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Happy 4th of July! Here's A Reminder Of What America Is All About.
Today, enjoy your burgers and fireworks. Tomorrow, let's all get back to work making America the best America she can be.
07.02.21
All illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
It's hard to truly describe the amazing bond between dads and their daughters.
Being a dad is an amazing job no matter the gender of the tiny humans we're raising. But there's something unique about the bond between fathers and daughters. Most dads know what it's like to struggle with braiding hair, but we also know that bonding time provides immense value to our daughters. In fact, studies have shown that women with actively involved fathers are more confident and more successful in school and business.
You know how a picture is worth a thousand words? I'll just let these images sum up the daddy-daughter bond.
A 37-year-old Ukrainian artist affectionately known as Soosh, recently created some ridiculously heartwarming illustrations of the bond between a dad and his daughter, and put them on her Instagram feed. Sadly, her father wasn't involved in her life when she was a kid. But she wants to be sure her 9-year-old son doesn't follow in those footsteps.
"Part of the education for my kiddo who I want to grow up to be a good man is to understand what it's like to be one," Soosh told Upworthy.
There are so many different ways that fathers demonstrate their love for their little girls, and Soosh pretty much nails all of them.
Get ready to run the full gamut of the feels.
1. Dads can do it all. Including hair.
A father does his daughter's hairAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
2. They also make pretty great game opponents.
A father plays chess with his daughterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
3. And the Hula-Hoop skills? Legendary.
A dad hula hoops with his daughterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
4. Dads know there's always time for a tea party regardless of the mountain of work in front of them.
A dad talks to his daughter while working at his deskAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
5. And their puppeteer skills totally belong on Broadway.
A dad performs a puppet show for his daughterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
6. Dads help us see the world from different views.
A dad walks with his daughter on his backAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
7. So much so that we never want them to leave.
a dad carries a suitcase that his daughter holds ontoAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
8. They can make us feel protected, valued, and loved.
A dad holds his sleeping daughterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
9. Especially when there are monsters hiding in places they shouldn't.
A superhero dad looks over his daughterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
10. Seeing the daddy-daughter bond as art perfectly shows how beautiful fatherhood can be.
A dad takes the small corner of the bed with his dauthterAll illustrations are provided by Soosh and used with permission.
This article originally appeared nine years ago.
We've all been in this predicament, haven't we?
We all know that being in a relationship means having…er…getting to share everything with our partners, including sweet treats. However, just how much to share isn’t always straightforward.
After all, was this yummy snack designated for either of the two significant others, like a birthday cake situation? Who brought it home? How much does each person like this treat? Who got most of it the last time? These are all factors that could make splitting it 50/50 not all that fair in the long run.
One wife found herself in a bit of a dessert dilemma and sought the advice of strangers online to determine whether or not she ate more than her fair share of a cookie, as her husband accused.
Admitting that she cut the cookie horribly—her love of crunchy edges may or may not have gotten her “carried away”—the wife shared a picture that contained a red outline of the full cookie, with a cross in the middle, and the chocolate chip triangle that was left after she cut into it.
While this was clearly a very wholesome debate, folks (nearly 60K folks, to be exact) took this cookie quandary incredibly seriously.
"This isn't a cookie anymore, it's a math problem with emotional consequences. Would you agree?" one person wrote.
Tons of folks shared screenshots of their own calculation, moving pieces around to get as “accurate” as possible. One person (dubbed a 'professional cookie measurer' by the readers) even used Photoshop to retrace the shape and wrote code to compare the pixels of instant cookie to eaten cookie. That’s the Internet put to good use.
Serious measurements.preview.redd.it
Getting closer to the truth.preview.redd.it
People generally agree that the wife ate somewhere between 45-48% of the cookie. So, not quite a full half, but very, very close to crossing the line. However, a few thought there were other ways of avoiding the issue.
"For the love of God, next time, either: A) PROPERLY cut the damn cookie in half, not like a maniac or B) get more than two damn cookies.” (Though I’d argue that they’d still run into this problem with the last shared cookie, no matter how many they got).
