Tag Archives: OddBox

The Swiss City That’s Full of Cat Ladders

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Imagine, if you will, what it’s like to be an average cat. You live with your owner on the fourth floor of an apartment building and, like so many of your fellow felines with exposure to the outside world, you have a fierce case of wanderlust. But until your owner gets home, you can do little more than sit on a sunlit windowsill, press your nose against the glass, and peer wantingly at the neighborhood below. You are beholden to someone who chooses to spend most of the day separated from you. No wonder your species is so notoriously moody.

In most parts of the world, you’d be stuck at home until someone comes and lets you out. But in certain European countries, human residents have built outdoor climbing aids, called cat ladders, to help their feline friends come and go as they please.

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Homemade cat ladders are as architecturally eclectic as they are charming. Many are simple and economical: a teetering plank between balconies; spindly pegs ascending a vertical drain pipe; a slatted wooden bridge laid diagonally from the branch of a climbable tree to a higher windowsill. Some are precarious, scaffolding-like structures of wood and metal that zigzag up multiple stories. Still others span intimidatingly wide gaps between roofs and apartment buildings, dozens of feet off the ground. At least one lucky cat has its own spiral staircase with a small perching platform on top.

Despite their whimsical photogeneity, cat ladders haven’t yet been thoroughly documented. The graphic designer and writer Brigitte Schuster aims to change that. She had spotted the occasional cat ladder in her native Germany, but it wasn’t until she moved to Bern, Switzerland, six years ago that she realized how popular they were. She’s since taken hundreds of photographs of cat ladders around the Swiss capital, compiling them in a book analyzing the structures from sociological, architectural, and aesthetic perspectives. Swiss Cat Ladders will be published by Schuster’s book imprint, Brigitte Schuster Éditeur, in German and English in fall 2019.

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Cats are the most common household pet in Switzerland, and also in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands—all countries, Schuster says, where cat ladders are staples of urban and suburban environments. But a country that loves cats isn’t necessarily one that embraces cat ladders.

There aren’t cat ladders in the United States, where many states have so-called leash laws that forbid the animals from being off-leash outdoors, and where city dwellers have built screened-in “catios.” Russia, which ranks highest in Europe in both cat ownership and household cat population, doesn’t have cat ladders. In Istanbul, hundreds of thousands of stray cats—some feral, some cuddly, all ownerless—roam and scale the city without the help of ladders designed specifically for them. A recent documentary, Kedi, tells the story of seven such cats, for whom every climbable structure is a “cat ladder.”

“I was questioning if cats really need these cat ladders, or if humans impose the cat ladders on their cats because they find them practical,” Schuster says. Her question appears backed up by traditional feline lore: If cats always land on their feet (and have nine lives), why do they need cat ladders? Couldn’t someone just open the window for their dearest feline and let her find her way to the ground, even if doing so requires an acrobatic leap?

“Cats do need them!” says Dennis C. Turner, a veteran cat behaviorist who’s considered, by his estimate, one of the world’s “four or five foremost cat experts.” “They’re very important. But they’re rarely mentioned in books about how to properly house cats.”

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Turner points to two reasons why cats need cat ladders: their physical safety and their mental well-being. Contrary to popular belief, cats don’t always land on their feet—the innate “cat-righting reflex” only works up to 30 meters, Turner says—and even when they do, their daredevil leaps can result in injuries as severe as torn ligaments, ruptured tendons, and broken legs.

There’s a saying Turner often repeats during interviews and public lectures: “Once an outdoor cat, always an outdoor cat.” That is, if a kitten was born outside and spent its first weeks outdoors, it should be kept as a cat with outdoor access for the rest of its life. Outdoor cats held “captive” indoors, Turner says, will invariably develop behavioral problems, including urine marking and scratching furniture and drapes. For people in urban areas who live in apartments, or even in two-story houses, cat ladders (plus cat doors) are the easiest way to let cats come and go.

For those who might find the notion of an outdoor cat objectionable, Turner isn’t against keeping cats exclusively indoors—“I wouldn’t do it myself,” he says, “but that’s personal”—as long as two rules are fulfilled: They’ve never been outside and their home indoors is physically and mentally stimulating, with scratching posts, elevated perches, sunny views, and so on.

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Not all cats immediately take to their ladders like catnip. There’s a learning curve. Schuster says that some cat owners will put food on different steps to lure their pets out, in a form of positive reinforcement. “Cats only learn when they want to learn,” Turner says. “Punishment never works with them, but positive reinforcement does.”

