Middle Ground Lighthouse lies off of Newport News in Chesapeake Bay. Though built in 1891, it remains in nightly operation. Northern Virginia magazine reports that it's also been renovated and is available for sale as a functional house.

Joe Negri was a child prodigy as a musician and was a local star in Pittsburgh when Fred Rogers hired him to star as a recurring character on his iconic children's television show. As Handyman Negri, this musician interacted with puppets in The Land of Make-Believe and operated a music shop in Fred Rogers's* fictional neighborhood.

Joe Negri died on Saturday just a few days of his one hundredth birthday.

You can read more about Negri's work on television in The Good Neighboor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers--a biography that I have read and enthusiastically recommend.

*"Rogers" is a singular noun and thus an "s" is necessary to indicate possession, but Fred Rogers did not follow that rule when titling his show, hence the spelling in the post title.

Images: PBS, Fred Rogers Institute

YouTuber Max Miller makes historic recipes and shares the results online. Recently, he posted a video about a cheesecake recipe in a book by Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman famous for ending all speeches in the Senate, regardless of the subject, by calling for the destruction of Carthage. Cato's recipe for savillum (cheesecake) can be found here.

Miller's video mentions other Roman recipes that I suspect you haven't tried yet. They're listed in Apicius, a Fifth Century AD cookbook that you can read in Latin or English.

There are three recipes for pig uterus: grilled, boiled, and, if I understand the text correctly, pickled.

Cook a pig uterus and slip it into the backpack of a friend.

In a trendy, upscale neighbhorhood of Pittsburgh close to the Allegheny River is the Pinksburgh House. It's an Airbnb that is marketed by the owners as the perfect place to stay for a girls' trip or a bachelorette party in the Steel City.

This eccentric two bedroom, one bathroom house is now listed for sale on Zillow.

The Walmart website is confused about whether this item they are selling is a book about Reconstruction in Arkansas or a bra.

It has an author and a cover photo but also comes in different bust sizes. pic.twitter.com/xNPVmHZGlB

— Hereward the Woke (@BamaExpat) May 28, 2026

Sadly, Walmart has already fixed the listing. Otherwise, it would have been possible to learn Reconstruction history in four different band sizes. Oddly, it appears that one cup size fits all for this highly specialized work.

Crystal Schenk is a multimedia artist and art professor who lives in Portland, Oregon. One of her earlier works is this 2006 sculpture titled Have and Have Not. It's a work of commentary on wealth, consumerism, and material survival.

-via Contemporary 100

As the saying goes, any landing that you can walk away from is a good one. A couple weeks ago, pilot Mike Raicevic performed a good landing when the engine of his Republic RC-3 seaplane (last manufactured in 1947) went out over Phoenix.

NBC 12 News reports that Raicevic had about 10 seconds to decide what to do. He spent those seconds searching for a more or less empty stretch of road and ended on Seventh Street as he nimbly dodged power lines, roadside signs, and traffic lights.

The pilot and all passengers--as well as people on the ground--escaped injury as the plane landed.

This is the Duluth Mushroom House. Sometimes it's called The Flintstones house because of its resemblance to the architecture on The Flintstones. This 5-bedrooom, 3-bathroom architectural wonder is now for sale.

Japanese Instagram user konel_bread creates amazingly realistic baked goods that look like animals and cartoon characters. In the past, we've seen their loaves that look like teddy bears with six pack abs. Now, they show something more sedate but equally charming: bagels prepared to resemble dozing wiener dogs.

A trend on X lately is to share photos of historically significant buildings that have been preserved by being repurposed by modern businesses. Not all of the descriptions are correct. For example, I've verified that a particular Chipotle was not the place where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense. But this Publix grocery store is indeed an old government printing house.

501 Gervais Street in Columbia, South Carolina is the site of a brick building where the Confederacy printed fiat currency until February of 1865, when General Sherman burned it. It was rebuilt after the war and is now a grocery store.

It's interesting to watch these changes in real time. There's a beautiful historic building in the small town of Marion, Texas. I drive by it a few times a year. It's lately been a coffeshop, but changes every couple of years.

Photo: Ron Cogswell

Every ellipse has two foci. The foci are, Khan Academy tells us, "two points whose sum of distances from any point on the ellipse is always the same."

Let's say that you build a miniature golf course shaped like an ellipse and place the hole at one focus. If you hit the ball from the other focus with a bank shot, the ball will land in the hole. If you hit the ball from any other point with a bank shot, the ball will miss the hole.

That's the premise of this video by YouTuber Constructive Chaos. He build increasingly complex combinations of ellipses to make mathematically predictable miniature golf course.

-via The Awesomer

Aynsley Grealis is a fabrics artist in Toronto who makes inventive sculptures, often practical, with crochet techniques. Here, for example, is a a handbag shaped like New York City's famous pizza rat that was filmed moving through the subway system with a slice of pizza.

Av Grannan is an artist in Chicago who upcycles leather goods into inventive accessories. One of the gems of her website appropriately named Sublime Remains is this functional chessboard hat.

When the hatband is unsnapped, the hat flat. You can then play chess on it with the pieces slipped into the sides.

Mehul Hingu, a world traveler who lives in Mumbai, runs the Instagram account Street Food Recipe. His culinary journeys took him to the city of Nagoya in central Japan, where he visited the Tsuzuki Café. This cafe is situated just below the penthouse floor of a skyscraper, which is the the cafe markets itself as "Japan's highest cafe au lait."

Among the cafe's specialities are a Viennese coffee known as Einspänner, which is topped with a portion of whipped cream. The Tsuzuki Café accepts this vertical challenges by offering a coffee with what looks like a foot-tall peak of whipped cream.

The Hooters restaurant chain, founded 1983, has struggled financially in recent years. The chain offers sportsbar cuisine served by buxom waitresses in skimpy outfits, so the market appeal is primarily toward men who enjoy being served by such women.

Although breasts remain popular, this particular approach to using them for marketing is not thriving. So Hooters is rebranding its restaurants toward a more family-friendly vector. At The Takeout, Rolland Judd has 5 suggestions about how Hooters could keep its name while pivoting in a different narrative direction.

Among them is directing away from "hooters" as a slang term for breasts and toward the slang term for owls--specifically, the owls in the Harry Potter franchise. There would be some intellectual property issues to resolve, but a restaurant that let patrons pretend to be new students at Hogwarts could draw a large customer base.

Photo: Hooters