Japan loves Kit Kat bars. There are at least 15 different flavors of that candy bar available there. And now people in that nation can enjoy it in a new form: croissants. Pronto, a restaurant chain, is offering crescent rolls that have two Kit Kat bars baked inside of them. Rocket News 24 tested them and finds the combination perfect:

If you’d prefer your croissant warm and your Kit Kat melty, the staff will be happy to heat it up in the toaster oven for you. While this takes away some of the satisfying crunch of the Kit Kat itself, it also helps the chocolate seep into croissant, forming layers of sweetness between the buttery flakes. And just like the name implies, the flavor makes for a great contrast to the bitterness of a cup of coffee.

Pronto offers these croissants with both regular and matcha green tea Kit Kat flavors.

I'd love to see a Kit Kat cronut.

(Photo: Gabi Porter)

Pope Francis is visiting New York City on Thursday. There will be this example of that city's most famous food waiting for him. Chef Tony Salihaj of Bleecker Street Pizza in the West Village composed this picture-perfect pizza portrait of him. His robe is made of mozzarella and ricotta cheeses and his staff of anchovies.

This is only one of a surprisingly large number of pizzas that New York City's finest pizzerias are creating in the Pope's honor, often with the hope of actually delivering them to him. You can see photos of more Papal pizzas as the New York Post.

-via Incredible Things

Eugene Bostick, 80, of Fort Worth, Texas has a big heart for abandoned dogs. Since he retired 15 years ago, he's been picking up dogs that people leave behind on the street. He takes them to the vet, has them spayed and neutered, then takes care of them. 

(Image: Texas Famous)

The dogs have lots of room to run and play on his farm. But Bostick wanted to give them a special adventure. So he built this train using welded steel rods, wheels, and pastic barrels. Bostick hooks the train up to his riding lawnmower and takes the dogs for a rides. The Dodo reports:

Once or twice a week now, Bostick and the nine dogs currently under his care can be seen puttering down quiet streets around town or through the forest near their home, or stopping by a local creek for some fresh air in the custom dog train. It's something the formerly unloved dogs have come to relish in their happy new lives.

-via 123 Inspiration

(Photo: RJ Balson and Son)

They're not precisely sure when their business was founded. But RJ Balson and Son has on file a business license granted in 1515. And for that entire 500-year period, this butcher shop in Bridport, Dorset, UK, has been owned and operated by the same family.

It's survived wars, both foreign and civil, plagues, and economic depressions. RJ Balson and Son has been in its current location only recently--just since the 19th Century. But it's always been serving meat to customers in Bridport. The Daily Telegraph reports:

On sale now is a mixture of novelty and old-fashioned fare. Packs of beef dripping share space with sliced chorizo. There is a freezer of game: some traditional, like venison and rabbit, some exotic, like bison, zebra, crocodile, ostrich and kangaroo.

When the business opened, the kangaroo hadn’t even been discovered. […]

From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, butcher numbers tumbled from 15,000 to around 6,000, a drop of 60 per cent, according to Meat Trades Journal, though in the last couple of years figures have stabilised.

Balson is clear that he can fight against the supermarkets. “The main thing is personal service. When you come in, you get a nice welcome, you say, 'how’s your mum?’, 'how’s your daughter?’ Most of the people who come in, we’ve served their parents before them, and their grandparents before that and they like to be asked.

"You’re not going to get that personal experience in a supermarket. Who wants to queue up for 20 minutes before you even get to the checkout?”

In any case, if a shop has outlived 23 monarchs and 52 prime ministers, it probably stands a fighting chance of surviving the rise and Tesco and Aldi.

Can you make a product that looks like the Batmobile and sell it without DC's permission? According to a new ruling by 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, no. DC Comics has a legitimate copyright claim upon the Batmobile.

Mark Towle, a custom car builder, made replicas of the Batmobile and sold them. DC sued him. The court's decision on the case contains at least 3 specific Batman references.

(Photo: Seven for All Mankind)

Pictured above is Natasha Wagner--or, more precisely, the part of her body that earns her hefty paychecks. 14 years ago, fashion consultants discovered that Wagner has the ideal butt for testing designs for jeans. She's 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wears a size 6. Her posterior represents the needs of a vast number of women who buy jeans in a wide variety of styles. When fashion designers want to see how their work looks on an ideal set of buttocks, they call Wagner. Vogue talked to designer Julien Jarmoune about Wagner's assets:

“Natasha has the perfect marriage of body types,” clarified Jarmoune. “Because if you fit with someone who is too curvy (tiny waist, big butt), or with someone who has a straight body (no hips), you are limiting yourself to just a certain body type. A jean that is fit on a straight body will never look good on someone who has curves. That’s why Natasha comes into play perfectly. She has the best of both worlds where she’s slim and she still has shape. Additionally, she has great legs that are the perfect length (she fits our standard 30-inch leg inseam flawlessly) so that our jeans will work for someone who is short or tall.”

