How do blind people clean up after a
seeing-eye dog defecates?
An op-ed piece in the Washington Post is entitled "The double-standard of making the poor
prove they’re worthy of government benefits," written in response to exposés of alleged food-stamp misuse.
A map depicts
the most conservative and most liberal cities in each state (I don't see any advantage in having this presented as a map rather than a list).
Humorous one-minute video of
a windy day in Iceland.
A
New Republic article explores
why white people like camping and hiking, while minorities don't. "Carol Cain, a 42-year-old New Jersey resident of Dominican and Puerto
Rican roots, was apparently day-hiking in Washington's Olympic National
Park when she told the paper, "We’ve been here for two days, walking
around, and I can’t think of any brown person that I’ve seen.”"
Trypophobia is the term for a
pathological fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes.
Debunking the
bogus argument that the Iraq war was based on faulty intelligence. And the same subject vehemently expressed by
Rachel Maddow: "The Bush Administration was not passively lied to. They weren’t duped by
the CIA! They made the case that they thought would be most persuasive
even when it wasn’t true.”
Impressive gif of a
man feeding snakes. This guy is good at his job.
Sub fusc explained. The term (new to me) is from the Latin
subfuscus, "moderately dark."
Mental Floss offers a map of
the most popular breed of dog in each state.
Books and journals published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with
full-text and images online. An incredible resource link for those interested in a wide variety of art.
"
Supergrass is a British slang term for an informer, which originated in London.
Informers had been referred to as "grasses" since the late-1930s, and
the "super" prefix was coined by journalists in the early 1970s... The origin of the term "grass" being used as signifying a traitor, a
person who informs on people he or she knows intimately,
ostensibly can
be traced to the expression "snake in the grass," which has a similar
meaning.The phrase derives from the writings of Virgil
... and has been known in the English language, meaning "traitor," since the late 17th century."
A riot in Minneapolis occurred when
bicyclists used squirtguns to attack PedalPub users. Six of the PedalPub users were cops; arrests ensued.
A gloomy economic forecast in
The Telegraph: "The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nations has cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat... Stephen King from HSBC warns that
the global authorities have
alarmingly few tools to combat the next crunch, given that interest
rates are already zero across most of the developed world, debts levels
are at or near record highs, and there is little scope for fiscal
stimulus. "The world economy is sailing across the ocean without any lifeboats to use in case of emergency," he said."
A
Norwegian sex-education video.
"Inside Bain's house, police found
thousands of meticulously catalogued individual socks wrapped in sandwich bags with individual donors’ photographs attached. “They were everywhere and anywhere,” a police officer later testified.
“They were all over the furniture, hanging from lampshades and even in
the microwave, frying pan and cooker.
It was like there had been an
explosion in a sock factory and socks had blown all over the place.”... The master approached his slave-to-be at a spiritualist church and told
him he’d been conversing with angels, who had told him that he had to
collect 10,000 socks. So the promise of socks lured the sock gimp into
subservience."
"A
stretch of coast which is rich in wildlife and archaeology has been bought by the National Trust for more than £1 million as it launches a
new vision for looking after the nation's coastlines."
"A comprehensive guide to
YouTube’s dumbest and most dangerous teen trends." The Cinnamon Challenge, the Saltine Challenge, the No-Cry Challenge, the Condom Challenge...
Cory Booker: “When they told me
I couldn’t sit on the Senate floor with an iPad—that the technology wasn’t even permitted—I breathed deep and knew that I was
going to have to start pushing.”
The
Margate Shell Grotto is an as-yet-unexplained mystery: "the 2000 square feet of mosaics, created from mussel, cockle, whelk and
oyster shells have provoked a multitude of explanations none of which
have been confirmed with any total surety... had the grotto been built in the 1700s then there would have been some
vestigial local memory (or legend) of its construction. In order to get
millions of shells in to this underground passage many local people
would have to have been involved in their transport. Yet the discovery
in 1835 was a surprise to all – no one stepped forward with any
explanation... suggestion that the grotto was built by the Knights Templar or their associates sometime in the middle 1100s..."
A New Zealand
sikh removed his turban to comfort a small boy who had been injured in an accident. Some members of the local community responded in a heartwarming fashion.
Why Swiss cheese has holes. "Agroscope scientists noted that Swiss cheeses had fewer holes over the
past 10 to 15 years as open buckets were replaced by sealed milking
machines which "completely did away with
the presence of tiny hay
particles in the milk.""
A
brief (but incisive) comment on the latest revelations re Dennis Hastert: "If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the
President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives
led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that
he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments
covering up his sexual contact with a boy.
(links at the primary link)
The "
twenty most bike-friendly [large] cities on the planet." One of them is in the United States.
"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research
Agency had
industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed
with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on
LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work
through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate
feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row,
followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota
of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments
on other workers’ posts. "
"A new $2.50 battery sleeve called the Batteriser, coming to Amazon this
fall, promises to extend the life of your batteries up to eight times longer by drawing out their remaining power -- which you were about to
throw in the garbage. The tiny, 0.1 millimeter-thick stainless steel
Batteriser sleeve features an incredibly small circuit board, built to
tap into the battery's remaining energy." - Probably nonsense. Hat tip to reader Mark, who provides a debunking link in his comment.
