Waking up every day is like getting a mulligan from God. I have NO interest in cryptocurrency
Oklahoma, USA
Joined August 2009
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ToniWanKanobi retweeted
There's a saying on American social media:
"Be the American that Japanese people think you are."
I'm Japanese. I've lived in Tokyo my whole life.
So let me tell you what we actually say about you, when you're not in the room.
"When someone falls down on the street, we pretend not to see. We're protecting their pride. Americans run straight at them. They don't care about the pride. They care about the knee." (Office worker, 38)
"An American will stop four lanes of traffic for a family of ducks. And then everyone in the cars claps for the ducks." (Taxi driver, 61)
"If you lend an American a pen, you will never see it again. If you need a kidney, they'll ask your blood type." (Nurse, 45)
"At kids' soccer games, they cheer when the other team's kid scores. The other team's parents look confused. Then they cheer too." (Youth soccer coach, 52, lived one year in Ohio)
"A man sneezed on a bus in Chicago. Eleven strangers said 'Bless you.' He said 'thank you' eleven times. Nobody on that bus thought this was strange." (University student, 21)
"At an airport in Texas, I watched a soldier try to pay for his lunch. The cashier said someone already had. He asked who. She said, 'Somebody who didn't want you to know.'" (Retired teacher, 70)
"American fathers cannot braid hair. But they will watch a video at midnight for an hour so their daughter's hair looks right on picture day." (Hair stylist, 33)
"I ran the Chicago Marathon once. Strangers stood in the cold for hours holding signs for people they will never meet. At mile 20, a man I'd never seen read the name off my bib and screamed it like he'd raised me." (Runner, 48)
"When Americans get lost, they ask a stranger. If the stranger is also lost, they become a team." (Tour guide, 39)
"They ask the waitress her name. And then they remember it." (Restaurant owner, 66)
And one more. From my father. He's 76. He doesn't say much about anything. This is the longest thing I have ever heard him say about another country.
"Every time something terrible happens in America, I watch the news, and I look for one thing.
The people running toward it.
There are always so many."
So, America.
You don't have to become the Americans we think you are.
We're not imagining you.
We're remembering you.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
Maya dentists were not just decorating teeth
The strongest evidence that Maya dentistry was medical is not the stone. It is the glue.
Chemical analysis of the cement holding these inlays in place has identified around 150 organic compounds, among them pine resin, essential oils from mint-family plants and compounds derived from Salvia. Several are antibacterial. Several are anti-inflammatory.
Whoever mixed that cement was doing considerably more than sticking a gem to a tooth.
The practice runs through the Maya Classic period, roughly AD 250 to 900, which puts the teeth we study between about 1,100 and 1,800 years old. More than half of adults had inlays at the height of it.
There is a second finding worth knowing. A study published in November 2025 examined three inlaid teeth in Guatemala and found jade set into the teeth of children as young as seven, with the pulp undamaged and no natural decay present.
Whatever these inlays meant, some people were receiving them long before adulthood.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
This bottle was never opened. Roman bird flasks like this one were filled at the furnace and then sealed shut by reheating the tip of the tail, with no stopper and no opening anywhere.
To use the perfume you had to snap the tail off. An intact bird is an unused bottle, which is why there is still liquid inside this one after 2000 years..
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
A Japanese friend of mine gave birth in Seattle. Alone.
Her husband was stuck in Japan. A visa problem. Nothing anyone could do.
Her nurse was a woman named Tasha. When Tasha found out, she held out her hand.
"Okay. Give me his number."
She FaceTimed him. 3am in Tokyo. She propped the phone on the IV pole.
"Daddy, you're on duty. Don't you dare fall asleep."
For eleven hours, Tasha moved that phone. Every time my friend turned. Every time the doctor came in. When Tasha's shift ended, she didn't go home.
"I'm not leaving this girl."
In the last hour my friend was screaming. Her husband was crying in Japanese from a phone on a pole. Tasha was holding her hand with one hand and the phone with the other.
The baby came at 6:12pm.
Tasha held the phone right next to the baby's face.
"Say hi to your daddy."
The baby screamed. In Tokyo, her husband screamed back.
Then Tasha sat down on the floor and cried. She had been awake for nineteen hours.
The baby's middle name is Tasha.
It is a very unusual middle name for a Japanese girl. Both grandmothers asked why.
