Japanese Instagram user konel_bread creates amazingly realistic baked goods that look like animals and cartoon characters. In the past, we've seen their loaves that look like teddy bears with six pack abs. Now, they show something more sedate but equally charming: bagels prepared to resemble dozing wiener dogs.

A trend on X lately is to share photos of historically significant buildings that have been preserved by being repurposed by modern businesses. Not all of the descriptions are correct. For example, I've verified that a particular Chipotle was not the place where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense. But this Publix grocery store is indeed an old government printing house.

501 Gervais Street in Columbia, South Carolina is the site of a brick building where the Confederacy printed fiat currency until February of 1865, when General Sherman burned it. It was rebuilt after the war and is now a grocery store.

It's interesting to watch these changes in real time. There's a beautiful historic building in the small town of Marion, Texas. I drive by it a few times a year. It's lately been a coffeshop, but changes every couple of years.

Photo: Ron Cogswell

Every ellipse has two foci. The foci are, Khan Academy tells us, "two points whose sum of distances from any point on the ellipse is always the same."

Let's say that you build a miniature golf course shaped like an ellipse and place the hole at one focus. If you hit the ball from the other focus with a bank shot, the ball will land in the hole. If you hit the ball from any other point with a bank shot, the ball will miss the hole.

That's the premise of this video by YouTuber Constructive Chaos. He build increasingly complex combinations of ellipses to make mathematically predictable miniature golf course.

-via The Awesomer

Aynsley Grealis is a fabrics artist in Toronto who makes inventive sculptures, often practical, with crochet techniques. Here, for example, is a a handbag shaped like New York City's famous pizza rat that was filmed moving through the subway system with a slice of pizza.

Av Grannan is an artist in Chicago who upcycles leather goods into inventive accessories. One of the gems of her website appropriately named Sublime Remains is this functional chessboard hat.

When the hatband is unsnapped, the hat flat. You can then play chess on it with the pieces slipped into the sides.

Mehul Hingu, a world traveler who lives in Mumbai, runs the Instagram account Street Food Recipe. His culinary journeys took him to the city of Nagoya in central Japan, where he visited the Tsuzuki Café. This cafe is situated just below the penthouse floor of a skyscraper, which is the the cafe markets itself as "Japan's highest cafe au lait."

Among the cafe's specialities are a Viennese coffee known as Einspänner, which is topped with a portion of whipped cream. The Tsuzuki Café accepts this vertical challenges by offering a coffee with what looks like a foot-tall peak of whipped cream.

The Hooters restaurant chain, founded 1983, has struggled financially in recent years. The chain offers sportsbar cuisine served by buxom waitresses in skimpy outfits, so the market appeal is primarily toward men who enjoy being served by such women.

Although breasts remain popular, this particular approach to using them for marketing is not thriving. So Hooters is rebranding its restaurants toward a more family-friendly vector. At The Takeout, Rolland Judd has 5 suggestions about how Hooters could keep its name while pivoting in a different narrative direction.

Among them is directing away from "hooters" as a slang term for breasts and toward the slang term for owls--specifically, the owls in the Harry Potter franchise. There would be some intellectual property issues to resolve, but a restaurant that let patrons pretend to be new students at Hogwarts could draw a large customer base.

Photo: Hooters

Here's a fun online tool by Josh Mayfield that lets you generate your own titles cards for different Star Trek series. You can chooses between the Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.

Rowan J. Coleman is a YouTuber who examines in detail how science fiction television shows and films are composed and acted. In the past, we've seen his explanations of how William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and the stars of Babylon 5 were highly effective in their roles.

I was devoted to the Original Series as a child and followed closely The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise in adolescence and adulthood, so they seem normal.

Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy seem, to adapt a phrase from Douglas Adams, against the natural order of things. Leaving the storytelling aside, I find these series aesthetically grating as the sets are very dark and excessively large.

But the visual language of these series, sometimes referred to as "NuTrek", is a departure from previous series and films in ways more subtle than lighting and set design. Coleman analyzes how camera motion and shot setup in particular set NuTrek apart from its predecessors.

Sheila Wallis is a British artist noted for her highly realistic yet also imaginative paintins and drawings that include portraits, nude figure studies, and watercolors.

She came to my attention on Instagram for her illuminated illustrations that include the use of gilding.

Victoria Dauberville is a French ballerina and choreographer who performed professionally for many years in Belgium and France. Last year, while on a cruise to the Antarctic on Le Boréal, she had the opportunity to perform on an unusual stage: the bulbous bow of the ship.

Unlike the theater on the fourth deck of this cruise ship, the bulbous bow is only accessible with a zodiac boat. Dauberville wore a classical dancing costume and slippers to dance with grace on the slippery surface while surrounded by ice-filled waters and frozen air. The video recording of this event promptly went viral.

-via NEXTA

San Francisco figures prominently in the Star Trek universe. The city's first appearance in the science fiction franchise was in 1893 in The Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow." Kirk and companions borrowed a couple humpback whales there in 1986 in Star Trek IV.

By 2024, though, this fictional San Francisco had become a complete dump as it was consumed by crime and poverty.

After World War III ended in 2053, San Francisco experienced a great revival as it became the capital of the United Earth and the headquarters of Starfleet. When the Federation formed, San Francisco became the de facto capital of the Federation government, as well as the Starfleet which served as the military arm of that government.

To commemorate the great role of the city in Star Trek, the public library system is offering user cards that show a starship flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.

-via Henry Wu

Redditor /u/CornishShaman shares this photo of their library's beautiful new storytime chair. It's a custom sculpture commissioned specifically for Penzance, a town in Cornwall.

Free Range Designs, a Welsh furniture workshop created by Paul Bullen, composed it. Although the craftsmen there produce other pieces of furniture, their unique storytelling chairs have attracted the most attention.

The Penzance Library is in Cornwall, so its chair reflects the deep well that is Cornish folklore. Featured prominently are the Mermaid of Zennor, the Giant of Marazion, local pixies, and, of course, the Pirates of Penzance. The fish are pilchards (Sardinia pilchardus), a herring species that has been fished in Cornwall for centuries.

Lord Vinheteiro is a Brazilian musician who originally trained on the piano but is now must famous for his performances on rubber chickens.

In the past, we've seen him play a piano with a typewriter and perform "Flight of the Bumblebees" while using only one finger. After his rubber chicken performances rose to popular acclaim, we highlighted his rubbery renditions of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

In this funny video, his lordship explains how he goes about turning rubber chickens to be musically prcise instruments. He says, "True music does not depend on the instrument, but on the seriousness with which we approach it."

-via The Awesomer

Southeastern Texas is alligator country. They are both numerous and bitey. Gator Country is the name of a wildlife rescue organization that specializes in protecting these modern-day dinosaurs and showing them to adventurous tourists.

KHOU 11 News reports that an employee named Kat recently graduated from McNeese State University across the border in Louisiana. She arranged for a photoshoot with Laura Obelsbee Photography which showed the happy graduate snuggling with her favorite animals.

-via Jonathan Kentrick