Every annoying and unfamiliar issue we are dealing with this year has already been confronted by the residents of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Frank Vaccarriello looked up the scenes from M*A*S*H that deal with social distancing, infection, hand washing, and worst of all, lack of toilet paper. -via Laughing Squid
Lynx Vilden has lived off the grid for most of her life. She now camps out in the woods of Washington state. Vilden has a cabin, but prefers to sleep in a dugout away from any kind of civilization, where she holds camps to teach other people how to survive on only what they can find around them. Writer Katherine Rowland drove out to see what that's like.
It’s getting late, so Lynx and I abandon the cozy cabin for the lodge in the forest. “I like to sleep touching the earth,” she says, speaking in the drawn-out syllables of the Queen’s English. Through the thin light of my headlamp, I try to chase her sure-footed steps down an invisible trail through conifers and broad-leaved trees. I worry that I’ve lost Lynx to the night. But then I catch sight of an earthen dome rising five or six feet from the needled floor. I cast my light around, and see a tiny wooden door leading into the shelter, and crouch to enter a warm womb carved from the soil. Inside, Lynx coaxes embers to a roar before we settle into our matching hide and pine-bough beds.
The appeal of the “Stone Age thing,” Lynx explains as we sprawl before the fire, is that all you have are the materials available in the immediate environment. “It liberates something in the mind when you realize you’re not constrained by having to go buy some kind of tool that’s going to make your life easier.” This direct dependence on the elements cultivates “a depth of connection with all the nuances of nature around us,” she says. “You might see a shriveled-up stalk of grass. What I know is that, below the earth, there’s an edible root that tastes nutty. You just keep on learning.” Living wild, she elaborates, is an act of bearing witness, one that frequently requires relearning how to see and hear. Our senses have been numbed by the unrelenting light and noise of urban life. It deadens us, she says. “If we get so tame, so domesticated, we lose something that is very human.”
Read about Lynx Vilden and her philosophy at Outside Online. -via Digg
What happens when you force a comedian / magician and his lovely flight attendant wife to social distance together? Pure comedy gold!
FYI - The sketch was written by the wife.
Via - YouTube
A girl wearing a dress can be seen looking down at her bouquet. Behind her is a couple, who apparently were her parents, who look disappointed about their daughter’s wedding.
“This is my sister’s wedding in 1980. The photographer posed her so that she is looking at her bouquet and my parents are looming the background seeming very unhappy about the situation,” says Tricia, who submitted this photo on Awkward Family Photos.
Looks like a soap opera poster to me.
(Image Credit: Awkward Family Photos)
Having a bad day? This might be the memes that will turn your bad day into a good day, and your frown to a smile! If not, then I hope this will make you chuckle at least.
Enjoy your day!
More memes over at Cheezburger.
(Image Credit: Cheezburger)
Chico the sloth is on tour on the Gulf of Mexico exhibit in the Texas State Aquarium, and it might just be another boring day for him. For the dolphins, however, it isn’t.
The dolphins, generally being quite cheerful animals, were both curious and infinitely excited at the sight of a sloth.
Just look at them! They’re excitement cannot be contained!
The dolphins were not the only animals that Chico met. He also had the opportunity to hang out with the ducks, the seahorses, a shark, and some colorful fishes.
More details about Chico’s tour over at BoredPanda.
(Image Credit: TXStateAquarium/ BoredPanda)
Sometimes, video games throw players into boss fights that are seemingly impossible to beat.
For example, in Devil May Cry 5, the game begins with a boss fight that is meant to show the player who’s in charge. (It’s also meant for story progression, by the way). But if you are really good at playing this video game because you’ve played it many times, or if you’re just a guy born with natural gaming skills, you’ll find out that you can actually beat this seemingly unbeatable boss..
This is just one example of an unwinnable boss fight that turns out to be actually winnable. OutsideXbox delivers to us nine video games who throw players into unwinnable (but actually winnable) boss fights. See the video to know more.
(Video Credit: outsidexbox/ YouTube)
Ben Afquack began his journey to fame at a farm store in the small town of Anoka, Minnesota. There he met Derek Johnson, a human who discovered Afquack's musical talents and brought them to audiences in the Twin Cities.
You see, Ben Afquack is a prodigious drummer. He has become internet famous, which will hopefully transition into a deal from a major record label. Meanwhile, he's going on adventures with Johnson. The Star Tribune interviewed Afquack's manager, who said:
We take him hiking a lot, and we take him to beaches. He went kayaking with me. I brought him paddleboarding. He rides on the back of my mini motorcycle in the summer, in a pet carrier. We go everywhere on that, exploring different places. [...]
He likes to cuddle, believe it or not. I’ll scoop him up and put his back to my chest and lean back, and he falls asleep on my chest while watching movies.
He’s very playful. He was raised with dogs, so he’ll jump in and play with the dogs.
-via Swiss Miss
It has just been announced that the Modelo Group will be stopping production and marketing of Corona beer. For how long? Who knows.
The Mexican beer company said it was taking the steps to “comply with the measures adopted by the Federal Government” of Mexico.
