The metal flows so smoothly and perfectly over the surface. This is not just the work of a tradesman, but also an artist. The precisely rendered results of great technical skill are beautiful to behold. Scott Raabe, a professional welder in Texas, has this kind of skill.

After graduating from Texas State Technical College 7 years ago, Raabe has been working in both industrial and artistic settings. He can make delicate flowers, vibrant animals, and eye-popping signs. But there is something especially enchanting about the connections that he welds in places people will never see. They look like rainbows of steel. You can see more of these at Imgur.

-via Twisted Sifter

(Photo: Roel Hemkes)

Never mind a cruise ship. Those are like floating 5-star hotels. A more offbeat approach to sea travel is to book passage on a freighter. This is called “container ship tourism.” Most large freighters have cabin space for a few passengers. For a few thousand dollars, you can book a month-long journey across the ocean. Andy Wright of Atlas Obscura has a fascinating article about this very old yet largely unknown form of travel. He talked to Julie Richards, a travel agent who specializes in this field:

Ships departing Australia often make their way to Asia, the United States or Europe. Ships sailing from the west coast of the United States head to China or Hong Kong, while those from the East Coast or Savannah frequently sail to Europe. Trips may last just a few days, although some travelers sign on for 60 days or even around-the-world journeys. Meals are provided, rooms are cleaned once a week and passengers do their own laundry. Once in port, travelers can go ashore to explore; it’s their own responsibility to make it back to the ship in time for departure. Richards says most of her clients are single men, and the typical cost is about $120 a day.

(Photo: Judd Splitter/Freighter Bum)

You’ll probably get a reasonably comfortable cabin. But you’ll have to entertain yourself. A container ship offers nothing like the cruise ship experience. And according to freighter travel enthusiast Robert Rieffel, the food varies widely:

Passengers dine with the officers, and the cuisine is often dictated by the officers’ country of origin. Every day the Rieffels were offered a traditional European breakfast of sliced cheese, hard bread, butter and marmalade favored by the mostly Ukrainian officers. There was juice and coffee, eggs and bacon. One day, Rieffel writes in his book, dinner consisted of “salad, soup, beef tips in gravy, potatoes, green beans, a potato salad with calamari, cheese, cold cuts, bread, butter, wine cake and coffee.” Spittler’s German and European officers had a proclivity for hearty meals like pot roast. Alcohol, candy bars and other treats can usually be procured from duty-free shops. Spittler stocked up on Bacardi rum and Teacher’s scotch, parlaying his leftovers into a party for the crew towards the end of his voyage.

(Photo: New York Times)

Take a trip to Bixton, a trendy neighborhood in London. At many popular, independently owned cafes and shops, you can pay in the local currency. That’s not the British pound. It’s a locally produced and accepted bill called the Brixton pound, which is pictured above. It reflects a trendy new fashion: artisanal currency. Dan Crane writes about it in the New York Times:

These are small-batch currencies designed by locals and lovingly handled by millennials, who came of age during the rise of the Internet, the meltdown of the stock market and Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations, and would be forgiven for becoming more wary of credit and debit cards. […]

Many of the new alternative currencies have the look and feel of the regular legal tender accepted at such places. Most include anticounterfeiting measures like holograms and serial numbers. But they are more eye-catching.

These paper bills lack government backing, but they’re accepted in communities that want to keep their money local:

The local currency, though, is intended not as collectible but to encourage trade at the community businesses where they are accepted, rather than chain stores, where money taken in tends to flow out of town and into the coffers of multinational corporations. (Compare it to the farmers’ market: Homegrown lettuce now has a whole new meaning.)

-via Glenn Reynolds

(Image: NBC)

Loren Wade of Winfield, Kansas retired when he was in his 60s. But he got bored, so he went to work at his local Walmart. That was in 1983. He's still there. Now at the age of 103, Wade works as a store greeter, as well as waters the plants and works a cash register. He has no plans to retire because he likes to stay busy.

(Photo: Scott Davidson)

Police in Zion, Illinois call him the "unlucky thief." On Tuesday, police say, the suspect went into a Walmart to shoplift electronics. Store staff summoned the police. The suspect fled, only to find that his car was gone!

Police arrested him attempting to leave the area on foot. They determined that a repossession agent had towed the car away while the thief was inside the Walmart. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Hearn was later located walking by the side of the road, according to police. When asked why he was walking, he responded that his car had been repossessed while he was at the Wal-Mart, police said.

Investigators determined that the repossession company had followed Hearn to Wal-Mart, police said. The car was towed away when he entered the store, giving Hearn the only option of fleeing the scene on foot, police said.

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

(Video Link)

Flying is for suckers. When Stanley, an African grey parrot, wants to go downstairs, he just slides down the bannister. Janice Jensen, an animal care advocate in Hong Kong, recorded this video and notes the approval of the resident dogs when Stanley reaches the bottom.

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

(Video Link)

A tiny child is trying to get his white belt in Taekwondo at the Peak Taekwondo & Fitness Center in Temecula, California. He must break a board to do so. The boy is supposed to follow a particular method, but he has a "by any means necessary" approach to the task. Even jumping up and down on the board is acceptable to him--but it won't work!