My friend didn't explain.
She just showed them the video. The part where a woman they will never meet holds a phone up to a newborn and says, "Say hi to your daddy."
Both grandmothers asked for a copy.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
Early in his career, after a disastrous night on stage in Chicago, Bill Murray walked out into the street ready to end his life, and headed for the lake, thinking he might as well "float for a while" once he was gone...
Instead, he turned up Michigan Avenue and found himself in front of the Art Institute of Chicago. He walked inside without even stopping to pay, because, in his words, he felt he was already "pretty much dead," and there, in front of him, was a painting he had always loved:
The Song of the Lark, painted by the French artist Jules Breton in 1884. A young peasant woman stands barefoot in an empty field at dawn, a sickle in her hand, pausing in her work to listen to a lark somewhere above her, while behind her a huge orange sun is just rising over the horizon.
Murray looked at her and saw a girl with very little to hope for, and yet, as he put it, "the sun’s coming up anyway and she’s got another chance at it." That simple thought was enough to bring him back because it made him feel that he too was a person, with "another chance every day the sun comes up."
For every writer, creator and dreamer here on X, I want to leave you with this: think of this story the next time you feel your art is futile, or that your creative pursuit isn’t worth the effort. Somewhere, someday, someone may stand in front of what you made at the lowest moment of their life, and find in it a reason to see the sun come up one more time...
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
I asked 50 Japanese people, ages 9 to 91, one question.
"What do you admire most about Americans?"
Here are the top answers.
10. "They clap when the plane lands." (Office worker, 34)
9. "They say 'I love you' every time they hang up the phone. Even men. Even to other men." (Taxi driver, 61)
8. "A stranger told me she liked my shoes. Then she just walked away. She didn't want anything." (High school girl, 16)
7. "They thank the bus driver when they get off." (Bus driver, 55. He got emotional saying this.)
6. "They tell you their whole life story in the grocery line. I know about one man's divorce, his boat, and his knee surgery. We knew each other for four minutes." (My mother, 64)
5. "They stand for the anthem at a children's baseball game." (Little League coach, 47)
4. "When they lose, they shake hands and say 'good game.' And they mean it." (Sota, 12)
3. "They fly the flag on a regular Tuesday. No holiday. Just because." (Nurse, 28)
2. "They help a stranger push a car out of the snow, then leave without saying their name." (My cousin's husband, 52, who got stuck in Colorado once)
And the number one answer came from the oldest person I asked. My grandfather. He's 91.
He thought about it for a long time.
Then he said:
"They still believe tomorrow will be better than today."
I asked him what he meant.
"In 1946, we had nothing," he said. "The American soldiers I met were young and far from home. But they acted like the future was coming, and it was going to be good. After a while, we started to believe them."
I asked him if he thought Americans still believe that.
He nodded slowly.
"Tell them," he said, "not to stop."
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
June 6, 1944. An American paratrooper jumps into Normandy in the dark and lands on the roof of a church.
By the end of the war he had been declared dead, held a funeral he didn't attend, escaped the Nazis, and fought his way toward Berlin in a Soviet tank unit.
His name was Joseph Beyrle. He's believed to be the only American soldier to serve in both the US Army and the Red Army during World War Two.
Beyrle was from Muskegon, Michigan. He joined the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. His buddies called him Jumpin' Joe.
On D-Day night his plane was hit by flak and he jumped early. He came down on a church roof, slid off, and lost his unit in the chaos. For a few days he fought on his own, blowing up a power station and cutting German communications.
Then he was captured.
Here's where it gets strange. A German soldier ended up wearing Beyrle's uniform and dog tags. That German was killed. When the body was found, the Americans identified it as Joseph Beyrle.
The army told his parents their son was dead. His hometown held a funeral mass for him. His obituary ran in the local paper.
Meanwhile, he was very much alive, being moved from one German prison camp to another.
He escaped more than once. One time he and two other prisoners jumped off a train heading east. They thought they were heading for Russia and freedom. They got lost and ended up in Berlin, where they were caught by the Gestapo, beaten, and tortured.
In January 1945, from a camp in eastern Germany, he finally made a clean escape. He went east, toward the gunfire. Toward the Soviets.
When he found a Soviet tank unit, he walked out with his hands up, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted the only Russian he knew. American comrade.