In the preface of Schuster’s book, Turner writes, “I personally think that all ladders indicate a willingness to house the cats properly and respect the animals’ needs.” A home with a cat ladder is a home that knows and respects the needs of the cats who live there.

If it fits, I sits” is an oft-memed saying associated with images of cats sitting snugly inside boxes, baskets, bowls, and other containers. Cats’ relationship with cat ladders might be described thusly: “If it’s mine, I climb.”

Trump Campaign Tries to Prove Trump Did Not Call Meghan Markle ‘Nasty’ by Tweeting Clip With Him Doing Just That

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Donald Trump and the other Trumps (even Tiffany!) are going to London tomorrow to meet the Queen, but they are NOT meeting Meghan Markle, who is too busy with her new baby to meet this particular motley crew. This is probably for the best, as Trump and his re-election campaign have gotten into a little tussle with the…

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Take a Visual Journey Through 181 Years of Street Photography (1838-2019)

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All of us here in the 2010s have, at one time or another, been street photographers. But up until 1838, nobody had ever been a street photographer. In that year when camera phones were well beyond even the ken of science fiction, Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype process and one of the fathers of photography itself, took the first photo of a human being. In so doing he also became the first street photographer, capturing as his picture did not just a human being but the urban environment inhabited by that human being, in this case Paris’ Boulevard du Temple. Daguerre’s picture begins the historical journey through 181 years of street photography, one street photo per year all soundtracked with period-appropriate songs, in the video above.

From the dawn of the practice, street photography (unlike smile-free early photographic portraiture) has shown life as it’s actually lived. Like the lone Parisian who happened to be standing still long enough for Daguerre’s camera to capture, the people populating these images go about their business with no concern for, or even awareness of, being photographed.


The earliest street photographs come mostly from Europe — London’s Trafalgar Square, Copenhagen’s former Ulfeldts Plads (now Gråbrødretorv), Rome’s Via di Ripetta — but as photography spread, so spread street photography. Rapidly industrializing cities in America and elsewhere in the former British Empire soon get in on the action, and a few decades later scenes from the cities of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East begin to appear.

Each of these 181 street photographs was taken for a reason, though most of those reasons are now unknown to us. But some pictures make it obvious, especially in the case of the startlingly common subgenre of post-disaster street photography: we see the aftermath of an 1858 brewery fire in Montreal, an 1866 explosion in Sydney, an 1874 flood in Pittsburgh, a 1906 hurricane in San Francisco, and a 1920 bombing in New York. Each of these pictures tells a story of a moment in the life of a particular city, but together they tell the story of the city itself, as it has over the past two centuries grown outward, upward, and in every other way necessary to accommodate growing populations; transportation technologies like bicycles, streetcars, automobiles; spaces like squares, cinemas, and cafés; and above all, the ever-diversifying forms of human life lived within them.

Related Content:

Humans of New York: Street Photography as a Celebration of Life

19-Year-Old Student Uses Early Spy Camera to Take Candid Street Photos (Circa 1895)

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer, Discovered

Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

See the First Photograph of a Human Being: A Photo Taken by Louis Daguerre (1838)

The History of Photography in Five Animated Minutes: From Camera Obscura to Camera Phone

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Take a Visual Journey Through 181 Years of Street Photography (1838-2019) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Shields Date Garden in Indio, California

Knight of Shields, guiding seekers of dates.

A mammoth knight in armor points the way to Shields, just off U.S. Highway 111 in Riverside County, California. From the dusty heat of the Colorado Desert, follow the knight’s guidance into the calm and splendor of Shields Date Garden, overlooking the majestic Santa Rosa Mountains.

When Floyd and Bess Shields opened the Shields Date Garden on Christmas Day in 1924, they knew competition would be strong in the rapidly-growing Coachella Valley date industry. To distinguish his date farm from all others in the valley, Floyd began offering lectures to visitors on the lawns of the garden. In the 1950s, he did one better: a slide show with a recorded soundtrack, cheekily named “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.” Today, garden visitors can enjoy the slideshow, which has since been turned into a film that plays on a loop in the garden’s own “Romance Theatre.”

But the main attraction of Shields is, without question, not the suggestively titled cinematic experience, but the actual grounds: 17 acres of date groves, with a little pond at its center and Jesus in its heart. For here, amidst the beauty of winding pathways and date palms lush with fruit, are 23 biblical sculptures depicting Christ’s life, from birth to resurrection. They were donated in 2011 by a Canadian couple who were regular Shields Garden visitors, and are dispersed amid the date palms, olive trees, aloe plants, and citrus trees that populate the garden.

