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Exploding snowman forecasts hot summer for Switzerland - BBC News:

Way better than Groundhog Day.

“The Boeoegg’s head is stuffed with firecrackers and the belief is that the faster it explodes, the warmer the summer will be. This year it took a relatively quick nine minutes and 56 seconds, The Local reports.“

Last Sunday night, Alan Graham left the comfy confines of his Westlake Hills home and took to the streets to hang with the people who inhabit them. It is a routine Graham has had since 2003, when he began hosting Street Retreats as part of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, the Austin nonprofit he co-founded in 1998, whose mission is to restore dignity to homeless people through food, clothing, and camaraderie. Graham decided early on that he wanted to try to get to know every homeless person on a first-name basis in Austin, a population of around 2,200 people, as of early 2016 according to the Austin American-Statesman. Graham was fed up with the system’s typical response to big social issues like homelessness: put a bunch of…View Original Post

The post There’s No Place Like Home appeared first on Texas Monthly.

HOUSTON — The walls, painted blue and yellow, are accented with inspirational words: “HOPE. BELIEVE. DREAM. FAITH.” Shelves and cubbies line one wall, stacked with toys and books.

The room has a television and a limited supply of board games. Cribs are set up next door for napping infants. There’s a laundry room, showers, and a large closet full of extra clothes and toiletries. Sometimes the staff take the kids outside to use the basketball pavilion. That’s about all there is to do.

No one is supposed to sleep or spend more than a few hours in this little building at the Harris County Youth Services Center, called the Point of Entry. It’s meant to be a waiting area for young children whose families are being investigated for abuse or neglect.

But Texas’ embattled child welfare system doesn't have enough available beds, so office spaces like the Point of Entry are now being used as temporary homes for foster kids that nobody else wants. That's why cots with twin-sized beds are stacked in a corner.

And while kids who stay here have to be supervised at all times, if they decide to leave, no one is likely to stop them — a reality thrown into sharp relief earlier this month when a 15-year-old girl named Daphne Jackson was struck and killed by a minivan after running from a different child welfare office in Houston. (That office was not open for media tours.) 

Little is known about Daphne's circumstances. But "children without placement," as they're officially called, tend to be very troubled teenagers, and Texas is facing a crisis in finding good homes for them.

The state relies mostly on private companies to place and house foster children, and it pays them very little to do so. Few group facilities are willing to get into such an expensive business, and others have recently shut down because of safety concerns. In the past year and a half, Texas lost hundreds of beds meant for kids with complex emotional and behavioral problems — leaving many with no other option but psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention or government offices. 

Daphne had run away from foster care multiple times in the months before she died. That would have made foster families and group facilities hesitant to accept her, and when no one did, she ended up in a place even less equipped to keep her from running away.

Sleeping in a state office “is rock bottom for some of these kids,” said Katrina Griffith, a judge who presides over child protective services cases in Harris County. “You can see that in their face and in the demeanor ... they look tired, and some of them just look like they’re hopeless. They’ve lost contact with their family, and now they don’t even have a place that wants them.

“There just has to be a better facility for these children,” she said.

Texas’ foster care placement crisis has continued to make headlines, and the problem has only worsened. In March, 65 kids in Texas’ care had to spend at least two consecutive nights in places like child welfare offices offices or hotels. That’s more than double the number from February.

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, called those numbers “disappointing” and said the agency has a new plan to grow foster care capacity.

But that will be difficult to do if the Texas Legislature doesn’t provide more funding for child welfare. While state lawmakers appear willing to increase payments to foster care providers by about $115 million, child welfare officials asked for far more than that. 

Crimmins would not provide data on the number of children who had to sleep in specific offices, such as the Point of Entry. But Harris County Protective Services staff provides children who sleep there with a hot meal each night. On a recent weeknight, they delivered two paper plates with pizza, corn and fruit cups. In recent months, they've had to send up to 30 meals in one night — they put the boys in the main room while the girls slept in a nearby conference room. 

Ginger Harper, administrator of Harris County's Youth Services Division, said she has seen children stay at the Point of Entry for as long as a month. If they are without placement for more than a day, they're supposed to be enrolled in school. But that's not what she has observed for some kids. 

