It is said that around 7,000 people get cited yearly for violating the rules for driving in the HOV lane. This 62-year-old man just had to be one of them, after he tried to disguise a fake skeleton as a passenger so that he could use the aforementioned lane.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety says a trooper pulled over the man on Thursday after noticing he had placed a fake skeleton in the passenger’s front seat.

At the very least, I could praise the man for his cleverness by making the skeleton sit upright, tying it to the front seat, and have it wear a hat.

He could have had the skeleton wear the seatbelt, though, and have it wear gloves. But hey, that’s just me!

Last April, a man was pulled over after driving in the HOV lane with a mannequin wearing a sweatshirt, baseball cap and sunglasses.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Arizona Department of Public Safety via AP)

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Speechless. 3rd at the 5th Avenue Mile today in a massively deep field in 4:22.0. What a way to cap off a season 🙌🏼 Thank you @nyrr for putting on an amazing event! Already can’t wait for next year!!! 📸: Jane Monti

A post shared by Rebecca Mehra (@rebecca_mehra) on Sep 8, 2019 at 2:05pm PDT

Rebecca Mehra is a middle-distance runner with Little Wing, an elite running club in Bend, Oregon.

One day, Mehra had an “electrocution incident” in her home, which she recorded in her training log. Apparently, Mehra had an oven with a broken control panel, which caused it to beep continuously. So, she started unplugging the appliance when it wasn’t in use. That day, as she reached her hand behind the oven to pull the plug, something unexpected happened. ZAP!

Suddenly 240 volts were coursing through her left hand, up the arm, and down through her feet to the floor. “For what felt like three or four seconds I wasn’t able to let go of the plug,” she recalls, “as if my hand was glued to it.”

For a few moments, after successfully unplugging the oven, Mehra lay on the floor confused and worried. She felt fine at the moment, however, other than the fact that her hand was trembling, so “she carried on as usual.”

A few days later, the effects of that incident started to show: she couldn’t hit the splits, and, according to her coach, “It was like she was sticking to the ground on each step.”

What happened to her?

Find out more about Rebecca Mehra’s story over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Rebecca Mehra/ Instagram)

In 1835, Captain Charles C. Stannard was surprised to find a shallow reef way out in the middle of Lake Superior. Something had to be done to warn lake traffic away from the mountain underneath the surface, but it took years and patient engineering to build a lighthouse. The Stannard Rock Light stands 40 kilometers from the nearest island, and even further from the mainland, making it the most distant lighthouse in the world. It also earned the title “the loneliest place in the world.”  

Life in this remote outpost was lonely and harsh. The keepers were not allowed to have wives, girlfriends and families, which increased homesickness. The men spent time playing cribbage and ate whatever came out of the can. Often, they went days without speaking to each other. To combat the terrible isolation, the men were rotated off the Rock, typically after three weeks. Louis Wilks, who was the lighthouse keeper for twenty long years from 1936 to 1956, spent a record 99 consecutive days on the Rock—a feat no other keeper were able to even approach. The solitude was so crushing that many keepers had no idea what they signed up for until they arrived at the Rock. One keeper threatened to swim ashore if a boat did not come immediately to get him. Another one—as the legend goes—became deranged and had to carried off the Rock in a straitjacket.

You might not think that three weeks on a rock is all that bad, but there was no scenery to look at, much less internet access. The work was hard and dangerous, and sometimes the scheduled boats did not show up. The lighthouse was manned from 1882 to 1962. Read about the hard life on Stannard Rock Light at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Lt. Kristopher Thornburg, U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Alder)

Milk has a peculiar history. It's baby food for mammals, but humans continue to drink it way past infancy. We've learned to make cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream with it. And we drink milk from species other than our own, which is all kinds of weird. Is there any harm in that? The answer, of course, is "it depends." Which is the answer to pretty much all dietary controversies. Kurzgesagt gives us the state of the research about drinking milk. -via reddit

Santiago Terrasas, a Shoshoni martial artist and kinesiologist who lives outside of Reno, Nevada, will happily take you down with a meat cleaver. For 40 minutes, he'll whack at you with the sharp edge, livening up the blood flowing in your body. Eugene S. Robinson describes the experience in Ozy:

“Well, ultimately, our body wants to breathe,” says the 41-year-old Terrases. “So I want to improve the flow of blood, spread those blood vessels, open up the muscles and push the pain out.” A statement that could easily have been attributed to at least a half-dozen serial killers. [...]