“Just eat the rest of the cookie.”
“Eat the rest of the cookie and just gaslight him ‘huh? what cookie? There was no cookie, what are you talking about?’"
“The rule of fairness is that one person cuts it in half, the other picks the half they want.”
To this, another person echoed, “Divider-Chooser method is best. One person cuts. The other picks first. This makes the cut person more honest with making a 50/50 split. The other person gets to pick first in case they feel one side is better than the other.”
And then there were the comments that fell int a category of their own for humor alone:
“You ate a Pac-Man worth.”
“Nice Try Mrs Henderson! I STILL refuse to use geometry in my day-to-day life!”
“What kind of psychopath cuts a sharing cookie this way?”
In relationships, fights over really insignificant things can indicate larger underlying issues of not feeling understood or appreciated. Other times, partners are simply having fun. When your only “fight” is over precise cookie measurements, you’re doing pretty well.
John Mainstone was the custodian of the Pitch Drop Experiment for 52 years.
Because we use water all the time, most of us have an intuitive sense of how long it takes a drop of water to form and fall. More viscous liquids, like oil or shampoo or honey, drop more slowly depending on how thick they are, which can vary depending on concentration, temperature and more. If you've ever tried pouring molasses, you know why it's used as a metaphor for something moving very slowly, but we can easily see a drop of any of those liquids form and fall in a matter of seconds.
But what about the most viscous substance in the world? How long does it take to form a falling drop? A few minutes? An hour? A day?
How about somewhere between 7 and 13 years?
Pitch moves so slowly it can't be seen to be moving with the naked eye until it prepares to drop. Battery for size reference.John Mainstone/University of Queensland
The Pitch Drop Experiment began in 1927 with a scientist who had a hunch. Thomas Parnell, a physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia, believed that tar pitch, which appears to be a solid and shatters like glass when hit with a hammer at room temperature, is actually a liquid. So he set up an experiment that would become the longest-running—and the world's slowest—experiment on Earth to test his hypothesis.
Parnell poured molten pitch it into a funnel shaped container, then let it settle and cool for three years. That was just to get the experiment set up so it could begin. Then he opened a hole at the bottom of the funnel to see how long it would take for the pitch to ooze through it, form a droplet, and drop from its source.
It took eight years for the first drop to fall. Nine years for the second. Those were the only two drops Parnell was alive for before he passed away in 1948.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
In total, there have been nine pitch drops in the University of Queensland experiment. The first seven drops fell between 7 and 9 years apart, but when air conditioning was added to the building after the seventh drop, the amount of time between drops increased significantly. The drops in 2000 and 2014 happened approximately 13 years after the preceding one. (The funnel is set up as a demonstration with no special environmental controls, so the seasons and conditions of the building can easily affect the flow of the pitch.)
The next drop is anticipated to fall sometime in the 2020s.
The first seven drops fell around 8 years apart. Then the building got air conditioning and the intervals changed to around 13 years.RicHard-59
Though Parnell proved his hypothesis well before the first drop even fell, the experiment continued to help scientists study and measure the viscosity of tar pitch. The thickest liquid substance in the world, pitch is estimated to be 2 million times more viscous than honey and 20 billion times the viscosity of water. No wonder it takes so ridiculously long to drop.
One of the most interesting parts of the Pitch Drop Experiment is that in the no one has ever actually witnessed one of the drops falling at the Queensland site. The drops, ironically, happen rather quickly when they do finally happen, and every time there was some odd circumstance that kept anyone from seeing them take place.
The Queensland pitch drop funnel is no longer the only one in existence, however. In 2013, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, managed to capture its own pitch drop on camera. You can see how it looks as if nothing is happening right up until the final seconds when it falls.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Today, however, with the internet and modern technology, it's likely that many people will be able to witness the next drop when it happens. The University of Queensland has set up a livestream of the Pitch Drop Experiment, which you can access here, though watching the pitch move more slowly than the naked eye can detect is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
But one day, within a matter of seconds, it will drop, hopefully with some amount of predictability as to the approximate day at least. How many people are going to be watching a livestream for years, waiting for it to happen?
PoorJohn Mainstone was the custodian of the experiment for 52 years, from 1961 to 2013. Sadly, he never got to witness any of the five drops that took place during his tenure. Neither did Parnell himself with the two that took place while he was alive.
John Mainstone, the second custodian of the Pitch Drop Experiment, with the funnel in 1990.John Mainstone, University of Queensland
Sometimes science is looks like an explosive chemical reaction and sometimes it's a long game of waiting and observing at the speed of nature. And when it comes to pitch dripping through a funnel, the speed of nature is about as slow as it gets.
A teen was elated getting his first paycheck from McDonald's.
There are certain moments and milestones in life that hit harder than others. There are the biggies, of course—graduations, weddings, births, etc.—but there are also the smaller-but-still-significant ones that mark when you officially cross a threshold into a whole new stage of life.
A mom captured one of those moments on video as her teen son opened his first paycheck from his job at McDonald's.
The video shared on Reddit shows a teen in a McDonald's hat sitting in the passenger seat of a car opening an envelope that contained his paycheck. His mom said it should be "200-and something" dollars, and after a hilariously long struggle to open the envelope (Gen Z have rarely, if ever, snail mailed, so no judgment), he looks over the check stub to get the full picture.
"That's $283," he says in astonishment. To his credit, he asks "After tax, what's that?" not realizing that the amount of the check is the after-tax take home amount. His smile and laughter says it all.
Watch:
from MadeMeSmile
"Let's take it to the bank, then!" Heck yeah, kid.
People are fondly remembering their own first paychecks
Many viral videos of first paycheck reveals include complaints about how much is taken out in taxes, so it's refreshing to see this young man's joy at his after-tax pay. It was a beautiful moment to capture on film, as most of us remember that feeling of empowerment that came with our own first real paychecks.
People in the comments are feeling the nostalgia:
"I remember that feeling - pretty sweet to see money you earned yourself. Feels good earning your own cash."
"God that first paycheck felt so unreal. I will never forget you ace hardware."
"I remember my first paycheck was for like $300 after two weeks of being a counselor and I felt RICH. I immediately spent it all on a guitar that I still have 20 years later."
"I remember mine - from my first proper job. £64.29 in a little brown packet with holes in it to see the cash inside. 1980. 😂"
"My first “paycheck” was like $65, I was so proud. I took my mom to pizzeria to treat her and she was very very touched."
"Man… I remember my first paycheck… 23 years ago now. For two weeks of what limited hours I could work being 14 years old… that baby was $96.19! HO-LY smokes was I on cloud 9. Cashed it right there at work and bought myself a bag of Skittles. It was a good day."
That first paycheck feeling. Image via Canva.
Ah, to be young and unencumbered by adult expenses
Part of what makes this endearing is the innocence of it. As a teen, he's not worried about affording a mortgage or groceries or diapers or retirement savings. His elation over making $283 is adorable because he's just starting down the path of adulthood. Soon enough, that paycheck will seem small, but he's not there yet.
Such is the "first paycheck joy," that TikTok is rife with adorable videos of young people opening their first paychecks after working their first real jobs.
@fuck3n_andre Taco Bell on me 😭 I was fully expecting like $200😂 #fypage #firstjob #job #first #firstpaycheck #fyp #foryoupage #viral
When you're a kid, money is kind of an abstract concept. Maybe you get a small allowance or get paid a few bucks for odd jobs, and opening a birthday card with some cash in it is exciting. It's not until you're fully into the working world for a while that the regular flow of money and what it means for your life really sinks in.
It's not until you're a fully independent adult that you really grasp how relative your feelings about your paycheck can be. There's a big difference between being a 16-year-old getting your first paycheck and being a 30-year-old trying to raise a family on wages that don't cover all your needs. Things like cost-of-living and inflation start to actually mean something as you get older and experience their impact. You might find that you can make a lot more money and yet feel poorer than ever as expenses pile up into adulthood.
