Andrew Pawelczyk barely missed a beat when his cymbals broke during the Star Spangled Banner in the middle of a public assembly. Now, online viewers and the news media are hailing his patriotic response as the YouTube video goes viral.
By the time the bombs should have been “bursting in air”, Andrew’s cymbal was already on the ground, the handle left in his hand. He looked down in amazement, slowly placed the other cymbal on the ground and stood up, slowly, and turned toward the flag and solemnly saluted.
There won’t be a dry eye in your house after watching the Hungarian shadow theatre company “Attraction” perform on Britain’s Got Talent. Stunning dance dramatics feature only the shadows of their bodies.
Even with the popularity of digital media, people are still captivated by flipping through words and pictures in a tangible, physical book — especially when it’s personalized. School yearbooks, for instance, may never go out of style.
Enter Likebooks for the digital age. Apple for years has been offering a publishing service for making books and cards from user’s iPhoto libraries with captions. Now, Facebook users have the option of placing their social network activity into a book. The Likebook service allows users to create personalized, physical books based on status updates, pictures, and the comments from friends.
The nation’s largest retailer announced Monday that it will be delivering produce from farms to stores faster by buying fruits and vegetables directly from growers.
The plan is to source about 80 percent of fresh produce directly, explained Jack Sinclair, executive vice president of the food business in the U.S. for Wal-Mart.
A crop of Hemp, the non-psychoactive cannabis used to produce wax, rope, cloth, oil and more, has been planted in Southeast Colorado — for the first time in the United States in almost six decades.
The selling of hemp products is perfectly legal (about $500 million worth are imported from other countries every year), according to Real Farmacy.com. But the growing of it is against federal law because it is a cousin of marijuana, even though it does not have the same THC.
Hello, all you RSS subscribers and bloggers who have been using my Most Popular (FREE) News Section for content curation or headline scanning.
You have probably noticed already that only one new story has been added to Most Popular in the past two months – and it’s not because there were no popular stories!
Here is the reason: the Good News Network is under major redevelopment. In preparation for the new website’s launch in the next 4 weeks, we have taken down the paywall to our content, which makes Most Popular no longer useful as a social sharing tool.
Please grab the RSS feed for All Content, or one of our other News Sections, because now ALL our stories are accessible to everyone — not just to those who are members or subscribers.
Stay tuned for further details as the site launches. I wanted to let you know that we didn’t shut down, just because that one RSS feed is not being populated.
In a beautiful sea of red, yellow, navy and light blue, more than 1,300 cyclists took to central London’s streets on Sunday in aid of the UK military charity Help for Heroes.
They stood on the famous Mall for an extraordinary photography to mark out the colors of the iconic medal logo used by the Armed Forces charity.
The event was expected to raise around £1million for Help for Heroes, which will provide support for those who have suffered injuries in recent conflicts, as well as their families.
Squadrons of bumblebees are being deployed in the UK in a novel attempt to prevent grey mold from ruining the crop of summer strawberries.
The bees are routed via a one-way system in their hive through a tray of harmless fungus spores which, when delivered to flowers, ensure that the grey mold cannot take hold as the fruit grows. New flowers on a strawberry crop open every day, which means that spraying with pesticides only protects those that are open at the time.
Tesla plans a massive expansion of its supercharger network, making a coast-to-coast trip in a Tesla all-electric plug-in luxury car possible in the near future.
Tesla will be tripling the number of its supercharger stations by the end of June, and by the end of the year, its expansion program will allow Tesla drivers to go from Los Angeles to New York, with each free charge requiring only an hour, with stations located in most major metropolitan areas in the US and Southern Canada. (See the map at CNN.)
The Tesla Model S, which comes standard with the capability of extra fast charges — and won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year honors — can seat seven with a pair of rear-facing children’s seats in the hatchback cargo area.
Motor Trend admired the speediness of the $63,000 car, calling it “as effortless as a Rolls-Royce”, but also its cargo and passenger capacity which it likened to an SUV.
Instead of relying on an antiquated notion of A, B, C and D cups, Jockey has invested years of research in creating a better system.
Its new Volumetric Fit kits measure the volume and shape of a woman’s breast plus an under-bust measurement, with the volumetric sizes running from 1 through to 10. The new system has 55 size combinations, and promises to address the long-bemoaned problem of ill-fitting bras.
Claiming it to be the closest thing to made-to-measure bras, Jockey is offering the self-measuring kits for $19.95 online, which can be used to order any of the five different styles, including wire-free models.
50 year-old Pascal Honore became paraplegic after a car accident 18 years ago but has recently experienced surfing for the first time by being taped to the back of a young Australian surfer, Ty Swan.
It all starts on the beach and a backpack – “just a Kmart special”, she says – with leg holes cut into the bottom. She’s then lifted on to Ty’s back before duct tape is wound around the pair’s shoulders, waists and legs.
While some of his peers have shunned Wall Street as the land of the morally bankrupt, Jason Trigg’s moral code steered him there. He is after money — as much as he can earn.
And he’s not alone. To an emerging class of young professionals in America and Britain, making gobs of money is the surest way to save the world.
On a cycling website, a man from Minneapolis and his wife told the story of her father, a 79-year-old man with some dementia and how they taught him to ride a bike after 50 years.
“He still shovels snow and mows the grass…” but he didn’t remember what childhood bikes were for, began the post on RatRodBikes.com.
They practiced awhile with someone running along on each side — stopping, standing, and launching the rotation of the pedals.
After the devastating tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, four-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and his wife Chandra, who grew up in that state, wanted to help. In addition to donating his Charlotte All-Star race winnings, reported to be $1 million, they visited the town on Thursday, along with other NASCAR officials, to help bring some relief to families.
