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The World's Longest Running Daily Webcomic

Bill Holbrook, a cartoonist in Georgia, writes and draws two syndicated newspaper comic strips, these being On the Fastrack and Safe Havens. In an unusual twist for a cartoonist, he also writes and draws a third comic strip, this being the webcomic Kevin & Kell (an intended alliterative pun of Heaven and Hell). Following is a summary derived from the website.

Years ago, Kevin Kindle the rabbit and Kell Dewclaw the wolf met in an online chat room. After falling head over heels for each other, they decided to meet in person. It wasn't until then that they realized they were from separate ends of the food chain.

However, the relationship they'd developed online overcame Kevin's instinct for self-preservation, and Kell's heart melted from such a demonstration of trust. Kell was energetic and vivacious, qualities Kevin had found lacking in herbivores. Such a relationship between predator and prey seemed doomed to fail but these two opposites were determined to overcome the barriers that society placed in their path.

They eventually married, knowing good and well they would become outcasts. They settled in the suburb of Domain, which borders both a large metropolitan area and an uncharted region known simply as The Wild. A year later, Kell gave birth to Coney, a carnivorous female bunny who inherited Kevin's big ears and Kell's meaty appetite.

Other than their unconventional pairing, these woodland Bradys are not unlike a typical American family. Kevin and Kell live within a tree (at the corner of Tooth and Nail Streets) containing all the comforts of a suburban home: TV, indoor plumbing and neighbors with binoculars. Kell now works as CEO of a company that supplies meat to supermarkets through predation. Kevin owns and operates an Internet Service Provider called Hare-Link from the basement of their home. Family members and many other animals appear as regular characters, and in a running plot line, all marriages are almost always between different species, most often predator and prey.

Continuities vary from simple dailies to complex storylines that run for weeks on end. Plots typically involve some sort of high-tech but also run a gamut of topics such as friendship, relationships, family issues, workplace issues, and personal conflicts. Two things are certain - 1) you've never seen a comic strip like this before and 2) animals are every bit as neurotic as humans (who, by the way, make occasional appearances in the strip).

Kevin & Kell may be found at https://www.kevinandkell.com, embedded in which are links to Holbrook's other strips, and most surprisingly, to Hare-Link itself, which is a real ISP. Check it out and you may find, as I did, that it is a good daily read.


Reporting From the Storm

For some reason, news outlets send reporters into hurricane areas that have been evacuated. The reporters tell us that everyone should leave, yet they stay to give us visuals that we don't need. Are they risking their lives unnecessarily? Often, no. Today, people have been sharing a video from The Weather Channel in which a reporter is working hard to stand up against the wind, but it doesn't seem to affect the two guys walking in the background.

Adam Gordon and friends had a little time on their hands, and figured they could do their own report. -via reddit


Skeleton Typogram by Aaron Kuehn

American graphic artist Aaron Kuehn created this amazing Skeleton Typogram depicting all the bones in the human body typographically using only their names.


There's a Car in this Picture

There's a car in this picture somewhere, or so redditor Tittzo claimed, "This black car looks like a mirror after being washed."

Do YOU see a car?


The Third-Smallest Town in Texas

The 1980’s was a remarkable decade on many fronts, not the least of which was entertainment. There were noteworthy films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and noteworthy TV series such as Dallas. And then there was Greater Tuna in theater.

The play Greater Tuna is a comedy about Texas' third smallest town (fictional), where the Lion's Club is too liberal and Patsy Cline never dies. The twenty characters seen or heard in the play are portrayed by only two performers (with a small army of behind-the-scenes helpers), making this satire on life in flyover America even more delightful as they depict all of the inhabitants of Tuna - men, women, children - and animals.

Greater Tuna began as a simple party skit based on a political cartoon seen in an Austin, Texas newspaper circa 1980. Creators Joe Sears and Jaston Williams (the original actors), and Ed Howard were the imaginative authors that parlayed the sketch into a critically acclaimed production which has entertained audiences across the country ever since.

Although one must purchase the DVD here to see the original actors, one can click below to view another production of Greater Tuna on YouTube. The play is still on tour nationwide although the original actors have since retired after almost forty years.

Be warned – the play in its original form is NOT politically correct.


TV Reporter Investigating Car Break-Ins in San Francisco Got Both Her Bait Car AND Camera Crew Car Broken Into

How bad is the car break-in epidemic in San Francisco? Let's put it this way: recently a TV crew reporting on car break-ins got both their bait car and camera crew vehicles broken into!