"During the day, their [caseworkers] pick them up, and they go to their workers' offices," Harper said. "And then in the evenings they're brought back here to spend the night."

If it's a weekend or a holiday, she said, the kids will spend all day at the Point of Entry, watching television and amusing themselves with whatever toys are available. 

That was Lena's experience when she stayed there. Lena, a sex-trafficking victim profiled by the Tribune in March, was a chronic runaway foster kid who often found herself sleeping at the Point of Entry.

"It was pretty okay, they fed us," Lena remembered. (To protect her privacy, she is being identified only by her middle name.) But "they just gave us a place to sleep and take a shower." She had to sit in her caseworker's office all day. 

It was easy to leave, Lena said. “I’d walk out. I wouldn’t even run away, I’d walk." 

Had Lena been at a licensed child-care facility, the staff would be required to follow children when they run away and use a variety of methods to try to convince them to stay. 

But the Point of Entry isn’t set up for that. A flyer on the refrigerator in the brightly-colored room says:  “If a child runs away please make sure you call the [Houston Police Department] non-emergency line to make a report.”

Last November, at age 17, Lena ran from the Point of Entry for the final time. She never returned to foster care and aged out of the system about a month later. Her social media accounts indicate that she continues to be sold for sex all over Houston.

For now, the staff at the Point of Entry say they're doing the best they can. When kids talk about running, they do their best to stop them, calling their caseworkers and talking to them about the dangers of the streets. They say they lock the doors from the outside so no one can come in without permission. They also have 24-hour security, since they're a waiting area for young children whose families are under investigation. 

But no one can lock the doors from the inside or physically stop a child from leaving — and no one can prevent adults from lurking right outside. 

“The life outside is much more attractive to them than what we have to offer them,” said Rosie Christal, a program director for the state's child welfare agency who works at the Point of Entry. “And people out there take advantage of the kids. So that’s what we have to deal with.”

Read related Tribune coverage: 

• Read more about Lena, a young sex-trafficking victim who slept at the Point of Entry multiple times while she was in foster care. 
• A recent Texas Tribune investigation exposed how the state's broken child welfare system feeds Texas' sex-trafficking underworld. 
• Texas leaders are calling on religious groups to support and help recruit more foster families. 

The former Strange Brew coffee shop and its adjacent Lounge Side live music room have been dormant on Manchaca Road in South Austin since the business shuttered amid financial problems in January. But yesterday, Hyde Park coffee shop and bakery Quack’s announced they’re taking over the spot this summer, apparently with a music venue as part of the plan.

READ MORE: Quack’s bakery opening a location in South Austin

“We just signed the lease for our second location to be open this summer,” Quack’s posted to its Facebook page on Monday. In addition to Captain Quackenbush’s Coffeehouse & Bakery — harkening back to the long name used for the original location on the Drag in the 1980s — the site “will also proudly present The Austin Soundroom at 5330 Manchaca Road,” the Facebook post added.

Strange Brew opened in 2010 and added a live music room in 2012. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2016, then abruptly closed in mid-January. It had become an important cog in the local music scene, winning several Austin Music Industry Awards categories in recent years. Many of its residency gigs have since relocated to other Austin venues including El Mercado Backstage, One-2-One Bar and Cactus Cafe.

The specified Austin Soundroom address of 5330 Manchaca Road was actually the previous home of Tobaccoville, a smoke shop next to Strange Brew’s coffee and music rooms that Strange Brew ownership had taken over as part of expansion plans that never panned out. The inclusion of that address, in addition to the 5326 Manchaca Road address given for the new coffee shop, suggests Quack’s will expand or change the footprint of the previous Strange Brew music room.

