What is more important- to be productive, or to have a good life? The people of Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, emphasize the philosophy of “aylyak,” which translates to idleness or dawdling, but in reality embodies the idea that taking your time and savoring the moment is a valid and desirable way of life.

In the downtown Kapana district, people spill out of bars and cafes into the pedestrian streets. Under brightly painted murals on the walls, groups of young people hang out, flirt and check their phones. In the cafe by the Dzhumaya Mosque in the town centre, people sit for hours and sip cups of Turkish coffee. Even the cats in the cobbled streets of the old town seem more languid than elsewhere. They stretch and purr, then they roll over and go back to sleep. If you ask the people here why the city is so relaxed, they will tell you: Plovdiv, they will say, is “aylyak”.

Plovdiv's culture of a laid-back, social lifestyle owes its origins to history, but is also fed by its reputation, which draws new residents from around the world. Read about the city that takes its time at BBC Travel. -via Digg

Fans of The Mandalorian and anime fans probably overlap quite a bit. If the two were to merge, here’s what the intro would be. YouTuber Malec has a whole series of these mashups. -via Boing Boing

Whatever career you have, there are certain terms you use on the job that you don't use outside of work. I was a commercial baker for a short time, and didn't know what they meant by "proofing" the bread, but I did know what it means to "let it rise." Jobs that aren't so common have terms that you might want to know some day.  

That one's easy to figure out. Even children know that the term for people who ride without helmets is "organ donors." Read up on more professional jargon at Cracked.

Devoney Scarfe is an artist with lovely cakes and embroidery already perfected. Since the pandemic began, she has been obsessed with pies. This one features Homer Simpson on top of a meat and potato pie.  

The Homer pie was made as an apology to my husband. I was a bit grumpy one night in lockdown and bit his head off. He backed out of the room like the meme of Homer backing into the hedge. It made me laugh, so I made a pie about it.

Scarfe's pies come in all flavors and styles, which may take days to make and only minutes for her family to eat. This blueberry cobra pie is garnished with raspberries and flowers made of strawberries.



You can see a list of Scarfe's best pies at Bored Panda, and keep up with her future work at Instagram.

William Davis Hassler was a commercial photographer in New York City in the early 290th century. In addition to his commissioned photographs, he took plenty of pictures of his family, including his dog Bounce and his cats Reddy and Peaches. Those photos feature prominently in a collection of 5,000 or so of Hassler's images taken between 1912 and 1918. They show that families haven't changed all that much in 100 years, as the pets were i,portant members, if not the most photogenic part of the family. See some of those images at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The guy from the Action Lab explains how to boil water with the heat of your hand. The trick is, you don't need to generate 100 degrees (212F) to cause water to boil, if the conditions are right. -via Digg

It's not uncommon that people become famous for one thing, when other things in their lives are just as interesting if not as well known. After all, we all switch roles from work to home to hobbies and other interests. There are some people that have such interesting lives outside of what they are famous for that their stories should be better-known, like that of NBA star Bison Dele, who played for the Orlando Magic, Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, and the Detroit Pistons, before suddenly retiring at age 30.

He was a prototype for the most interesting man in the world. He stumbled onto basketball because of his 6'9" (ni'ce'') height, not passion, and used his NBA career to fund adventures. His list of alleged actions reads like Hemingway fan-fic: dating Madonna, running with bulls (in Spain this time), biking from Salt Lake City to Phoenix with no water, getting a pilot's license. His best friend was the guy who started Overstock.com. Essentially, he got a high-paying job and then treated it with open indifference while he did cool stuff.

Eventually, he bought a catamaran and sailed the Pacific. Isn't that the best life?

Yes, up until the point where that life ended in a mysterious tragedy, but which still aligned with Dele's "most interesting men in the world" description. Read the story of Bison Dele, plus five other people in the Cracked list 6 Famous People With Weird-Ass Hidden Lives.

What most people know of Erwin Schrödinger is the cat. In correspondence with Albert Einstein, Schrödinger wrote of an experiment with a cat in a box with a complicated device that had a 50% chance of killing the cat within an hour. According to the theory of quantum superposition, the cat is both dead and alive until the experimenter opened the box to see the condition of the cat. Schrödinger knew quantum mechanics -he won a Nobel Prize in physics for the Schrödinger equation. But he had a problem with quantum superposition, a theory that atoms could exist in more than one state at the same time.

You see, the problem the physicist had with quantum mechanics was that no one knew where its probabilistic effects ended. Why would the life or death of the cat be dependent on our observation? Why would the system care if we observe it or not? Isn’t the cat observing the poison? Who is observing the physicist observing the inside the box? How large could these probabilistic effects be? If it has a limit in its scale, how large is it? How could a system be independent and superpositioned before our observation but then its state be defined only once we observe it? This is a mess to explain because in relative macroscopic terms, everyday objects are not in multiple states until an observer interacts with it. It is therefore illogical that before opening the box, the cat is dead and alive at the same time, and only until you open the box the cat is retroactively dead, if that’s the result observed. This was meant as a direct critique of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Schrödinger never entertained the thought of actually carrying out the experiment, because (beside the cruelty and difficulty) what could possibly be learned about the "unobserved" state? His point was like that of a tree falling in the forest, and the hubris of the observer. Read about the underlying meaning of Schrödinger’s Cat at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

Traders from the Middle East brought cinnamon to Mediterranean civilizations beginning around 2,500 years ago, but kept the origin of the spice a secret. Europeans loved it, but didn't know where it came from or how to find out, but they kept looking. This continued after Europeans sailed for the New World. It had so many natural resources, surely there was cinnamon there somewhere!

