Yumiko Ukon and her late husband have been serving rice balls since 1960. Their restaurant, Onigiri Bongo, makes 1,500 rice balls a day in fifty-five flavors. Customers who crave for the classic snack in non-traditional flavors will have to wait up to five hours in line just to get them.
Canadian artists Catherine King and Wayne Adams live on an enormous floating island they built out of discarded and recycled materials on the west coast of Vancouver Island. They have lived there for almost thirty years now. The island, dubbed Freedom Cove, is 25 miles (by boat) from the nearest town, and doesn't have electricity, but it has what the couple needs.
The compound has everything you could possibly think of and more: a dance floor, an art gallery, a candle factory, four greenhouses, six solar panels, and access to a small waterfall that provides constant running water.
Read about Freedom Cove and how it came about at CNN. -via Digg
George Miller is the singer for the Kaisers and the New Piccadillys. He's also an artist and production designer. The lockdown meant he had plenty of time, so he's put that to use making marionette puppets of musical legends of the past. Ursula Cleary made clothing for them, and Chris Taylor designed retro-style art boxes for tech.
I’d made some marionettes for a video a few years earlier and since then had been toying with the idea of making one of Link Wray but never seemed to have the time, so lockdown seemed the ideal opportunity. I liked the notion of spending time making something that had no ultimate purpose other than self amusement and no deadline for completion.
Miller had more time than he imagined, and the collection of marionettes grew to a dozen or so. See them all and read an interview with Miller at Dangerous Minds.
Nothing is really more magical than witnessing new life emerge. It is made even more magical when you don’t see it happening all the time.
Last Sunday, residents of Morterone, the smallest village in Italy where only 28 people live, welcomed their 29th community member, newborn baby Denis. He is the first baby born in the town in eight years.
“It truly is a celebration for the whole community,” Antonella Invernizzi, the mayor of Morterone, told Corriere della Sera.
Denis’s parents, Matteo and Sara, followed the Italian tradition of announcing the birth by placing a ribbon – blue for a boy and pink for a girl – on the door of their home. It is the first time such a ribbon has been seen in the village since 2012, when a baby girl was born.
Denis was born in Alessandro Manzoni hospital in Lecco, weighing 2.6kg.
[...]
“Now we have gone back up to 29,” Invernizzi said. “There are no other pregnancies in sight, at least that I know of … but certainly a newborn is always a joy for all of us.”
More details about the story over at The Guardian.
(Image Credit: Commune di Morterone/ Trattoria DEI Cacciatori/ Facebook/ The Guardian)
Make this summer the greatest of all time with the Emergency Goat In Your Pocket from the NeatoShop. This pocket-size noise maker is a scream! We kid you not, we think you will find it bleating awesome!
The Emergency Goat In Your Pocket makes scream, bleat, kids, and goat sounds. It makes the perfect gift for any GOATS on your list.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great novelty and gifts.
Don't forget to also stop by the shop to see our large selection of customizble apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10 XL shirts. We know that fun and fabulous people come in every size.
George Orwell published his book Animal Farm in 1945 as an allegory for the political history of the Soviet Union. It's been used ever since then in schools, although not always smoothly. I read it for a junior high English class, which was not coordinated with our history class, as we never studied the USSR at all. World history class never even made it to the 20th century. But Animal Farm has a history of its own, including being shunned by Second World nations.
5. The Soviet Union banned Animal Farm until the Cold War was almost over.
In 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy liberalized the USSR, a Latvian journal called Rodnik published Animal Farm in four installments. The Russian government newspaper Izvestia printed an excerpt later that year, saying: “It is good that the prose of this great English writer reaches our readers, albeit late.”
6. Many other governments have banned Animal Farm.
Beyond the Soviet Union, Animal Farm has also been banned at various times in countries like Cuba (where the book was set on fire by the government), North Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and countries in Africa. In Malawi, government minister Albert Muwalo was charged with treason and hanged in 1977; one alleged piece of evidence was his ownership of Animal Farm, a banned book. And in 1991, Kenya’s government banned a Swahili-language play based on Animal Farm that attacked corruption.
Read the rest of the ten facts about Animal Farm at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Coentor)
Facebook announced that they will be releasing Instagram Reels, their own version of the widely-used app TikTok. Instagram Reels is described as a video platform that lets people create interactive short clips set to music. Doesn’t it sound like TikTok? Well, we’ll know when the app is officially launched. For now Instagram Reels is being tested in France, Germany, Brazil, and India.
image screenshot via USA Today
A Brooklyn family with a pedigreed French bulldog welcomed five puppies into the world in the summer of 1904. Sadly, the mother dog died only two days later, and the puppies were in dire need. The owners contacted the local pound for a possible canine wet nurse.
According to the news reports, the pound did not have a suitable dog to take on the important job. However, the superintendent remembered a stray cat that had recently been dropped off at the shelter with her newborn kittens.
He explained to Mrs. Fahnestock that all but one of the kittens had died, and the mother cat appeared to be grieving deeply over her loss. He thought she would accept the motherless puppies and nurse them.
Mrs. Fahnestock agreed to the experiment, and welcomed the mother cat and kitten into her home. The puppies accepted their new feline mother right away. The mother cat, in turn, purred joyously and seemed very happy to have these new fur babies.