Launched in 1988, Mystery Science Theater 3000 ran for ten seasons on Comedy Central and The Sci-Fi Channel, with its last episode airing in August of 1999. But now Slashdot reader #5844 ewhac writes: 17 years later, Season 11 of MST3K debuted Friday on Netflix. A full season has been produced, including a stretch-goal Christmas special, funded by the highest-earning Kickstarter Film & Video campaign to date ($5.76 million) -- thousands of contributors are listed in the show's end credits, spread across all fourteen episodes. The show remains true to its low-budget roots, relying almost exclusively on models and practical effects, including a very inventive new door sequence. The backstory for the new season is very swiftly established in the opening to Experiment 1101, as Jonah Heston (played by co-producer Jonah Ray) is abducted by the evil mad scientist Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and her sidekick Max a/k/a TV's son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt). Together with Gypsy (Rebecca Hanson), Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn), and Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah quips his way through a barrage of bad movies, including Reptilicus, Starcrash, The Loves of Hercules, and The Christmas That Almost Wasn't. In 2008 MST3K's original creator Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot's readers, and said he was fascinated by the popularity of Creative Commons licenses. "For most of the public domain titles that we've used, it's a matter of the garbage not being taken out. Basically, they forgot to apply for a copyright so it in fact lapsed into the public domain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sky Pool is not for the faint of heart or anyone afraid of heights. The terrifying swimming pool is on the 42nd floor of a new residential real estate development known as Market Square, located in Houston, Texas.

I’m so ready to book a room here, if only it were a hotel… but it’s a residential complex. And so my hearts break, but at least there are some options. For one, I could stalk the perimeter of the complex on the hunt for new friends that live at the building and might invite me over for a swim.

Or, maybe, just maybe, someone will post a unit at Market Square for nightly/weekly rent on Airbnb or a similar site. I’ll remain on the lookout for all of us vying to take a swim in this stomach-churning pool suspended 500 feet above the busy street below.

Glass Bottom Pool...😱 -- 🎥 by: @marketsquaretower. --- #OurLonelyPlanet #DontLookDown

A post shared by OurLonelyPlanet (@ourlonelyplanet) on Apr 9, 2017 at 5:36pm PDT

Market Square Tower

Market Square Tower

Market Square Tower

Market Square Tower

Editor’s note: In just 24 hours after this post was published, AISD received more than $10,000 in donations to pay off student lunch debt, but the issue is far from resolved. Click here to find out more and how you can help other students in Central Texas.

Millions of kids across America rely on school lunches for their main meal of the day, but what happens if they can’t afford it?

Many of them are enrolled in a free/reduced lunch program that either partially or entirely covers the cost of their lunch and sometimes breakfast at school, but plenty of other students either haven’t applied for the program or their parents make too much money to qualify but still struggle to pay off the account.

As news of lunch-shaming spreads — New Mexico garnered headlines last week as the most recent state to outlaw the practice of forcing kids to clean tables or otherwise “earn” their lunch, often in humiliating ways — I’ve heard plenty of people asking how they might pay off a low-income student’s lunch balance.

I reached out to AISD today to find out.

Of the 80,000 meals served through AISD each day, about 700 of them are “courtesy” meals — peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, milk and a vegetable for elementary students, and a salad and milk in middle and high schools — for students whose balance has fallen below zero.

Those meals add up to $350,000 per year that the food service department tries to absorb into its budget, but after receiving so many requests this year from people who wanted to help out, they started a crowdfunding campaign through EdBacker.com to help cover the costs. You can click on this link to donate to the general fund to help cover these courtesy meals and pay off the balances of some students throughout the district.

If you want to donate directly to a school, you can also stop by the front office to make a donation for a single student.

“Those wanting to help out are more that welcome to visit their neighborhood schools to contribute to help bring negative balances current at that location.  Cafeteria managers on each campus are able to accept these donations,” says Anneliese Tanner, director of AISD’s nutrition and food services department. “The EdBacker was setup to create an easy way for people to help out across the entire district, which also helps to offset the donations that may be more plentiful in neighborhoods with more resources.”

On Twitter, I heard from freelance writer Melanie Haupt, whose community gathered enough donations to cover the outstanding balances of every student in their school.

MORE: New Mexico Outlaws School ‘Lunch Shaming’

MORE: Watching What We Eat: On the complicated politics of the school cafeteria

From Del Valle ISD:

In Del Valle, students are able to have a negative balance for up to six meals. Once that is met, the students are then provided an alternative complete meal (food can vary). All DVISD students are already provided a free breakfast and, if they’re staying for after-school enrichment, a free dinner.

