Curaçao is a Caribbean island nation off the coast of Venezuela. It’s also the new home to Juergen Horn and Mike Powell, who will be there for 91 days. Mike wrote about the Queen Emma Bridge, a unique floating pedestrian bridge in Willemstad. The water supported the bridge, but boats still must get through.

So, whenever a ship needs in or out, the bridge must open. But this one doesn’t raise and lower — it just moves to the side. The Queen Emma rests atop of a set of pontoons. The final pontoon, connecting the bridge to the Punda side, has a motor and a driver. And when a ship arrives, the entire bridge opens on a hinge, just like a door. For small ships, the bridge only needs to open a crack, but for larger vessels like oil tankers, it will swing all the way over to the Otrobanda side.

It’s a strange sensation to be on the bridge as it opens. First, the operator will close the gates on either side, and anyone still on the bridge has to wait. Usually, it’s just a couple minutes, but occasionally it takes fifteen to twenty. In the meantime, anyone who isn’t stuck on the bridge can cross between Otrobanda and Punda using a free ferry.

When you’re in Curaçao, you have to be ready to go with the flow. Read more about the bridge and see some gorgeous pictures and a video at For 91 Days.

George Carlin once said, “Have you ever noticed, when you’re driving, that anybody who’s driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?” The rest of life is like that, too, when everyone around us is judged by the standard that is us. Meanwhile, we are being judged by that standard that is everyone else in their own minds. How much happier we could be if we could only delight in each other’s differences! This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.

While 99% of us know that walking while using a smartphone is dangerous, 73% still do it. Here’s a video illustrating the many things that can happen when you walk while glued to your phone.

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The video by Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo somewhat resembles a Three Stooges short. Don’t miss the chain reaction scene. -via the Presurfer

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.” Han makes it clear he’s an atheist in the original Star Wars film. He will come to think differently in the next couple of movies. But how did he come to his unbelief in the first place? 

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I guess that’s one more reason to just completely ignore the prequels. There was no reason other than merchandising to include Chewbacca in Revenge of the Sith. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Stoner Sloth is a new anti-marijuana campaign from the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, an agency in Australia. The premise is that smoking pot turns one into a sloth, apparently one that is so baked that they can’t do anything at all. If you wanted to compare a stoner with an adorable yet slow-moving animal, wouldn’t a koala have been more appropriate for Australia?    

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There are more videos at the campaign’s Tumblr site. The Facebook page that accompanies the campaign only has a few posts, but the reactions are hilarious. One thing is for sure, sale of the t-shirts will soar, and since everyone will want a stoner sloth at their party, sloth costumes will be highly in demand. Read an overview at Mashable. -via Metafilter

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Elvis Presley's gift-giving was legendary. Elvis referred to his gifts as his "happies.” No one Elvis was even remotely close to came up empty-handed. According to many recipients over the years, the reason Elvis gave gifts so lavishly over the years was because he loved seeing the look on their face.

Anyone familiar with Elvis knows of his fondness for giving away Cadillacs, and this part of Elvis' "legend" is, indeed, true. But Cadillacs were just the tip of the gigantic iceberg of gift-giving by Elvis.

The gifts Elvis gave were generally given out of genuine and pure love, admiration, and affinity, but some served as a reward for loyalty, some re-inforced the power balance in a relationship, and sometimes Elvis (who never liked to apologize for anything) would give gifts as a way of saying "I'm sorry".

Not everybody accepted: early girlfriend June Juanico, adhering to southern custom, declined the many gifts her boyfriend offered her because she understood that a man giving a gift to a woman would want something in return. She later said: “Think of all the Cadillacs I passed up!"

Another early girlfriend, Anita Wood, wasn't quite so “Southern,” and received a diamond ring, a new car, and endless toys and jewelry.

In 1956, Elvis gave a maid who looked after his family a car when he found out she had to walk a mile from her home to get to the nearest bus stop.

When future wife, Priscilla, first visited Memphis for Christmas 1962, Elvis gave her a poodle puppy, which she named “Honey.” When she came to live there the following year, Elvis gave her a Corvair to get her to and from school (Priscilla was still a teenager). One of the first things he did was buy her a $1,500 wardrobe of clothes (all of which he picked himself). Elvis was still buying her gifts a decade later, after their divorce.

Now that we are in the middle of a record-breaking Star Wars weekend, it seems everyone wants to learn how to be a Jedi. Only a select few will learn from the oldest and wisest Jedi master.

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A lightsaber-wielding toy Yoda teaches a class of Jedi cats-in-training the ways of the Force. The five cats and one dog are a little slow to grasp the lesson, but they sure do pay attention! -via Tastefully Offensive

Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor (previously at Neatorama) is the current UFC featherweight champion, after defeating the #1 pound-for-pound UFC champion José Aldo in just 13 seconds. McGregor instantly became the talk of the fight world, and is poised to be the next superstar. Maybe you should learn a little about the man.

10. He held two different belts in the same year

Before Conor signed with the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 2013, he was fighting in the Cage Warriors Fighting Championship. Now typically most fighters stay within one weight division, but most fighters are not Conor McGregor. At CWFC 47, Conor defeated opponent Dave Hill and won the featherweight belt. Then in his next fight he gained weight, and secured the CWFC lightweight belt. So in one year, Conor held two belts for two different weight divisions.

3. He was on welfare before entering the UFC

Conor’s life wasn’t always filled with sold-out fights or driving in fast cars. According to McGregor himself, he was actually collecting welfare checks from Ireland before he made his UFC debut. He secured his first UFC win in Sweden against Marcus Brimage, and after the fight he told reporters: “I didn’t have money before this, you know. Like I said, I was collecting 180 Euros a week off the social welfare and here I am and I’ve got 60 G’s bonus and my own pay”.

Taken together, those things show that fighting for the Cage Warriors doesn’t pay well. But there’s a lot more you can learn about Conor McGregor in a list at Worthly. 

Finding and collecting rare books takes specialized knowledge. We all have an attic full of old books, because books are hard to let go of. But the ones that are worth big bucks are the rare ones, and they are quite hard to keep up with, much less spot in a private library. Rebecca Rego Barry has a master’s degree in book history, which gives her an edge in the hunt for rare treasures. Her new book Rare Books Uncovered is filled stories of how people discover and collect really rare and valuable books. Some tell of great luck, like the time Christie’s missed the value of a rare copy of Gone With The Wind and let it go in an odd lot of other books.    

This raises an interesting question: When one person finds a rare book, is their gain always at the expense of somebody else?

“That can be true,” Barry says, “but among the booksellers I work with, especially those that belong to organizations like the ABAA or the ILAB, there’s an ethical obligation not to swindle each other or people who don’t know any better, like little old ladies selling their husband’s things. Personally, if I were to go to a garage sale and thought I had found a $5,000 book on sale for a dollar, I would feel conflicted. In most cases, though, the more common example is that you see a book you feel like you’ve seen before and decide to take a chance on it. It’s only after you get it home and do your research that you know if you’ve hit the jackpot—or overpaid.”

Read some of those stories, and take a look into the field of rare book discovery, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: John Wiley, Jr.)

You think you know everything there is to know about the Star Wars universe? Think again! This trivia list goes deep into territory you’ve never explored, and even gets to the bottom of some Star Wars myths.

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Daven at Today I Found Out says this is “the most time consuming post in the history of TIFO by a good margin.” They worked late and got it ready for today. -Thanks, Daven!

We know an awful lot about Santa Claus. He is based on stories of St. Nicholas, who was a bishop and therefore unmarried. He evolved into Father Christmas, which makes us wonder who Mother Christmas is. If our Santa Claus always had a wife, she stayed in the background until a few sighting appeared in the literature in the 19th century.

After lurking in the background of Santa-focused tales for a few decades, Mrs. Claus finally got a starring role in "Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride," an 1889 poem by Katherine Lee Bates. The poem is told from the perspective of Mrs. Claus herself, who is given a name of sorts: Goody, which is short for Goodwife, a polite form of address once used in place of "Mrs."