Visitors can also sample Floyd Shields’s two hybrid date varieties—called blonde and brunette dates—the only place in the world where they are grown. Today, nearly 95 percent of all dates grown in the United States are from the Coachella Valley.

In 1936, Shields also developed and patented a date sugar that he called date crystals, which are the key ingredient in Shields Date Garden’s most popular beverage: their signature date shake. Visitors can enjoy a date shake at the original counter, set up in the 1960s. The café at Shields of course celebrates dates on its menu. While they have your garden-variety omelets, sandwiches, and steak, consider trying the date burger, date pancakes, or just plain ol’ dates stuffed with cheese, jalapenos, and prosciutto, and wrapped in bacon.

There’s also the garden shop, which sells all the date varieties grown on the grounds, in addition to the famous Shields date crystals, along with a variety of sauces and vinegars, including the very intriguing figs and date vinegar.

The Secret to This Brazilian Coffee? Ants Harvest the Beans

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After João Neto stopped using pesticides at his coffee farm, critters that had long been absent started showing up. Birds began singing at his window in the morning, pacas paraded through the woods, and bees appeared to pollinate the flowers.

Like many producers in the interior of the state of São Paulo, one of the main coffee-growing areas in Brazil, Neto had for decades used chemicals to grow a monocrop of coffee at his Fazenda Santo Antônio farm. But his change in approach also attracted the kinds of insects that farmers often fear: beetles, crickets, and ants.

Neto, though, says he isn’t concerned about insects plaguing his crops. “Nature is in charge. If these plants have to stay here, they will resist.” According to him, all the creatures returning to his farm are important for the “natural rebalancing that the monoculture of coffees had extinguished.”

So when ants started appearing by the coffee trees, Neto did not worry or resort to killing them. But one day, on a walk around the plantation, he noticed de-pulped beans scattered around the trees.

While it’s easy to forget when ordering at a café, coffee begins its life as a fruit, and the beans are the fruit’s seed. When Neto took a closer look, he realized the ants were climbing his coffee trees, knocking down the fruits, and carrying them into their anthills. The insects, Neto concluded, must be feeding coffee pulp to ant larvae, and then discarding the beans outside the anthill.

The ants had left enough beans to fill a large coffee grinder, so Neto gathered all of the beans in a bag to study them. When he told his friend, Katsuhiko Hasegawa, a Japanese customer who has been buying his coffee since the 1990s, Hasegawa was eager to taste coffee made with the “ant beans.” What sensory notes could it have?

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Ant coffee would not be the first cup of Joe whose production involves animal interaction. Some of the world’s most expensive coffee beans are partially digested and then pooped out by civets, a cat-like creature common in Indonesia, jacu birds, which are indigenous to Brazil, or by elephants in Thailand. The animals’ digestive enzymes can change the structure of the coffee beans’ proteins, which removes some of the acidity and makes a smoother cup of coffee. What Neto and Hasegawa didn’t know is whether a humble ant focused on the fruit was capable of a similar transformation.

To answer that question, Hasegawa decided to roast several kilograms of the ant beans for himself, Neto and his children, and other friends who were at Fazenda Santo Antônio that day. As he couldn’t count on a proper roaster machine—like the ones modern coffee shops boast in their entrance areas—he had to manage with a small roaster Neto bought years ago.

The group could barely contain their anxiety, and Hasegawa, says Neto, acted like he was handling a new, rare gemstone. With cups finally in hand, the ritual of moans and murmurs only heightened the expectation. “It was a coffee with different and pleasant acidity,” says Neto. “Although I am not a professional taster, I enjoyed it.”

The group widely agreed that the taste was unique. Some thought the coffee’s acidity had improved, or that the flavor resembled other floral coffees with jasmine notes. To test the commercial potential of the beans, Hasegawa took a few ounces to Japan to roast and taste with a baristas group.

Hasegawa runs a coffee shop in the hip Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza. Called Café Paulista, it was named after the Brazilian state where most of the coffee beans in Japan originally came from. The café was opened in 1911 by Ryo Mizuno, a Japanese entrepreneur who brought the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil to work on coffee plantations. Since Hasegawa inherited Café Paulista from his grandfather, who bought it from Mizuno, he’s retained the legacy of maintaining a close partnership with Brazilian farmers.

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So when Neto’s Brazilian ant coffee traveled to Japan, it reflected a century-old relationship. Hasegawa says the Japanese baristas were excited to taste it, and intrigued by the story behind it. When they tried it, some believed the coffee had gained interesting acidity characteristics, while others said that the ants had given it sweeter notes. Overall, they liked it.

