Let's face it- the only reason in the world to spend a ridiculous amount of money on clothing is so that everyone around you will know that you have enough money to waste it any way you want. Or enough power to get them free. Last month, Balenciaga staged their 52nd couture show during Paris Fashion Week. One of the more astonishing overpriced creations unveiled was a pair of jeans that retail for $27,000.

Ah, but these are no ordinary jeans. They aren't even jeans at all. These are regular cotton and linen pants, hand-painted in trompe l'oeil fashion to resemble worn and faded denim. Each pair represents more than 100 hours of labor, and you can't even throw them in the washer. Let's break this down. Consider that the materials and company overhead could cost as much as $2,000 (a very generous estimate), that means that the artist, or more likely a team of artists, should have earned around $200 an hour to paint the pants and still give the company a $5,000 profit per pair. Nice work if you can get it, but is it believable? And do they have them in stock in a variety of sizes, or would you have to commission them? Read more about Balenciaga's trompe l'oeil jeans and other new fashions at Highsnobiety.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Balenciaga)

Have you ever wondered why bubblegum is pink? Why #2 pencils are yellow? Why blue jeans are blue? It is often the story that many brands of the same product end up the same color because new brands want to be recognized as much as the first popular version, riding on their coattails, so to speak. But someone somewhere had to decide what color that original version would be. And there's a story behind each of those decisions. That's just commercials products. Some universal objects have logical reasons for their color. When it works in one place, it works everywhere. Let's learn some of those stories behind universal colors from Weird History.

We've read plenty of stories of the people aboard the Titanic when it sank on April 15, 1912. Let's have a perspective on that night from another ship, the Carpathia. The Carpathia was a much smaller ship traveling east to Liverpool that night. It had only one radio operator, Harold Cottam, and he was in the process of shutting down radio operations for the night -it was after midnight- but decided to go ahead and relay some messages from Cape Cod piling up for the Titanic. In reply, he got a distress signal. The "unsinkable" Titanic had struck an iceberg and was sinking.

Cottam and the first officer ran to wake Captain Arthur Rostron. The captain immediately ordered the Carpathia to change direction and head 58 miles to the northwest to aid the Titanic, at full speed. It would take four hours to get there. As the ship chugged along, the passengers slept and the crew prepared to take on survivors. Meanwhile, Rostron considered the dark night and the field of icebergs he was taking his ship toward. Read the story of the Carpathia, the ship that rescued 706 Titanic survivors, at Singular Discoveries. -via Strange Company 

The question at reddit was "Americans of Reddit, what places in America should foreigners avoid at all cost?" You might expect that there would be a bunch of people telling visitors not to come to America at all due to the danger of gunshot wounds that you can't afford to have treated. But instead the commenters took it seriously, based on foreign visitors they have known who came to the US with the wrong ideas. They had already been warned about the guns and the cost of healthcare, but were completely uninformed about the dangers of Yellowstone, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon. They're not really saying don't come, but if you do you should be aware of what to expect, and it can be dangerous. Also, many visitors have no concept of how big the US really is. Read all the advice at the reddit thread, which includes warning tourists away from your hometown, or just the highlights that make the most sense for both foreign and domestic tourists at Digg.

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

Of all the meteorites that we have found, two-thirds of them have been recovered in Antarctica. As strange as that seems, those meteorites are pretty much restricted to one small area of Antarctica. When you first hear that, you might think that it has something to do with earth's rotation, or maybe a magnetic field that grabs these falling objects and steers them towards this area around the South Pole. That place is weird in many ways. But you'd be wrong. The operative phrase in the first sentence is "that we have found." It is Antarctica's unique environment that makes finding meteorites easier than anywhere else on earth, even though that continent has relatively few people looking for them. The vast majority of rocks falling from the sky will never be found, but those that are collected in Antarctica tell us an awful lot about outer space, according to this video from MinuteEarth.

...Lychon—a member of my own family!—slaughtered me, still in my youth. He threw me from the heights like a discus. I was twenty years old, so full of beauty, when the Moirai spun my fate and sent me as a delight to Hades."

