The chocolate truffle La Madeline au Truffle has been recognized by Forbes Magazine as the most expensive chocolate in the world with a $250 price tag.

It´s the Danish chef and chocolatier Fritz Knipschildt, owner and founder of Knipschildt Chocolatier and Chocopologie, a café in South Norwalk, Connecticut, who sells and makes these.

Since this truffle is considered the world's most expensive chocolate, it attracted investors from the Middle East and a second shop opened in Dubai a couple of years ago, but I´m unsure if the shop is still open. Both the Twitter and Facebook account for the Dubai shop aren´t up-to-date.

Featured image: La Madeline au Truffle via NBC Connecticut.

Farmer Christoph Huttner, has received much attention after a balloonist discovered a set of crop circles at his wheat field near Weilheim in Oberbayern, Germany.

He suggests that this is the work of students who are on summer holiday.

Image credit: via DailyScene.com

US funk band Vulfpeck released a quite unusual album. Their fourth album Sleepify consists of 10 tracks of complete silence.

When they put the album on Spotify, they encouraged fans to play it overnight to help them raise money for a future tour that would be free for fans to attend.

The album didn´t do bad and the band raised nearly $20,000 (£11,700) before Spotify removed the album from their service.

Featured image: via TeamRock.

A new study published in the Journal of Communication, gives that people who have had a more stressful day at work, felt guilty and experienced a sense of failure if they choosed to watch television or play computer games instead of doing other more meaningful tasks when they came home from work:

The study, published in the Journal of Communication, found that people who were highly stressed after work did not feel relaxed or recovered when they watched TV or played computer games.

Instead they had high levels of guilt and feelings of failure.

Researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany and the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands asked 471 study participants how they felt after work or school the previous day and what media they had used.

They found that those who were especially fatigued were more inclined to feel that they were procrastinating by watching TV or playing games instead of doing more important tasks.

This led them to feeling guilty, which in turn made them feel less recovered and revitalised, diminishing the positive effects of using media.

Previous research has shown that using entertaining media can produce a “recovery experience” that helps people relax and detach from the stresses of work.

But the latest study highlighted the paradox of using various media to relax after a stressful day, with those who might have benefited most from using media to recover instead experiencing lower levels of recovery, because they felt doing so was a sign that they had failed to exercise self-control.

Featured image: A family watch colour television in the 50s. The image from the Hulton Archive is titled Family Viewing. Via The Guardian.

• The Guilty Couch Potato: The Role of Ego Depletion in Reducing Recovery Through Media Use (original article)

This is amazing footage from the BBC documentary series Africa. What you see are toxic soda lakes, a chain of lakes that run through East Africa. The water is toxic because it´s poisoned by volcanic springs.

The face of the lakes changes day by day when the sun evaporates the water and leave the salts behind.

The incredible colors is due to algae, specially adapted to live in this corrosive liquid.

The algae feed the flamingos, who gather in these waters whenever the algae bloom.

You can watch this in episode 2 Savannah on Dailymotion.

Here are the rest of the episodes:

• BBC Africa with David Attenborough - episode 1 Kalahari
• BBC Africa with David Attenborough - episode 3 Congo
• BBC Africa with David Attenborough - episode 4 Cape
• BBC Africa with David Attenborough - episode 5 Sahara
• BBC Africa with David Attenborough - episode 6 The Future

When American novelist Sherwood Anderson wanted out from the advertising business and instead pursue his career in writing, he wrote a witty resignation letter, asking his employer to fire him:

Dear Barton:

You have a man in your employ that I have thought for a long time should be fired. I refer to Sherwood Anderson. He is a fellow of a good deal of ability, but for a long time I have been convinced that his heart is not in his work.

There is no question but that this man Anderson has in some ways been an ornament to our organization. His hair, for one thing, being long and messy gives an artistic carelessness to his personal appearance that somewhat impresses such men as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mr. Curtiniez of Kalamazoo when they come into the office.

But Anderson is not really productive. As I have said his heart is not in his work. I think he should be fired and if you will not do the job I should like permission to fire him myself. I therefore suggest that Anderson be asked to sever his connections with the company on [the first of next week]. He is a nice fellow. We will let him down easy but let’s can him.

Respectfully submitted,

Sherwood Anderson

Featured image: Photograph by Eric Schaal taken from Virginia Tech´s The Sherwood Anderson Collection.