If someone would like to help pay off a school lunch balance at DVISD, they can drop off a check written to Del Valle ISD at any school OR they can mail a check to the district at 5301 Ross Road, Del Valle, TX, 78617. In the Memo section of the check, they would need to add “negative lunch balances.”

Do you remember lunch shaming when you were in school? Have you ever paid off a student’s balance?

 

An Australian rapper who calls himself “2pec” is in trouble after skipping out on a $621 bill at a seafood restaurant, being chased into the ocean and retrieved by police on jet skis. If that last sentence didn’t make you want to hear more then this story is not for you.

33-year-old Terry Peck sat down for a nice meal at Omeros Bros Restaurant in the Gold Coast where he ordered two lobsters, 17 oyster shooters and a baby octopus before becoming upset at his $621 bill. Peck claimed his lobsters were overcooked, there was a piece of shell in one of his oyster shooters and the restaurant’s prices were too high — which he felt justified making a break for it. He ran onto the beach while being chased by restaurant staff, and eventually out into the ocean.

When police arrived they didn’t have the means to retrieve the man, so they worked with local lifeguards to be taken out into the surf on jet skis to bring him back to land. Eventually Peck was charged with two counts of serious assault of a police officer, and banned from the restaurant for life. According to Australia’s ABC News the judge in the case couldn’t believe the meal the man ordered.

"Oh God! By himself?" she exclaimed when told how much the bill amounted to.

Peck claims he has good reason for running away from the restaurant, and if you’re thinking it’s going to be weird as hell, well, you’re right. The man claims he had to leave before paying because he needed to help his friend who was giving birth on the beach -- but says police arrested him before he could find her.

Peck is now in serious trouble after being released from prison in February. His lawyer told the court he has a serious problem with alcohol, which contributed to the incident.

I desperately tried to find video of 2pec’s music for you to hear, and just when I was about to give up I found an entry from a 2012 song contest in which Terry Peck submitted the song “Lets Get Drunk Lets Get Fuuuucked Up lol : ) PARTY!!” Yes, that’ the full title. The video does contain explicit images, so advanced warning — it’s also one of the worst songs in the history of human existence.

_{Editor's note: If you'd like an email notice whenever we publish Ross Ramsey's column, click here.}

Texas is run by people who hold economic growth up as a kind of secular sacrament, whining against the regulations and fees that throttle businesses and cost jobs and whatnot. It’s a reliable line of attack in the state Legislature, used for a range of issues, like tort reform, environmental regulation and who should use which bathroom.

So why did lawmakers devise and refine a school finance system that relies on some of the economic impediments they regularly wail against?

At the moment, top whining rights belong to property owners in the Austin Independent School District, which pays more in “recapture” payments than any district in Texas. Recapture is the term for the money the state collects from “property-rich” districts for distribution to “property-poor” districts.

In Austin’s case, recapture throttles one of the state's economically thriving cities with a special state tax that sucks more than $400 million out of the taxpayers who are trying to keep their education system up to the standard that will keep that economy thriving. For AISD’s fiscal 2017, the amount is $406.1 million; the district projects it will pay $533 million to the state in fiscal 2018. Without that recapture, property tax rates in the state’s capital would drop 35 cents.

If the state were doing this to an industry, legislative lips would quiver with rage. But the state is doing this to AISD or, more accurately, to the property owners and taxpayers in AISD.

Austin is the biggest fish in this net, a liberal city being milked to avoid state spending by a parsimonious Legislature. Houston is joining the club this year. Dallas is close behind.

The state’s school finance scheme has been tagged as “Robin Hood” — a balancing mechanism that takes money from districts with more valuable property and gives it to districts that have less valuable property. The idea is to make sure each district has enough money to provide every kid in Texas with the same quality of education.

Everything in the previous paragraph has been argued in the state’s courts for years, and one need not employ an oracle to find out whether those arguments will continue. They will; this is about money, after all.