“There are more things under heaven on Earth than in our books of science,” says surgeon Dr. Steve Ballinger quoting Hamlet. “But I’ve had four massages with razor-sharp instruments and it seems like it works 50 percent of the time. Usually if the cleaver is cold, it’s like an ice massage. Or maybe it scares you into a neuro reset.”

Terrasas charges $3 a minute, but will soon raise that price due to increased demand for his services. So make an appointment while you can still afford it.

-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Kasia Robinson

In the summer of 2011, brothers Morgan and Mason McGrew (previously at Neatorama) had an idea to shoot their own stop-motion version of Toy Story 3. They were just kids then, but they jumped in and never gave up on the project. Joe magazine tells their story.

And yes, these were toys that Morgan and Mason had played with when they were young. “We had some of the toys from when we were kids,” Morgan tells me over email. “Others we found elsewhere - school, day-cares, parks, etc.” It gives the film a whole extra level – when the Woody and Buzz memorably face the existential crisis of their owners growing up and no longer being played with, some of these are real discarded toys that have actually had that happen to them.

Their film is a combination of various techniques, and has all been shot on iPhones. Woody, Buzz and the rest mostly move in stop-motion, with the brothers having customised and modified the off-the-shelf toys to be poseable for their animation needs.

The human characters are played by their friends, family and school teachers. Morgan plays Andy, and Mason is grown-up garbage man Sid. Kids from a local day-care fill in as extras.

The result of that work is a shot-for-shot recreation of the Pixar film. The eight-year production was completed about a month ago. McGrew and McGrew sought permission from Disney before posting the finished movie on YouTube Saturday. If you want to watch it, continue reading.

We’ve all been there. We’ve had a friend or relative who passed away, and it’s a sad thing to know that they can no longer be here with us in this world. We only have a handful of photographs and memories with which to remember them. And one way of seeing these photos and reliving these memories is by opening Google Street View.

One Twitter user recently posted that her family never got to say goodbye to her grandpa when he died a few years ago, but when she visited her grandpa’s farm through Street View, there he was, sitting at the end of the road. Thousands of people responded, many with their own stories of finding old Street View shots of their dearly departed grandmas reclining in their front yards or their grandpas getting into their trucks.

Check out some stories of people who found their loved ones on Google Street View over at Slate.

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

It is the end of January once again, and I believe that most of us by now have broken their resolutions from the New Year. This brings us to this question: why are old habits hard to break, and new ones hard to make? Dr. Radha Modgil explains to us the answer, and also tells us what it takes to create a new habit.

Check out the video over at BBC.

(Image Credit: ColiN00B/ Pixabay)

This is Chesnut. He is a photogenic cat who has his own Instagram account. His human, ChazaySSB, posted these pics of Chestnut smiling for the camera on reddit last week, and they became an instant meme. See, it looks as if Chesnut is telling a joke that he thinks is uproariously funny. So everyone began putting words in his mouth. Here are a few examples- click to the right to see them.



There's always another bad Dad joke that Chesnut can tell. See 21 of them at Bored Panda.

A buffet line can be tempting, and they are particularly handy when trying to expose young children to a variety of foods, but there comes a time when you have to ask yourself "Can I really eat $20 worth of food in one sitting?" A lot of people take an all-you-can-eat offer as a challenge, and it's a wonder that the restaurant can make any money at all. You better believe they have the numbers and risks down to a science. For example, they save on staffing compared to a full-service restaurant.

Self-service allows a buffet to bypass a wait staff, and all-you-can-eat dishes (which are generally less complex and prepped in enormous batches) can be made by a “skeleton crew” of line cooks.

“At a typical restaurant, a cook can service 25 customers per hour — and that’s at best,” says Joe Ericsson, a managing partner at the food consultancy Restaurant Owner. “In the same amount of time, a single buffet cook might be able to prep enough food for 200 people.”

Because margins are so slim, buffets rely on high foot traffic: At Golden Corral, a buffet chain with 498 locations in 42 states, dining floors are 5k-square-feet and seat 475 people. On a typical Saturday, it’s not uncommon for 900 diners to come through the door.

The amount of food served per customer is also broken down, with diners categorized by how profitable they are. Read the statistics of how buffets make money at the Hustle. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Zachary Crockett/The Hustle)

Bless the maker and His water.

Bless the coming and going of Him.

May His passage cleanse the world.

May He keep the world for His people.

