Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Julia Child, America’s original celebrity chef, was surprisingly relaxed about that most food-focused of national holidays, Thanksgiving. The author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking didn’t break out complicated recipes like stuffed duck or deconstructed turkey for Turkey Day. As friends and former guests at her Thanksgivings told The New York Times, she was quite down-to-earth as a host. 

Before the meal, she set out Goldfish crackers for folks to munch on, and made what she called “reverse martinis,” consisting of vermouth on the rocks with just a little bit of gin. She rarely used complicated spices, often opting for just salt and pepper, and instead of deconstructing her bird, she usually just popped the whole turkey in the oven. (For the curious cooks out there, she roasted it at 325°F.) For dessert, she served her Aunt Helen’s molasses-and-bourbon-laced pumpkin pie.

Her Thanksgiving advice to novice chefs often boiled down to some version of “relax.” 

“I even heard her tell people that turkey wasn’t meant to be served hot,” a former Child Thanksgiving guest told The New York Times. Hey, if Julia Child says it, it must be true! 

[h/t: The New York Times] 

As part of The Telegraph’s ongoing 360-degree video series, you can now take a tour of one of the oldest library systems in Europe. The halls of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries are stunning and full of glorious biblio-history, but they also have another notable draw: They happen to be where the library scenes in the Harry Potter films were shot.

The reading room known as Duke Humfrey’s Library served as the Hogwarts library for the movies. It’s the oldest reading room at the library, dating back to 1488. It was refurbished in 1598 by Sir Thomas Bodley, who the current library system is named after.

The Bodleian Libraries are legally entitled to a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland—one of six such “legal deposit” libraries in the UK—and the system includes around 12 million volumes right now. Go ahead and take a look around, and discover just how Hogwarts-y it is.

[h/t The Telegraph]

Air travel in the modern era is all about fees. There are higher ticket prices for checking a bag, charges for those instances when you need headphones or a snack on a cross-country flight, and of course, those fees that give you the honor of assisting in an emergency, a.k.a. the “extra room” exit aisle seats.

If you do choose to upgrade your way out of the cattle pens of traditional coach, be it through a first class ticket or a premium economy seat, beware that your cushy seat could be pulled out from under you—with barely any refund, as writer and consultant Chris Matyszczyk points out over at Inc.

Airlines reserve the right to overbook flights and bump passengers, including putting them in seats that cost a lot less than the one they paid for. But even if you do let your extra legroom go without a fight (not that you have much choice), getting your money back is harder than you’d think. Airlines usually will refund you the difference of the tickets, but with a catch: They give you the price difference between what you paid and the day-of cost of the seat you end up actually sitting in. And airline tickets purchased on the day of the flight are obviously pretty pricey, a lot more so than the coach-class ticket you’d have bought if you initially knew you’d be bumped to that section of the plane anyway. Sometimes, those day-of coach tickets might even cost more than a first-class ticket bought weeks in advance.

And of course, you’ll most likely have to chase down those refunds yourself. Good luck with that holiday travel, everyone!

[h/t Inc.]

It’s now possible to send text messages through glass cleaner and vinegar. Technology invented by Stanford University engineers can relay messages through pulses of acids and bases to pH sensors, as The Verge reports. All it requires is a machine that can send out and decode messages of this type.

Researchers have been able to type text messages into a special machine that then sends out signals with vinegar and glass cleaners to a computer that decodes the chemicals back into text. Initially, inventor Nariman Farsad tried to use vodka to send messages, but the signals ended up building up so much that messages could no longer be received—kind of like a voicemail box that is too full. Instead, by using acids and bases (in places of the binary zeros and ones used by other communication systems), the chemicals cancel each other out when they’re received by the computer. The chemicals do, however, leave behind some residue, which means there’s a bit of noise in the signal that will have to be eliminated to make it truly effective.

The application of such a technology isn’t immediately clear, but the Stanford researchers suggest in a press release that it could be used underwater or in places with a lot of metal—both locations that usually confound electromagnetic communication signals. Because the tech could someday be used without electronics, it could potentially be harnessed to send messages off the grid, or to send signals between biotechnology nanorobots inside the body.

[h/t The Verge]

All images via YouTube courtesy Stanford University

In honor of this weekend’s World Toilet Day, it’s time to embrace your inner poet. The awareness-raising holiday for sanitation issues—one of the leading causes of child death worldwide—takes place on November 19. This year, DefeatDD, an initiative combating diarrheal diseases from the global health nonprofit PATH, has launched the third edition of its “Doo a Poo Haiku” awareness campaign, NPR reports.

The contest part of the campaign is already over, sadly, but DefeatDD wants to keep the poo-etic musings flowing and is encouraging people to keep submitting their haikus on Twitter with the hashtag #poohaiku.

Some of the current submissions include gems like these:

When you have to go,
It’s quite important to know,
You won’t be in woe.

oh crap butt’s hurting
i guess i should watch my hands
damn you e.coli

Poo here and there
Makes for illness everywhere
Poo belongs in the loo

And yes, there is the occasional video:

“It’s more than just squirts!” Dick Guerrant, @CGHUVA, reads his #poohaiku with help from Andy Prendergast. #TropMed16 pic.twitter.com/gejA4mQeNh

— DefeatDD (@DefeatDD) November 14, 2016

Check out some of the other submissions by searching the hashtag #poohaiku.

[h/t NPR]

Lack of access to toilets is one of public health’s greatest crises, causing serious diseases that, especially in children, can be fatal. Toilets are particularly rare in India, where an estimated 70 percent of the population doesn’t have access to one. But now, the Indian government and Google are launching a public toilet locator to help people find clean facilities, according to The Verge and the International Business Times India.

