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These sleeping positions may be awkward to us, but cats are liquid, so they settle in just fine anywhere. The real reason you should check out this collection of cat pictures is because they are both funny and adorable. Link
Aric S. Queen was on a quest to be the first person at the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu, Peru, on January first. However, that involves some high-altitude walking uphill first thing in the morning, and he despaired as other hikers passed him by. But at the gate, serendipity gave Queen the opportunity to go first.
Ten-plus years of travel, forty-plus countries, countless marvels, but this is the only place I cried at seeing.
One photo was snapped from my phone — those four seconds were the maximum amount of time I wanted to take my eyes off of it.
For 30 seconds, I sat in silence – not even realizing what I had just done.
It took the sound of footsteps behind me to bring everything back to the present. And it took the sounds of voices to realize that when I had first gotten up – there were none.
An estimated 1.2 million people this year, and I was visitor no. 0,000,000,001.
Read Queen’s story and see a video of the adventure at Intelligent Travel magazine. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Aric S. Queen)
One morning, after she had two pear-sized tumors removed from her brain, Debbie Wagner decided to paint the sunrise. This became a daily ritual for her — a celebration of the life that she still had. For seven years, that’s what she’s done almost every day. Wagner explains why:
“When I look at a sunrise, it represents a new beginning. I’m just so happy to be here another day and see my kids do different things and go to dinner with my husband. I suppose that’s the addiction of it — it puts me in a state of mind focused on gratitude.”
Seven years have many sunrises, so Wagner has produced more paintings than she can display. She sells them to people who want to mark a special day:
Increasingly, Wagner’s artwork is taking on personal significance for others as well. People moved by her story have started requesting sunrise paintings for their own milestones: the day of a wedding or a baby’s birth; the day a loved one came home safely from Iraq or Afghanistan; the day a person finally overpowered a stubborn addiction.
Link -via Oddity Central (where there’s a video) | Photo: Debbie Wagner
Image Via allspice1 [Flickr]
If you didn’t already hear, Saturday was Thank A Mailman Day. While we missed the holiday itself, the fact is that mail carriers rarely get the respect and appreciation they deserve, which is why we’ve decided to go ahead and “deliver” you these fascinating facts about the USPS with the hope that you’ll find time in the upcoming week to say “thank you” to your mail carrier.
America got its first postal service in 1692 when King William gave Thomas Neale the power to erect “offices for the receiving and dispatching letters and pacquets,” essentially making him the US’s first Postmaster General.
The post office is so well-established in the states that the Constitution specifically grants congress the right “to establish post offices and post roads. In fact, Benjamin Franklin helped create the United States Post Office and served as the first Postmaster General.
After 1792 and up until the post office was divided from the government in 1971, the Postmaster General was a position on the Presidential cabinet and the person in the role served as the last person in the presidential line of succession –meaning that if the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Attorney General and every other cabinet member died in some sort of freakish accident, the leader of the post office would suddenly be in charge of the nation. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m certainly glad it never came to that.
The first adhesive stamps were issued in 1842 and postage rates became standardized in 1845. Congress officially authorized postage stamps in 1847 and the first two general issue stamps featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The two men were the only images seen on stamps until 1856, when a Thomas Jefferson stamp was issued. Throughout this time, other payment methods were still accepted but in 1856, postage stamps became mandatory for mail sent through the Post Office.
more …
Sally is a 44-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Denver Zoo. She developed a benign fibroid tumor of the uterus that was interfering with her other organs. Veterinarian Diana Boon arranged to collect orangutan blood from around the country and enlisted volunteer surgeons to remove the growth. The doctors tried to prepare but found a dearth of information on orangutan anatomy.
But when Sally lost the ability to go to the bathroom, Boon understood she had only days to live if the obstruction wasn’t removed. So on a Friday afternoon she fired off e-mails to the team, telling them the surgery had to be done by Sunday. And they wouldn’t have blood.
“It had to be a bloodless surgery,” Boon said. “It was either this would work, or this wouldn’t work and it would be fatal for Sally.”
And then, the group got a break. Covidien, a Boulder company that makes a device called LigaSure that helps limit blood-loss during surgery, donated the use of a machine for Sally’s sake.
Another snag loomed. The procedure demanded quite a bit of rummaging around in Sally’s abdomen. If a wayward blade nicked her distended bowel, she would die; Sally would not understand how to use a colostomy bag.
