(Photo of Boston by Glenn Beltz)

Charley Locke of Wired suggests that this ad from the Boston missed connections section of Craiglist deserves a literary prize. I agree. This is a fantastic, heartfelt piece of writing:

I met you in the rain on the last day of 1972, the same day I resolved to kill myself.

One week prior, at the behest of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, I'd flown four B-52 sorties over Hanoi. I dropped forty-eight bombs. How many homes I destroyed, how many lives I ended, I'll never know. But in the eyes of my superiors, I had served my country honorably, and I was thusly discharged with such distinction.

And so on the morning of that New Year's Eve, I found myself in a barren studio apartment on Beacon and Hereford with a fifth of Tennessee rye and the pang of shame permeating the recesses of my soul. When the bottle was empty, I made for the door and vowed, upon returning, that I would retrieve the Smith & Wesson Model 15 from the closet and give myself the discharge I deserved.

He went for a last walk through the city before killing himself. On that journey, he met a mysterious woman in a ball gown:

(Photo: Francois G Durand/WireImage)

Never mind how it looks. This is what the cool people are wearing these days. So get with it. You'll need a harness and a second person--preferably a light one.

Fashion designer Rick Owens offered this outfit and others similar to it to visitors of Fashion Week in Paris this past week. Thankfully, he intends for this to be just an artistic expression for the catwalk, not everyday wear at the home or office. Owens's arrangement of one model carrying another upside down is a way of saying that we all have to carry each other's burdens in society. He explained on the extremely poorly designed website Dazed Digital:

Owens's collection also includes menswear. Specifically, the male models are wearing shapeless fabric sacks that cover their entire bodies except for their genitals.

I'll forgo including a picture of that one.

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Dario Rossi is a drummer from Italy. He bills himself as the Techno Street Drummer because he plays techno music at a furious pace on city streets as a busker.

Rossi has a couple of actual drums as part of his normal performance set. But most of his materials are pieces of trash, such as old pots, pans, buckets, as well as more mysterious scraps of metal. With them, Rossi creates impressively sophisticated and precise performances, such as this one that he gave in Amsterdam.

-via The Presurfer

(Photo: Peter Trimming)

Some people are happy drunks. Others are friendly drunks. The squirrel in this story, unfortunately, is an angry drunk. He broke into the Honeybourne Railyway Club, a private club near Evansham, Worcestershire, UK after it had closed. He utterly trashed the place, getting sauced on beer in the process. Sam Boulter, the club secretary, trapped the squirrel in a trashcan, then thew it out. The Western Daily Press quotes Boulter:

Yesterday the branch secretary of the club said the rodent had caused around £300 worth of damage.

He added: "When I opened the door it was absolutely ransacked.

"At first I thought we'd been burgled but I realised it was all still locked up and that's when we saw the squirrel. [...]

"There were bottles scattered around, money scattered around and he had obviously run across the bar's pumps and managed to turn on the Caffrey's tap .

"He must have flung himself on the handle and he must have drank some as he was staggering around all over the place and moving a bit slowly.

"I've never seen a drunk squirrel before. He looked a bit worse for wear.

-via Mickey White

(Photo: Anna Hezel)

From left to right, you see Rapunzel, Ariel, Belle, and Pocahontas. Brilliant! If you think that the Disney Princess meme had been exhausted, you're wrong. Anna Hezel and Gabriella Paiella have found a fresh take using fresh ingredients. You can find their recipes here. I want to eat them all up, then do a line of Disney villain hot dogs and Disney princess corn dogs. 

-via Tastefully Offensive

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Stephanie Arne, a wildlife conservationist, is--or was--the host of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. She has not been heard of since making this horrifying video. Unfortunately, though she was a wildlife expert, she waded into a pool of baby Asian Small-Clawed Otters without wearing body armor or taking other necessary protective measures. The video cuts out before we can see her fate, but that's probably for the best.

-via Uproxx

(Photo: University of Queensland)

It's a stylish one piece suit with pair of stripes across the midriff to accentuate the body's lines. Why is this baby loggerhead sea turtle wearing it? Owen Coffee, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland built this swimsuit in order to hold a diaper on it. This is how Coffee and his colleagues will collect fecal samples, which are usually difficult to acquire from wild sea turtles. ABC News reports:

But Mr Coffee said it had previously been difficult to collect entire faecal samples because it dispersed into the water.

