It must be a refreshing and nostalgic feeling for someone who has been living near nature to reflect on how things have changed throughout the years. Living near rivers, mountains, and lakes must bring a lot of memories to mind and remind us of things past.
In her new book "the lake", Robin Layton captures several breathtaking photos of life in, on, and around Lake Washington and shares her experiences and unique perspective of the place in which she has spent most of her life for the past decade living and working.
The British Parliament has two months left before the deadline for a Brexit deal to be passed, starting the transition period for the UK to leave the European Union. At the moment, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering a no-deal Brexit.
Nearly 100 companies have relocated from Britain to the Netherlands or set up offices there to be within the European Union due to the United Kingdom’s planned departure from the bloc, a Dutch government agency said on Monday.
Another 325 companies worried about losing access to the European market are considering a move, the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency said.
Shown at D23, the annual convention for Disney fans, the first part of this video blows by pretty quickly, showing us familiar scenes from the original Star Wars trilogy and even glimpses of the prequels. Fast forward through The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and suddenly there's til-now-unseen footage from The Rise of Skywalker, leading up to a final snippet that raises so many questions. What is Rey wearing, and why? But what a cool lightsaber she's got! We won't know what it all means until The Rise of Skywalker premieres in December.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA mobilized an isolated community, the Hmong Tribe in northern Laos, to fight the Viet Cong. More than forty years after the war ended, they are still waiting for someone to save them.
In 2008, Al Jazeera's Tony Birtley trekked uphill for more than two days through dense forests in search of the Hmong who were left behind. He found a settlement of fewer than 200 people, most born after the war but still living as their ancestors had. He was the first outsider they had seen in 32 years.
The United States, while ostensibly welcoming immigrants from all over, has a peculiar history of demonizing those newcomers in waves, no matter where they came from. Some time later, we hear about it and wonder what the fuss was all about. One of those panics came from an influx of immigrants from -of all places- Canada. During the Civil War, shipments of cotton from the South ceased and New England mills shut down. As business resumed after the war, nearly a million French-Canadian workers arrived to operate the mills. While they became American citizens, they kept to themselves (mostly in squalid company tenements), spoke French, and worst of all, they were Catholic.
But U.S. opinion demanded of the naturalized citizen something more than a merely formal participation in civic life, and Franco-American efforts to preserve their culture soon aroused suspicion and enmity. By the 1880s, elite American newspapers, including The New York Times, saw a sinister plot afoot. The Catholic Church, they said, had dispatched French Canadian workers southward in a bid to seize control of New England. Eventually, the theory went, Québec would sever its British ties and annex New England to a new nation-state called New France. Alarmists presented as evidence for the demographic threat the seemingly endless influx of immigrants across the northeastern border, coupled with the large family size of the Franco-Americans, where 10 or 12 children was common, and many more not unknown.
Living outside Glasgow, Scotland is Jillian Falconer, along with her husband and four children.
When her youngest kid, Lucie, went to school for the first day, she took an adorable photo in her school uniform. However, everything changed by the school day’s end, and her mother knew not was coming.
"Her dad asked how she got on during the day so I sent him the picture of Lucie just to show obviously she had an eventful day," Jillian told TODAY.
On what caused the 5-year-old's disheveled look, Jillian said: "I think she was just excited to see her friends after the summer break. Nothing specific happened."
The photos, however, for some reason, became viral after Jillian and her family posted them on their personal social media pages.
"It just went crazy," she explained.
"I presume because it's relatable," she added. "Anyone can relate to it, either going to school or after a night out. It's a before-or-after I think adults can relate to because of that, and parents can relate to it because their kids may come home in the same state."
