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Steven Spielberg is selling his $184 million mega-yacht because he needs a bigger boat

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Oceanco Seven Seas

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg is in need of a bit more space while traversing the oceans.

He's selling his yacht, The Seven Seas, which he purchased for approximately $184 million, because the 282-foot vessel is just not enough boat for him, according to the Daily Mail.

"Steven didn’t realize how much he’d enjoy cruising the ocean. Now he’d like to spend more time exploring the seas, and bring a few friends along for the ride. So he’s upgrading to a bigger yacht," a friend of the director's told the Daily Mail.

Oceanco Seven SeasBuilt by Dutch shipbuilding company Oceanco, The Seven Seas is packed with amenities. An infinity pool, 15-foot glass movie screen, helicopter pad, gym, spa, and massage room are just a few of the luxuries that are reportedly onboard.

As for accommodations, there's one master suite, two VIP suites, two double bed cabins, and one cabin with a twin bed. In total, the yacht can sleep 12.

Oceanco Seven Seas

Spielberg is currently chartering out the massive yacht to the tune of $1.2 million a month — making it one of the most expensive charters in the world, the Daily Mail reports.

His new yacht will be a mere 18 feet bigger, reaching the coveted 300-foot threshold and costing a cool $250 million to build.

SEE ALSO: Feast your eyes on what could be the world's most expensive mega-yacht

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These former horse stables have been transformed into Oakland's hippest street

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temescal alley oakland california 6025

The one-story, 20th-century structures that line Temescal Alley and Alley 49 used to horse stables. Horses pulled the town's trolleys from a nearby amusement park to the hills of Berkeley.

In 2011, the city rezoned the all-but-abandoned lot in Oakland, California, and four co-investors snapped up the parcels with intent to transform the microneighborhood.

Today, the two dead-end streets — known collectively as Temescal Alley— form a hotbed of creativity and artisanship. Independent shops, restaurants, and artists' workspaces make it the perfect place to pass an afternoon.

SEE ALSO: This guy visited every country in the world before turning 40 — here are the highlights from his journey

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On a recent visit to Temescal Alley, I nearly breezed right by the first street, known as Alley 49. Except for a few potted plants, the street was deserted.



I walked to the dead-end and discovered some hole-in-the-wall vendors: a doughnut shop, a designer boutique, and a bookstore. Hip!



Brick-and-mortar boutique Esqueleto enchanted me from the moment I entered. Jewelry, metals, and petrified wood glittered in the window.

Shop Esqueleto »



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Here's what 11 prominent authors were doing before they got famous

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The odd jobs writers take on to make ends meet while pursuing their creative passions can oftentimes end up being valuable sources of inspiration. After all, what would they write about without having some unusual experiences under their belts? 

Unplag.com, the plagiarism detection engine, put together an infographic on "big-name authors and their weird jobs," listing the gigs of great writers like Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, and Stephen King.

Perhaps these writers have their strange pre-fame careers to thank, in part, for their success as storytellers.  

Unplag.com Writers and Weird Jobs

SEE ALSO: 35 books everyone should read at least once in their lifetime

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Why expensive wine is probably a waste of money

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wine store

Luckily for our wallets — and our taste buds — the authors of "Think Like A Freak" present an experiment that shows one thing: Even if expensive wine is better, most of us won't be able to tell.

The book, a follow-up to the popular "Freakonomics," tells the story of Levitt's experience as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, where, as he puts it, "postdoctoral students carry out research and, once a week, sit with their esteemed elder Fellows for a formal dinner."

Wine, the book explains, was a key part of these weekly dinners and came from the society's extensive, and expensive, wine cellar. The dinners' attendees included Fellows who happened to be wine connoisseurs, and who were confident in the superiority of pricey bottles of wine.

To challenge this assumption — and in the hopes of bringing the dinner's price down — Levitt took two expensive vintages from the cellar along with the cheapest bottle he could find made from the same grape (about one-tenth the price of the other bottles), and conducted a wine tasting between four cups: Two held the same expensive wine, one held the other expensive wine, and the last held the cheap wine.

