Graham Hughes set out in 2009 to visit every country in the world without flying. By the end of 2012, he'd visited 201 countries and a couple dozen territories. You can find out more about the journey at the website The Oddysey Expedition. Meanwhile, here's the short travelogue, in which you will see one second from every country. This really beats watching endless vacation slides. Link -via b3ta
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His wife left him in charge of labeled the corn harvest for the freezer. He thought labeling them was silly because the cobs were in clear plastic. But he did it anyway. Link
An illegal immigrant from the Philippines who stowed away on a container ship will be allowed to stay in the United States. A female cat apparently wandered into a shipping container in Manila, which was loaded and crossed 6,400 miles to Los Angeles. The cat was found when the shipping container was opened, over three weeks later. Pinay was weak and dehydrated, and the Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control took her to the Baldwin Park Animal Care Center.
“The cat was very weak and frail,” said Marcia Mayeda, DACC’s director.
The cat, named “Pinay” (Pin-eye) by staff, was described as a Domestic Short Haired, orange and white female and is listed in fair condition at the Baldwin Park Animal Care Center’s medical unit.
“It is amazing that this cat could survive the almost 6,400 nautical mile journey by sea without food or water,” Mayeda said. “She has been closely monitored and cared for by our medical team and is getting stronger and putting on weight.”
Pinay is now available to be adopted into a good home, preferably one that won't let her roam. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control)
You often hear of bears taking things from dumpsters, but this one just took the whole thing! The Edelweiss Restaurant in Colorado Springs had a security camera trained on the back alley, and Tuesday night they caught the bear in action. Reaching to the top of the dumpster, the bear backs up and takes the entire unit away! Link -via Fark
But then it happened again.
Talk about meals on wheels! There is no information on where the dumpster was found, but the restaurant posted an update on Facebook in which you see the bear returning for more German food on Wednesday night! Link
The makeup of the U.S. armed forces has changed considerably since the days of the draft. The all-volunteer military is a self-selected group that must must pass higher entrance requirements than ever before. Various reports and polls give us a snapshot of what the overall active-duty population is like. For example, they are more educated than ever.
Today's military personnel are more likely than comparable age groups in the civilian population to have graduated from high school (after all, with rare exceptions, military recruits must have high school degrees or GEDs). Military officers, meanwhile, are substantially better educated than civilians: Only 30 percent of the overall population over age 25 have bachelor's degrees, compared to 82.5 percent of officers.
And they tend to come from higher-income backgrounds.
Today's military is distinctly middle class. In part, this is because military requirements render many of the nation's poorest young people ineligible: The poorest Americans are the least likely to finish high school or gain a GED, for instance, and poverty also correlates with ill health, obesity, and the likelihood of serious run-ins with the criminal justice system, all of which are disqualifying factors for the military.
Active-duty personnel are also older than they used to be, and more likely to be married than the civil population. They hold more liberal political views than you might imagine. And best of all, while some veterans have trouble reintegrating into civilian life, the vast majority of post-9/11 veterans do well both socially and economically. The article at Foreign Policy also explores the reasons people volunteer for the military, the geographic distribution of recruits, and other demographics. Link -via Digg
Don't just tell people to smile for a picture -make them think of happiness! The group Soul Pancake set up a giant camera and invited passersby to "Snap Your Joy." Those pictures were then displayed for others to see. After all, smiles are contagious. This just goes to show that if you remind people of joy, they will feel it -and show it. -via Viral Viral Videos
How did Harriet Tubman lead so many slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad? With careful planning, plenty of luck, and a little opium.
“I never run my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger” -so boasted Harriet Tubman, the most successful conductor on the Underground Railroad. Tubman ran up her unblemished record while leading groups of runaways on a 650-mile odyssey from eastern Maryland to St. Catharines, Ontario. Starting in 1850, Tubman made a total of 19 journeys, personally freeing more than 300 slaves. The rewards offered for her capture totaled an astronomical $40,000 (just over $1 million in today’s money), but the bounties went unpaid.
So how exactly did she score that perfect record? Here are some tips based on her harrowing adventures—call it the Tubman Technique.
KNOW THE TERRAIN; MOVE BY NIGHT: Many slaves had never ventured far from their owners’ property. Slave owners deliberately kept them close so they wouldn’t know how to escape. As a result, runaways needed Tubman to do the navigating. She led groups along dirt roads and paths by night. If no safe house was available during the day, Tubman hid her passengers in dense forests, swamps, or other places no one would think to look. When it was safer to split up—a decision she sometimes made when she knew the group was being hunted—Tubman gave simple, easy-to-follow advice for reaching a meeting point, like “follow the drinking gourd” (the Big Dipper, which points north).
