Due to a scheduling mix up, Ben, an employee of a Waffle House in Birmingham, Alabama was working the overnight shift alone. Almost 30 people had crowded into the restaurant and Ben was trying to manage cooking, serving, and cleaning all by himself. He was overwhelmed.

So one customer put on an apron and got to work. Then another did, too. Ethan Crispo, a hungry customer and witness of the incident, talked to the Today Show:

"The look on his face was just bewilderment,'' Crispo told Sanders.

An unidentified male customer then decided to help him out, grabbing an apron and going behind the counter to wash dishes.

Another customer, Alison Stanley, went behind the counter to brew some coffee — in her stiletto heels and sequined dress.

"I don't think it's anything special,'' Stanley told Sanders. "He needed help, so I got up and helped out." [...]

Crispo had his usual order, double plain waffle, as he took in the scene of strangers helping out Ben on his shift.

"Humanity truly isn't good, it's great!" he said.

-via Dave Reaboi | Photo: Ethan Crispo

Brent Walter has invented what he calls the Volksprod. It's a minibike with a custom frame wrapped with a vintage fender from a Volkswagen Beetle. It's a precision-crafted work of art; he even casted the aluminum badges and the footrests himself.

Don't worry about the rest of the Beetle. It's a sharp-looking hot rod now.

-via Design Boom

The premise is simple, yet brilliant: elephants eat a vast variety of plants, but digest only about a third of them. So why not pass on those flavors to drinkers by mixing the essence of that poop into alcohol?

Put your hand down. That's a rhetorical question.

Les and Paula Ansley of Mossel Bay, South Africa believe that the value of Indlovu Gin lies in its close ties to nature. That's surely the reason why, when they collect elephant poop for their distillery, they use bare hands. The Associated Press tells their story:

They described the gin’s flavor as “lovely, wooded, almost spicy, earthy” and one that changes subtly with the seasons and location.

The gin bottles are marked with the date and coordinates of where the elephant dung was collected. “So, you’re able to compare almost different vintages of the gin,” Ansley said.

After about five sizeable bags of dung are collected for a batch of 3,000 to 4,000 bottles of the gin, the droppings are dried and crumbled, then washed to remove dirt and sand. Eventually only the remains of the fruits, flowers, leaves and bark eaten by the elephants are left behind.

Nature is amazing.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Ibhu

Sora News 24 introduces us to Twitter user @kusabanaasobi, an origami master who specializes in leaves, acorns, and other fallen products of autumn. She can make fairies, butterflies, Santa Claus, crayons, and more appear from these natural materials. Best of all, her Twitter feed is filled with videos that show you how you can do it, too.

South African visitors brought a 2019 Rugby World Cup ball to Antarctic waters and tossed it back and forth with a beluga. Perhaps they are recruiting for some rival of the Springboks, who won the championship this year.

-via Twisted Sifter

When I saw our hero's Jayne Cobb hat and the Star Wars shirt, I had to start watching the video. It just kept getting better, especially the bit about what the would-be victim happened to be doing while alone in his apartment when the attack took place.

Ben Ball of Oshtemo Township, Michigan is a medieval combat reenactor. He knows how to swing a sword and an axe around and make it land where he wants it to. So the home invader stood no chance and fled. Police followed his trail of blood to his location and arrested him.

I keep arguing with my wife that we need swords at home for just this very reason. If a home invasion takes place, I won't have time to retrieve a gun. And in Texas, the open carry of swords is now legal. So are Jayne Cobb hats.

-via Dave Barry

Rod Dreher, an American writer, has recently been traveling in Russia. He brought home this unusual dessert: pine cones preserved in syrup. Dreher describes them:

Just tasted them. Not great. Tastes like ... eating a pine cone. . . . If you cook the little bitty ones down in syrup, they become soft. It's kind of like eating a caramel. A caramel made out of sugar and pine tar.

The blog Russia Beyond says that you can eat pine cones in other ways, too. These include pine cone tea, pine cone "honey", and pine cone booze. In the last case, the pine cone should be consumed as a digestif and not consumed in great quantities.

In 1066, William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded England and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king. As William gradually asserted authority over England, some Anglo-Saxon nobles, unwilling to tolerate the new situation, decided to leave the country.

They packed their goods and most loyal men into ships and sailed for the Mediterranean. There, after some piratical adventures, they entered the service of the Byzantine emperor, as Constantinople was then under siege. As a reward for their service, the emperor gave them the right to settle in (and enforce his authority over) the Crimean peninsula.

The location of the Anglo-Saxon settlement is uncertain. One possibility is Arkhipo-Osipovka, east of Crimea. It is photographed above.

Dr. Caitlin Green, a medieval historian and archaeologist, details their adventures and the evidence for them here.