This photo taken from the International Space Station by German astronaut Alexander Gerst, shows fired rockets and explosions in Gaza and Israel. He describes the photo in his Tweet as his "saddest photo yet", a tweet that has received great attention and gone viral.

Huffington Post covers this story more in depth.

Mother of two, Christie Watson, was surprised one morning to see that her son´s uneaten ice cream sandwich sitting on her patio table, had barely melted during the night, although 12 hours had passed and it was an 80 degree morning. Even though Walmart´s ice cream sandwich meets all FDA guidelines, I personally would choose other alternatives.

Related:

• Fed Up: The Documentary That Makes You Re-Think Food

This gentlemen´s guide about how to do proper fist bumps, puts a smile on my face:

If that´s isn´t enough for you, the different poses have been made into animated gifs.

Via Buxx.

These unique looking domes located in Cape Romano, Florida, were once a holiday home, built in the 80s by a retired independent oil producer named Bob Lee. The home was well ahead of it´s time, both self sufficient and solar-powered.

It was used as a primary residence up until 1993, but after some hurricanes and a rising sea level, the domes are now abandoned and will soon be claimed by the sea.

Image credit: Vintage image by Kristian Maples (Bob’s grandson). Image of abandoned domes by Mila Bridger.

Via Inhabitat.

I stumbled upon this live performance at KCRW by Angus & Julia Stone, a brother-sister duo from Australia playing folk-blues. The song is called Big Jet Plane:

For more great music, visit Morning Becomes Eclectic.

Featured image: Angus and Julia in Mexico City. Via Instagram.

Related:

• Rhob Cunningham Performs Wait Until the Sun Grows Cold Under a Bridge
• Tycho Performs Live at Radio Station KCRW
• Tinariwen Gothenburg Harbour Performance

The New York based real estate developer Extell Development Company has gotten green light to build in a "poor door" in a high-rise building located next to the Hudson River, so that high-income homeowners doesn´t have to use the same entrance as the residents with low incomes:

The City of New York approved a proposal by one of the largest real estate developers in the city to build in a 'poor door', or a separate door for residents living in affordable housing to enter their building.

[...]

Extell's proposal allows them to force affordable housing tenants to walk through an entrance located in a back alley behind the building to enter, leaving the more prominent front entrance for tenants paying for nicer apartments.

Under the Inclusionary Housing Program, for which the city approved Nextell's application, larger properties are allowed to be built as long as they include a portion of affordable housing units.

For the 40 Riverside Boulevard location, 55 units will be designated as affordable housing, all units facing the street. Another 219 units will face the river.

[...]

'No one ever said that the goal was full integration of these populations,' David Von Spreckelsen, senior vice president at Toll Brothers, another developer specializing in luxury residencies, told The Real Deal in 2013. 'So now you have politicians talking about that, saying how horrible those back doors are. I think it’s unfair to expect very high-income homeowners who paid a fortune to live in their building to have to be in the same boat as low-income renters, who are very fortunate to live in a new building in a great neighborhood.'

One question comes to mind: isn´t it unfair to get approval to build larger properties at the expense of low-income renters? What´s the big deal of not having to share the entrance, you still have your apartment?

Feature image: A beautiful view from one of the guest rooms in The Standard High Line NYC overlooking the Hudson River.

I usually open a sewn bag with the help of a scissor, but this isn´t necessary. New Hope Mills has made a how-to video, showing us the correct and easiest way to open those bags:

Featured image: Rockwood Lump Charcoal via Packaging of the World.

Via Metro (Sweden).

The Ape Who Went to College is a documentary about a rather unique experiment. In 1978, Dr Lyn Miles at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, raised a rejected baby orangutan named Chantek as a human child:

By the time he was four, Chantek was a familiar sight on campus. His photo appeared in the university yearbooks alongside the students, and he sat in on lectures: he loved human company. Chantek had a riotous sense of humour. His favourite game was to steal food from students and he’d hide in the women’s toilets, wait until a student went into a cubicle and then stretch an arm under the door to provoke a fit of shrieks.

His language was becoming more complex. When he didn’t know a sign, he adapted others: ketchup was ‘tomato-toothpaste’, and a Big Mac was ‘cheese-meat-bread’.

