The pandemic has caused many families to break into smaller groups, and many are either canceling big family feasts or paring back the guest list. This means that farmers who've spent a lot of time and effort growing large Thanksgiving turkeys are facing a very different market. Their customers are asking for smaller turkeys.  

In Pescadaro, California, Dede Boies has had to dig into her wallet to ensure she is prepared for any demand in smaller birds. Boies, whose heritage turkeys were born in May, says by mid-summer she knew Thanksgiving wouldn’t look normal this year.

“It’s a little nerve wracking… If turkey sales are not where we planned them to be, then that’s going to impact us significantly,” she says, adding that if she isn’t able to sell the meat by December, it would put her in the red.

She’s paying her processor an extra dollar per turkey to cut the birds in half, as she is receiving so many inquiries for smaller size turkeys. Boies also decided to harvest half of her 200 birds two weeks early so they didn’t grow anymore. She has needed an extra facility to store them, which has cost an extra few thousand dollars.

So if you are looking for just the right turkey, you may have to pay more per pound. At the same time, if the turkeys don't sell, farmers will be in a spot. Read about the demand for smaller turkeys and how turkey farmers are coping at Smithsonian.

For months now, people have been comparing the year 2020 to a badly-written novel, but the concept of “badly written novel” can sink ever lower. The English Department at San Jose State University sponsors the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the most confounding opening sentence to "the worst of all possible novels." The competition, now in its 37th year, is named for author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a popular producer of purple prose. The 2020 winners have been announced, and the grand prize goes to Lisa Kluber of San Francisco for this opening line:

Her Dear John missive flapped unambiguously in the windy breeze, hanging like a pizza menu on the doorknob of my mind.

The winners and “dishonorable mentions”in the various categories are a hoot as well. Julie Winspear is a winner in the Romance category for whatever this is:

In Gertrude’s experience lovemaking was always bittersweet, or at least it had been until one fateful night when Chaz, the seductive man behind the concession stand blessed her with the salty-sweet bliss reminiscent of both true romance and quality kettle corn.

While there’s plenty to read, you do not want to miss the category titled “vile puns.” See all the jaw-droppingly bad lines at the winner’s page. -via Fark

Turkey — Ali Yerlikaya, mayor of Istanbul, has recently announced via Twitter that the resident cat of Hagia Sophia, Gli, has passed away due to old age. Gli was 16.

The famous cat has captured the hearts of the many who visit the Hagia Sophia. She has over 120 thousand followers on Instagram and has been a resident of the mosque for the past 16 years.

Among the famous figures charmed by her is former U.S. President Barack Obama, who was said to adore the cat during a trip in 2009.

Gli the cat will be sorely missed by her online fans and those who were lucky enough to score some one-on-one playtime with her.

May she find peace in cat heaven. Rest in peace, Gli.

(Image Credit: Ali Yerlikaya/ Twitter)

Oh, to reach a destination without spending long hours on the road in traffic. Now that’s a future people can get behind! Fast technology transportation may be closer to completion. Hyperloop technology claims that it could transport people and goods at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour. A company developing the technology has managed to move its employees through a test system: 

Virgin Hyperloop became the first company to conduct a human test of the technology on Sunday at its 500-meter test track in the desert north of Las Vegas. The two volunteers, wearing casual street clothes, were whisked in a pod that was levitated by magnets inside a vacuum tube to 107 m.p.h. in 6.25 seconds.

The riders sat in molded seats covered in white vegan leather, housed inside the all-white carbon fiber-clad pod.

While the G-forces on the pod were three times that of an airplane, “it was much smoother than I expected,” said Sara Luchian, 37, one of the test riders and the company’s director of passenger experience. And unlike an airplane, there were no lateral forces that would have caused the pod to sway, she said.

“It felt not that much different than accelerating in a sports car,” said Josh Giegel, 35, the company co-founder and the other volunteer rider.

“This is a step of historical significance,” said Jay Walder, the company’s chief executive, pointing to 20 months of planning. “I don’t think you can overstate it. This is a moonshot moment. I have no doubt this will change the world.”

Image via the New York Times 

Île de Ré is an island off the western coast of France. It is often plagued by mosquitoes which bite the legs of the asinine residents. To protect them, the local humans dress the donkeys in pants. BBC News informs us that donkey caretakers in other parts of the world, including Greece and Canada, have adopted this clever practice in their own nations.

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Jiel Beaumadier

Are you masking up when you go out of your home? In many places, it can be socially and legally mandatory. The protective face mask has come to represent life in 2020. A variety of artists offered their fresh takes on masking at the Vicki Myhren Gallery in Denver, Colorado, including this papier-mâché blowfish by Liz Sexton.

Rob the Original, an artist in San Antonio, Texas, works with hair, salt, dollar bills, wood burned tortillas -- well, there aren't many media that he doesn't use. Much of his work is on the heads of people in San Antonio, as he operate a barbershop there. Or perhaps it should be better called a hair art studio, considering what he can do with your locks.

Obviously, the answer is no, but that’s what he thinks he is. In this short clip, Einstein the Texan Talking Parrot calls himself a chicken many times and then proceeds to make chicken noises.

That’s a weird-looking chicken right there.

See the clip over at Laughing Squid.

