Florence Teeters of Phillips, Wisconsin had always wanted to go hunting. It's part of the culture that she has lived in her whole life. But there was never an opportunity for her to do so until recently. NBC 15 reports:
“I took mom out to the blind this year. I had a nice chair for her and it was nice and warm. A little after 4 p.m., a buck shows up about 30 yards away. I tapped her on the knee and I pointed. She nodded and smiled and was real quiet. Then she took the shot!” said Bill.
Bill says she was elated when she realized she made the kill screaming “I got a buck! I got a buck!” Bill says the buck was small and a “spike” buck which means it has unbranched antlers.
“She wanted to go hunting because she wanted to experience the part of being out in the stand with the boys,” Bill said. “She likes the idea of being out in the woods.”
Farmers in the Malnad region in Shivamogga, Karnataka, India, have been plagued by monkey raids on their crops. One of them, Srikant Gowda, decided to combat the monkey threat by making his dog more menacing. News 18 reports that he painted his dog to look like a tiger:
He found a farmer in Bhatkal who was using a fake tiger doll to scare away monkeys. Gowda triedthe same tactic in his areca field and realised it worked.
However, Gowda told Deccan Herald that the endeavour would not last much longer so he instead he painted his dog. The paint is made of hair dye and lasts up to a month before fading.
The farmer has also put up posters of his dog and and that of tigers in the grass to scare away rogue monkeys.
Thanksgiving and Christmas often means visiting relatives, which means breaking out extra bedding. How do those fitted sheets work? Cartoonist Matthew Gallman has a step-by-step guide.
Honestly, I usually skip steps 1 and 2 and proceed directly to 3.
Well, actually, it's not that mysterious. I can think of two big reasons why she's popular:
Her instructions are simple and clear.
She takes her time to show the entirety of each step, especially when vigorously shaking toppings on her dishes.
Sora News 24 brings to our attention Kuma Cooking, a YouTube channel that teaches you how to cook Japanese food on a griddle. It's a practical experience that will give you an expansive appreciation for another culture.
Kuma wears t-shirts for her sponsors, so be sure to support content creators by watching her advertisements.
Yes, they are one-line drawings, but they are also much more. Dr. Bob Bosch, a mathematician who teaches at Oberlin, created this image of Botticelli's Birth of Venus using the shortest possible line while still rendering the image. It's an illustration of the Travelling Salesman Problem.
The problem of finding the shortest path that passes through a set of given points once and only once, as when a travelling salesman needs to visit a number of specified cities exactly once, using the shortest possible route. The problem is notoriously difficult to solve, because the number of possible tours rises rapidly with the number of cities.
You can see five other examples here, including images of the Mona Lisa and a Van Gogh self-portrait.
Mike Clifford made this amazing guitar out of, obviously, LEGO bricks. He used a Les Paul design in vector file format in Fusion 360, a 3D design program, to develop the shape. Then, after building a mold, he poured epoxy over the bricks. Clifford describes the process at Core77:
The most challenging part of this guitar build was creating a solid guitar blank from the Legos and epoxy. I put the Lego bricks on a backplate in a pixelated elliptical pattern. I then put the Legos face down into a partially cured layer of epoxy, then poured more epoxy to halfway cover the Legos. After this epoxy cured, I could remove the backplate that was holding the Legos together, pour more epoxy resin over them to fill in the backs of the Legos. While the epoxy was still fluid, I added a second layer of Legos, and finally came back to fill in the entire form with resin. After I had the epoxy Lego guitar blank, I could just use standard woodworking processes for guitar building, to shape the guitar from the epoxy Lego blank.
All praise to Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times for this incredible literary achievement. In her article that is sadly behind a paywall, she describes the challenges of US veterans who use emotional support dogs as part of their daily lives.
The story is tragic, but the composition of the sentence is magnificent.
The closing of the article is pretty good, too. Steinhauer quotes a flight attendant about the challenges of regulating service animals on board airline flights:
“We want clear guidance from the Department of Transportation,” she added. “We need to be matching species that are able to fulfill those service functions and that’s not a peacock and that’s probably not a sloth.”
Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician.
There are many historical examples of geniuses in divergent fields. For example, Johann Goethe (1749-1832), who is pictured above, was a brilliant playwright, geologist, biologist, poet, and philosopher. How was he and a few others through history able to rise to the top of not only one field, but many very different fields?
David Robson explores the possibilities at BBC Worklife. Robson quotes researcher Waqas Ahmed:
Studies of students in many different disciplines – from academia to sport and music – have shown that, after a certain amount of practice or study, we stop learning so efficiently. We can therefore make better use of our time if we regularly switch between skills or subjects. The same goes for studies of problem solving – you will find more solutions to a task if you return to it after looking at something completely different, rather than simply spending ever more time on the same question.