A campus worker who had suffered an accident to his hand was ‘Dave Missing-Finger’. Chantek loved outings too, including trips to the lake where he’d bathe, and to the takeaway. But his interaction with the human world was causing problems. Drivers would gawk at the sight of an ape in a car, and sometimes Dr Miles was forced to pull off the road for safety. University lawyers voiced fears of a lawsuit if Chantek caused a pile-up on the motorway.

[...]

After two years Chantek was moved to Atlanta Zoo, where he lives with other orangutans. He cannot accept they’re the same species as him, though – he calls them ‘orange dogs’. Dr Miles now has to go to the zoo as a visitor to see her beloved Chantek. He asks her for his favourite foods; he’s forgotten many words, but still remembers the sign for ‘I love you’.

Update: The video gets deleted from YouTube, but you can watch it on the PBS website instead.

Featured image: Taken from the documentary, Chantek paying for food at a fast food drive-thru (video).

Forbes Michael Humphrey writes about musician David Byrne´s concerns about Amazon´s new venture Kindle Unlimited, a service that for only $9.99 a month gives you access to 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks:

So here’s a question for book lovers: Are you willing to pay big bucks to see your favorite authors in “concert?” Can you imagine dropping between $50 and $100 to hear an author read from their books or give a speech? Maybe you already have, and can, and so it’s probably not Suzanne Collins, J.K. Rowling or Stephen King that we need to fret about. They will have the negotiation power to make themselves money and the following to break off on their own if they wish. As Byrne writes: “Some of us have other sources of income, such as live concerts, and some of us have reached the point where we can play to decent numbers of people…”

But would you pay $5 to $10 for an author that you have barely heard of? Probably not. As Byrne notes, “Writers, for example, can’t rely on making money from live performances – what are they supposed to do? Write ad copy?”

This has already been the case for many writers, whose core work turns out to be a loss leader. Many teach, one former poet laureate sold insurance, others get by on grants. Some of them, yes, write ad copy. For $9.99 a month to read a never ending stream of books, they may not be your biggest concern.

But the arts “streaming” phenomenon, which now appears inevitable, does come at a price that no one seems willing to pay. And when it rolls all the way down, it inevitably hits the creators, especially those who don’t have the time and space to write your next favorite books, songs, and scripts. It is not a world without entertainment, but it’s one nearing all-or-nothing status. And that’s a problem.

“A culture of blockbusters is sad,” Byrne concluded, “and ultimately it’s bad for business. That’s not the world that inspired me when I was younger. Many a fan (myself included) has said that ‘music saved my life’, so there must be some incentive to keep that lifesaver available for future generations.”

Reading this, it reminds me of something Joe Walsh from The Eagles said when appearing at Daryl´s House (video). Raises concerns, doesn´t it?

Featured image: David Byrne via The Talks. Copyright by Getty Images.

Now you can relive some of the greatest goals made during the World Cup 2014 in Brazil by watching this wonderful drawn flipbook.

The goals depicted in the video are:

1. Tim Cahill 1-1 Australia - Netherlands
2. James Rodriguez 1-0 Colombia - Uruguay
3. Robin van Persie 1-1 Spain - Netherlands

With the help of a bot named Lsjbot, Swede Sverker Johansson has authored 8.5 percent of Wikipedia´s entire collection, which makes for 2,7 million articles. I find it fascinating that a bot can author articles with such a high quality, something I wasn´t aware of before.

He has been particularly prolific cataloging obscure animal species, including butterflies and beetles, and is proud of his work highlighting towns in the Philippines. About one-third of his entries are uploaded to the Swedish language version of Wikipedia, and the rest are composed in two versions of Filipino, one of which is his wife's native tongue.

An administrator holding degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics, he says he has long been interested in "the origin of things, oh, everything."

It isn't uncommon, however, for Wikipedia purists to complain about his method. That is because the bulk of his entries have been created by a computer software program—known as a bot. Critics say bots crowd out the creativity only humans can generate.

Mr. Johansson's program scrubs databases and other digital sources for information, and then packages it into an article. On a good day, he says his "Lsjbot" creates up to 10,000 new entries.

[...]

Mr. Johansson says his bot could be an inspiration to future authors who have knowledge outside the typical interests of standard Wikipedia contributors. He says a computer program can't write about everything.

"Wikipedia also needs writers to describe sentiments, literary quality, those kinds of things—my bot won't ever be able to do that," he says.