Levitt detailed the results on the Freakonomics blog:

The results could not have been better for me. There was no significant difference in the rating across the four wines; the cheap wine did just as well as the expensive ones. Even more remarkable, for a given drinker, there was more variation in the rankings they gave to the two samples drawn from the same bottle than there was between any other two samples. Not only did they like the cheap wine as much as the expensive one, they were not even internally consistent in their assessments.

Levitt and his coauthor, Stephen J. Dubner, admit that this experiment wasn't exactly scientific. But then again, it may very well be enough to ease your worry the next time you choose the $15 bottle over the $50.

SEE ALSO: Here Are The Top Wine Consuming Countries In The World

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This is the biggest mistake men make when they apply hair product

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David BeckhamApplying hair product isn't hard — open tube, squeeze out liquid, and apply to hair.

But there is a trick to the last step that many men aren't aware of.

You can't just apply cream, wax, or pomade to the top of your hair or the ends and let it sit there.

By only applying product to the tips of the hair and then styling it immediately, you end up with uncooperative strands that won't do anything close to what you'd like.

The solution is simple: Apply product from root to tip, massaging it in to ensure even distribution. This is much easier to do with a water-soluble product while the hair is still damp.

Note: Most hair products prefer to be applied to wet hair. Applying them to dry hair (even in the correct, root-to-tip fashion) will prove difficult and can result in a flaky, "dusty" look.

SEE ALSO: 16 things every modern gentleman should have in his bathroom

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46 years ago today, 400,000 people descended on a farm for the greatest music festival of all time

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Woodstock 1969

This August marks the 46th anniversary of the famed Woodstock Music and Art Festival, which took place on Max Yasgur's 600-acre farm in Bethel, New York.

Every notably musician at the time, from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin, played during the three-day fest. The crowd was made up of over 400,000 attendees who forced their way in, despite extremely heavy traffic and fences surrounding the perimeter.

Even with so many fans, zero reports of violence were made to the police during or after the Festival, and with two babies allegedly born on the premises, it certainly was a weekend of peace, love, and music.

Ahead, take a look at those who made it into the music festival's premises and became part of the renowned "Woodstock generation."

SEE ALSO: Vintage photos show what Glastonbury music festival was like in 1989

When residents of Wallkill, New York denied plans for Woodstock to occur near their town, farmer Max Yasgur came to the rescue, offering his land near Bethel at the price of $75,000.



Woodstock was created by the then-novice promoters John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang. Originally, the four had hoped the festival would be a way to raise funds to build a recording studio and rock-and-roll retreat near Woodstock, New York.



Tickets to the event costed $6.50 a day, and festival organizers told authorities they were expecting around 50,000 people, even when 186,000 tickets had already been sold.



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How a startup that makes fake meat from plants caught the attention of Bill Gates and the founders of Twitter

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ethan brown beyond meat

Meat doesn't have to come from an animal to be nutritious. 

That's the idea behind Beyond Meat, a startup that aims to manufacture fake meat using a patented technology and plant products.

Founder Ethan Brown grew up in Washington, D.C., with a professor father who had a real passion for agriculture.

On the weekends and over the summer, he and his family would travel to a hobby farm they owned in rural Maryland. The farm eventually grew into a full-fledged dairy operation. 

"I spent enough time there to get the notion that there must be a better way to do this," Brown told Business Insider. "Meat is well understood in terms of its core parts, as well as its architecture. Meat is basically five things: amino acids, lipids, and water, plus some trace minerals and trace carbohydrates. These are all things that are abundant in non-animal sources and in plants." 

"The challenge is to take those core parts from plants and assemble them in the architecture of meat." 

But why avoid meat in the first place?

"Raising livestock is an incredibly inefficient way of producing protein. It takes a lot of land, a lot of energy, and a lot of water just to generate one pound of meat from an animal. About 30% of the animal is meat we eat; the rest is not useful," Brown said. "By manufacturing meat, we can simultaneously solve four problems." 

He calls those problems "the four horsemen" — climate change, animal welfare, natural resources, and human health. Brown himself became a vegetarian when he was 18.

"A lot of people are uncomfortable with the way animals are slaughtered today," he said. "But we also have an unnatural number of animals living today, and when they breathe, they're expelling carbon."  