“You can get into the zone and be very productive up until a certain point, then you need to change your activity in order to come back to it in an optimal state,” says Ahmed. “So I know, for example, that if I was exclusively an artist or a painter, then I wouldn't be as productive because I would experience diminishing returns – I'd require external stimuli in order to allow me to get over a block.”
[...]
Albert Einstein, who was an accomplished violinist and pianist as well as a physicist, apparently used this approach. According to his son and daughter, he would play music whenever he faced an intractable problem, and would often finish the performance by saying, “There now, I’ve got it”. It was a much better use of his time than continuing to fruitlessly agonise over the maths or physics.
Who cares about the Superbowl or the World Series? For really thrilling sporting action, you need to check out the annual National Beard and Mustache Championships. Only the beardliest of beards and other facial hair expressions could even enter the competition, held this year in Las Vegas.
Photographer Greg Anderson was there so see these world-class athletes at their finest moments. You can see more of these champions at My Modern Met.
The branch that the beaver needed for his dam was very long--too long, really, for him to haul alone.
So 19-year old Alexander Oswald lend him a helping hand. Together, beaver and man were able to carry it across the road. The drivers in Deggendorf, Germany, were good sports about the delay caused by their animal brother.
The owner says, "young people nowadays don't care much about the privacy."
He's counting on that to make money. The owner of the One Dollar Hotel in Fukuoka, Japan thinks that his scheme will lose money in the beginning, but turn a profit once he can monetize the videos on his YouTube channel. So far, four people have taken him up on the offer in the past month. CNN reports:
Guests are permitted to turn the lights off, and the bathroom area is out of camera range.
"This is a very old ryokan and I was looking into a new business model," says Inoue, who started running the hotel last year. "Our hotel is on the cheaper side, so we need some added value, something special that everyone will talk about."
Before there was Walmart, there was Woolworth's. These were general-purpose dime stores where shoppers roamed with carts and brought their selected items to the cashier for purchase. In the late 19th century, this was a new kind of shopping experience that has become the norm today at brick-and-mortar shops.
In the 20th century, many Woolworth's opened little restaurants inside where shoppers could grab a meal. These were called luncheonette counters.
There are no more Woolworth's, as the company faced increasing competition after the 1960s by Kmart, Target, and, eventually, Walmart. In 1997, the last Woolworth's store closed.
Thankfully, one lunch counter survived. It's now located at an antiques mall in Bakersfield, California. Eater reports on the very authentic experience there:
There, in the back corner at the ground-floor level of the four-story building, is a fully functioning former Woolworth luncheonette counter, complete with 22 counter seats, Formica tables ringing the room, and an open kitchen for griddling burgers and making milkshakes. But this well-protected bit of ephemera isn’t cordoned off with Do Not Touch signs — it’s still a real, thriving luncheonette counter called the Woolworth Diner, serving police officers, antiquers, and locals daily. [...]
The menu is simple at Woolworth Diner, mostly just burgers and a chili dog with sides like fries, baked beans, or macaroni and potato salad. There are milkshakes available, root beer floats too, but nothing even comes close to crossing the $10 mark. Signs hang both inside the dining area and beyond showcasing five-cent Coca-Colas or ten-cent sandwiches, an overt homage to the five-and-dime history of the place. The workers still don black and white outfits when flitting around behind the counter, and many in the dining crowd are old enough to remember Woolworth in all its glory.
Cory Mervis-Bocskor converted this old Ford Aerostar minivan into the ultimate ride. He uses it as a Burning Man vehicle, but this Type 6 Federation shuttlecraft also has interstellar capabilities. It's modeled after the Goddard, which Scotty flew off the Enterprise-D the last time that he appeared on Star Trek.
Oh, sure, you can claim that your relative is dead and the company needs to pay out. But insurance adjusters know to ask for proof. Like Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify."
The grieving family in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa complied with Old Mutual's demands and delivered the decaying corpse after the company refused to accept documentary evidence of the man's death. The Daily Mail reports:
Ntombenhle Mhlongo and Thandaza Mtshali were filmed taking the body of uncle Sifiso Justice Mhlongo into a branch of Old Mutual somewhere in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, this week after their claim on a funeral plan was delayed.
Ms Mhlongo said the claim, for £1,700, had been delayed for nine days because of problems over the paperwork, meaning important tribal rites for their uncle, who died at the age of just 46, could not be performed. [...]
Ntombenhle told News 24: 'We are not rich people. We are poor and they were refusing to pay us. We are still so heartbroken.
'We kept going back but they kept stonewalling and we were angry, frustrated and just wanted to make sure we could properly prepare and bury him.
We thought if the documents do not give them enough answers then maybe the body will.'
In 2012, Hurricane Isaac slammed into Louisiana. This little squirrel fell out of her nest during the storm, so nearby humans took care of her. It was a perfect match, so they decided to stay together.
Now the squirrel, whom the humans have named Jill, lives among the Two-Legs. They provided her with a teddy bear, which she clutches when it's bedtime.
