Well, his heart was in the right place. Jesean Morris wanted to help ALS fund research to cure amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. So he took the ice bucket challenge and posted the video on Facebook to spread awareness about the cause.
He also spread awareness about his whereabouts, which was of interest to police in Omaha, Nebraska. That's because Morris is a convicted felon. He violated his parole. So when someone else saw his post on Facebook, s/he recognized the house in the background of the video and alerted police.
NBC News reports that Morris was displeased by this turn of events:
The suspect allegedly gave the cops a false name and birth date, knocked out a safety partition in the police cruiser, and spit in the one of the officer's face, according to an incident report. Morris was booked into jail on the warrant and on suspicion of criminal impersonation, resisting arrest and assaulting an officer.
UPDATE 8/28/14: Neil Tugade Consuelo, the cosplayer in the photo, kindly shows up in the comments to tell us more. Thanks, Neil! He writes:
The electrical components consisted of the globe which lit up using LEDs taken from a illuminating ice cube. Inside the tube has 3 small LED flash lights that were cut and wired all together to shine on my face. Now, the controller that I am holding controls the LED strips on the gold pillars on the left and right side of me. The LED strips and either stay illuminated, blink at a steady pace or blink faster.
This ingenious cosplayer, whose name remains unknown to me at this point, is dressed as Zordon of Eltar, the enigmatic (and racist) mentor of the Power Rangers from the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I'm curious about what he can do with those electrical components.
In his most famous painting, Sandro Botticelli showed Angelina Jolie rising from the sea on a half shell. That at least is this interpretation by Eisen Bernard Bernardo, an artist in Los Baños, the Philippines. For his series Mag + Art, he takes photos of celebrities from magazine covers and places them neatly over the images of people in famous works of Western art.
Do you like dogs? Would you like to earn money working with them? If you're a great dog walker, you can earn $96,000 a year. It's one of many jobs that pay really well, even though you might not have heard of them. BBC Capital reports:
A good dog walker, for instance, can make a mint, according to Aaron Boodman. “Our dog walker charges $25/session,” Boodman wrote. “He takes up to eight dogs walking at a time (soon to be the legal limit in my city), twice a day. That's $96k per year, much of it in cash. Once he's picked up and dropped off all the dogs, each run to the dog park takes about three hours round trip. So his workday is about six hours.”
One anonymous pool boy said he made more than $60,000, plus tips, for just six months of work. “I would charge a customer $40 a week to keep their pools clean and all the chemicals balanced. This usually took me about 45 minutes a trip,” he wrote.
“I would typically only have to visit the pool once a week so I could do many pools in a week. For about five years I maintained roughly 10 pools a day, six days a week for six months out of the year…I was making good money for an 18 year old with no college education.”
Other jobs require mastering unusual skills. A theatrical carpenter, for example, can earn $400,000 a year. A a construction crane operator may be one of the highest paid employees on a site, earning $500,000 a year.
There was flooding in Chicago last week, shutting down roads and damaging homes. WGN-TV sent its helicopter to one of the flooded areas. The news crew back at the station watched the footage and commented on it.
Yes, there was water damage. But, oh, look! There's a huge statute of the Hulk in one resident's backyard! The journalists quickly lose their focus and go to all-Hulk coverage.
Batman is not a disguise that Bruce Wayne wears. Bruce Wayne is a disguise that Batman wears.
He's never truly out of uniform. But when it's really hot, Batman's suit must be lighter and cooler than kevlar. A bit of sunscreen and a few hours on the beach are all the Light Knight needs.
We are now in the midst of the bicentennial of the War of 1812. I find this war fascinating and my interest has led me to write numerous posts on the subject for Neatorama. For example, last Sunday, I published a lengthy piece to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the burning of Washington--an event the British Embassy in Washington humorously observed with a White House-shaped cake surrounded by sparklers:
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of burning the White House. Only sparklers this time! pic.twitter.com/QIDBQTBmmL
One of my more popular War of 1812 posts is this one about HMS St. Lawrence, a massive, 112-gun warship that the Royal Navy built on Lake Ontario. At the time, ships could not readily enter or exit that lake, so this huge expenditure of British treasure was trapped there.
HMS St. Lawrence
When the St. Lawrence sailed out of Kingston harbor on Sept. 10, 1814, the Americans were properly fearful of the consequences. The US Navy on the lake had no force capable of defeating it in battle.
But that did not stop the Americans from trying. President Madison hoped to build two battleships equal to the St. Lawrence. How the nearly bankrupt United States hoped to pay for this goal is a mystery to me. But, to their credit, the American shipbuliders at Sackett’s Harbor, New York made serious progress toward that goal with minimal financial backing.
Thankfully, peace intervened. The treaty signed at Ghent ended the war on the basis of status quo ante bellum. This was the end to the second and final war between the United States and Britain. But the popular view on both sides at the time was that Ghent established a temporary armistice. War would likely return soon.
So the USS New Orleans remained incomplete, in its stocks, while Americans and Britons looked at each other suspiciously across Lake Ontario. Even after the demilitarization of the Great Lakes with the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement, the New Orleans sat not in a state of readiness, but at least hypothetically useful.
