One of the best pieces of marital advice that I encountered while I was engaged was, "Take your wedding vows seriously."
Samantha Joel has a similar idea. She's a doctoral student in psychology and is engaged to be married. She's written ten phrases that can be used in wedding vows. These reflect what psychological research reveals to be successful traits of enduring relationships. Each of her vows are followed by a psychological explanation and footnotes to support her claims. Here's an example:
6. I promise to nurture your goals and ambitions; to support you through misfortune and celebrate your triumphs.
This vow covers the other side of being a good attachment figure: being there for your partner when they’re not distressed. Basically, my partner and I both want to know that we can take risks, make mistakes, and come home to a supportive partner at the end of the day. Letting your partner go out and conquer their goals, knowing that you’re there in the background cheering them on, is called being a “secure base”.7
It’s called the Everglades Pie. Evan Daniell, the owner of Evan’s Neighborhood Pizza in Fort Myers, Florida, invented it. The Everglades Pie is a mixture of many creatures from that swamp: hog, frog legs, python and swamp cabbage.
He devised the recipe about 2 years ago after pythons, an invasive species in Florida, became prolific. It’s his way of culling the population. It costs $45 for a 14-inch pizza, largely because python meat costs about $66 a pound. So far, about 150 people have purchased it at his restaurant.
When you post an artist's work, if it is at all possible to identify the artist, provide his/her name and link to the site. And certainly don't remove the artist's name from the work or, worst of all, add your own watermark after removing the artist's name.
Pictures in Boxes expresses the frustration that a lot of artists, especially webcomic artists, experience.
I've just discovered the works of Leonid Afremov and I'm quite taken with them. He's a native of Vitebsk, Belarus who now lives in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. After exploring different media during his career, he has settled into the application of oil paint on canvas with a palette knife.
The results are striking. The choppy forms and vibrant colors are especially convincing in his scenes of cities during rainy nights. You can see more examples of his work here.
"It’s a-me...Horsio!" This is Danny Boy, a horse owned by Lindsay of the crafting blog Knit Fast, Die Warm. Sorry, Mario. The princess is in another stable.
David Catá feels the positive influence of certain people in his life: friends, family members and teachers. He wants them to know how much they’ve meant to him—how much they are woven into his life. In order to express this, he embroiders portraits of them into his hands.
For example, on the left, you can see a portrait of his girlfriend, Tamara. On the right is what his hand looks like after he has removed the stitches.
Benjamin is a Holland Lop rabbit and an Instagram star. With the assistance of his human, Lauren Gates, he has released a 2014 calendar featuring him dressed as your favorite characters from classic movies of the 80s and 90s, such as Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back.
You can see more photos of Benjamin at Mashable, where he's dressed as Rambo from the movie of the same name, Stay Puft from Ghostbusters and the shark from Jaws.
Now before you start breaking open fire hydrants, know that this was a special case. Capt. Craig Moreau, a firefighter in Houston, Texas, was driving from Austin to Houston on Highway 71 when he spotted a tractor trailer by the side of the road. One of its wheels was on fire.
He stopped and found that the brakes had caught on fire. He and the driver fought the fire with a small fire extinguisher that Capt. Moreau kept in his car, but it wasn't enough:
"I crawled underneath and thought we'd got it out but it flared back up," said Moreau, who was off duty at the time. "So I said to the driver, 'what have you got in here?'"
"It's beer! It's all beer," the driver said of his cargo of Coor Banquet beer.
Praising the sacrifice of perfectly good beer, Fire Chief Terry Garrison said in a statement, "I support the extinguishment of fire, no matter what the cost."
Thanks, brain. You're a big help. I had a moment of actual joy going on until you stepped in.
Tom Fonder of Happy Jar reminds us that our brains are kind of jerks. Now take a moment to remember that embarrassing thing that you did eight years ago.
Anne Frank and her family fled the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany by immigrating to the Netherlands. After Germany conquered the Netherlands, they and a few other people lived in hidden rooms in in a house in Amsterdam. In 1944, Dutch Nazi police discovered the secret rooms and shipped the inhabitants off to concentration camps. Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in March of 1945. She was only 15 years old.
