Name another city where you can be casually walking your dog and run into this... 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/u57TtmOXVT

— Everything Georgia (@GAFollowers) July 11, 2020

Chavis Flagg gets your attention by rolling through Atlanta on his motorized unicycle, all without skipping a single beat. He keeps your attention by being a great musician. If you see him at night, you may also be treated to a mobile light show.

Flagg earns his living through busking. Hopefully, his new album can take him further. CNN describes his work:

Flagg's impromptu performances aboard a Onewheel electric skateboard have helped double the 24-year-old musician's social media following over the past two weeks and earn him some money during a time when live venues have closed around the city, he told CNN.

On Saturday, from about 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET, Flagg earned roughly $300 in tips from people stopping to thank him for his music and to request songs. Since he started playing along the Beltline roughly two weeks ago, he's performed music by Prince, Jimmy Hendrix and Pop Smoke. Flagg's equipment includes a small amplifier and two JBL speakers attached to the Onewheel.

-via Super Punch

Horoscopes usually consist of three things: a brief description of a person (which is sometimes accurate) born within a certain star sign, pros and cons of being born in the sign, and a prediction (which is likely inaccurate) of what might happen to the person in the future. While various horoscopes generally give us good advice on how to live our lives, they shy away when it comes to telling us our bad traits. This horoscope doesn’t, and you’ll love it for its brutal honesty.

See this honest horoscope over at Sad And Useless.

What does it say about you?

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

Data Broz brings us another moving graph, this time of animated movies from 1926 to 2020. The first half moves fairly slowly, as Disney films dominated the landscape for decades. Then other studios moved in, and finally in 1989, the age of the Disney Renaissance overtook the chart, raking in cash left and right. Things go really fast toward the end, as computer-generated animation, ticket prices, and a rising population made the money making all that much easier. -via Geeks Are Sexy

1) A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread: this enigmatic Roman gold ring was found in a ploughed field near Silchester in 1785. The square bezel has a portrait of the pagan goddess Venus, inscribed backwards SUNEV for use as a signet ring by the owner. Curiously... pic.twitter.com/Ls0QcDVNzq

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 10, 2020

Twitter user Gareth Harney brings us a fascinating tale of two artifacts that were only connected to each other many hundreds of years later. A precious gold ring depicts the goddess Venus, but the inscription proclaims it belonged to a Christian.

3)... at a temple to the mysterious British god “Nodens” 80 miles away in Lydney, Gloucestershire, a lead curse tablet (defixio) was later discovered. On the tablet a man named “Silvianus” complains that his gold ring was stolen and he suspects “Senicianus” was the culprit! ... pic.twitter.com/T50LeVRykr

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 10, 2020

It’s a cold case of jewelry theft, possibly signifying the tension between old and new religions. The ring is called the Ring of Silvianus in some sources, and the Ring of Senicianus in others. What is fascinating is the possible connection between this ring and the One Ring to Rule Them All, which you can read about in the full thread at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

The entertainment manager in my nan's care home decided to recreate album covers with some of the residents.
This is my nan. pic.twitter.com/0e6bAzVW97

— Tim Frost (@TimFrost23) July 11, 2020

Residents of the Sydmar Lodge Care Home in Edgware, UK are, with the help of the home's entertainment manager, rocking out their top hits. Tim Frost's photo thread includes remakes of Madonna's True Blue, Blink 182's Enema of the State, Bruce Springstein's Born in the U.S.A., and Taylor Swift's 1989.

-via Nag on the Lake

While most people restlessly sheltered in place this summer, one senior citizen found a way to self-isolate and earn himself $1,000 by mapping his entire neighborhood with his new DJI drone.

Bill Cook from Winchester, Virginia, flew around 50 flights, most of which were from the safety of his driveway. Check out the full story.

Irina Guicciardini Strozzi is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Lisa de Giocondo, the original model for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Here, photographer Drew Gardner has photographed her posed and framed like her famous ancestor.

This is part of Gardner's project titled The Descendants. It shows the descendants of famous people in the style and costume of iconic portraits of their ancestors. Gardner's subjects include the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Horatio Nelson, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

You can read more about Gardner's project at Colossal.

Dr. Benjamin Rush was an intellectual who influenced George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, among others. He was one of the youngest men to sign the Declaration of Independence, and became the young country's most famous doctor afterward. Rush was an advocate for many social causes, including humane treatment of the mentally ill.

Rush was a founder of American psychiatry. As a scientist, he was fascinated by mental illness; as a doctor, he was horrified by its treatment. Where most saw the workings of God or demons in the manners of the mentally ill, Rush saw malfunctioning parts. It was no sin to be deranged. The mentally afflicted deserved sympathy and sophisticated care. They had “diseases of the brain,” he said, not character flaws of failures of will. Rush was a pioneer in removing psychiatric patients from prison conditions. He unchained them, gave them proper lighting, and had them exercise in the hospital gardens.

While he was a brilliant thinker, he wasn't right about everything. Read about Rush and his views on all sorts of subjects at Nautilus. -via Strange Company

A speed camera in Italy awarded a driver with a $960 prize for taking her Ford Focus up to 437 miles per hour, or approximately 10 times the maximum speed of that vehicle. Alas, she was to be disappointed, as it was a computer glitch which caused the reading. Fox News reports:

The Autoappassionati report said local police failed to double-check the camera’s findings before mailing the woman a ticket – which placed 10 points on her license and carried a fine of 850 euros, or just under $1,000.

