Month: April 2017

Looking for something to do this weekend that’s both outdoorsy and free? In celebration of National Park Week, you can visit any one of the more than 400 parks included within the National Park Service for free.

While the majority of the NPS’s parks are free year-round, they’ll be waiving admission fees to the 117 parks that normally require an entrance fee. Which means that you can pay a visit to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, or Yellowstone National Parks without reaching for your wallet. The National Park Service, which celebrated its 100th birthday last year, maintains 417 designated NPS areas that span more than 84 million acres in every state, plus Washington, D.C., American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

If you can’t make it to the great outdoors this weekend, you can tag along with Hamilton star Jordan Fisher, who took us on a tour of Alexander Hamilton’s New York City home, the Hamilton Grange National Memorial, earlier this week.

Let’s face it: Whether it be stamps, coupons, or fruit, everything looks better when color-coordinated. Julie Seabrook Ream highlights a collection of colorful flat lays in Encyclopedia of Rainbows, a whimsical index that’s bursting with color.

Each page offers readers a different selection of eye candy all neatly organized in rainbow order. The book is separated into two categories, the natural world and the built world, which include themes like daisies, toy trains, matchbooks, berries, and more.

You can peek at some of the book’s offerings below or grab your own copy on Amazon.

Encyclopedia of Rainbows: Our World Organized by Color by Julie Seabrook Ream, published by Chronicle Books 2017.

It was one year ago today that legendary, genre-bending rocker Prince died at the age of 57. In addition to being a musical pioneer, the Minneapolis native dabbled in filmmaking, most successfully with 1984’s Purple Rain. While most people know about the singer’s infamous name change, here are 10 things you might not have known about the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.  

1. HIS REAL NAME WAS PRINCE.

Born to two musical parents on June 7, 1958, Prince Rogers Nelson was named after his father’s jazz combo.

2. HE WAS A JEHOVAH’S WITNESS.

Baptized in 2001, Prince was a devout Jehovah’s Witness; he even went door-to-door. In October 2003, a woman in Eden Prairie, Minnesota opened her door to discover the famously shy artist and his bassist, former Sly and the Family Stone member Larry Graham, standing in front of her home. “My first thought is ‘Cool, cool, cool. He wants to use my house for a set. I’m glad! Demolish the whole thing! Start over!,'” the woman told The Star Tribune. “Then they start in on this Jehovah’s Witnesses stuff. I said, ‘You know what? You’ve walked into a Jewish household, and this is not something I’m interested in.’ He says, ‘Can I just finish?’ Then the other guy, Larry Graham, gets out his little Bible and starts reading scriptures about being Jewish and the land of Israel.”

3. HE WROTE A LOT OF SONGS FOR OTHER ARTISTS.

Continue reading “10 Surprising Facts About Prince”

The Many Possible Reasons British People Hire Chimney Sweeps for Their Weddings. Mainly because they are good luck.  
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10 Things You Should Never Do to Your Lawn. You want it to be a nice place to walk through in your bare feet.
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How Realistic are New York Apartments on TV Shows? Hint: less realistic as time goes by.
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New Super-Earth May Be Best Yet for Finding Signs of Life. Until a better one is discovered in another week or so.
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How To Know When Your Roommate Is Bad. Some annoyances are trivial, others are a sign that you need to get out.
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The Silence of the Lambs as a romantic comedy. Selective editing and mood music can make a movie into anything you want it to be.
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Fox News dumped Bill O’Reilly over money. It’s that simple. Change comes when it affects the bottom line.
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Women in Medicine: 6 Pioneering Activists. They had to fight for the right to save lives.