Street artist JPS spotted the perfect form for the battery. The concrete post in Triefenstein, Germany has just the right dimensions for a scaled-up cylindrical battery. He quipps:
hopefully I don’t get charged
-via Street Art Utopia
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Typewriter Collector's entire YouTube channel is worth browsing, as it's filled with lovingly restored and often strange typewriters. This particular one is Toshibia BW-1182 from the 1940s. The horizontal cylinder contains Chinese, Japanese, and English characters. YouTube commenter amontoval describes the arrangement:
They're arranged phonetically by most common "on-yomi" (or kun-yomi in some cases) according to the kana syllabary (many homophones, of course). Can't see the whole circumference of the cylinder but at about 0:30 it's clear that the order doubles back at the ring of mathematical symbols. Red characters help parse the readings. Last character to left of equal sign can be pronounced "kin" (exert) and the first character in next row "gin" (silver), then "ku" (suffer) in red followed by "kuu" (sky, empty), "kuma" (bear), "kun" (teachings, meaning [also the kun in kun-yomi]), "gun" (group), then "kei" (system) in red followed many, homophones of "kei". It's the same order in which (mostly compounded character) words in a normal Japanese monolingual dictionary for Japanese speakers would appear.
-via Nag on the Lake
Twitter user Hurt CoPain has a refrigerator that has a screen. It's probably one of those internet of things things. Anyway, such a screen (paired with a camera inside) lets you see inside without opening the door. It also allows for much pranking if you have Hurt CoPain's photoshop skills.
-via My Modern Met
And, specifically, Angostura bitters. That's a particular type and brand of bitter liquor from Trinidad and Tobago. Bitters are liquors that are traditionally served as aids to digestion. Do they work? I don't know, but folk medicine traditions say that they do. That's the crux of our story today.
Nelsen's Hall, a bar on Washington Island in Lake Michigan, faced a serious problem during the Prohibition Era. Its primary means of doing business--serving alcohol--was now illegal. But it was legally permissible to offer liquor for medical purposes. Atlas Obscura describes how bar owner Tom Nelsen took advantage of this loophole:
“During Prohibition, Tom got a pharmaceutical license so he could legally sell bitters,” says Sarah Jaworski, whose parents have owned Nelsen’s since 1999. This loophole wasn’t quite the same as that used by doctors who prescribed alcohol during Prohibition. Rather, the bitters were classified as a “stomach tonic for medicinal purposes” instead of alcohol, meaning that a doctor’s prescription wasn’t required. “Medicinal tinctures are usually taken in smaller doses, but since Angostura bitters are 90 proof, he was able to legally sell it as a tincture,” she says. “He just sold it as shots.”
Tom’s tonic proved to be extremely popular among locals, many of whom apparently suffered from previously undiagnosed stomach ailments. In fact, customers who kept Nelsen’s open for the entirety of Prohibition are directly responsible for the pub being the oldest continuously-operating tavern in Wisconsin.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, Nelsen reopened all bar services. But a taste for bitters stuck with the locals. It continues to this day. Customers at Nelsen's Hall remain the largest consumers of Angostura bitters. Drinking a shot gains you entry into the Bitters Club. Custom dictates that you're not a true islander until you've had yours.
Images: Nelsen's Hall, Google Maps
The bucket truck in Santa Rosa, California caught fire after the crane had already lifted a worker up. Now he unable to escape the fiery inferno except taking a long, dangerous jump to the ground.
That's when truck driver Efrain Zepeda sprang into action. He drove his truck next to the conflagration so that his trailer was positioned beneath the bucket. The trapped worker was then able to drop down to the top of the trailer and escape.
Here is the hero, Efrain Zepeda. Glory to his name and to his house.
-via Debby Witt | Photo: Estes Express Lines
Would you like to look like a dish scrubber? How about a bottle of floor cleaner or a can of mackerel? Then Felipe Cavieres, a fashion designer in Chile, has the perfect selection of clothes for your new look. You, too, can show the people around you that you have the fashion sense of a steel wool pad.
Food artist Manami Sasaki, who is internet famous for her elegant slices of decorated toast, says that:
I feel that breakfast, which wakes up our senses for the day, and shoes, which take us to the exciting world outside, have something in common . . .