But Wagner is much more than just her bottom. After doing this kind of work for 14 years, she's become an expert in jeans design:

Wagner, who owns more than 100 pairs of jeans herself, explained her “science of denim” further: “Once I had learned the jean terminology, I began to help designers flesh out details or catch things that may have been overlooked. They’re busy, they’re working on the current season plus a year ahead. I’m just focusing on fit and am able to point out specifics like if the back rise is pulling or if there’s bubbling or roping,” she said. Plus, she knows the jargon. “A lot of the time you’ll get what’s called ‘slippage’ on a jean, where the denim pulls and you can kind of see the weft in the garment. So I can recommend trying a different type of construction or a different side seam. I know how the body should look in the jean, so I’m able to tell them things like, ‘Kick out the back rise,’ or ‘Take a measurement from the top of the rise and add it to the bottom of the rise to give it a nicer butt shape and a lift.’ ”

-via Lost at E Minor

(Photos: Jason E. Bond, TDKR Chicago 101) 

On the right is comedian Stephen Colbert. On the left is the Aptostichus stephencolberti, a spider species found in California. The resemblance is striking, don't you think? If Colbert ever needs a night off from his new show, he's got a stand-in ready.

This is 1 of 24 animal species that have been named for celebrities rounded up by BuzzFeed, including Hugh Hefner, Barack Obama, Johnny Depp, Madonna, and Harrison Ford.

-via The Presurfer

(Photo: South African Tourism)

Baobabs are among the widest trees in the world and this particular one is a whopper. At 155 feet around, the Sunland Baobob in Limpopo, South Africa is the largest in the continent. It's the location of a nice bar, located in the interior of the tree. The bar is designed to look like a classic English pub. It even has a dartboard. Up to 20 people can fit into the pub comfortably, drinking beer stored in the bar's literal root cellar.

This is 1 of 10 unusual bars located at remote or extreme locations rounded up by Atlas Obscura. The list includes one in Antarctica that distills its own vodka, the only bar on Pitcairn Island, and one in Scotland that is usually accessed by a boat ride.

-via Marilyn Bellamy

(Video Link)

Safari tourists drove through Kruger National Park in South Africa. They stopped to watch an elephant family. The baby wanted to act big and tough, like a full-grown elephant should. So he charged the tourists and trumpeted. Sorry, little guy. You'll have to grow up a bit more before you can scare the humans.

-via Tastefully Offensive

What's that about scientists saying that cats don't actually love people? Don't tell that to this extremely affectionate feline. The boy is playing hard to get, but the cat is patient and very aggressive. 

(Video Link)

-via Gifsboom

The New Yorker's iconic single panel cartoons usually nail comedy with their single-line captions. They cover a vast variety of human experiences. But designer Frank Chimero argues that most if not all of them can be captioned with an automated email notification subject line that LinkedIn accounts send to people: "Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."

(Photo: Ansgar Walk)

The Smoking Hills are located near Cape Bathurst on the Arctic Coast of the Northwest Territories. When Royal Navy Captain Robert McClure explored the area in the 1850s, he thought that the smoke on the shore came from a large number of campfires. Upon further exploration, he found the smoke emerging from vents in the ground. This stretch of land has rich veins of lignite near the surface. As the land erodes, the lignite spontaneously catches fire when exposed. The CBC explains:

Here, vast deposits of lignite  -- concentrations of carbon-rich shale and pyrite rich in sulphur - literally ignite spontaneously when the hills erode and the mineral veins are exposed to the air, producing a constant smoke. […]

The sailors are said to have returned with a sample of the smoldering rock, and when they set it down on McClure's desk it burned a hole in the wood.

-via Amusing Planet

(Video Link)

The story of Peter Pan began as a play by J.M. Barrie. The most recent incarnation of it is Pan, a movie to be released on October 9. But probably most of us, when hear of Peter Pan, think of the 1953 Disney movie of the same name. It's a lighthearted and innocent story that was a cherished part of your childhood. You'd share it with children today, right?

Maybe you shouldn't. Screen Junkies's long-running honest trailers series explains why Peter Pan is really, really disturbing.

Revisit the animated classic that you will make you say, "This is way creepier than I remembered." Peter Pan. Prepare for a film about an immortal trickster who spies on you through your bedroom window, sprinkles you with dust that makes you feel like you're flying, then kidnaps you to a war-torn island where full-grown adults force orphans to join their ranks or die. It's like a magical Sudan.

-via Geek Tyrant

(Photo: Kana Natsuno)

Get a freshly poured McDonald's shake. Stick a straw in and suck. It's a very soothing feeling--almost primal. It's specifically designed that way. The straws used at McDonald's outlets in Japan are  reflect the experience of breastfeeding. Rocket News 24 quotes Den Fujita, the founder of McDonald's Japan, in his book Den Fujita's Business Strategies 2: Overwhelming Business Strategies:

When humans drink something, the speed that produces the most delicious feeling is the speed at which babies nurse…McDonald’s straws are designed so that when used with a shake, the speed will be the same as that of an infant drinking breast milk.

Drinking a McDonald's shake is supposed to reflect an essential infantile experience of pleasure.

The Pediatric Society of Rio Grande in Brazil wanted to remind new mothers that, for the sake of the babies that they nurse, they should eat healthy food. Body paintings of junk food on the breasts of nursing mothers communicate that mothers are feeding their babies bad food when they eat it themselves.

It's a clever advertising approach by the ad agency Paim. But I'm curious about whether it makes any medical sense at all.

-via Lost at E Minor