(Unrelated photo by Cara Fealy Choate)

The emergency services dispatcher for the West Yorkshire Police answered the call. The man on the other line explained that a cat in his home had performed a nefarious crime:

Me girlfriend has let the cat eat my bacon . . . I want to press charges.

The dispatcher asked for clarification: did the man want police to arrest his girlfriend or the cat? Both. She responded:

Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

She should be! The dispatcher refused to do anything about this brutal act of thievery. The tabloid The Mirror reports:

He starts to protest and insists it's the girlfriend's fault for allowing the cat to do it.

But when he is finally told it's not a 999 emergency, he finally concedes and ends the call.

(Video Link)

You can listen to a recording of the call in this video. It's a disgraceful act of negligence by an alleged "civil servant."

-via Dave Barry

I'm laying down a marker here: the Face Mask Hotness Hoodie is the future of menswear. This design by Andew Christian Laurel Cross has everything that a man needs to be comfortable and cool at the same time. And if it gets a bit chilly, all the wearer must do is pull on his hoodie and face mask.

This one is a mixture of cotton and polyester, which will be standard evening wear. For business settings, men will wear velour versions to look professional.

-via The Worst Things for Sale

Potty training story books are an entire genre of young children's literature. But, sadly, most of those books are directed at human children and feature only human characters. That's why Gary Whitta is writing Pooping Is Logical: Potty Training Your Child the Vulcan Way.

Whitta is a screenwriter, most famous for writing The Book of Eli and Star Wars: Rogue One. His book, which is ilustrated by Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik, tells the story of a little Vulcan boy who is learning to shed his diapers. Geek Dad reports:

Fortunately his parents, who are wise and loving, are on hand to help him through this transition and assure him that pooping on the potty is a perfectly natural, safe, and grown-up thing to do. In a society based on logic, what could be more logical than pooping?

At the moment, Whitta is facing difficulty getting copyright permission from the owners of Star Trek. Hopefully that will be resolved before the next generation of Trekkies is ready to learn how to use the potty.

-via The Mary Sue

(Photo: Rafael Gamo)

It won't be enough to absentmindedly stroll up and down the stairs. You'll have to think about where you're placing your feet or you'll tumble down. JSa Architecture, a firm in Mexico City and Lima, designed these stairs, although it's not clear why.

-via Contemporist

(Photo: Devon Knight/The Guardian)

The Spaghetti Incident, a new restaurant in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has devised an ingenious way to get people to buy its spaghetti. Besides offering several tasty varieties, the restaurant offers its spaghetti for takeout in cones. The result is that people wandering the neighborhood for amusement can grab a cone and a fork and eat it as they stroll. Spaghetti, a food that is normally messy to eat, becomes completely portable by this method. Dave Bry of The Guardian explains:

Eating spaghetti out of a cone is, oddly, easier than eating it from a plate. This is because of the well-known “twirl method” that sophisticated humans have learned to use to eat pasta. The cone shape facilitates the trick by giving natural purchase to the tines of the fork as they twist. The curved sides of the cone help guide the strands of spaghetti into a ball around the fork. (Emily Post recommended using a spoon to achieve the effect). The twirl negates the need for spearing any bit of food with the fork.

-via Carmen Jade

(Photo: University of Bath)

Yoda is an owl with a job. A handler brings him to the library of the University of Bath to drive off seagulls that settle on the building and cause mischief for students and staff. Yoda has diligently kept these troublemakers from nesting there, so the library administration recognized his work by granting him an honorary library card. The Guardian reports:

The library management team decided to issue a library card to Yoda in recognition of his “valuable service” to the university. The card, which is valid until 2020, features a photograph of the bird, described as Prof Yoda The Owl.

A spokesman said: “The university has invited Yoda and his handler Marcus to visit the campus twice a week as an environmentally friendly method to control the seagull numbers on campus and thereby limit the potential adverse effects a large gull population can have.

-via Jessamyn West

(Video Link)

It has become a familiar, even expected experience in a neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. Every day, Don Brittain, 78, checks to see when sunset will occur. When it does, he stands on his back porch and plays "Taps" slowly on his trumpet.

His neighbors now walk out to their own porches and silently stand at attention while the 24 notes flow out across Puget Sound. It is a shared experience of reverence:

"[I want to] support our guys who are over there fighting" said Don. "I had polio as a kid so I couldn't serve."

For him, that was one of the worst things about getting polio.

"I would have served in a heartbeat," he said.

Yet, Don's daily ritual is not just for the soldiers, it's also for his neighbors. They now take it as seriously as Don does. As soon as Don begins to play, his neighbors come outside and stand at attention.