There were other hairy moments during the six hours of surgery, but Sally came through it. Read the entire story (and see a video) at The Denver Post. Link -via Fark
There’s Hello Kitty restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and more, so why not a dentist office? For those that just can’t stand the sterile environment of the standard dentist clinic, the Hello Kitty dentist office is a welcome alternative…even if it means having to travel to Japan just for a teeth cleaning.
Hill Valley of the future is such a wonderful place to live, or at least it is when created by Lego artist Alex Jones. He has even more cool movie sets on his Flickr page for the viewing enjoyment of any Lego enthusiast.
Link Via Geekologie
There’s something so wrong about combining the the mythos of Skyrim with that of Star Wars that it just has to be right. While there’s a lot of talking before you get to the good part, the bottom line is yes, you can get a lightsaber in Skyrim.
Via Kotaku
What more could an amorous porcupine ask for than a heart-shaped box of corn and a bouquet of red roses? It’s all just so romantic.
Via BoingBoing
Here’s one of those studies you probably didn’t need science to tell you: guys show off to impress women.
In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?
Link Via The Jane Dough
A Sulcata tortoise enjoys a salad, which probably took hours in real time. With time-lapse fast forward photography and a dramatic soundtrack, he’s an unstoppable eating machine. -via Geekosystem
In order to examine the way that the human brain evolved differently from that of other primates, scientists arranged for selected humans and monkeys to watch the Clint Eastwood movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
All the study participants watched 30 minutes of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, listening to the dialogue through headphones. The humans watched it once and the monkeys saw it six times, during which the participants’ eye movements were scanned and their neural activity monitored via functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The researchers found some similarities in brain activity locations among the species, but several differences, too. Monkey brain areas that fired up during movements on screen were quiescent in the humans, yet both species shared activity in other areas. This is a function of the species‘ separate evolutions — brain regions that may once have been very similar have adapted to focus on different tasks.
“The method may clarify whether specific functions are preserved in areas that anatomically correspond, are absent in one of the two species, or are shifted to other cortical locations,” Mantini and colleagues wrote. This, in turn, could shed light on how human cognitive function evolved, as compared to cognitive function in our closest cousins.
Which movie would you compel monkeys to watch?
Link | Image: United Artists
While it lacks the menacing message of The Prisoner poison glass (which is, after all, the effect we generally want when entertaining guests) Ange-line Tetrault’s coffee cups have a certain charm. As you drink from one, you expose a bear, a fox or an owl.
Aliens may have been rating our planet as a travel destination all along! This set of reviews is from Matthieu Barrère’s webcomic Awful Drawings. Link -Thanks, Kim!
The vehicle plays the music in the new video from OK Go in conjunction with Chevrolet. This took four months of preparation and four days of shooting. From their website:
So let’s not forget the true meaning of Sunday — OK Go in a super-hacked Chevy Sonic, playing 288 guitars, 55 pianos, and 1,157 homemade instruments while Damian acts as a stunt driver. (He took lessons.) It’s truly the little things that are meaningful.
How
do you tout the benefits of your fancy-schmancy lawn mower? Lawn mower
maker Jacoben turned to advertising icon Stan Freberg to create (now classic)
ad campaign.
Stan's answer? Compare it to a sheep. The Presurfer has the video clip: Link
Maria Popova of the always neat Brain
Pickings has a great review of The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination
The iconic image above is the classic 1926 illustration by Fritz Kahn titled Der Mensch als Industriepalast / Man as Industrial Palace
Lots of people love playing with tape, but Rebecca Ward has elevated sticking-tape-on things into an artform.
Take a look at her geometric installation, featured over at My Modern Met:
The tape artist redefines the space she's working in with her evenly spaced parallel and interweaving stretches of bright lines that form three-dimensional shapes. Taking her architectural pieces around the world, Ward has shown her installations from a gallery in Texas to a Kate Spade flagship store in Tokyo.
Link | Rebecca Ward's official website
Your bread might get soggy, but the view is worth it. At the Villa Escudero resort in the Philippines, you can dine right next to a waterfall. Don’t bother wearing shoes because the water runs right through the dining and buffet area.
Link -via Bit Rebels | Photo: maryan54
Do you watch the Super Bowl for the sports or the commercials? Back in the 1960s, a 30-second ad spot cost about $42,000. Now, it's $3.5 million, a whopping 8,300% increase. And something that costs that much money ought to be good, right?
This one above from 1973 is Noxzema's "Creamed" ad with football star Joe Namath and pre-"Charlie's Angels" Farrah Fawcett.
