Americans knew what real bananas tasted like. That doesn't mean that the flavoring was wrong; in fact it was very close to the taste of real bananas. But those bananas were the Gros Michel variety. That's the banana that Americans went crazy over when they began to be imported on a large scale. Gros Michel was the type of banana you found in stores up until the mid-1950s. Then it was replaced by the Cavendish variety, which is what we have in every grocery store now. And it tastes different.

Brandon Summers-Miller wanted to taste a Gros Michel banana to see how different that variety is from the ubiquitous Cavendish strain. It was difficult to find any, but he managed to have some shipped to him. Then he tested Cavendish and Gros Michel bananas in old recipes that were designed with the Gros Michel banana in mind, namely bananas Foster and banana pudding. Note for the banana pudding, he made sure to use vanilla pudding instead of artificially-flavored banana pudding for the comparison. The taste tests revealed what we have lost. Read about that comparison, and the history of banana varieties at Epicurious. And if you want to know what a Michel Gros banana tastes like, try a piece of artificially-flavored banana candy. Or go to a farmer's market in Southeast Asia. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Juan Emilio Prades Bel)

Dire Straits released the song "Money for Nothing" in 1985 and it went to #1 for three weeks, becoming the biggest song of the year. But it also holds up well almost 40 years later. Ask anyone why, and you might get six different answers. It's got a great beat that you can dance to, a killer guitar riff, a story to tell, a hot cultural reference (for 1985), and Sting's unmistakable vocals parodying his own song. Oh yeah, and a video that was way ahead of its time. None of those things came about by accident. Well, some of them did. Actually, most of them did. We know that the idea came from an actual conversation Mark Knopfler heard in a store, but the rest of the production was a series of wild stories. Imagine recording a song in the Caribbean, and what do you know, Sting just happens to be there vacationing that week. David Hartley tells the story of the many ideas that strangely converged into one song that become "Money for Nothing."

We once speculated on the reasons that the Neanderthals died out, and came up with plenty of possibilities. Maybe modern humans killed them off for their territory, or they were wiped out by diseases brought in my modern humans, or they just couldn't compete for resources. Then we found out by genetic studies that homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, and now most of us carry around a little Neanderthal DNA.  

More precise studies are now possible because we have decoded the genome of some actual Neanderthal remains. These show that Neanderthals that lived hundred of thousands of years ago already carried a chunk of homo sapiens DNA, even more than the traces of Neanderthal DNA we have now. The studies suggest that interbreeding between the two peoples began as far back as 250,000 years ago. The implication is that maybe Neanderthals didn't disappear because of some calamity. Considering their population numbers compared to homo sapiens over time, they may have merely been absorbed into modern human communities until their genome was diminished to the fraction that we carry today. Read how the research points to this possibility at Live Science. -via Strange Company

If your day is not going all that great, a little polka music will fix that right up! "Weird Al" Yankovic just dropped a new polka medley with the classic oom-pah beat and accordion you'd expect. But these aren't classic polka tunes. "Polkamania" has 13 polka versions of relatively new pop songs like "WAP" by Cardi B. ft. Megan Thee Stallion and "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X and "Thank You, Next" from Ariana Grande. Not only that, but Yankovic recruited a slate of animators you may be familiar with to illustrate those tunes, some of them who came to his attention when they made Weird Al fan videos. I was hooked as soon as Cyriak Harris' unmistakable style led things off. Some of them snuck in references to other Weird Al songs that only true fans will recognize. You'll find a list of the songs and a list of the animators at the YouTube page.

"Bond. James Bond. I'm not like other spies." Most of us never get the chance to see our jobs portrayed on the silver screen, because they aren't that interesting to the general public. Those who do complain that Hollywood doesn't get their profession right at all. That applies very much to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent who is the best known spy of all. Real intelligence agents can easily see that Bond is too flashy, too self-sufficient, and too adventurous to make it in the real world business of espionage. But a realistic portrayal of the profession wouldn't draw millions into a theater.

Alma Katsu is a former US intelligence officer, or what people refer to as a spy, who turned to writing spy novels. She and her former colleagues have a love-hate relationship with James Bond. But as an author, she understands why the fictional version is portrayed like a superhero, while the real work is carried out by heroes who never get recognized. Read what she has to say about Bond at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting