From the Ripley's Odditorium in Williamsburg, Virginia, here are some articles found inside the stomachs of cows that were swallowed in pursuit of salt.
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In 2005, Kalamazoo, Michigan, went from a somewhat below-average place to live to a powerful magnet of a city in just one day. Seven years later, the New York Times magazine looks at how the hope of higher education has transformed the town.
Back in November 2005, when this year’s graduates were in sixth grade, the superintendent of Kalamazoo’s public schools, Janice M. Brown, shocked the community by announcing that unnamed donors were pledging to pay the tuition at Michigan’s public colleges, universities and community colleges for every student who graduated from the district’s high schools. All of a sudden, students who had little hope of higher education saw college in their future. Called the Kalamazoo Promise, the program — blind to family income levels, to pupils’ grades and even to disciplinary and criminal records — would be the most inclusive, most generous scholarship program in America.
It would also mark the start of an important social experiment. From the very beginning, Brown, the only person in town who communicates directly with the Promise donors, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills. It’s primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy. The few restrictions — among them, children must reside in the Kalamazoo public-school district and graduate from one of its high schools — seem designed to encourage families to stay and work in the region for a long time. The program tests how place-based development might work when education is the first investment.
Since The Promise was made, student test scores have gone up, the school district's enrollment increased by 2,000 students, $35 million has been granted in tuition money, and Kalamazoo is now a place to which families want to move. The program has also inspired other towns and school districts to compete by helping more students pay for college. Link -via Kottke
Ethel Maze of Circleville, Ohio, took a group of 18 disabled veterans and volunteers to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. She hadn't planned to take her cat Bob-bob, but there he was, stowed away in her suitcase when she arrived at her Disney Resort hotel.
Mike Groleau, the group's designated "baggage handler," said he thought he saw the bag move — but after a long night of packing, he slapped some tags on the front and back of the green suitcase and loaded it with the rest.
"This was the last bag I grabbed," Groleau said. "... [S]omehow it got zipped up."
Ten hours later, as the group settled into its Disney-area hotel, Maze unzipped the bag, and there was Bob-bob, a little shaken but still purring.
Despite a TSA security check (which did not set off any alarms) and several hours in the cargo hold, Bob-bob appeared to be just fine. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Jacob Langston, Orlando Sentinel)
Who would've guessed Bill Nye the Science Guy wore bow ties back in high school? And made them look good even then? Link
It sounded like a plot straight out of Seinfeld, but Jonathan Hood really did pay his school tuition with mail-in rebates.
Most companies send rebates in the form of prepaid debit cards, while about a third use cash or checks, he said. Almost all the rebates Hood uses are "free-after-rebate" offers, which means he's refunded the full amount.
[...] it was a month ago that he achieved his greatest feat so far: Using rebates to cover almost a semester's worth of tuition at Auburn University, where he's studying for his PhD.
"Tuition for this semester was $4,500," he said. "I paid over $2,500 of it with prepaid debit cards [from rebates] and a little over $1,000 of it with rebate checks."
He estimates he entered between 200 and 250 prepaid debit cards into the University's online bill pay system. After all the rebates were counted, he was left with less than $1,000 to pay out of pocket.
Find out how Jonathan was able to do it over at this Business Insider article by Mandi Woodruff: Link
Jeff Reitz and Tonya Mickesh got annual passes to the Disneyland Park as a holiday gift, and when they both got laid off from their jobs, they hatched an unusual plan:
As the months of unemployment dragged on, Mickesh grew despondent. Then she shared an idea with Reitz: resolve to go to Disneyland each day of 2012. That way, life, preferably in the form of a job, would be sure to get in the way of the plan. “You know how when you go to a restaurant and you order a meal, and it doesn’t come and doesn’t come?” she explained to me. “But you get up and go to the bathroom, and it comes.”
And you know what, it worked (at least for Mickesh). T.A. Frank of The New Republic interviewed the friends at Disneyland (where else?):
Because what they’ve done is weird, Reitz and Mickesh have gotten international press attention, which makes things weirder. Online comments in response have ranged from supportive to condemnatory (often “Why don’t you look for a job?” even though Mickesh is now full-time employed), but, either way, the idea of fighting unemployment with Disneyland touches on something visceral. Anyone who has suffered a bout of joblessness knows that one of its effects is to spoil leisure. Absent work, play loses its meaning. The bold stroke of Mickesh and Reitz was to forbid the bad from spoiling the good, to enjoy play even without work. Going to Disneyland is, sometimes, a way to persevere.
Link (Photo: Cd637/Wikipedia)
A group of people in San Francisco called the Guerrilla Grafters surreptitiously graft fruit tree branches onto non-fruiting trees in public spaces in the city -about 50 trees so far. Tom Levy of SFGate spoke with two of the "undercover orchardists," Tara Hui and Miriam Goldberg.
"The intention of doing guerrilla grafting is not so much for the sake of challenging authority, but to set an example - a working example - to counter the arguments," said Hui, a Beijing-born urban gardener and gray water activist with a computer science degree. "If we have a prototype, we can have a legitimate rational discussion on the issue."
But challenge authority it does. According to Mohammed Nuru, chief of San Francisco's Department of Public Works, guerrilla grafting is vandalism. The department says that no matter who plants or maintains a street tree, if it's on a sidewalk or other right-of-way area under city jurisdiction, it's publicly owned.
City officials say fruit trees are forbidden because fallen fruit could be a safety hazard. So far, there have been no complaints and no arrests. Link to story. Link to website. -Thanks, Kirsten!
(Image credit: Tom Levy)
Birds in the wild spend most of their time looking for something to eat, so should it surprise anyone that they want what you're eating? The music is Pomplamoose's cover of the Angry Birds theme. -via Pleated Jeans
Can you believe you're going to see color film footage from over a century ago? Inventor Edward Raymond Turner, along with businessman Frederick Marshall Lee, filed a patent for a color film process in 1899, but it was considered a failure. From the YouTube page:
Turner developed his complex three-colour process with support, first from Lee and then from the American film entrepreneur, Charles Urban. Using a camera and projector made by Brighton-based engineer Alfred Darling, Turner developed the process sufficiently to take various test films of colourful subjects such as a macaw, a goldfish in a bowl against a brightly striped background and his children playing with sunflowers, before his death in 1903 aged just 29. Urban went on to develop the process further with the pioneer film-maker George Albert Smith which resulted in the commercially successful Kinemacolor system, patented in 1906 and first exhibited to the public in 1909. Sadly, Turner's widow never received a penny from her husband's invention.
When the film footage was found in his archives, it appeared to be black and white. But each frame had been shot through alternating red, blue, and green filters. Watch how Michael Harvey, Brian Pritchard, and David Cleveland of the National Media Museum reverse-engineered the process to see the colors. Read more about it at Engadget. Link -via the Presurfer
Arthur O'Neil of Mansfield, Massachusetts has been decorating his lawn with plastic pinks flamingos for years, even dressing them up for holidays, which entertained the neighbors. But for the past few months, the flamingos have been disappearing one by one. Then one of the flamingos reappeared with a ransom note written on it:
"We have the flamingos....
If you ever want to see Arturo and his friends again, call [this number]."
The fact that the perpetrator knows a name of a plastic flamingo would make one believe the thief is someone O'Neil knows. O'Neil turned the evidence over to police. No arrests have yet been made.
Link -via Fark
This is amazing! Sasha the dog met a carp while swimming in Lake Mead, Nevada. They nosed each other for a while, then started swimming together like they were friends.
StoryCorps' new animated short is from the memories of Ramon "Chunky" Sanchez, who recalls the days when Mexican-American students would find their names Anglicized by schoolteachers. Until that one day... Video directed by the Rauch Brothers. Link
One day a couple of years ago, retiree Dominic Ehrler met Maria while walking around a manmade lake at Echo Park in Los Angeles, California, and the two became inseparable. Now, people fall in love all the time, but this is an unusual love story of sorts. You see, Maria is a goose:
The story doesn't end there. A year ago, the city of Los Angeles embarked on a project to drain the lake at Echo Park and Maria the Goose had to be moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Grrlscientist over at The Guardian has more on the story of Dominic and Maria (including a gender bender shocker about Maria and a sweet update from Dominic himself): Link
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