"Do you mind if I smoke?"

YouTube link.

This video was posted in memory of the magician, Tom Mullica, who died this week. 

Two trigger warnings seem appropriate.  If you are offended by people smoking, definitely give this a pass.  Additionally, those who tolerate smoking (or smoke) may find some of the maneuvers gross and disgusting. 

Chaise longue

A chaise longue is an upholstered sofa in the shape of a chair that is long enough to support the legs. In modern French the term chaise longue can refer to any long reclining chair such as a deckchair. A literal translation in English is "long chair".  In the United States, chaise longue is often written and pronounced as "chaise lounge", a 19th century folk anagrammatic adaptation of the term.

Image credit.

"Best Visual Effects" Oscar winners

YouTube link.

Webbed fingers as swimming aids

Why didn't I think of this? Make them for maybe 2c, sell them for $3.  I could have been rich.

Via Neatorama.

Crack

The frozen surface of Lake Baikal (National Geographic).

A "regumming factory"

(This post will be of interest only to stamp collectors)

I'd like to share some fascinating excerpts from an article published in the May 1988 issue of The Posthorn (the official journal of the Scandinavian Collectors Club).  The author, Gene Lesney, was visiting Hamburg and arranged to make a visit to a clandestine regumming workroom.

"Lined up on shelves like any kitchen spice rack were dozens of bottles of stamp gum - all labeled by country and year...

To show me the process, a technician wearing a lab coat picked up a rather clean copy of an old U.S. stamp with tongs.  It was a mint 1869 pictorial, 10c yellow Scott 116...

It had been treated first with hydrogen peroxide to refresh the slightly oxidized color before using a mild pure soap and soft bristle brush to cleanse it.

By the stamp's appearance of F-VF centering and full perfs, I would rate it worth approximately $150 to $250 on the auction market without gum.  But easily worth more than twice that amount if with full O.G. NH ! ...

Now the stamp was placed face down on a tiny rectangular plastic pallet... From an organized tray holding an assortment of thin, ruler-like strips of plastic with short perf pegs on both edges, the technician selected four pieces of perf 12 which he gently fitted on each side of the stamp.  The pegs filled in the perf grooves to prevent gum intrusion...

While the stamp was being mounted on a spindle, an apprentice mixed a solution of gum from a bottle marked "USA 1869/gewöhnlich gummi/#0023." This solution went into an air brush... five applications covered the stamp to the precise thickness desired...

It was explained that normally a  dozen or so stamps would be heat cured as a batch for better cost efficiency, however today's demonstration was special.  What was the price for this procedure?  The cost for a job just witnessed would be $6 to $10 depending on the numbers of items in the order...

The promotional mailer outlined various services; including cleaning, patching or replacing damaged papers, repairs to stamps and covers, removal of unwanted markings such as cancellations, replacing gum, and other improvements as requested... Most work cannot be detected using conventional inspection procedures."

Judging from what was seen in Hamburg, this has to be a fulltime production operation.  The supplies, equipment and personnel signify an ongoing profitable business.

This report was published in 1988.  Nowadays this stamp would catalog $750 without gum, $2000 with disturbed (previously hinged) original gum, and some multiple of that for mint never hinged status.

Image (of a comparable stamp) from The Swedish Tiger.

Minnesota tries to safeguard the money of vulnerable adults

Auditors working in the Minnesota courts have exposed problems ranging from dubious fees to outright thefts by people appointed to safeguard more than $875 million held by dementia patients and other vulnerable adults.

In one Houston County case, the parents of a young man with cerebral palsy used his money to buy a truck for use on the family’s Alpaca ranch, noting that he enjoyed spending time with the animals. The judge ordered them to repay his estate $21,991 and post a bond of $200,000...

Auditors also raised concerns in several cases about professional conservators and their attorneys who charged high fees to handle simple tasks like opening e-mails and answering phone calls. One lawyer, working alongside a conservator in a Hennepin County case, billed $120 to drop a letter at the post office. He’s appealing an order that he repay $9,192 in fees...

[The Minnesota system] has evolved into the only mandatory, online financial reporting system for conservators in the country. It’s called MyMNConservator, and it alerts the court to red flags in a protected person’s financial reports. Under the old system, it was up to judges and their staff to wade through scanned financial reports, unverified receipts and sometimes handwritten account summaries. Anderson said the task was nearly impossible...