(Image Credit: Einstein the Talking Texan Parrot/ Laughing Squid)

After finding inspiration in nature, engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed this soft fabric robotic gripper that can grip and pick up objects without breaking them, similar to how an elephant’s trunk behaves. The engineers state that this technology could be applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as in agriculture, and even in human rescue operations.

Dr. Thanh Nho Do, Scientia Lecturer and UNSW Medical Robotics Lab director, said the gripper could be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if his team secured an industry partner.

He is the senior author of a study featuring the invention, published in Advanced Materials Technologies this month.

[...]

"Animals such as an elephant, python or octopus use the soft, continuum structures of their bodies to coil their grip around objects while increasing contact and stability—it's easy for them to explore, grasp and manipulate objects," he said.

"These animals can do this because of a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles without rigid bone—for example, an elephant's trunk has up to 40,000 muscles. So, we wanted to mimic these gripping capabilities—holding and manipulating objects are essential motor skills for many robots."

Researchers have demonstrated in a test that a gripper prototype weighing only 8.2 grams could carry up to 1.8 kilograms, which is over 220 times its own mass.

Amazing!

Learn more details about this device over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: UNSW Engineering/ TechXplore)

Whatever it is that’s inside this thing, I’m sure that it is something that we are not yet ready to see. But for now, we can only guess.

What do you think is in there?

Image via Engrish.com

In the 19th century, when sugar was an expensive treat, Swedish people used candy for important occasions, such as weddings, baptisms, and anniversaries, wrapped in bright colors and adorned with celebratory images. They also used candies for funerals.

But funeral confectionery design was often downright macabre. There may have been sweets inside the wrappers, but the candies did little to sugar-coat the sad occasion, with wrappers carrying lithographs of skulls, graves, and skeletons.

“The thinking was, ‘We’re dealing with death here and a great loss,’ so visually the expressions were gloomy and morbid,” says Ulrika Torell, a curator at the Nordiska Museum and the author of Sugar and Sweet Things: A Cultural-Historical Study of Sugar Consumption in Sweden. “You were not making something milder than it really was.”  

These funeral candies were treated as precious souvenirs, and were not often eaten. But over time, changes in culture changed the custom of funerary candy until it has become a lost art. Read about Swedish funeral candy at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Karolina Kristensson/Nordiska Museet)

BetaSmash used Melodyne Autotune to turn the sounds of a cat fight into music. The point is to showcase how cats use tone, rhythm, and tempo to communicate their feelings, as we are more likely to listen when the caterwauling has been made a bit more pleasant. Still, I was impressed at how this ”cat fight” turned out to be more of one cat lecturing another about his place in the pecking order. There is a bit of violence about halfway through. Still, the animal kingdom has a way of winning and losing fights without causing too much damage; gotta look out for the survival of the species, after all. -via Boing Boing

At around 1:34 AM on election night, Emily Harrington began her free climb of El Capitan’s Golden Gate route. Her goal: to finish the whole climb within a day. Was she able to achieve her goal? Yes, she was, and it was nothing short of amazing.

Of course, Harrington knew that it was going to be difficult, as she already attempted this route twice last year. But this time, she just knew that she could do it, and her intuition was correct.

Over the course of the next 21 hours, 13 minutes, and 51 seconds, Harrington motored up the 3,000-foot line, becoming the first woman to achieve this feat, as well as only the fourth woman ever to free-climb El Capitan in a day, on any route. (In 1994, Lynn Hill became the first person to free-climb the Nose in under 24 hours. Steph Davis and Mayan Smith-Gobat have each climbed Freerider, in 2004 and 2011, respectively, in a day.)

More details about her climb over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Jon Glassberg/ Wikimedia Commons)

While Dr. Seuss is best known for his timeless children’s books, he created plenty of other things, like advertising copy and political cartoons. These were projects he did for a living, but there was also a hidden series he called the Midnight Paintings, which were personal, experimental, and sometimes surreal artworks that show us a different side of Dr. Seuss. -via Digg

A St. Louis couple is not only facing felony gun charges for pointing guns at protestors, they are also in another legal dispute with a photographer who shot a viral photo of them. It turns out that the couple, attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey used a viral photo of them shot by United Press International (UPI) photojournalist William Greenblatt: 

 He hadn’t given the couple permission to use his photo in any way, and therefore their cards seemed to be a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.

“Being lawyers, they should know copyright laws, but apparently they feel like they don’t need to adhere to any of that,” Greenblatt tells PetaPixel.

In response to the cards, Greenblatt sent the couple a bill while UPI sent a cease-and-desist letter.

“I am in the business of selling images,” Greenblatt writes. “I do not give them away for free. Enclosed you will find an invoice for $1500.00, a normal charge for an image such as yours.”

Mark McCloskey responded by posting the letter to Facebook.

“This made my day: the photographer that trespassed into my neighborhood and stole a photo of us has sent us a bill!!!!!” McCloskey writes. “Now be nice and don’t bother him, but what chutzpah.”

Greenblatt says the couple has yet to respond to his letter, and that it’s not money he’s after — he simply wants to protect his copyright as a photographer.

“People steal work all the time. They take it and feel that it’s theirs. […] It makes me mad that they feel they can use the image just because it’s of them,” the photographer says. “It’s not even the money. I could care less about the money.

Image via PetaPixel