It worked.
He asked to join them. And they said yes.
For about a month, an American paratrooper rode with Soviet tank crews as they pushed toward Germany. He used his demolition training. He fought. He was reportedly welcomed by a Soviet officer who was one of the rare women commanding a tank battalion.
Then a German dive bomber attacked. Beyrle was badly wounded.
He was evacuated to a Soviet hospital. Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov reportedly visited, heard his story, and gave him papers to get to the American embassy in Moscow.
When he showed up, the embassy didn't believe him. As far as the US was concerned, Joseph Beyrle was dead. They held him under guard until his fingerprints proved who he was.
He made it home to Michigan in April 1945.
In 1946 he got married. In the same church where they'd held his funeral.
Decades later, in 1994, he was honored at the White House by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin for serving both countries.
And the last twist. His son, Joseph Beyrle II, grew up to become the United States Ambassador to Russia.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Joseph Robert “Joe” Beyrle had two sons. The elder son, Joe Beyrle II, served during the Vietnam War, but wasn’t a US Ambassador. That was the other son, John Beyrle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Be…
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
Meet Honky Chonk Beardonkadonk.
The National Park Service assigned the whimsical moniker "Honky Chonk Beardonkadonk" to an exceptionally large brown bear residing within Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.
Achieving such an immense physical size, however, demands an extraordinary amount of physical effort and a continuous supply of nourishment.
According to data provided by the National Park Service, an individual sockeye salmon yields approximately 3,000 to 4,000 calories, and an active adult bear is capable of consuming between 20 and 30 fish during a single feeding session.
This eating pattern totals a massive 60,000 to 120,000 calories per day, assuming the catch is devoured entirely.
These dense caloric inputs are vital for generating the substantial fat layers that animals depend on to survive the harsh winter season. While in hibernation, their metabolic processes decrease significantly, leaving stored tissues to sustain vital functions across several months of complete fasting. It is common for individuals to shed up to one-third of their aggregate mass over this dormant interval.
The highly productive salmon migrations at Katmai provide the unique environment necessary for this level of physical preparation. As a result, the largest apex predators can put on hundreds of additional pounds before retreating to their winter dens.
Once this specific bear retreats into its den, its biological systems will decelerate, relying solely on accumulated lipid reserves to power its body through months devoid of sustenance or hydration.
Upon coming out of dormancy in the spring, the creature will appear drastically leaner and prepared to resume its foraging routines, starting the lengthy process of accumulating the necessary mass for the subsequent winter. And the cycle repeats.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
Van Gogh painted this in one of the happiest moments of his life, for a friend he couldn’t wait to welcome home, and he had no idea what was coming...
In the summer of 1888 Vincent was living alone in a small yellow house in Arles, in the south of France, and he had a dream: to turn it into a home for artists, a place where painters could live and work together. The first to come would be his friend Paul Gauguin, and Vincent wanted the room waiting for him to be beautiful. So he decided to fill it with flowers. As he wrote to his brother Theo: “Nothing but large sunflowers.”
He painted as fast as he could, racing against the summer, because sunflowers wilt within days. By the end of August he had finished four canvases, bright yellow blooms in a simple vase, some fresh and open, some already drooping and going to seed. Gauguin finally arrived in October, saw them on the walls, and loved them.
But that happiness didn’t last: two strong, difficult men under one roof began to clash, and just before Christmas, after a bitter argument, Vincent suffered the breakdown in which he cut off part of his ear. Gauguin left Arles and never came back.
The dream of the yellow house was over after just nine weeks...
Despite everything, Vincent never stopped loving those flowers, and in the weeks after his breakdown, he painted the sunflowers again, copying his own pictures, as if he were trying to hold on to that summer when everything still seemed possible. Some painters, he told Theo, were known for their peonies or their hollyhocks, “but I have the sunflower, in a way.” And he described what they meant to him in a few simple words: they were his way of “symbolizing gratitude.”
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
Otter at a local zoo is going viral after showing zookeepers her favorite marble collection.
At a local zoo, staff noticed one otter had a habit that was different from the rest.
Otters are known for using rocks to crack open shellfish, and some even keep their favorite stones because they work better than others. But this otter wasn’t saving rocks. She was saving marbles.
Zookeepers first noticed her hiding one shiny marble in the corner of her enclosure. Then another appeared. Then another.