McBride said many times there’s a good explanation for expenses the auditors found suspect. But when the expenses involve substantial funds or valuable gifts that are going to the conservator or the conservator’s family, “then you get really suspicious,” he said. “Ultimately they have to manage the ward’s funds to the benefit of the ward and not to their own benefit.”

Walking cane

One of my prized possessions is a walking stick that was hand-carved for me by an elderly man in Kentucky when I used to live and work there.

The one above was carved by a craftsman in Oregon from a single stick of wood.  Here is his video documenting the process:

  YouTube link.

His Etsy webpage is here.

Red kidney bean poisoning

Many people are unaware that kidney beans, if consumed raw, contain a dangerous toxin... The toxin is named phytohemagglutinin (PHA), a member of a very common class of proteins called lectins. Lectins are glycoproteins that are present in a wide variety commonly-consumed plant foods, particularly in the seeds. In most cases, they are not harmful and possibly beneficial, but some lectins are known to be toxic. One of the most dangerous poisons known, ricin, is a lectin derived from the seeds of the castor bean Ricinus communis (not a true bean and totally unrelated to the legume family Fabaceae); this is not, however, the same lectin found in beans and other legumes...

PHA is known to be an insecticide, and plants probably developed it to keep their seeds from being destroyed by pests. In humans and other susceptible mammals (those of us without compound stomachs) PHA attacks and disables the epithelial cells lining the intestine. The body reacts to the threat by emptying the entire digestive tract as rapidly and completely as possible, to rid itself of the toxic substance...

For the safest results in cooking dried kidney beans, they should first be soaked for several hours, the soaking water discarded, then brought to the boil in fresh water and cooked for at least ten minutes...

Gardeners, in particular, should be a aware of the potential dangers of raw beans if they like to "graze" in their gardens, eating the fresh raw seeds directly from the shell. The level of PHA in all varieties is not known.

Green beans (snap beans) are a questionable matter. Many people do like to eat young green beans raw, and overcooking green beans until mushy is widely regarded as a sin against the vegetable. I can find no clear evidence that raw green beans have PHA levels high enough to make them unsafe for most of the population. It should be noted that the level of PHA is highest in seeds, and green beans are usually consumed for the sake of the green fleshy pod, at a stage when the seeds are only beginning to develop. 

And from another source:

The syndrome is usually caused by the ingestion of raw, soaked kidney beans, either alone or in salads or casseroles. As few as four or five raw beans can trigger symptoms. Several outbreaks have been associated with "slow cookers" or crock pots, or in casseroles which had not reached a high enough internal temperature to destroy the glycoprotein lectin.  It has been shown that heating to 80 degrees C. may potentiate the toxicity five-fold, so that these beans are more toxic than if eaten raw. In studies of casseroles cooked in slow cookers, internal temperatures often did not exceed 75 degrees C.

Amblypygi

YouTube link.

It looks like a "spider with hands."  It is, in fact, a "whip spider."

The name "amblypygid" means "blunt rump", a reference to a lack of the flagellum ("tail") that is otherwise seen in whip scorpions. They are harmless to humans.

Amblypygids possess no silk glands or venomous fangs. They rarely bite if threatened, but can grab fingers with pedipalps, resulting in thorn-like puncture injury.

Divertimento

In a two-and-a-half-minute video, Carl Sagan lucidly explains how Eratosthenes not only deduced a spherical earth, but accurately calculated its diameter in 200 B.C.

Lament posted on a professor's door:  "When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead.  It is difficult only for others.  It is the same when you are stupid."

A hotel safe can be opened using a neodynium magnet and a sock.

Another "fake thumb" magic trick.

""You’d think we could have more influence,” Charles Koch told the F.T. last month over pulled-pork sandwiches at the staff commissary of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas. The wealthy industrialist and conservative impresario was giving a rare interview in support of his new book, but his disillusionment with the state of the Republican presidential race (and politics in general) was apparent."  Lots more discussion and analysis at Vanity Fair.

Stare at this image for 15 seconds and you will see a giraffe. [the image at the link, NOT the one above this entry...]

Winston Churchill did NOT say “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Darwin Award candidates:  ?Two teenagers in Robertson County, Tennessee, have died after drinking a liquid determined to be racing fuel mixed with Mountain Dew... Vanderbilt toxicologists called the liquid, “DewShine,” which is similar to moon shine only much more potent."

Click and hold the red square.  Don't let it get hit by the blue shapes or the wall.  (You can report your best time in the comments below).