The Los Angeles Times has the timeline of the Best Super Bowl commercials through the years: Link
So, it's Super Bowl Sunday and you've gotten yourself invited to a football party but you know next to nothing about the sport or the two teams playing. What to do?
Don't worry, BuzzFeed has got your back! Here are some handy talking points if you found yourself amongst fans of either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots:
Read the rest over at Sly's post over at BuzzFeed: Link
For Super Bowl Sunday, Jaymee Sire made these jello shots by mixing vodka and fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. She then poured the mixture into emptied grapefruit rinds and quartered them after they congealed.
Link -via Tasteologie
AMC is promoting the return of the TV show Mad Men with a minimalist poster showing a falling man, with a blank expanse around him. The only other thing the poster contains is the date at the bottom right. That’s just asking to be embellished, and plenty of folks have great ideas about what to add. Gothamist asked for submissions, and has been collecting the “improvements” to post for your pleasure. Link to gallery one. Link to gallery two. -via Laughing Squid
Truly Custom Cakery based its cake on the Batmobile from the 1989 movie. Would the Tumbler Batmobile taste better? Or the 60s-era Batmobile? This calls for a comprehensive study.
Link -via That’s Nerdalicious! | Bakery Website
Costume retailer HalloweenCostumes.com recently held a contest for variations on Darth Vader’s iconic helmet. This feathery one wasn’t among the winners, but I think it’s the cutest. Who could resist obeying his every command?
Winners and Other Contestants -via The Mary Sue
Steven Spazuk draws with fire by holding a candle up to pieces of canvas, then adjusting the soot with brushes, knives, and his fingers to create images. I really like his impressionistic works, like the one above. But from a technical perspective, his massive composite portraits consisting of hundreds of smaller pieces demonstrate the magnitude of his skills. Watch a video at the link showing how Spazuk does it.
Sir, it’s quite possible this staircase is not entirely stable. Nonetheless, C3PO will descend it as Mr. Duchamp requires. John Mattos composed this painting. You can see a roundup of other famous works of art with a science fiction twist at the link.
Link -via The Uniblog | Mattos’s Website
Beer + fraternity = lawsuit:
A college student claims he was injured when a fraternity member in a “drunken stupor” decided “that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his anus,” and did so, “but instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in the defendant’s rectum, and this startled the plaintiff and caused him to jump back,” and fall off the fraternity’s deck.
The student is now suing the fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega, for failing to provide a railing for the deck as well as the frat brother who lit the rocket in question.
Prediction: Google will not be this young man’s friend in the future.
News Link and Complaint -via Lowering the Bar | Photo: Flickr user snackfight
Forget
Tiger Moms! The
secret to raising great, well-behaved kids is ... being French!
Pamela Druckerman explains why French parents are superior:
Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?
Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.
By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn't French children throw food? And why weren't their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?
Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.
If you've got kids that don't listen to you, this is the one post to read today: Link
Feeling
miserable today? Maybe you live in Miami, Florida. The city - famous for
mega-million mansions and South Beach clubs - has just gotten the unenviable
title of America's Most Miserable City.
Forbes Magazine took a look at 10 factors (including violent crimes, unemployment rates, and foreclosures) for the 200 largest metro areas in the United States to find the 10 most miserable cities in America. See if yours make the list:
Miami, Florida
The housing crisis has devastated Miami with 47% of homeowners sitting on underwater mortgages. Foreclosures have been rampant with 364,000 properties in the Miami area entering the foreclosure process since 2008 according to RealtyTrac.Detroit, Michigan
Detroit has closed schools and laid off police in an effort to avoid a bankruptcy filing this year. Home prices are down 54% the past three years, worst in the U.S. The median price was $38,000 last year in the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn metro division.Flint, Michigan
Flint razed 775 abandoned homes in the year ending October 2011, to try and change the city landscape. The state of Michigan appointed an emergency manager last year to take over Flint's budget and operations. Crime remains a severe problem with the violent crime rate the third worst in the U.S.West Palm Beach, Florida
South Florida has long been stained by corruption. One of the latest examples: Jose Rodriguez, the mayor of Boynton Beach (part of the West Palm metropolitan division) was suspended from his office last month by Gov. Rick Scott after he was arrested for allegedly using his position to obstruct a child abuse probe involving his wife's estranged daughter. Home prices in the West Palm area are off 50% since 2006.
See the rest at Forbes: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