But Robin Hood is only part of the mechanism. Local districts put up some money for public education — that’s where the biggest chunk of your rising local property taxes goes. The federal government puts up a chunk. The state government puts up a chunk.

Generally speaking, the Robin Hood money balances the local funding differences between districts. The more dependent the overall system becomes on local financing — and local property taxes — the more money the rich districts pay to the poor districts.

Within reason, that’s no different than any transfer of wealth. The residents of some states pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits; some of the state’s counties send less money to the state than they receive in services, and so on.

That’s how this deal works. But in school finance, the subsidies get bigger when the state’s share of public education spending drops. And one effect of that — when property taxes are a big a part of the mix as they are in Texas — is that the state puts the arm on its boomtowns. 

Texas would still have Robin Hood if the state government spent more on education, but Robin Hood wouldn’t be nearly the size it is now. Ten years ago, the state paid about 45 percent of the cost of public education — the same share paid by local school districts. The federal government, as it still does, paid the remainder. But the state’s share has dropped to 38 percent, shifting more of the load to local school districts. And because those local school districts don’t raise the same amounts of money even when their tax rates are equal, that increases the load on Robin Hood.

Property owners in the property-rich districts pay more so that the property-poor districts can keep up — a job made more difficult when the state cuts its share.

State officials will tell you — correctly — that the state is spending more money on public education now than it did 10 years ago. It’s just not spending as much per student. Somebody has to make up the difference.

More columns from Ross Ramsey:

• The state has a Rainy Day Fund with billions of dollars in it, but Texas lawmakers would rather use accounting tricks to balance their next budget.
• The death of a teen on the run from the state's foster care system stirs deeper questions: Why aren't these programs working, and who will be held to account for that?

• You might rejoice or bewail the death of a piece of legislation, but remember this time-proven adage: Nothing is really dead while the Texas Legislature is still in Austin. 

Is this the best meme of all time? Shut up. Don’t even answer that question. It was rhetorical. And, for the record, the answer is clearly yes. The Internet is, by all accounts, a raging garbage fire of human misery peppered with occasional bits of happiness that usually take the form of animal pictures. The latest bright light at the end of this dark, never-ending tunnel is a series of weird advertisements for natural habitats like forests, deserts, oceans, and jungles that feature photos of animals with the sort of gloriously incorrect-but-not-entirely-wrong names you’d find in a book like xckd’s Thing Explainer.

This particular dank-ass meme came to our attention via Twitter user Yarrow, and now it’s consuming our every waking thought.

idk what this meme is but i love it pic.twitter.com/q1N60EgF9q

— yarrow (@yarrrow) April 7, 2017

How about the jungle? Come for the new neon hoppers, but stay for the harmless vines!

Maybe the forest is more your speed?

Or if you like it hot, how about a desert?

Or perhaps you think its better, down where it’s wetter, under the sea?

Hell, even the Monterey Bay Aquarium is getting in on the action:

We heard this is a thing now? pic.twitter.com/zdEjs7jPvr

— Monterey Aquarium (@MontereyAq) April 7, 2017

Now maybe you’re Sir David Attenborough, the veteran English broadcaster and calming voice behind BBC’s Planet Earth series, and you find this sort of misinformation to be disingenuous. But maybe you’re Sir David Attenborough, the veteran English broadcaster and calming voice behind BBC’s Planet Earth series, and you have a great sense of humor. And if that’s the case we need you to narrate each and every one of these ads because the world could honestly use it right now. Especially those poor little snippers. Just look at their tiny snip-snips. Are you going to say no to them, Sir David Attenborough? Good, I didn’t think so.

Featured Image: BBC

---

Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).

WASHINGTON—After ordering the first U.S. military attack against the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, President Donald Trump held a press conference Friday to express his full confidence that the airstrike had completely wiped out the lingering Russian scandal. “Based on intelligence we have received over the past several hours, the attack on the al-Shayrat air base in Homs has successfully eliminated all discussions and allegations about my administration’s ties to the Russian government,” said Trump, adding that at approximately 4:40 a.m. local time, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from U.S. naval ships obliterated all traces of the widespread controversy in news outlets across the media. “Ordering this strike was not a decision I took lightly, but given that it was the only way to decisively eradicate any attention being paid to congressional investigations into possible collusion between key members of my staff and ...

