Wonderful video showing some of the wonderfully unpredictable, silly and sometimes annoying but funny things our cats do. It’s totally impossible to stay angry at them, even when they sleep in our cookware. Brought to you by Cole and Marmalade (whom are cats, naturally) and their people.
…help justify destroying people’s homes and cemeteries, using eminent domain to make way for what would become the most visited city park in the country. The village was leveled in 1857, the same year construction began on Central Park.
Faithtap asks the right question! “What better way to kick off a new year than with the spread of joy and enthusiasm?” Flash mob of singing teachers does exactly that. And they sound good, too!
The Desmoines, Iowa flash district teachers performed ‘One More Day’ from the hit Broadway musical Les Miserables. Not all are music teachers.
Kung Fu Bear is a master of the fighting stick. Don’t believe me? Watch!
Wiretap, a CBC radio show that’s just ending after an eleven year run, produced this short video as a gift to its listeners. In “Aging Gracefully”, a series of progressively older folk give advice to the people they were … not long ago.
A 93 year old advises his younger self, “Don’t listen to other people’s advice. Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.”
Although they’re going off the air, WireTapWiretap is keeping its Facebook page open, so check it out.
I have come to a conclusion:
Either the people will elect to make the GOP extinct, or the GOP will come through and make the people extinct.
The fabulously talented Renata Flores Rivera offers a Michael Jackson cover of “The way you make me feel” in Quechua, the ancient native language of Peru.
Fusion online mag writes
Flores’s mother, Patricia Rivera Canchanya, kicked off the campaign this year through a cultural association, la Asociación Cultural Surca, which she founded 11 years ago to promote arts and Peruvian culture in their home city of Huamanga (also known as Ayacucho). Rivera is also a musician, and set up a music school through the association. She said she saw an urgent need to pass on Quechua to younger generations, before the language is forgotten in Peru.
Filmmaker and drone flyer Ian Wood has put together a beautiful video of visual treasures in downtown LA, well worthy of the 5 minute viewing time with a rocking blues soundtrack that makes it a fun watch.
People, this is a good use of drone technology – spreading wonder, enjoyment … celebrating culture and sense of place – and showing that aerial photography is within reach of the average Joe. Wood’s video comes with a companion map of locations he filmed.
Thanks for the heads up Curbed LA and friend Leen de Weerd Mosley.
Have you recently read The Yellow Stream by I. P. Daly?
I missed marking the passing of William Safire, who authored my favorite newspaper column On Language until he became late in 2009 at the age of 79. So let me celebrate his work and how it touched me me, a little bit, now.
Safire inspired my love for language to blossom into good and accurate writing and introduced me to etymology – the topic of his twice weekly New York Times Magazine column for over 30 years. Teen me didn’t know that there was such a thing as etymology. It’s the study of words, and it’s fascinating. Safire’s compelling writing style pulled me right in. Google offers this definition:
Wendy’s new logo shows the word ‘Mom’ underneath Wendy’s face. Photo courtesy Megan Davis
You can also check out these pretty interesting facts about Wendy’s founder, its frosties & the company’s history.
The Atlantic’s Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism: Exceptional nonfiction stories from 2014, includes:
SALON / The Day I Left My Son in the Car by Kim Brooks (Kimi note: this is a truly blow-away article)
“I made a split-second decision to run into the store. I had no idea it would consume the next years of my life.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES / Working Anything but 9 to 5 by Jodi Kantor
“She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy. Months after starting the job she moved out of her aunt’s home, in part because of mounting friction over the erratic schedule, which the aunt felt was also holding her family captive. Ms. Navarro’s degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes. She needed to work all she could, sometimes counting on dimes from the tip jar to make the bus fare home. If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.”
Carlos Arturo Torres is a believer in fun and childhood now living in Chicago. In 2014, as a student at Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, he also became the creator of Iko – “a prosthetic arm for children that also acts as a platform for creative Lego projects.” Iko responds to signals traveling through its wearer’s arm nerves to move, pick up and manipulate objects and it’s got a great grip.
Torres explains,
sometimes a functional element is everything (a kid needs), but some other times it might be a spaceship, or a doll house, or a telescope, or a video game controller, or a swim fin. What if kids could use their imagination to create their own prosthetics, their own tools according to their own needs? Learning. Creating. Being kids.
They’ve invented a ball thrower your dog can use without you. Isn’t that nice? (BTW, it works for big and small dogs.)
Watch it in action… Buy it on Amazon!
Hat tip to Nora Montoya for this find
My friend Lucy thinks of this cute little ditty when people are giving her an unjustified hard time and she’s about to lose her cool. The cute little ducky singing his whoop-ass ditty makes her laugh instead of roar. Watch and you’ll see why!
