While Dr. Seuss is best known for his timeless children’s books, he created plenty of other things, like advertising copy and political cartoons. These were projects he did for a living, but there was also a hidden series he called the Midnight Paintings, which were personal, experimental, and sometimes surreal artworks that show us a different side of Dr. Seuss. -via Digg
A St. Louis couple is not only facing felony gun charges for pointing guns at protestors, they are also in another legal dispute with a photographer who shot a viral photo of them. It turns out that the couple, attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey used a viral photo of them shot by United Press International (UPI) photojournalist William Greenblatt:
He hadn’t given the couple permission to use his photo in any way, and therefore their cards seemed to be a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.
“Being lawyers, they should know copyright laws, but apparently they feel like they don’t need to adhere to any of that,” Greenblatt tells PetaPixel.
In response to the cards, Greenblatt sent the couple a bill while UPI sent a cease-and-desist letter.
“I am in the business of selling images,” Greenblatt writes. “I do not give them away for free. Enclosed you will find an invoice for $1500.00, a normal charge for an image such as yours.”
Mark McCloskey responded by posting the letter to Facebook.
“This made my day: the photographer that trespassed into my neighborhood and stole a photo of us has sent us a bill!!!!!” McCloskey writes. “Now be nice and don’t bother him, but what chutzpah.”
Greenblatt says the couple has yet to respond to his letter, and that it’s not money he’s after — he simply wants to protect his copyright as a photographer.
“People steal work all the time. They take it and feel that it’s theirs. […] It makes me mad that they feel they can use the image just because it’s of them,” the photographer says. “It’s not even the money. I could care less about the money.
Image via PetaPixel
Let’s get real, it’s hard to keep up with a healthy diet. Some of us might not have enough resources or time to prepare a well-balanced diet. But there are other ways to look out for our health, too. Cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University, shared what nutrients to look out for when you’re buying packaged food. Check out Well and Good’s full piece here to know more!
Image via Well and Good
About 3 years ago, Arnie Lloyd of Elmsdale bought a 1948 Ford F1 car from a family. Aside from the car, he also bought some boxes of truck parts from the same family.
Recently, as he was going through one of the boxes, Lloyd found a hand-written letter by a Canadian soldier named Arnold Weisner. The letter, which was dated Nov. 4, 1944, was addressed to one Clark Armstrong of Beechville.
Lloyd said he found numerous other items bearing Armstrong's name in the box, including love letters, old pay stubs and a driver's license from the early 1900s.
Lloyd currently plans on reuniting the items with Weisner’s family.
"If a grandson or granddaughter gets to read that letter, they get a piece of history that maybe their father or grandfather didn't get a chance to talk about," Lloyd told CTV News.
But according to the curator for the Army Museum Halifax Citadel, Ken Hynes, Lloyd might find it difficult to find the Canadian soldier’s official records, as the Library and Archives Canada haven’t released the records to the public, as some veterans are still alive to this day. Lloyd, however, is determined to search for Weisner’s relatives.
I wonder how the letters ended up in the box of truck parts.
What do you think?
(Image Credit: Arnie Lloyd/ Facebook)
Kristy Scott knows that Desmond, her gamer husband, tends to be too focused when playing video games to the point that he is "never aware of what is going on around him". To see how engrossed Desmond is when he plays video games, Kristy then decided to test her husband if he would notice his own baby.
… she purchased a realistic doll - which she says was made funnier by the fact it looked nothing like their child - and dressed it in her son's clothes, wrapping it in a blanket and hat to better hide its true identity.
Kristy waits until her husband is fully distracted by the game before asking Desmond to look after their son and placing the doll in his lap.
What happened next? Find out on this short video.
Via Mirror
(Image Credit: The SCOTTS/ YouTube)
In 2004, British billionaire Richard Branson established Virgin Galactic, with a rather ambitious goal in mind: to make it possible for hundreds of people to become astronauts without training from NASA.
Branson is the only one among the group of the so-called space barons, the group of space-loving billionaires that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who has publicly pledged to take a ride in the near future aboard a spacecraft he has bankrolled.
Bezos' company, Blue Origin, is working on a competing suborbital space tourism rocket. Musk's SpaceX, however, is focused on transporting astronauts and perhaps one day tourists on days-long missions to Earth's orbit.
Over the past decade, Branson announced virtually every year that his company would be flying customers in a year or so, but that promise was broken time and time again, for many reasons.
On Thursday, however, Virgin Galactic set yet another deadline for Branson's flight: Sometime between January and March of 2021.
Notably, that declaration didn't come from Branson. This time it came from Michael Colglazier, the recently installed CEO of Virgin Galactic whose goal is to guide the company as it grows from an engineering project in the California desert into a multibillion-dollar space tourism business. Colglazier was speaking not to reporters, but to Virgin Galactic investors who bought into Branson's vision after the company made its stock market debut in late 2019. (The company's valuation has grown to $4.5 billion, though it's still burning through more than $20 million per month as it trudges through the final stages of SpaceShipTwo's testing and certification process.)
More details about this over at CNN.
What are your thoughts about this one? Do you think Branson’s space flight will finally take off next year?
