Padmé uses a Japanese cold brew coffee system that her mother gave her because it’s as much art as it is a method of preparation. pic.twitter.com/eOzY8hgobu

— Violet "Twt Throttled my Likes" Wilson (@ViWiWrites) April 28, 2020

Star Wars fanfiction writer Violet Wilson matched Star Wars characters with their most likely preference for coffee. The Star Wars universe does have coffee, or rather a stimulant drink called caf, which is never mentioned in the feature films. Wilson gives us the coffee preferences of 16 Star Wars characters, or maybe just 15, since both Kylo Ren and Ben Solo are counted. And then people offered more of them in the replies.

Meanwhile, Baby Yoda drinks hot chocolate but pretends it's coffee so he can fit in with the adults.

— 🏳️‍🌈 Miranda 🦋 (@An_Absent_Mind) April 28, 2020

See all of them in this Twitter thread, and try to think of others you might contribute. -via The Daily Dot

Celebrities have getting some poor press during the past couple of months. People on the internet have not responded well to movie stars trying to cheer us up by singing a song together or implying solidarity by showing us how they have isolated themselves in their mansions. Folks are even waiting for the Botox to fail. But some famous people are taking steps above and beyond to help out those in need.

See a dozen stories of celebrities who are doing their part in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

Sheriff_Woody_PCT is a botanist. He recently hiked for several hours through Death Valley, looking for plants. In this video, he identifies quite a few rare plants and an animal or two, and finds the tail section of a crashed plane. While any other YouTuber would have jumped up and down with excitement in finding a plane crash, this guy just includes it with the other interesting things he found. As one commenter said,

You know you're really serious about botany when stumbling onto the wreck of a secret spy plane is the least interesting part of your hike.

Anyway, the story behind the plane is pretty cool. No one died in the 1952 crash, and the wreckage is so remote that it was never hauled out of Death Valley. -via reddit

This is an adventure game that harks back to the days when you had to whack your disc drive to get a game to operate. Or at least I did. David, Florence, Patrick, and Julie designed Fifteen Monsters All In A Row because designing monsters is fun.

You are in a cave. You don't know why you are in a cave. But you are in a cave. The walls glow unnaturally, casting everything in a pale blue light. Water drips from the ceiling. Puddles as dark as blood cover the floor. And ahead of you you see fifteen monsters all in a row, standing between you and whatever lies beyond.

Freedom?
Fortune?
Fame?
Or fifteen monsters more?

The thing to remember about these monsters is that they are all different, and nothing in the rules says that all monsters are dangerous or even unreasonable. Your decisions will greatly influence your progress. Both children and adults will enjoy playing Fifteen Monsters All In A Row. -via Metafilter

Liked 60 Logic Puzzles to Keep from Going Corona-Crazy? Here is another puzzle PDF from Conceptis, aiming to keep parents from going Corona-Crazy:

As many of us continue to face quarantine and school closures, we wanted to create a puzzle book for kids. This print-friendly PDF book has a variety of dot-to-dot puzzles that will help keep their minds focused and hopefully, provide the parents with a tiny bit of quiet!

Download here

The President of the United States mused about consuming (and injecting) disinfectants during a press conference last week. This statement unsurprisingly triggered a backlash from medical experts, who were quick to point out the risks of doing such a thing. But in some instances, mixing disinfecting substances, such as bleach, with water, and then drinking that is a good idea, as it keeps you safe from danger.

That’s right, adding bleach or other disinfectants to drinking water that may contain deadly pathogens, like viruses, is a proven way to make that water safe to drink.

[...]

Dilution is key to safely consuming bleach. The CDC recommends adding eight drops of unscented bleach per gallon of water, if that water is clear.

Check out more details about this over at Outside Online, and view the CDC flyer on how to make your potentially unsafe water safe to drink over here.

(Image Credit: ronymichaud/ Pixabay)

King Solomon once saw something interesting under the sun. He saw that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.” In other words, luck has something to do with success, and one such man from Colorado has stumbled upon such luck.

With a little bit of luck and persistence, a Colorado man has hit the jackpot twice after playing the same numbers for 30 years.

Colorado Lottery officials identified “Joe B.” as the winner of two $1 million Powerball jackpots on March 25. He claimed the winnings on Friday, KUSA-TV reported.

The winning tickets were sold on Lake Avenue in Pueblo at two different stores, about a mile apart, officials said.

“Joe B.” bought one ticket in the morning and the other in the evening, communications director Meghan Dougherty said.

Vince Lombardi once said that the price of success is hard work and dedication. After three decades of dedication, I guess this man clearly deserved that win.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Jim Bachor is a Chicago-based mosaic artist who often fills ugly potholes with his art. He writes that:

In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. 

Appropriately, he recently filled several potholes in one street with images of supplies that have become especially important while in lockdown. You can view more at Colossal.

If you’re in for the extreme and gruesome, like losing your fingers on purpose, then this sign from Changsha, China is a gentle reminder for you to do it with utmost care.

