A fish statue in Morocco has sparked outrage and controversy from social media users. Located in the coastal town of Mehdia, the statue, which shows two peach-colored fish jumping into the air, was called ‘pornographic’. Some locals complained about the local government’s decision to erect the statues instead of spending money elsewhere, as the Daily Mail detailed:
The mockery and outrage was so intense that local authorities in the coastal town of Mehdia began demolishing the statues on Thursday
'People in Kenitra and Mehdia told authorities they want reforms in the city. And authorities bring them these statutes,' one social media quoted by Morocco World News said.
'Pornographic fish. People in Kenitra asked for reforms, authorities [brought them this],' another posted.
Mehdia, where the statues are located, is in Kenitra province but is not part of the city of Kenitra.
I believe that the models in this story deserve the highest praise or a pay raise. Christian Siriano decided to have a fashion show in his backyard in Westport, Connecticut. Fashion editors and guests sat socially distanced, but the models strutted on very squelchy-looking grass and crossed a small bridge over Siriano’s pool in their elaborative outfits and high heels. The Daily Beast has more details:
the models, decked in all manner of vision-obscuring ruffles, tiered gowns and diaphanous skirts and wearing HEELS somehow walked as if this were the most natural thing in the world. There was the odd stumble. Most of us would have ended up on our asses with one step.
The clothes, as ever, were for women of different shapes and sizes—even the strangest outfit, which looked like it had lots of black creatures squashed on to it. Another dress was covered in flowers.
Siriano told WWD that it had been the most expensive fashion show he had ever produced, that Sarah Jessica Parker had supplied the shoes, and that the show had been inspired by movies like Clueless (Alicia Silverstone is a friend of Siriano’s), and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, where Christina Applegate ends up hosting a fashion show at home, bridges over the pool.
Okay, this might seem unusual, but hey, it’s been sixty years since late US President Richard Nixon didn’t finish his sandwich. But how did we know that? Steve Jenne, 74, of Sullivan, Illinois, preserved Nixon’s half-eaten bison barbeque sandwich when the president left on September 22, 1960. Jenne preserved the sandwich by storing it in his freezer for decades, as Oddee details:
But how come Jenne came to possess the lunch of Nixon, whose legacy would years later become forever tarnished in the Watergate scandal?
For answers, let’s accelerate to 88 mph and take a trip back in time. We find ourselves in the city of Sullivan on that more or less fateful date: 9/22/1960.
In case any Europeans are reading this, that’ll be 22/9/1960. Don’t get too confused, now.
On this date, Nixon was out on his presidential campaign. He was running against a Massachusetts senator, one John F. Kennedy.
As we know from history, a couple months later Kennedy would win the presidency. Nixon would have to wait until 1969 for his turn in the White House.
But on this September day, Nixon was in Sullivan on a campaign trip. For lunch, he was served the aforementioned bison barbeque sandwich.
Whether he wasn’t all that hungry or just straight-up didn’t like the sandwich has been lost to history. The facts are that he ate about half of it before proceeding to the park where he was supposed to debate Kennedy. However, Kennedy failed to show up, so Nixon took the chance to give a speech of his own.
While he was speaking, Steve Jenne – then a 14-year-old Boy Scout – kept an eye on the Senator’s unfinished lunch.
A horse trapped in a 60-feet ravine was saved by California firefighters. They used a harness and a helicopter as they hoisted the poor creature out of the ravine. Lola, the 8-year-old horse, fell down a ravine at Caspers Wilderness Park in San Juan Capistrano after bucking her rider, as UPI detailed:
Firefighters said the Orange County Fire Authority technical rescue team's helicopter was summoned to the scene after rescuers determined the terrain was too rough to attempt to walk Lola out of the ravine.
A veterinarian sedated Lola so she could be harnessed and air-lifted to safety.
Lola was reunited with her owner, who was not injured from being thrown from the horse.
For now, we're going to ignore the fact that Romeo and Juliet is about two idiotic teenagers who got themselves and four other people killed in four days. And we're going to hope that this couple has a happier life.
