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

Although I prefer "Baby Shark" in the original Latin, this version by Episcopal priest David Sibley of Walla Walla, Washington will do for now. It follows the Agnus Dei liturgical chant.

Since people are as they are, Father Sibley found it necessary to pin this tweet.

-via Aelfred the Great

Although it may come as a surprise, the findings of this study are clear: when sexually aroused or attempting to secure a sexual partner, people tend to be more willing rather than less willing to lie.

Scholars Gurit E. Birnbuam, Mor Iluz, and Harry T. Reis published the results of their research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

In the first study, the researchers exposed participants to sexually stimulating media, then asked them whether they agreed to or disagreed with an opposite-sex stranger's opinion. They were more likely to conform their stated opinion to the stranger's than a control group that had not been sexually stimulated.

In the second study, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about their dating preferences while subliminally exposed to erotic or landscape photographs. Participants were likely to provide different answers and, specifically, stricter partner requirements when viewing a landscape image.

For the third study, participants were asked to state their total number of past sexual partners in variously a formal survey and a flirtatious chat. While chatting with an attractive and apparently romantically interested person, participants were more inclined to lie about their number of past sexual partners.

The fourth study attempted to address methodological flaws in the third, as it was unclear whether encountering a potential sexual partner would make a participants more likely to understate or overstate the number of past sexual partners. This study had the same participants complete both the formal questionnaire and an online dating profile, each of which asked for the number of past sexual partners. Participants were, again, more inclined to lie to potential partners in an online dating profile.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: zenjazzygeek

Do your AirPods keep falling out? Jam this one in and you'll never have to worry about that problem again.

Redditor Master_Aar made this 3D printed scaled-up AirPod that is Bluetooth-compatible and fully functional. When asked by fellow redditors why he made it, Master_Aar had no clear answer. But that's okay. When you have a 3D printer, you don't need a why, just a how.

You can see more photos here.

How to do you get to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz? Follow the now yellow brick road to the site where L. Frank Baum's home once lay.

1667 N. Humboldt Boulevard in Chicago is the place where the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wrote his most famous novel. Although the original home is long gone, the site now includes a memorial to his life and work.

The Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, which is rebuilding the decaying neighborhood, has paved a 70-foot stretch of sidewalk with bright yellow bricks. Book Club Chicago reports that the the rounded concrete shape above will house a mural by artist Hector Duarte. The total cost for the project is about $65,000.

-via Colossal

I can appreciate Simon Fearnhamm's morbid sense of humor. This piece is titled "Full Throttle." Although it's only one of two items currently on sale in his Etsy shop, pictures of some of his other works are visible on Saatchi Art.

As it is priced at over $24,000, convincing my wife to acquire this table for our home will be a hard sell. If I don't ask her first, then I'll be the skeleton on the left side of the photo.

Jennifer Murphy, a collage artist in Toronto, is exhibiting a collection of pieces titled In the Shadow of Sirius. After reflecting on a landfill in that city that has gradually been reclaimed by wildlife, she felt inspired to create collages by cutting out images of plants and animals from nature magazines, then arranging them into larger plant and animal forms. Murphy explains that:

While making this new body of work I also discovered the American poet and ecologist W.S. Merwin, (1927 – 2019). Merwin’s poetry speaks of memory and of loss, the continuum of time, ecology and hope.Working on eighteen acres of wrecked earth at his home on the island of Maui, W.S. Merwin created a garden of palm trees that became The Merwin Conservatory. The most bio-diverse garden of palm species in the world, was grown on land that was once ruined by pineapple plantations.  

I find hope in making my work and in places of ruin where wildflowers grow, and in the poetry of those who have felt immense loss but continue to create.

You can see more images of her work on Colossal.

There's always so much going on in New York City--so many intersecting people and places--that there are a lot of coincidental juxtapositions. Photographer Jonathan Higbee captured these moments, often waiting for four months for a single shot to line up just right.

In an interview with My Modern Met about his new book, Coincidences, Higbee explains that he hopes that people will find ordinary joy through the serendipity of his pictures:

It’s inescapable these days, this focus on politics and polarization and differences over similarities that’s penetrated every inch of our culture. So I hope people take a few things away from Coincidences: firstly, I hope this book provides an escape, however brief, from our current anxiety-fueled reality. There are so many little fascinating details in every image and word found on its pages, so many mind-breaking moments and scenes that can really surprise people, and plenty of opportunities to sit back and just soak in. If these elements of the book manage to whisk people away to another world, then I’ll be thrilled.

-via Flavorwire

Julius Pringle, the Pringles mascot, steps to life gracefully from the can which contained his potato chips. This is one of many sculptures by Japanese artist Harukiru. Food packages, absent the contents, are the base materials for his sculptures of humans, machines, musical instruments, and more. In Harukiru's hands, a box of Oreo cookies can become a fighter jet and a box of whisky can be a knight in full plate armor.

30 of his works are currently on display at a museum in Tokyo. This compilation video shows many of those works.

-via Technabob

Varonya, a custom plush maker in Germany, elongated Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic to an astonishing 9 feet! Once she has wrapped herself around you with love, a built-in magnet helps keep her in place.

Don't worry so much! The Fluttersnake isn't venomous. Let her share her kindness with you.

By the end of the movie Carrie, Stephen King's character is covered with blood in a terrible prank. That's when she...cuts loose.

It's an iconic scene in American film and it makes for a pretty good costume. So, for Halloween, Sidney Wolfe of Ohio put on a white prom dress and covered herself with fake blood. Then, driving home from a Halloween party, she hit a deer and wrecked her car.

Wolfe has the presence of mind to realize that her appearance might distress first responders. NBC News reports:

She said she warned a 911 dispatcher that when police and medics arrived, she would look more mangled than she actually was. "I said to the responder that I am in full Halloween makeup and don't want them to be frightened," she said.

But the memo wasn't relayed.

Indeed not.

Wolfe wrote in a now-viral tweet that "everyone who was a first responder thought I was dead," adding an apology in all caps.

She said an additional officer who showed up later while she was "making conversation with people" came over to the group imploring, "I hate to interrupt but don’t you guys think she needs medical assistance?”

-via Dave Barry

My kids think that we should definitely get a rocking couch, but my wife is less enthused. There are, I suppose, potential drawbacks once you're done using it as a seesaw.

Patrick Knoch of Extranorm, a design studio in Paris, calls this piece Équilibriste. He says that "It creates communication between people, a physical, lively and spontaneous communication." Surely you couldn't find a better use for the $5,269.28 price.

-via Core 77

Relatively speaking, private bedrooms--or even bedrooms--are a modern invention. A house might have only one room or just a few, none of which could be set aside for sleeping.

So if an amorous couple desired, uh, privacy, then they needed a box bed. Amusing Planet describes the other purposes of the box bed:

 Aside from privacy, the small enclosed space of the box bed trapped body heat keeping the sleeping person warm during winter. It’s also possible that the beds offered some degree of protection against intruders, especially wolves and other animals, that might have entered the house. It has been suggested that peasants kept their children inside box beds while they went to work in the fields.

In Europe, box beds continued to be common until the Nineteenth Century, when the practice declined for hygienic purposes.

Photo: Wolfgang Sauber