RIP my dude💔

(Louvre Ma 2867, trans. Chaniotis) pic.twitter.com/xFDMYE7Eaq

— Roko Rumora (@rumorahasit) March 8, 2023

A tombstone looted from ancient Greek city of Alexandria Troas, near Istanbul, is now in the Louvre. It is inscribed with the image of a rather short young man. The epitaph has only recently been translated into English, and we get the macabre story from the inscription. Poor Aphrodisios! He was only 20 years old, yet lost his wife and his life to the greed of Lychon, thrown like a Frisbee to his death. The discussion at Metafilter centers around who arranged (and paid) for this gravestone to be carved. If it was commissioned by Lychon, who was after all a relative, he wouldn't have included the part about the dirty adultress. It could have been Aphrodisios' parents, which would explain the description of Aphrodisios as "so full of beauty." All we have left is a mysterious glimpse into an ancient dysfunctional family.

American black bears once roamed the entire continent before it was settled by European immigrants. Due to conservation over the last hundred years, the bears have rebounded to about half the area they once inhabited. But weird things are happening to black bears lately. Their hibernation period is growing shorter, and some bears don't hibernate at all! This is especially true among "urban bears," those who hang around close to towns. The number of urban bears began to spike around 1990 in the Lake Tahoe area. A 2003 study tracked them, and found that bears that lived near towns went into hibernation a month later than more isolated wilderness bears, and awoke earlier in the spring. Five of the 38 bears did not hibernate at all.

There are two reasons for this. Urban bears have a year-round food supply in human garbage, so they don't get the nutritional cues to go sleep for a couple of months. Climate change is the other reason, as winters stay warmer longer and spring arrives earlier. One expert calculated that by mid-century, the average bear hibernation could be two to six weeks shorter than today. Read about how human activity has changed a bear's natural cycle at LitHub.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Cephas)

Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It, has been using artificial intelligence to bring his weird ideas to life, so to speak. He sang this song himself, but then AI made his voice sound like Johnny Cash. The songs are an eclectic mix of songs the Man in Black would never consider performing: "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, "Wannabe" by The Spice Girls, and "Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus. They are all set to the tune of "Folsom Prison Blues." But the best part is the last verse, in which the ghost of Johnny Cash laments the use of artificial intelligence. It's an affront to his sense of propriety. 

At the YouTube page, Ballard announced that there is now a live version of the There I Ruined It band, and they are going on the road beginning with a show in Dallas, date and venue to be announced later. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Just in time for the dog days of summer, we have a new toy that you can use as an excuse to stay inside with the air conditioning. Yokohama developer saharan, who gave us the Bubble-Blowing Web Toy, has a new distraction for you that could easily suck up your whole day. It's called the Blob Toy, which looks pretty simple at first. You have blobs, and you have a mechanism to corral them. But take a look at the many tools on the lower left corner! They enable you to draw new barriers, erase what you've drawn, pickup and move a blob, inflate your blobs, draw straight lines (they won't stay straight), start a shower of blobs, or just start all over. I haven't quite figured out what the chevron does yet. What you do with all this is up to your imagination. If I had the time, I would create a "blob run" and watch them bounce their way through. -via Metafilter 

Food preservation in metal cans was invented in 1810. Those early cans were opened with a hammer and chisel, which is one of the reasons canning in glass jars was more popular. The can opener was invented in 1858, and improved upon in 1926. But you didn't need to remove the entire lid to open a can of beer or soda, so people used a church key, often called a bottle opener these days.

Ermal C. Fraze owned a tool company in Dayton, Ohio, and also several patents. He was at a picnic in 1959 and wanted a beer, but he didn't have a church key with him. Frustrated, he ended up poking a hole in the can with the fin of his automobile. Or at least, that's the story. One would think that at a picnic, someone else would have lent Fraze a church key, but it's possible that everyone else was drinking lemonade and Fraze brought his own beer. At any rate, he decided this was a problem he needed to fix. That led him on the road to developing the pop-top, and the reason our drinks now come in aluminum cans instead of steel.  

Read the story of the pop-top can, along with other can-opening innovations, at Smithsonian.

Deadpool 3 won't be released until May of next year, but Marvel fans are getting hyped about it thanks to dribs and drabs of information about the filming. A few days ago, both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman posted an image of Deadpool and Wolverine in costume. It was surprising to see Jackman in the blue-and-yellow Wolverine suit from the comics. He had never worn it in any of the movies. And now we have video from the actual film shoot, featuring Deadpool and Wolverine blocking out a fight scene.

