|
|||
|
Five good things · Three minutes
|
|||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
A stranger rebuilt their stolen farm stand for freeSomeone drove off with it at 2 a.m. A stranger read the post.
Katrina Blancaflor's farm stand lasted less than 24 hours before someone drove off with it. The Rhode Island baker, a former pastry chef who once worked at Bobby Flay's Las Vegas restaurant, had asked her husband, Ian Swett, to build the stand at the end of their driveway for her home bakery, K's Bakestand. Their daughter, Kalia, planned to sell her squishies alongside the sourdough. Swett spent months on it. They woke on the Fourth of July to find it gone. Neighbors' security cameras showed an SUV loading it onto its roof around 2 a.m. A police report went nowhere. Then John Adams, who owns a construction company and had never met the family, saw Blancaflor's post and offered to rebuild it free. He and his son Casey worked from Swett's original blueprints. "When we saw it we were like, 'Wow, that looks just like our stand,'" Blancaflor said. She hugged Casey when it arrived.
| |||
| |||
|
MOTIVATIONAL • Upworthy
A 21-year-old landed the failing plane on the highway. Everyone walked away.The airport was too far. So she picked the highway.
Emily Shelton, a 21-year-old flight instructor, landed a malfunctioning plane on Interstate 10 in Pensacola, Florida, after the engine failed during a student's first-ever lesson. She reported the trouble to air traffic control early, first noting a burning oil smell, then dropping oil pressure. When the engine lost power, the nearby airport was out of reach. "I just want to let you know, we are lined up with I-10, trying to avoid the cars," she radioed. She threaded the plane under the metal signs stretching across the interstate without clipping a wing. Both she and the student walked away uninjured, and the aircraft was undamaged. Truck driver Eric Jordan caught it on his dash cam. "If I wouldn't have seen that shadow over my truck and slowed down, he would've been in the side of the cab," he told NBC 11 Alive. Shelton said she had practiced this exact scenario many times, and never expected to run it for real.
| |||
| |||
|
DELIGHT • Upworthy
He spent his own money to guide his blind friendHe built it for one friend. Millions walk on it now.
The bumpy yellow tiles at train platforms and crosswalks worldwide started with one man and one friend who was going blind. Seiichi Miyake, an engineer from Japan's Okayama Prefecture, spent his own money in 1965 developing a warning system for pedestrians who navigate by touch, CNN reported. His design had two signals a foot or cane could read: raised dots meant danger ahead, and long parallel bars meant the path was safe. He called them Tenji blocks, after the Japanese word for braille. The first ones went in on March 18, 1967, outside the Okayama School for the Blind. Tokyo and Osaka followed, and within a decade Japan National Railways required them on every platform in the country. Miyake died in 1982, before the United States, Britain and others adopted the tiles in the 1990s. He never learned whether his friend's name would stay private. It did. Roughly 7 million Americans live with vision loss, and every one of them walks on something built for a single person Miyake knew.
| |||
| |||
|
MEDICINE • Reasons to be Cheerful
600 transplant recipients gathered, and nobody felt special anymoreHe had a new heart. For one week, that was the least interesting thing about him.
Robert Lindemann, a 32-year-old accountant from Germany, spent a week in Arnhem this June feeling gloriously unremarkable. He had a heart transplant less than two years ago, an experience shared by only a few hundred people in his country each year. At the European Transplant Games, where 600 athletes gathered, that stopped being the whole story. "It sounds a bit weird when I say you don't feel special here, because everybody has a special story," he says. The event is open to transplant recipients, dialysis patients and living donors, and Lindemann chose bowling and shotput. Edelle Collins, 50, from Ireland, arrived hoping only to make it there after a double lung transplant in 2021 and dialysis three times a week. She left with a bronze in darts. "Nobody's really interested in your big, long sob story," she says, "because we all have sob stories, every single one." Lynne Holt, the U.K. team manager, watched from behind sunglasses, hiding what she calls her "leaky eyes."
| |||
| |||
|
DELIGHT • Upworthy
He rejected Harvard's rejection letter. It won nine Emmys later.The letter had a typo. He would not let that stand.
Paul Devlin was a high school senior in 1981 when Harvard rejected him. He noticed the rejection letter contained a grammatical error, and decided the school did not get to have the last word. So he wrote back, rejecting their rejection. "Then I sent a version to all the colleges that had rejected me," Devlin told Snopes. His letter opened with mock formality: "it is with great regret that I must inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection at this time." He explained that the number of rejection letters he could accept was very limited, and closed with "See you all in the fall." Devlin's mother sent it to The New York Times, which printed it in the New Jersey section on May 31, 1981. He went on to win nine Emmy awards for producing and directing documentaries. In 2022, the actor Himesh Patel read the letter aloud at the Royal Albert Hall.
| |||
|
|||
|
Someone forward you this? Get it every morning →
|
|||
|
With love, The Editor
|
|||
|
honeyletter
|