The music is nothing but sounds sampled from everyday items, plus many layers of Andrew Huang’s singing voice. The result is a medley of six hit songs of 2014, which you’ve heard many times, but not like this. The Canadian musician was staying with a friend in the Netherlands while he recorded it. There is a list of the songs and the sounds used to make them at the YouTube page. -via Viral Viral Videos
See also: more from Andrew Huang.
C.J. Huffman came home from work and found this his roommate’s dog, Lilo, had chewed up her new bed. He didn’t yell or make a big deal, just had a serious talk with her about it. When he threatened to tell on her, Lilo figured it was time for some serious begging, affection, and flattery. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
A family of Australian Aboriginal people lived all alone in the desert for decades, until 1984. The group, called the Pintupi Nine, were nomads roaming the Western Desert of Australia, cut off from not only white civilization, but also from other Aborigines. In the 1950s, Australia conducted missile tests in the desert, and rounded up the Pintupi people who lived there for resettlement. One family was overlooked, and lived off the land, wandering from water hole to water hole. Gradually, the Aborigines were allowed to return to their homelands, but the Pintupi settlement Kiwirrkurra wasn’t built until 1984. The isolated family by then consisted of two women and their seven teenage children, who had never seen an automobile or a person wearing clothing before. The oldest brother, Warlimpirrnga, remembers the day he and his brother Thomas approached a couple of men who were camping.
"We had just speared a kangaroo. We could smell the faeces of other humans in the air" - they were probably a couple of kilometres away - "and we saw smoke in the distance.
"We moved closer and stood on a rock and could see people camping down below. So I began to move closer to their camp. I ran towards where they were standing. Then I snuck over closer. I coughed. The people heard me. It looked like they were scared. They became frantic, running back and forth," he says.
"This is my grandfather's land," Warlimpirrnga said. One of the men started filling a billycan with water for them. "When he did, we thought, we won't spear him," says Warlimpirrnga. "They were so scared. They were really scared of us, scared out of their wits."
The campers were a Pintupi man, Pinta Pinta, and his son, Matthew, who had decided to set up an outstation at a place named Winbargo, 45km from Kiwirrkurra. The young man panicked and fired a shotgun in the air - all parties scattered, and the two men drove off at speed, despite a flat tyre.
Read the story of how the Pintupi Nine were integrated into the community and into the modern world at BBC News Magazine. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Osiris)
Glover produced “The Hobbit Song” by remixing sounds, effects, and dialogue samples from The Hobbit trilogy using Logic Pro X. The accompanying video is a visual feast from the three films. This video may prove to be an earworm. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
(Image credit: Jeremy Noble)
Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize–winning achievements, see each year's special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the website.
2007 Ig Nobel Aviation Prize
The prize was awarded to Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacionalde Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
REFERENCE: "Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5, 2007, pp. 9834-9.
Online dating sites are full of evil time-traveling robot assassins. Or, you wish they were, because that would make browsing through the profiles much more interesting. As it is, anytime you catch a potential date in a lie, you can assume they are just ineptly covering up their true nefarious intentions. Then again, if you actually ran across someone who described themselves as an evil time-traveling robot assassin, you'd take a second look, wouldn't you? This is the latest from Tree Lobsters!
Sometime around 1908, suffragists in Cincinnati staged a photo shoot to imagine what a women police officer might look like -if there was such a thing. They apparently were not aware that Marie Owens was an officer in the Chicago Police Department already. Then in 1910, Alice Stebbins Wells became a member of the Los Angeles force. You can see four pictures from the photo session at Mashable.
Ah, champagne -the soda pop of alcohol. But it’s not just carbonated wine, because we could do that with a Soda Stream (not recommended). There are over 600 different chemical compounds that make champagne what it is. This video from Reactions, the video channel of the American Chemical Society, explains how champagne gets its bubbles. Understanding the science may enhance your New Year toast! -Thanks, Elaine!
Discover magazine’s Body Horrors blog relates a disturbing story about a group of housemates in which one was doing research with some nasty parasites. It was a case of “the rare coincidence of a parasitologist with a homicidal grudge.”
In 1970, four housemates living in Quebec were in a spat over the rent. Specifically, one housemate, a post-graduate in the department of parasitology at MacDonald College, was significantly late on his share of the monthly dues. Tensions ran high, and the quarrels continued. In what sounds like a particularly acrimonious argument, the delinquent housemate made a seemingly outlandish threat: he would poison them with the same organisms that he experimented upon in his laboratory, with the pig parasite Ascaris suum. His threat was quickly dismissed and the roommate was summarily evicted.
It was only a week later when the four housemates ended up in a hospital after an elaborate dinner – yes, you’ve already figured it all out, haven’t you? – prepared by the delinquent room mate that the threat of poisoning by parasite was revisited.
The story may be disturbing to sensitive readers. You’ll find out how the Ascaris suum parasite works and what it can do to its host, what happened to the victims, and the legal outcome of the case.