Image via Engrish.com

Graphic designer Josh Berta set to work digitally altering classic book covers for the Covid-19 era. Here, Earnest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises tells of a different lost generation.

Spain operates two bases in Antarctica, on Livingston Island and Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands. They are only manned during the summer months and are not equipped to house research teams through the winter. So when the news of a global pandemic came, the scientists stationed at those bases had to plan for a fast escape, lest all borders be closed to them. There was no coronavirus in Antarctica, but being stranded for months with no supplies was not a good option.  

Ushuaia, a port in southern Argentina, is a common transit point for Antarctic researchers, but the country was also thinking of closing its own borders. Fearing the worst, the Spanish authorities decided to send Hespérides, a Spanish Navy–operated scientific research vessel docked in Chile, to Antarctica and get the staff from both bases to Argentina before it was too late. If they would be trapped, better there than across Drake Passage.

The date for the ship’s arrival kept being pushed up—from March 19 to March 16. Then, on March 12, the bases found out it would arrive in just two days. Normally, staff would have a week to shut everything down and shield all the scientific equipment and living quarters from the harsh Antarctic winter. This time, they had a single day. González Álvarez and her colleagues ran around Deception’s volcanic cauldron, retrieving their seismic monitoring equipment in violent wind. Others scrambled to pack up not just their own equipment, but all their food, medicine, and trash, too.

That single day was still not fast enough, as several South American countries closed their borders before the Hespérides arrived. While the passengers were virus-free, they couldn't go ashore. Read the story of the convoluted way the Spanish researchers found their way home to a changed world at Atlas Obscura.

(Image: courtesy of Jordi Felipe Álvarez)

John Corcoran went to school in hopes that he would be able to read like his sisters did. As he grew up, however, he found out that learning to read was a really difficult, if not impossible, task. Unfortunately, as a child at a very young age, he didn’t know how to articulate his problem.

I remember praying at night and saying, "Please Lord, let me know how to read tomorrow when I get up" and sometimes I'd even turn on the light and get a book and look at it and see if I got a miracle. But I didn't get that miracle.

As he moved from grade to grade, Corcoran would eventually give up on learning how to read.

I got up every day, got dressed, went to school and I was going to war. I hated the classroom. It was a hostile environment and I had to find a way to survive.

And found some ways he did. Without the need to read, Corcoran would see his way through high school and college, and he eventually found a profession in which he could hide his inability to read — teaching.

Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I'd been through high school and college without getting caught - so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read.

Corcoran hid his secret for a long time. But thanks to seeing Barbara Bush talk about adult literacy on TV one night, Corcoran was inspired to ask for help and finally learn to read.

More details about his extraordinary story over at BBC.

(Image Credit: BBC)

The intervening years have made it clear that there was no real plan for a sequel to the 1977 movie Star Wars. There was no guarantee that it would be a hit, much less the saga it came to be. Before that year was out, though, science-fiction writer Leigh Brackett was working to construct a sequel. George Lucas nixed many of her ideas, and she died before the project could be finished, so the story was passed to others. So what was in Brackett's treatment of the story?

"I’ve never been able to understand the pleasure human beings get from placing their mouths together."

That was a line from C-3PO. Read its context, and other ideas that were changed from the first script of The Empire Strikes Back at Mental Floss.

Because you have so much time in your hands, you might be thinking how you might use that time to do meaningful things. One of the things I can suggest to you is learning a new language. This could prove to be a useful skill in the future, and a skill that greatly widens your horizon. But which languages are the easiest to learn, and which are the most difficult?

This article from CNN might be of help to you. Why don’t you take a look?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Back in 1989, Joel Hodgson and his robot friends took their local show Mystery Science Theater 3000 to Comedy Central. The premise of MST3K was that they were forced to watch old B-movies, which they spiced up with wisecracks. That first season is rarely talked about, because the cast had yet to find their groove. However, the movies they selected were perfect for the concept. Wouldn't it be great if they could re-do those, with 30 more years of experience in riffing? That's exactly what they are going to do with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live Riff-Along on Sunday, May 3, streaming live on multiple platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Pluto TV, Stirr, Xumo, Redbox, and Vizio. The show will feature a new short called Circus Day and the 1969 movie Moon Zero Two, which was part of that first season.  

“We’ll be prepping—it’ll be our downtime,” Hodgson said. “People can watch us as we make it.”

And who better than the MST3K crew to act as role models for maintaining sanity and some semblance of normalcy during quarantine? Isolated from civilization with only advanced technology to keep them company, communications with the outside world restricted to the four (or six) sides of a viewscreen, whiling away the hours in front of filmed entertainments selected by malevolent overlords: These are the tragic lemons that a succession of test subjects have made into comedic lemonade for the past 30 years—and they did it all in clothes that were functional, yet comfortable, to boot.

Read about the production at the A.V. Club, and bookmark your chosen platform for watching.