E TEMOS VIDEO! Confira 3 minutos das gravações que aconteceram hoje de DEADPOOL 3.

Créditos no vídeo. pic.twitter.com/m1h6cAd60G

— Marvel News (@BRMarvelNews) July 11, 2023

Enjoy this little glimpse into the movie, because talks between SAG-AFTRA (the actors' union) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down and a strike has been called beginning Friday. Production on all Hollywood movies, as well as TV shows, is expected to cease. -via Geeks Are Sexy

They say you can only pick two: good, fast, or cheap. But sometimes lightening strikes. Some of our best movies, TV shows, or songs came about under strict deprivations. Lack of budget leads to innovation to get around it. Lack of time leads to a creative burst. You can't count on it, but some of the most creative productions have a backstory of desperation.

You can see 29 examples of things that turned out uniquely wonderful in spite of (or because of) a lack of time or money at Cracked. But these came from professional creatives. If you are getting your home remodeled, the "pick two" rule still applies, and sometimes you just get one.

Birds and other wildlife are amazing when it comes to adapting to new conditions, like human cities. Erect a building, and birds will nest on its roof and ledges like it was a tree. Humans fought back by placing anti-bird spike on ledges to deter birds from building nests. A new study out of the Netherlands shows that intelligent birds like crows and magpies responded by taking the anti-bird spikes and using them as building material for nests!

In the nests studied, crows tend to rip up the spikes and use them as building materials. Magpies, on the other hand, tend to place the spiky strips on top of their dome-like nests, possibly as protection from predators. These goth nests are a fine example of "reuse and recycle," although at the expense of the people who manufactured the anti-bird spikes. Kees Moeliker (previously at Neatorama) thought he'd seen it all when he collected a pigeon's nest made from nothing but chicken wire, many years ago. He said,

“I didn’t expect this. These anti-bird spikes are meant to deter birds, they are supposed to scare them off, but on the contrary, the birds just utilise them.”

As they say, life finds a way. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Auke-Florian Hiemstra/Naturalis Biodiversity Center)

We often lament that Hollywood has run out of ideas for new stories and new characters, which is why it seems like every new film is a sequel, prequel, remake, gender-swapped version, musical, or a different point of view of an existing franchise. But you can't argue with the fact that it works, or at least sells an awful lot of tickets. From the looks of the first trailer, the movie Wonka may work very well. This is a musical, and a prequel to the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. On paper, that sounds like throwing in all possible guaranteed shortcuts to a hit, but if the movie lives up to the trailer, it will be a lot of fun.

Wonka follows a young Willy Wonka, played by Timothée Chalamet, as he sets out to open a chocolate factory, but must first battle the existing chocolate cartel. Other characters are played by Keegan-Michael Key, Rowan Atkinson, Olivia Colman, Tom Davis, Sally Hawkins, and Hugh Grant -as an Oompa-Loompa! Wonka was originally scheduled to open in March of this year, but now will open on December 15. One look will tell you it will work much better as a Christmas movie. -via Gizmodo

In the early 19th century, the secret society of the Masons became more and more popular. The movers and shakers of small communities would bond over elaborate initiation rituals and spend time together socializing and sometimes publicly flaunting their wealth as they did good works. But in the 1820s, a member of the Batavia, New York, Masonic Lodge 433 named William Morgan became fed up with the insular political power wielded by the Masons. He threatened to publish an expose in the newspaper.

The Masons began to harass Morgan incessantly, having him arrested, searching his home, and even setting his business on fire. They also harassed publisher David Miller who was working with Morgan on the expose. In 1826, Morgan was again arrested, but bailed out by a stranger who was part of a gang who shoved Morgan into a carriage upon leaving jail. Morgan was never seen again.

The disappearance/murder investigation went nowhere, since everyone involved was a Mason. Miller then went ahead and published Morgan's expose, which led to more scrutiny and a backlash against the Masons from the public. Read how this led to the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party and even a presidential candidate in 1832, and dealt a blow to the secrecy of the Masons, at Smithsonian.