A firsthand account of what it's like to be homeless in America

From The Atlantic: "3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless. My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire)."

How long can a chicken live without a head? A surprisingly long time

From the BBC: "On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were killing chickens, on their farm in Fruita, Colorado. Olsen would decapitate the birds, his wife would clean them up. But one of the 40 or 50 animals that went under Olsen's hatchet that day didn't behave like the rest. "They got down to the end and had one who was still alive, up and walking around," says the couple's great-grandson, Troy Waters, himself a farmer in Fruita. The chicken kicked and ran, and didn't stop. It was placed in an old apple box on the farm's screened porch for the night, and when Lloyd Olsen woke the following morning, he stepped outside to see what had happened. Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous headless bird. The local paper dispatched a reporter to interview Olsen, and two weeks later a sideshow promoter called Hope Wade travelled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. He had a simple proposition: take the chicken on to the sideshow circuit - they could make some money."

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. And I appreciate it, believe me!

How should we handle development on the Moon? Use the dark side

From Scientific American: "As we open what my mentor Gerard K. O’Neill called the “High Frontier” of space, we have the chance to do things differentlyI propose that we all agree to ban all permanent lunar development that is visible with the naked eye from Earth. Be it a strip mine gashing the eye of the man in the moon, a scar on an ear of the lunar rabbit, or a hole in the gown of the goddess of the moon, it is not our generation’s place to condemn all future generations to bear witness to our lack of compassion and frankly, good taste. We don’t need to change the moon’s familiar face—so why not agree to leave it unmarred by any obvious act of humanity, forevermore? Meanwhile, we can let our lunar dreams come into full bloom on the far side, never to be directly seen by wandering eyes here on Earth. There’s plenty to go around, so to speak."

Wearing a salmon on your head is back in fashion for orcas after a 37-year break

From IFLScience: "As anyone who follows fashion knows, certain trends like indie sleaze and cargo pants can come back around after a long and quite deserved break. Orcas, it seems, are not immune. After a 37-year break, killer whales have once again been spotted wearing dead salmon on their head. In the Puget Sound area of the northeast Pacific in 1987, one female orca from k-pod began carrying a dead salmon around on her nose. Over the next five to six weeks, the behavior spread, and by the end of it, orcas from her own and two other pods were wearing dead salmon hats. Then all of a sudden, the fad was over. Bar a few times the following summer, the trend had never been seen again. That is, until it emerged again quite recently. Orcas belonging to "J pod" were spotted recently in Puget Sound with salmon on their heads.

Jingle Bells didn't have anything to do with Christmas originally

From Now I Know: "Jingle Bells is neither a wholesome song nor about Christmas. The song we sing today was originally written by a guy named James Lord Pierpont. Pierpoint most likely wrote the lyrics in Medford, Massachusetts in 1850 although there is some debate around the when. The lyrics, to modern ears, sound very Christmasy — “dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh” — but perhaps only glancingly so; there’s no mention of Christmas, and the sleigh isn’t Santa’s, which of course comes with reindeer. It's possible that Pierpoint’s lyrics were inspired by Medford’s sleigh races. But another theory may be more likely: that Jingle Bells was a drinking song. According to some reports, Jingle Bells was a popular song to drink to in the 19th century, and guests at parties would 'jingle’ the ice cubes in their glasses while they sang along."

You can stay in this capsule hotel on the side of a cliff in Peru

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com