Father of the Year candidate.

The etymology of serendipity.

Speculation about why people used to put the skulls of horses under the floorboards of their homes.

Why you should never ever clean a valuable coin.  Especially not an MS64 1850 $20 gold piece.

"...after researching this topic further, I am now convinced that the wisdom teeth industry is probably a scam."

"...[in New York City] there are three pay toilets, one in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. Compare that to Singapore, which has fewer inhabitants and over 30,000 public bathrooms."

A high resolution photo of the moon's surface in true color.  Spoiler alert: boring.

Introducing the tiger quoll.

An explanation of which billionaires are supporting which presidential candidates.

Scripts that can be added to a blog or a webpage.

How to make a sled out a frozen towel (actually more like a toboggan).  But even better are strap-on leg sleds.

"Troy Haupt is a 47-year-old nurse anesthetist here in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. He has a secret to reveal about Super Bowl I: He owns the only known recording of its broadcast."  The television stations don't have copies.  And they won't let him market his copy.

"Oregon... according to a new analysis of consumer phone calls—placed to businesses across the country, and recorded anonymously—is home to the [fastest] speakers in the nation. The second-fastest talkers? They’re in Minnesota. The third? In Massachusetts. The slowest talkers, for their part, can be found in the South: in South Carolina, Louisiana, and—the most laconically languaged state of them all—Mississippi."

Which foods to stock up if you want to be prepared for a food shortage crisis (civil disorder, natural disaster, etc).

A high school senior with Down Syndrome hits a 3-point shot in basketball.  The crowd reaction is priceless.

The New York Times has a recurrently-updated calendar of all the state presidential primaries and number of delegates awarded.

Here's the Rolling Stone obituary for Dan Hicks, founder of the Hot Licks. (and a bio from 1973). "My Old Timey Baby." "Sweetheart." "I Scare Myself" (with Sid Page on violin).

"A couple, aged 75 and 76, went down to the beach in Porsguen in Portsall on the French coast this past Monday. A wave surprised them and knocked the man down. As he was being swept out to sea, his wife chased after, and was soon swept under herself!"  No deaths, but a sobering video.

I selected today's photos from a larger group posted at Mashable.  The images were taken by North Vietnamese photographers during the war.  "One hundred eighty of these unseen photos and the stories of the courageous men who made them are collected in the book Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side."

This is a "Caroline cart"

Target stores across the U.S. are adding a new type of cart to their stores that will make shopping easier for those with kids or adults with special needs. The carts, which are called Caroline’s Carts, are a new option in addition to the traditional shopping cart and will be in stores nationwide starting March 19.

The Caroline’s Carts sport Target’s traditional bright red baskets, but on the driver’s side is a larger harness-equipped seat and foam covered handles that swing outward. The seat is designed so that parents or caretakers can transfer a wheelchair-bound child or adult into the front seat, so that he or she doesn’t have to maneuver both a cart and wheelchair.

Caroline’s Carts were created by Drew Ann Long, an Alabama resident who designed the cart for her daughter Caroline. Caroline has a neurological disorder called Rett syndrome, and she had outgrown the child’s seat in traditional shopping carts. Long needed a better solution to make shopping easier with her 7-year-old daughter.

Via Neatorama (whence the photo, cropped for size).

This woman saves children

A woman from Denmark named Anja Ringgren Lovén has spent three years in Nigeria saving children from the worst cases of abuse. She is taking care of kids abandoned by their own very families for being witches.

A documentary on her work is coming up and she has been raising funds [via this link] from people in her country to assist the kids.   See what this woman is doing, it can’t be compared to some Nigerian NGO’s that are just eating UN’s money.

“I’ve seen much here in Nigeria over the last 3 years. I have spared you for many experiences when we’ve been on the rescue operations. Thousands of children are being accused of being witches and we’ve both seen torture of children, dead children and frightened children. This footage shows why I fight. Why I sold everything I own. Why I’m moving out in uncharted territory. Why the new documentary is so important for dinnødhjælps work so we can shout world leaders up so we can get focused on superstition in Nigeria! I hope you will all see with when ” Anja Africa ‘ is being shown on TV. Together we can make the biggest difference!

Photo and text from awomkenneth.com.

Via Reddit, where it is noted that this woman has raised a million dkr in a few days to help the children.

Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump's wedding

I'll defer commentary. 

Via Reddit, where the discussion thread includes plenty of commentary.

Thought for the day