We Recommend: Your Friday Freebies

Each Friday, our contributors send in a bunch of (legally) free stuff they’ve come across this week to help you waste your weekend. You’re welcome.

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Video — David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s ‘Dancing In The Street’ Without Music

Recommended by: Katie Booth (‘What Should We Do About TV Spoilers? And Why Do We Even Care?‘)

It really shouldn’t be so funny, but it is. Some genius on YouTube has made Bowie and Jagger’s classic music video to ‘Dancing In The Street’ music-less and the results are pretty amazing. It’s the latest in a series of “Musicless Musicvideos” and turns the original choreography into one big, awkward mess.

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Article — “And Now, Every Character From ‘Orange is the New Black’ As They Appear On ‘Law and Order'”

Recommended by: Rebecca Shaw

If you’ve been watching Orange is the New Black (as you should be if you want to be my friend), you’ll know it is a show about women in prison and the people who run it. It’s also apparently about my indecision in deciding which character I would want as my prison wife, but that’s another story. Fittingly, the website Autostraddle (an online haven for women who like women) has discovered that a lot of the main actors from OITNB appeared on Law & Order at some point, before moving quite logically from the law and order system into the prison system. And it delighted me.

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Tumblr — Women Ignoring Men As Art

Recommended by: Elizabeth Flux (“The Team Behind Grace of Monaco Have Made The Worst Possible Film, So You Don’t Have To”)

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys giving back stories to strangers or imagining the conversations that seagulls are having with each other, then you’ll probably find the same kind of joy in this series of pictures. Historical paintings provide an abundance of hilarious facial expressions and spawn niche Tumblr pages all the time, but there is something extra dumbly funny about ‘Women Ignoring Men As Art’.

Maybe it’s the uncomfortable parallels with high school romantic comedies, or maybe it’s the fact that the woman in the fourth-last picture has the cold, dead eyes of a killer; whatever it is, I laughed harder than that time I captioned a Lord of the Rings picture with a Gimli monologue about beard conditioning where every third word was “BEARD”. Strong praise.

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Podcast — The Organist ‘Episode 14: The Birthday Song‘

Recommended by: Andy Huang

If you happen to know someone superhumanly cool and awesome who’s having a birthday soon, and would like to send/sing/wish/entertain them with an original birthday message, then stop racking your brains and/or surfing the net for funny animal memes and use this thing instead. Produced by the savvy folks at Believer mag, The Organist is a clever, offbeat arts and culture podcast that features quirky interviews, features and radio plays, with recent contributors including St. Vincent/Annie Clark, and Portlandia power duo Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.

Right now, at this very minute, the ‘Birthday Song’ is being sung to someone. We all know the song, but what you might not know is that it’s heavily tied up in intellectual property laws. This episode looks at the song’s tortured history, but in an interesting way – The Organist held a comp for a new, copyright-free ‘Birthday Song’, all of which can be found and heard on Free Music Archive. While this might prove a bit tricky to remember, Romie Scott’s ‘Birthday Song’ is a particular favourite of mine.  And whether it’s their birthday or not, your pal will love and thank you for introducing them to this very excellent podcast.

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Article — ‘Important Kitty Litter Questions Answered‘, by Paul Ford for Medium 

Recommended by: Steph Harmon (‘Male Brown Bears Are Having Heaps Of Oral Sex, And The Scientists Are ON IT‘)

“Two weeks ago I read an article about how kitty litter is used to store nuclear waste and realized that, despite lugging about a ton of litter around New York City over the last 20 years in the service of various cats, I didn’t know much about the stuff. I set out to find where it comes from and if it’s killing us, and in the process realised that kitty litter was directly responsible for the shape of Internet culture.”

That’s just an excellent way to start an article about kitty litter. In 1500 words, Ford tracks kitty litter back to its humble origins, before examining its environmental impact and its fraught relationship with nuclear storage and the internet. It also includes a handy guide as to which types of kitty litter are bad. Turns out, most of them. “Clay litter is strip-mined; clumping litter is strip-mined and clumps in the lungs of your cat; organic litter doesn’t really biodegrade; and silica gel litter requires solid waste flushing, which spreads toxoplasma gondii into the water supply, infecting oysters, the beloved food of the joyful sea otter, so playful and sleek and, now, dead.”

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Twitter Friend — Olivia Taters

Recommended by: Chris Harrigan

A computer pretending to be a Ukrainian teenage boy supposedly passed the Turing test earlier this month, launching a thousand fears that when Skynet finally strikes the apocalypse may be more tad more angsty than a coldly rational merchant of death. But! Another teenage automaton has been fooling people into talking to it for a while now.

Her name’s Olivia Taters, and she’s a sassily nonsensical Twitterbot. Programmed to make fun of people’s syntax (fun, right), she quickly took on an idiosyncratic life of her own, inverting people’s tweets in poetic juts of hallway-spun wisdom:

my hands are literally nazis.

— olivia taters (@oliviataters) May 21, 2014

just saw a vine of a girl pushing a big load of gummy worms out of her ass . white people are inexpensive handheld cakes.

— olivia taters (@oliviataters) February 8, 2014

a bitch will secretly supply that need for you and your family before this week runs out in jesus name.

— olivia taters (@oliviataters) June 19, 2014

She’s been mistaken for the girlfriend of One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson, and guest-edited today’s Today in Tabs newsletter, which is also another free thing you should totally get in on. Follow Olivia for a free, almost human friend.

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