The Google Toilet Indicator, sponsored by the Indian Ministry of Urban Development, will be an integrated part of Google Maps. According to India.com, it works like this:

Once you open Maps, you can simply put in any word related to a toilet, like lavatory, toilet, washroom, sauchalay, sulabh, etc. and Google Map Toilet Locator will understand your need. It will then locate all the public toilets in the vicinity and help you locate one closest to you. Additionally, people will be able to review the toilet and give feedback so if the one you visit is particularly stinky and dirty, give it negative ratings and help others stay away.

A pilot program is debuting around New Delhi during the ministry’s “Cleanliness Fortnight,” which runs until November 30. You’ll be able to search for public restrooms and those in metro stations, gas stations, hospitals, and more. Eventually, the app will cover the entire country, but there’s not yet an end date.

Access to toilets isn’t India’s only sanitation problem. Especially in rural areas where open defecation has been the norm for years, it has proven incredibly difficult to convince people to use them, for cultural and personal reasons. Though the Indian government aims to build 60 million toilets by 2019, efforts to curb open defecation haven’t been terribly successful. While a toilet finder can’t fix that problem, it can help foreign tourists and urban residents who are already accustomed to using them.

[h/t The Verge]

The United States may be experiencing some turmoil over its recent presidential election, but in Canada, political discussions of a different source are happening in the halls of government. Namely, is Parliament too dignified for the word fart? On November 15, members of Canada’s Parliament began debating whether or not its members should reference flatulence on the floor, as Mashable dutifully reports.

During a discussion of carbon taxes, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel got colorful, asking, “Why does the government treat Alberta like a fart in the room that nobody wants to talk about or acknowledge?”

In response, Green Party MP Elizabeth May of British Columbia decided to spell out just how offensive her word choice was. “I hate to interrupt my friend in her speech, but I heard her say a word that I know is distinctly unparliamentary, and I think she may want to withdraw it,” she declared. “The word was f-a-r-t.” Later, she explained that “the reason I feel it is important to make something of the member’s choice of words is that she then accused people opposite her for reacting. In that context, decorum and respect are important in this place.”

Another Conservative MP from Alberta told her to sit down, and eventually someone broke out the rule book on Parliamentary language. The discussion later moved on to more serious matters, leaving the issue of the f-word unresolved. How will we ever know how to refer to flatulence in the halls of government now?

Because Canada is a beautiful place, the entire discussion has been transcribed by the independent, volunteer-run openparliament.ca, and can be viewed in its entirety here.

[h/t Mashable]

Apple is a company that inspires more extreme devotion than most, but their latest release will really separate the superfans from the run-of-the-mill admirers. It’s an entire coffee table book full of pictures of the company’s technology, as Ars Technica reports. The collection is called Designed by Apple in California.

The hardcover, linen-bound book—all white, naturally—is full of 450 eye-candy photographs tracing 20 years of Apple’s evolving design work. It features old-school favorites like the 1998 iMac to the game-changing original iPhone to the unremarkable 2015 Apple Pencil. The book was created with the idea of exploring Apple’s design philosophy and its history of innovation.

“This archive is intended to be a gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years,” said Jony Ive, the company’s longtime design guru, in a press statement. The book is dedicated to Ive, who’s arguably been the most influential leader at the company aside from Steve Jobs. “We hope it brings some understanding to how and why they exist, while serving as a resource for students of all design disciplines,” Ive said.

There are two versions of the book, a 10-inch by 13-inch copy, and a 13-inch by 16-inch copy. Sort of like choosing the iPhone 6 or the iPhone 6 Plus. The smaller version comes with a slightly smaller price tag, at $199, while you can expect to shell out $300 for the bigger book. Even the paper is highbrow: the company describes the book being filled with “specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink.” (Ghosting is when an unwanted image appears on a page due to a flaw in the printer system.)

If you are a normal person who probably won’t spend $300 on a book full of gadget pictures, it’ll be on display at Apple stores, where you can browse it for free.

[h/t Ars Technica]

All photos from Designed by Apple in California courtesy Apple

TGIF fans can now own a little piece of TV history—the house that Cory Matthews lived in. While the interior shots on Boy Meets World were studio sets, the establishing exterior shots of the Matthews’s abode in Philadelphia were actually filmed at a house in Los Angeles that’s now up for sale.

The two-bedroom, two-bath home is located in Studio City, a Los Angeles neighborhood that’s home to plenty of celebrities, as well as the CBS Studio Center, where the latter seasons of the show were shot. The listing describes it as a “private gated celebrity estate.”

The interior might not look exactly like the house you saw on television, but some features are reminiscent of the make-believe Matthews residence; there’s an exterior patio like the one Cory and Shawn played basketball on, and a somewhat similar kitchen aesthetic. But an L.A. pad with ties to television will cost you. It’s listed at close to $1.6 million.

All images courtesy Estately.

In every big city, there are a handful of restaurants where it can be tough to land a reservation, but a select number of world-class eateries take exclusivity to the next level; no matter how hard you try, you’ll probably never get in, even if you can manage to foot the bill. Seats and Stools, a company that makes restaurant seating, found 11 restaurants where it’s nearly impossible to get a table. If you think the world-famous Noma is hard to get into (it fielded 20,000 reservation calls a day before announcing its imminent close in February 2017), try getting a table at the Walt Disney-founded Club 33, a private club where membership initiation costs $40,000, annual fees run you $12,000, and the waiting list is 14 years long.

Other restaurants have shorter wait times—meaning a year or so—but require reservations to be placed at very specific times (like when the restaurant empties its voicemail box), or at midnight on the first day of the month. Some, like New York’s Damon Baehrel, have waiting lists that are so long, they’ve stopped taking reservations altogether (to the point that some people have questioned that particular restaurant’s myth altogether). Check out some of the world’s most sought-after restaurants below.