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.

-My Modern Met

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

From her home in Geneva, Celine Rousseau produces La Table. C'est magnifique! Her kitchen gives birth to amazing tarts, pizzas, and charcuterie. This pizza doesn't use cherries, but it does use cherry tomatoes, parmigiano reggiano, and ricotta.

-via Totally Gourmet

One day, a particular employee at a hospital in Catanzaro, Italy stopped showing up for work. He still got paid, though, for the next fifteen years. He was paid the equivalent of $646,545 for that time.

The man is now under criminal investigation, as are six other people at the hospital connected to the incident.

How did he get away with it? BBC News explains:

The employee was a civil servant, and was assigned to a job in the hospital in 2005. It was at this point he stopped going into work, the police said.

The police have also accused him of threatening his manager to stop her from filing a disciplinary report against him.

That manager later retired, police added, and his ongoing absence was never noticed by her successor or human resources.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo by Pixabay

Video director, writer, and all-around Renaissance man Mark Slutsky is on fire lately with brilliant, innovative ideas for products and services that could be in our near future.

Why do we use old fashioned fire alarms that scream at us? That tech is decades old. We can do and build better now.

But wait--there's more! Slutsky is already improving his idea before it hits the prototype stage:

An NFT is some sort of blockchain thing. And don't ask me to define blockchain--just invest my life savings in one.

-via Super Punch

Oliver the cat wants to play, but his human servant needs to work. The two get along well enough thanks to The Loveseat, a chair designed by Stephan Verkaik and Beth Horneman. It's made out of beech wood and recycled polyurethane leather. The exercise wheel can be added to either side of the chair

Katerina Murphy, an artist in Ukraine, makes three-dimensional stained glass sculptures. They're made, specifically, out of sea glass, which is weathered glass that washes up on beaches. Slide a light inside and they turn into vibrant cat lamps.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 유승현 Seunghyeon Yoo (@thinx___)

I don't have much information about this lamp design. But it appears that dropping a steel marble in the top activates the power switch. It takes about 21 seconds for the marble to spin in the video. Alternatively, I suppose, an impatient user could simply drop the marble down the hole.

-via Core77

If you're wearing a mask, how to you hold nails or screws in your mouth while on a home improvement project? Arlen Abraham helpfully suggests gluing a magnet to the inside of your mask. I'd bet that it would also help you keep track of any loose USB flash drives that you need to tote around.

-via Super Punch

Vitaly Vivchar of Tomsk, Russia trained with yoga and freediving techniques before attempting this amazing feat. While holding his breath, he climbed onto a submerged bench and pressed a 110-pound barbell 77 times! In doing so, Vivchar blasted pass the previous record of 62 presses.

Some sources are reporting that Vivchar only completed 76 presses. Either way, the current Guinness World Record is his.

This 4-month old puppy, Emy, found a butterfly in her yard in Brazil. Her humans report that the two played together for over an hour. Such is bliss.

-via Nag on the Lake