He cites a landmark study published by environmentalists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang in 2009: "The single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions globally is livestock. It's not automobiles, it's not power plants, it's livestock."

Bill Gates was impressed

In 2009, Brown, who has a background in fuel cell engineering, began working with a pair of professors at the University of Missouri — Fu-Hung Hsieh and Harold Huff — who had been developing their own platform for realigning proteins in plants. The team received several grants from the state to further develop the technology, which became the device that Beyond Meat uses to manufacture meat today.  

While the company's main plant is still located in Missouri, it has opened its main headquarters and research and development facilities in El Segundo, California, a small town just outside Los Angeles. 

beyond meat

In 2011, they scored an investment from Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm's first investment in a food startup. The Obvious Corporation — founded by Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone — would join Bill Gates, Taiwan's Tsai family, Morgan Creek Capital, DNS Capital, and Honest Tea founder Seth Goldman as later investors

"It's a powerful notion that you can potentially impact things globally very quickly by making this simple change," Brown said. 

In 2013, Gates wrote a blog post about his experience trying a chicken taco made with plant-based meat from Beyond Meat.

"Like most people, I don’t think I can be easily fooled. But that’s just what happened when I was asked to taste a chicken taco and tell whether the meat inside was real or fake.

The meat certainly had the look and the smell of chicken. I took a bite and it had the taste and texture of real chicken, too. But I was surprised to learn that there wasn’t an ounce of real chicken it. The 'meat' was made entirely of plants. And yet, I couldn’t tell the difference.

What I was experiencing was more than a clever meat substitute. It was a taste of the future of food."

In 2014, Whole Foods was forced to recall two curried chicken salads served in stores in the Northeast after mixing up the labels for the actual chicken and Beyond Meat's version. According to the New York Times' report of the incident, none of the customers could even tell a mistake had been made. 

Still, Brown says the team has plenty of  work to do. 

"We're not there yet. It will be a while before we perfectly replicate meat, but fortunately for us, if you put it our product in a taco or bolognese or something, it's very hard to tell the difference," he said. "Naked side by side, it's still clear which one is plant-based."

And the company certainly has its detractors, like Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott, whose disparaging words the team hung on a wall in its El Segundo R&D facility.

beyond meat

Brown says that the Beast Burger, made primarily from a non-GMO pea protein, continues to be one of the brand's most popular products. 

All of Beyond Meat's chicken and beef products can now be purchased in more than 4,000 stores across the country, including Whole Foods, Target, and some conventional grocery stores.

SEE ALSO: Sex, lies, and eggless mayonnaise: Something is rotten at food startup Hampton Creek, former employees say

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Welcome to The Dakota, New York's most exclusive building haunted by ghosts, murder, and a crazy co-op board

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Dakota Building NYC

The late 19th Century Dakota building is one of Manhattan's most mysterious and exclusive residences. 

Stories of ghost sightings have loomed around the building — located at 72nd Street and Central Park West — for years. 

But even more intimidating than its haunted rumors is the Gothic-style building's picky co-op board, which has made a sport of rejecting rich and famous applicants. 

Here are the 15 most fascinating facts about The Dakota, from past to present.

John Lennon was shot dead in front of The Dakota by a crazed fan.

On December 8, 1980 Lennon was assassinated by Mark David Chapman outside of The Dakota. He died at Roosevelt Hospital at the age of 40 after releasing his new album, "Double Fantasy." 

Yoko Ono still lives in The Dakota and says she saw Lennon's ghost there. 

Ono and late husband Lennon moved into The Dakota in 1973. Ono stayed in the building after Lennon's death and, according to the New York Post's Page Six, saw her husband's ghost sitting at his white piano. She says he told her, “Don’t be afraid. I am still with you.”

When he was alive, Lennon told Ono that he saw a "crying lady ghost" in the building. 

The Beatles musician told his wife he'd seen the ghost roaming the halls. 

The building has no fire escapes.

Architect Henry J. Hardenbergh purposely avoided fire escapes by slathering mud from Central Park between the layers of brick flooring to fireproof and soundproof the building. 

Tenants are "forbidden" to throw away original doors and fireplace mantels.

