In American folk history, during World War II, soldiers might find themselves getting free meals at restaurants. "Your money is no good here," a manager might say. Americans knew who their heroes were then, and we still do now.
Allan Marshall of Detroit, Michigan exemplifies this spirit. He had saved up $900 for a personal purchase, but decided to do something better with it. WDIV reports that Marshall held up a sign for two days in front of an Exxon station, offering to pay for gas for nurses, who are among the heroes on today's front lines.
But it gets better.
When Marshall ran out of money, a woman approached him and paid the gas station $200 for additional fuel for the nurses' cars. She said that she felt inspired by Marshall's generosity.
Some men just want to watch the world burn. But not Bear. Bear cares. So this Carebear, while on his morning walk in Denali National Park in Alaska, fixes a fallen traffic cone, then continues on his way. The Daily Mail reports on this video by Michael Mauro that dates back a few years:
Mauro wrote on his Instagram account that two bears were actually in the area on a nearby road. He knew the bears (at least one of them) would wander off the road, so he set up a tripod to capture the action.
'As you saw this bear must have been the responsible older brother and he cleaned up the mess. It just goes to show that you never know what’s going to happen in nature,' Mauro wrote.
Ben Afquack began his journey to fame at a farm store in the small town of Anoka, Minnesota. There he met Derek Johnson, a human who discovered Afquack's musical talents and brought them to audiences in the Twin Cities.
You see, Ben Afquack is a prodigious drummer. He has become internet famous, which will hopefully transition into a deal from a major record label. Meanwhile, he's going on adventures with Johnson. The Star Tribune interviewed Afquack's manager, who said:
We take him hiking a lot, and we take him to beaches. He went kayaking with me. I brought him paddleboarding. He rides on the back of my mini motorcycle in the summer, in a pet carrier. We go everywhere on that, exploring different places. [...]
He likes to cuddle, believe it or not. I’ll scoop him up and put his back to my chest and lean back, and he falls asleep on my chest while watching movies.
He’s very playful. He was raised with dogs, so he’ll jump in and play with the dogs.
Michael Reid, an art dealer in Sydney, Australia, expresses the existential angst that many of us are starting to feel while in quarantine. Like Edvard Munch's inner voice, he screams. Let us all make food art from our stash. But beware: once the cookies are used up, they're gone for food.
Slap a few more kebabs down on the griddle. French multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender (NSFW) is making me hungry. In 2012, he converted a clothes iron into a functional cook plate and used it to prepare food for visitors at the Centre d'Art La Cuisine in the town of Negrepelisse in southern France.
Mailaender calls the piece "L’Union Fait la Farce", which I can translate literally as "the union is the farce," but not idiomatically. All I know is that I want beef right now.
Lucy Smalls is going stir-crazy after two weeks of isolation in Florida. This is when the notion of building a picnic table for local squirrels made perfect sense.
I'm three weeks in and completely agree. I should line my fences with these tables.
If you go the website for the car parts retailer O'Reilly Auto Parts and search for part 121g (that stands for 1.21 gigawatts), you'll find a listing for the flux capacitor from the Back to the Future movie franchise.
It's well into the afternoon and I'm still in my pajamas. Of course, I'm a blogger, so that's a day that ends with the letter Y. I'll probably maybe shower later after I finish watching Tiger King.
Are you working from home? Are you attending meetings or classes through Zoom or WebEx? Penn and Kim of the Holderness Family sympathize with your struggles, like getting dressed or muting the mic when going to the bathroom. In this musical parody video, they sing along as we try to join the meeting and share our screens.
Heidi Oley, a hairstylist at the Chroma Station Salon in Atlanta, can't work on her clients due to the coronavirus shutdown. But she has a boyfriend, Geoff Clark, to work on while they hole up in a cabin in the woods in northern Georgia.
Heidi keeps creative and Geoff keeps beautiful as she gives him daily makeovers. You can find his many transformations on Instagram.
Redditor and Trekkie Naelavok gathered blooper reels from Star Trek: The Next Generation and spliced the failed elements into the final scenes. For example, this scene from the episode "Future Imperfect" now features LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn high-fiving each other.
Dr. Daniel Reardon, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, was admitted into a local hospital after being unable to retrieve the magnets that he had stuck up his nose. He had placed them there in the hope of finding a way of reducing coronavirus infections.
How were nasal magnets supposed to help? The Guardian explains:
The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.
[...]
“I had a part that detects magnetic fields. I thought that if I built a circuit that could detect the magnetic field, and we wore magnets on our wrists, then it could set off an alarm if you brought it too close to your face. A bit of boredom in isolation made me think of that.”
During his experiments, Dr. Reardon a magnet up each nostril. These became stuck. So he decided to use the other two magnets in an attempt to retrieve the nasal magnets. These got stuck, too:
“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.
“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”
Fortunately, hospital staff were able to remove the magnets, although the Guardian article does not explain how. Presumably their method did not involve additional neodymium magnets.
Twitter user @Dope_chakra writes that "sometimes my cat walks around with my slipper like he’s wearing it." His name is Meeko and, like many cats, he is an Instagram influencer. Soon, everyone will be walking around with one shoe on the front left paw.
Three days ago, Twitter user @meghanbits adopted a puppy. Yesterday, that puppy adopted a potato as his best friend. Such is the way with almost all young children.
His sibling, whom I gather is named Kash, is equally normal.
The most Reagan Era movie of the Reagan Era was, I think, Red Dawn. This Cold War film depicted a sudden invasion of the United States by communist nations led by the Soviet Union. The are ultimately defeated by American courage and pluck as exemplified by a band of freedom fighters led by Patrick Swayze.
Or a character that he played. I forget which. It's been about twenty years since I've watched it.
David Hookstead, a writer for the Daily Caller, has enjoyed the movie for many years. He recalls a time in college when he once persuaded a young lady of his acquaintance that Red Dawn was based on the real, historically true Soviet invasion of the United States in 1980. It was a brutal war that killed 80 million Americans.
You know, that war. The once that was a mere forty years ago. Hookstead reminisces:
That’s when I paused the movie and just took a deep dive into this great war America won in 1980. I explained to her how the Soviet nukes had knocked out key tactical strongholds of America in the Dakotas, and how “crack” paratroopers took the Rocky Mountains.
[...]
I mean, she didn’t just buy it. She was asking genuine questions about why this was never taught in high schools or colleges. I had to explain with a quivering lip that after America lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980 that we couldn’t discuss it in schools because the pain was too great.
[...]
At one point, I explained to her how D.C. took a direct nuclear strike, but we were able to hold off the Soviets at the Mississippi River (again, a direct reference to the plot of the film).
[...]
Then, later at night, she was literally talking to people how she had just learned the USA lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980. Eventually, somebody told her she was being pranked and she was far from pleased.
Still, to this day, I consider it my greatest accomplishment. If you aren’t smart enough to know Washington D.C. didn’t get nuked in 1980, then you deserve to get made fun of.
