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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
Three generations of family reunited on one Hollywood tour busA tour guide. A passenger. A sister he last saw at three.
Danny Trejo was telling a busload of tourists in Hollywood how helping others had shaped his career when a passenger leaned over and quietly told him she was his sister Marlene's daughter. Trejo, 82, had been separated from Marlene since he was three. "Are you kidding?" he said. A fellow rider caught the moment and relayed it to everyone else on board. "That's his niece, yo. His niece is on the bus." Trejo, hosting the TMZ Brunch Bus past his own coffee shop and taco spot, put it plainly. "What's up, I have a relative on this bus." The niece had brought her daughter along, which placed three generations of that side of the family on the same tour at once. Her daughter credited her mom for the connection. "I've been watching TMZ since I was, like, 5 because of her," she said. Trejo had opened the ride by saying everything good in his life came from helping someone else.
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KINDNESS • Google News Human Interest
She climbed onto her car roof. Firefighters swam her out.The water rose. She climbed onto the roof and waited.
Abilene firefighters pulled a woman from the floodwaters at Mockingbird Lane and North 1st Street early Thursday morning, after rising water trapped her vehicle in the underpass. The rescue came around 1:00 a.m., minutes after the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning that would last until 3:30 a.m. North Abilene had taken about two inches of rain overnight, with water pooling up to five feet deep in spots. The woman climbed onto the roof of her car as the water rose, which bought her time and a dry place to wait. Firefighters reached her and helped her swim to safety. Both the fire and police departments responded to the scene. The Texas Department of Transportation, as it does after nights like this, repeated its long-standing advice to drivers: "Turn around, don't drown." Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
Two teens asked Oprah for an interview. She said yes.They had no appointment. Oprah once didn't either.
Two 18-year-olds from Dublin, Ben Hanlon and Glen Anderson, landed an interview with Oprah Winfrey for their Back of the Class Podcast, and they did it by asking. Anderson first approached journalist Gayle King, not realizing she is Winfrey's closest friend. King sent a video along. "All of a sudden, we get that text on the Instagram page from Oprah's personal security guard," Hanlon said. The message read: "Hi Ben and Glen. Are you the kids looking to interview Oprah? Come to the hotel at 7!" Winfrey told them why she agreed. At 21 or 22, she had done the same thing to the poet Maya Angelou, waiting backstage without an appointment. "I like you because you had the chutzpah, you had the tenacity," she told them. She also admitted she never had a big dream. She planned to be a fourth grade teacher until a radio man heard her read at 16. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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DELIGHT • InspireMore
A DNA test led him to his father, Michael McDonaldHe wondered his whole life. The answer sang yacht rock.
Michael Goessling took a 23andMe test wondering about the biological parents who placed him for adoption in St. Louis in 1966. On his 58th birthday, he met his biological mother, who connected him with his father. The man on the phone chatted about his work as a musician and summer plans to pass through St. Louis, and something clicked. "And then I finally said, 'Are you Michael McDonald?'" Goessling told KMOV. "And he said, 'Yeah, I'm afraid so.'" Yes, that Michael McDonald, of the Doobie Brothers. The shared first name is a coincidence. McDonald's mother was 14 when the boy was born and left him unnamed. The name Michael came from Kay Goessling, who raised him with her husband Paul. "The real rock stars in this story for us are his adoptive parents," McDonald said. When the two Michaels finally met in person, there was a bear hug. "He told me he loved me, and I told him the same," Goessling said. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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DELIGHT • NPR Stories
He made the freeway everyone hates sound like a songEveryone in Los Angeles hates the 101. He heard a song.
Jay Judah has turned Los Angeles freeway traffic into music. His project, The 101 Plays Itself, pulls live camera feeds of U.S. 101, five lanes wide, and converts the flow of vehicles into something close to a song. A computer program spots each car and assigns it a note. The lane sets the pitch, the speed sets how long the note rings, and the vehicle type sets the octave. The idea started about a decade ago, when Judah took a job on the 10th floor of a building above Interstate 405 and began seeing the lanes as a game of Guitar Hero. "This thing that everyone in Los Angeles just hates, this universally reviled thing of traffic, to me, from up there, just looked like a river," he said. The tool is free online, and listeners can pick their own instruments. Judah prefers a theremin, a harp and a handpan steel drum, running just past rush hour.
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THE HONEYMAP
Sweet news is everywhere, if you know where to look.
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With love, The Editor
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