I added Aerosmith ft. Run DMC to this video of the shadow of a millipede walking and it has amused me more than it should have done. pic.twitter.com/esyBCaugXn
By now you've probably seen the viral video by Dr Juanita Arrieta of a millipede walking, made easier to see by the elongated shadow it cast. The millipede prancing jauntily along is intriguing, and of course the internet had to put music to it. @Pandamoanimum found a bunch of songs that not only refer to walking, but work with the bug's rhythm ("Walk of Life," "Footloose," "I Walk the Line," "Walking on Sunshine," "500 Miles," and The Imperial March, among others). You can see them in a Threadreader post, but I would recommend checking out the entire Twitter thread, as other people contributed their own ideas. My personal favorite is the one with music from Panjabi MC. -via Metafilter
New York in the 1890s saw the rise of iceboxes. The city stayed hot in the summer, and food had to be brought in from further away than ever, so ice was harvested in the winter, stored all year long, and delivered to keep food fresh and cool. There were 1500 ice trucks in New York at the time, and deliverymen were a welcome sight. This led to raunchy jokes about all the housewives an ice man would see every day. Those joke inspired J. Fred Helf to write the hit novelty song, "How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?”
An iceman had to be in good physical shape, which made his presence all the more concerning to husbands who were away. Unlike other delivery men, he had to come inside, and ensconcing ice in the box sometimes required chipping away at the block until it fit. It wasn’t unusual, after all that work, for the lady of the house to offer the ice man a drink or snack. It’s no wonder that he came to be perceived as a working-class lothario—sort of a 19th-century version of a buff pool boy.
“How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?” capitalized on the idea that icemen had it made. In the opening verse, the narrator admires a brownstone mansion and asks the servant if Mr. Vanderbilt is in. “I thought it the house of a millionaire,” the song continues, “but he told me the iceman resided there.” Subsequent verses describe the iceman trading ice for kisses at customers’ homes and enjoying free drinks at the cafe. (These are referred to as “tin-roof cocktails,” capitalizing on a joke with a double meaning about tin-roof cocktails being “on the house.”)
Phil Donohue is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work is on the once-popular aspects of American culture that are discarded or forgotten in the passage of time. From Midcentury malls left desolate, restaurants and businesses adorned in fading pastels from the ’80s and ’90 , nostalgia is felt and shown. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Phil Donohue shared a selection of his photographs from his book I Dreamed It Was Better Than It Was, along with the concept behind it:
What are the concepts behind I Dreamed It Was Better Than It Was, and what are you searching for in a photograph?
Phil Donohue: In a lot of ways, these are portraits of forgotten spaces and the sometimes lone people who inhabit them. I look for something that I fear won’t survive our current view of progress — and a lot of what I’m drawn to does seem to disappear shortly after I make an image, so I’ve learned to trust my instincts there.
I’ve always had a camera on me, whether I was filming or shooting, but I only really started focusing on this type of work around 2006, and even then, it was only a personal exploration, nothing I ever considered sharing in any kind of meaningful way. It was around 2011 when I started to contextualize and share the work.
Researchers at UCLA initially hypothesized that cat owners would be more emotional, or suffer from more anxiety and depression, than other groups they observed, including dog owners and folks with no pets at all. Upon examining the results from the study’s 511 participants (264 owned pets, 297 did not), their hypothesis didn’t hold up.
“We found no differences between cat owners and the other participants on any of the self-reported measures of anxiety, depression or experiences in relationships,” the study explains.
The pet owners, overall, did appear to empathize more with their dogs and cats upon hearing the animals’ meows and whimpers, as they rated the sounds “sadder” than the group who didn’t already own pets.
In the 1960s, huge fiberglass advertising statues were erected across America, meant to draw attention and traffic to one business or another. These were called Muffler Men, since many of the 18- to 25-foot figures held a muffler or other product. The first one was a statue of Paul Bunyan, and the company that inherited the mold used it to make giant men of all kinds, and then branched out to other giant advertising statues, like chickens, dinosaurs, and women. In the 1970s, fiberglass giants fell out of favor, and out of advertising budgets. Now many of them have been repurposed, or belong to private collectors.
