In the case of a very slow news day, or possibly the UK jumping on the “terrible weather news” bandwagon in its own way, the Plymouth Herald published a news story about a trash can being blown over.

IN A sign of just how windy it really is outside, a dustbin has fallen over onto its side.

The toppled wheelie-bin was spotted in Tavistock Place, off North Hill, by Herald reader Dave Arthur.

The Herald hopes there will be no further reports of items blowing over but if you do spot one, email news@plymouthherald.co.uk.

This scene is recreated on my street every week after the garbage is picked up. However, since they are round, I often have to run down the street chasing my trash cans. Still, the newspaper can’t hold a candle to the weather hype in the satirical Galway Daily News.

-via Arbroath

(Image credit: Dave Arthur)

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Panda Express is a chain that’s sort of like a fast food version of American Chinese recipes. Buzzfeed assembled some Chinese folks of different generations to sample some dishes from Panda Express, and, to no one's surprise, their opinions varied. There's no mention of how long the taste-testers have lived in America (and we can assume they’re in America from their accents). What struck me is how the older generation is altogether less judgmental about the food. After all, whether something is “authentic” matters less than whether you like it. And at any restaurant, there will be offerings you like and some you don’t like. -via Tastefully Offensive

An art exhibit in New York displays the original paintings for the covers of Mexican pulp fiction books of the 1960s and ‘70s. In paperback form, these were tiny -sometimes as small as 2x3 inches. But what really makes them stand out is the sublimely weird subject matter they illustrate. If you can’t make it to New York for the full exhibit, you can see a baker’s dozen of the covers at Collectors Weekly. 

The essence of comedy is the incongruous, the discovery of something that doesn’t fit into the world as we know it. The new blog H.P. Lovecat marries two of the biggest memes on the internet: cats and the horror of H.P. Lovecraft. The inherent incongruity of these two things is so delightfully odd that you have to laugh.  

Because there exists no method known to man, more terribly suited to expose the cosmic meaningless of existence than pairing the words of H.P. Lovecraft with seemingly delightful and charming pictures of adorable kittens

Yeah, what he said.

-via Everlasting Blort

In 2005, Dr. Frank Gaillard, then a radiology student in Melbourne, started uploading his x-rays and notes to the internet. It was his way of archiving his personal files. Then in 2007, he opened the site, Radiopaedia, to the public, and fellow radiologists from all over the world came to share and discuss cases. Now it’s an online wiki-style encyclopedia with contributions from medical personnel curated by experts. It’s a vast resource. Gaillard said,

"Aside from the selfish reasons you use the site, in terms of keeping your own case library and looking up things for your own study or work, the thing that's come out of it is that in Australia we forget how lucky we are to have the sort of health system we do have," he said.

"To be able to give radiologists or doctors in third world nations, who don't have the teaching, or the expertise, or the hardware that we do, the ability to see some of these cases and better treat and diagnose their patients is probably what gives me the greatest sense of satisfaction on a day-to-day basis."

Read about the history of Radiopedia and get an overview of what it has to offer, plus a few select x-rays in an article at ABC News Australia. Some images may be disturbing, particularly the last one, which is also NSFW. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dr Jeremy Jones, UK)

Prince Armory makes custom handcrafted armor, costumes, and leather products. They’ve made quite a few mashups of pop culture characters in the form of medieval armor. Their latest project is a full suit of medieval armor in the style of Darth Vader! It’s a little bit science fiction, a little bit fantasy, and a whole lot of impressive. Get a good look at this armor from all angles at Geeks Are Sexy.

Bart, the cat who returned from the dead, is recovering from his surgery at the Humane Society of Tampa Bay. A day after his operation, Bart was found to be anemic, and received a blood transfusion. The blood donor was another cat at the shelter, Draco, who is waiting for a forever home. In return he was featured as Pet of the Day yesterday. Let’s hope Draco is rewarded with a new home and people who appreciate him.

(Image credit: Krista Sparkman)

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Google is no longer selling Google Glass, but insists that the company is committed to the product, which will be retooled and eventually launched in a different form. That’s not very helpful to the people who already bought one, as they will no longer receive software updates. What happened? If you watch this video, you might think it’s telling you that forces from beyond the grave caused the failure of Google Glass, but I believe the point is hidden in the simple fact that these guys couldn’t manage to summon porn with it. -via b3ta

This is another of the ridiculous challenges from UsvsTh3m. I used to be a pretty fast reader before my eyesight began to fail, but as I interpreted the question (correctly) as “How fast can you flip through the pages of War and Peace?” There are 1486 pages.

That was pretty fast, considering I stopped to take screenshots along the way. But the exercise added years to the age of my keyboard. If I were to attempt to actually read all those pages, my guess is that it would take me about 15 years.

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It’s not unusual for the parent in the passenger seat to record video of the baby in the backseat. This compilation of clips proves that there’s a universal reaction to riding through an unexpected tunnel for these little ones. “Hey! The world changed!” Or something like that. The totally unrelated music in this video only adds to the surrealism. Metafilter has a string of puns and jokes about what’s going on in their heads, including the title of their link post: OMG, it's full of cars!

