This week’s column features a very buff kangaroo, a talking husky, a cat with delicious ears, a naughty pug and a couple of playful and fluffy dogs.
There’s no better pick-me-up than the one you get when you see a clip of an animal acting silly, which is why we’ve compiled this weekly column. These short videos feature all sorts of animals, providing you with that much needed mid-week rush of endorphins.
This week’s column features an assortment of cute and exotic animals, including a very buff kangaroo, a talking husky, a cat with delicious ears, a naughty pug and a couple of playful and fluffy dogs. Have a look.
This very muscly and fit kangaroo is adorable, because all kangaroos are adorable, but also extremely intimidating. Kangaroos are known for their very strong hops and kicks; I don’t want to imagine what a kick from that guy would feel like.
Talking husky
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0lgIVwgKFa/
Huskies are among the most vocal and expressive of dog breeds, widening their eyes, putting themselves in weird positions and whining just because they feel like it. Maybe it’s the wolf in them.
Sleepy cat
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0yw7PintId/
While biting your cat’s ear is something that your pet might not appreciate, I can’t help but see the appeal when looking at this soft and cuddly cat.
The minute this person started opening up different McDonald’s containers, I knew something weird was going to happen. Still, the perfectly timed appearance of the tiny pug eating some french fries was better than what I had imagined.
Puppies wearing shoes
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0zpX69Fv9S/
Not a lot happens here. There’s some relaxing and playful music playing in the background while three small dogs play and push each other around. One of them is wearing shoes, which is the highlight of this whole column.
Nearly one year after tying the knot, Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Brad Falchuk are finally moving in together.
The Oscar-winning actress, 46, stirred controversy when she revealed that she and her husband — known for co-creating “American Horror Story” and “Glee” — didn’t share a home following their September 2018 nuptials.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt38Zg-BJP2/
However, in an op-ed for InStyle’s special 25th-anniversary issue published on Tuesday, Paltrow confirmed that she’s since decided to move into a single home with her life partner.
“Married life has been really good. We took a year to let everybody [in the family] take it in and let the dust settle,” Paltrow told the outlet. “And now we’re moving in together this month.”
Later in the article, Paltrow lavished praise on her husband, who she described as being “a real equal” who challenges her on a daily basis.
“I adore my husband. He’s brilliant and deeply kind,” she says. “I feel like he’s a real equal too. And he pushes me in the best ways. I really like being married. It’s fun.”
The actress announced her split from Justin Theroux after two years of marriage last February. Our source says that since celebrating her 50th birthday earlier this year, Aniston has been spending time with friends as much as possible — including her beloved Friends co-stars — who have encouraged her to start dating again.
“The support she has had from women in her life has truly helped her move on and upward and, with lots of encouragement from friends, she finally has started dating,” the source tells ET. “Lisa [Kudrow] and Courteney [Cox] and Jen are really close and have encouraged her to date and get out there.”
According to the source, Aniston is also friendly with her ex-husband Brad Pitt, who actually made an appearance at her star-studded birthday bash in February. The two were married for for almost seven years before announcing their separation in 2007. Pitt, of course, went on to marry Angelina Jolie, though he is now currently single again after they split in September 2016.
School is an integral part of our lives, shaping our behaviors, our friendships, and how we spend the majority of our time.
When you’re young, school is the one place other than your home that dictates how your world works. Even though you go there to learn your educational basics, there’s a bunch of relevant information that is swept under the rug, like how to fill out tax returns and not ruin your credit before you’re 25.
Although it’s never too late to learn new skills, Life Hacker compiled a list of some of the most useful ones that we should’ve learned at an earlier age. Knowing these five skills would have made your adult life a hundred times less overwhelming.
While all Millennials wish they knew how to code, there’s some leeway in this case since the social media revolution hadn’t hit yet in the 90s and early aughts. Take note, schools: kids and teens should learn the basics of coding in order to have more job opportunities in the future. Computer programming and engineering are some of the fastest growing and better paying professions.