It’s hard not to fall for clickbait. With sensationalized titles that are vague but intriguing and eye-catching cover pictures, how can anyone resist? Taking the bait usually leads to a questionable page stuffed with ads and information from dubious sources.

The Wild Detectives is trying to shake things up by using the controversial phenomenon to “trick” people into reading classic novels. The Texas-based indie bookstore is calling its campaign “Litbaits.” It began last year when the store started sharing scandalous posts on Facebook with titles like“British guy dies after selfie gone wrong” and “This Italian politician makes Trump look like a saint.”

The posts looked like any typical clickbait story you would see on Facebook or Twitter, but when clicked, the links didn’t lead to a sensationalized story. Instead, they took users to blog posts containing the full-text of public-domain classic reads like The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde and The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.

Other books shared by The Wild Detectives include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and more. Every post begins with the tagline, “You fell for the bait, now fall for the book.”

Below are some hilarious examples of posts for the Litbaits campaign. You can see a full list of the bookstore’s posts on Medium.

The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli

Watch the video below to learn more about The Wild Detective’s quirky experiment:

Strange things can happen as we hover on the edge of consciousness

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas was on a big win streak and sitting on top of the Big 12.

Then came four losses in the last six games, a skid that sent the No. 3-seed Longhorns stumbling onto their home court for the opening round of the women’s NCAA Tournament. It’s not exactly the kind of momentum push Texas was looking for.

After advancing to last season’s final eight, Texas opened the season with big expectations, only to bookend it with struggles early and late. The Longhorns started 2-4, then won 19 in a row before the tough finish dashed their hopes of upending Baylor for the Big 12 regular-season championship.

The worst came after a home loss to Baylor, when coach Karen Aston and her team had to hear Bears coach Kim Mulkey say she still had the league’s dominant program. Two weeks later, a loss to West Virginia in the conference tournament denied them a rematch.

Aston had to dig deep to get her team sorted out.

“There was this first moment of a few days of disappointment and probably being mad … a lot of emotions that we needed to sort of work through,” Aston said as the Longhorns (23-8) prepared for Friday’s matchup with No. 14 Central Arkansas (26-4) in the first round of the Lexington Regional. Friday’s other game in Austin pits No. 6 North Carolina State (22-8) against No. 11 Auburn (17-14).

Texas senior forward Kelsey Lang made sure her younger teammates shook off the blues before the start of her final NCAA Tournament. She’s was in Aston’s first recruiting class in a five-year rebuilding project that has the Longhorns nudging their way among the nation’s elite programs.

Despite the late losses, Texas was still impressive enough to the tournament selection committee to be a tournament host for the second year in a row.

“The upperclassmen really had to get the point across that once you lose, you’re out,” Lang said. “For us, we’re done. I think it was important to get the underclassmen to understand how important taking every single moment is.”

LOOKING UP

Central Arkansas is about to experience the sheer size of the Big 12. The Sugar Bears have only two players taller than 6-feet and just barely that as post players Raquel Logan and Kierra Jordan are 6-1. Texas has six players at least 6-3, tying Kansas State and Oregon as the tallest teams in the nation this season.

“Regardless of size we can play against anybody,” Central Arkansas senior guard Brianna Mullins said. “They’re bigger, I’m sure they maybe a little stronger, a little quicker. But my teammates have the heart to come out and basketball.”

SWEET AS A SUGAR BEAR

Central Arkansas has one of the most distinctive mascots in college basketball. School officials say there’s no special story behind it, only that decades ago the school wanted a nickname that set the women’s team apart from the men’s team. The name may sound soft but the school logo is the face of snarling bear.

“I think we’ve got the best mascot in the country,” said coach Sandra Rushing. “Somebody asked me where did it come from? I said it’s just because we’re so sweet.”