Soon, staff realized she wasn’t just collecting them by accident. She was carefully keeping each one like it meant something.
The zookeepers thought it was so sweet that one by one, staff members started bringing her a different marble as a gift. Every time she received one, she would take it gently, inspect it, and add it to her little collection.
Now, whenever certain keepers visit, she gathers the marbles together as if she’s showing them off. Visitors say it looks like she knows exactly which marble came from which person.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, yet few people know the story of the woman holding the parasol…
It was painted by Claude Monet in 1875, and she was his wife, Camille, out for a walk with their young son Jean near their home in Argenteuil, just outside Paris. Monet painted them outdoors on a windy day, from below, so that Camille stands against the sky, her veil and dress caught by the wind, looking down at us as if we had just called her name.
It feels less like a moment a husband didn’t want to forget.
Four years later, Camille was gone. After a long illness, she died in September 1879, at just 32. Five days before the end, a priest blessed the marriage she and Monet had made in a simple civil ceremony nine years earlier. And there, at her bedside, the artist did the only thing he knew how to do: he painted her one last time. Years later, he confessed that even then, sitting beside her, he caught himself studying the colors that death was leaving on her face, a moment he never managed to forget.
By then, she had appeared in some fifty of his paintings: in a green silk dress at nineteen, standing at a window, walking through the poppies with their little boy. Without ever meaning to, he had painted the story of her whole life with him.
Monet lived almost fifty more years, but on this canvas it will always be that summer afternoon, with Camille turning to look at him in the wind…
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
If you want to understand what it means to be an American citizen, look at what happened in the Indian Ocean on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009.
One merchant captain from Vermont named Richard Phillips was being held hostage inside a covered orange lifeboat by Somali pirates armed with AK-47s.
He was not a general. He was not a politician. He was one cargo ship captain who had offered himself as a hostage to save his crew.
To bring that one man home, the United States sent the guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, the frigate USS Halyburton, the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, and a team of U.S. Navy SEALs who parachuted straight into the black ocean at night.
For four days, the lifeboat pitched violently in rough seas twenty-five yards behind the destroyer.
Then at dusk on Sunday, a pirate pressed the barrel of his AK-47 directly against Captain Phillips' back and prepared to kill him.
On the fantail of the USS Bainbridge, three Navy SEAL snipers lay braced in the dark. The destroyer was rolling in one direction. The tiny lifeboat was pitching in another. If even one sniper missed by half an inch, or fired a tenth of a second late, the hostage would die.
Through night-vision scopes, all three snipers waited for the exact millisecond when three targets appeared in the tiny windows at once.
One word came over the headset.
Three rifles fired as a single sound.
All three kidnappers dropped instantly. Captain Phillips walked onto the deck of the USS Bainbridge without a scratch.
Do not touch a citizen of a country that will drop Navy SEALs from the sky at midnight for one man.
ToniWanKanobi retweeted
In a children's hospital in Boston, I shared an elevator with an officer wearing an official photo badge on his chest.
His badge read Captain Pancake. Director of Morale.
Captain Pancake was a ninety pound Golden Retriever who was currently trying to eat his own leash.
In my land, elite guards do not drool on the sandals of strangers.
Captain Pancake drooled on both of mine and then sat directly on my left foot so I could not escape.
On the fourth floor, his handler led him into the room of a six year old girl with a bald head and clear tubes taped to her small arm.
Her mother stood by the window with dark circles under her eyes.
"She hasn't spoken or smiled in five days," the mother whispered. "She won't let any of the nurses touch her."
The instant Captain Pancake stepped across the threshold, the clumsy dog vanished.
He walked across the cold floor without making a sound.
He did not bark. He laid his heavy golden chin gently on the edge of the mattress, two inches from the little girl's fingers, and looked up at her with warm brown eyes.
Slowly, the girl reached out and buried her hand in his long furry ear.
Captain Pancake closed his eyes, let out a long breath, and immediately produced a loud, ridiculous snore that sounded like an old farm tractor starting in winter.
The little girl burst out laughing.
Her mother dropped into the bedside chair and wept into her hands.
For forty minutes, ninety pounds of golden fur did what ten doctors and a million dollars of machines could not do.
When Captain Pancake left the room, I bowed deeply in the corridor. He tried to eat my sleeve. I let him.
