Thomas the Tank Engine should have died a long, long time ago. He begged for death, but death would not, could not come. We needed him. In the midst of the desolation of post-apocalyptic Sodor, we needed Thomas to maintain a transportation infrastructure.
First, Y. Nakajima gave him robotic legs because we couldn't keep the rail lines stable. But as Thomas's components continued to break down and the madness devoured him, we were eventually left with just his face.
In 2014, artist Billy Sprague of Oakland, California inherited his grandfather's leatherworking tools. He wanted to explore his own family traditions, so he began using them. As an avid bicyclist, he applied his emerging skills to bike saddle making. Sprague has since founded a studio called Obsidian Monarch, where he produces and sells leather goods, such as bike seats, guitar straps, and axe sheathes.
Cong Yan of Jilin, China weighed 230 pounds. He wanted to lose weight, but didn't know how. A weight loss business offered to help, but he couldn't afford it. So he found a simpler solution: wearing a 90-pound rock on his head.
Yan didn't start out that way, of course. He began 3 years ago with a 33-pound rock, then worked his way up to 90 pounds. Now he walks in a nearby park about 1.9 miles every day while wearing the rock. It works! Yan says that he lost 60 pounds in a single year. You can see more photos of him at the Daily Mail.
With proper tending, Nature's bounty can grow almost anywhere. In this case, her fruits swell out of bra cups.
Members of the Maple Village Women's Institute in Surbiton, Surrey, UK converted 20 bras into planters. They hung the bras along railings on a public road in town. The purpose of the project is to promote sustainable gardening everywhere. People can have gardens, even if they don't have a yard. The Surrey Comet quotes Kelly Woods, the president of the organization, about how to make your own bra garden:
She said: “Obviously the bigger the bra the more you can fit in it. We have put flowers in ours but you can actually plant fruit and veg in them too.
Øyvind Berntsen added LEDs to the cells of his bookcase, then made them programmable. With them, he can display pixelated images in multiple colors.
Berntsen first used the setup to create a game of Snake which ended with a marriage proposal to his girlfriend, Nadia Tokerud. You can see the romantic scene here.
Having secured Tokerud's hand in marriage, Berntsen sensibly converted the system into a game of Tetris. There are so many options with this gaming platform!
Joshua Wright is correct. Chickens, which outnumber humans 3 to 1, are one of the foundations of our civilization. Without the chicken, we would be hungier. Let us erect a monument to the chicken and burn offerings before it.
If I could live at the library where I work . . . yeah, actually, I'm going to pass on that one. But would have been an attractive opportunity when I was younger and more adventurous.
Cait Etherington writes in 6sqft that some older libraries in New York City used to have apartments. These were set aside not for librarians, but for building superintendents who needed to monitor the plumbing, boilers, and electricity as needed. Like residential building superintendents, this was easiest done on-site and on-demand. So they lived at their libraries:
This meant that for decades, behind the stacks, meals were cooked, baths and showers were taken, and bedtime stories were read. And yes, families living in the city’s libraries typically did have access to the stacks at night—an added bonus if they happened to need a new bedtime book after hours.
The New York Society Library, which is a subscription library, employed the Thornberry family, who are pictured above, for that purpose:
The family, who were joined by Rose Mary’s younger brother Terrence in 1945, lived in the library until Patrick Thornberry retired as the building’s superintendent in 1967. Their home was in what the library now refers to as the “closed stack” (a locked stack reserved for rare books). While the closed stack is currently sealed off to daylight to protect its rare contents, when the Thornberrys lived in the library, it was a light-filled and vibrant space. But the family was by no means confined to their apartment. They also enjoyed a penthouse-level garden and after hours, access to the library’s stacks and large reference rooms too.
This lizard didn't, even though the snake had swallowed him whole. Bryan Snyder, a naturalist, spotted this savage battle while walking in Santa Ynez, California. I'm rooting for the lizard. He has spirit.
If you apply sunblock to yourself, you may miss spots. And it can be awkward to ask someone else to rub it onto your hard-to-reach areas. That's why this invention could be handy. It's called the SnappyScreen. It sprays sunblock over your entire body.
First, select the SPF level that you want. Then tell the machine whether you're under or over 5 feet tall. It gives you several seconds to step inside. Then it sprays a sunblock mist on one side, gives you time to turn around, then sprays the other side.
The SnappyScreen is currently available at 10 resorts in the US and Caribbean. But the developers hope to eventually make it available at waterparks and ordinary swimming pools.
In the Ponar forest outside of Vilnius, Lithuania, the Nazis murdered and buried about 100,000 people. Later in the war, as the Red Army began to push the Germans out of the Soviet Union, the Nazi authorities realized that they couldn't leave such a massive number of corpses behind as evidence.
So they took 80 Jewish prisoners from a nearby concentration camp and forced them to dig up and then burn the bodies in the forest. The prisoners had to remain the forest at the site during the project. They took the opportunity to dig a 112-foot escape tunnel. On April 15, 1944, they fled through it. The Germans pursued the escapees, but 11 survived the war.
Recently, archaeologists used electrical resistivity tomography equipment, which is also used in oil exploration, to find the tunnel. They left the site physically undisturbed, relying on only remote sensing tools to study it. The BBC reports:
Jon Seligman, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said he was reduced to tears on the discovery of the tunnel, calling it a "heart-warming witness to the victory of hope over desperation".
"The tunnel shows that even when the time was so black, there was yearning for life within that," he told Associated Press.
When Ben Franklin learned that lightning consists of electricity, he realized that it would be possible to protect a tall building from lightning strikes by connecting a ground wire to a pointed metal rod at the top of that building. He called his invention the lightning rod.
The current State House of Maryland was built in 1797. Before he died in 1790, Franklin drew detailed plans for how his lightning rod was to be installed. The builders followed that plan and it's remained there ever since.
The Republican governor said in a Facebook post Saturday morning that the lightning rod on the dome "was constructed and grounded to Franklin's exact specifications." He says at the time it was added to the building, it served as "a powerful symbol of the independence and ingenuity of our young nation."
On June 27, 1976, 4 Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. They forced the pilots to fly to Libya, and then to Uganda, where they could rely upon the assistance of the dictator Idi Amin. There, the terrorists and Ugandan soldiers released some of the hostages, keeping 106 of them, most of whom were Jews or Israelis.
After diplomatic efforts failed, the IDF launched a raid dubbed Operational Thunderbolt on the Entebbe airport where the hostages were held. This was conducted in C-130 Hercules and Boeing 707 aircraft flying 2,500 miles from Israel just above the ground and water to avoid radar detection.
Redditor petriomelony found a pepper that looks like it has a built-in gradient illustration of mild to hot spiciness. S/he used it to make jerk chicken, which hopefully has a similar range of flavor punch.
Victoria Belanger, the inventor of the Cadbury Creme Egg jello shot, is back with the perfect treat for the Fourth of July! She hollowed out stawberries, then filled them with gelatinized vodka colored white and blue.
Get cooking now and you'll have your own available for your party. You can also wait 10 days, change the order of the colors, and have shots for Bastille Day.
