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Infographic: The Overworked American

American workers are putting in longer hours than ever, for even less pay.

Column Five
By Column FiveJul 22, 2011
Column Five
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A collaboration between GOOD and Column Five Media.

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Gary is the Internet's most famous adventure cat.

Photo credit: James Eastham (with comments from Instagram)

Meet Gary, the Internet's most famous and adorable adventure cat

Any time my wife and I take our furry little feline, Tony, on a stroller ride through our downtown square, we’re mobbed with smiling children and laughing old ladies and confused college dudes rolling their eyes. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be James Eastham: proud guardian of Gary, the 10-year-old domestic longhair who’s become Internet-famous for his adorable outdoor adventures. Together, they’ve amassed over 600,000 loyal Instagram followers, who flock to their catalog-worthy photos of hiking, skiing, and paddling excursions around the Canadian Rockies.

In a time of extreme political divisiveness and social-media toxicity, cute-cat profiles are one of our few remaining sanctuaries. And it’s impossible not to fall in love with the handsome and gung-ho Gary, whether he’s looking all zen on the water or resting on his dad’s shoulders while zooming down a snowy hill, decked out in badass goggles. But the account, greatgramsofgary, is more than just feel-good fluff—he’s also inspired people to be more active and mindful with cats, rethinking preconceived notions of how to enrich their lives and ours.

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100-year-old Gaston Pettigrew got more than what he asked for.

Photo credit: Jordan Proust on Facebook

WWII veteran wanted 100 cards for his 100th birthday. The response was overwhelming.

The night before his 100th birthday, World War II veteran Gaston Pettigrew put on his Royal Canadian Navy uniform and enjoyed a birthday celebration in the dining hall with the friends, family, and staff of the Maison Paul-Triquet home in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. All he wanted for his birthday was 100 cards for him. He was greeted with a box full of 1,700 cards and more are still on the way from around the world.

Weeks prior, Pettigrew’s request was posted on a Facebook community group dedicated to military history by Jordan Proust. Since then, among the hundreds of likes and reacts the post got, the birthday cards kept coming in. Pettigrew’s residence expects him to receive over 2,000 cards by the end of his birthday week.

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Eric Idle says The Beatles were "just as funny" as Monty Python.

Photo credit: Conan O'Brien YouTube screenshot (Eric Idle), The Beatles YouTube screenshot (The Beatles)

Eric Idle says this classic Beatles moment shows they were 'just as funny' as Monty Python

The Beatles’ cultural impact extends beyond music into film, TV, fashion, literature, and even comedy. And if you ask Eric Idle, member of the influential British comedy troupe Monty Python, the band’s sharp wit was crucial to ushering in the Beatlemania craze in America. He even argues that The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) were equally funny to his own crew.

"When The Beatles first arrived in America, what made everybody love them is they were funny," he said on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. "There was this guy called Ringo with a big nose, a funny name, the funny haircuts. Everybody knew Ringo first. That’s the first name they knew. But it was their humor at the airport conference that broke them in America—I’m convinced of it. In a way, they were just as funny as we were.

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An ancient petroglyph is opening up the possibility that early humans knew more about dinosaurs than we thought.

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Stunning 9,000-year-old rock carvings suggest ancient people may have studied dinosaur tracks

Researchers in Brazil have uncovered a remarkable discovery that spans across millennia—dinosaur footprints found alongside ancient rock art dating back over 9,000 years. This significant find occurred in Serrote do Letreiro, located in the Sousa Basin, and the research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study, led by Leonardo P. Troiano, Heloísa B. dos Santos, Tito Aureliano, and Aline M. Ghilardi, suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Brazil created mysterious rock art designs—known as petroglyphs—next to dinosaur footprints. These findings offer valuable insights into the intersection of paleontology and archaeology, particularly at the Serrote site.

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Some heroes wear orange.