What if your school had taught you how to best spend your time? What if we all had the knowledge that is only taught to CEOs and chiefs of staff on exclusive courses? Maybe there would be less procrastinators in the world and a more productive work environment.
While some schools and teachers incorporate basic study habits into their classes, there should be a bigger emphasis on this during kids’ formative years. These skills teach people how to be good at school and how to learn information more efficiently. They can help students how to comprehensively understand a topic better and, most importantly, how to remember it once they present their exams.
Debt, credit cards, loans, housing. About half of these are some of the biggest hurdles people in their 20s face. By teaching kids the basics of handling money you’ll have more productive and less stressed out adults.
Psychology and classes that focus on mental health are strictly limited to university environments, depriving kids and a large part of adults about simple information that can help them be more thoughtful and careful with their brains. Who wouldn’t want to learn from a young age how to cope with their anxiety and stress?
Knowing the proper dosages for flowers, edibles, dabs and vapes will have you on the path to gentle elevation.
Unless you’ve never consumed a medicinal, alcoholic, tobacco, narcotic or marijuana substance (i.e. you are barely recognizable as a human being), you already know that dosage is important. Dosages of any substance effect people in different ways. Factors like tolerance, body mass, mindset and more all make a difference.
Still, there is a continuity to cannabis for your average imbiber. Because the only controllable factor to how high one gets is the dosage — that’s what this is all about.
As the folks at Key to Cannabis point out, it’s not pleasant being too high. Paranoia or lethargy can kick in or you can binge eat a box of cookies and end up crying into your pillow (or laughing uncontrollably into it!). Knowing the proper dosages for flowers, edibles, dabs and vapes will have you on the path to gentle elevation.
Smoking cannabis is the easiest to control as the high hits pretty much instantly, so you know how much is just enough right when it is. Still, it’s good to have guidelines for yourself. A small bowl is likely good, depending on the quality of the weed, for a moderate smoker to feel fine on their own. A one hitter is also a great way to manage your dosage, as you can just reload if you want another boost. A joint with around a gram of cannabis is good for a small group of imbibers who are looking for a social high.
Photo by Yarygin/Getty Images
Edibles
Ingesting your flowers is a little more tricky, as the time it takes them to kick in (typically 45 minutes to an hour and a half) makes dosing difficult. For the uninitiated to edibles, it’s best to start off slow with a 10mg square of chocolate or something similarly tame. For those who smoke on the daily, start with 50mg and WAIT. A nice thing about edibles is that the high lasts a long time and if you want to add onto your dosage after an hour or so, you’ll still be feeling the first when the next kicks in.
For anyone who hasn’t yet done a dab, take this method slow. A little dab’ll do ya, as they say. A little dab, which is what you should start with, is around the size of a pinhead. You can graduate to two pinheads in your own time, but that’s about as big as you need get for dabbing. The high hits you as you’re exhaling, and likely having a little cough, so measuring it is pretty simple. Just remember to pass when you’re good and stay hydrated.
Vape pens are ultra stealthy, easy to measure hits on and have become better and more concentrated over the years. Because the oil has become almost or just as strong as dabs, taking only a few draws to begin with is recommended. Don’t overdo it if you’re out in the heat and remember to drink water. A half gram pen could last a couple hours on the couch between two experienced smoke buddies or it could last for a week or more for the more social partaker. Since vaping also hits almost instantly, you’ll know when you’re done.
The top “Reefer Madness” colleges, according to the Princeton Review, come from states with legal recreational cannabis.
High school students choose where they attend college for a litany of reasons: sports programs, location, where your friends are going. Sometimes, it’s just the school that gave you the most money, because student loans aren’t worth it. Other times, it’s even more simple — you choose the best/only school that accepted you.
But the Princeton Review thankfully gave us another metric to decide which college best to attend, with its 2020 edition of The Best 385 Colleges. Amongst its 62 rankings, the Princeton Review included a category called “Reefer Madness.” How are universities judged for their “Reefer Madness” ranking, you may ask? Well, it’s easy. Whichever schools smoke the most marijuana across the country receiving the highest ranking. (Highest, get it?)
