(Photo: Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers)

Women! Ugh. Right, guys? Nothing keeps them happy. You catch a snake and put it in your car, forget to tell her about it, and she flips out.

One man in Australia is experiencing this first hand. Richie Gilbert’s profession is snake catching, which must put him in high demand at his local elementary school on Career Day. He works for Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers. In a recent Facebook update, he wrote:

WHOOPS!!! Note to self: Next time I have a 1.5m snake loose in my car, don't let my wife drive it. […]

A couple of days earlier I had a python escape from a bag (mistake no.1) inside my car and Nat knew this but had assumed I had found it again and I didn't tell her otherwise (Mistake no.2).

Last night I was sound asleep and I get a call from her saying "I just opened the door and there was a snake coming out from underneath the steering wheel in the dashboard". Whoops!!!!

My bad.

The snake left the dashboard 3 days later.

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

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Dog is man’s best friend and man occasionally returns the favor. In this case from Russia, man really delivered. You see, the man who bravely jumps into a frozen lake isn’t rescuing his own dog, but a stray. The man uses his fists to smash through the ice as he swims toward the dog. According to news reports and video descriptions, after the rescue, a passerby in a car picked up the man and the dog and took them someplace warm where they could get vodka (for the man) and sausage (for the dog). The unknown hero has adopted the dog and named him Rex.

-via 22 Words

Twitter user Overtime Queen had a brilliant idea: make a scarf that she can eat! It will keep her both warm and well-fed.

She used 15 packs of a type of gummy candy that comes in 50-inch strings. Her knitting needles are actually chopsticks. With them, she elegantly wove citrus soda and cola-flavored strands into fabric.

The final product is about 10 by 6 inches, so she probably needs about 100 more packs to make a full size winter scarf.

You can see more photos at Rocket News 24.

Do you love to ride? Artist Graham McLoughlin does, so he developed a bike rack to show it. He worked with the bike rack manufacturer Cyclehoop and the British Heart Foundation to place 14-heart shaped racks around London. You can see more photos of it at Contemporist.

P.S. The Cyclehoop website is really fascinating. There are all sorts of exotic rack and hanger designs like nothing I've ever seen.

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The Kaikottikali is a dance performed by women in Kerala, a state in south India. The Musical Heritage of India explains that it "is a feature of every home in Kerala." That's a large talent pool to draw from. But it still took 10 months of organization and practice to get 5,211 women costumed and perfectly syncronized into a living wave of rhythmic motion. This effort secured the Guinness World Record for the largest performance of the Kaikottikali.

Quidditch is a sport in the Harry Potter universe. It's sort of like soccer, except that the players ride on broomsticks. There are real world versions too--even for Muggles like you.

These Buddhist monks in Thailand are clearly contemplating putting down their robes to play professionally. This photo, which shows them in flight, has landed them in serious trouble with Thailand's National Office of Buddhism. The Phucket News reports:

NOB Director Nopparat Benjawattananan said today (July 10) that the monks in the widely shared photo acted inappropriately and lack discipline. The organization will identify them, he said; they deserve punishment. 

-via Tor

(Photo: Europics)

A swan was swimming amidst a group of ducks in the Peacock River, Korla, Xinjiang, China. A couple walking along the river noticed that in the cold weather, the swan's beak had frozen shut with a thick layer of ice. The swan was unable to eat food offered to her.

The couple alerted the Swan Guard, which is a local force that provides care for resident swans. The Swan Guard lured the swan into a warm building, where the ice thawed. The New York Post reports:

“I have been caring for swans for years and I admit that this is the first time I have ever come across anything like this,” said Swan Guard Sheng Liang. “We think it must have happened when she fell asleep with a wet beak.”

Sheng, 45, lured the frozen fowl to shore, then rushed her to a “swan house” the group uses for healing sick or injured birds, according to CEN.

“Once there, we put her in a warm room and waited for the ice to melt,” Sheng said. “Once she could open her beak again, we gave her a special treat of fish before taking her back to the river.”

-via Huffington Post

(Lapizados)

Movie producer Michael Bay is famous for the explosions that unnecessarily punctuate his movies. It is a destiny that he was born to. Similarly, the delivery room staff was temporarily blinded with lens flare when J.J. Abrams was born.