(Image credit: Alan R Walker)
If you think you might be a contender for the Compulsive Phone Checking Championship, be aware that the field is deep and the competition is stiff. I have six daughters who could well be finalists, but they assure me that their friends are much worse. My kid found out what her Christmas present was by checking her email in the middle of a one-on-one face-to-face conversation with me. This is the latest from Randall Munroe at xkcd. Refresh! Refresh!
If you were under the impression that New Year’s Eve was supposed to be a great time, John Oliver wants to set you straight. New Year’s Eve festivities are horrible and you should avoid them at any cost. He’s even got some tips on exactly how to do that. -via Tastefully Offensive
If they made a movie about flying in coach class, it would surely be a horror film. And here’s the trailer. It’s not quite accurate, as I haven’t seen food of any kind (outside of peanuts) offered on a domestic flight in decades, at any price. And I don’t even want to peek behind the curtain, because seeing first class is depressing when you’re flying coach. You keep telling yourself that it’s only a couple of hours to save days of driving, but by the time you get through ticketing and security and multiple terminals and delays and airport food, that road trip looks pretty good. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
For film director Eric von Stroheim, bringing his favorite novel to the big screen was a work of passion, but it would nearly undo his career. The story is as epic as any classic movie, even if the final product itself is lost to history.
TRINA AND McTEAGUE
Loosely based on a real-life San Francisco murder, Frank Norris’ 1899 novel McTeague was all about the destructive power of greed. The main plot: Marcus is engaged to Trina, a German immigrant. One day, Trina falls off a swing and chips a tooth, so Marcus takes her to see his friend McTeague, an unlicensed dentist. Despite Marcus’s objections to gambling (because he can’t afford to play), Trina wins a massive fortune in an underground lottery. They fight, and Trina leaves Marcus for McTeague. But she hoards her money, lives like a pauper, and turns into a hag. Out of jealousy, Marcus gets McTeague's dental practice shut down. McTeague has no way of making a living, but Trina still won’t share with him, either. So McTeague kills her.
The nearly 500-page novel takes place over two decades, features dozens of other characters and subplots, recurring motifs, and lengthy physical descriptions of the characters and the seedy San Francisco neighborhood in which they live. The many subtle touches and countless details would make it a hard book to turn into a movie, but silent film director Eric von Stroheim knew he could do it.
THE GERMAN INVASION
Von Stroheim emigrated from Vienna to the United States in 1909 at age 24, and after a few years of odd jobs found work as a crewman in the 1914 silent film epic The Birth of a Nation. He parlayed that job into a stint as an actor in World War I-era silent films, playing loathsome German military captains. Von Stroheim’s portrayals of evil Germans were so popular that his films were marketed as “Starring Eric von Stroheim, the man you love to hate.” In The Heart of Humanity, for example, von Stroheim’s character tears off a nurse’s uniform with his teeth and throws a crying baby out a window.
But by 1916 the jingoism he’d helped spread backfired on him- Germans were so hated in the United States during and immediately after World War I that von Stroheim couldn’t get work anymore (even though he wasn’t really German- he was Austrian). With no acting work being offered to him, the former movie star was reduced to renting a room in a boarding house in New York City. In his room, he found an old, beat up copy of McTeague left by a previous tenant. The book struck a nerve, especially in how McTeague had suddenly lost his means of employment when others turned on him. Von Stroheim vowed to himself that he’d make a movie out of the book someday.
A few months later, he got a break; D.W. Griffith, director of Birth of a Nation, asked him to co-star in his latest movie, Intolerance. So von Stroheim headed for the world’s emerging film capital- Hollywood, California.
Mothers can’t help but be protective of their children. Redditor DantesInfernape was watching something with his mother when a woman’s bare breasts appeared on screen. Despite the fact that he’s 22 years old and gay, his mother felt compelled to cover the offending scene. That’s funny enough, but Mom and her towel soon turned to covering up other things.
The guy who goes by 12LetterName caught her covering up Kim Kardashian’s butt. That's just the beginning.
Every once in a while, someone really gets away with murder, although we can hope that they were at least eventually arrested for another crime. The remaining mysteries bother us for as long as we remember, and the people who knew the victims will never forget. Here’s one such story.
It was 1966, a gorgeous Australia Day in the suburbs of Adelaide, when nine-year-old Jane Beaumont and her siblings, seven-year-old Arnna and four-year-old Grant vanished seemingly into thin air. The kids hopped a bus for what should have been a five-minute ride to Glenelg Beach, a popular spot they visited often. Hours later, they failed to return home, setting into motion one of Australia's most sensational mysteries — and even today, one of its most prominent cold cases.
Witnesses claimed to have seen the siblings on the beach playing with a tall, thin, blonde man. Jane Beaumont was spotted buying snacks (including a meat pie, which the children had never purchased before) with money she did not have when she left the house that day. A mail carrier who knew the family saw the kids walking in the direction of their home a few hours later ... but they never made it. Where did the children go? Who was the tall man? Though the case has continued to generate leads and wild theories (religious cults, a madman who may have turned the kids into a human centipede of sorts via "experimental surgery"), it remains unsolved. Needless to say, parents in Australia became a lot more protective and paranoid in the wake of this case.
There are seven other stories you may or may not know in a list of lesser-known unsolved crimes at io9. -via the Presurfer
