Airbnb and its competitors let you rent out your house to strangers in search of a place to stay. This real estate aspect of the sharing economy is expanding. The New York Times (paywalled article) reports that new businesses let people offer up their household pools, living rooms, and backyards. The article focuses on Sniffspot, a company that turns ordinary household backyards into dog parks.
This company is thriving in suburbs outside of large cities, such as New York and Seattle. Wealthy dog owners who live in crowded apartments in the city will pay $35 an hour or more for access to fenced-in backyards. This large fee encourages hosts to make their yards especially appealing to dogs, such as adding agility equipment, play structures, and shallow pools.
The Barter Theatre building in Abingdon, Virginia dates back to at least 1876. But it got its current name during the Great Depression. When it reopened its doors under new management in 1933, guests could purchase tickets to see plays by bartering with farm and garden goods, such as pickles and eggs. Paying in cash was an option, but, Atlas Obscura reports, 80% of guests paid in trade.
The Barter Theatre became a media sensation and has thrived ever since, drawing famous actors to its stage, including Gregory Peck and Ernest Borgnine. It has an active show schedule and sees 160,000 visitors every year, although one can no longer buy tickets with chickens.
Magic: The Gathering is an enormously popular fantasy-based collectible card game that launched that gaming genre. Since 1993, the corporate owner, Wizards of the Coast, has produced billions of Magic cards.
When you're looking at billions of pieces of paper with variable values, you need an economist to understand how they behave. That's why Wizards of the Coast is hiring a Senior Design Economist to study how the game is played and help the company make prudent design decisions about it.
The job posting is here. You'll need a graduate degree in economics or some other data science field and a familiarity with an analytical programming language.
Eating, though it is great fun, is also a lot of work. Futurists promised us flying cars, but we don't actually need flying cars. We need automatic forks in order to ingest more food while using as little effort as possible.
Dave of DaveMakesStuff makes the best possible future a reality. He likes to say that "I don't usually know what I'm making until it's too late." This invention was supposed to be a 7-pronged screwdriver, but an eating utensil makes more sense. It's driven by eight beveled gears nested in a sphere. Dave kindly offers his STL files if you'd like to 3D print your own.
The Laundry Jet is the first vacuum powered laundry chute that transports laundry from any room with ports installed, to the laundry room [read more: https://t.co/ad50LRzmkn] pic.twitter.com/vuPaVi8j40
Is it really necessary? No. Would it be useful? Yes. Would I use it for purposes other than laundry processing if there was one in my home? You'd better believe it!
Laundry Jet has up to four ports that open either with a manual slide or motion sensors. Vacuum force sucks the clothes down to a central repository in the laundry room. It works the other way, too. You can get an optional return system installed that sucks the clean laundry up to a designated location in the house.
Although Laundry Jet is best installed during the home construction, it's also possible to retrofit the system into a preexisting home by routing the 6-inch wide pipes through an attic. Those pipes are wide enough for most laundry items or carefully wrapped sandwiches.
Your flight with Singapore Airlines has not been delayed. It's not late and you are not early. The flight has simply been "retimed". The language is important because you should have a positive outlook. As the sage advised, "always look on the bright side of life."
John Ollila of the travel website Loyalty Lobby shares this email from Singapore Airlines for his flight out of Bali. The new wording should make the experience less difficult, right?
So, yes, Ollila's flight has been retimed. But at least it has not experienced an unscheduled terrain contact. That could really disrupt his plans for after deplaning.
The worst has happened: there is a moment in time in which there is nothing distracting you from your own thoughts. You can sit in peace and think clearly for the first time since you first held a smartphone.
This is a disaster waiting to happen and Pablo Rochat isn't helping any. He's an artist and commercial art director in Atlanta. Rochat's Twitter feed is filled with many public pranks and visual jokes that bend reality. In this case, Thing from The Addams Family is disciplining you for your addiction to the phone. It's time for an upgrade.
Or, to be more precise, having a name that takes longer to pronounce correlates with lowered job prospects with the sampled group for this study.
Qi Ge (Vassar College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) are economists. They studied the employment prospects of 1,500 recent graduates of economics doctoral programs by measuring the acquisition of tenure-track positions at institutions with high research productivity. An algorithm assessed the pronounceability of names by the "commonality of letter and phoneme combinations" within those names.
One standard deviation in the time that it takes to pronounce a person's name reduced the likelihood of attaining a tenure-track position by 8%. Although anti-bias training of hiring committee members may address the pronounceability of the names of candidates, such training does not appear to have made a significant impact on the cost of having a name that takes a long time to pronounce.
You can read the full text of Ge and Wu's paper at SSRN.
Alasdair Beckett-King, a very English comedian, offers reasonably good Texas accents in this brief parody of The Lord of the Rings and King of the Hill.
I would really enjoy seeing a special episode of King of the Hill in which the The Lord of the Rings takes place in Texas. Hank Baggins is tasked with delivering a Super Bowl VI ring to Austin for its destruction.
