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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Once again, Mental Floss tackles the world's most pressing questions. Why Do So Many Maple Syrup Bottles Have a Tiny Little Handle?  It’s not for holding, that’s for sure. Well, this one would be pressing if anyone in the US could still afford maple syrup. Ideally, you’d be able to hold the handle of a maple syrup container while you carry it and also while you pour the syrup onto pancakes, waffles, or whatever other foodstuff calls for it. Good gods, how big is your maple syrup container? I usually get the ones about the size of a beer bottle, which doesn't even require a handle. Or, you know, I used to, when we were still getting stuff from Canada. But the typical handle on a glass bottle of maple syrup is way too small and positioned too far up the bottleneck to be functional in either respect. So, why is it there? Why is anything nonfunctional anywhere? Decoration, tradition, or for easy identification, perhaps. The most widely accepted explanation is that the tiny handle is a skeuomorph, meaning “an ornament or design representing a utensil or implement,” per Merriam-Webster. I'm actually sharing this article not to complain about trade wars, but because I don't think I'd seen 'skeuomorph' before, and it's a great word. As the article goes on to note, it's apparently pretty common in software design. They use other examples, but here on WDC, we have a bunch of them. The magnifying glass for Search, the shopping cart (or trolley) for Shop, glasses for Read & Review, the gear icon for settings, and so on. I don't do website or graphic design, so I didn't know the word. But there are plenty of skeuomorphs that don’t involve the transition from analog to digital life, and the useless handle of a maple syrup bottle is one of them. I'd hesitate to call it "useless," myself. Obviously, it's not useful as a handle for carrying or pouring, but, clearly, it does have a purpose: marketing. Here’s one popular version of the origin story: The little handle harks back to the days of storing liquids in salt-glazed stoneware that often featured handles large enough to actually hold. Moonshine distillers, take note. (And yet, the article mostly debunks that origin story, as one might expect.) Maple syrup manufacturers had started to add little handles to their glass bottles by the early 1930s. This, apparently, was a bit of a marketing tactic. “Maple syrup companies weren’t so much retaining an old pattern of a jug as reinventing it and wanting to market their product as something nostalgic,” Canada Museum of History curator Jean-François Lozier told Reader’s Digest Canada. Like I said. Perhaps one day, I will again have the opportunity to purchase delicious maple syrup. When I do, I'll be looking for the skeuomorph. |
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