Since then, millions of people have read copies of the insightful diary that she left behind.
In this new short story by Harry Turtledove, a prolific writer of alternate history, Anne Frank survived the Holocaust. She eventually immigrated to America, married and raised a family. She's 84 years old and living in a nursing home when a middle school class listens to her speak about the experience of the Holocaust.
“I’m gonna put it up on my Facebook page and talk about all the things you told us,” Vicki said. “That was awesome!”
“Facebook . . .” Anne smiled in reminiscence. “We had nothing like that back then, of course. But I used to keep a diary when I was all cooped up. About a year before the end of the war, one of the Dutch Cabinet ministers in London said on the radio that they were going to collect papers like that so they could have a record of what things were like while we were occupied. I went back and polished mine up and wrote more about some things.”
“So you gave it to them?” Vicki’s eyes glowed. “You’re part of history now, and everything? How cool is that?”
A little sheepishly, Anne shook her head. “While the war was still going on, I intended to. But almost the first thing I did after we could come out was, I threw it in the trash.”
“Why?” the Asian girl exclaimed.
“Because I hated those times so much, all I wanted to do was forget them,” Anne Berkowitz replied. “I thought getting rid of the diary would help me do that—and some of the things in there were pretty personal. I didn’t want other people seeing them.”
“Too bad!” Vicki said, and then, after a short pause for thought, “Did throwing it out help you forget?”
“Maybe a little,” Anne said after thought of her own. “Not a lot. Less than I hoped. When you go through something like that, it sticks with you whether you want it to or not.”
The Doctor has been through...well, a bunch of incarnations. The enumeration really gets confusing, what with the War Doctor being thrown into the middle. And then there's Peter Cushing playing the Doctor in two films. Counting the Doctor gets very wibbly-wobbly.
Anyway, here are the first and last lines of the incarnations of the Doctor that we know so far and are considered canonical. More or less.
Kevin Strahle--AKA The L.A. Beast-- is a competitive eater. But whereas other competitive eaters focus on eating vast amounts of normal food, such as hot dogs, the L.A. Beast prefes to eat things that are normally not considered foods at all, such as Vegemite.
For his latest challenge, the L.A. Beast decided to succeed where others had failed. He was going to eat a cactus--and more. He was going to eat not just one cactus, but two, right down to the roots.
Watch him shake with pain for 7 minutes while forcing the cacti down his much-abused throat.
Fadiouth is an artificial island off the coast of Senegal. It’s made almost entirely of clam shells. People living in the area built it over generations of clam harvesting. This was their shell dump. Now it’s large enough to support houses, though it’s most widely known for its Christian cemetery.
Visitors can go there over a 400-meter long wooden bridge. As they walk through the streets and by the graves they can hear and feel the shells crunch beneath their feet.
Medical schools hire actors to pretend to have certain ailments. Medical students then attempt to diagnose those afflictions. Ryan Jones, a medical student at the University of Virginia, examined one of them, Jim Malloy.
Malloy was pretending to have an aortic aneurysm. Jones noticed that he was doing a very convincing job of it. He showed all of the symptoms of an actual aortic aneurysm.
Sometimes medical schools hire people who have real medical problems in order to make these simulations more realistic. But this was not one of those times. Jones informed the attending physician, who suggested that Malloy get further tests.
Malloy did so and later had surgery to correct the problem in his heart. By calling early attention to the problem, the medical student had saved his life.
Joey Prusak, 19, works at a Dairy Queen restaurant in Hopkins, Minnesota. In September, a blind man purchased a meal at the counter. While paying, he accidentally dropped a 20-dollar bill on the floor. The woman standing behind him in line snatched it and put it in her pocket.
Prusak approached the woman and asked her to give it back. She refused and began cussing at him. He told her to leave, which she did, while keeping the money. Later Prusak spoke with the blind customer and handed him a 20-dollar bill from his own pocket.
All of this might have passed by without further attention but for an email that another customer sent to Dairy Queen’s management. She described the incident, which promptly went viral.
Since then, Prusak has gotten a lot of positive attention, including an invitation from Warren Buffett to attend a shareholders meeting of his company, Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen.