There are plenty who see value in his mission. Lennart Gulbrandsson, a representative for Wikipedia in Sweden, says "Sverker's work has proven its value" and many skeptics have converted into believers. Mr. Johansson says he is pained by those who continue to criticize him.

"It saddens me that some don't think of Lsjbot as a worthy author," he said. "I am a person; I am the one who created the bot. Without my work, all these articles would never have existed."

Sverker interviewed in Sweden:

In the well-produced Channel 4 production Scandimania, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sets out on a journey to find out why the Nordic countries Sweden, Denmark and Norway get voted the happiest countries in the world.

The series starts off with a visit to Sweden:

Here are the episodes with Denmark and Norway.

Featured image: Via Orelia.

Related:

• Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigates the good life in Scandinavia
• Channel 4 sends Hugh on a Scandinavian adventure
• Scandinavia: Scandimania, takes hold

The Vermont Novelty Toaster Corporation that started off by manufacturing toasters that printed Jesus into the bread, now offer a service that, as the owner says, only is limited by your own creativity.

After having successfully reduced manufacturing cost and acquired the machinery needed, you can buy a custom toaster that will burn your choosen art onto the toast:

The finished products - which retail for $75 apiece - lightly grill bread to a golden brown, save for the image outline which is burnt on at a higher heat to make for a darker hue.

The company's president, Galen Dively says there is no other product like this in the world.

'This is a first in the novelty toaster world,' he told Reuters. 'Before, setup fees and large minimums effectively limited personalized toasters to larger companies, corporations and individuals with deep pockets. We are creating a whole new market; personalized impressions on toast available to all.'

The company, which began by making toasters that printed Jesus into bread in a barn off a dirt road in rural Vermont, had been trying to make this concept an affordable reality for several years.

'We finally acquired the machinery needed to make it happen,' Mr Dively said. 'Gone are the days it cost me $1,500 just to add one new design to our catalog. We are now limited only by our creativity.'

All work is done at the company's warehouse in Vermont, and despite a lack of promotion, the selfie toasters are already selling well, Mr Dively says.

'We immediately got interest and orders,' he revealed. 'The response has been great.'

Via Caitlin Dewey.

Pediatric physician Allison Ballantine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia gave a commencement speech to a class of graduating medical students about the importance of living with presence:

We become so accustomed to life on the hamster wheel of achievement and approval that we just forget. We scamper on and on, chasing the ephemeral promises of “someday…” or “if only I…”

Growing up, I learned a hard lesson about how that hamster wheel could cheat us.

My father was a pediatric surgeon, with tremendous enthusiasm and drive to succeed that encompassed his work, his family, and his friendships. He was a huge influence in my life — he taught me the value of hard work and the satisfaction of a job done right. But on a winter day when he was driving home from the hospital where he worked, his car slid on a patch of black ice, hitting a telephone pole on the driver’s side, killing him instantly.

He was forty-eight and I was eighteen.

[...]

This … serves as a reminder that I cannot live my life on the hamster wheel, waiting for “someday…” or “if only I…”

[...]

What you have is in the present moment, and it is unfathomably precious.

Featured image: Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.

Imagine you have to watch The Hobbit, The Avengers and Inception for your next job application. That´s what LA-based producer Josh Garrell had to do when he applied for a job at Netflix.

Josh works as a "tagger", responsible for giving on-demand movies the right keywords. Frankly, I´ve actually never heard of this profession before.

"You're really breaking down parts of a movie or TV show that you wouldn't think to break down," says Josh, who has been tagging since 2012. "Netflix built an incredibly detailed, multi-page set-up for us to be able to input a gargantuan amount of information."

These tag descriptors are then put to work with a series of algorithms, forming Netflix's complex search and recommendations engine. In layman's terms this is how the entertainment streaming site guesses that you might like Eat Pray Love, based on the fact that you watched Pretty Woman (though let's face it, you shouldn't be watching either).

[...]

"I originally applied for another job at Netflix - but didn't get it. A friend of mine works at Netflix and I interviewed for a job with one of the higher ups there. I wasn't qualified enough for the job I was applying for but Netflix really liked me during the interview, so they called me up later and asked if I was interested in interviewing for tagging."

"I watched The Hobbit, The Avengers and Inception for my Netflix job application. I had to take five movies I'd already watched and create fake tags for them, then Netflix checked whether or not they were accurate against tags that someone else had done."

