What have you accomplished in your life? What must you accomplish in order to feel satisfied with the summation of your experience on earth? This is your bucket list. For Walter Thomas, 90, of Woodstock, Illinois, this list consisted of one task: backing a car out of a garage without opening the door first.
His family convinced a body shop to donate an SUV for this purpose. One of his relatives provided a garage with a closed door for the special event.
-via Dave Barry
(Photo: Lara604)
The state-operated lottery of Indiana is offering a jackpot prize of 20 years of bacon.
Well, that’s what officials are saying, anyway. The prize is actually 20 years of bacon paid in $250 annual installments, so that’s actually more like 20 months of bacon for a normal person.
One can only hope that the state would also offer a lump sum payment. Not all of us can wait 20 years for that much bacon.
-via Dave Barry
Ashraful Arefin is a photographer in Dkaha, Bangladesh. For the past year, he’s owned two rabbits. The couple recently welcomed a litter of four kits into the world. So Arefin has been busy photographing the baby rabbits, documenting their lives from the day they were born. He writes:
Each and every day from their birth was special to me. Watching them growing up everyday, opening their eyes for the first time, wiggling their tiny feet… everything was just so special and magical to me! I thought I’d try to capture those moments and share the happiness with other people.
Thank you, Mr. Arefin! Go forth to Bored Panda and see the baby bunnies. You can also view more of his rabbit photos on his Facebook page.
-via Lost at E Minor
(Photo: Peter Klashorst)
The Sak Yant tattooing tradition from Cambodia is shrouded in mystery. The ink is said to contain snake venom, among other ingredients:
Sak Yant (or Sak Yan and Yantra) were tattoos engraved by Buddhist monks, Brahman masters and Ruesi ascetics into the warriors who sought protection and strength in battle. These are believed to give the warrior good health, luck, strength, and protection against evil. The Sak Yant artist punctures the skin with the use of a sharpened long steel rod or bamboo called mai sak dipped in ink that may be made of snake venom, charcoal, herbs, or cigarette ash. But no one really knows what’s in the ink since it’s a secret only known by the monks.
This is 1 of 7 tattoo styles from around the world rounded up by When on Earth. Other nations among the contributors are the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand, and China.
Ozzy is fantastic! He and his human, Nick, live in Norwich, UK. He’s a cross between a Welsh Border Collie and Kelpie. Ozzy holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest crossing of a tightrope by a dog. You can watch him set that record here.
In this video, he’s doing a handstand, which is something that we’ve seen before. But he’s doing it on a tightrope! Ozzy can also do a parkour trick that Nick calls tree bouncing.
(Corey Giacco/Down the Upward Spiral)
Please delete me from your mailing list. I am not interested in your products and/or services.
(After all—it’s not like we want to talk to meat.)
(Photo: NPR)
Before World War II, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was out of print and almost unknown—a forgotten work of a previous generation. Then, in 1945, it was republished for distribution to American soldiers. Now The Great Gatsby is regarded as a treasure of American literature.
World War II had a profound impact on American culture, including what Americans read and that they read at all. In an article in Commentary, Terry Teachout describes how government programs to provide books to soldiers massively increased American reading habits and middlebrow culture. The US government saw providing interesting books to soldiers as essential to maintaining morale:
The solution was to distribute paperbacks, which had been introduced to the United States by Pocket Books in 1939. At a time when most hardbacks cost two dollars or more—$33 in today’s dollars—Pocket Books printed 38 million 25-cent paperbacks in 1943 alone. Its success persuaded other publishers that it would make commercial sense to work with the military on a program to print books for soldiers, the assumption being that to do so would create a new market for inexpensive paperback reprints after the war. Thinking along closely similar lines, Time, the New Yorker, and other magazines created miniaturized “pony editions” for servicemen.
Thus, the Armed Services Editions, which were published by a civilian organization called the Council on Books in Wartime—compact, oblong, two-column-wide paperbacks that were designed to slip easily into the pockets of a uniform. They were sold to the military for six cents per volume.
These Armed Services Editions (ASEs) altered the thinking and literary experiences of a generation of American men:
Witness, for instance, the testimony of a G.I. who wrote to Helen MacInnes, the author of the espionage novel While Still We Live, long after the war. According to MacInnes: “He had read little until [the ASE edition] got him enjoying literature. From there, he read constantly, and after his service went to college. He ended with a Ph.D. and sent me a copy. It was dedicated to me, the writer of the novel that started his reading.” […]
No less suggestive was the experience of the New Yorker, whose wartime “pony edition” jumped in circulation from 20,000 in 1943 to 150,000 in 1944. The magazine’s domestic circulation, which had been 171,000 in 1941, reached 325,000 a decade later, a leap that the editors attributed to the fact that so many servicemen had read it for the first time in the pony edition. Most important of all, commercial mass-market paperback reprints—not just of mysteries but of every possible kind of book, lowbrow and highbrow alike—became ubiquitous after 1945, undoubtedly because of the popularity of the ASEs among returning servicemen.