Giovanni Strologo, a transportation spokesman for the community of Offagna, in Ancona province, where the incident happened, advised the driver to appeal to the local government for compensation, according to the report.

In a Facebook post, he noted that police should have checked the details before sending the driver a ticket and joked that “even with a missile” the car could not possibly reach speeds that high.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo: TuRbO_J

If one wants to go to Mars, there is a launch window that comes around every two years or so when the planets align in a manner that makes the trip to the red planet a lot easier. NASA takes advantage of that launch window every time it comes around, as in this moth. China and the United Arab Emirates are scheduled to also send missions to Mars in July. The planned European-Russian Exomars mission was scrapped, but three missions are still a go as of now. NASA is out in front with an audacious plan to send a lander to Mars and then bring it back with samples of the planet!

In 2011, when U.S. planetary scientists were asked what big-ticket projects should receive federal funding over the next decade, a Mars sample-return mission came out as their top choice. Actually, they needed two missions. The first would collect rocks and soil and cache them on Mars, and the second would retrieve the samples at some later date and return them to Earth where they could be studied in far more detail than they could be on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover constitutes Part One of that plan. Now scheduled for a July 17 launch from Cape Canaveral [Update: Launch is now planned for no earlier than July 30], it’s the most advanced Mars mission yet.

Having established from past investigations that Mars was once a habitable place, scientists now want to know if the planet was, in fact, ever inhabited. That’s a more difficult question, as there currently are no definitive “biosignatures” for identifying life, short of spotting a kangaroo bounding across the Martian surface. More likely, a tentative answer will come from multiple lines of evidence showing that a particular rock’s chemistry and physical characteristics probably resulted from biology. Perseverance’s job is to find the rocks that look most promising for containing that fossil evidence.

Read about all three Mars missions launching this summer at Air&Space magazine. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

YouTuber walter santi (previously at Neatorama) surprised his two cats with a ball pits and 500 plastic balls! Santi and Indy had a ball, so to speak, playing in it. However, Indy kept losing his favorite ball amongst all the new ones. -via Metafilter

Being able to outrun an explosion.

You know how you have to be somewhere at a certain time, and you leave early, but then use up all your spare time and more looking for a parking space? Somehow, people in movies manage to always have a parking space waiting for them right in front of their destination, even in cities, even in Manhattan. It's movie logic. While some shortcuts are forgivable (no one wants to watch someone looking for a parking space), other just bend reality for a good visual, like walking or running away from an explosion.

Waking up from a long coma and being able to walk...

People who've had similar real-life experiences can be thoroughly distracted from a movie plot when something is just so wrong. Read a list of 40 things people have noticed in movies that just don't work that way in real life at Bored Panda.

ViralHog introduces us to one gentlemen's beautiful quarantine crafting project: a completely functional and smooth-sipping fountain made of whiskey bottles. He writes:

In the video, I am videoing a Jack Daniels waterfall feature that I made from scratch with everything recycled apart from the pump inside! It's amazing what you can do when stuck in lockdown.

It's beautiful and, when fully filled, helpful at parties.

-via Born in Space

Journalist Juliette Bretan is not musically-inclined, but as she was researching her roots, particularly the lives of her Eastern European grandparents, she was captured by the sounds of an obscure musical genre. Interwar Polish tango combined Argentine tango, Jewish klezmer, and Polish folk music to produce sad, sentimental, and strangely patriotic songs. The heyday of Polish tango was 1918 to 1939, so it was both birthed and killed by war. You can hear some examples here, here, and here.   

Bretan fell hard for Polish tango, which, in an article for culture.pl, she described as “merging pinches of the age-old Polish romantic and sentimental melodies with Jewish inflections and a more modern, brassy sound, dripping in glissandos and vibrato.”

The Jewishness of Polish tango is essential to understanding the source of these sounds, which means it’s important for those of us in 2020 to understand what it must have been like to be Jewish in Poland during the interwar years. Briefly put, it was no picnic, in particular because of the overt antisemitism of the popular National Democratic Party, which organized successful boycotts against Jewish-owned businesses. For the fascists and racists who waved the banner of the NDP, antisemitism was nothing less than a prerequisite to Polish patriotism.

Even so, being a Jewish composer, musician, or performer in Warsaw, whose population between the wars was roughly one-third Jewish, offered Jews a rare measure of personal and professional freedom. That’s because many interwar Poles, whose country’s borders had been erased from maps by Russia, Germany, and Austria in the late 18th century, were ready to celebrate their nation’s newfound independence. Thus, for large swaths of the Polish population, especially those in Warsaw, Jewish composers, musicians, and performers were tolerated, and even welcomed, to the extent, that is, that they were entertaining.

Read about the rise and fall of the unique interwar Polish tango at Collectors Weekly.

To protect their soldiers from getting wounded by the weapons used in their time, the Ancient Greeks during the time of Alexander the Great developed this suit of armor made out of layers of linen glued together by animal fat. The said armor is capable of deflecting arrows. It can also reduce the impact of sword blows on the wearer’s body. But how does this ancient technology fare against modern weapons, such as new arrows and guns? You might be surprised at how comparable this armor is to a light kevlar, when it (the armor) is 5 times thicker.

It doesn’t fare well against fire, however, as it is flammable because of the animal fat.

Via The Awesomer

(Image Credit: How To Make Everything/ YouTube)