Remarkably, as Guerrero was conducting the interview, a car belonging to the Inside Edition crew was broken into, resulting in two broken windows and the theft of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. That robbery was also caught on by surveillance cameras.
"We actually got hit twice in one day," Guerrero declared.

Watch Child Prodigy Alma Deutscher Compose a Piano Sonata in Under a Minute with Four Notes Drawn Randomly From a Hat

Alma Deutscher began playing the piano at the age of two. By the age of six, Deutscher had composed her first piano sonata. And by the age of seven, her first operatic piece.

So she's good.

Just how good Deutscher is can be seen easily in this 2017 clip from 60 Minutes, where the child prodigy was given four random notes pulled from a hat. She created a piano sonata in under a minute.


The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch as an Online Interactive Adventure

Surely you've seen Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, the famous triptych oil painting from the late 15th century.

But do you know the meaning behind all Bosch's fantastic and gruesome figures in the painting?

Put on your headphones and head on over to this online interactive documentary. Either join the audiovisual tour of The Garden of Earthly Delights, as narrated by Redmond O'Hanlon, or freely explore and click the various icons to read and hear the story behind a particular part of the painting.


28 Trombones Play BoRhap

Christopher Bill (previously at Neatorama) assembled a group of trombonists from all over at the International Trombone Festival and recorded all the parts to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." The participants are listed at the YouTube page, many of them with websites. -via Laughing Squid


The Icy Village Where You Must Remove Your Appendix

Villas Las Estrellas is one of the few settlements in Antarctica where people live for years and raise children. The core population is made up of scientists and workers from Chile's military, but they stay long enough to bring their families along. There's a school, a post office, a bank, and a Russian Orthodox church. But the nearest hospital is 625 miles away, so if you want to live there, you must have your appendix removed first -children included. Getting pregnant is not prohibited, but discouraged. See what life is like in Villas Las Estrellas in a gallery from BBC Future. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: SnowSwan)


Man Learns to Talk Turkey

Joe Hutto has spent so much time with turkeys that he's learned their language. He can interpret the individual calls they use for other species, requests, and warnings. Hutto understands turkey language more than he can speak it, which is quite an accomplishment. This clip is from the BBC Earth series Natural World: My Life as a Turkey. -via Tastefully Offensive


The Life Of One Of America’s Bloodiest Hitmen

When Jose Manuel Martinez was arrested for the murder of an Alabama man in 2013, he made a decision not to involve his family in an investigation, and admitted to killing more than 35 men over several decades.

Martinez, who was born and spent most of his life in California, said that for three decades he had worked as a gun for hire, collecting debts and killing people across the United States. Police say that work was often for Mexican drug cartels, though in a few cases he also killed people just because they pissed him off. Martinez refused to say anything about the drug business, including whom he worked for or with. But he was more than happy to talk about bodies. And about his own prowess in killing. They called him El Mano Negra, he said — the Black Hand.

The dead were young and old, drug dealers and farm laborers, fathers and husbands. But always men. They were scattered across as many as 12 states, but his primary killing ground was Tulare County, a little-populated land of vast green fields and listless, sunblasted farm towns in California’s Central Valley, where Martinez had been born and raised.

“You want to know who killed them all?” he asked at one point. “I killed them all.”

The stunning part of Martinez's crimes was that so many of the unsolved murders had received scant attention and little investigation. Read about the 30-year career of a hitman who almost got away with it at Buzzfeed. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Matt Rota for BuzzFeed News)


Trombone Suicide Routine

They didn't tell you when you signed up to play trombone that you would eventually be risking your life for the entertainment of the crowd. And you won't even have to play the instrument! While these kids from China Spring High in Texas are impressive, you can't help but wonder how painful it was to practice until they got it right. -via reddit


Dinosaur or Baby Great Blue Heron?

According to the origin of birds scientific hypothesis, birds are modern-day dinosaurs - and this photo by JJJFrank shows how a baby Great Blue Heron looks just like an Archaeopetryx.

via Geyser of Awesome


Dumb Things People Believed as Kids

There's so much about the world that children are expected to just pick up from their environment. That means so many things are only half-learned because we don't realize what we are misunderstanding. Ross McClearly asked Twitter users to share the misconceptions they remember from childhood.

My daughter told me that when she was very young, she'd watch me do laundry. I would clean the lint filter out and put the lint in the "magic pink box" on the shelf. And after it got full, she'd look in and all the lint had disappeared! Magic!

"Honey, that's a waste basket. I emptied it."

"I know! I felt like an idiot when I got older and figured that out!"

Read some of the other things people completely misunderstood when they were children at Buzzfeed. There's more in the comments, too, and in the original Twitter thread.


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