The Thorn Birds author Colleen McCullough dies on Norfolk Island http://t.co/DufWhpPaQl

— The Australian (@australian) January 29, 2015

Australian novelist Colleen McCullough, who wrote The Thorn Birds, died on Thursday at age 77. Her obituary at The Australian (warning: auto play video) began with this paragraph:

COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: “I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting thing is I never had any trouble attracting men.”

Fans and non-fans alike were struck that, after a lifetime of accomplishment as both a scientist and an author, McCullough’s obituary would begin with her appearance and then her relationships with men. The reaction was immediate, as pointed out by The Guardian. New Zealand’s Stuff reacted by composing similar obituaries for renowned male authors. Twitter users mocked The Australian by using the same style for their own obituaries under the hashtag #myozobituary.

Although his beard looked like someone had glued it on & his hair would have been unconvincing as a wig, he married a rockstar #MyOzObituary

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) January 30, 2015

Although a shouty malodorous vulgarian he nevertheless enjoyed most episodes of house hunters international. #MyOzObituary

— Craig Ferguson (@CraigyFerg) January 30, 2015

#myozobituary 'Not being a woman, his physical appearance is not really that noteworthy.'

— Justin Lewis (@Mumbler3) January 30, 2015

-via Metafilter

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Here we have a rare video from Kruger National Park in South Africa that doesn’t involve any blood, death, or mutterings of “that’s nature’s way.” A lioness had somehow gotten separated from her pride -for three days. She hid in the brush and sadly called out for them. Then on the third day, here they come down the road! She wants to make sure its her pride, but as soon as she recognizes them, the party is on. -via Arbroath

The upcoming movie Jurassic Word has a theme park website, featuring a map, park features, and a link to the company behind its creation. Some of the pages are disabled, or rather marked as “coming soon” because the park isn’t yet open, but you can follow the countdown of the days until it is. They do have pages on the dinosaurs, including the new genetically-modified monster they call Indominus rex. It’s forty feet long and has a scream that can reach 160 decibels.

We set out to make Indominus the most fearsome dinosaur ever to be displayed at Jurassic World. The genetic engineers at our Hammond Creation Lab have more than delivered.

At first glance, Indominus most closely resembles a T. Rex. But its distinctive head ornamentation and ultra-tough bony osteoderms can be traced from theropods known as Abeliosaurs. Indominus’ horns have been placed above the eye orbit through genetic material hybridized from Carnotaurus, Majungasaurus, Rugops and Gigantosaurus. Fearsome indeed.

The conceit here is that real dinosaurs that we know about aren’t scary enough, so they had to create one even more dangerous. From the silhouette icon, it appears that I. rex has an advantage over T. rex in that its arms are long enough to reach out and grab a movie star. And its teeth, while capable of tearing a movie star to shreds, do not meet properly. Whether that’s a glitch in the genetic modification technique or not, it could well make the creature angry enough to lash out at its creators. Jurassic World is due in theaters in June. -via Gamma Squad

This adorable little girl is Akua. She lives in Ghana and is celebrating her birthday. The guy in the picture said, “What do you want for your Birthday, Akua?”

She replied, “I want to say Hi to America!”

So the guy’s friend posted the picture to reddit. Akua certainly charmed everyone, and received thousands of comments wishing her a happy birthday. See some of the responses posted in images.

T.S. Eliot was poised to be the top poet of his generation. But first he had to be rescued from his day job.

(Image credit: Flickr user Seth Anderson)

In 1921, suffering from a “nervous disorder,” T.S. Eliot took a three-month hiatus from his day job. The 33-year-old had been working as a clerk in the London sub-basement of Lloyds Bank for four years. But with the luxury of time, the part-time poet focused his attention on completing his magnum opus, “The Waste Land.”

Released in 1922, Eliot’s haunting and defiantly oblique work is a landmark of modernism; even at its most impenetrable, one reviewer admitted that Eliot’s work possessed “the music of ideas.” Ezra Pound, too, was impressed. Convinced of Eliot’s genius, Pound reckoned that the grunt work was smothering his creativity. “Some of us consider Eliot’s employment in a bank the worst waste in contemporary literature,” Pound bemoaned.

Of course, financing poetry is a problem as old as poetry itself. For Emily Dickinson or Lord Byron, the answer was simple—being born into the right family relieved them of the worry. Others turned to hack writing to stock the till. Walt Whitman penned a temperance tract while guzzling cheap wine. Edgar Allan Poe cranked out newspaper filler like “Why Not Try a Mineralized Pavement?” When William Wordsworth landed a decidedly unromantic job as a tax collector, he could take comfort in the knowledge that Geoffrey Chaucer had been a customs comptroller in the 14th century. “There’s no money in poetry,” Robert Graves once observed, “but then there’s no poetry in money either.”