You can go online to order everything from delivered food to new friends, but the companies and networks don't have to put up with horrible behavior from their customers. Each of these services has a limit to what they'll tolerate, and if you cross that line, you'll no longer be a customer. And for each rule, you know there's already been someone who broke it. For example,

A paper trail is the last thing people should want when paying for illegal goods and services. And yet, a recent survey of 1,000 millennials found that around a third of them had used Venmo to pay for drugs.

I mean, people can do what they want — but maybe don't label payments, "For drugs." Those kinds of transactions are explicitly prohibited by Venmo, and it can ban accounts because of them.

People should at least try to hide what they're doing.

Learn what can get you banned from Uber, Tinder, Yelp, Twitch, OpenTable, and more at Mashable.

Artists Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh had a volatile and somewhat lopsided friendship. Van Gogh was living in Arles in 1888, and wanted Gauguin to come live with him there, where he imagined they would paint together and found an artist's colony. Gauguin had a sense of foreboding about that plan, but finally relented and said he would go to Arles for a temporary stay.

Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a beloved friend who was about to come visit.

Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear incident.

During that time, Gauguin saw Van Gogh descend into his mental illness. Things came to a head two days before Christmas, when Gauguin went to a hotel for the night. Gauguin had escaped being cut by a razor by Van Gogh, who instead went home and cut off his own ear. Read Gauguin's account of that night and the aftermath, from the book Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, at Brain Pickings. -Thanks, Tim!

For a lot of human history, the solution to the problem of poverty-stricken children, no matter how young they were, was to find them a job. For 15 years in the early 20th century, Italian boys from poor families and orphans could better themselves by going to sea on the ship Caracciolo, run by educator Giulia Civita Franceschi.  

The idea of a training ship for disadvantaged children wasn’t new in Italy. In 1883, Genoa had established the training ship Garaventa and in Venice, Scilla was open to orphans of fishermen. In Naples, the situation of the poor was particularly desperate. Housing was unsanitary and overcrowded. Malnutrition was common. The cholera outbreak of 1910–11 killed an estimated 2,600 people over five months. In 1911, a law was passed to approve the donation of Caracciolo, a former Navy ship, to the city. In August 1913, Civita came aboard as head of the program, which was open to boys between the ages of six and 16 (despite being referred to as a “kindergarten ship”).

But it wasn't just a job, or even just vocational training. The ship Caracciolo incorporated a real education along with training as a sailor. The pictures are grim, but many boys were proud of their training and accomplishments, and went on to live lives they wouldn't have otherwise. Read about the "kindergarten ship" Caracciolo at Atlas Obscura.

A pride of lions is gathered around a watering hole at the Djuma Game Reserve in South Africa. One cub keeps running to the water, while his mother tries to keep him under control. But kids just want to play! No, son, there may be crocodiles down there!

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She manages to get him to the baby pool, but you can tell this mischievous cub is going to strain his mother's patience for quite some time. -via Laughing Squid

William Brusco is a taxi driver in Houston, Texas. As hurricane Harvey approached, a young Cooper's hawk flew into his car and decided it was a good place to stay. After all, there was both a weather event and a cat outside!

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Brusco couldn't shoo the hawk away (although he tried), and continued to record short video updates on his hawk adventure, as he took the bird home with him. Continue reading to find out what happened to Harvey the Hurricane Hawk.

Jesse Szewczyk graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, and now writes for Buzzfeed. He shares some basic tips for making your home-cooked dishes taste more like what you'd get in a top restaurant. If you've been cooking for a long time, you might know some of these things already, but it's always good to have a refresher course. For beginning cooks, it's an eye-opening list.  

5. Completely dry your meats before cooking them.

Whether it's roasted chicken or seared scallops, drying them ensures you'll get a crisp, golden skin that won't stick to the pan. Pat them dry with paper towels or let them air-dry in the cooler for a few hours before cooking them.

6. For maximum flavor, toast your nuts and spices.

Toasting nuts and spices brings out their flavors and takes your cooking to a whole new level. For spices, give them a quick toasting in a dry pan over low heat or bloom them in hot oil. For nuts, toast them in a 350° F oven for 10-15 minutes before cooking with them.

See all 16 tips at Buzzfeed.

A couple, a few, several, some, what do those terms mean? The carpenter knows what he's doing, but he doesn't know precisely how many nails he'll need. Meanwhile, the assistant wants a number because he has no clue what those terms mean. I always considered "a couple" to be two, "several" to be three, and "a few" to be however many nails you can pick up easily with one hand. Your mileage may vary. However, when I'm writing a blog post, I use "quite a few" when I have no idea what the actual number is. This is the newest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble. 

Simon Tofield gave his animated cat a break, and instead strung together a parade of kitten clips showing real life cats playing, like kittens should.  

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I love the imaginative names these kittens have. Meet Strudel and Schnitzel, Auto and Motive, Cletus and Bubba, Hot Dog and Tatertot, Vents Du Sud, and my favorite, Lugnut.

