Weekend Links: The Origins of Popular Monsters

Starting things off in a big way with this time-lapse trifecta: a photographer captures a meteor, the Milky way and the Northern Lights all in one shot. Nicely done!
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Flossy reader Steven Meeker does the Europe Map Rap for (and with!) his class. "It's terrible," he says, "but they loved it." I actually think it's pretty great, and reminds me of me of my late grandmother who had a rap to learn the books of the Old Testament. Fantastic.
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Johanna sent in a certain link about testing one's color IQ that made me remember a similar link … (this link was co-hosted by the Department of Shameless Plugs. There's another one tomorrow, get ready!)
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From the WayBack Machine comes the unexpected and lovely duo of Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown singing "It's a Man's World." Goes to show why classics like this never go out of style [thanks Mary for the link!]
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Brush up on your monster knowledge for Halloween - just where did the tales of certain monsters originate?
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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: check out these 10 cartoons inspired by live-action characters (or real people). I like how half of these are backed up by fact but the rest are just speculative. Not to say I disagree!
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From the Annals of Too Much Time: Artist Sagaki Keita's densely composited pen and ink illustrations are a wacky juxtaposition of fine art and notebook doodles, and the results are stunning!
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Sure emoticons and GIFs can be good ways to display certain emotions online, but sometimes you just need the help of sound. This sound effect gallery should do the trick - especially because you can link directly to certain sounds.
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Finally, give some additional thought to English idioms (or one of them, at least), courtesy of this confused German ("it's so inefficient!")
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Stay tuned! More links on the way tomorrow - in the meantime send your submissions to FlossyLinks@gmail.com!