If tenants want to rid apartments of these items, there is a special storage area. 

The_Dakota_1890b

The original owner's former apartment has sterling silver floors.

Singer Sewing Machine Company founder Edward Clark commissioned The Dakota as a $1 million apartment building for 60 families, including his own. Unfortunately, Clark died in 1882, two years before the building was completed. 

According to legend, it gets its name from its far-west location. 

The building was situated so far West, people liked to joke that it might as well have been built in the Dakotas. 

It's been a magnet for the rich and famous since it opened in 1884. 

The building was reportedly fully rented before it even opened, thanks to a glowing New York Times review. Piano family the Steinways were one of The Dakota's first residents; although he died in 1883 Peter Tchaikovsky is said to have lived there (perhaps he lived in it before its completion); and actress Lauren Bacall owned a nine-room apartment for 53 years that recently sold for $23.5 million. 

Other notable residents include author Harlan Coben, U2's Bono, Rex Reed, Jack Palance, Lillian Gish, Boris Karloff, Rosemary Clooney, Connie Chung, and Maury Povich.

The building had zero vacancies for 45 years after it opened. 

From 1884 to 1929, all 65 of The Dakota's apartments — each with a reported four bathrooms, a parlor, and servant quarters — remained spoken for.

the dakota

The current application process is insane. 

Hopefuls must submit years of financial statements and tax documents, go through a background check, and pay a fee of over $1,000. After completing the rigorous application process, the co-op board can still deny applicants. 

Back in 2011, the co-op board was accused of bias and sued by a former board member who lived in The Dakota for racial discrimination and defamation. 

Celebrities don't get special treatment. 

Notable celebrities that have been rejected by The Dakota co-op board include Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas, Cher, Billy Joel, Madonna, Carly Simon, Alex Rodriguez, Judd Apatow, and Tea Leoni.

One particularly odd 10-room apartment has been for sale for eight years. 

Apartment 26 has been on and off the market for the last eight years, dropping from a $19.5 million asking price to a recent $14.5 million. 

It's rumored that $30,000 is buried under the floor of Lennon and Ono's apartment.

According to author Stephen Birmingham's 1996 book, "Life at the Dakota," the previous resident of John and Yoko's apartment hid the money under the master bedroom floor. Whether or not that's true will remain a question, as the board refuses to destroy the floor to solve the mystery. 

the dakota

Its boilers could can heat every structure in a four-block radius. 

The Dakota has an in-house power plant so its residents will never have to shiver. 

Leonard Bernstein’s former apartment was the building’s most expensive sale.

Located on the second floor, the four bedroom, four bathroom apartment had a library, formal dining room, kitchen and breakfast area, wood fireplace, and views of Central park. It was listed at $25.5 million and sold for $21 million.

 

 

SEE ALSO: No one wants to live in this $14.5 million apartment in New York's most exclusive building

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27 pictures that will make you want to visit India

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Varanasi India boats

India is home to gorgeous palaces, bustling cities, and a diverse and tranquil countryside filled with mountains, lakes, and exotic animals.

The intricacies found in the detailed architecture of India's palaces and temples are both fascinating and breathtaking, and most of the sites are unlike anything you would encounter in the Western world.

From stunning temples to lush tea plantations, here are 27 photos that will inspire you to book a trip to India.

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The Assam tea plantations in northeast India have lush green tea fields that seem to stretch on forever.



The Meenakshi Temple is located in Tamil Nadu in southern India and is a beacon of bright blues, yellows, pinks, and greens. The incredibly detailed layers of the temple reach far into the sky.

To visit the temple's website, click here >



The colorful Wagah border ritual is held daily in Punjab, where India borders Pakistan.



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ManServants lets you rent a man for $125 an hour to wait on you hand and foot — here's what it's like to use

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ManServants Service

Last year, a startup called ManServants launched, promising to give women what they really want: a man for hire to anticipate their needs and pamper them.

CEO and cofounder Josephine Wai Lin tells Business Insider her service "started as a joke, and it became way too real."

Last fall, ManServants launched in San Francisco, and then in Los Angeles. Most recently, the very real startup launched in New York City. Soon, Wai Lin says, it will expand to Las Vegas.