But, like the lovers in Shakespeare's tale, they did meet in Verona and woo from balconies. Quarantined in apartments across a street from each other, they felt an immediate attraction. The Washington Post describes their love story:
Michele D’Alpaos, 38, first laid eyes on Paola Agnelli, 40, in mid-March when she walked out on her balcony. Agnelli spotted D’Alpaos that night on his terrace, and said it was love at first sight.
“I was immediately struck by the beauty of this girl, by her smile,” D’Alpaos said. “I had to know her.”
Agnelli stood directly across from him on her sixth-floor balcony while her sister performed a violin rendition of “We Are The Champions” as part of a nightly 6 p.m. musical performance, intended to uplift the quarantined neighborhood.
“It was a magical moment,” said Agnelli, who has lived in the same apartment complex since she was 5 years old. She had never met D’Alpaos, even though he has lived opposite her, on the seventh floor, for most of his life.
“I immediately thought, ‘What a beautiful boy,’ ” she continued.
They met online and dated that way, eager for the next ten weeks to meet in person.
Barred from stepping closer than 200 meters away (about 220 yards), a smitten D’Alpaos was desperate to show his affection to Agnelli. He started by sending multiple bouquets of flowers, but then decided that wasn’t enough.
In an effort to put his love on full display, D’Alpaos hung an old bedsheet with “Paola” emblazoned in big, bold bubble letters from his apartment complex in late March.
They finally met in person in May and are now engaged.
When Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, the Americas were not a sparsely-populated wilderness ready to be exploited. However, by the time serious colonial settlement began, a majority of the native people had succumbed to diseases the Europeans introduced, which made them easier to conquer. A plague called cocoliztli wiped out 80% of the Aztecs in the 16th century, opening the door for Spanish rule. Aztec authors wrote about the effects of the infectious disease that destroyed their defenses against invaders. Some of these accounts still survive. A writer thought to be Don Mateo Sánchez said,
On the first day of August [of 1576] the great sickness began here in Techamachalco. It was really strong; there was no resisting. At the end of August began the processions because of the sickness. They finished on the ninth day. Because of it, many people died, young men and women, those who were old men and women, or children… When the month of October began, thirty people had been buried. In just two or three days they would die… They lost their senses. They thought of just anything and would die.
Now that autumn is here, you may wonder how trick-or treating can work in the era of social distancing. Matt Thompson figured out a way to deliver candy to costumed children without getting close to them- with a zip line! He recruited friends and neighbors to dress up their kids to demonstrate how it will work in this video. We assume that these people will be wearing face masks when everyone is out trick-or-treating. -via Laughing Squid
Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler have been working on a project called Toonify, which can turn a photographic face into a cartoon character. It's not yet perfected, but the story behind how they did it is kinda neat. The normal way to train an algorithm to do this would involve a large dataset of portraits and their corresponding cartoon characters. Since that does not exist (yet), they had to start from scratch and create such a dataset.
First, Doron Adler trained a StyleGAN model—the same tech behind This Person Does Not Exist, a site which randomly spits out photorealistic people that, as the name implies, are entirely computer generated—on Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks characters so it could recognize features are quintessentially cartoony. The model then automatically selected fake people from the This Person Does Not Exist universe and augmented them with those cartoon features. But StyleGAN globbed all the styles from computer generates images, cartoons, and photographs together equally, which meant that the same person might have tufts of realistic hair, CGI meatball cheeks, and eerily flat hand-drawn eyes.
This is where Justin Pinkney came in with his model, which they blended with Adler’s.
Pinkney developed a “layer-swapping” process to parse out the desirable characteristics from each image: the cartoon half affects only the structure of the resulting toonified face, while the human half contributes the lighting and other high-resolution details.
There's a lot more to it, of course. Is there an app where I can make my own face into a cartoon? Yes, but you can't do it (yet). First, the program doesn't use your face. It will select a computer-generated photorealistic face from the This Person Does Not Exist library that looks like you -and the program is pretty good at that, although it takes some time. Second, when they launched the online app, so many people invested the necessary time to try it that they couldn't afford the bandwidth bill, so they took it down. Adler and Pinkney hope to work out the kinks and make it available to the rest of us soon. Read the story at Gizmodo.
