New Zealander Cathy Valliant and Australian David Valiant tied the knot on Jetstar Flight 201, heading from Sydney to Auckland. The couple exchanged vows at 37,000 feet, just when the flight hit the halfway point between the two countries. Their ceremony was a celebration of their home countries, the first time they met, and their love of aviation, as UPI detailed:
The couple said airplanes have always been a big part of their relationship -- they met in 2011 as players of the Airport City computer game and first met in person at the Sydney airport two years later.
A Jetstar representative told CNN "all customers [who had been booked on the flight] received an email beforehand saying there was going to be filming."
The customers were allowed to change flights without extra charge if they did not want to be on camera.
Regular puffer jackets better watch out, as there’s a new hot item in town! Vollebak, a start-up company that uses science and technology to make the future of clothing happen first has introduced the indestructible puffer jacket. Designed to outlive the owner and be an item that can be passed down to generations, the heavyweight jacket is made out of the world’s strongest fiber, dyneema, as Designboom detailed:
Made out of dyneema, the world’s strongest fiber, the puffer jacket is considered to be fifteen times stronger than steel. Dyneema is most commonly used for heavy duty jobs, such as tethering satellites from space or mooring giant container ships. Unlike other puffer jackets on the market, the ‘indestructible’ coat can also serve as a protective armor, as it endures extreme damage tests, such as knife slashing and tearing.
Besides the ultra-durable fabric that integrates dyneema, the jacket also features military-grade belt tape, zippers, elasticated drawcord adjusters and other details that will last for years.
Many Americans spent the month of November during elementary school learning about the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when the Pilgrims feasted for three days with the Wampanoag in celebration of successful harvest. But it wasn't the first such feast of thanks the Pilgrims experienced, since such holidays were held in Europe, too, to celebrate the harvest, or more often to celebrate a victory in battle. Earlier settlers in Virginia had those celebrations, too, usually after a massacre of the locals.
David Silverman lays down the reality of the Wampanoag and Pilgrim alliance in his seminal book This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. In the book, Silverman details why the Wampanoag Massasoit (a sort of diplomatic leader) named Ousamequin helped the Pilgrims even though they had spent their first year robbing graves and squatting in emptied Wampanoag houses. In short, Ousamequin vowed to protect and help the 50-odd pilgrims because his people simply needed the numbers. The Narragansetts, a rival for land and resources, had not fallen victim to the spread of European diseases and they were willing to fight for land to plant their crops to feed their people.
This all leads up to the first “rejoicing” that took place in the fall of 1621. Back then, a “rejoicing” was a party. For three days (like the fest back in Holland), people would feast, run shooting drills, compete in feats of strength, and so on — kind of like a proto county fair. The Wampanoag — who had promised military protection to the Pilgrims — heard all the shooting, assumed they were under attack, and sent over 90 of their soldiers with Ousamequin at the lead. After a tense moment and realizing the pilgrims were actually partying, the Wampanoag ended up staying the three days and partying too.
By all accounts, there were no Pilgrims holding out their hands and inviting the Wampanoag to their table in “thanks.” It was mostly a misunderstanding that led to a little comingling. Almost inexplicably, though, this one-off event that few ever thought about again until the 1890s ended up being central to our ideas of Thanksgiving today.
Another strange fact that belies what we learned in school is that it took another 200 years for the Pilgrims' feast to be pinpointed as the "first Thanksgiving." The Puritans, a completely different group of settlers, later held their own feasts of gratitude. The Founding Fathers and other presidents occasionally declared a Thanksgiving holiday for one reason or another -often as a victory celebration after a battle- but did not tie the festivities to the 1621 feast until much later. And a lot of the traditions we keep today weren't introduced until the 20th century. Read a history of Thanksgiving at Uproxx.
Good news for people who suffer from migraine attacks. There is now a new drug that can relieve pain after just two hours, according to a new study.
For the estimated six million people in the UK who suffer migraine attacks, the new drug being trialed in the US offers hope for treatment – particularly for those who cannot take existing medication because of a heart attack or stroke risk.
The most common medication taken for migraines are triptans, which narrow the blood vessels in the brain. This process, however, is not safe, especially for those with pre-existing cardiac problems.
The new medication, Ubrogepant, is an oral pill that instead works by blocking a protein called GCRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide) in the nervous system, which is involved in pain signalling, blunting any discomfort.
