Philadelphia Little Free Library is filled with yarn instead of books.

There are over 90,000 Little Free Libraries around the world, but one of the first dedicated to yarn popped up outside Philadelphia.

According to news site Billy Penn, local proprietor Liz Sytsma fills up her Little Free Fiber Library with a bevy of yarn, and each day it's cleared out. Don't let BIG STRING learn about this.

Sytsma owns the Wild Hand yarn shop and uses the Little Free Library box her dad created as a sort of outreach to the community. It's caught a fan base on Instagram and Twitter as a result.

Never seen this take on the @LtlFreeLibrary movement before—a Little Free *Fiber* Library outside Wild Hand yarn shop in Mt Airy, Philadelphia. There are knitting books and balls of yarn inside. #AmKnitting pic.twitter.com/XEHHSTkMrT

— Claire (@vcmcguire) February 16, 2020

It's been a huge success in the one month since it started. "I was surprised," Sytsma tells Billy Penn. "Yarn shops all over the country reached out. Also people from all over wanting to put yarn in it."

Aww, wait until Hobby Lobby or Michael's gets a whiff of this and starts a crackdown.

Photos with Drake are an NCAA violation. Also boring.

Colleges and universities self-report violations they commit against the NCAA code of conduct from the previous year. It's a way of hoping that the mea culpa saves them from losing scholarships or lucrative invitations to bowl games and March Madness. It's also just a polite way of saying, "Oh, snap! My bad! Honest mistake!"

Which brings us to the University of Kentucky, which once reported that their former point guard (who has now gone pro), Tyler Ulis, created a violation when he met Drake backstage after a concert in 2015.

6⃣🙏 @champagnepapi

A photo posted by Tyler Ulis (@tulis3) on May 30, 2015 at 2:47pm PDT

The chills! The excitement!

This looks about as comfortable as a sixth-grade school dance.

It seems that one of Drake's management team recognized Ulis in the crowd (Wait--whaaaa?--because he's addicted to Kentucky basketball?) and invited him backstage. This was a problem because Drake is a big supporter of Kentucky basketball, for reasons only he and his own personal god understand.

This recent post from a few weeks ago on Instagram continues the Kentucky love:

Cold blooded. 💰✅ #BIGBLUE

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Dec 17, 2016 at 4:40pm PST

Why a guy from Toronto loves Kentucky basketball is like a modern-day Riddle of the Sphinx. Who knows?

Drake's Instagram game is a bit weak. He has over 35 million followers who revel in pictures of Drake, uhh, leaving a hotel:

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Dec 8, 2016 at 9:37pm PST

Goodness. I haven't seen such a thrilling moment since I stood outside a nearby Motel 6 for ten minutes.

It's becoming readily apparent that the only real violation here is that Drake's social media accounts are criminally boring.

This Week in Science!!!

A career in writing will lead to premature aging and a healthy dose of personal humiliation. But science and medicine is where you'll make money, fame, and the respect of your parents. As a result, we might as well pay attention to what they're doing in those fields.

So it's time to take another peak at anything going on in the world of science and medicine this week.


Starting off with:  A weasel goes out in a flash...of sorts.

story one:
Weasels hate science!!!

Science hater.

Confirming long-held suspicions of villainous behavior, a weasel is possibly to blame for taking down the $7 billion, 17-mile Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

The collider--which moves protons at nearly the speed of light before smashing them together in hopes of building on data on the Higgs boson, a cornerstone of particle theory--went offline this week after a power cable was disabled.

And how was it disabled? Engineers found the charred, furry remains of what they believe was a weasel or marten at the scene of the crime. Crime doesn't pay, weasels! Karma bites back!

This isn't the first time cute animals have tried to cripple science at the Large Hadron Collider. Back in 2009, a soggy, plain baguette dropped by a passing bird became caught in some electrical equipment and took out the collider then as well. That's right--bread products and birds are undermining scientific advancements, too. The chaos needs to end!

Does this mean small woodland creatures hate particle theory? Are they fundamentalists? Spies? What's their angle? Only time will tell.



story two:
Brainless slime can adapt!!!

Little Bobby is delicious!

Slime actually exists outside of Nickelodeon skit shows and two-bit divorce lawyers, and scientists have discovered that it can think. Sort of, at least, according to Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

A single-celled organism called Physarum polycephalum has no nervous system, with largely a solitary desire to find food as its lone act of survival. Picture your average 15-year old boy. Just like that.

Scientists wanted to know if the unicellular organism would adapt if they put a harmless barrier between it and a food source. Using caffeine or quinine as the barrier, P. polycephalum showed reluctance to move at first. On day one of the experiment it took the slime hours to adjust to the barrier, as apparently our mindless friend doesn't appreciate the finer qualities of a cup of joe as we do.

After nearly a week of testing though, and apparently tired of the charade, the slime smartened up. Once placed in the petri dish on day six, it immediately moved across the barrier to its food source. Scientists believe this is an example of 'habituation,' where harmless stimuli are ignored in order for the appeasement of important life functions.