Now the process of determining where students smoke the most weed wasn’t exactly a scientific process, as Business Insider notes. “How widely is marijuana used at your school?” was the question posed to 140,000 students at 385 schools by the Princeton Review. The highest rated schools were those found in states where recreational cannabis is legal, which doesn’t come as too much of a shock.
Photo by Vasily Koloda via Unsplash
Here are the five highest “Reefer Madness” schools, per the Princeton Review:
University of Vermont
Pitzer College
University of Rhode Island
Wesleyan University
Skidmore College
On the flip side, the three schools where marijuana use was the least prevalent were all military schools, with the Air Force Academy, Military Academy, and Naval Academy coming in one, two, three. You can check out the full top 20 “Reefer Madness” schools here.
It’s not exactly a pick-me-up, but cannabis can enhance fitness in ways we never before dreamed, allowing us to train harder, grow leaner, and heal faster.
Podcast (and former TV) host Joe Rogan describes getting stoned and going to the gym with relish. “Getting high and working out is one of the least talked about and least appreciated pleasures of fitness,” he said. “Lifting weights are fun when you’re under a spell, cardio is cool too, but for me, nothing compares to getting high and hitting the heavy bag.” It’s not exactly a pick-me-up, but cannabis can enhance fitness in ways we never before dreamed, allowing us to train harder, grow leaner, and heal faster. Here are ways marijuana can get you excited about fitness.
Your body produces its own endocannabinoids during physical activity that can be increased and enhanced by combining them with the cannabinoids in cannabis — THC and CBD bind to the same receptors in our endocannabinoid system. The pain-relieving effects of both plant and human-derived cannabinoids are only one exciting aspect of using the power plant cannabis to get excited about working out.
Reaching new Personal Bests
When you exercise, endorphins are released, increasing your pain threshold, decreasing your perception of the effort you’re putting out and allowing yourself to push harder, go further, last longer. Driving beyond your perceived limit (safely) leads to gains, whether it’s building muscle, having more endurance, stretching deeper. And this is where marijuana can help. By dulling our perception of pain slightly, we can push through the barrier to reach a new level of fitness.
Loose muscles are essential for flexibility and ease of motion, but if stretching and breathing aren’t enough to release tense muscles, cannabis can be an ally. Ganja yoga isn’t just a hot trend; the two practices do complement each other; weed is slowing the mind while yoga slows the body.
The intense focus that comes from marijuana can be startling to new consumers, but when that focus is trained on something physical—long distance running, yoga, or weight lifting—it can be a revelation. Professional athletes rely on sports psychologists to help them stay “in the zone” during a competition, but a little cannabis could help you reach that state on your own.
Did you know that cannabis could be considered mildly performance enhancing? As a bronchodilator, marijuana can help an athlete take in more air, which then gets delivered to oxygen-depleted blood to take to the muscles. The more air that reaches the tissues, the longer an endurance activity can be sustained.
Photo by Flickr user ThoroughlyReviewed
Recover faster for your next session
Recovery is an essential part of being physically fit, building muscle and restoring energy for the next training session and cannabinoids from cannabis can help ease the discomfort of recovery until your ready for your next workout. While CBD helps lower inflammation in your sore muscles, THC will help inspire two other activities critical to recovery: refueling and sleeping.
Furthermore, drugs like Ibuprofen belong to a family of medications called NSAIDs, which can be hard on the kidneys when taken regularly and during sports. Deaths from the toxic effects of NSAID drugs — when tabulated separately — make them the 15th most common cause of death in the United States. CBD used as a recovery tool is a much more gentle approach, and far less toxic.
Photo by bruce mars via Unsplash
It’s about time we drop the stereotype of the lazy, unmotivated stoner and celebrate the fact that so many people live healthy, active, positive lives with cannabis. If you find yourself indifferent toward physical activity, it may be a matter of finding the right mix of cannabinoids and terpenes to get you looking forward to that next weight-lifting session, long run or hike. You’ll be blown away at how much more focused and engaged you can feel when you’re using cannabis to elevate your fitness regimen.