"Jennifer Lawrence in X-Men: Days of Future Past is 'haunted' and 'angry'. If I'm describing a character from a movie I have a tonne of options to choose from, which is also true for when I'm describing the movie itself. You just try to narrow it down to the tags that best describe that character, so they end up not being a mish-mash of too many things."

"The key is really being able to show an understanding of TV and film. I think that's most important - there were a lot of people who were recruited with a very specific skill, like speaking multiple languages, but who hadn't watched a tonne of TV and movies so they had to have more training. It's really about being able to have that intrinsic knowledge, having watched a bunch of stuff and understanding how it works."

[...]

"Documentaries are the hidden gems of Netflix - they often get overlooked but the ones that I've tagged have been phenomenal. There's this amazing one about how the human personality is formed [The Lottery of Birth] which shows that the only way to unlearn hatred, small-mindedness or bigotry is to start over how we're thinking and look carefully at what were instilling in children when they're born."

"I try to make it as fun as possible for myself. Sometimes I'll crack open a beer. Or I have a bit of a sweet tooth so I'll have chocolates and cookies or something like that. I have a projector and a screen so it makes it feel like I've got a little movie theatre at home."

"It's up there with driving an ice-cream truck. It's one of the best jobs I've ever had. If anything, the only thing that sucks about it is that I don't have more work. Even if I'm not tagging stuff I'm watching Orange Is The New Black or I'm going to the theatre - I don't stop ingesting. I love watching movies so this is like the coolest thing that I could ever imagine having."

Image credit: The boy watching TV via USC News.

In his photo series 7 Days of Garbage, photographer Gregg Segal´s friends, neighbors, and other acquaintances have been photographed surrounded by the garbage they accumulate in the course of a week. As Gregg so beautifully puts it: “We’ve made our bed and in it we lie.”

Images via Asylum Art.

When Outside meets up with Lance Armstrong in Outside Talks, it´s his first appearance since talking with Oprah:

Related:

• Stop at Nothing - The Lance Armstrong Story

I've put together a rather lengthy resource, linking to videos related to Transcendental Meditation. Happy viewing!

Introductions to Transcendental Meditation:

• Executive director of the David Lynch Foundation Bob Roth describes the Transcendental Meditation technique in depth
• Short introductory by the TM Center in Wellington, New Zealand
• Transcendental Meditation in action (new UK introductory)
• Transcendental Meditation in action (UK introductory from the 90s)
• TM is explained by scientists Dr. John Hagelin and Dr. Norman Rosenthal

The use of Transcendental Meditation in scools:

• Actress Judy Greer's short-documentary about one school's use of the David Lynch Foundation's The Quiet Time program
• A school in Detroit let students meditate
• Grades improve at a school in San Francisco

The use of Transcendental Meditation in prisons:

• Overcoming anger with Transcendental Meditation
• Prisoners find stress relief with Transcendental Meditation
• Rehabilitation of prisoners through the use of Transcendental Meditation
• A family doctor working inside prison, talks about his experiences with Transcendental Meditation and its many benefits

The use of Transcendental Meditation when working with trauma:

• Treating PTSD with Transcendental Meditation
• Veterans overcome PTSD with Transcendental Meditation

Longer talks and interviews:

• Tina Marx discusses Transcendental Meditation with TM teachers
• TM teacher Chris Greathead's talk at TEDxJesmondDene
• Hugh Jackman interviewed by the David Lynch Foundation's Bob Roth
• Bob Roth interviews Jerry Seinfeld on "Success Without Stress" on SiriusXM

The use of Transcendental Meditation in the work environment:

• A family company creates a healthier working environment with the help of TM

Transcendental Meditation in the news:

• Transcendental Meditation on ABC's Catalyst, Sydney, Australia
• Transcendental Meditation on CBS Sunday Morning
• Transcendental Meditation on the Katie Couric Show

Transcendental Meditation and creativity:

• A painter describes her experience of Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation and parenting:

• Springli Johnson, a school administrator and a mother of six, speaks about the greatest gift TM has given her
• The "busy" journalist and mother Soledad O'Brien found the time to do Transcendental Meditation on a daily basis

Transcendental Meditation and autism:

• Transcending Autism: Jaxson's story
• Transcending Autism: Joey Lowenstein's Foundation
• Adam, Asperger's syndrome, and the Transcendental Meditation Technique
• Autism, Meditation and Stress – webinar with moderator Rita Cosby