"To start off I had a different method that wasn't overly successful, and this is what we ended up," he said.

He said the idea with the rash vest had been used a few times with hatchlings. […]

"I had to scale it up and adjust a little bit for my purposes.

"Basically it's a full-size second hand rash vest adapted to sit on the shell of the turtle with a small opening with the tail and the nappy to attach to collect the faeces."

Coffee and his colleagues are using these fecal samples to study the diets of the loggerheads.

When autumn arrives and leaves fall to the ground, Polish artist Joanna Wirazka gathers them and uses them as canvases. On these leaves, she paints elaborate and mystical landscapes of seemingly magical lands. Her night scenes and cityscapes are particularly effective as swirling forms of light and line.

That's my bet. After all, you wouldn't build a time machine in a vehicle that wasn't capable of hitting the necessary speed. David Heykants, a hot rod builder in Red Deer, Alberta, would have taken that detail into account while designing his DeLorean Back to the Future golf cart.

This is Bolinha, a stray dog that lives in a slum of Rio de Janeiro. She appeared in the neighborhood about a year ago and is a good neighbor. She plays with the children actively. Recently, the kids gave her the end of their jump rope. She joined in their game!

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-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

(Photo: Pete Berkinshaw)

OCLC stands for Online Computer Library Center. It's a huge non-profit organization in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio that provides library computer support services. Among them, OCLC catalogs books and other items owned by libraries around the world. When you search a library's catalog, the call numbers and subject headings are often selected not by the local library, but by OCLC.

For decades, one way that OCLC provided cataloging services was by printing card catalog cards for libraries. Over the years, it's produced 1.9 billion cards.

Now that service is over. The Columbus Dispatch reports that OCLC has printed its last card catalog cards:

Catalog cards were once a key part of the company, with rows of printers running in a sunny second-floor observatory, hitting a peak output of 131 million cards in 1985. The company’s innovation was in compiling the information on the cards, which meant that libraries didn’t need to write the text themselves. As of last year, orders had fallen to less than 1 million.

The final shipment was bound for Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y., where librarians use the cards as a backup to an online catalog.

Among the last cards was a book of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and a DVD of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

-via Jessamyn West

In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy forced Japan to open diplomatic and trade relations with the United States. This was followed shortly by the arrival of other nations, including the Dutch, the Russians, the French, and the British. Large numbers of foreigners suddenly arrived in Japanese port cities.

Japanese artists illustrated these encounters as well as life in these foreign lands--as best they understood it. Pictured above is print of Washington, D.C. made with a copperplate process in 1861. It's one of many Japanese depictions of Westerners in the 1850s and 60s rounded up by Flashbak.

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Recently, Teressa Cee, a dancer for the Miami Heat basketball team, was visiting the Blue Lagoon Island resort in the Bahamas. While lounging on a floating platform, she asked a man to hold her phone for a moment. He accidentally dropped it into the water.

That might have been the end, but a local dolphin named Cacique picked up the phone from the water and brought it back to her! (auto-start video)

-via Tastefully Offensive

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Cartoonist Simon Tofield has to get his cat to the vet. The cat knows this the moment he sees the pet crate. He will use his claws, his teeth, and--most importantly--his wits to evade this trap.

For millions of years, domestic cats have evolved to have superb defenses against their natural predators, veterinarians. Simon's cat is ready.

Plot twist: the kitten was in on the con from the beginning.

-via Pleated Jeans

It is well known that Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Josip Tito of Yugoslavia despised each other. Shortly after World War II ended, the two leaders and their respective countries became embroiled in a diplomatic struggle, largely because Tito refused to accept the Soviet Union as the leader of the Communist world.

What is not widely known is how Stalin's personal hatred of Tito and his country almost instigated a general war in Europe between the Communist East and the Free West over the fate of Yugoslavia.

15 years ago, John R. Schindler, a historian and national security scholar, published an article on the subject in Cryptologic Quarterly, a classified periodical maintained by the National Security Agency. The NSA recently declassified it. You can read the full text here.

In the article, Schindler describes how Tito became, in Stalin's mind, a terrible enemy of Communism that had to be destroyed at all cost: