Food can make a wonderful art medium. Making food "cute" is also a great way to get kids to enjoy their lunch, as we've seen in many artistic Bento boxes. But when does food cross the line from one to the other? Instagram user Peaceloving Pax is a doctor in Thailand who is also a food artist. You have to wonder whether his/her creations ever are actually eaten.
Peaceloving Pax recreates rice balls depicting kawaii characters from Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, and other anime and cartoon worlds. See more of these wonderful rice balls, as well as dumplings, sandwiches, baked goods, and other foods at Instagram.
-via Buzzfeed
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John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem in 1858 entitled "Telling the Bees" about a New England custom that was dying out even then. Back when many households kept beehives for honey, wax, and pollination, the hardworking bees were considered members of the family. When a relative died, the bees must be informed and given a proper opportunity to mourn.
This practice of “telling the bees” may have its origins in Celtic mythology where the presence of a bee after a death signified the soul leaving the body, but the tradition appears to have been most prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe. The ritual involves notifying honey bees of major events in the beekeeper’s life, such as a death or marriage.
While the traditions varied from country to country, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family—so that the bees could share in the mourning. This generally entailed draping each hive with black crepe or some other “shred of black.” It was required that the sad news be delivered to each hive individually, by knocking once and then verbally relaying the tale of sorrow.
There were variations on the ritual over time and place, and folk stories that warned of the bad things that could happen if bees weren't kept current on family news. Read about the custom of telling the bees at Jstor. -via Nag on the Lake
We've heard a cheetah cub squeak and a lion cub roar, but have you ever heard the sounds a baby caracal makes? This cub makes his presence known by making the sound of a small electric motor, like a remote control toy! -via Boing Boing
Once he finished filming Avengers 4, actor Chris Evans announced that he was through with Captain America. We don't know the character's fate, but it's as good a time as any to look back on the movie version of the ultimate soldier and his character arc. -via Geeks Are Sexy
An auction at Sotheby's Friday night featured a Banksy work titled Girl With Balloon. It was a final sale of the night, and the framed work was bid up to slightly over a million pounds before the gavel went down. As soon as it did, however, the painting was partially ejected through a shredder installed in its frame!
It is unclear whether the prank will have destroyed or enhanced the value of the work.
Sotheby’s said in a statement to the Financial Times: “We have talked with the successful purchaser who was surprised by the story. We are in discussion about next steps.”
The auction house declined to reveal the identity of the buyer.
The identity of the artist has yet to be revealed, either, but Banksy is known for audacious pranks. We can assume that the extent of Sotheby's involvement will be revealed sooner or later. -via Metafilter
Hyperallerigic has an eye witness account.
Before we had government regulations to set safety standards for food, the American consumer was pretty much at the mercy of those who sold what we ate. In the late 19th century, the dairy industry was particularly egregious in selling low-quality and even dangerous milk to consumers. There were three basic problems. First, lack of sanitation led to bacterial contamination, causing the spread of disease. Second, milk was diluted with cheaper ingredients, such as water and chalk, or even calf brains.
Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.
Indiana's top public health officer John Newell Hurty fought for safer milk, but strangely, he was okay with adding formaldehyde for a time because it killed bacteria. Read about Hurty's part in the fight for safe milk at Undark. -via Digg
Doctor and diver Ben Burville made friends with a young female grey seal that became used to seeing him dive in her waters. He calls her "Dive Buddy," and she loves to hug, nuzzle, and hold "hands" with Burville. She also loves getting a nice scratch from him. Dive Buddy will even chase other seals away from him! Burville says,
I would advise that divers do not touch marine life. Notably grey seals have a range of rather unpleasant bacteria in their mouths and these bacteria can cause serious infections. (Including various mycoplasma and streptococcus species)
You can see other videos of Burville and Dive Buddy at Laughing Squid.
Dr. Claire Simeone is a veterinarian and the director of the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Center in Hawaii. Yesterday she, and quite a few other people connected with the facility, began getting silent phone calls, over and over. They were coming from the center, so complaints came to Simeone.
Simeone says that Hawaiian Telecom, the center’s phone company, confirmed that “a bazillion calls” were indeed coming from a single line inside the hospital and asked her to look around to find the problem phone.
When she finally found it, however, the issue wasn’t hardware or software, but footwear—that is, the toe pads on a tiny gold dust day gecko.
Yes, a gecko had climbed onto a phone at the center, specifically onto the touch screen, where his tiny suction-cup feet had originated the phone calls. He was not a regular resident at the Marine Mammal Center, but is suspected of attempting to cold-call potential customers about insurance coverage. You can read the story at Gizmodo, or in her illustrated Twitter thread.
(Image credit: Dr. Claire Simeone)
On September 22, Sukiri, a cheetah at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, gave birth to her first litter of cubs. The three baby cheetahs are doing fine under Sukiri's care, and have bonded well with their mom. That makes ten cheetah cubs born at the facility this year, and has biologists breathing a sigh of relief.
Biologists were initially worried Sukiri would struggle adapting to motherhood. Her own mother aggressively handled her and her two brothers, wounding the cubs’ necks when she carried them. Concerned by this, SCBI biologists made the decision to hand-rear Sukiri and her brothers apart from their mother. Following several surgeries, the cubs made a full recovery and have all survived into adulthood.
“We always want moms to raise their own cubs because it increases the probability that those cubs will breed and raise their own cubs as adults,” Crosier says. “Sukiri was clearly able to adapt and being hand-reared has not affected her ability to raise cubs at all.”
Read more about Sukiri and her three cubs (and their father, too) at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: National Zoo)
8yr old Saga Vanecek named 'Queen of Sweden' locally as she discovers a pre-Viking-era sword in a Swedish lake, "The cool thing is that I'm a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, and this looks just like a Viking sword!" said Vanecek. #queenofsweden #Viking #Sword #Archaeology #sweden pic.twitter.com/BLrW3DFVzv
— My Good Planet (@MyGoodPlanet) October 5, 2018
According to English folklore, Saga Vanecek might now be a queen or else a magical being who can confer royalty on another. Monty Python would beg to differ.
Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
Either way, eight-year-old Swedish-American Vanecek has quite a story to tell. She found an ancient sword in Sweden's Lake Vidöstern as her family was vacationing there. The sword is now in the custody of the local museum.
It was initially reported that the sword was at least 1,000 years old, but the museum later contacted The Local to clarify that they believe it may be even older, estimated to date back to the 5th or 6th century AD, pre-Viking Age. The find has prompted huge interest from archaeologists and historians.
"It's about 85 centimentres long, and there is also preserved wood and metal around it," explained Mikael Nordström from the museum. "We are very keen to see the conservation staff do their work and see more of the details of the sword."
Anyone hoping to see the sword will have to wait at least a year, Nordström told The Local, explaining: "The conservation process takes quite a long time because it's a complicated environment with wood and leather, so they have several steps to make sure it's preserved for the future."
A search for more ancient relics is going on at the lake. Read the story at The Local.
The glaciers atop Les Diablerets in the Swiss Alps make for a wonderful skiing experience. But workers at the ski resorts are seeing changes. Glaciers move and grow and melt, and recently they've been melting and moving faster than anyone can remember. That means hustling to keep the resorts in place. It also means long-dead bodies uncovered.
People have been disappearing on glaciers for as long as people have been walking on glaciers. And for most of human history, they were simply gone, vanished, entombed in a hopelessly deep, dense river of ice, carried away by a slow, grinding current. How many, no one knows, because that number is lost to time. For a benchmark, though: Since 1925 (when records first began to be kept), almost 300 people have disappeared in Valais alone, though not all, of course, on a glacier.
And maybe none of them would have ever been seen again. Except then the world got hotter, and the glaciers got smaller, thinning and retreating, and now, after decades, centuries, millennia, they're slowly surrendering the dead. This is not peculiar to Les Diablerets, obviously. Glaciers all over the planet are receding at alarming rates, some more than others. The thaw is catastrophic, and global.
Last summer, Jan Theiler found two mummified bodies revealed by the thawing ice. An article at GQ follows the story of the victims, the recovery, and the glaciers that are giving up more and more secrets as they melt. The article contains one image of the remains as they were found. -via Digg
(Image credit: Zacharie Grossen)
A cute kitten named Pixie suddenly gets a roommate that's a battled-scarred retired military dog named Brutus in a comic series by cartoonist Ben Hed. See the adventures of Pixie and Brutus (so far) at Bored Panda and more of Hed's stories at Instagram. My favorite is the Halloween costume.
Elizabeth "Ellen" Nugent Wharton was a prominent member of Baltimore's high society in the 19th century. She had married well, raised two children, and for all anyone knew, was quite wealthy.
Sadly, her personal life had more than its share of tragedies. In the late 1860s, her husband, Major Henry Wharton, died suddenly and mysteriously. Not long afterward, her only son, Harry, joined his father in the grave, leaving Mrs. Wharton with no consolation except the large life insurance policies she had taken out on her unfortunate menfolk. When her brother-in-law Edward Wharton and his daughter also passed away during a visit to her home, her friends greatly sympathized with poor Elizabeth. Mrs. Wharton's only remaining close family member was her daughter, Nellie. Nellie Wharton's health also took a dramatic downturn during this period, but fortunately, she survived.
In late June 1871, an old friend, Eugene Van Ness, paid her a friendly social visit. Van Ness, a bookkeeper, kept the records of Mrs. Wharton's accounts at the banking firm of Alexander Brown & Sons. On June 28, another of Mrs. Wharton's friends, General William Scott Ketchum, also came to spend the weekend at her home. The object of his visit was not just pleasure, but business. Some time back, the General had loaned Mrs. Wharton $2,600. He wanted the loan repaid before she set out on a voyage to Europe which was scheduled for the following week.
You can see where this is going. Both men fell ill, but Van Ness recovered. The general survived the weekend, but he never left Mrs. Wharton's home alive. Suspicion fell on Mrs. Wharton, and previously-unknown stories about her earlier life came to light. Read about Elizabeth Wharton and her unsavory habits at Strange Company.
Canada declared war on Germany more than two years before the United States did in World War II. The British Columbia Regiment was shipped out to a secret destination on on October 1, 1940.
Coming down Eighth Street in New Westminster, Canadian photographer Claude P. Dettloff of The Province newspaper positioned himself to photograph the whole column marching down the hill. As he was getting ready to take the picture, he saw a young boy run out onto the road; Wait for Me, Daddy captures the image of the boy, five-year-old Warren "Whitey" Bernard, running out of his mother's grasp to his father. The picture Dettloff captured was picked up all over the world, getting exposure in Life; it hung in every school in British Columbia during the war.[1]
Jack Bernard made it home from the war five years later. Dettloff captured the reunion of Bernard and his much-grown son. Warren Bernard tells his story here. Today, a bronze statue depicting the iconic photograph stands at Hyack Square in New Westminster, British Columbia. -via reddit
Sam Fletcher must have been playing with a corkscrew and thought, "This looks like someone riding a rollercoaster." So he made it happen. This "stupid thing I made that went viral" is what the internet was made for. -via Boing Boing
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