Students attending Boston public schools are now getting a more accurate depiction of the world after the school district rolled out a new standard map of the world that show North America and Europe much smaller than Africa and South America. From a report on The Guardian: In an age of "fake news" and "alternative facts", city authorities are confident their new map offers something closer to the geographical truth than that of traditional school maps, and hope it can serve an example to schools across the nation and even the world. For almost 500 years, the Mercator projection has been the norm for maps of the world, ubiquitous in atlases, pinned on peeling school walls. Gerardus Mercator, a renowned Flemish cartographer, devised his map in 1569, principally to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans. An exaggeration of the whole northern hemisphere, his depiction made North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa. He also placed western Europe in the middle of his map. Mercator's distortions affect continents as well as nations. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ARLINGTON, VA—Throwing President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal across the room in a fit of anger, James Scheri, ringleader of the Meals on Wheels America program, reportedly shook his fist in the air and shouted “Curses!” Thursday upon learning that his gravy train could soon be cut off. “Blast—my scheme has been found out!” said Scheri, his face growing red with rage after learning of the Trump administration’s plans to eliminate federal grants that fund his elaborate moneymaking swindle of delivering food to the homes of elderly and disabled Americans. “The jig is up! Now that those damned feds have gotten wind, what will become of the grand empire I have built? And what of all my many mansions and luxury automobiles? My life of Community Development Block Grant luxury might be at an end!” At press time, Scheri was excitedly rubbing his hands together after realizing ...

HOWARD, MD—Shaking his head and sighing as he viewed the televised proceedings, Merrick Garland reportedly grumbled “Could’ve been me” while watching Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s Senate hearing Monday at a local bar with his fellow highway maintenance workers. “I’m supposed to be sitting up there before the Judiciary Committee, you know,” said a visibly frustrated Garland, taking a swig of beer and complaining to the members of his road crew that if he hadn’t gotten “royally screwed” he would be on CSPAN-2 testifying right now. “It’s all a bunch of political bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, I like working with you guys out there, but I had that nomination dead to rights, and they snatched it away from me. Well, guess it’s time to get back to work—those dotted white lines aren’t gonna paint themselves.” At press time, Garland ...

Ten years ago the BBC brought us Planet Earth, the most intense wildlife documentary series ever made. Until recently that is. Because after over five years in the making, the hugely popular series finally returned to our TV screens recently, and the opening episode contained quite possibly the most horrifying, the most fascinating, and the most unforgettable piece of wildlife footage we’ve ever seen.

It has all the makings of a great viral news story. A young lawyer defending an arsonist in Miami runs out of the courtroom during his closing arguments because his pants are on fire. How ironic. Maybe a little too ironic.

Read more...

Rude Court Says a Snuggie Is a Blanket, Not Clothing

Zoom in on the syrup.

Denny’s marking genius.

The children of the Papdale Primary School in Kirkwall, Orkney, decided that a toilet bowl funeral wasn't good enough for their beloved class pets — two goldfish named Bubbles and Freddy. Instead, they decided to give the fish the fiery Viking-style sendoff they deserved.

The Primary 3 and 4 classes received Bubbles and Freddy for Christmas. Unfortunately, the pair died after a few short months. 

Luckily for the dead fish (and the internet), the children were learning about Vikings the week of the untimely deaths of Bubbles and Freddy.  Read more...

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DOUGLAS, AZ (KXAN) — The Border Patrol stopped a smuggling operation getting attention for it’s brazen engineering design.

Agents found a catapult on the Mexico side of the fence near Douglas, Arizona. Officials explain it was being used to hurl bundles of marijuana into the U.S.

American agents dismantled the catapult and Mexican authorities seized it in a joint operation. Investigators are working to determine who set up the catapult.

• INVESTIGATION: New border arrest data show fewer major drug busts

In Texas, law enforcement officers tell KXAN they’ve seen little to no change in the supply of drugs here at home, despite the efforts being poured into the border region. And officials in border counties tell KXAN the result isn’t worth the cost.

Analysis of the Department of Public Safety arrests in border regions showed that of the more than 32,000 arrests made since June 2014, only six percent of the arrests were for felony drug possession.