More details about this medicine over at Independent.
It’s that time of the year again where we gather around the table with our family or close friends and eat good food. But once you’re on the table with people, politics becomes an inevitable topic — you will talk about it, whether you like it or not. The Thanksgiving table then becomes not as a table of peace, but as a table of debate, insults, and quarrels. So how do you survive this season with such things in mind?
The Washington Post provides us some insightful tips on how to handle quarrels within the Thanksgiving table. Check them out over at the site.
When 82-year-old bodybuilder Willie Murphy was preparing for bed, she heard a man outside asking for help. However, she would not let the man in. After all, why should she let someone into her house?
The man then became furious and broke in. But, unknown to him, he picked the wrong house.
“[The] young man is in my home,” recounts Murphy. “ [He] broke the door. And you know what? It was kind of semi-dark and I’m alone and I’m old,” she continues. “But guess what? I’m tough,” she says with conviction while showing her muscles on camera.
We’ve seen it in enough holiday rom-coms, from parties to family gatherings, the mistletoe is a very well-known Christmas item and tradition. While it stems from Norse mythology and Greek and Roman medicine, how did it end up being everyone’s most loved or most despised Christmas decoration? The mistletoe’s ties to both love and fertility from mythology is what encorporated the plant in Christmas traditions, as Reader’s Digest details:
Since this healing plant blossoms even in the cold winter, Celtic Druids thought it restored fertility, too. On the mythology side, legend says the gods used mistletoe to resurrect Odin’s son Baldur from the dead. And Baldur’s mother, the goddess of love, vowed to kiss whoever passed the plant, a symbol of love.
Ties with fertility and love stuck with the plant through the 18th century and were easily incorporated into Christmas celebrations. It reportedly started with lower-class servants in England before moving up to the middle classes, according to TODAY.
Versions of the tradition have changed throughout the years, too. One version says couples who kiss should also take a berry from the mistletoe with each kiss, and another says that refusing a kiss under the mistletoe is bad luck.
The Internet, specifically social media had dealt a huge impact on every aspect of our lives. From aesthetically pleasing shots of food, and clothes that someone owns for clout, to setting the trend on what’s the good thing to do, eat, or wear, not only has social media affected our culture, but also Japan’s food culture. Japan Times details the heavy impact and change social media has on what people want to eat nowadays:
The photographic skills of the uploader became very important and, at the same time, there were many examples of food that wasn’t just made for show that became wildly popular because it was ba-e (good looking). Few foodstuffs demonstrate this as well as bubble tea, called tapioca milk tea in Japan. Tapioca had an early peak in popularity in the 1990s, but the big tapioca pearls in the milk tea introduced from Taiwan around 2015 were deemed to be particularly ba-e, and millions of Instagrammers pose with cups of the cute drinks.
While Instagram helped to popularize the notion of regular food as visually attractive, most people (women especially) no longer seem that interested in making highly complicated food. Short and sweet recipes are now the norm, and choi-tashi (adding just a bit of something to packaged food to make it different) recipes are very popular.
Solar farms could be playing in the near future an essential role in the energy system 24 hours a day. A breakthrough trial has proved that they can help in balancing the grid at night.
National Grid used a solar farm in East Sussex to help smooth overnight voltage fluctuations for the first time earlier this month, proving solar farms don’t need sunshine to help keep the lights on.
Lightsource BP, the owner of the solar farm, said an inexpensive tweak to the project’s electrical equipment meant it could help balance the grid with only two seconds’ notice. Kareen Boutonnat, the company’s chief operating officer, said: “We have proven that solar plants can play a larger role across the electricity network. But this is only the beginning.”
I hope this development will encourage everyone of us to use solar power. Although it might be expensive at first, it will cost less in the long run (and it’s eco-friendly, too!).
More details about this news over at The Guardian.
Can you feel the chilly winds of Thanksgiving? We are in that season again where we stuff ourselves with delicious food that will make our taste buds explode with joy and satisfaction. But which food rules them all? Of the many foods served in the season of Thanksgiving, which is the best?
Ryan Herbison is a graduate student in parasitology at the University of Otago. A few years ago, Ryan collected about 1,300 earwigs and over 2,500 sandhoppers from gardens and a beach in New Zealand. He then dissected and examined the insides of their heads in search of worms that coiled themselves within some of the insects.