In 1919, a New York advertising agency told 18-year-old Lillian Eichler that they did not hire women, or Jews, as ad writers. But her writing impressed the company officials so much that they changed their minds and hired her. She produced many innovative ads over the next few years. At the same time, Doubleday issued an etiquette book by Eleanor Holt, which was stuffy and old-fashioned, and did not sell too well. They needed help advertising it.

Lillian produced a campaign showing an agitated guest spilling a cup of coffee over the table cloth, with the caption ‘Has This Ever Happened To You?’ The ad swiftly sold the 1,000 copies of Holt’s encyclopedia, but they were just as quickly returned, readers finding the tone too old fashioned.

Doubleday hit upon the idea of having this fusty book filled with Victorian social dilemmas, being re-written and modernized. And who better to put a Jazz Age spin, than the copywriting prodigy that had created the ad.

“My mother was asked to rewrite this out of date book to make it more appropriate for the time”, recalls Anita Weinstein, Lillian’s daughter. “She was a very ambitious young woman. She was very proud that she was one of the very few women who would drive over the bridge [from Queens] to work in the city.” Astonishingly for 1922, the young copywriter not only re-wrote the book on etiquette, but dreamt up the ad campaign to sell it as well.

Lillian Eichler's Book of Etiquette was not stuffy, and addressed social manners from the viewpoint of a modern young woman, one like herself, who made her own way in life yet wanted to impress friends and family, bosses, and suitors. The book and several others made her a millionaire. Read the story of Lillian Eichler, and see pages from her books at Messy Messy Chic.  

The last time we checked in, the newlyweds from Megacynics were preparing for a Hawaiian vacation. Comics have been sparse since they left, but now we see how the trip is going. Yeah, she could have asked for a drink without coconut milk, and probably did, then forgot about it a few drinks later. She's going to have to keep that buzz maintained for the rest of their stay to deal with the itching. Or at least use that as a plausible excuse.  

Research in 2002 concluded that this is the world's funniest joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence; then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "OK, now what?"

Once upon a time, it wasn't so easy to determine whether a person was dead, or merely ailing. A case from 1702 chronicles how Anthony Grey, the Earl of Kent, keeled over and died, possibly from a stroke. Dr. Charles Goodall was staying at the same location, and hurried to do what he could to revive the 57-year-old man. However, the standard procedures of the time were tantamount to torture, and could have even hastened Grey's death.

Then Doctor West came, who advised a frying pan made red hot to be applied to the head…

Read the timeline of those procedures as they were recorded by the doctor, at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company  

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

It's not easy to swing a real estate deal when a particular piece of property is considered a work of art. There are a couple of dozen houses in far-flung places across the U.S. that stand out from their neighbors because they were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The homes are innovative, beautiful, and historic, but they aren't easy to sell. Who wants to pay millions of dollars for a house that has only one bathroom? That's not the only reason the houses are hard to sell, as Mental Floss explains. 

A commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Wright's birth is expected to bring a horde of his fans to New York City next month, and many of them will make a pilgrimage to Tirranna, a Wright house in New Canaan, Connecticut. It's on the market, but few visitors will be equipped to purchase it.  

For brokers like Mr. Milne, marketing these houses offers unique challenges, including the need to become a Wright expert, to devise a strategy for separating potential buyers from sightseers, and to develop a convincing argument for why someone should pay a premium to live in a house with small bedrooms and a snug kitchen, cinder-block walls, cement floors, narrow doorways, a carport instead of a garage and, quite likely, no air-conditioning.

For potential buyers, it means becoming the steward of a legacy, which includes instant membership in an exclusive, sometimes intrusive, society of Wright enthusiasts.  

The New York Times tells the stories of five Wright houses that are on the market our have been sold in recent years. Pictured is the Penfield House in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, which has been on the market for three years.  

(Image credit: Marykeiran)

I hope whoever was responsible for this carousel installed under a wall was fired, but they should have been forced to remove it first. In a collection of weird construction failures, you know some of them were the result of working around an addition, like cutting a hole in an existing door because moving a door is really hard. Some are due to laziness. Others are just incomprehensible.

At least this one is easily fixed, although it's probably in a hotel, in which case it's a scheme to save on toilet paper. You can see 21 weird construction results at Pleated-Jeans. 

There are places found all over the world where street artists go the extra mile to liven up the city around them with glorious color. And the cities are proud to show off their colors and styles. The image above is one of the many murals you'll find at Calle 28 de Julio in Barranco, Peru. If you are traveling anytime in the future, you'll want to look these addresses up when you get there. If not, you'll enjoy a trip around the world in street art by seeing the pictures at The Culture Trip. -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Flickr user Heather Sperling)

Barnaby Dixon, who's made some awesome puppet designs before, is back with an impressive finger puppet of a glow-in-the-dark insect!

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On the one hand, it's cute and the fluorescent effects are neat. But the real magic here is Dixon's skills as a puppeteer and the way he makes the bug move so naturally with just his fingers. -via Boing Boing