What to take away from this? Slime will adapt and dominate the planet in forty million years. Be prepared.



story three:
Your dog is a touch-me-not!!!

"Help meeeee."

A researcher at the University of British Columbia studied a collection of 250 photos of humans hugging their dogs and claims that not only are many people suspicious of being touched by you, but even your dog would appreciate three feet of personal space.

Stanley Doren, a professor of psychology at UBC, studied the photos and says the canines often exhibit signs of stress, anxiety, discomfort, or plain dislike of the hugging situation. The discomfort originates in dogs' inherent desire to flee from danger, and with all your hugging and canoodling you're trying to negate ages of evolutionary behavior.

Doren believes that 81.6% of dogs in the photos were giving off at least one sign of discomfort--all while you were trying to Instagram and Facebook that awkwardness--except you weren't picking up on the social cues apparently.

So the next time your dog is giving you some serious side-eye action, he's not flirting. He's wondering where the pepper spray is.



story four:
Zinc has never sounded so sexy!!!

Zinc = XXX

When a human egg is activated by a human sperm, a tiny little zinc firework explodes around the egg, researchers at Northwestern University say. The larger the zinc firework, the healthier the egg is for developing a viable embryo. Zinc is now officially the sexiest chemical on the periodic table.

Researchers say this could have huge benefits toward choosing the healthiest eggs for in vitro fertilization. "It’s a way of sorting egg quality in a way we’ve never been able to assess before," said Northwestern's Teresa Woodruff.

To think, all those years creepy guys said they could make fireworks happen in the bedroom--they weren't lying.

Queen Elizabeth was short and to the point with her letter writing as a child.

To celebrate Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday, the public relations arm of the British monarchy has taken to social media to get hip with the kiddos and bombarded sites like Instagram with throwbacks to the Queen's glory days. Those being when she was a kid.

Take the following post, showing the very first letter Queen Elizabeth (known to family as Lilibet) wrote to her grandmother, Queen Mary.

This is the first letter ‘Lilibet’ as Princess Elizabeth was known to her family, ever sent to her grandmother, Queen Mary. #Queenat90 #fromthearchives

A photo posted by The British Monarchy (@the_british_monarchy) on Apr 19, 2016 at 4:40am PDT

You're supposed to read this in your head as if one of the daughters from Downton Abbey is speaking.

How extensive a doll house is it that it's taking ages for the kid to unpack? Is it life-sized? It's possible that every time we look at Buckingham Palace we're just seeing at a really grandiose dollhouse. Is Prince Philip really just an elaborate Ken doll? Potentially.

Social media and an obsession for morning haikus has led little known poet to crack bestseller lists.

Tyler Knott Gregson is a 33-year old Montana-based poet and photographer who started posting one poem a day--usually with an accompanying photo--to his social media accounts, like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For five years he's continued this, never missing a day, which has led to over a quarter million followers on Tumblr.

According to the Wall Street Journal, usually his mornings start with posting a haiku and photo, followed by afternoons where he scans longer poems composed on a typewriter, which are then shared with the masses.

This addiction to his craft has paid off, as his first collection of poetry, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series, has cracked multiple bestseller lists, with over 50,000 copies in print. That's largely unheard of for poetry, never mind a first-time published poet.

As for his daily poetry, Gregson sees some sort of potential for it ending eventually. As he tells the Journal, "I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up. [...] But I have a noisy brain, so I just keep going."

Beef between boxer Floyd Mayweather and rapper 50 Cent is now involving a Harry Potter read-off.

Boxer Floyd Mayweather has a long history of public spats with various hip-hop artists, but things just took a turn for the extreme: reading for charity.

In May, Mayweather had a brawl with rapper T.I. at a Fatburger in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, last month, Nelly (yes, he still exists!) claimed he didn't have a beef with Mayweather (despite dating Mayweather's ex), but that "it's kind of hard talking to someone who hasn't graduated high school." Zing!

Now Mayweather has decided to go 3-for-3 on the hip-hop has-been battleground circuit, taking aim at 50 Cent, who once mildly chided the boxer for losing his girlfriend to Nelly.

Says Mayweather to MLive:

"God has blessed me with an unbelievable talent, with fast feet, fast hands, unbelievable defense and a very, very sharp mind. So I'm thankful for that. Of course, hip-hop artists, they come and go. They come and go. But I'm still here."

50 Cent took umbrage with the suggestion he's a has-been. After all, his last single reached #119 on the US charts (#95 in the UK!). So the rapper has taken to Instagram and posted a video mocking the recent Ice Bucket Challenges, and instead challenges Mayweather to read for charity. Specifically, to read--with no mistakes--a page of Harry Potter for $750,000 to a charity of his choice.

This reminds me of that time Tupac challenged me to read a page of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales without screwing up the Middle English. Tupac was a scholar, I tell you.





Why $750,000? When you're that rich and you offer that much, why not go for a round million? What's a quarter million amongst friends?