-via Tastefully Offensive

Taco Bell is coming to Japan. The staff of Rocket News 24 is excited, but also trepidatious. Will the fast food giant be able to adapt to Japanese tastes? Recipes that are popular in the United States may fall flat in Japan. So the Rocket News 24 team assembled 5 taco meals that it thinks will do well, such as these with fresh octopus tentacles. The others are wasabi, natto, sushi, and green tea.

(Photo: Peter Corbett)

There's a spit of land in Kent jutting out into the English Channel. It's so dry that the British government refers to it as the nation's only desert. This is Dungeness and it can be yours--for the right price.

468 acres of the area comprises Dungeness Estate, a property owned by a family trust. The family has decided to part with it. So if you can afford the £1.5 million ($2.32 million USD) cost, you can own the site of so many movie and music video shootings. The Daily Telegraph describes how the estate has appeared in pop culture:

Dungeness also featured on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1981 album A Collection of Great Dance Songs, released a few weeks before bassist Roger Waters quit the band.

It also appeared in the cult 1981 film Time Bandits and in music videos for bands such as Pink Floyd, The Lighthouse Family, The Thrills, The Prodigy, Athlete, Aled Jones and Turin Brakes.

(Photo: RichardBH)

Skipping stones along a lake--it's one of the little joys and challenges of childhood. Can you get the flat rock to skim along the surface? How many times can you make it bounce?

Usually people search for and throw appropriate stones that they find on site at the lake. But if you're a cut above the ordinary riff raff, then you deserve the luxury skimming stone by Dominic Wilcox. This artist, whose work we've featured extensively, has a gift for creating offbeat versions of ordinary products and experiences. It's a flat rock covered with 24 karat gold leaf and fits inside a bespoke belt-mounted pouch.

The stone is a comment on preciousness of time. Wilcox wrote this lovely short short story to accompany it:

(Photo: Avalon Waterways)

This is the Aria Amazon, a 5-star luxury cruise ship. It won't make a call at any sunny Caribbean or Mediterranean port because it sails only along the upper Amazon in Peru. The 147-foot ship has 16 guest cabins that offer floor-to-ceiling views of the mysterious river. Nature guides take guests from the Aria on skiffs to nearby sites. You can see more photos of the ship at The Contemporist.

Conventional cruises have little appeal to me, but I do like the idea of taking a small ship to an exotic location, like Antarctica or St. Helena. Where would you like to cruise?

(Photo: US Army Materiel Command)

"An army marches on its stomach." That's a line attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who put great thought into how his armies were supplied with food. Since the end of his era, this logistical trend has only increased. The US Army in particular has spent vast sums of money and manpower developing the best possible means of assembling, preserving, and distributing food.

Anastacia Marx de Sacredo is the author of a new book on the subject titled Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat. In an interview with NPR, she explains that the US military intentionally shares the results of its research with the public so that private companies that integrate into the military food supply chain in the event of war:

Most people don't realize that the military has a policy to get the science that it uses for rations into the public's food. The reason is military preparedness. This dates back to a policy that was made after World War II, which is designed to make sure both the military and its supporters can be ready at a moment's notice to convert over to producing rations or to create consumer products that they might be substituted in their stead. The key point here is that companies don't generally invest in basic and applied food science. What the Army is looking at is the big questions in food science. There are not many other places interested or able to do the research, so the Army guides the direction of food science.

A vast amount of the food that we Americans eat every day is the result of military research and product development:

(Video Link)

That's not precisely what the Yellow Backie program is, but that's my takeaway from this interesting development from Amsterdam.

With half a million cyclists, Amsterdam is the bicycling capital of Europe. If you've lived in Amsterdam for a while, that's great. But if you're a visitor, then navigating the city by bike can be confusing. So Yellow Bike, a bike rental company, invites people to stop by one of its locations and get a free yellow luggage rack. When you ride around town with one of these, you're inviting people to hitch a ride by sitting on the rack.

Yellow Bike says "It's a bit like couchsurfing--on a bike!" Right now, rides are free. But as some economists have pointed out, the boon of Uber is that it lets people turn their consumer goods into capital goods--their personal possessions into ways of earning money. Perhaps these yellow luggage racks are the beginning of a way for bicyclists to do precisely that.

-via The Presurfer

(Photo: Robert Crouse-Baker)

Why on Earth would anyone have a use for a portable computer instead of or in addition to a desktop model? In a December 8, 1985 column in the New York Times, Erik Sandberg-Diment is dismissive of arguments that laptops just haven't become small and powerful enough to be useful. They're fundamentally a bad idea:

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

-via David Thompson

Recently, Tice Ledbedder flew his drone around a public pier in San Diego. Many fishermen had gathered to relax and see what they could catch. One of them made a perfect cast and snagged an unusual flying fish: the drone.

He's a jerk for grabbing someone else's property over a public place, but you have to admire his skill with a rod and reel. Ledbedder certainly takes it in good humor, adding an appropriate spaghetti Western soundtrack to accompany this master marksman.

(Video Link)

-via Gizmodo