Although the baristas’ response was positive, Hasegawa couldn’t take any orders, because the farm’s production of the beans has been very limited. With the new organic approach, Neto’s coffee production has dwindled from more than 230 hectares to just 40 (from 570 acres to just 100). In his biggest year, 2015, Neto cataloged less than 60 pounds of these ant beans. He hopes to soon be able to sell tiny amounts to customers. But, for now, he only makes ant coffee samples, and he does not know of anyone selling ant coffee commercially.

Not only is producing the beans a “little ant job,” as is said in Brazil, a local expression meaning something that takes a lot of effort. But the relationship between insects and coffee trees can take a very long time to develop.

That’s according to Susanne Renner, a botanist from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She notes that the symbiosis between some ants and their Rubiaceae species (the family that includes coffee trees) evolved over about three to five million years. The Phildris nagasau, an ant discovered on the island of Fiji, even plants, fertilizes, and guards its own coffee crops.

“We believe that it started with the nesting behavior of ants who have lost the ability to live in any other nest or build their own nest,” she explains. “We don’t know why Rubiaceae, instead of, for example, other plant species.” This close relationship has been known since about 1880. “Our discovery,” Renner says, “is that the ants actively collect and then plant the seeds of their house-plants by inserting them into cracks in the bark of canopy trees.”

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The studies conducted by Renner with PhD student Guillaume Chomicki, whose research called for climbing trees in Fiji for a closer look, shows that this symbiosis happens regularly. It also suggests that ant species around the world may have relationships with coffee trees—Neto’s ants being a good example.

In sharp contrast to the advice of internet posts that suggest spreading coffee grounds to deter ants, new studies suggest that household ants are attracted to coffee odor. Researchers have found that several varieties, particularly Arabica, are attractive to some foragers ants, such as Tapinoma indicum, Monomorium pharaonis, and Solenopsis geminata.

This research is shedding light on the relationship between ants and coffee trees, and similar studies could one day support the production of coffee by the tiny, hard-working creature, and investigate Hasegawa’s belief that the ants notably changed the coffee’s characteristics. In any event, João Neto will let the ants do their job.

“Who knows if eventually we will have a significant amount to sell in the market?” Neto says. “The quantity of ants is increasing on the farm.” Unlike any other coffee farmer, he seems very happy about it.

Bill Gates Recommends Five Books to Read This Summer

his billions are based on luck, not being smart. everyone should look for their own books.

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It’s becoming an annual ritual. Every summer Bill Gates offers us a reading list–5-books to take on vacation. As you’ll see, his list assumes that even if you’re physically on vacation, your mind isn’t. The curious mind takes no breaks. Bill writes:

Upheaval, by Jared Diamond. I’m a big fan of everything Jared has written, and his latest is no exception. The book explores how societies react during moments of crisis. He uses a series of fascinating case studies to show how nations managed existential challenges like civil war, foreign threats, and general malaise. It sounds a bit depressing, but I finished the book even more optimistic about our ability to solve problems than I started. More here.

Nine Pints, by Rose George. If you get grossed out by blood, this one probably isn’t for you. But if you’re like me and find it fascinating, you’ll enjoy this book by a British journalist with an especially personal connection to the subject. I’m a big fan of books that go deep on one specific topic, so Nine Pints (the title refers to the volume of blood in the average adult) was right up my alley. It’s filled with super-interesting facts that will leave you with a new appreciation for blood. More here.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. It seems like everyone I know has read this book. I finally joined the club after my brother-in-law sent me a copy, and I’m glad I did. Towles’s novel about a count sentenced to life under house arrest in a Moscow hotel is fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat. Even if you don’t enjoy reading about Russia as much as I do (I’ve read every book by Dostoyevsky), A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story that anyone can enjoy. More here.

Presidents of War, by Michael Beschloss. My interest in all aspects of the Vietnam War is the main reason I decided to pick up this book. By the time I finished it, I learned a lot not only about Vietnam but about the eight other major conflicts the U.S. entered between the turn of the 19th century and the 1970s. Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important cross-cutting lessons about presidential leadership. More here.

The Future of Capitalism, by Paul Collier. Collier’s latest book is a thought-provoking look at a topic that’s top of mind for a lot of people right now. Although I don’t agree with him about everything—I think his analysis of the problem is better than his proposed solutions—his background as a development economist gives him a smart perspective on where capitalism is headed.

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Related Content:

Bill Gates Names 5 Books You Should Read This Summer (2018)

Bill Gates Recommends Five Books for Summer 2017

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Summer (2016)

Bill Gates Recommends Five Books to Read This Summer is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.