The use of Transcendental Meditation when treating addiction:

• Homelessness and addiction decrease with Transcendental Meditation

Shorter interviews about Transcendental Meditation:

• Jerry Seinfeld discuss TM with Bob Roth on SiriusXM
• David Lynch and Brandon Boyd discuss Transcendental Meditation

How does Transcendental Meditation helps anxiety:

• Transcendental Meditation heals anxiety and stomach pain

How does Transcendental Meditation affect your health:

• TM improves heart health

Practitioners of Transcendental Meditation speak about their experiences using it:

• Russell Simmons on the value of Transcendental Meditation
• Supermodel Raquel Zimmerman speaks about all the positive changes that's taken place in her life, after having practiced Transcendental Meditation for one year
• Jerry Seinfeld and Howard Stern discuss Transcendental Meditation over a cup of coffee
• Businessman Ray Dalio on Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation documentaries:

• "School of Thought" starring David Lynch
• a filmmaker seeks out Transcendental Meditation in "David Wants to Fly"
• David Lynch's documentary "Meditation, Creativity, Peace"

Tip: See also my post "Transcendental Meditation and the Alternatives".

Featured image: From the In Short documentary by Judy Greer.

Swede Alassan Issa has probably done one of the most daring stunts I´ve ever seen. He jumps over a Lamborghini Gallardo that comes speeding in 80.77 mph (130 km/h).

Watching the video, you can tell Alassan prepares himself alot for his stunts.

He says that the ultimate goal would be to jump over two cars and that nobody has done this before. My question is, has someone jumped over a fast running Lamborghini Gallardo before?

Via @EmmelieWallroth.

Related:

• Watch a man jump over a speeding Lamborghini
• Ken Block Turns the Street of San Francisco Into His Own Little Playground

Fortunately, footage like this is rare. When a Boeing 767-300 from UTair Aviation coming from Moscow was about to land, an Airbus A340-300 from Aerolíneas Argentinas suddenly crossed the runway. Thankfully, the Russian crew could avoid a serious accident by performing a go around, to land safely short after:

Related:

• Incident a Barcelona airport caught on video: Airbus 340 runway incursion during Boeing 767 landing

In Jerry Seinfeld's comedy web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, he meets with Howard Stern. In this clip they discuss Transcendental Meditation:

Here's the full episode, but it seems the meditation part didn't make the cut.

Tip: See also my post "Transcendental Meditation and the Alternatives".

I fell in love with this old Step 2 car transformed into a very cool-looking Batmobile.

Featured image: Photograph by Michelle Lloyd.

Visit the beautiful and serene Sistine Chapel and Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City, in 360-degree view.

There's also 3D virtual tours for you to enjoy, guiding you through the Sistine Chapel and Saint Peter's Square.

Featured image: The Sistine Chapel

I got all sweaty by watching the newly released short-film with rock climber Alex Honnold. I´ve previously written about Alex when he climbed the mountain face of Sentinel in Yosemite National Park.

In this footage, Alex is in San Francisco and climbs the sculptures on Crissy Field, the Palace of Fine Arts and finish off by ascending a tall building, with a brick facade held up with glue, which makes this climb extra challenging:

Mentalgassi is a street art collective from Berlin, Germany. Back in 2007, their first work together took form when they glued large black and white portraits onto recycle bins and turned them into "metal heads". Since then, many different street art installations have followed:

In 2007 the friends created their first three-dimensional work. With a digital camera, Photoshop software and a large commercial printer, Mentalgassi produced vast black-and-white portraits (usually of family or friends) which they then glued with wallpaper paste onto some of Berlin’s recycling bins.

[…]

‘Metalheads’ - which were part-street-art-part-sculpture-part-photograph - was followed by hilarious face stickers attached to U-Bahn ticket validation machines and then by ‘Public Intimacy’, a series of six fleeting Berlin installations: an early morning U-Bahn carriage quickly transformed into a twee and cosy living room, a photo booth converted into a lavatory, an U-Bahn driver’s platform mirror redressed as a domestic bathroom mirror with shelf, toothbrushes and deodorant. Many of the ‘Public Intimacy’ installations lasted for less than five minutes, until removed by authorities. ‘Or nicked by the public,’ recalled one of the Mentalgassi. ‘Within five minutes someone stole the deodorant stick.’