-via Aelfred the Great

Images: C. Green and Yuriy75, respectively.

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You're off to great places!

But your fears will betray!

Please excuse my dear Aunt Sarah, for she has cast adulthood into a realistic light. It's 2 AM, and you're thinking about what you should have said to that guy or something that will almost certainly happen tomorrow if everything goes wrong. Which it will. Oh, the places you'll go inside your own skull! Cartoonist Aunt Sarah gets us started.

-via Pleated Jeans

Paula Kuka, a professional artist, is also a mom. That's two full-time jobs right there, but Kuka takes it in stride as she wrestles her two krakens into their car seats. She's felt inspired to turn her Instagram feed into a webcomic about the everyday struggles of parenting her two kids. Parenting, she groks, is stressful, exhausting, and joyful.

Caitlin Kirby strode into this great battle of her academic career wearing a skirt made of rejection letters for scholarships, publications, and academic conferences. To earn her doctorate in earth and environmental sciences at Michigan State University, Kirby had to press on through these defeats. To symbolize her determination, she sewed the rejections into a skirt. The Lansing State Journal reports:

“The whole process of revisiting those old letters and making that skirt sort of reminded me that you have to apply to a lot of things to succeed,” she said. “A natural part of the process is to get rejected along the way.” 

Those rejections and what she learned from them weighed heavy on her mind when the day of her dissertation defense came. Kirby wore the skirt to continue the work that she, her adviser and colleagues did to normalize rejection.

This very mature and striving attitude reminds me of a speech by Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Press on past defeat and onto victory.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Caitlin Kirby

Yes, but only if you approach it from the right angle. Don't try a Riker Maneuver on this one.

This uniquely-designed chair, when placed correctly, looks impossible to sit on. I'm tempted to build one, although it looks even weirder when viewed normally.

-via Geekologie

András Arató, an electrical engineer in Hungary, never expected to become an internet meme. But then a photographer asked him to pose for a set of stock photos. That image became an internet sensation as "Hide the Pain Harold" as people interpreted his expression as one of hiding inner torment beneath a banal smile.

When Arató discovered that he was internet famous, he embraced this identity, even though it was not particularly complimentary. He writes in The Guardian:

People noticed that I had taken ownership of the meme and got in contact to offer me work. I was given a role in a television commercial for a Hungarian car dealer. In one of the adverts, I travelled to Germany to buy a used car and it broke down halfway home; if I had bought the same car through their company, the brand claimed, it wouldn’t have happened. The fee for that commercial changed my wife’s mind about the meme.

Now my life has changed dramatically. People ask me to talk about my story, to demonstrate the power of memes. A football website flew me to England to make a video about Manchester City; I got to tour the ground and watch them play a Champions League game. The German mail-order giant Otto flew me out to make commercials for them. The Hungarian hard rock band Cloud 9+ have a song called Hide The Pain, with me in the video. I’m the face of Totum, the British discount card run by the National Union of Students – they got me to wear a bucket hat. I’ve even given a TED talk.

The historical figure of Johann Georg Faust was a 16th Century German occultist. The legendary Faust was a character written about in plays in stories since that time. This fictional Faust sold his soul to Satan for dark powers. His wickedness is contrasted with that of the lady Margareta, a woman of humility and holiness, whom Faust covets. Faust is encouraged down his dark path by the demon Mephistopheles.

This inspired a now-unknown 18th Century sculptor to carve a single log of sycamore wood into a sculpture that, when viewed from one side shows Mephistopheles and, from the other, shows Margareta. It is on display at the  Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India. You can see more photos of this remarkable piece at My Modern Met.

Photo: Salar Jung Museum

18 years is a long time to wait for a government to repair the damage that a government vehicle left on private property.

But it gets worse.

Homeowner Calvin Hawley first noticed and reported the incident in 1993!

Hawley, a resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, noticed that a city-operated snow removal truck damaged his curb when his second son was born. CBC News quotes him:

"I came home from the hospital ... and discovered a large chunk of curb under a whole whack of snow," says Hawley, who lives on Tyrone Bay in St. Vital.

That was January 26, 1993. The day is clear in his mind, because that's when his second son was born.

When Hawley reported the problem many, many times, the public servants were unhelpful:

"One time they told me the system for logging complaints had changed and my previous complaints weren't on record."

Still, he didn't give up. He kept calling and as the years passed, the rebar or reinforced steel used to strengthen the curb gradually became more exposed and crumbled.

Two years ago, he even saw a city repair team working on other damaged curbs in the neighborhood. But not his.

The good news is that the City of Winnipeg has now given itself a deadline to complete the task: June 26, 2037.

So Hawley might as well count this problem as solved.

-via Dave Barry