"It seems to move people," said Don. "It has an effect on them."

In our everyday, hectic lives there is almost nothing that gets people to stop like this and reflect, but in Tacoma, under Don's leadership, people spend twenty-four notes nightly doing exactly that.

You can read more at CBS News (warning: auto-play video).

-via American Digest

When your robot companion feels the call of the wild, you must set him free. He's not really yours unless he chooses to be with you. Randall Munroe of xkcd reminds us of this great if painful responsibility.

(Photo: L. Shyamal)

But I can offer this little bug close competition. Only my appreciation for half-and-half prevents me from claiming the title as well.

The coffee berry borer beetle eats coffee beans. It doesn't have a lot of competition because most animals, including other insects, find the caffeine in coffee beans too toxic to consume directly. And now scientists know why. Ed Yong writes for National Geographic that researchers found that the coffee berry borer beetle's unique digestive tract can detoxify caffeine:

Javier Ceja-Navarro from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has discovered its secret: it has bacteria in its guts that can detoxify caffeine.

When he fed the beetles with coffee beans and analysed their faeces for traces of caffeine, he couldn’t find any. None. Something in their gut had completely destroyed the would-be poison. Bacteria seemed like the obvious candidates, so Ceja-Navarro fed the beetles with antibiotics. This time, when they ate coffee beans, their poo was laden with caffeine. And when they got a chance to breed, they utterly failed. Most of their eggs and larvae died outright, and none of the survivors made it to adulthood. Without their microbes, they couldn’t handle their caffeine.

-via Marilyn Terrell

(Photo: Global Reactions)

In 1953, the general store and post office of Ochopee, Florida burned down. So local residents converted an irrigation pipe shed on a tomato farm into a temporary post office. It stayed there and remains in business to this day. 

(Image: Kris555000)

It serves residents of 3 counties and was once a bus stop. A single Postal Service employee works there, sorting mail into slots on the back wall. In addition to being a functional service point, the Ochopee Post Office is also a popular tourist attraction as it is the smallest Post Office in the United States.

This is 1 of 7 of America's smallest civic institutions rounded up by Atlas Obscura, including the smallest national forest (33 trees) and a police station the size of a phone booth.

It's pretty neat until you realize that from the Slinky's point of view, it's a human attempt to create a Sisyphean hell for all Slinkykind. Matthias Wandel's eternal Slinky escalator amuses us to no end and horrifies any Slinky that watches it.

(Video Link)

Wandel made his escalator with a looped wood chain of steps. He tried to use an electric drill to automate the task. But after failing to get the right speed, he opted for a simpler and more effective hand crank. Just turn at the right speed and the Slinky will never stop its labor.

-via Gizmodo

(Video Link)

So you want to start your own country. This is a reasonable life goal. What's the process? Joe Bereta of Epic How To gets you started on the major benchmarks of being a country. It's pretty hard at this point because almost all land in the world has been claimed by someone and it's difficult to forcibly take over a country with just yourself and your buddies.

One option that Bereta leaves out is purchasing territory from a government that agrees to relinquish sovereignty in addition to the land. A sufficiently desperate government (say, one that is losing a civil war) may be willing to do so for cash. Just take care of that chore and soon you'll have currency with your face on it. Good luck!

-via Blame It on the Voices

In space, no one can hear you complain that it's chilly outside. So throw another log into this wood stove that Burned by Design made. It's shaped like the head of the xenomorph from Alien. He comments on Facebook that "this should keep the neighbors cat out of the garden."

This is one of several geeky wood stoves that Burned by Design has made from old LPG tanks. Others include Darth Vader, R2-D2, Iron Man, and a stormtrooper helmet.

(Image: CCTV News)

Liu Haibin, 30, is an engineer who works in Xiamen City, China. His work takes him away from his family, which lives 730 miles away in Tengzhuo City. He dearly misses his 8-month old son in particular. So Liu built two matching seesaws equipped with motion sensors, cameras, and display screens. With them, Liu and his son and seesaw together in real time. The Daily Mail reports:

'I want to leave some good childhood memories for my boy.

'Hopefully he will remember when he grows up that his father has tried to make him happy.'

Speaking of his inspiration for the project, Liu added: 'Every time I think about my childhood, I remember my father coming home early to play with me on the seesaw.

'This memory always gives me strength, so I want to give my son memories that fill him with love.'

Going down the slide at the playground is so much fun! But the puppy isn't so sure. It looks a bit scary. So it's a good thing that Mommy is here to show how simple and safe it is.

When Puppy hesitates, Mommy does what's good for her and pulls her down by her leash.

(Video Link)

-via Gifsboom