We need two things in life: food to eat and books to read. The Traveler Restaurant in Union, Connecticut offers both. Buy a meal and you get to pick a book from the thousands available on the eatery's shelves. Atlas Obscura describes the experience:

On the shelves edging the tables are westerns, cookbooks, pulpy paperbacks, children’s books, and romance novels. The vibe is decidedly comfortable diner meets community book sale. Owner Marty Doyle, an avid reader, started bringing books into his restaurant in the mid-1980s as a way to thin his oversized collection and find new homes for old books. Now, after finishing a meal, diners take time to wander the stacks looking for their perfect new read.

Over the years, Doyle also collected a number of autographed photos from many well-known authors including John Updike and Michael Crichton, and these are also on display at the Traveler. Under new ownership since 1993, the restaurant’s books are now mostly donated by area libraries and community members, and the take-home amount has been upped to three books a person. 

Photo: Traveler Restaurant

This dog in Brazil knew exactly where to go. Google Translate renders the Portuguese video description as follows:

Injured dog enters veterinary clinic alone and receives treatment in the interior of Ceará

Street animal had a wound on his paw and was diagnosed with a tumor after entering the establishment located in the Center of Juazeiro do Norte.

I have been unable to confirm this story from other sources. But let us not permit an absence of verifiability to stand athwart cuteness of this degree.

-via Laughing Squid

Men are more likely to help a woman in need if she has erect nipples. That's the conclusion of a study led by Dr. Rebecca Burch of the State University of New York in Oswego.

For this study, the researchers asked 421 heterosexual college students to look at photos of women. For each woman, there were two versions: one with erect nipples and one without erect nipples. How likely were they to loan the women $100 or help them fix a broken-down car? The men were more likely to help the women with erect nipples. PsyPost reports:

The researchers found that men perceived women with erect nipples as more deserving of help compared to the same women without erect nipples. This was particularly true when the help involved greater interaction with the woman, such as tutoring her or stopping to provide aid if her car had broken down.

Male participants also expected women with erect nipples to behave more altruistically toward them and were more willing to include them in their social circle.

Female participants, however, were less likely to help women with erect nipples:

Female participants, on the other hand, were not more willing to help women with erect nipples compared women without erect nipples. The researchers also found that nipple erection made women less willing to include another woman in their social circle.

“Do women interact with women with nipple erection differently? Our research shows that they do; they want to avoid them,” Burch explained.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Stock Snap

Sayaka Mitoh and Yoichi Yusa of Nara Women’s University in Japan have observed whole-body regeneration in sea slugs, specifically the species Elysia cf. marginata. The sea slugs pulled their own heads off, discarded their bodies, and eventually regrew a new body from the head!

On close inspection, the researchers found that sea slugs have a slight groove looped on the back of the head region that seems to work as a break-here zone. The bodies left behind can still move on their own for days or even months. An abandoned body, however, doesn’t regrow its head. The leaf-shaped remnant instead turns pale and weak and eventually dies.

Mitoh and Yusa believe that this extreme behavior is a method of getting rid of parasites, although the phrase "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" may occur to you. You can see a video of a slug's head wandering away from its body in the story at ScienceNews. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: S. Mitoh)

In the 1950s and '60s, families gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Disney himself would introduce the show, often promoting Disneyland's attractions as he did so. Jack Plotnick has edited himself into those clips, boosting the entertainment value while highlighting the more problematic behavior of that era. SFgate talked to Plotnick about the series.

Plotnick isn't a Disney hater; in fact, he's been a lifelong Disney fan, taking family trips to Walt Disney World starting when he was very young. “I always wanted to be an Imagineer,” he says. “I've always been fascinated with them.”

“I really wanted to see what would happen if I put myself into the videos,” Plotnick says. “People were watching the videos to escape into another world, and that's kind of what I ended up doing.” So, he made himself an Imagineer — several of them, actually, in videos teasing the openings of everything from the Haunted Mansion to the Plaza Inn.

Plotnick's first video in the series has to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The auction scene in the attraction was not changed until 2018. See his videos about the Haunted Mansion, It's a Small World, and the Plaza Restaurant as well. -via Metafilter

Auralnauts has completed their project to bring us the Star Wars original trilogy retrofitted with all the stuff we've learned in the 40 years since then. There are old deceptions revealed, new Force powers, and for some reason, dinosaurs.   

The third and final installment of the Reimagined series, where we take narrative developments from newer Star Wars media and forcefully jam it back into the original trilogy. World building isn't easy, and we love Star Wars, but it's still funny to imagine how awkward things could have been between Vader and Palpatine after Luke arrived on the scene.

The first installment was posted almost two years ago, but you may have missed The Empire Strikes Back Reimagined only six months ago, so continue reading to see it.

This video of Bryant-Lake Bowl and Theater in Minneapolis makes the place look like a fun place, but to see that, you first have to get over your awe of the cinematography in this video. This is what drones have made possible. (via reddit)

Once a book goes into the public domain, publishers everywhere are in a hurry to print copies or make them available as digital works. The cover art can be an afterthought, maybe an assignment for an intern. How else could you explain such bad covers as Mary Shelley with her hand on the knee of Frankenstein's monster, and Jane Austin's British love story emblazoned with a picture of an American flag?

