A recent thread at Askreddit could be a writer's prompt to expand hilarious one-liners into ridiculous stories. But you don't even need the whole story to get a laugh. The question is: Which quote is most improved by tacking "here, in the middle of this Olive Garden" to the end of it? The best quotes paint a picture all by themselves. Here is a small selection.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar -- here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.

You come to me here, and you ask me for a favor, on this; the day of my daughter's wedding here in the middle of this Olive Garden?

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti here, in the middle of this Olive Garden.

The thread has many more, and it's still open for your contributions if you can think of one, at reddit. -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Anthony92931)

Only a year after acclaimed director John Huston gave us The Maltese Falcon, he was called up to serve in World War II. The army put him to work creating propaganda films, which he took seriously. Huston created three masterpieces, the last of which was Let There Be Light, an unscripted documentary that featured returning soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Previously referred to as battle fatigue or shell shock, the term PTSD didn't make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980. Huston's one-hour documentary followed World War II veterans undergoing treatment at Mason General Hospital on Long Island.

When the Army saw the finished product, higher powers pulled the plug on the movie, citing concerns for the soldiers’ privacy. In contradiction to this, the Army approved several film stills from Huston’s footage (which clearly show the soldiers’ faces) to be published in a 1945 article for Life magazine on the treatment of “battle-fatigue” for wounded soldiers. Why was a powerful film tackling the complexities of PTSD denied a release? The decision would help push back the awareness and progress for PTSD treatment by another four decades.

Huston kept a copy of the film, which you can see in its entirety along with the history of Let There Be Light at Messy Messy Chic.

“Eco-friendly, backyard DIY saunas” is not a phrase you would encounter every day. Thankfully, BZB Cabins and Outdoors turns this dream into a reality with their reasonably *coughs* priced Sauna Kits. 

BZB recently rolled out a collection of “ready-to-assemble outdoor sauna kits that can be set up by two people in just a few days.”

The BZB saunas are the ultimate DIY project for those needing to unthaw during the freezing winter months. Costing between $5,000 and $14,950, the ready-to-assemble sauna kits come in a variety of styles, such as barrel, oval and igloo-shaped. The kits also come in different sizes, from a tiny, two-person sauna to a larger structure that fits up to eight people.

Get in loser, we’re going thawing. 

Find out more at Inhabitat.

Photos: BZB Cabins and Outdoors

Fortune lists the five best things restaurants did in 2019 to improve dining experiences across America. From cuisine fusion to statement wallpapers and start-up boosters to non-alcoholic cocktails (good news, pregnant mommies), these moves by big names in the restaurant scene can inspire more restaurateurs to keep finding creative ways to improve their business. 

I must say, what probably takes the cake on this list is the considerate gesture by several restaurants to keep toiletries, like diapers and menstrual products, in their customer restrooms. 

Read the full story by Naomi Tomky. 

Photo: Marcus Herzberg / Pexels

Alexey Kondakov creates a masterful yet playful spin to classical art in Napoli Project. In his digital collages, he fuses “antiquated characters inside clothing shops and riding public transportation,” giving us a brilliantly fresh perspective of historic characters against the backdrop of a starkly different style and tone of a bygone era.

Using photo manipulation, Kondakov superimposes Renaissance paintings onto scenes from contemporary European locations including, but not limited to, Italy, Berlin and London. 

To get a hint of just how much skill is required to do this, I made my own botched attempt to create Classical Meets Contemporary as seen above. Not as easy as it looks, folks. 

To see an expert rendition of how photo manipulation is really done, follow Kondakov on Facebook or Instagram.

Find out more at My Modern Net.

Photo: Pixabay / Pexels ; Wikimedia Commons

Most people think of cats as fairly inscrutable. Cat owners learn to read body language, as the predators keep their faces still and let their emotions come out in their tails. While it's true that cats don't use facial expressions the way people do, there are subtle changes in a cat's face that can give away their feelings. However, few people can reliably read those facial expressions. A recent experiment in which 6329 people were shown close-up images of cats' faces without the rest of their body or environmental context clues, the average score was only 59%, revealing that people are not good at reading a cat's face. 

So why do researchers think they have any expression at all? Roughly 13 percent of subjects scored well on the test, getting at least 15 of the 20 questions correct. Those that did well were generally people who had extensive experience with cats, like veterinarians. That led researchers to conclude that people can become more attuned to the subtle flickers of emotion that may pass over a cat’s face.

“They could be naturally brilliant, and that’s why they become veterinarians,” Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist and the study’s senior author, told The Washington Post. “But they also have a lot of opportunity to learn, and they’ve got a motivation to learn, because they’re constantly deciding: Is this cat better? Do we need to change the treatment? Does this cat need to go home? Is this cat about to take a chunk out of my throat?”

Do you think you have what it takes to be a cat whisperer? You can take an online version of the test to see if you outscore the average participant.

(Image credit: Luke Rogers)

The season is upon us, so it's time to watch the greatest of all Christmas movies: Die Hard. Redditor lammage01 is helping to spread that special Christmas cheer with this Advent calendar inspired by the classic Bruce Willis film. He used artwork borrowed from A Die Hard Christmas: The Illustrated Holiday Classic, a storybook that retells the classic tale.