The arrangement was custom-made for the papers of the time, so the cat, named Lady Gray, along with her kitten Bill Gray and the five French bulldogs became locally famous. The puppies later went on to win awards in dog shows, while always staying affectionately loyal to their cat mother. Read about the interspecies adoption saga at The Hatching Cat.
Scientists at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary were just trying to boost production of Russian sturgeon, using hi-tech reproduction technology and an American sperm donor fish, and ended up with a fish that isn't supposed to exist. This story brings to mind two pertinent quotes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," and "Life, uh, finds a way." Researcher Attila Mozsár described the experiment.
Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are critically endangered and also economically important: They're the source of much of the world's caviar. These fish can grow to more than 7 feet long (2.1 meters), living on a diet of molluscs and crustaceans. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) filter-feed off of zooplankton in the waters of the Mississippi River drainage basin, where water from the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into. They, too, are large, growing up to 8.5 feet (2.5 m) long. Like the sturgeon, the have a slow rate of growth and development puts them at risk of overfishing. They've also lost habitat to dams in the Mississippi drainage, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The two species last shared a common ancestor 184 million years ago, according to the Times.
Nevertheless, they were able to breed —— much to the surprise of Mozsár and his colleagues. The researchers were trying to breed Russian sturgeon in captivity through a process called gynogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. In gynogenesis, a sperm triggers an egg's development but fails to fuse to the egg's nucleus. That means its DNA is not part of the resulting offspring, which develop solely from maternal DNA. The researchers were using American paddlefish sperm for the process, but something unexpected happened. The sperm and egg fused, resulting in offspring with both sturgeon and paddlefish genes.
The picture here shows a sturgeon on top, then three of the hybrid offspring below it, all looking quite different from each other. About 100 of these hybrids, which the scientists call sturddlefish, now live at the institute, and it is not clear whether they can reproduce on their own. Read about the creatures at LiveScience. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Jenő Káldy et al/CC BY 4.0)
What’s the next great thing after watching mukbang vlogs? Watching cats eat huge amounts of food. Watch how these cats react into seeing and eating a large tiger shrimp for the first time.
Some people don’t really pay attention to how a meal was cooked, let alone to how that particular meal was discovered. Did you know that the flat iron steak began as an experiment? It was a result of an experiment in a meat science laboratory in 2001, as The Hustle details:
In 1998, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — the industry’ largest trade group — gave a pair of meat scientists $1.5m in grant money and a seemingly impossible mandate: Find a new cut of meat that centuries of professional butchers had missed.
Three years later, the world was introduced to the flat iron steak.
In its first several years of life, the flat iron steak — a very thin, very tender cut from beneath the shoulder blade of the cow — topped 92m pounds per year in sales, about as much as the porterhouse and the T-bone steak combined.
Back then, it was rare to see a new steak enter the market. The flat iron became a proof-of-concept for the industry — and it left the beef titans craving more new cuts.
image via The Hustle
You won’t have to switch on a video conferencing platform, as Facebook Messenger adds a new feature that many probably are waiting for: the ability to screen share within the app.
Right now, you can share your screen (or pictures from your camera roll, or your Instagram feed, or whatever you’d like) with up to eight people in group chats or up to 16 people in Messenger Rooms. However, Facebook says it’s working on expanding the feature for up to 50 people in Rooms. The update is available on both Android and iOS.
To share your screen, first make sure you have the latest version of Messenger installed. Then, during a call, swipe up from the bottom of your screen to reveal the call options. Then just click “share your screen,” “start sharing,” and then “start broadcast” (presumably Facebook is giving you that many warnings so you don’t start sharing anything by mistake). After that you can navigate as you like on your phone, or return to the call to stop the broadcast.
It also seems that Facebook has the advantage here, as of many video chat services such as Skype and Zoom, Messenger works with the least issues on iOS and Android devices.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: The Verge)
It turns out that yes, you can print a house. Watch as a computer-controlled printer on a huge (10 meter square) scaffold squirts concrete in a precise pattern to construct a two-story house in Antwerp, Belgium.
Kamp C, the provincial Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction, printed the first house in Europe. This is the first printed two story building worldwide. The house has a floor surface of ninety square meters and was printed with the largest 3D concrete printer in Europe.
The printer only did the basic structure, while craftsmen installed windows and did the finishing work. This house is a prototype, but someday they might take this show on the road. -via Geekologie
The game Operation debuted in 1965, and so generations of kids have tried to remove a patient's funny bone, spare ribs, or butterflies from the stomach. If you screwed up, an electric buzzer and a red nose pointed out your failure. The tasks are not at all realistic ....or are they? Real surgeons love the game, and many of them receive an edition for medical school graduation. Some were inspired by it, or used it for practice for their future profession. Dr. Anthony Rossi of Sloan Kettering said,
I actually played Operation a lot as a kid — I was obsessed with it. From an early age I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I loved that game because of the precision that you needed. It’s also the rare game where both winning and losing was fun — even hitting the buzzer was fun. I’m left-handed, so I’d play the game left-handed and then I’d try it right-handed just to see how good I was. I love that game so much I recently bought it for my nephews and told them to try it with their dominant hand, and then their non-dominant hand.
Rossi and two other surgeons are quite familiar with Operation, and take us through the various organs included in the game, explain how it builds fine motor skills, and describe what happens when you "touch the sides" in real-life surgery, at Mel magazine.
(Image credit: PaRappa 276)