Beckett-King envisions Dale Gribble as Boromir and Boomhauer as Gollum. Additionally, Bill Dauterive would be the ideal as Legolas, Luanne Platter should be Galadriel, Cotton Hill should be Saruman the White, and Bobby Hill should play Pippin Took.
And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.
Other users shared that this is an unusual, but not unknown practice in Sweden. When children visit the homes of other children, there's no expectation that the guest children will be fed.
Why? The Washington Post consulted a variety of experts on Swedish culture, including the food historian Richard Tellström at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Tellström explained that in the past, feeding someone else's children would be considered an insult:
“Eating was something that you did at home,” he says. “You didn’t feed other people’s children — that would have been considered a sort of intrusion in another family’s life, with the subtext of ‘You can’t feed your children properly, so I will feed them.’”
Tellström speculates that this now fading tradition was likely due to the atomistic development of families in rural Sweden. Dining with people other than your immediate family was unusual and thus providing food hospitality outside of the family would not be customary.
It was 1941 and the war was not going well for the Allies. The Nazis were advancing on multiple fronts, including deep into the unprepared Soviet Union. Britain was now locked into an uneasy but necessary friendship with that Communist power.
HMS Trident, a Royal Navy submarine, docked at Polyarny on the Arctic Ocean coast of the Soviet Union. While his boat was undergoing repairs, Commander Geoffrey Sladen dines with the Soviet post admiral. He comments that his wife sometimes struggled to push their infant's stroller through snow. The Admiral suggests having a reindeer pull the stroller and promptly has a reindeer delivered to Trident as a gift to Commander Sladen's wife.
This was a diplomatically uneasy time, so Commander Sladen knew that it would be unwise to refuse the gift, even though transporting a reindeer by submarine back to Britain would be difficult. The crew names the reindeer Polyanna after the port and takes on a barrel of moss for her to eat during the voyage back home.
On the way to Britain, Trident recieves new orders: stay on patrol in the area on the hunt for German warships. The supply of moss runs out, so Polyanna eats condensed milk instead. She hangs out in the torpedo room and sleeps beneath the captain's rack. But she is not exactly toilet trained and gets rather stinky. Submarines are called "pigboats" for a reason, but Trident gets unusually smelly due to Polyanna's contributions.
Despite spending six weeks on a submarine, Polyanna arrives in the UK healthy and has, in fact, gained weight, making removing her from the boat an added challenge. She lives for five more years at a the Regents Park Zoo in London.
Instagram member @nrml_mbter describes himself as an abnormal dude on a bike, but I don't see anything abnormal about him, aside from exceptional cleverness. This inventive gentleman records his off-road bicycling adventures which often take him far away from civilization.
When heading out into the wild, it's important to carry supplies that make the adventure comfortable, or at least survivable. Don't ride beyond your resources. Stay fed and hydrated.
To assist with the latter task, he used a cavity in his bike's frame to create a cereal bowl. With milk in a bottle and a spoon in his pocket, he's prepared for the journey.
In Japan, a bow conveys a lot of messaging into a brief and sometimes slight movement. Using the wrong bow conveys the wrong message. For example, the eshaku, which is a 15º bow, is a casual greeting. The keirei, which is 30º, is a more formal bow used in the working environment. The saikeirei, which is 45º, expresses deep respect to a social superior.
The gentleman pictured above is demonstrating the dogeza, which is an abjectly apologetic bow used to beg for a great favor or forgiveness for a serious wrong.
Sora News 24 says the dogeza sometimes does not go far enough. That's when the more extreme dogeritsu is necessary. In addition to having committed a huge offense, the dogeritsu requires substantial athleticisim, especially if it is necessary to hold the position while waiting for the aggrieved party to consider the apology.
In 1925, an American entrepreneur named Howard Johnson established a pharmacy and ice cream shop in a suburb of Boston. It thrived and by 1929, Johnson opened a restuarant. This was the first Howard Johnson's-brand restaurant, which became a thriving chain that swept across the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s. The company, which also built a chain of motels, was especially popular with road travelers who took part in the post-World War II travel boom.
The company sold off the motel chain and continued in restaurants, but it struggled with changing markets and gradually declined, especially in the early years of the 21st Century.
Now, CNN reports, the restaurant chain is completely dead. The last Howard Johnson's restaurant in Lake George, New York has shut down. The site is for sale with a current asking price of $10.
UPDATE 6/7/22: Commenter Unknown2 has helpfully explained why the price is so low. This refers to not the purchase price for the property, but the rental price per square foot. That makes a lot more sense.
This hound dog is Jack, a rescue pup owned by Brennan Gilmore, a guitarist with the bluegrass band Walker's Run. Jack often attended rehearsals and sang along with the music, but was not present at live performances until one special night in 2016.
Gilmore tells The Dodo that the band was playing at a theater in Little Washington, Virginia. Jack slept in the greenroom. But the door must have been left ajar when Walker's Run went to the stage to perform an encore because Jack followed them and began to howl.
Sadly, Jack passed on two years ago. But Gilmore thinks of him often, for one of his guitars is engraved with a portrait of Jack.
