Divertimento #145

A practical use for a fitted sheet at the beach.

In The Wizard of Oz movie, the snow in the poppy field scene was chrysotile asbestos (also the Wicked Witch's broom and the straw man's entire outfit).

A proposed sticker for Intel (because the CEO sold millions of $ of his shares before the company publicly announced a design flaw.

"Troll the ancient Yuletide carol..." explained thus: "Trolling a carol might sound like some obnoxious attempt to undermine it, but it’s actually a great way to get in the holiday spirit. According to the OED, one of the meanings of “troll,” in use since the 16th century, is “to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.” It’s related to the sense of rolling, or passing around..."  There are five other grammar lessons from Christmas songs.

Wisconsin's bald eagle population has hit a record high (1,600 occupied nests).

A logo for a the "Dairy Air" ice cream company features a cow's rear end, and has caused some controversy in a New Jersey community.

An article about the potential toxicity (or not) of silver dragées used to decorate Christmas cookies.

LED traffic lights are energy-saving.  BUT... they don't emit enough heat to melt the snow that sometimes coats or plugs them.

While the Trump administration is shrinking the national park system, Iceland is heading the other direction: "National Parks, protected areas and nature monuments now cover 21.6% of the surface area of Iceland, according to the Environment Agency. This could expand dramatically in the next years..."

One opinion on which minority is destroying America.

Campbell's Soup responds to a hater.

Hungarian Mangalica pigs are so wooly they look like sheep.

Staircase modified to accommodate a small dog.

"Scientists examined the stomach contents of gulls that foraged on landfills and found most of the birds were filling their bellies with human detritus. It wasn’t just plastic, either—the birds’ stomachs were packed with glass, metal, and even building materials..."

Hair clip.

Lidar technology dramatically reveals old Roman roads in the English countryside.

"It took three weeks for Cincinnati Premier Youth Basketball League to kick out a Kings Mills area team due to their disgustingly racist jerseys with phrases like "Coon" and "Knee Grow" emblazoned on the back. "

Squirrels have lots of defense mechanisms.  They can turn their feet 180 degrees, and they can heat up their tail when they confront a heat-sensing rattlesnake (but not other snakes).

"Spamnesty is a simple service: forward your spam to it and it will engage the spammer in pointless chatbot email chains, wasting their time."

The 28 shortest men in Hollywood.

"As a 19-year-old university student, Carl Størmer used a hidden camera to photograph life in Oslo, Norway from 1893 to 1897."

Northern pike attacking a grebe (video)

Totally inept arsonist (video)

Best movie adaptations (video)

High-school basketball teams wins on a last-second shot.

Engineer explains the "steam hammer" effect in pipes (similar to the more familiar water hammer).

The State of Oregon has passed a bill that allows some residents in rural counties to pump their own gas at a gas station.  Many of them don't know how to do so.

Partially opened whipping cream container resembled John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

What to do with a slice of deli meat that has a metallic sheen.

"Good news everyone: Scott DesJarlais, a strident anti-choice congressman and beloved Tea Party hero from Tennessee, says God has forgiven him for having sex with his patients when he was a doctor and then pressuring them to get abortions."

How to cope with frost in the attic of your home.

Bear lays out in a dive.

Which animal can hold it's breath the longest underwater - a sloth or a dolphin? (hat tip to the elves at No Such Thing As A Fish).

The city of Houston has a program to train citizens and authorize them to issue parking citations to vehicles improperly parked in spaces reserved for the disabled.

That elaborately interwoven brick sidewalk?  It's not.

The photos embedded in this post were selected from a group of 10 beautiful ceilings posted at the BBC.  Locations and photo credits at the link.

Supercut of the 2018 Academy Award nominees

YouTube link.

If you enjoyed that, here are the links for similar compilations for
2017
2016
2015...

High-school lockers are so... yesterday

It is a full five months into the school year, and Isabel Echavarria, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, hasn’t used her locker once. She’s not even sure she has one...

Once the gravitational center of the high school day, lockers long ago lost their allure, and their usefulness seems a relic of an epoch of education that has slipped away... The trend has expanded so rapidly and widely that schools are now removing individual student lockers from their hallways, and builders and designers for many new high schools don’t even include them in their plans...

So, why the change? Anyone with a high schooler in their orbit knows that students now want everything they own with them all of the time. Books, phones, water bottles, headphones, laptops, tablets, snacks, coats, extra shoes...

Lockers are also being left in the dust because schools offer more classes that use online textbooks, or they keep textbooks in the classroom to be shared by students... At Rock Ridge High, also in Ashburn and home to 2,100 students, Principal John Duellman estimates that 90 percent of sophomores, juniors and seniors don’t use their lockers.

More at the Washington Post.

Inside the Leaning Tower of Pisa

YouTube link.

It looks like a grain silo.

Via Boing Boing.

Passports may be necessary for some flights within the United States

If certain states do not upgrade their IDs to meet federal requirements.

The nine states are Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington. Each of these states does not currently issue a state ID that lives up to federal ID minimum security requirements, according to the REAL ID Act of 2005. That means these states have about three months to make changes to their state IDs or drivers licenses so that they meet federal government standards. Otherwise, you'll need to apply for or renew a passport—or at the very least, find yours, wherever you stashed it after the last trip—before passing TSA and getting on a commercial airplane to another U.S. city. Other forms of ID that will work are permanent resident cards (green cards) or military IDs.