(Image Credit: Chatham House/ Wikimedia Commons)
The famous toy artist Dan Polydoris is back with more funny action figures inspired by unexpected sources. Most recently, at Gallery 1988, he exhibited several mint on card figures with characters from The Simpsons. With each one, there is one needful element missing. For Mr. Burns, it's his lifelong companion Waylon Smithers.
The race is called "Ironman" for a reason. It's brutal. Competitors must run a full marathon, bike 112 miles, and swim 2.4 miles. Chris Nikic, pictured above, is an ironman because he completed one on Sunday. This 21-year old man from Maitland, Florida is the first person with Down Syndrome to finish an Ironman. The Orlando Sentinel describes the obstacles he had to overcome to accomplish this ultimate athletic challenge:
Chris Nikic had his first surgery, to repair two holes in his heart, at 5 months old. He still needed a walker at 3. [...]
He began swimming as a kid in his parents’ back-yard pool and at 16 tried his first “sprint” triathlon — a dramatically shorter version of the Ironman. But he lost two years of training because of repeated surgeries to reconstruct his ear canals, which, in people with Down syndrome, are prone to chronic infections.
When he restarted, he could barely swim a single lap or run 100 yards without stopping.
But Nikic persisted and, as a result, inspired everyone involved in helping him achieve his goal:
“Because this is a first for us, we had to work out some logistics,” said Beth Atnip, Ironman’s vice president of global operations. “But I’ve met Chris, and he is so impressive. His heart is so big. And I think this will open doors for a lot of other folks who maybe just thought it was impossible.”
-via Super Punch | Photo: Chris Nikic
Here is entrepreneur Emani Outterbridge of Philadelphia. She's standing in front of her invention, the yarn vending machine. Outterbridge is a master crochet artist and offers professional consultations in that craft. While recovering from a broken foot, developed the idea of a vending machine that dispenses yarn skeins. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:
While recovering, Outterbridge used the time to consider ways to earn money. A vending machine wouldn’t require her to pack orders and deliver in a cast. So she set out to raise money to finance three vending machines. She spread word of her campaign on social media, inviting people to shop from her site or to donate. It worked. Outterbridge raised $10,000 and launched her first machine last week, selling about 100 skeins of multicolored yarns.
-via My Modern Met | Photo: Emani Milan
2020 is a tough year for all of us. With all the bad things that have happened within this year, one would think that all hope is gone. Thankfully, it isn’t the case, and Mother Nature has its own way of telling us that there is still hope that remains, through “a potato that naturally grew in the shape of a hand giving the peace sign.”
The potato was grown by a 73-year-old farmer named Shigeo Takaki from Kawamata Town in Fukushima Prefecture. It’s about 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, and he said that while he’s seen some of his potatoes grow in unusual U-shapes before, this was a first for him. He has no idea how it grew this way.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
(Image Credit: YokohamaNoHito/ Twitter/ SoraNews 24)
Going home to isolate during the pandemic has led many people to new endeavors or hobbies. Gardening and making sourdough bread come to mind, and another is cooking with a cast iron skillet. However, so many who are new to cast iron cooking are intimidated by the experts, meaning those who have used them before. There seem to be so many rules about using a cast iron skillet, how will you ever get it right?
Say or write the words "cast iron" aloud or on the internet or so much as post a picture of a skillet, and someone will swoop in and offer complicated and unsolicited advice about the steps you must to take to keep from destroying it and rending a hole in the fabric of the universe. If some fella (it's always a fella—sorry fellas) perceives even a mild flaw in your pan, he may feel compelled by fella-law to instruct you how to build an entirely unnecessary electrolysis tank in your home as penance when honestly, steel wool and patience will do. He may tell you that you need a blast furnace and 37 layers of grapeseed oil to achieve a seasoning that won't earn his scorn. (Otterman notes that Lodge factory-seasons with canola at 700°F but they tell consumers that "a high temperature or an oil with a high smoke point" will do, and says coconut or flaxseed oil are fine options.) It's lovely if you want to spend your time that way, but making it seem that complicated, being told you have to earn your right to use this object, just strips the joy along with the rust.
Kat Kinsman of Food&Wine tells a story of rehabilitating a 90-year-old skillet and talks with the experts to calm your trepidation about using cast iron. -via Nag on the Lake
Fans of The Mandalorian and anime fans probably overlap quite a bit. If the two were to merge, here’s what the intro would be. YouTuber Malec has a whole series of these mashups. -via Boing Boing
Whatever career you have, there are certain terms you use on the job that you don't use outside of work. I was a commercial baker for a short time, and didn't know what they meant by "proofing" the bread, but I did know what it means to "let it rise." Jobs that aren't so common have terms that you might want to know some day.
That one's easy to figure out. Even children know that the term for people who ride without helmets is "organ donors." Read up on more professional jargon at Cracked.
If games include dogs and cats in their games, they should allow the player to pet them! I do not care if the dog looks like a horrible creature from Greek mythology, Cerberus is still a dog and I would like to pet the good boy (the Hades developers did let its players pet the Underworld dog, so good job!). But in general, most players would love to interact with pets and animals, even in the simplest ways (let me pet the dogs in Breath of the Wild, please). This mechanic apparently does not come easy. Check out Polygon’s Jenna Stoeber investigate how the petting mechanic is coded in games.
