After our vet informed us that there was plaque build-up in our cat’s teeth, we got to work to search for the perfect brush
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If you are a cat parent, then you must know how tough it is to get your feline roommate get their teeth brushed. After our vet informed us that there was plaque build-up in our cat’s teeth, we got to work to search for the perfect brush. And we found a soft-bristled finger brush, like they use for babies. You can slide your index finger into it, squeeze on the toothpaste and give it a go. Don’t concentrate on brushing; massage the gums instead—the latter gets to the plaque automatically and our cat seemed to find it more tolerable and less intrusive.
https://amzn.eu/d/iCgRUiX
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Bantering with the SO
Couples facing rushed conversations or awkward silences on video calls caused by being on different timezones and long-distances can try bantering instead. Banters is an online game that helps partners learn more about each other and strike up interesting conversations based on specific topics. The game has decks of virtual cards which throw up different prompts to start and keep a conversation going, which is perfect for when you want to know more about your love interest but just can’t go beyond ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ or the clichéd ‘What are you doing?’ Arranged in five levels of increasingly-probing questions, the decks prompt you to talk about fun things such as choosing between a superpower of talking to plants or animals, or deeper questions that talk about fears and what the one expects from the other partner. Swipe right on the card once both you and your partner have talked about a subject, and you can, of course, go beyond what is asked to come up with questions of your own. The next time you’re video calling someone and feel the silence begin to drop, banter away.
withours.com/games-for-couples
Hard muscles, soft approach
If you are a fitness enthusiast, or even someone mildly interested in fitness and use social media regularly, chances are that the algorithm will throw up posts by influencers that are, as a rule, full of impossible comparisons accompanied by condescending messages like “What’s your excuse?”. Or, there will be trainers who go around looking for pictures of food and commenting on them about the high calorific value and how you are inviting certain death by eating it. Nerd Fitness, an initiative that calls itself a “rebellion”, describes itself at the “most caring online fitness community in the galaxy.” Enough to make us stop browsing and take notice, because of the refreshingly supportive and non-judgemental approach. The home page has a quiz with simple questions that help set the agenda for their online courses. The free articles section has a curation of write ups about fitness, nutrition and mindset, all written in simple language.
nerdfitness.com
Word finder for brain fog
We all go through that particular day when our brains just don’t brain as they should, and it feels like there’s a fog in your mind when you try to grasp for that one synonym of… derelict? Decrypt? Chirag Mehta’s Tip of My Tongue website, launched in 2007, was way ahead of its time. The website does what your brain forgets to do sometimes—perform a complex search of all the words that sound similar to the one you can’t remember. This writer was grasping and groping for a word that sounded similar to ‘derelict’, and which had some variation of the word ‘crypt’ in it. A Google search yielded nothing. That’s when Tip of My Tongue came in handy; we simply typed in the starting syllables of the word (de) and any possible letters it could contain (cre), and were presented with a list of words that included decreet, decrepitate, and the elusive word we were hunting for—decrepit. Success!
chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/
Smorgasbord of history
Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker notions about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned as a humane alternative to the punitive violence of late-18th century jails,” says the introduction, and we’re hooked. The article in question traces the origins of the concept of solitary confinement in American prisons. It is hosted on The Public Domain Review (PDR), an online journal of essays based on publicly available material and our current addiction. PDR’s articles are also accompanied by great visual elements. This article, for instance, includes an 1827 illustration of the under construction Philadelphia penitentiary, a hand-painted lithograph of it made in 1833 and a photograph of imprisoned Mormon polygamists taken in 1899. PDR is a labyrinth of information to get lost in on a slow day at work. How do you think we found it in the first place?
publicdomainreview.org
Curated by Gautam S Mengle, Christalle Fernandes, and Arpika Bhosale