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How Trident the cat saved his family, proving some heroes wear orange

Orange cats have become a meme over the last few years, known for the “orange cat behavior” that often calls into question their number of brain cells. In fact, there’s an entire subreddit with 805K members called r/OneOrangeBraincell dedicated to their delightful derpiness. However, sometimes out of that derpiness comes something more. The amazing Trident the cat recently proved that while not all heroes wear capes, some heroes do wear orange.

Alana Falk, Trident’s mom, shuts the door to her bedroom at night. Sometimes Trident, whose fur appears as a dapper orange and white tuxedo with little white socks, will want to come in for “one more pet,” Newsweekreports. What would typically start as a request for “one more pet” quickly escalated one night, however. Trident was “meowing, scratching at the door, and trying to get in,” Falk wrote on TikTok in a video that now has over 276K views. Trident refused to let his owners sleep. Seeing this was unusual, Falk got up to open the door. Trident practically fell inside the room with all the vigor of his scratching and meowing, and ran to the stairs, still meowing, Falk shared. She realized shortly after that something in the house wasn’t right. There was a burning chemical smell in the house that hadn’t been there when Falk and her husband went to bed.

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Melaka Mystika, guest host of Texas A&M's Draggieland, entertains the crowd

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How a Texas A&M drag show advocated for free speech and won

Since it first began in 2020, the annual drag pageant Draggieland at Texas A&M’s College Station campus has regularly sold out their 750-seat campus theatre. This year, however, they almost didn’t get the chance.

At the end of February, the Texas A&M Board of Regents declared it would no longer be allowing drag performances on campus. “The Board finds that it is inconsistent with the System’s mission and core values of its Universities, including the value of respect for others, to allow Special Event Venues of the Universities to be used for drag shows,” it wrote. “The Board finds that Drag Show events are likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women.” It continued on to share its acknowledgement of the president’s Executive Order that “the federal government shall not promote gender ideology” and "federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and if they allowed drag shows on campus they “may be” violating these orders since the university receives federal funding. It meant that Draggieland, despite being student-funded and not university-funded, would be canceled.

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Bad music at work can kill your job performance.

Photo credit: Canva

Scientific study shows how terrible background music at work actually ruins job performance

If you have ever worked in retail, a restaurant, or in an office, there may be some music that remind you of those workplaces—many times for the worst. It's not just that the songs are annoying, either. You'd probably swear that the annoying (or outright bad) music actually made you worse at your job. It may seem like just a feeling, but science is saying that it’s actually a fact: bad music can ruin job performance.

A study at Ohio State University found that if background music at the workplace doesn’t fit well with what workers need to do their jobs, it doesn’t just impact their moods or energy, but their job performance overall. Bad songs may have killed the mood in the room, made it hard for workers to concentrate, or just didn’t feel “in sync” with the work being done. “Music misfit,” as the researchers called it, didn’t just make work less pleasurable for the workers, but was shown to cause fatigue and make it more difficult to concentrate. This is a big deal since 13.5 million people work in occupations in which background music is common—and for the most part, the music is chosen with customers in mind rather than the workers.

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Physics and geometry can make public restrooms cleaner.

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Thanks to physics, urinal splashing in men’s bathrooms reduces by 95%

If you have ever entered a public men’s restroom, you are aware of a frequent and gross problem: urinal splash back. When the typically designed urinal is in use, it’s not uncommon for droplets spraying and splashing onto the floors, walls, and the pants of the users. This has caused not just a health hazard but great expense and water use in cleaning up these messes so frequently. Thanks to physics and engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Weber State University in Utah, this splashing problem will be flushed to the past and create cleaner men’s rooms.

Current methods to clean or prevent urinal splashing are better than nothing, but still aren’t very efficient. Targets in the urinal, absorbing mats, and frequent cleaning schedules don’t address the root of the problem. According to the published study from UW and WSU, there are approximately 56 million urinals in businesses, government buildings, and other non-residential areas across the United States, leading researchers to conclude that more than 350,000 liters of urine splash onto their floors every day. That leads to a lot of time, money, and water to clean up pee.

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