Each day of this time of expectation and preparation, pull a tab out. Terrorist leader Hans Gruber will fall just a little bit more to the bottom of Nakatomi Tower.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

Before the development of the printing press, book s were serious business. They were copied painstakingly by hand, one copy at a time, and the resulting work was worth a lot of money. Since these manuscripts were tempting to thieves, many of them included a curse upon any who would steal or abuse them. They might even rhyme.

Who folds a leafe downe
ye divel toaste browne,
Who makes marke or blotte
ye divel roaste hot,
Who stealeth thisse boke
ye divel shall cooke.

Read more of these medieval book curses at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

Photographer Lara Vychuzhanina of Yekaterinburg, Russia, imagined the dolls Barbie and Ken living in Russia during the final years of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She set the dolls in a dismal apartment, which is an intricate recreation in miniature, down to the brand-name products in the kitchen.  



See more images from this series at Bored Panda.

The artist known as My Dog Sighs is fascinated by faces, especially eyes. Some of his eyes are enormous, all-consuming images. Others are smaller, but equally vivid. I especially enjoy his cans, which he paints to add faces to pre-existing bodies.

That's not a sculpture of a banana. Artist Maurizio Cattelan had considered making one out of resin. But, instead, he simply stuck a real banana to a wall with a strip of duct tape. It sold at auction at the Art Basel event in Miami Beach.

Although the art news website Artsy does not say precisely what the price was, it does mentioned that the sculpture had been priced at $120,000.

It's called Comedian. Cattelan intends it as a joke. I suspect that his audience, especially the person in it who purchased the banana, may be the butt of the joke.

-via Chris Arnade | Photo: Zeno ZottiJacopo Zotti

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (previously at Neatorama) takes the art of the pie to the next level. She unveiled her latest work at reddit. It's a raspberry Christmas pie featuring Baby Yoda! Check out the details that make it special: the edge is festooned with holly and candy cane shapes, but also has three Mandalorian helmets. The baby is drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and a candy cane. His eyes are shiny thanks to a glaze of maple syrup. And look at his tiny Santa hat! You can enlarge the picture here. See more of Clark-Bojin's pies at her website and at Instagram.

Update: We now have an image of the pie before it was cut!

Winter may be coming, but this subreddit’s cold reception to the franchise is icier than the Night King. 

In 2019, the record-breaking HBO fantasy series, Game of Thrones, came to its conclusion after nearly eight years since its first episode aired in the U.S. in 2011. The crowd reactions to the season finale were mixed, to say the least, with fans across the globe generally divided on whether they love or hate season 8, which ran from May to April of 2019. 

Reddit's 2019 Year in Review lists the leading television community platforms on the website, and enthroned at the top 2 are freefolk followed by the GoT community itself. This is not so surprising considering the massive buzz its creators, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, have generated since the very beginning, from the breathtaking panoramic sets to the gruesomely unexpected character deaths. After all, who doesn’t get fired up from their favorite TV show? 

Fans who were keen to lambast the show identified their group as refusing to “bend the knee” to the HBO installment, hence the name “freefolk.”

Did you know that r/freefolk was able to raise over $100k for Emilia Clarke’s (Daenerys Targaryen) SameYou charity? 

Read the full story at The Wrap.

Photo: @iyasirhere / Twitter)

A little girl wakes up on a special day and wants her hair to look perfect. But she's just a kid, and her father knows nothing about hair styling (obviously someone else did his). You might think this is about black hair and about a father overcoming his incompetence, but it's much more than that. Hair Love was directed by Matthew A. Cherry, producer of BlacKkKlansman, Everett Downing Jr., animator in Up, and Bruce W. Smith, animator in The Princess and the Frog. -via Metafilter 

We know that there are children who develop even in the worst circumstances, while there are others who are sensitive. The question is, why is it that some children become the latter and others the former? That is what pediatrician and researcher Tom Boyce has been asking for over four decades.

Starting in the 1970s, Boyce, like many pediatricians, observed that most kids were physically and mentally resilient—relatively immune to illness, injury, and disease. But a small group of kids seemed to accumulate a disproportionate number of health and behavior problems: from severe respiratory disease, injuries, and developmental delays, to more mental and behavioral issues, like anxiety, depression, and aggression. He could see these kids tended to come from families that faced a lot of stress or adversity, in the form of socioeconomic disadvantage or general misfortune.

There was, Boyce found, a consistent link between family stress, adversity, and all kinds of childhood illnesses, injuries, and behavioral disorders. The associations, however, were modest.

They were statistically significant, meaning they were unlikely to be due to chance, but they could only explain a small portion—just 10%—of different outcomes, of why a child with more stress would have worse health and behavior.

Boyce wondered: What if it was a child’s reaction to the stress, and not the type or amount of stress, that predicted who would suffer most? Clearly excessive stress is bad for all children (as it is for adults); governments, doctors, and communities should focus on reducing poverty and violence to support families and minimize stress. But were some kids better able to weather those stressors?

Read more about what Boyce found out over at Quartz.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)