“The drug dealers are not dumb, alright. So they’ll go around and find other areas where there’s not so much concentration of DPS in one place. Because that’s what they’ve been doing,” said Martha Sanchez of LUPE, a community union that works with low-income communities.

Take a look at the flag up there. Does your heart swell with pride? You’re not alone. Most Texans feel the same way. The very suggestion that the Texas flag might be messed with is offensive on a fundamental level to people who know that Lone Star doesn’t just refer to a brand of cheap beer. (Want proof? Check out the comments on this post from 2013 a graphic designer who dared to redesign the Texas flag.) Still, that pride doesn’t stop many Texans from making an embarrassing gaffe when texting. Sadly, there is no official Texas flag emoji, presumably because if there were, the other states would get jealous and then we’d have scroll through all of the lesser flag emojis to find Texas’s. However, there is the flag of the Republic of Chile,…View Original Post

The post The Texas Legislature Wants You To Stop Using The Chilean Flag Emoji appeared first on Texas Monthly.

A Texas woman spent several days last week cleaning up honey dripping down the walls of her home due to a bee infestation in her roof.

According to KIAH, the CW-affiliated television station in Houston, when Spring homeowner Latanja Levine called in professionals to help with her roof repair, they discovered they couldn’t fix the problem until the bees were eradicated. A hole in the roof was patched so the bees couldn’t get through, allowing workers to repair the roof, but when Levine returned home after the repairs she found the sticky sweet substance was covering her walls.

“It’s coming in from the ceiling, down to the walls. I’m mopping it up, mopping in the walls. It’s all over the curtains here— just honey. They’re probably ruined,” she told KIAH. “It’s going to other walls and coming through other places and you can see it’s coming through cracks and crevices in the crown molding.”

Levine told KIAH professionals eradicated the bees by smoking them out and putting them back into their colonies. She estimated they captured about 50,000 bees — but there’s one problem. They didn’t capture the queen.

Ever since the City of Austin declared February 9 “Shakey Graves Day” several years back, the Austin artist a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia has used the day as an opportunity to celebrate with his fans in Austin and around the world. Most years, he’s released a collection of b-sides or live recordings to commemorate the occasion.

This year, frustrated by the current events, he is opting to make his entire catalog, “10 albums worth of songs including demos, b-sides, live recordings, and rarities,” available at a pay-what-you-wish price on www.shakeygraves.bandcamp.com for 72 hours, from February 9-11. He plans to donate 50 percent of the proceeds to charities that support “good causes.”

“Every day it seems we awaken to news that some new hole has been slashed in the foundations of everything we’ve held true concerning science, human rights and general empathy,” Rose-Garcia wrote in an emotional post on his Facebook page Monday. “These things now come in direct conflict with our new president’s disgusting vision of America.”

Rose-Garcia is asking his fans to suggest worthy charities, nonprofits and think tanks that are working to turn the tide. He and his team will select one or more to support.

He will also be hosting his annual Shakey Graves Day party at the Mohawk on February 9. This time round he’s bringing along friends, David Ramirez and Rayland Baxter to “do a set of songs in the round, fart jokes storytelling and kumbaya.” Los Coast opens the show.

Fans have an opportunity to sign up to buy $10 pre-sale tickets on his Website. The reduced price pre-sale tickets will be awarded by lottery. Additional tickets will be available at the door on the day of show.

While they are important showings of solidarity in retaliation to the threat of oppression, today's Women's Marches held in cities around the world have also been possibly the greatest display of sign-making skills and cheeky wit in recent memory. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the world's most treasured actors, Sir Ian McKellen, showed up to London's event with an absolutely top-notch sign that both extolled the fed up message of the day and trolled his good friend, Sir Patrick Stewart.

McKellen was spotted by a fan, who snapped a pic of him and posted it to Twitter. In a message shared on Twitter late Saturday, McKellen said the sign was not his own.  Read more...

More about Protest, Women S March On Washington, Sign, Ian Mckellen, and Sir Patrick Stewart

Johnny Depp wins the movie icon prize at the People's Choice Awards - despite recent domestic troubles and film flops.