Solo per Due is a luxurious restaurant in a villa in Vacone, Italy. It serves only the finest cuisine and wine for discriminating palates. If you eat there, you won't have to worry about it being crowded. There are only two dining seats in the entire restaurant.
For a bit more cash, you and your dining companion can have a firework display and personalized flower arrangements. That's why you must have a reservation to eat at the Solo per Due. The gates won't even open until your appointed time.
This is one of eight tiny restaurants described in Honest Cooking. Some of them offer less refined cuisine, but all of them have limited floor space.
A top excavator driver is a surgeon with his equipment. A complex machine like a digger becomes an extension of his own body. With it, he can push a truck, paddle a boat, or light a cigarette.
In this video, a driver in Omalloor, Pathanamthitta, Kerala, India loads his excavator into the back of a truck. A ramp? No, only amateurs use ramps. Experts do this.
Pictured above is the Spotted Handfish (Brachionichthys hirsutus). It's one of several related species which have fins that look like hands or feet. The Spotted Handfish lives in the estuary of the River Derwent, which flows from the interior of Tasmania into the Pacific Ocean. These fish live on the sea floor, gently pushing themselves around with their foot-like fins.
The Spotted Handfish is an endangered species. Unfortunately for them, Spotted Handfish prefer to lay their eggs on Sea Tulips. The Northern Pacific Sea Star hunts these Sea Tulips, which gives the Spotted Handfish fewer places to lay their eggs.
To help them breed more prolifically, conservationists have stuck plastic tubes into the sea floor. The Spotted Handfish have responded by laying their eggs on these tubes as acceptable substitutes for Sea Tulips.
A river runs through the Elephant Nature Park in northern Thailand. When it's time for this baby elephant to take a bath, all the nannies escort him into the river. They form a wall with their bodies so that he can wash and play without any worry of being swept away by the fast current.
As we've seen before, elephants take care of kids in their herd, even if the kids aren't their own children.
Get that roach out of your mouth! It hasn't been properly cooked yet. For that, you need to go to The Bug Chef. That's David George Gordon, a professional chef who specializes in preparing insects.
Gordon thinks that humanity's culinary future lies with the insect world. If your goal is to produce a large quantity of meat, then livestock insects, such as crickets, are much cheaper than pigs or cattle. They require less food, water, and land. They're also nutritious. KPLU explains:
Crickets are high in calcium, said Gordon. Termites? Rich in iron. Grasshoppers? About as much protein (by weight, dried) as beef. Bugs are really pretty good for you. The U.N. report notes that bugs have high proportions of omega-3 fatty acids, comparable to those in fish (and much better than beef or pork).
And most bugs are good protein sources. Scorpions, for instance, have lots of edible muscle tissue. “I like their tails and claws,” said Gordon. “There’s the equivalent of crabmeat in there.” Just take out the stinger first, folks.
Best of all, Gordon argues, bugs are delicious. He's published a cookbook of 40 recipes that you can use to make your insect preparation tasty. For example, you can deep fry tarantulas. Here's Gordon's recipe. It's coated in a tempura batter and accented with smoked paprika. Yummy!
"You hear laughter, which is almost more terrifying than crying." Yes. Or you hear nothing. You know that your kids are (probably) still in the house, but you don't hear them. That's when you should really worry.
Rob Fee of Mandatory describes life after you become a parent. Perhaps you used to sleep in on Saturday. But those days are over.
In my home, Saturday morning is my turn to get up with my kids. I'm always exhausted, they always wake up early, and I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world.
I could not agree with Doghouse Diaries more emphatically. Neckties serve no productive purpose whatsoever and are uncomfortable. They're like corsets for your throat.
I do, occasionally, wear a necktie at work. It's a My Little Pony tie with a Rainbow Dash theme. Does it give the best impression? Well, let's just say that it gives an accurate impression.
The movie The Purge is a dystopia set in 2022. In this alternate future, all laws are suspended in the United States for a 12-hour period every year. During this time, people can commit any crime without fear of legal repercussions.
In this Vine film by Julien Sigouin, Canada has adopted this legal change, too. For those 12 hours, the innate barbarism and bloodthirstiness of the Canadian soul breaks free in an orgy of violence. So, you know: viewer advisory.
YouTube member CycleJack was pedaling through Romford, Essex, UK on a wet day. He was traveling about 22 MPH. A car cut across his path and he hit the fender. CycleJack flew over the car, head over heels, but landed neatly on his feet. It was an impressive bit of unintentional acrobatics caught on camera.
And it's a good thing that CycleJack was wearing a camera. The driver tried to dispute that she was at fault. The video footage took care of that problem:
Safe to say the video has saved me a lot of hassle and 3 weeks later the cheque has already arrived from the insurance company.
Content warning: CycleJack uses a bit of foul language when the car hits. But who can blame him?
Last month, we told you about the real SpongeBob SquarePants restaurant in Ramallah, Palestine. Photos posted on its official Facebook page show that construction is coming along nicely. Here you can see the counter, which looks just like the one that Squidward runs.
It looks like Mr. Krabs already has a functional office. He even has a safe installed where he allegedly keeps the secret recipe for the Krabby Patty.
There's plenty of room for any fish who wants one of those delicious burgers. Just pull up a barrel!
In this Dukes of Hazzard mashup by David Branstetter, the Dark Knight has found the ultimate Batmobile. It's sturdier than the Lincoln Futura and prettier than the Tumbler. The Gotham PD will never catch up with him and the Joker will never escape him now. But he should probably change the horn from playing"Dixie" to something more daunting.
Today, several scientists and science journalists published in-world scientific descriptions of Tatooine, the homeworld of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
Joe Hanson holds a doctorate in biology and hosts the PBS show It's Okay to Be Smart. For his contribution, Hanson examined the cutest creature on the planet: the Sarlacc. He describes his expedition, during which he was accompanied by a terrified C-3P0. Hanson writes about the likely morphology of the creature:
At its posterior end, deep beneath the sand, extend many feeding tentacles, drawing and storing nutrients from the surrounding soil like a taproot. To my knowledge, this hybridized organ arrangement, both plant and animal in nature, has never before been reported. Reports of sarlacc longevity extend to 50,000 years, although isotopic analysis has yet to verify these claims due to the extreme danger involved in collecting even the smallest tissue sample.
Despite that, the sarlacc’s supposed longevity and plant-like external morphology are reminiscent of Earth’s 2,000+ year-old Welwitschia, a desert-dwelling plant whose tentacle-like leaf extensions attach to a deep central taproot core, owing to its longevity in Earth’s own harsh desert environments.
The complete absence of subterranean waste in local soil and groundwater samples suggests that the sarlacc may lack an anus, and combined with the observed anterior mouth morphology and radial body symmetry, the closest terrestrial species useful for anatomical comparison might be the sea anemone, suggesting that the sarlacc either shares a common ancestor, or displays a convergent body plan with the terrestrial phylum Cnidaria.
Here are other articles in the series about the science of Tatooine:
He's the bear we deserve, but not the bear we need right now because it's just too hot. Rescuers saved this bear, who is named Georges when he does not wear the cowl of the bat, from bear bile farmers.
(Apparently bear bile is an ingredient in the traditional medical practices of certain East Asian cultures.)
Georges has escaped that awful fate. He's now trying to beat the summer heat in a rescue facility in Vĩnh Phúc, Vietnam.
Sweet, delightful Twitter--where the raw emotions and unformed thoughts of humanity are made available to the entire world. It has been in existence since only 2006, so few of the greatest minds have had access to it. But what if, instead, scientists across history had used it. What Twitter conversations would they have had?