At the Lowe’s Home Improvement store there, the group passed out supplies including buckets, gloves, disinfectant wipes and oatmeal. The company, which is also a sponsor of Jimmie’s, has already donated $1 million to tornado relief.
As part of its effort to position itself as a clean-energy leader, Apple is hiring former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson as its vice president for environmental initiatives. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the high-profile hire Tuesday at a technology conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
“Apple has shown how innovation can drive real progress by removing toxics from its products, incorporating renewable energy in its data center plans, and continually raising the bar for energy efficiency in the electronics industry,” Ms. Jackson told Politico in an e-mail.
Ten years ago, 12 boys from a Liberian choir visited the United States to raise money for their orphanage, and touched the hearts of a North Carolina town. Forty-five boys from that orphanage have since been adopted and are now living what they only dreamed a decade ago.
The young boys had traveled to the U.S. from the West African country of Liberia to raise awareness of the needs of children whose parents had died during the country’s years-long civil war.
Lysa Terkeurst, a mom of three girls who lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, was so moved by the boys’ performance at a local church that she was inspired to do the extraordinary.
In 2008 Leslie Davis suggested to her mother, a Master Gardener in New Mexico, that in addition to cultivating flowers for worthy causes, she might try growing fresh produce for the community, especially since the recent recession had left so many people unemployed and so many food pantries overburdened.
That discussion five years ago grew like a seed into a thriving bounty of volunteers who harvest thousands of pounds of produce, sometimes in a singe weekend, for people in need.
Led by Penny Davis and dozens of Sandoval County Master Gardeners, the happy band of do-gooders labor to feed their neighbors under the non-profit banner Seed2Need. (Watch a video at the bottom)
80 of them recently gave up their Saturday in the town of Corrales, near Albuquerque, to sit in the dirt planting the seedlings that would grow to fill two lush acres with tomatoes, green chiles, cucumbers, melons, green beans, carrots and zucchini. The project originally started with a small plot of land donated in the nieghbor’s horse corral but now the group works in a large irrigated field where boy scouts, families and retired folks together can plant and cover 2000 tomato plants in just over two hours. Two weeks later 3500 green chile plants were also dug in.
“It was a demonstration of the power of teamwork,” said Penny, who last year saw their labor of love generate a whopping 65,200 pounds of fruit and vegetables, with an estimated market value of $82,000. All of it was was donated fresh off the vine to fifteen food assistance programs in Sandoval and Bernalillo Counties.
“It’s so fresh that dirt is still clinging to the tomatoes,” says Leslie Davis who moved back to the state after leaving her old job. The social camaraderie and sense of helping others has sparked a passion in the younger Davis.
She recounted with pride the story of a local man who owned an orchard. Last fall he offered 80 pristine trees to Seed2Need for the picking. A group of high school students had to go back three times to finish collecting the 11,000 pounds of flawless apples. Participating food pantries were overwhelmed with apples in the first week. There were so many that the central food bank of New Mexico was called in to distribute to other regional pantries.
“Two to three hours and all of a sudden you have 4000 pounds,” Leslie Davis told the Good News Network. “They had to send a huge truck.”
To keep down the costs and control quality the Master Gardeners grow their own seedlings in a greenhouse that, of course, was built and assembled by volunteers. With the tending of their skilled hands, the healthy organic plants thrive.
“Little cub scouts are hidden by these bushes picking from tomato plants that are 5-and-a-half-feet tall,” recalls Leslie, who has noticed over the years of volunteering, the little boys growing up, too.
Seed2Need also provides an easy drop point for residents and farmers in late summer looking to unload their excess harvest. Tons of produce were collected this way last year both at the Corrales farmers market and from individual donations.
With the ongoing drought in the Southwest, the cost of produce is likely to climb, making projects like these crucial to those facing food insecurity.
If you would like more information, or would like to help, please visit their website at www.Seed2Need.us or visit the Seed2Need Facebook page.
A 62-year-old woman’s desire to find her birth mother led her back to California and into the arms of the resident who found the abandoned infant, in the front seat of her car.
“There was a little blue bundle on the passenger side front seat of the car, powder blue blanket, wrapped papoose style,” said Jan Hungerford. “Lifted the lid, and these two little eyes were staring at me.”
Now Jan is looking at those little eyes six decades later with gratitude for the new friendship between her and Kira Derhgawen.
Arvind V. Mahankali, a 13-year-old boy from Queens, was showered with confetti as he became the champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee yesterday after correctly spelling “knaidel,” a Yiddish term meaning “dumpling.”
It was Mahankali’s fourth trip to the annual spelling bee, and his last because contestants must be under 14 years old. This time he earned $30,000 in prize money.
After Pranav Sivakumar misspelled “cyanophycean” in Round 15, Arvind correctly spelled “tokonoma” and “knaidel”, smiling and nodding as he did. His parents and brother joined him on stage as Arvind hoisted the trophy over his head.
Andrew Pawelczyk barely missed a beat when his cymbals broke during the Star Spangled Banner in the middle of a public assembly. Now, online viewers and the news media are hailing his patriotic response as the YouTube video goes viral.
“It’s so fresh that dirt is still clinging to the tomatoes,” says Leslie Davis who moved back to the state after leaving her old job. The social camaraderie and sense of helping others has sparked a passion in the younger Davis.
“Little cub scouts are hidden by these bushes picking from tomato plants that are 5-and-a-half-feet tall,” recalls Leslie, who has noticed over the years of volunteering, the little boys growing up, too.