It's all relative.i.giphy.com
Don't we all wish we could go back to the hopeful, happy days of making our first real chunk of money before all of those grown-up concerns arose? That simple sense of pride in having worked hard and earned something. The excitement of being able to pay for something you want yourself. The sense of freedom that comes with those early earnings. We see and feel all of that in this teen's bright smile, and it's glorious.
He may not realize how different he might feel opening his paychecks down the road, but there's no need to tell him yet. He'll find out soon enough, as we all have, so let's just let him enjoy this moment of bliss. He's earned it.
This article originally appeared last year.
Via Good Deeds Day / Facebook
After Arab plumbers learned their client was a Holocaust survivor, they gave her a ridiculous bill: nothing
It's estimated that only about 220,000 Holocaust survivors are still living. It's a number that's dwindling fast, rapidly accelerating every year. Sadly, in the coming years that number will eventually make its way to zero. When that day comes, it will be quite a loss for humanity. The stories and voices of those who lived through one of the worst atrocities imaginable are so important to our understanding of history. In fact, they've never been more important.
Nazi concentration caps were liberated 74 years ago, so a twenty year old who made it through the atrocity is now 94. Elihu Kover of Nazi Victim Services for Self-help Community Service spoke of the conditions many of these elderly survivors face as they advance in age at a Senate hearing in 2013.
"Holocaust survivors are growing older and frailer. … She may be coping with the loss of her spouse and have no family to speak of. In addition to the myriad problems associated with so-called 'normal aging,' many survivors have numerous physical and psychological problems directly attributable to their experiences during the Holocaust. … And many of these problems only surface in old age, having been hidden during their working years when the survivors struggled and made a new life for themselves as productive citizens of this country."
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of EuropeBy Alexander Blum - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
This sympathetic view of the tragedy isn't as popular in the Arab world where Holocaust denial is rampant and many cynically accuse the Jewish people of exploiting Western sympathy surrounding the tragedy to establish the State of Israel.
However, in 2019 two Arab men in Haifa, Israel made a beautiful show of respect to a Holocaust survivor who found their gesture "uplifting." And with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, it's a powerful reminder that good people are everywhere.
Arab citizens make up about 20% of the population of Israel. The recent escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict has put added strain on the relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens. Some politicians have painted Arabs as enemies of Israel, or as terrorists or security threats. In turn, it's easy to see why some Arab citizens would be distrustful and guarded.
But not these men, who chose to see the humanity in their customer.
Simon and Salim Matari, who are brothers, were recently called to the home of Rosa Meir, 95, to fix a leak.
(Also, how cool is it to see another pair of brother plumbers getting some headlines?!)
Move over, Mario Brothers.Giphy
"When we got there, we saw there was a large blast of water and we started fixing it," Simon told the Times of Israel. "At some stage, while working, my brother Salim started to talk to Rosa about her life. She told us she's 95, a Holocaust survivor, and that she has a daughter."
"Her life story touched my heart," Simon continued. "At that moment, I decided I won't take a cent from her."
After the brothers finished their work, they gave Meir a bill that read: "Holocaust survivor, may you have health until 120, from Matari Simon and Matari Salim," adding that the cost of the service was "0 shekels." The service would have normally cost about $285 US.
"May you live until 120" is a Jewish blessing that carries the implication that the receiver live a happy and healthy life until the age of 120, which was when Moses is said to have died, his life "deemed perfect and complete."
When asked why he refused the payment, Simon said, "Money is important, but it’s not the most important. It’s important to be a human being.”
The gesture brought Meir to tears. "The brothers really surprised me," she said. "It was so moving and uplifting, and I thanked them a lot."
The brothers also told the woman that if she needed anything else they would be by to fix it for free.
If nothing else, Rosa Meir will be able to live out the rest of her days free of worry from leaks, drips, and broken faucets in her home. A small consolation, but the gesture touched the hearts of people far and wide. It's not the first time a big-hearted plumber has decided to waive his bill. A British plumber went viral several years back after fixing a 91-year-old's boiler for free. It just goes to show the power of a simple gesture for people who deserve our respect, admiration, and all the help we can give.
This article originally appeared six years ago. It has been updated.
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