Metal heads in Berlin. Image via ekosystem.org:

[…]

With their growing success, the three friends began to export their work along with the anarchic, humorous spirit of Berlin. At Getxo Photo near Bilbao, in response to the festival’s ‘In Praise of the Elderly’ theme, Mentalgassi attached faces to two-metre-diameter balloons and set them adrift in the harbour. In Serbia at the Novi Sad EXIT music festival they launched smiling, illuminated helium balloons over the heads of the crowd. In Poland they transformed a Katowice city bus into a mobile ghetto blaster. They have worked with Amnesty International, Converse sports shoes and in Finland created vast ‘fence pictures’ as part of the Pori Art Museum ‘Street Art: the New Generation’ show.

Featured image: Mentalgassi in collaboration with Mundano on Pimp My Carroça in São Paulo.

Via Rumiram and En Derin.

A SUV ended up in the treetops in Wenzhou, China. When translating the article, it seems that the driver did park in neutral and pulled the handbrake when he found himself in a steep mountain slope, but unfortunately that wasn´t enough and as a result the car started to run down the slope and ended up in the woods.

Featured image: Via GMW.cn.

Story via @Brian_Ashcraft.

A nice live set from Tycho visiting the music program Morning Becomes Eclectic at KCRW:

Skilled professional rally driver Ken Block enjoys the streets of San Francisco in his own special way. The speed and the precision in which Ken drives his car is amazing. His team must have been working hard to pull this off, because the footage is a great watch. Be sure to watch in HD.

Also, don´t miss out on Ken´s appearance in BBC TopGear.

This is a pure little gem, watching this tears started to roll down my cheeks. Dutch filmmaker Frans Hofmeester started to film his daughter Lotte as an infant every week and kept going. The result is a beatiful time lapse video of Lotte´s journey from being an infant to becoming a teenager, and a loving document capturing a fathers love for his child(ren):

A father takes recording childhood growth spurts to the next level by creating a timelapse film of his daughter Lotte, capturing her transformation from newborn baby to teenager.

The captivating video shows the gradual transformation of Dutch filmmaker Frans Hofmeester's daughter Lotte, who was born on October 28 1999, the filmmaker and photographer has also made similar films of his son Vince.

Mr Hofmeester, filmed his children every week for about 15 seconds to make the films, which in total he says have received over 15 million views on YouTube and Vimeo, this particular video has also been shown at the Spanish National Reina Sofia museum in Madrid.

The filmmaker explained the motivation behind the videos and the techniques he had to employ to engage his - some times reluctant - subjects.

"I filmed Lotte every week from the moment she was born. She was changing at such a rapid pace, that I felt the need to document the way she looked, to keep my memories intact.

"The baby blanket, the white background, was a constant factor."

"Sometimes they did not feel like it. Then I said 'Just one minute. Tell me about your ball game, did you win?' That way I stalled them so I could complete the shot."

Mr Hofmeester says he discussed "ever step" of the project with his children, who are very proud of the ongoing project.

The documentary Fed Up must be one of the most important releases this year. Narrated by Katie Couric and directed by Stephanie Soechtig, the documentary uncovers the political agenda and the influential forces surrounding the food industry:

Released in theaters on May 9, the documentary Fed Up untangles the roots of obesity in America's youth. Directed by Stephanie Soechtig and narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up does not shrink from telling viewers how the government's decades-long capitulation to Big Food and its lobbyists has fostered an epidemic of excess pounds. The national focus on diet, diet foods and exercise is not abating the obesity epidemic and actually making it worse, charges the film.

Examples of capitulation to Big Food are many in the film. In 1977, the McGovern Report warned about an impending obesity epidemic and suggested revised USDA guidelines to recommend people eat less foods high in fat and sugar. The egg, sugar and other Big Food industries, seeing a risk to profits, demanded that guidelines not say "eat less" of the offending foods but rather eat more "low-fat" foods. Ka-ching. They won over the objection of Sen. McGovern.

In 2006, the United Nation's World Health Organization (WHO) released similar food recommendations and then Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy G. Thompson actually flew to Geneva, according to Fed Up, to threaten WHO that if the guidelines stood, the U.S. would withdraw its WHO financial support. Again, Big Food won.