A man in blue can be seen on the cargo space of the truck. Suddenly, he trips, but he has a quick reaction time, and manages to hang on the truck, albeit in a weird position. Thankfully, a car happens to pass by in the area, and the car’s driver helps him to climb back again on the truck.
This might just be the weirdest thing that I have seen in my life — a $1,400 denim overall with grass stains. I mean, why? You could just buy a new denim overall and roll on the grass in your backyard.
“This denim overall is crafted from organic cotton and specifically treated for a stained-like, distressed effect,” reads the description of the dirty dungarees, which debuted on the runway as part of a grunge-inspired collection back in January and are now available in stores and online.
[...]
“It is produced through cultivation and manufacturing processes that don’t involve harmful chemicals, pesticides or artificial fertilizers,” a description on Gucci.com reads.
But real farmers think these fancy pants should be put out to pasture.
“For [that much money], I’m thinking, ‘What’s the equivalent of that in second-cut hay bales?’ That’s the currency I’m most interested in,” farmer Lauren Gitlin, 40, told The Post.
During a long road trip with my kids came inevitably the matter of farts; then the conversation veered towards serious: we asked ourselves if this is was a means of Covid-19 transmission. School, work, bus, we would be at great danger every moment!!!
Forbes made a complete post on that serious subject back in April. I guess people have more sensitive bowels than my kids to ask this question so soon!
Everyone is trying their best to make ends meet in these troubling times. Many people are looking for more ways to earn more money or expand their businesses. The new startup Civvi seized the opportunity to establish their business when unemployment is widespread and a lot of people can’t pay their rent. This company aims to make it easy for the landlords to hire eviction agents, as Vice details:
Helena Duncan, a Chicago-based paralegal who also participates in housing activism, saw a Craigslist post from Civvl while searching for jobs. The ad alarmed her.
"It's fucked up that there will be struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like furniture-hauling or process-serving for a company like Civvl, evicting fellow working-class people from their homes so they themselves can make rent," she told Motherboard.
In its Craigslist ads, posted across the country, Civvl explains the opportunity plainly: "There is plenty of work due to the dismal economy."
"Unemployment is at a record high and many cannot or simply are not paying rent and mortgages," the ads state. "We are being contracted by frustrated property owners and banks to secure foreclosed residential properties."
Civvl aims to marry the gig economy with the devastation of a pandemic, complete with signature gig startup language like "be your own boss," and "flexible hours," and "looking for self-motivated individuals with positive attitudes:" "FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19," its website says. "Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants."
You fell in love with him when you saw him on The Mandalorian. You bought the miniatures and the toys. But you know that your soul won’t find rest until you’ve collected all of the Baby Yodas out there in the whole world. And now comes another Baby Yoda collectible, but this time in LEGO form.
Fans of The Mandalorian can soon get their hands on this adorable LEGO version of The Child aka Baby Yoda. The 1073-piece kit builds a 7.8″ tall version of the littlest could-be Jedi, and features a posable head, movable ears, and an adjustable mouth. Drops 10.30.2020. Pre-orders start at 1pm PST on 9.21.2020 on LEGO.com.
The Force and the cuteness are strong with this one.
If you ask me, world records are getting weirder and weirder. But hey, aiming for world records is no joke. It takes time, effort, and money, and so I can say that even weird world records deserve recognition.
A Texas city's annual Rotary Duck Derby, delayed for months..., went forward without some of the usual fanfare, but with a Guinness World Record for lining up rubber ducks.
The City of Graham's 3rd Annual Rotary Duck Derby, which was originally scheduled for April, took place at the city's Downtown Square.
Residents could sponsor a duck in the race for $5 or 24 ducks for $100, with the proceeds being donated by the Graham Rotary Club to a variety of community projects.
[...]
Organizers said they expected the number of ducks to come out to 20,000, enough to break the Guinness record of 17,782 ducks.
The greatest enemy that you can have in life is not your best friend. It’s not your partner. Nor is it another family member. The greatest enemy that you can have is yourself.
But how do you battle against yourself? How do you confront yourself? This goat decided that the best way that he can confront himself is through hand-to-hand combat, or in this case, head-to-head combat, in the mirror.