-via Tastefully Offensive

(Image: Jonathan W. Arbuster/Disney)

Peckoltia greedoi is a newly-classified species of suckermouth armored catfish found in the Gurupi River of Brazil. Jonathan W. Armbruster, David C. Werneke, and Milton Tan, who are researchers at Auburn University in Alabama, named it after Greedo, a character from Star Wars. Greedo is best remembered as a bounty hunter who cornered Han Solo on Tatooine. Solo quite properly shot him at the first opportunity.

The resemblance is obvious, so I would advise shooting first upon encountering such a fish.

-via Geekologie

The popular HBO drama series Girls is about young women in their 20s who live in New York City. Their stories are apparently timeless because lines from the dialogue can be perfectly matched with classical works of Western art, such as Caravaggio’s head of Medusa.

Mean Girls Art History is a Tumblr blog filled with similar combinations. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all day, and I’ve never even watched Girls.

(Head of Adriane by Gaspare Landi)

(Photo: Highways Agency)

Would you like to be happy? Of course you do! Your supervisor considers your happiness to be essential. It will have a great impact on your quarterly evaluation. So keep your happiness level high because a new device invented by Hitachi monitors it continously and informs your boss of your happiness -- or lack thereof.

Hitachi's new gadget is about the size of a credit card. You wear it (presumably it's not yet available as a subdermal implant). Sophie Chara of the Wall Street Journal explains how it works:

Essentially, Hitachi has come up with a happiness algorithm based on how much you sit, stand, nod, type and walk around at work. The badge houses an accelerometer to measure your activity, including how quickly, say, you are moving and collects data on your movements an incredible 50 times a second throughout the day.

The benefit of the system is that ideally all employees in a business would wear a badge with the wearable sending data to cloud based servers in real time. The aim isn't to get individual data but an overall score of workplace happiness. It's a system Hitachi dubs Human Big Data.

So keep smiling!

-via Rocket News 24

(Image: Lewis Walpole Library)

Sidle up to some handsome fellow and say:

Sir, Sleep is not more welcome to the wearied Traveller, than thou art to my House.

If you know what I mean and I think that you do.

In 1713, Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, published The New Academy of Compliments: Erected for Ladies, Gentlewomen, Courtiers, Citizens, Countrymen, and All Persons of what Degree Soever, of Both Sexes : Stored with Variety of Courtly and Civil Complements, Eloquent Letters of Love and Friendship : with an Exact Collection of the Newest and Choicest Songs a la Mode Both Amorous and Jovial.

(Back then, book titles were loooooooong.)

Sackville's book is filled with suggestions on how to woo a man. Ask the Past offers a few selections from it, such as this pick-up line:

Sir, You are so highly Noble, that Your Purse is my Exchequer.

Ask the Past also lists suggested phrases for gentlemen who wish to impress ladies and acquire their romantic companionship. But they are so brash that using them will likely result in a slap than a kiss.

(Photo: Elvert Barnes)

We all do it when we're talking. As we're trying to come up with words to express, we say "um" or "uh." Linguists call these expressions filled pauses. Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying them for about 10 years. He's gathered and analyzed a lot of data about who uses which of these terms. BBC News describes his findings:

"As Americans get older, they use 'uh' more," he says. "And at every age, men use 'uh' more than women."

If you look at "um", exactly the opposite is true. Younger people say "um" more often than older people. And no matter the age, women say "um" more than men.

Liberman and his colleagues have also studied these interjections in other Germanic languages. What they've noticed is that the dominance of "uh" has been eroding over time. More and more people prefer "um." Josef Fruehwald, a sociolinguist at the University of Edinburgh, doesn't understand why this change is taking place. But it's clearly happening:

"When you have two options, you can start using one more frequently and maybe replace the other one so that it's no longer an option," he says. "So why 'um'? It's just one of these things. There's always a little bit of randomness to the whole situation."

-via Marginal Revolution

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There are no small jobs. There is no work that cannot be refined and perfected. And when it has been mastered, the master has earned our respect.

Erin Mosbaugh of the food blog First We Feast calls this anonymous artisan a "back-of-house hero." Dishes flow from his hands smoothly into place. How many dishes did he process before he achieved this level of excellence? Tens of thousands? A million?

Seph Lawless, a photographer, explores abandoned places in America. His new book, Black Friday, chronicles the death of the American shopping mall. For this project, Lawless explored the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. Fresh winter snow fills the empty interior of what was once a place to buy and sell, spend time with friends, and have a good time. You can see more images from the series at Business Insider.

-via Daily of the Day