Among the many culprits of global warming, new research says fragile masculinity is high on the list.
Data published in the academic journal Sex Roles says that some men avoid making environmentally conscious decisions – like shopping with reusable bags – over fear of being perceived as less masculine. Poor men.
This information was revealed by analyzing three different studies, which found that environmentally conscious decisions were deeply associated with gender and femininity. The first two studies asked participants to read fictional activity logs of people, to guess their sexual orientation, and to rate if the person was behaving in feminine or masculine ways.
Photo by Image Source/Getty Images
“There may be subtle, gender-related consequences when we engage in various pro-environmental behaviors,” says Janet Swim, one of the authors of the study. “People may avoid certain behaviors because they are managing the gendered impression they anticipate others will have of them. Or they may be avoided if the behaviors they choose do not match their gender.”
As crazy and delusional as these results appear, they’re nothing new. The Pacific Standard reports that this problem has made green companies and organizations look for ways of repackaging environmentally conscious behavior in order to make it more appealing to men, very much like self-care products and make up companies have done in the recent past.
As it stands, guys still need companies to hold their hands and explain to them that taking care of their skin and ensuring that the planet still exists in a few years time won’t magically make them gay.
Educating Canadians on the dangers of “high” driving is important, but these PSAs make us laugh, too.
Something about anti-marijuana ads just makes us giggle. Portraying people inebriated by cannabis in an exaggerated manner inherently leads to goofy characterizations and metaphors. Even as a teenager, watching those “Above the Influence” commercials on TV didn’t teach me anything. Instead, I just laughed at the preposterous notion that smoking weed would transform a girl into a literally flat human being.
Poor Flat Sara.
But a new campaign from the Ontario government—a province of Canada—is funny for the right reasons. The advertising’s goal? Convince Canadians that driving while high isn’t a super smart idea. The videos, shot by the Perlorian Brothers and envisioned by McCann Canada, focus on that negligible difference between being “barely high” and plain old-fashioned stoned.
“When I’m high, I can’t stop laughing,” starts the funniest of the ads, titled Giggles. “When I’m barely high, I just giggle now and then.”
Kudos to the team behind this one. As Fast Company notes, we’ve been conditioned from anti-drunk driving PSAs to expect scare tactics and fearmongering. Such strategies can dissuade us from such aberrant behavior.
However, treating people like adults triggers a more effective persuasion. Because when I watch these videos, I recognize how accurate they are. These ads convince me by reinforcing behavioral patterns I already know about myself—i.e. the difference in brain patterns between “barely high” and “high.” Anyone who smokes weed long enough understands it, too. It doesn’t hurt the videos make you laugh, too.
Recent research also demonstrates how important such PSAs are in this “honeymoon” phase of the legalization era. According to a study conducted by AAA, nearly 15 million Americans got behind the wheel of a car within an hour of smoking weed in the last 30 days. What’s more? About half of marijuana users believe they can drive safely while stoned, one poll finds. So yes it’s probably more important than ever to educate people on the dangers of stoned driving.
Cancelling plans provides a rush of dopamine to the brain, producing the tangible happiness people feel in these situations.
The dinner date or camping session that you scheduled with a friend under the influence of a couple of drinks can be repressed and forgotten until the last minute. Then, it catches you off guard in the most unexpected of times, often as you’re relaxing at home after a long day. Dread floods your system. Your plans of having a glass of wine and catching up on TV fly out the window.
According to experts and psychologists there is evidence that canceled plans provide relief in the brain. “If having to keep to a plan made is causing the person discomfort — say she has a lot to do or does not really want to meet the person — it is likely there will be increased activity in the emotion centers and in the prefrontal cortex, where most higher level processing takes place,” Dr. Regan Gurung tells Bustle.
Gurung explains that cancelling plans provides a rush of dopamine to the brain, producing the tangible happiness people feel in these situations. The dopamine effect becomes even more pronounced in people who have social anxiety.