They also expressed their “total commitment to be part of the fight against the SARS-Cov2 virus”, the statement reads.
Judging by the pallets of Corona still left in the supermarkets near us, the product hasn't been selling well in recent weeks.
VIA - CNN
Photo - Rodgrigo/ AFP/Getty Images/ FILE
A neighborhood in Lake Oswego, Oregon figured out a clever way to celebrate a 7-year-old's birthday.
To celebrate 7 year old Liam, neighbors had signs to wish him a 'Happy Birthday' during his birthday walk!
You may not be able to have a party, but that doesn't mean we all can't still celebrate! A very happy birthday to everyone, young and old, who has a birthday coming up.
Via - Instagram
Romans brought elephants to England during their invasions in first century of the common era, but after that, more than a thousand years passed before another elephant was actually seen by people in Britain- or most of Europe. But travelers brought back tales, which artists tried to illustrate. For his masters thesis at the University of Arts in Berlin, Uli Westphal created a taxonomic tree of those illustrations called Elephas Anthropogenus. It was later published in Zoologischer Anzeiger - A Journal of Comparative Zoology.
Since there was no real knowledge of how these animals actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral, pictorial and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct an elephant, thus, reinventing the image of an actual existing creature. This led, in most cases, to illustrations in which the most characteristic features of elephants – such as trunk and tusks – are still visible, but that otherwise completely deviate from the real appearance and physique of these animals. In this process, zoological knowledge about elephants was overwritten by its cultural significance. Based on a collection of these images I have reconstructed the evolution of the ‘Elephas anthropogenus’, the man made elephant.
Westphal's interactive chart is posted here. Click on an elephant to see the drawing up close. There are also links to the originals, like the hoofed elephant from the year 1444 shown here, although many suffer from link rot. -via Metafilter
Update: You can see quite a bit of those medieval artworks in a gallery at Flashbak.
Erin Krichilsky is a research assistant at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. In 2018 she examined a unique sweat bee that appeared to be male on one side, and female on the other side -divided exactly in half like a side show performer, but without the costume. This was a gynandromorph, which is so rare that this is only the second gynandromorph bee found in 20 years.
In humans, biological sex is determined by two sex chromosomes—one from mom and one from dad. Inheriting two X’s yields a female, while an X paired with a Y creates a male. But bees do things a little differently. All fertilized eggs, which carry genetic material from a mother and a father, hatch female bees. Unfertilized eggs, however, can still yield offspring: fatherless males that carry only one set of chromosomes from their mothers—half of what’s found in females. Sex, in other words, is determined by the quantity of genetic information in a bee’s cells.
That's very weird in itself, but bees might consider the way humans do it to be very weird. Scientists have a couple of different theories as to the genetic mishap that caused the gynandromorph bee. They also did a behavioral study of Krichilsky's bee, still alive when it was discovered, which you can read about at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Chelsey Ritner/Utah State University)
In 1784, just a year after the Revolutionary War ended, the US suffered its first secession. Several counties in what was then North Carolina, now Tennessee, decided they would be their own state, the 14th state, called Franklin after Benjamin Franklin. The residents who had lived and worked there all their lives felt they had no choice. The federal government threatened to seize their land. North Carolina wanted to keep them. Native Americans had a treaty that also carried a claim. And the US hadn't worked out any plan to create new states in addition the the original 13.
One of the primary political concerns of the Franklinites was that the North Carolina government and the federal government would sell their land from beneath their feet. That fear was grounded in reality, as North Carolina had ceded the territory west of the Appalachians to the United States for the purpose of resale just months before the formation of Franklin.
In 1784, the United States owed massive debts to its allies from the Revolutionary War. Without the power to levy taxes, the Continental Congress, which was the federal governmental body in charge before the U.S. elected its first president and ratified its Constitution, had to get creative in how they compensated their lenders. One way the U.S. did this was by accepting land ceded from the 13 states and selling land titles to settlers. North Carolina’s cession of the territory on the other side of Appalachia threatened to make the Franklinites trespassers on the land on which they lived and worked. When North Carolina changed its mind about giving up the territory in November 1784, it was too late. Washington, Sullivan, and Greene representatives met in Jonesborough, a city in Washington County, and declared their sovereignty in the form of the brand new State of Franklin.
The state of Franklin was never officially recognized by North Carolina nor the US government, but locals fought for it for four years, including one deadly gun battle. Read the story of Franklin at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Iamvered)
How to bring people together. This work has individual people dancing, but never int he same place at the same time. Chalk dance steps on the floor show the leading and the following steps and individuals can do either. This is filmed forma sage distance and at no time do the people meet or touch. It is all brought together in the edit after the face. Perhaps in the future we shall do a follow up where people really dance together.
Challenging times call for challenging puzzles! To help you through these times of quarantine and social distancing, our team has created a print-friendly PDF book with a variety of our most popular puzzles. And, in case you are new to Conceptis, there are rules and solutions for all puzzle types. We hope you enjoy this free book and share it with your loved ones.
60 Logic Puzzles to Keep from Going Corona-Crazy [PDF, Google Drive]