Goody has a few bones to pick with her jolly old husband. Bates depicts her as a dutiful wife prone to asking the odd passive-aggressive question. "Santa, wouldn't it be pleasant to surprise me with a present?" she asks, having laid out the fact that Santa gets "all the glory of the joyous Christmas story" while "poor little Goody Santa Claus" gets "nothing but the work." Two stanzas later, the resentment gets more intense:

    You just sit here and grow chubby off the goodies in my cubby
    From December to December, till your white beard sweeps your knees;
    For you must allow, my Goodman, that you're but a lazy woodman
    And rely on me to foster all our fruitful Christmas trees.

Does Mrs. Claus even have her own name? We got to know her a little better in the 20th century. Read the history of Mrs. Claus as we know her, at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Anssi Koskinen)

Want to learn how to make pretty candy roses from penny candy you wouldn’t bother to eat otherwise?

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From prison ingenuity to a children’s party activity. Or maybe something to do while the whole family is together for Christmas. Scar shows us how to transform Jolly Ranchers into something pretty that you might give as a gift. -via reddit

Several fairly new technologies combine to make something pretty neat -Christmas lights in the sky! Ascending Technologies programmed a drone with LEDs to perform a precise dance in the air, while taking long-exposure photographs and video. You can see how long the exposure is by the movement of the stars in the picture above.

The Drone Light Painting Video is world’s first drone light painting project of that quality. For this purpose a high-tech drone mounted with a LED was controlled by the flight planning software AscTec Navigator. After some testing all the light painting flights could be performed quite quickly and fully automated.

Due to the excellent flight characteristics of the AscTec Falcon 8 it was possible to fly such complex lines through predefined waypoints as precise and to fly those flight paths several times with such accuracy.

Yeah, the finished products only exist in photographs and video, due to the necessary long exposure, but those are some impressive pictures. Read more about it, and see a video of the process in action at Ascending Technologies. -via mental_floss

Can you keep a straight beat? Why sure! I’ve never played drums, but I was in marching band and don’t draw attention to myself on the dance floor, so I guess that's passable for a non-musician. But here we have a test that measures your response in milliseconds.

You will lose a point for every two milliseconds you were off by. You will score no points if you're off by 100ms or more.

I have no idea whether my score is any good compared to other people. I bet it’s not. How did you score? -via the Presurfer

Between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, communication between the Western powers and the Soviet Union was shackled by the deep rivalry and distrust of the Cold War. The US and the USSR had nukes aimed at each other and spies trying to find out what was actually going on over on the other side. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the secrets it kept remained secret because even their own citizens were not privy to the details. So there are still many mysteries we don’t have answers for. For example, in the space race between the two world powers, we only heard about the Soviets’ success stories.  

Everyone knows the year Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space: 1961. But what if Gagarin was not the first man in space, but simply the first man to survive? That’s the question underpinning the chilling ‘lost cosmonauts’ theory.

Not long after Gagarin’s historic mission, a Czech agent allegedly leaked information to the Allies about a failed spaceflight. Nothing odd about this, until you look at the date. According to the notes passed on, the Soviets had sent a man into orbit in December 1959.

Unlike Gagarin, though, that man had died a gruesome death. According to the informant, there were many others who had suffered similar fates. In a creepy twist, there may even be some evidence to back this up.

Two months before Gagarin’s flight, a listening station in Italy picked up a brief Russian transmission, broadcasting the words “everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the Earth.” A few days later, they picked up what sounded like a scream of terror, followed by empty silence.

If that wasn’t creepy enough, a later transmission was heard featuring three people sobbing and one of them saying “Conditions growing worse, why don’t you answer? . . . We are going slower. . . the world will never know about us. . .” The source of these transmissions remains a mystery. Were they hoaxes, or did Russia really abandon failed cosmonauts to an unimaginable fate?

That’s just one of ten mysteries of the Cold War that remain, that you can read about at Urban Ghosts. 

(Image credit: Pline)