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Five good things · Three minutes
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
This gas station gives 20% off for dancingGas is expensive. The clerk found a workaround.
A Sunoco gas station in Saratoga County, New York, is offering customers 20% off for one thing: their best dance moves. A sign at the individually owned Sunoco of Halfmoon reads, "Want a discount? Show us your best dance moves." The idea came from Paulina Sirtori, 23, the station's social media manager. "The No. 1 complaint we hear from people everywhere is that gas prices are just too high," Sirtori told the New York Post. "So we wanted to really do something to alleviate that a little bit." In the video, customers perform to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," which is a lot to ask of anyone standing near a fuel pump on a Tuesday. They do it anyway, and they look happy about it. The clip has drawn nearly 10 million views across the station's platforms. "Guarantee they all felt good after they left," one commenter wrote. Read the full story → | |||
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MOTIVATIONAL • Positive News
A deaf man brought Oasis to life for deaf fansHe assumed live music wasn't for him. Now he signs it.
Luke Holdsworth signed all 14 UK dates of the Oasis reunion tour this summer, standing in front of tens of thousands of fans at Cardiff's Principality Stadium and interpreting the whole spectacle in British Sign Language. That meant conveying tempo and melody, and, working with colleague Samantha Vanterpool, the Gallagher brothers' Mancunian swagger. "It's compulsory," he laughs. Holdsworth, 36, was born profoundly deaf to deaf parents, and BSL was his first language. He didn't see a concert interpreter until seven years ago, watching Tracey Tyer sign alongside Underworld at Latitude Festival. "She embodied the music from the second it started and smashed it out of the park," he says. His own first gig came in his mid-20s, because he assumed live music wasn't for him. It was One Direction, with no interpretation, and he understood none of it. Since qualifying in 2023, he has signed for Harry Styles at Wembley. Latitude is next.
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DELIGHT • Atlas Obscura
A dog fountain came to Ohio, one bone at a timeThey went to see one fountain. They came home to build another.
A fountain crowded with painted cast-aluminum dogs now sits at the center of South Main Plaza in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, watched over by a cat, a pony, two pairs of birds, and, for reasons no one has explained, an apple. At the middle is a golden bone. The cat, smart enough to know better, stays perched out of the spray. It began when Gambier resident Phil Samuell saw photos of a dog fountain in Toronto's Berczy Park, designed by landscape architect Claude Cormier. He liked it enough that he and his wife, Mary, drove up with their golden retriever, Sandy, to meet Cormier and see the real thing. The trip got the idea rolling. The Ohio version does not take itself seriously. It is a pile of dogs caught mid-splash around a bone, and people now linger, trying to find every animal hidden in the water. The apple keeps its own counsel. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Sunny Skyz
A postcard from his late parents arrived 26 years laterThe mail carrier had a theory. Sheppard preferred another.
Bob Sheppard opened his mailbox in Long Beach, California, this August and found a postcard his parents mailed from Copenhagen in July 2000. It had taken 26 years to travel from Denmark to his front door. "Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere. Love, M&D," they had written. Both of his parents have since died. His mother, Joanne, four years ago. His father, John, six years ago during the pandemic, when hospital restrictions meant Sheppard never got to say goodbye. "It haunts me to this day," he said. So a handwritten note in their hands, arriving now, undid him. "I just started looking at it and go, 'Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!'" His mail carrier guessed the card had slipped behind a cabinet somewhere for two decades. Sheppard prefers a different theory. "This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven," he said. Read the full story → | |||
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SCIENCE • Smithsonian Magazine
They found the biggest animal on Earth with a laserThe whale went quiet and dove. The cable still felt it.
Scientists off Norway's Svalbard archipelago have tracked a blue whale nearly 1,000 feet underwater using a fiber-optic cable no wider than a human hair, even when the animal made no sound at all. The whale displaces so much water as it swims that it produces low-frequency waves, which stretch the buried glass cable almost imperceptibly. Onshore, laser pulses catch that faint disturbance. Usually the signal turns out to be a submarine or a passing ship. This time it was the largest animal on Earth, diving in silence. The team, led by geophysicist Martin Landrø of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, borrowed a 1917 physics equation originally built to study collapsing bubbles. Bubbles and blue whales differ considerably in size, but the physics holds. Whales spend most of their lives underwater, where researchers have never really been able to watch them. Now a dormant strand of telecom glass can hear one swim past. Read the full story → | |||
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One more thing — I’m putting together a small wall of reader notes for the website. If honeyletter has changed your mornings, hit reply and tell me. Say if I can quote you, first name and state.
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With love, The Editor
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