Among those excited about potential new sources of cinnamon was Francisco Pizarro. Fresh from his destruction of the Incan Empire, Pizarro recruited his brother, Gonzalo, to conquer a place he had heard of not far from his base in Quito called la Canela, the Land of Cinnamon. Contemporary accounts of what happened next are both confused and horrific.

Another Spanish explorer apparently told Gonzalo Pizarro he had found the “Valley of the Cinnamon,” though he hadn’t been able to explore it. He said local people had told him if he continued on he would find a flat land of prosperous people. Dalby suggests that what he had probably actually found was South American trees of the family Lauraceae, which smell sort of like cinnamon. The prosperous land was most likely the Amazon basin, where people cultivated many crops like cassava, maize, and yams—but not “cinnamon trees.”

There were no cinnamon trees, but that didn't stop Pizarro from committing atrocities in his quest. Read about the search for American cinnamon at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Simon A. Eugster)

A disembodied head goes on a trip, finding himself in a strange and frightening city. He encounters a urine monster, gets chased by an angry mob, and is finally shot by a cannon. This stop-motion video for the song "Closet Lunatic" by Caro was produced by the group's singer Adam Pardey. He writes about the process of learning to do animation here. -via Digg

TV theme songs can become earworms that fans will remember all their lives, some because they are catchy and pleasant, others because they are associated with a beloved and long-running show. Each theme song has a story behind it, whether the song or TV show is any good or not. This list looks at the more interesting stories, rather than the quality of the song. Case in point: Batman. The show was beloved and the song was catchy, but few would say it is good.

Batman’s theme song has been covered so often in the last half century that younger fans might not even know where it originated. The year was 1966, the show was ABC’s animated series Batman, and the musical genius was Neal Hefti. In a 2006 interview for Journal Into Melody, Hefti admitted that he struggled to develop a tune that was as “outrageous” as the show itself, and he didn’t have high hopes for his pitch to producers. “I had to sing it and play it on the piano. Well, I'm no singer, and I'm no pianist,” he said. “My first thought was that they were going to throw me out, very quickly, but as I was going through it, I heard them both reacting with statements like, ‘Oh, that's kicky. That will be good in the car chase.’” Hefti eventually used eight singers to bring the “Batman!” chorus to life, but he suggested cutting two different tracks in case producer William Dozier preferred a purely instrumental intro. Though Dozier chose the vocal version, Batman star Adam West later propagated the myth that instruments—not voices—were behind the “Batman!” bit. “Old pals would call to congratulate me and also to ask, ‘Are those horns or voices saying ‘Batman’ during your theme song?’” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “(They were horns.)” Since the single word did technically qualify as “lyrics,” Hefti was credited as both songwriter and composer. “One of the choir members on the recording session wrote on his part: ‘Word and Music by Neal Hefti,’” Hefti told the Los Angeles Times.

Read the stories behind ten more TV theme songs, from 1960 to today, at Mental Floss.

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Ryan Kadyk has a baby rescue raccoon he named Governor. Governor has really taken to farm life, and gives his all to herding the goats, just like the dog does! That'll do, Governor, that'll do. -via Laughing Squid

The extinct human species Homo denisova, which we call Denisovans, were first discovered as a distinct Homo variant in 2008. That discovery came from mitochondrial DNA in fossils from a cave in Siberia, and indicated that Denisovans lived there as long as 76,000 years ago. Traces of Denisovans DNA have since been identified in people in Asia and Australia. But more evidence of Denisovans' past is coming to light. 

Denisovan mitochondrial DNA extracted from sediment layers in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau indicates that these humanlike folk inhabited the high-altitude site roughly 100,000 years ago and again around 60,000 years ago, say geoarchaeologist Dongju Zhang of Lanzhou University, China, and her colleagues. These are the first examples of Denisovan DNA found outside of Siberia’s Denisova Cave (SN: 12/16/19).

The discovery and accompanying artifacts hint that Denisovans were more widespread for a much longer time than we previously thought. Read the implications of the find at Science News. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Dongju Zhang)

This year's LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special will feature time travel, as the characters from the final trilogy go back to meet the characters from the original trilogy, plus all the other Star Wars properties. As you'll see in this trailer, we even get a paradox when Solo meets Han. Will Rey make it back to her own timeline in time to celebrate Life day? How could she not? The special will begin streaming on Disney+ on November 17. -via Geeks Are Sexy

If you're fired from your job for fighting with the boss or using drugs, it rarely affects anyone outside the family or workplace. But on a successful TV show, an actor quitting or getting fired means his character must move out of town or more likely, dramatically get killed off. Or the producers may get creative, as in the case above. But there was a very important character who continued on after the actor bowed out.

Who knew that one of the main features of the Doctor was born from a practical production reason instead of an existing mythology? But that's why we still have Doctor Who today. See a pictofacts list of TV characters and the reasons they left their shows at Cracked.