This story was posted in October and the deadline was in January, which has already passed.  Does anyone know how it was resolved?

"Hereditary" trailer

YouTube link.

 Laudatory reviews from Sundance.

Escalators

Art installation added to the old escalators at Au Bon Marché, Paris.

Test yourself on world geography

The test, developed by Ghent University, presents you with outlines of two countries.  Your task is to click the (+) and (-) until the bottom entity is the same proportional size to the upper one as they are in real life.

It's a bit challenging, in part because so many of our mental maps distort high-latitude regions.  My results were so-so:

Apparently the set of maps offered varies, so you may get the same pairs I did.  But feel free to post your results in the Comments.  The test is here.

Via Neatorama.

Recognize this mountain?

You've probably seen it a hundred times.

The cussedness of inanimate objects

Via.

"I guess my adrenaline took over..."

YouTube link.

Kudos to Olson Vacuum in Madison - updated

"They don't make 'em like they used to."

That dictum is often applied to products like small appliances, and it was the mindset we had when our 35-year-old Hoover vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost.  We researched replacements, but this one had worked so well for so long that we agreed that if it could be repaired for less than $100 it would be worth it.

We took it in yesterday to a local company on Odana Road here in Madison.  The young fellow at the desk greeted us, asked a few questions, then put it on his counter and proceeded to take it apart.   That surprised me, since I was expecting to get an approximate cost and an estimated time for how long it would take to order replacement parts for a 35-year-old model.

He found the drive belt that had been totally worn out, had a replacement on hand which he inserted, cleaned a couple dirty parts, put it back together, and we were "good to go."

Elapsed time:  probably 15 minutes
Total cost (parts and labor):  less than $4.00

Awesome.  What a totally pleasant experience.  I'm delighted to use the power of this blog to give public "props" to a first-class business.  If you live within driving distance of Madison and need repairs (or a new vacuum), they are worth a visit.  Here is their website.

Addendum:  See also my comment and one by reader The Weaving One regarding Park Street Shoe Repair -

- at 609 S. Park St.  This is the go-to place for shoe and other leather repair.  They don't have a website.

And... while I'm at it.  On the same street (420 S. Park St.), Wayne's Barber Shop:

Also no cyberpresence - just excellent, inexpensive haircuts while you wait.  :-)

Addendum:  I'm very sorry to report that Park Street Shoe Repair is closing:

Eighty years after his father started the business, Fabian decided to hang up his cobbler’s tools after suffering a broken leg in October — and broken water pipes at the shop during the last cold stretch this winter...

The shop had been an institution in Madison and the old Greenbush neighborhood. Its closing not only means customers will have to find a new place to have their shoes repaired. It also means the collection of longtime friends and neighborhood residents that met in the shop — or outside on a bench along Park Street in warmer months — have to find a new meeting spot to swap stories... “We don’t really have a spot,” he said. “There really aren’t any old neighborhood places left ... where you can drop in.”..

Although Fabian said not as many people get their shoes fixed today, he was able to put all three of his children through college with the money he made repairing footwear.

“I’m very proud that I put three kids through college in this shack,” he said.

This story is "important" only to Dane County residents, but the event is I believe emblematic of a larger problem of the retirement of a cadre of skilled workmen, solo practitioners in their trade who are being replaced by faceless corporations or by a public attitude that products that become faulty should be thrown out and a new one purchased.

I don't know what I'll do the next time the leather upper of one of my hiking boots gets torn.  I certainly have enough $ in my savings to get a new pair of boots, but I would much rather have taken it in to Mr. Fabian to be restitched.

Best wishes to a retiring Madison legend.

Bottom photo credit: Amber Arnold, State Journal.

You can now buy gluten-free water

The BBC offers a perspective on the abuse of the term "gluten-free":

The food labelling craze coupled with banner headlines about the dangers of gluten, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and hormones are leading to increasingly absurd results. For example, you can now buy “premium” water that’s not only free of GMOs and gluten but certified kosher and organic. Never mind that not a single drop of water anywhere contains either property or is altered in any way by those designations...

In my experience as a food economist, such “fake transparency” does nothing to inform consumers about the nature of their foods. Moreover, it can actually decrease well-being when accompanied by a higher price tag...

Since federal regulation requires that hormones not be used in pork or poultry, advertising a chicken breast as “hormone-free” doesn’t make sense – yet doing so allows a company to charge more or help its products stand out from the less-labelled competition.

"Magicum" is not just a Latin word

Of course, it is a Latin word that a few will recognize:

Adjective

magicus (feminine magica, neuter magicum); first/second declension

1. magic, magical

But apparently in this modern world it has taken on a new context.

Passion Dust is the first product of it's kind. It is a small sparkleized capsule that dissolves when inserted into the vagina and releases the sweet sparkle that is Passion Dust.  Passion Dust creates what we call "magicum" which is essentially a "flavored orgasm"... Women can use the capsule without intercourse just to experience the visual fun of it. Vaginal discharge is natural so if it has to come out what's wrong with having a pretty sparkly spot rather than a sticky white one?...

More at the link to company's website.  In the Q&A the company dismisses gynecological risks by insisting that it's not dangerous for everyone.  This will not come as pleasant news to those who feel there is already too much glitter in the world.

With a tip of the blogging cap to the elves at No Such Thing As A Fish.

Choir creates a thunderstorm

YouTube link.

More about this Los Angeles choir here.