Your understanding of human anatomy is obsolete. The spice has changed us. Refer to Mark's Basic Biochemistry: A Clinical Approach by Michael Lieberman and Allan D. Sparks for an update.

Joke via Aelfred the Great

Crossing the street is one of the most frightening experiences I have in my life, especially when there are drivers who, upon seeing that someone will cross the street, will drive even faster than before.

I still find it difficult and frustrating to cross the street up to this day. Thankfully, there are those who will help you go to the other side, like this dog in Georgia, who acted as a crossing guard for the children.

Because of this heroic deed, the dog named Kupata (which means “sausage” in English) was honored by the Adjara Department of Tourism and Resorts with a "People's Choice" appreciation star.

They also helped build him a small wooden house in the place where he's been living for the last four years.

Good dog!

(Video Credit: Rusa oqruashvili/ YouTube)

Nansledan is a residential community in the southwestern corner of England. Residents of Nansledan have to abide by some rules, such as painting their homes and doors in certain colors, and no fast-food chains should be set up, only local businesses. It just happens that these rules must be followed because your landlord, the Prince of Wales, told you so. Having Prince Charles as your landlord in Nansledan is no surprise, as the community is a project taken by the Duchy of Cornwall, as The New York Times details: 

Nansledan, which will eventually have about 4,000 homes, could be the most ambitious project undertaken in the 700 years of the Duchy of Cornwall, the patchwork of properties spread across England, covering more than 200 square miles, that provides an income to the Prince of Wales.

A dukedom within a kingdom, the duchy was created in 1337 by Edward III for his eldest son, Prince Edward (known after his death as the Black Prince, perhaps because of the color of his armor). Prince Edward became the first Duke of Cornwall and the Prince of Wales, but he was never king — he died, probably of an illness, at age 45 while his father was still on the throne.

Most of the time since then, the duchy has passed to the eldest surviving son of the monarch, who is also heir to the throne and holds the title of the Duke of Cornwall.

Since 1952, that has been Prince Charles. At age 71, he has been in charge of the duchy longer than anyone before him (thanks to his mother, still reigning at age 93).

The duchy, which receives rent from tenants that include farmers, homeowners and shopping centers, earned 21 million pounds, or about $28 million, for the year that ended in March 2019, and Charles shared some of that income with his two sons and their families.

image via The New York Times

The Curiosity rover froze in place thanks to a software glitch. The multi-billion dollar rover has been operating on Mars since 2012. The unexpected glitch came in the form of the rover forgetting its awareness. Curiosity is designed to maintain an awareness of where each of its arms and implements are so it won’t damage them as it goes around Mars. On January 20, Curiosity lost this awareness, triggering a safety mode in which it ceases any movement, as SlashGear details: 

According to Dawn Sumner, a Planetary Geologist at University of California Davis and one of the people working on the Curiosity project, that “body awareness” – also known as attitude – is checked before any motor on the rover is activated. That way, it stands a better chance of spotting a potential issue before it happens.

“When the answer is no – or even maybe not – Curiosity stops without turning the motor,” Sumner writes. “This conservative approach helps keep Curiosity from hitting its arm on rocks, driving over something dangerous, or pointing an unprotected camera at the sun."

It was that safety evaluation which was interrupted, with “some knowledge” of Curiosity’s attitude escaping it, Sumner explains. The rover did continue sending back information to Earth, and that allowed scientists on the ground to come up with a recovery plan. “The engineers on the team built a plan to inform Curiosity of its attitude and to confirm what happened,” Sumner says. “We want Curiosity to recover its ability to make its safety checks, and we also want to know if there is anything we can do to prevent a similar problem in the future.”

image via wikimedia commons

The new Star Wars series The Mandalorian takes a step away from how the usual Star Wars films were created. Instead of building massive and elaborative sets, Lucasfilm is using new Stagecraft technology. They are using a rear-projected LED screen to create a dynamic environment, essentially a real-time green-screen. New photos from the set showcase the Stagecraft technology at work, as SlashFIlm details:  

 Here’s a wide glimpse at the Stagecraft being utilized in the opening scene of The Mandalorian from the first episode. As you can see, the screen surrounds the entire set and allows the crew to shoot from any angle. The technology allows the screens to change how the environment looks based on how a scene is being shot.

So if the camera is panning along with a character (as above), the perspective of the environment moves as the camera does, recreating what it would be like if a camera were moving in that physical space. You can get a better idea of how this is achieved over here.

image via SlashFIlm