Armand Foisy did not expect a video of his 101-year-old mother playing in the season’s first snowfall to go viral. But it did, reaching 7.7 million views on his Facebook page in two weeks.
“It was just a simple little video that was meant for family and friends,” he said, describing the moment captured in the video as “great joy and fun.”
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/101-year-old-woman-snow-1.3344065
Manhole covers don’t have to be ugly sewer lids. In Japan, they can be astoundingly intricate, colorful, museum-worthy feats of urban design.
Photographer S. Morita (Flickr name MRSY) has snapped over a thousand manhole covers around Japan over the years. In a country renowned for its attention to detail and rich artistic heritage, it’s pretty inspiring to take a bland city staple, that people literally walk all over, and morph it into eye candy.
Link: https://gizmodo.com/the-manhole-covers-in-japan-are-absolutely-beautiful-1716296346
At 12:30 on January 8th at the lovely New School Auditorium on 12th St., I’m doing a short introductory talk as part of my continuing Reasons To Be Cheerful project.
Link: https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/01/david-byrnes-reasons-cheerful/
Editor’s note: The Post has learned that this article contained several passages that were largely duplicated, some without attribution, from a story published by Salt Lake City’s NBC affiliate, KSL. Post policy forbids the unattributed use of material from other sources.
Air Force veteran Ron Villemaire, 69, was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer this year. His dying wish was to see “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” and with the petition of his daughter, a community made it happen.
Link: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/12/20/veterans-wish-star-wars-last-jedi-orig-trnd-lab.cnn
We like to bring this chestnut back from time to time. Watch it, and you’ll know why.
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died of a heart attack, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable.
We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.
Link: https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
Jupiter’s atmosphere is quite simply a work of art. With an atmosphere that best resembles the sun, Jupiter is predominantly made up of hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of ammonia, sulfur, methane and water vapor. Strong east-west winds in the planet’s upper atmosphere travel at 400 mph, with dark belts and light zones reflecting different compositions of chemicals.
Link: https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/blogs/behold-dreamy-beauty-jupiters-clouds
The fast food chain plans to start selling a McVegan burger in hundreds of restaurants across Sweden and Finland starting on December 28.
The sandwich, which has already been tested at a handful of McDonald’s locations in Finland, consists of a soy patty, bun, tomato, lettuce, pickles, onion, ketchup, mustard, oil and an egg-less sandwich sauce.
Link: https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/19/news/mcdonalds-mcvegan-vegan-burger/
The race route notes read like features on a road map from The Hobbit – cross the Tropic of Capricorn, avoid wandering stock, pass the world’s longest fence, and Beware of Aliens.
Competitors in the biennial Bridgestone World Solar Challenge race across one of the least hospitable places on Earth.
Link: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motorsport/world-solar-challenge-most-extreme-road-race-earth