Photo by JESHOOTS-com via Pixabay
Another expert, Dr. Maya Borgueta, says that we put ourselves in these unwanted situations because we agree to things on the moment, without thinking about our real motivations and what we really want. “We’ll say ‘yes’ to something because we can’t think of a good excuse not to go in the moment, but we’re really not interested,” Borgueta told Apartment Therapy.
PhD Chip Raymond Knee provides a more layered explanation for this phenomenon, putting the blame on the plans themselves. He told Men’sHealth that in order to be motivated to do something, you have to know that your plans will fulfill at least one of the following requirements:
1) Autonomy: Feeling that your behaviors stem from what you really want
2) Competence: Feeling capable and effective in what you’re doing
3) Relatedness: Feeling like you belong
If your plans don’t satisfy any one of those needs, you’ll most likely stay in for the night.
Of course, it all depends on the plans; canceling some plans might feel better than canceling others. While a party that you chose to skip out on might leave you with some FOMO, a canceled meeting with a friend that you haven’t seen in a long time might produce some guilt and hurt feelings. It’s important to prioritize and to avoid canceling plans when your fears are rooted in laziness and social anxiety.
‘Bachelorette’ Hannah Brown says Tyler can date who he wants because “he’s single”; and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are getting backlash for an insensitive Instagram post.
Hannah Brown isn’t burning bridges quite just yet with Tyler Cameron. The former “Bachelorette,” who dumped Cameron during the finale, commented on rumors that Cameron and supermodel Gigi Hadid have been spending time together, as reported by E! and People.
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Cameron and Hadid for comment
Though Hadid and Cameron have been silent on the buzz that they are getting to know each other, Brown spoke out in multiple interviews on the rumored romance and explained that while she has thoughts about the speculation, she’s not holding anything against Cameron.
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“I have feelings, but I’m also single and he’s single and I wanna keep my options open and he can keep his options open,” Brown told Entertainment Tonight, saying she had a “great time” spending time with him after asking him out, and that the maybe-couple is “trying to figure out how we feel.”
“We definitely hung out and talked about everything and… I know nobody will believe me (about) just hanging out and actually talking but it was good to be able to catch up. We had a lot to talk about.”
Speaking to People, Brown explained that “the feelings that it have for Tyler didn’t go away.”
“Just because I’m single doesn’t mean I didn’t have feelings for him still,” she added about their hangout. “I did want to hang out with him and a single girl can go out on dates and I wanted to go out and have a drink. I thought it went great. I think he did too.”
“I want to keep my options open,” she said, “and make sure I’m doing the best thing for Hannah.”
Meghan Markle celebrated her 38th birthday on Sunday (August 4). The entire royal family took to social media to wish the Duchess of Sussex a very happy birthday. While most royal watchers were delighted to see Prince William and Kate Middleton share a birthday wish for their sister-in-law on Instagram, they also faced a ton of backlash for the photo they chose to post.
Kate and William shared a photo from last Christmas, which features Prince Harry and Prince Charles in addition to Meghan. Though Kate and William most likely chose to share a happy family memory with their followers, some royal watchers were offended that the post didn’t do more to highlight Meghan specifically. Here’s the post from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, sweetly captioned “wishing a very happy birthday to The Duchess of Sussex today!”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0vA-fQFQgb
Here are some of the comments left on the post:
“Why a picture of the whole royal family?! It’s not about Kate or Wiliam or Charles! It’s about Meghan! Ridiculous!”
“That they chose an image where Duchess Meghan isn’t centered though the post is dedicated to her birthday speaks volumes as to the Cambridges’ lack of class.”
“All these royal photographers couldn’t find a pic of Meghan in the center?!?! In a brighter color???????????”
It’s (unfortunately) not so surprising to see such negative comments pop up on the Cambridge’s post. Meghan and Harry faced similar backlash for their own birthday messages for Prince George back in July. Hopefully the royals aren’t paying too much attention to the criticism and are simply enjoying the birthday celebrations together IRL.