MAKE SURE EVERYONE KNOWS WHO’S IN CHARGE:
This video takes the concept of Breaking Bad and stands it on its head. A notorious meth dealer confronts the fact that he has cancer and decides to make some changes in his life. Contains NSFW language. -via Unreality
Or maybe you could just call it an octopi. I can't find the baker or photographer, but I found a song about it. It looks dreadfully delicious. -via Nag on the Lake
Update: The artist/baker who made this is Sandy Yoo. -Thanks, Buster Stanley!
An unnamed fisherman in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, caught a really big shark. In order to have a trophy photo that would stand out from the others, he gutted the shark and crawled inside for the photo you see here. A friend put the picture on the wall of the Metung Hotel. John Burns talked about it on his 3AW radio show.
"This fellow has decided as a jape to climb inside the shark with a knife, put his hand through the gills of the shark and pretended to stab it between the eyes," Mr Burns said on 3AW this morning, before telling listeners about the reaction of an American couple who saw the picture at the Metung Hotel.
"An American couple have turned up at the Metung Hotel to see this photo and their immediate response from the wife was 'Did he survive!?'."
The fisherman was standing right behind her at the time. Presumably, his answer was "yes".
Link -via Boing Boing
When a study in 2008 found that children, on average, do not like clowns, many people were surprised. The rest of us weren't because we never liked clowns, either. Sometime over the past 50 years, clowns in popular culture moved from funny to downright horrific, which is indicative of how an audience sees them. Smithsonian looks at the history of clowns, and finds that depressing, creepy, and/or frightening clowns are really nothing new. The happy children's clowns of the mid-20th century were somewhat of an anomaly, because clowns were never all sunshine and smiles, from court jesters to Grimaldi to Pagliacci to Emmett Kelly to John Wayne Gacy.
Even as Bozo was cavorting on sets across America, a more sinister clown was plying his craft across the Midwest. John Wayne Gacy’s public face was a friendly, hard-working guy; he was also a registered clown who entertained at community events under the name Pogo. But between 1972 and 1978, he sexually assaulted and killed more than 35 young men in the Chicago area. “You know… clowns can get away with murder,” he told investigating officers, before his arrest.
Gacy didn’t get away with it—he was found guilty of 33 counts of murder and was executed in 1994. But he’d become identified as the “Killer Clown,” a handy sobriquet for newspaper reports that hinged on the unexpectedness of his killing. And bizarrely, Gacy seemed to revel in his clown persona: While in prison, he began painting; many of his paintings were of clowns, some self-portraits of him as Pogo. What was particularly terrifying was that Gacy, a man who’d already been convicted of a sexual assault on a teenage boy in 1968, was given access to children in his guise as an innocuous clown. This fueled America’s already growing fears of “stranger danger” and sexual predation on children, and made clowns a real object of suspicion.
After a real life killer clown shocked America, representations of clowns took a decidedly terrifying turn.
Read a fascinating rundown of the history and psychology of scary clowns at Smithsonian. Link
Professional skateboarder Bob Burnquist named his backyard "Dreamland." In this video, you'll see why. The moves become more insane as the video progresses -especially at the 6:30 mark. Um, don't try this at home. -via Metafilter
When you learn new words by reading and not so much by hearing them, it's easy to mispronounce them in your head. Then later, if you hear the word spoken, you might not even recognize it. It happens to everyone, or at least everyone who reads a lot when they are young. John Green sets the record straight on a long list of commonly mispronounced words. -via mental_floss
Brita Lee West was going to marry Willard Tinch at the Scott County Jail in Tennessee, where Tinch was incarcerated. Instead, she ended up in jail herself!
According to a report filed by the Scott County Sheriff’s Department, West inquired about being able to kiss her groom during the marital ceremony as she was being searched prior to entering the facility. Corrections Sgt. Tiffany Byrge reportedly noticed that West’s “false teeth kept falling down while she was talking and noticed a package in her mouth,” according to the report. The package turned out to be a gum wrapper containing two strips of suboxone — an addictive pain relief narcotic — and an amount of crystal methamphetamine.
More drugs were found in West's vehicle, and she was charged with several drug violations. The wedding was cancelled. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Scott Co. Sheriff's Department)
A Korean woman takes her first driving lesson. From the camera setup, this appears to be a professional teacher, who, in my opinion, is particularly restrained when he starts yelling just seconds into the lesson. This makes me feel much better about my teenage driving student, who has yet to fail this badly. Knock wood. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
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