Run, don't walk, to or with this sandwich to fuel you through the day. It's completely edible, vegetarian, and made with several different types of bread.
-via My Modern Met
Octopus Decanter
— 𝐀𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐚 (@A_aphrodisia) April 25, 2021
by Josh Dewall pic.twitter.com/DTbqqZpRgP
The wine aerates as it flows through the eight legs of the octopus. It's an ingenious design by Joshua DeWall, a glass artist in Virginia. Look at his other extraordinary glass sculptures, many equally functional, on display on Instagram. I'm especially taken with DeWall's delicately composed arthropods.
Tumblr user Glumshoe, if I understand their bio correctly, works in science communications on the Lake Michigan shore and thus knows something about how the mysterious and sometimes dangerous sand dunes in Indiana Dunes National Park work. It was in that location that, several years ago, a 6-year old boy sank into and almost died in the interior of this real-life sarlacc.
Physically speaking, how is this possible? Glumshoe drew this comic and explained:
The current leading geological theory as to how this happened is that the organic material you engulf, like trees, slowly decompose beneath your slopes, leaving behind unstable voids held together only by the fragile remains of the decayed material. When these voids are walked over, they collapse, forming sudden sinkholes that can swallow visitors whole. The rules that typically govern stationary dunes, or wandering dunes in areas that are not forested, no longer apply to you. You are unpredictable and dangerous and have remained closed to visitors except on guided hikes ever since.
-via FYSS
The New York Times has broken open a scandal at NASA and other space agencies around the world. Have you ever eaten one of those sweetly-flavored food bars labelled in NASA gift shops as "astronaut ice cream"? Then you've accomplished something that no astronaut has done while in space:
With real ice cream available, there is no need in space for those blocks of chalky Neapolitan astronaut ice cream parents buy for their children at museum gift shops. Indeed, in the 60 years of the space age, no astronaut has ever eaten astronaut ice cream, at least not in space.
The freeze-dried ice cream was indeed developed in 1974 for NASA — for the gift shop in the agency’s Ames Research Center in California. The company that makes it, Outdoor Products of Boulder, Colo., now sells a couple million of them a year.
Sorry for linking to a paywalled article, but this is an important scandal for people to know about.
-via Super Punch | Photo: Ruth Hartnup
Under Taiwanese law, companies must provide newly married couples 8 days of leave. So a married couple divorced and then immediately remarried and claimed those 8 days. They repeated the process. The bank where the husband works concludes that this was an unfair exploitation of the law. CTV News reports:
But an unnamed bank employee decided to game the system last year, claiming 32 days of leave using a novel ruse.
Over a period of 37 days, he and his wife got married four times and divorced three times, claiming the full eight days for each of their nuptials.
The bank balked and the employee appealed to Taipei city labour department, which initially fined his employer Tw$20,000 (US$670) for violating the leave regulations.
-via Marginal Revolution
Miru-chan enjoys the walks his human servant takes him on. When it rains, he's protected from the elements with an appropriately-sized umbrella. The transparent materials lets him see all around himself without difficulty. Such is the good life.
滅多に見る事が出来ない激アツシーンがこちらです pic.twitter.com/ch7SyZGGfu
— 五条ミソる (@nakamanian) April 24, 2021
Gravity is for losers. The top seagull knows this fact. He can just take a break on his pal while the winds provide enough lift for both of them. We've all had co-workers like this (or are one).
-via Adrian Lozano
Sadly, Nordstrom is sold out of the Pavé Chair Bag, which was designed by Area X Myreality. It's less of a functional purse (since you can't carry anything in it), and more of an art piece that makes a statement about the person who wears it. But what is that statement?
-via Super Punch
The in-laws of redditor /u/Yamaha234 tore up the carpet in home to replace it. They found a complete Monopoly game board underneath! S/he hopes to convince them to just coat it in epoxy so that it can be played in the future. Such huge game boards may have been a trend once upon a time, as other homes have old Monopoly boards, too.
Other redditors propose ideal games for giant floor play. I suppose choosing Twister would be self-defeating.
-via Laughing Squid
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