It's the age old problem: how do you keep your snacks warm while keeping Agent 47 busy on his killing spree? Kentucky Fried Chicken has now solved that conundrum by designing a console with a built-in chicken warmer.

It's not exactly an original idea. Gamers have been heating food on overly-hot consoles for years. But what the KFConsole does is conveniently and intentionally conduct the machine's heat to the food. CNN reports:

Your chicken will be kept hot thanks to a custom-built cooling system that keeps the console hardware at a regular temperature while using heat produced by its components to warm the chicken chamber. [...]

The console can handle virtual reality games and offers smooth gameplay thanks to 240 frames per second frame rate and 4K display compatibility, according to details published by Cooler Master.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: KFConsole

The Veal family of Indianapolis has bushes growing near the pond on their property. For every winter since 1961, they have sprayed pond water with food coloring onto the bushes (now an artificial scaffold), encasing them in layers of colored ice. They carve steps into the back so that family members can climb it to trim the ice into the vivid sculpture you see above. You can see photos from this ongoing project on their Instagram page or learn how to visit it in person here.

How does the Veal family manage to create this sculpture? This 2018 local news video illustrates the process after one daring reporter climbs the ice tree to inspect it.

-via Design You Trust

Every year, the small Scottish town of Newburgh turns a local child's drawing into a Christmas light on public display. For nearly two decades, the town has added a new light to a particular lamppost. BBC News describes the mysterious origins of this project:

The tradition is now in its 19th year, but no-one remembers who started it.

Shona Gray, head of Newburgh Action Group, who organise the lights, told BBC Scotland: "It might have been that there was a teacher from the local school on the committee that year, but no-one remembers.

"All we know is it became an annual competition and all the schoolchildren entered their drawings, with one being chosen to turn into a light." [...]

Shona said: "Lamppost 15 is always the new light. It's opposite St Katherine's Court where we gather for the light switch-on.

You can see more photos at Design Boom.

Photo: Newburgh Action Group

For several years, Ruby Silvious, an artist in New York, has enchanted the world with her delicate, precise paintings on tea bags. She has refined and expanded her art with every work, making use of her skills during quarantine lockdown to transform what we might think of as trash into aesthetic wonders.

Lân Nguyen, a photographer in the Netherlands, experiments with laying silhouettes over the sky and mixing the forms with the shapes suggested by the clouds and moon. The results are often amusing and heartwarming. His source material includes romantic images, as well as scenes from classic Disney films. You can see more on his Instagram page.

Tim Smith of Williamsburg, Kentucky, may have agreed to make his route, despite rain, snow, heat, or gloom of night. But he never agreed to face down dogs with axes. Fox 19 News quotes him:

There’s a lot of reasons why your mailman might not deliver your packages, and this is one of them. I can handle a dog, but not a dog with an axe.

Yup. Keep driving. The customer can pick up his mail at the post office, if necessary.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Tim Smith

Like chocolate syrup and pickled pigs' feet, some foods just naturally belong together. McDonald's China division recently discovered that Oreo cookies and Spam are complementary ingredients. Kotaku reports that the Oreo Spam burger will go on sale on December 21. It will be limited to a run of 400,000. Perhaps, like the McRib, it will be occasionally returned to the menu for hungry fans.

Image: McDonald's of China

Dodging my responsibilities like....#hockey 🪑 pic.twitter.com/Itk1NuqmaN

— Pavel Barber (@HeyBarber) December 17, 2020

Pavel Barber is a Canadian hockey coach who describes himself as "a stickhandling specialist." That means he's an expert in the precise and consistent use of the hockey stick. In this video, he's at The Skating Lab, a hockey training facility in Toronto. That facility's website is fascinating to browse, as it's filled with photos of many specialized machines designed to optimize hockey performance.

In this video, he's using a treadmill to maintain control of a puck while maneuvering it around increasingly difficult obstacles.

-via The Awesomer

A friend of redditor appuhlatchuhn recently brought an adorable dissertation into the world. She got this beautiful maternity photo taken with it. Mama looks so proud. I hope the little tyke grows up and gets published as a monograph some day.

Rommy De Bommy, an artist in the Netherlands, makes fashion accessories that look just like (and I'm going to guess tastes like) food products. She says that they're made of clay and "and little bit of magic." She can make custom orders, so if there's some special food that speaks to your soul, De Bommy can make a purse that looks like it.

In the olden days, before Amazon Prime, people still had daily deliveries to their homes. In the United States, this often consisted of a daily drop off of fresh milk. The milk could be left at one's front door. But to hide bottles from casual thievery and make the milk easier to grab while still inside the house, some homes had milk doors. These were cabinets built into the outside wallk, accessible through doors on each side.

They weren't locked, but, as Rain Noe of Core77 points out, they represent a similar approach to the delivery lockers that some people use to prevent "porch pirates" from making off with their property.

Perhaps, in the future, homes will have built-in delivery lockers to support this new instant delivery lifestyle.

Photo: Downtowngal

A Dutch team of aerospace engineers led by Henk Hesselink argue that future airports should be built with circular runways rather than linear ones. This would give pilots flexibility during variable weather conditions and allow for an easier traffic flow. In 2017, Hesselink spoke to International Airport Review about these advantages:

This runway is a circle, that has no limitations on where to take-off or land on this circle. This makes it possible to fly in from or out to any direction. The size of the circle is pretty large, its diameter is 3.5 kilometres. Total length of the runway therefore is 10 km. This means that passengers during take-off or landing will not feel like they are in a roller coaster, a maximum of 1.2g forces will be experienced, similar to a train on a curved track. A typical landing only requires a part of the runway with a limited curve.

Current airports operate runways with fixed directions, so a limited number of directions is available for take-off and landing. During a storm, the capacity of the runway is limited because of this. This fixed direction also means that some communities experience more noise than others.

At the Endless Runway, aircraft have the possibility to land anywhere on the circle. This gives the possibility to find always at least one point where there is no crosswind and only headwind. This means that the airport can operate a sustainable capacity.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Netherlands Aerospace Center

Anna Chojnicka, an artist in London, went into lockdown with the rest of her city last spring. She needed to be creative, so she began bruising bananas. She uses a stylus to lightly and precisely press into ripe bananas, bruising the skin. Every day, she makes a new banana image, some of which display amazing detail and shading.

We were all impressed when, last month, redditor kelvin214 neatly arranged 518 blocks on top of one. Now he's blown away his own record with 1,002. There's no glue or other adhesives at work--just ordinary wizardry.

Here's a time lapse video of the erection process. At the 1:33 mark, having completed his work, the Jenga master brings it all crashing down.

-via Geekologie

Prudence Staite is a master chocolatier. She can make seemingly anything out of chocolate (and other foods) and does so with an artistic flair.

YouTuber Technomoan, who explores antique audio equipment, bought a Christmas music record from Staite's Etsy shop. It's literally made of Belgian dark chocolate and is completely edible. The sound quality is . . . well, not as good as a vinyl record, but remarkably strong for chocolate.

You can watch a longer version of Technamoan's video here.

-via The Awesomer