One such collector, the Bay Area’s Bell Plastics, is refuge to what is perhaps the world’s largest conglomeration of original muffler men. Once a year, they invite the public into their warehouse for a unique opportunity to wander amongst various advertising giants, including the rare Uniroyal Girl (a bikini-clad female “Muffler Man” who is said to be modeled after Jackie Kennedy), two of San Francisco’s beloved Doggie Diner heads, a slightly demented Santa, a pair of industrious car washing octopi, and other oversized company shills. What makes this event even more special is that Bell Plastics has reconstructed the goliath molds using the original figures and now Big Mike threatens to roam the earth once more.
The bad news is that the open house at Bell Plastics was last week. The good news is that Boing Boing has a collection of images from the event. And there's always next year, if you want to start planning a road trip to Hayward, California.
In the age comfort viewing for shows and films, where some are available with just a simple click on a streaming platform, there are a lot of original and exclusive shows on streaming platforms. Platform exclusives such as Stranger Things (Netflix) and Good Omens (Amazon Prime) are available, along with other fantastic recent additions. But even amidst the wide variety and choice of recent shows, why are people still opting for a rerun of old shows? The answer: comfort. Some watch it for the sake of nostalgia - a show they can turn back to when they want to relax, or want to avoid the pressure of social commentary on latest shows (also, spoilers). They can watch these shows at their own pace, and under no pressure at all.
Matthew Ball comments on this phenomenon by pointing out what streaming sites such as Netflix are for - it isn’t for what they contain, but what they provide:
Matthew Ball, a US venture capitalist and sharp commentator on the streaming platforms, calls it “tonnage”. For him, the idea that it is “quality” driving the shift to streaming is a misconception. “Netflix’s biggest shows drove subscriber growth and branding, but most of its success comes from enabling audiences to easily watch large volumes of all types of content wherever they are, without fail, and at a low cost,” he says. “Netflix isn’t ‘hired’ for Stranger Things, but for entertainment at large.”
There have been no violent crimes about the ISS, as far as we know. But NASA is looking into whether astronaut Anne McClain may have crossed a legal line in communications from the International Space Station. McClain is accused of improperly accusing her estranged wife's bank account.
McClain's spouse, former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden, brought a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that McClain had committed identity theft, despite not seeing any indication of moved or spent funds.
Worden's parents then brought another complaint with NASA's Office of Inspector General, alleging that McClain had improperly accessed Worden's private financial records and conducted a "highly calculated and manipulative campaign" to gain custody of Worden's son.
McClain's lawyer, Rusty Hardin, told the Times that "she strenuously denies that she did anything improper" and "is totally cooperating."
He added that McClain was monitoring the account to ensure the well-being of Worden's son, who they had been raising, using the same password to access the account as she had throughout their relationship.
It all began as a joke. Fraser Harvey, a regular customer at the Sensory Lab coffee shop in Melbourne, Australia taped a flier to the wall of his favorite cafe. It proclaimed him Customer of the Week.
Harvey then went about his business, which included drinking coffee. When he stopped by again, he saw this photo instead of his own. It was better than his, as it had a frame.
Harvey was angry.
He had been challenged.
He would not back down, as he was the true Customer of the Week. And thus began the Great Customer War of 2019, as neither would yield to the other. Both Harvey and his anonymous adversary repeatedly one-upped each other.
In their most recent engagement, Harvey's opponent got a tattoo affirming her position as Customer of the Week.
Read the whole extraordinary story at The Guardian, including feedback on the reactions of employees and customers:
Malatesta was able to shed more light: “Customers were weirding the [expletive deleted-ed.] out. Because she wheeled in that projector. She was there, you know, trying to get her face exactly where she wanted it. If only they’d filmed it. It’s like a Seinfeld episode.”
Yes, it really is like this. Cosmo Kramer would totally get into a competition like this.
-via Nag on the Lake | Photos: Fraser Harvey, whom I'm rooting for.
Nancy Tuttle, an artist in Oregon, makes extraordinarily vivid sculptures from driftwood. She finds monsters, fairies, beasts, and mages deep within the grains of wood. Tuttle carves eye-popping faces that direct their sometimes unwelcome attention at the viewer.