I have collected a number of these very fun, very bad covers below. All of these covers are “real,” that is, attached to books that are at least nominally available for purchase, though many are digital covers for digital editions. You’ll find a number of covers from Wordsworth Classics, premier publisher of badly Photoshopped book covers, but many more from the wilds of digital independent publishing. Some are merely ugly; others make it clear that no one involved in the creation of the cover cracked open the book.

Yeah, the best worst ones are those that have nothing to do with the contents. Not reading the book is the only way to explain a cover of Hamlet that's a naked woman with a seashell. See all these covers at LitHub.  -via Digg

When water was often unsafe to drink, people turned to wine. But beer takes a lot less time to make, and is somewhat nutritious besides. Brewing beer is akin to cooking, so making beer became one of the household chores that women performed.  

From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale – and, later, beer – was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins. Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks.

Some enterprising women took this household skill to the marketplace and began selling beer. Widows or unmarried women used their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money, while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business.

The difference between making beer at home for the family and selling beer is that one is profitable, so you can see where this is going. Some men thought women should spend their time at home instead of selling beer. Others wanted in on the money to be made. Read how women brewers came to be accused of witchcraft at The Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: John William Waterhouse)

The most notable difference between a Hollywood explosion and a real explosion is that a movie explosion does not kill the protagonist. That's a given. We've seen how our heroes can casually walk away from explosions without even feeling the blast force -and it looks good because of the bright flames behind them. And that's the next difference- those colorful flashes do not happen in most real explosions of the same size. Nuclear bombs may be the exception here. Tom Scott shows us what's done to make them look so appealing. -via Digg

Dolev Elron, a fashion design student at Shenkar College in Israel, offers these unique jeans. Stare into the butt and experience all times and locations in the universe simultaneously.

Who wants to make the first black hole joke in the comment thread?

-via Ugly Design (although, in this case, it's actually a cool design)

Photo: Amit Zantkern

Greg Frehr, an artist in New York City, makes SwingTables. These table sets are designed to keep active people involved in conversation by encouraging them to move around, swinging back and forth. In an interview last year, Frehr explains:

They help people with ADHD concentrate on the work at hand, use movement to get creative juices flowing, and have a unique ability to bring people together for meetings or socially – there is something special about sitting next to a co-worker, friend, or stranger on a swing that brings out a shared child-like joy. 

The model photographed above is a mere $6,450.

-via The Awesomer

This is Aogashima, an island about 220 miles off the coast of Japan. It takes its shape from the four calderas of its volcano.

That's an active volcano. Although it hasn't erupted since 1785, that eruption killed half the population. Still, the 170 people who live here are a hardy lot and are not inclined to let the occasional (by the standards of geological history) cataclysm disrupt their plans.

TYWKIWDBI points out that Aagoashima is governed by the city of Tokyo. I have verified this claim elsewhere. So it's technically correct (the best kind of correct) to say that that this photo depicts Tokyo.

Photo: Charly W. Karl

The rejected script for episode nine of the Skywalker saga, written by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, leaked online a year ago. It was an intriguing story, especially considering how poorly the script that replaced it was received. Star Wars fans read it and imagined what might have been if Disney hadn’t fired Trevorrow and enlisted JJ Abrams to do the last film. Imagine a Star Wars universe in which Palpatine is dead, Leia is not, and Luke's Force ghost haunts Kylo Ren.

Hey, Star Wars fans. I've been working the past year on a comic book adaptation of Colin Trevorrow's Star Wars Episode IX script "Duel of the Fates" and I'd like you to check it out! (It will be 7 issues total when completed.)
Hope you enjoy it!https://t.co/XfrNX5wHvQ pic.twitter.com/2Ay070L9oS

— Andrew Winegarner (@AndyWinegarner) March 4, 2021

And now Andrew Winegarner has taken that script and rendered it in webcomic form! Read Duel of the Fates online, at least in part. It’s a work in progress, which explains why only part of it is in color. Bookmark the link so you can read the whole thing as it is drawn. -via Boing Boing

Lent is the 40-day period, not including Sundays, leading up to Easter. It is a time of fasting and reflection, and in the Catholic church, part of that fasting means no meat on Fridays. However, fish is not considered meat, so the Friday fish fry has become traditional. But fish is still animal flesh, so why is it not considered to be meat?    

Legend has it that centuries ago a medieval pope with connections to Europe's fishing business banned red meat on Fridays to give his buddies' industry a boost. But that story isn't true. Sunday school teachers have a more theological answer: Jesus fasted for 40 days and died on a Friday. Catholics honor both occasions by making a small sacrifice: avoiding animal flesh one day out of the week. That explanation is dandy for a homily, but it doesn't explain why only red meat and poultry are targeted and seafood is fine.

For centuries, the reason evolved with the fast. In the beginning, some worshippers only ate bread. But by the Middle Ages, they were avoiding meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 13th century, the meat-fish divide was firmly established—and Saint Thomas Aquinas gave a lovely answer explaining why: sex, simplicity, and farts.

To make sense of all that, you’ll need to read the article at Mental Floss. Of course, the difference between fish and other meats is subject to change- at different times in different places, beavers, capybaras, muskrats, and alligators have been classified as fish.