The U.S. government plays both sides of the obesity street -- admonishing people to eat right while pushing the foods that make them fat -- because of the USDA's double mission of protecting the nation's health and protecting the health of the nation's farmers. According to Fed Up, the low fat movement allowed the USDA to maximize those split loyalties.

First, in order to maintain taste in low-fat foods (which tend to be bland once the fat is removed), sugar became the evil stand-in. Much of Fed Up examines the role of excess sugar in obesity, metabolic disorder and food addiction, especially in soft drinks. (The film's exposure of Big Food's financially-driven infiltration of public school lunchrooms with junk food is astonishing.) But the low-fat craze had another pernicious effect. All that unused fat had to go somewhere, says Fed Up, and it ended up in the dairy industry's cheese operations. Even as the USDA recommended "low-fat" diets, it worked with the industry group, Dairy Management, to "cheesify" the American diet and even worked with Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy's and Domino's!

The trailer:

As a personal side note, me and my wife try to eat healthy. For example, there´s this lovely jam from St. Dalfour that´s all natural and is lovely to put on the oatmeal in the mornings. For thoose rare occasions I use it, I consume a Stevia based ketchup. However, I´ve noticed that some food manufacturers now would like to jump on the Stevia train and make us believe on the package that this is the only sweetener used in the product. Not seldom, when you look closely at the list of ingredients, you might discover that it´s blended with other sweeteners, so be cautious.

In closing, I´d like to mention Finlands´s program The North Karelia Project, that begun in 1972. In short, they reduced the amount of salt and fat used in diet, and as a result got healthier hearts.

Via A Cup of Jo.

Here is a list of seven things you can do to start incorporating daily exercise into your life. Doing small things like this, I think, is one key to start living a more healthy life, and later a more formal exercise routine might follow as a result.

Featured image: Group of obese women undergoing slimming course in a courtyard in New York, 1926. Unknown photographer (source). Found via PASiNGA.

This time lapse footage shows artist Jordan Molina´s creative process when he draws a Japanese cherry blossom tree. The time lapse combined with the calming music makes for a perfect little break.

An rather unusual sight meet rafters on the Lower Clark Fork River, Montana. After a train derailed, heading from Wichita, Kansas, to the aircraft manufacturer Boeing´s plant in Renton, Washington, three Boeing 737 fuselages ended up in the river:

Hot weather and tough terrain is to blame for a bogged down cleanup after a train derailed and tossed three fuselages into the Lower Clark Fork River on Thursday.

The train wreck is turning into a scenic destination for rafters along the popular route where the wide canyon slows to a crawl and lets people get a good look at the fuselages.

“It’s kind of a surreal thing that comes around the corner. You would never expect it,” Joshua Flanagan, owner of a Spokane-based rafting company, Wiley E. Waters, told the Daily News.

The plane parts were on their way to Boeing’s Renton, Wash., plant from Wichita, Kan., but 19 of the Montana Rail Link freight cars derailed and lost its expensive cargo west of Missoula. There were six fuselages total, but the others luckily dropped near the tracks above.

Crews reopened the railroad line Saturday night, but fetching the big parts in the river is “going considerably slower than we hoped,” Montana Rail Link spokeswoman Lynda Frost told the Daily News. “By day’s end, we will be lucky to get one up from the river.”

Featured image: Photograph by Kyle Massick. Image via NBC News.

Close to Kai Fagerström´s family summer home in Finland, some houses are abandoned due to the fact that the previous owner has either moved out or died. However, the buildings are not fully abandoned, new tenants have moved in as you can see in this unusual photo series:

Persistence pays off! Kai spent several evenings waiting to capturing this moment involving his dog and a bank vole:

This is what Kai told National Geographic:

It was the air of desolation that drew Kai Fagerström to the handful of derelict dwellings near his family’s summer home in rural Suomusjärvi, Finland. As the amateur photographer peered through broken windows and cracks in doors, he noticed tiny tracks: Mice, badgers, and other feral trespassers had made themselves at home after the residents had died or relocated. “When I go into these houses, it’s like stepping back in time—the past lingers in the corners,” says the 48-year-old, who works by day managing properties for a parish in his hometown of Salo. “But there’s consolation in the idea that nature is reclaiming the places it has lent to people.”

This image really puts a smile on my face:

Via TwistedSifter.

Related:

• The Abandoned School Once Again Comes Back to Life in This Wondrous Photo Series