It remained in place until 1883. It was then that the US Navy sold the rotting remains of the obsolete hulk to a merchant in Syracuse, New York. By that time, US-British relations had greatly improved and the possibility of war between the two nations seemed unlikely. The mightiest warship that never was would never be.
What's in the purse? Not even Indiana Jones is reckless enough to excavate the unearthly horrors that lie beneath the surface of receipts. Rather than incur the curse, it's best to just leave the old purse alone.
Camels existed in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago, when they were most likely hunted to extinction. The New World was then camel-less until 1856, when the US Army imported dromedary (one-humped) camels from Egypt. They were very useful for crossing the western deserts. Later, the camels went to work in as far north as Vancouver Island. Dr. John Lienhard of the University of Houston describes the adventures of these American camels:
In any case, the Confederate Army captured the Texas Camels during the Civil War and used them to move cotton into Mexican ports. Meantime, private promoters in San Francisco also saw the potential for camels. They realized that two-humped Bactrian camels could carry even more freight than Dromedaries.
So they began importing Bactrians from Manchuria. Some were sent to Los Angeles. In fact, someone even tried to set up a camel express service between Southern California and Arizona.
But the camel saga takes a strange northward turn with the discovery of gold in British Columbia's Cariboo region -- off in the mountains two hundred miles north of Vancouver. One John Calbreath quickly bought 23 of the San Francisco Bactrian camels at three hundred dollars each. He had them shipped to Vancouver Island. From there they were put on a barge and taken to the Frasier River. There they went to work hauling goods into the mountains.
Genius investor Warren Buffett (right) is worth $62.7 billion. But his children will see only a small fraction of it when he dies. He's leaving them some money, but only what he describes as "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."
He's one of many self-made millionaries and billionaries who is intentionally leaving only small portions of their fortunes to their children. They're not doing it out of spite, but out of love. The famous and wealthy chef Nigella Lawson put it like this:
I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money.
Roxanne Roberts investigated this trend for the Washington Post. She describes how one multi-millionaire arranged his estate:
‘We probably struggled over this more than any other issue,” says a local self-made multimillionaire. The businessman and his wife, worth hundreds of millions, grew up modestly in middle-class families and wanted to create a financial plan that would take care of their children — but not spoil them — if the couple died suddenly.
“We were horrified by what might happen if they had control of a large amount of money at a young age,” he says. “The more we stared at that, the more we became uncomfortable.”
Inspired by Buffett’s example, they created trusts for each of their now college-age children. Each kid has $2.5 million controlled by trustees, who can release money only for education, health care, a home purchase or a business start-up. Any unspent money in the trust will continue to be invested and grow.
Those restrictions remain in place until each child reaches age 40; after that, the money is all theirs to do as they please. In their 20s and 30s, the funds are there to get them launched; by 40, their parents assume they will be mature enough to use the money wisely or save it as a safety net.
Eleanor Bartsch, a violinist in Madison, Wisconsin, visited the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. There, she performed Bach's Concerto for Two Violins for Kelly and Viola, two elephants who live there. Kelly and Viola, who are clearly classical music buffs, danced to the rhythm.
Grove Care is a home for the elderly in Winterbourne, Bristol, UK. It includes a facility for people with Alzheimer's Disease and dementia. This facility features Memory Lane, a strip of three shops decorated to look like a stereotypical English village from the 1950s.
The shops are a post office, a grocery store, and a pub. There's also a working phone box. They're decorated with vintage advertisements and objects. Residents can visit Memory Lane and place a call, mail a letter, drink a pint of beer, and buy a cake.
Memory Lane is an exercise in retro-decorating, a caregiving practice for people with dementia. Besides providing comfortable surroundings, retro-decorating taps into old memories to help dementia sufferers cope with daily life. In a 2011 article in The Guardian, June Andrews, a scholar in the field, describes how it works:
"If you have ever woken up in a strange hotel and had to spend five minutes trying to work out how to use the light switch or the shower you can understand how it might feel for someone with dementia when faced with a new style tap or a mobile phone," she explains.
"If you provide older examples of these objects, for example an old bakelite phone, someone with dementia might remember how to use it and be able to make a phone call, whereas they may not with a mobile phone, even if they had been using the mobile perfectly well just six months ago."
Guangxi Province, on China’s border with Vietnam, contains this natural wonder known as Moon Hill. The mountain is called that because the hole that goes straight through it is shaped like the moon.
I use a sitting desk because . . . actually, I'm not sure why it's necessary to argue for sitting down while working. Nothing is better than a good sit, except possibly a good lie down. My sitting desk is definitely a considerable improvement over Alex's original office design.
P.S. I have yet to acquire the time or the money to build my proposed mechanical bull desk. Attention venture capitalists: talk to me if you're interested.
This is a cycleball match. A 2010 article in Wired describes the game: two teams of two players each face off on an indoor court measuring 36 by 46 feet. The ball is about 7 inches in diameter. Players use their bicycle wheels to whack the ball toward their opponents' goals, which are 6.5-foot squares. As you can see from this match in Japan, skilled players can make the ball go precisely where they want to.
The sport was popular in Europe during the 1970s and 80s. There was an effort to develop it in the United States, but it never flourished. There was, however, a major demonstration of cycleball in 1984.
