Neuropathy in the extremities--a loss of sensation--is an effect of diabetes. When a person with this condition loses sensation in the soles of their feet, they experience increased falling risks. Design Boom reports that the startup company MYNERVA in Zurich, Switzerland is developing socks with electrodes that help people with diabetes experience sensation while walking.
The company has named the device Leia because the visual appearance of the sensors are reminiscent of Princess Leia's hairbuns. The socks, which are controlled with a smartphone app, indicate to the user when they are in contact with the ground.
MYNERVA plans to release the product in the USA in 2027.
Olly Hawes is a British actor with experience on the stage and screen. Years ago, during a student production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Hawes had the titular role. As he writes in The Guardian, he was unprepared for the necessary realism that one of his fellow performers brought to the assassination scene. Due to a mishap, the performer of Brutus stabbed him with a real knife:
There was a sharp piercing feeling. The knife was supposed to have been quietly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.
But the show must go on, so Hawes lay still with a blade a mere centimeter from his aorta. When the lights went down, Hawes asked for an ambulance. He left while the play continued with the audience unaware of the accident.
It's unclear who took up the role of Caesar's ghost after Hawes left.
Instagram user June Cleaver's Vintage Closet shared this image of a Thanksgiving dinner-themed Enterprise model. Its five hour mission is to explore strange new dishes, seek out new tastes and new recipies, and to boldly expand the waistline where no stomach has gone before.
I think the design originates with MakerWorld member Fixumdude. Various alterations are available to reflect different preferences in pies, as well as light meat vs. dark meat. He also provides downloadable files and specific 3D printing filament suggestions. Now load up your plate, pour some Aldebaran whiskey, and get ready to watch the parrises squares game on the viewscreen.
UPDATE 12/3/2025: Geeks Are Sexy was delighted by this design and 3D printed their own. Then they made this song about the toy:
Have you ever seen a snail that looked old, ugly, saggy, or tepid? Of course not. Snails always look youthful, vibrant, and moisturized. So it makes sense to pay spas a lot of money to put snails on your face.
Ideally, you want to biggest snails available, specifically giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica) because they have the most mucus. According to one cosmetics company, the mucus not only rejuvenates your skin, but also gently massages your flesh as the snails roam across your body (you can opt for locations other than your face).
Jones Green Bean Casserole Soda (2004-2004): Part of a novelty #Thanksgiving variety pack, this soda was meant to evoke the polarizing side dish (green beans, fried onions, and cream of mushroom soup) in carbonated liquid form pic.twitter.com/qUmTyoARLV
Green bean casserole is The Goonies of the food world. You either love it or hate it.
In 2004, Jones Soda, a gourmet soda producer in the Seattle area known for its unusual flavors, created a Thanksgiving variety pack of sodas. According to a Spokesman-Review article from that time, the pack included fruitcake, turkey & gravy, and cranberry. The green bean casserole soda was the most controversial inclusion.
Thanksgiving originates as a Christian holiday, but that doesn't stop the Jewish Meme Queen from getting into the spirit of the occasion. She made this challah loaf shaped like a turkey. It's called the Turchallah.
Les Fo'Plafonds is a French musical ensemble that makes instruments with found objects and plays them masterfully with covers of popular songs. In this video, they recreate Henry Mancini's iconic jazz theme for The Pink Panther film series. They use plastic pipes, rubber chickens, steel drums, and an impressively large number of plastic pink pigs.
The other covers by Les Fo'Plafonds include the theme to The Smurfs, AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" featuring a refrigerator door and a toaster, the Simpsons theme with bottles, PVC pipe, and a steam iron.
Although I prefer to attribute the origin of the Reuben sandwich to divine intervention into the fallen human world, a more historical acknowledgment belongs to a man named Reuben who invented the sandwich for his weekly poker games at the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Crescent Moon Alehouse across the street from that hotel produces its Reubens in the classical style. It also holds an annual ReubenFest that celebrate's America's greatest sandwich. Featured variants of the Reuben include the Reuben Chimichanga and Reuben Pierogi.
This is one of sixteen restaurants that Takeout insists are the best in the country for Reubens.
My fondest memory of the Reuben is a now long-defunct Greek restaurant named The Oven on Dolly Ridge Road in Birmingham, Alabama that served Reubens on pumpernickel buns the size of footballs. They were, alas, too good for this world.
Pot of Greed - If you have the most money at the start of your turn, you may draw 2 cards from a standard deck of playing cards. They are worth money equal to their value x 10 or may be used in combat (see combat rules below)
Design Boom reports that engineers at Northwestern University have developed a haptic feedback device that allows users to interact with digital environments with high resolution. The VoxeLite functions like a bandage that wraps around a finger. The very thin sheet is covered with tiny nodes where the fingertip is. Each node has its own electrode that adheres it to a surface when voltage is applied.
The VoxeLite replicates human touch for digital screens without blocking the natural sensation of physical contact. The researchers hope that future versions will allow for use with tactile maps or provide for haptic feedback in games.
John Williams is perhaps the most widely known orchestral composer due to his long career of music authoring for films, including Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Saving Private Ryan.
One associates Williams with grand, dramatic spectacles that use a whole orchestra to emotionally enrapture audiences, not...calypso.
But that's what he made when Sherwood Schwartz's 1964-1967 sitcom Gilligan's Island. Williams introduced the characters and premise for the pilot episode. Schwartz disliked it and instead went with the more familiar version by George Wyle.
Wyle's version written in the standard "ballad metre", which is why it's possible to sing it to the tune of "Amazing Grace" and "The House of the Rising Sun."
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a famous or infamous erotic novel by D.H. Lawrence. He published it privately in 1928. It was banned in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and other nations as obscene. It was scandalous for not only its sexual content (or so I've been told; I've never read it), but because it upended class norms by depicting an affair between an upper-class woman and the lower-class gamekeeper who worked at her estate.
In 1959, the US Supreme Court ruled that the law banning the novel violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. That same year, Field & Stream, an American magazine about hunting and fishing, reviewed Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is, after all, a novel about gamekeeping. Ed Zern wrote the brief review:
Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.
Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.
Ed Zern, a humorist, is being facetious: there is no such book as Miller's Practical Gamekeeping. But it would make sense that much of Lawrence's novel contains scenes that are extraneous to the needs of hunters.
Nick Chipman of DudeFoods is one of the great pioneers of extreme food preparation. In the past, we've seen his corndog made with five different types of sausage, ice cream cone made out of Fruity Pebbles, pizza crust stuffed with cheese balls, a crookie (a combination croissant and cookie), s'mores chicken wings, Reuben sandwich cone, a sandwich with fillings for each letter of the alphabet, and a hamburger bun made of French fries. He's what would happen if Leonardo da Vinci and Julia Child had a baby together.
What does food say about the nation that prepares it? This is the starting point for research by Óscar Cabral, whose article in Frontiers in Political Science examines the menus of 457 state dinners presented by Portugal between 1910 and 2024. Cabral treats menus as political documents that express trends in Portugal's internal politics and diplomatic objectives over the course of a century.
The first year, 1910, is fitting because it is the year in which a revolution permanently overthrew the 800-year old monarchy. In a press release, Cabral explains that although Portugal has not had a clearly defined "culinary diplomatic strategy" since the foundation of the Portuguese republic, certain trends are clearly evident.
For example, during the nationalist Estado Novo period, state dinners offered less of the traditional French cuisine offered to foreign diplomats and instead emphasized authentic Portuguese foods. This trend culminated in a 1957 state dinner offered to Queen Elizabeth II with a menu designed by Portugal's most respected ethnographer at the time.