The worms are parasites that force earwigs and sandhoppers to march into bodies of water, drowning themselves so the worms’ aquatic offspring can thrive.
“Like a back-seat driver, but a bit more sinister,” said Mr. Herbison, describing these mind-controlling parasites. “And sometimes they may just grab the steering wheel.”
Just how they do that, though, has remained a bit of a mystery…
When someone says they enjoy watching bad movies, that could mean anything. Our ability to determine whether a movie is bad says something about our recognition of good movies, which is anything but objective. Classifying successful movies as "bad" requires that a viewer step out of the moment and become a critic of filmmaking, while deconstructing movies that have no aspiration to art (Sharknado and Hallmark films come to mind) is unsatisfying and rather pointless -you may as well just enjoy them for what they are. My favorite flavor of bad movies are those in which the creator had obvious passion for the project, but no expertise or budget to pull it off, like The Room or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Those are only one kind of bad movie, and there are many others, as Phil Christman describes in a rather highbrow essay.
...I kept watching bad movies, wondering how the satellite and the planet interacted. I drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives (1986), a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it on their television program. I stayed up late finding and downloading the bits and pieces of a torrent file of the 1982 Turkish fantasy film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), known in Anglophone countries as “Turkish Star Wars” because of its unauthorized and awkward splicing-in of actual Star Wars footage. I lost my wallet, not inappropriately, at a showing of The Dragon Lives Again (1979), a surreal festival of copyright infringement in which an actor playing (though hardly resembling) a resurrected Bruce Lee fights characters named The Godfather, The Exorcist, Popeye, James Bond, and Dracula, among others. I came to love Twilight (2008), with its wholly original, indeed hermetic vision of human psychology and conversation, its endearingly transparent wish-fulfillment aspects, its inexplicable baseball game. After it left theaters, I marveled at Batman vs. Superman (2016), that filmic analogue of a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody.
We may just regard scrambled eggs as the most basic dish. We may think that preparing such a dish is super easy, until we become the ones who prepare it. Despite it being deceptively simple, it is in fact one of the most difficult dishes to master.
So how do you make perfect scrambled eggs? Lifehacker provides us some tips on how to do so, no matter how we it cooked, whether fluffy or creamy. Check it out over at the site.
Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library is digging up old vinyl records. These large black disks that are now being recognized for both their sound and aesthetic value will be collected, digitized, and preserved. The old vinyl records the Archive digs up will be added to their collection, as one of the resources the Internet Archive is compiling for their “Universal Access to All Knowledge” campaign. The vinyl records will be joining the Archive’s collection of books and television recordings, as My Modern Met detailed:
To do so, the Internet Archive has teamed up with the Boston Public Library earlier this year to digitize more than 100,000 audio recordings from the Boston Library’s sound collection. Within this assemblage are recordings in formats like wax cylinders, 78 RPMs, and LPs—although, at the moment, the project is focusing on the LPs.
CR Saikley, the Director of Special Projects at the Internet Archive, says, “The LP was our primary musical medium for over a generation. From Elvis, to the Beatles, to the Clash, the LP was witness to the birth of both Rock & Roll and Punk Rock. It was integral to our culture from the 1950s to the 1980s and is important for us to preserve for future generations.” These audio files were never translated into digital format, which means their content is at risk since it is locked in the physical vinyl. This makes the LP digitization project a priority for the Internet Archive and the Boston Public Library.
Currently, you can listen to 750 full LP albums by visiting Unlocked Recordings on the Internet Archive.
Malaysia — The last of the Sumatran rhinoceros, named Iman, died of natural causes last Saturday due to shock in her system, according to the Wildlife Department in eastern Sabah state on Borneo island. Iman had uterine tumors ever since her capture in March 2014. Her death has made the Sumatran rhino extinct in Malaysia.
Department director Augustine Tuuga said in a statement that Iman, who reportedly was 25 years old, was suffering significant pain from growing pressure of the tumour to her bladder but that her death came sooner than expected.
It came six months after the death of the country’s only male rhino in Sabah. Another female rhino also died in captivity in 2017 in the state. Efforts to breed them have been futile but Sabah authorities have harvested their cells for possible reproduction.
[...]
The WWF conservation group estimates that there are only about 80 left, mostly living in the wild in Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia.
