Divertimento #143

I let my boyfriend choose a shower curtain and now we have this.

A list of the longest plays in NFL history.  In 2016 the longest was 141 yards run by Odell Beckham on a 4-yard punt return.   There is also a list of the fastest ball carriers.  And the longest tackles and fastest sacks.

A lake trout caught in Lake Superior is at least 46 years old.  "... the fish has been tagged eight times in the past four decades."  It was tagged again and released.

"Mikayla Holmgren made history this weekend when she became the first woman with Down Syndrome to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant, and as far as pageant officials know, the first in the country."

A brief anecdote about interacting with small children.

"Police say two people were accidentally shot at a church in Tellico Plains Thursday afternoon during a discussion about the recent church shooting in Texas."

Airless bicycle tires.

"A pair of Queensland paramedics made a detour to the beach for a palliative care patient who wanted to see the ocean again. The unidentified patient was being transported to the palliative care unit of a local hospital when she mentioned her desire to see the beach. The paramedics decided to take a detour to the hospital, propping the patient up in the stretcher so she could see the ocean stretching out from  Hervey Bay."

Fire pit made from an old clothes washing machine.

"Between 1,200 to 1,400 calls are made every year to the [Mackinac] bridge's Drivers Assistance Program that provides motorists with a crew member to drive them across if they're too afraid to drive themselves."

Coyote climbs a tree to eat the fruit.

Mind-boggling photos of landfills.

"Calculated destruction" as a police tactic.

"A pair of amateur explorers in Canada have found a vast underground passage stretching hundreds of metres underneath the bustling streets of Montreal whose formation dates back more than 15,000 years ago to the Earth’s last ice age."

A dog and an orphaned fawn grooming each other.

Extremely well-camouflaged snow leopard.

How Scott Walker and the Republican party are dismantling environmental regulations in Wisconsin for the sake of an industrial development by Foxconn.  "Foxconn can fill in wetlands that are regulated by the state, change the course of streams, even build in a stream running through the property if it wants to. In addition, the plant will use potentially polluting chemicals to manufacture an array of super-high-definition display panels. Yet no environmental impact statement will be required by state officials for one of the largest economic development projects in U.S. history."

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (Japanese "fail-video" game program) overdubbed a la MST3K. 

A dalmatian in a blanket.

Looks like Paul McCartney has released a new album.

Progression of Alzheimer's illustrated by a series of crocheted squares.

"The US Department of Education's Free Application for Federal Student Aid program requires any student applying for federal aid for college or university to turn over an enormous amount of compromising personal information, including current and previous addresses, driver's license numbers, Green Card numbers, marital details, drug convictions, educational history, tax return details, total cash/savings/checking balances, net worth of all investments, child support received, veterans' benefits, children's details, homelessness status, parents details including SSNs, and much, much more. If you have the Social Security Number, data of birth, and full name of anyone who's applied for college grants or loans, you can then feed it into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and it will show you all this data."

Lake Chad is "The World's Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster" (a longread to spoil your day).

Most people by now have heard about the conundrum posed by the "Do Not Resuscitate" tattoo,

Rex Tillerson "was a debacle, pure and simple, the worst Secretary of State in living memory (and there has been serious competition) not because of ineptitude, but because of the semi-intentional demolition job he was doing on his own department even as he fell out of presidential favor."

It is now possible to transplant vascularized lymph nodes to treat lymphedema.

"Enough Is Enough. We Need to Elect More Scientists to Congress."

"Yet perhaps the greatest thing in this scene [the singing of La Marseillaise in Casablanca] is that most of the people in it weren’t actors at all; rather, director Michael Curtiz filled the scene with actual French refugees. Keep in mind, this movie came out in 1942 and was filmed at the height of World War II, at a time when Germany looked nearly unbeatable and Nazi occupation of France was indefinite. And here was a group of refugees from that occupation, given the chance to sing their anthem with defiant pride. For one brief moment, this wasn’t a movie. It was real life, and it was tragic, and it was brave. Reports have said that extras were crying on set during filming, and the passion is evident any time you look past the main actors to the background singers."

The images in today's linkdump come from a review at Collector's Weekly of match holders and match safes (see also here).