-via VA Viper
(Image: ABC 10)
Whether you're in the wilderness, out on the street, or even in the privacy of your own home, you're in danger. If you stare at your phone, you're just asking to get bitten by a snake.
Tim Malone, a skating rink DJ in Chickasha, Oklahoma, learned that the hard way. He was walking through town to work while paying attention to his phone, not his surroundings. As a result, he stepped right on top of a 4-foot bull snake lying on a sidewalk.
The bull snake bit him, leaving a couple marks on his leg. Fortunately, that's a nonvenomous species. After briefly panicking, Malone helped capture the snake and release it into the wild.
-via Huffington Post
(Photo: sauer_kussen)
Redditor sauer_kussen brought this incredible find to my attention. One of the branches of the Medina County District Library (I think the main library) in Ohio has a real, active beehive inside the children’s department. It’s called the Library Observation Hive. A local organization of beekeepers maintains it, moving the hive out before the winter and returning it in the spring. The local branch of the Rotary Club brought it to the library in 2008 as a way for people to learn about bees. The resident bees can leave through a pipe that connects to the outside of the library building.
Wally, an Angora rabbit in Massachusetts, has long fur, as an Angora should. But his human, Molly, shaves his body. With long hair on only his ears, he looks like he’s a hound dog or a rabbit with pigtails. Check out his Instagram page for a full-out awwww experience.
-via Tastefully Offensive
(Photo: Nelsphotos)
Everyone at the ball will stop in awe and wonder when Princess Leia arrives in this incredible gown by cosplayer Elizabeth Oldak. The skirt alone has 20 feet of fabric in it and her hair is styled perfectly as Leia appeared in Episode IV. No other Disney princess will be able to say that she is underdressed for formal parties, which in this case was Star Wars Celebration 2015.
-via When Geeks Wed
(Photo: unknown)
You’ve been a big help—far more so than General Knowledge, Major Damage, and Corporal Punishment. May you one day earn a promotion, despite the loss of a perfect punchline.
-via Pleated Jeans
Marc Bushelle, a photographer in Brooklyn, and his wife Janine want to inspire their daughter to achieve great things. So they photographed young Lily costumed and posed as famous women of the past century who have accomplished great things. For example, Dr. Mae Jemison was an astronaut and Star Trek actor.
(Photo: Oddity Mall)
The Beach Glass is designed to address one very specific problem: drinking on a beach without accidentally knocking over your glass, or seeing it sink to the bottom of the sea. The glass is actually plastic, so it floats. And instead of ending in a foot, the bottom of this glass is a spike. When you’re done with a sip, drive your glass into the sand. The designers also suggest using it with snow or while soaking in a bathtub, since it will remain upright in water. I suspect that it could also be a crude weapon if sharpened into a shank.
-via Oh Gizmo
(Photo: Mark Vanhoenacker)
Why is there a hole in the airplane? This would normally be an alarming question. But we’re referring to the tiny hole in each window of a jetliner. It may be more noticeable when ice crystals form around them, which commonly happens. Mark Vanhoekacker of Slate explains that these holes are necessary to maintain proper cabin air pressure:
If you look closely at a typical passenger cabin window, you’ll see three panes, typically made of acrylic materials. The purpose of the innermost pane—sometimes called the scratch pane, but I like to call it the smudge pane—is merely to protect the next one.
The middle pane (with the breather hole in it) and the outer pane are more important. Generally speaking, as an aircraft climbs, the air pressure drops in both the cabin and the outside air—but it drops much more outside, as the aircraft’s pressurization system keeps the cabin pressure at a comfortable and safe level. This means that the pressure inside the aircraft during flight is typically much greater than the pressure outside.
The outer two cabin windows are designed to contain this difference in pressure between the cabin and the sky. Both the middle and the outer panes are strong enough to withstand the difference on their own, but under normal circumstances it’s the outer pane that bears this pressure—thanks to the breather hole. As Marlowe Moncur, director of technology for GKN Aerospace, a leading passenger cabin window manufacturer, put it to me via email: “[T]he purpose of the small bleed hole in the [middle] pane is to allow pressure to equilibrate between the passenger cabin and the air gap between the panes, so that the cabin pressure during flight is applied to only the outer pane.”
(Image: CBS)
So there’s nothing to be anxious about, Mr. Shatner. Please return to your seat.
-via Marilyn Terrell