When might you need a ManServant? Anytime, really. ManServants gives a few examples on its website: bachelorette parties, girls' nights out, pool parties in need of a cabana boy, just to name a few. Wai Lin says ManServants have been hired for a few same-sex weddings, too.

We were curious about the service, so we decided to round up some friends and try it for ourselves.

SEE ALSO: The 30 most eligible men and women in every major industry

Wai Lin and her cofounder Dalal Khajah were working in advertising last year before ManServants launched. The two were trying to hire a "hot male assistant" for one of their girlfriends' birthdays. After failing to find what they were looking for on Craigslist and TaskRabbit ("There was no handsome help available on TaskRabbit," Wai Lin recalls), they turned to a stripping agency for help.



After the botched attempt to hire a stripper to perform menial office duties, Wai Lin and Khajah's coworkers started asking the two women to help them find and hire more of these men for their bachelorette parties in lieu of actual strippers. So last year, Wai Lin and Khajah quit their jobs to bootstrap ManServants.



ManServants are "not just handsome," Wai Lin tells us. "They're very multidimensional, multitalented. He can't just be good to look at. He has to be hilarious and entertaining as well."



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Star Wars is about to take over Disney theme parks — Here are all of the new attractions being planned

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star wars land.JPG

Disney announced a ton of new theme park attractions coming to its parks in California and Florida, Saturday at fan event D23.

Among them are several new "Star Wars" experiences including a launch bay, an update to its popular "Star Tours," and "Star Wars"-themed lands.

Let's take a closer look at everything "Star Wars" coming to Disneyland and Disney World.

Disney CEO Bob Iger took the stage at the company's biannual fan event D23 Saturday to unveil new "Star Wars"-themed lands coming to Disneyland in Anaheim, California and Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida's Walt Disney World Resort.



“We are creating a jaw-dropping new world that represents our largest single themed land expansion ever," said Iger. "These new lands at Disneyland and Walt Disney World will transport guests to a whole new Star Wars planet, including an epic Star Wars adventure that puts you in the middle of a climactic battle between the First Order and the Resistance.”



The lands will include two big attractions.



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10 crazy pictures of your favorite foods sliced directly down the middle

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Foods Cut In Half - 9

When photographer Beth Galton and food stylist Charlotte Omnès decided to collaborate, they wanted to take a critical look at foods we eat every day.

During the process of choosing those items, they realized that pairing various foods together would be more efficient and visually appealing. “Shown together, they create a stronger statement about their symbolic nature,” Galton told Business Insider.

It's not the first time a photographer has tackled bisected foods, but it's not a common practice, either. The images are technically difficult and time-consuming to make — but in the end, they are truly eye-opening.

We talked to Galton about how she created the series.

SEE ALSO: It's nearly impossible to tell that these stunning landscapes are made entirely of food

There is no set approach to the process of slicing and shooting. “Each item had its own set of issues that both Charlotte and I tried to solve,” Galton says.



While they were able to slice some of the foods in half easily, there were some cases where multiple images had to be taken and then later pieced together with Photoshop. A seasoned stylist, Omnès was able to create solutions to various problems they would run into, including adding gelatin to the soup in this shot.



They also worked with two digital retouchers. “When our ideas could not be created realistically, they would help guide us with creating enough images for them to assemble the image we wanted,” Galton says. “They both added their creativity as well as their technical expertise to the process.”



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Disney is working on its first Marvel ride, but you'll have to visit Hong Kong to see it

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iron man experience

Disney announced plans to expand its theme parks over the next few years at its biannual fan event D23 this weekend. 

In addition to several new "Star Wars" attractions, the company announced several other projects it's working on including a much-anticipated Marvel ride.

However, if you want to check it out, you'll have to head to Hong Kong Disneyland.

That's where the Iron Man Experience will debut in 2016.

Check it out below.

Set to open in Disneyland Hong Kong in 2016, the Iron Man Experience will be the first Marvel attraction to be at any Disney theme park.



The attraction will put guests in Iron Man's shoes as they soar above the streets and through the Hong Kong skies.



Riders will head to the Stark Expo where they'll board the Iron Wing to battle Avengers nemesis Hydra with Iron Man.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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