An aluminum cargo jet is about the worst place you could pick to spend an Alaska winter. Jon Kotwicki trucked a retired DHL DC-9 down the highway from Fairbanks and turned it into a three-bedroom guest house beside the runway at his flight school in Big Lake. He'd spent a winter testing insulation in the DC-6 he converted first. The DC-9 kept its yellow and red, and he built a sauna into the tail cone.

Fort Wayne refused to put Harry Baals on its government building, so here he is on your timeline. His name got more than 23,000 votes, and officials went with "Citizens Square." Why ask the public if you can't handle a little Harry Baals? Consider this his tribute. Please show some respect while these local news anchors attempt to do their jobs.

This man gets paid to taste pet food, and somewhere along the way he picked a favorite. At Royal Canin, staff take real bites to check firmness, texture, and how a pâté holds up against chunks in gravy. The dogs and cats still get the final vote on flavor, but the humans catch everything else, including whether the smell will make an owner regret opening the can in the kitchen. His pick is the Gastrointestinal formula, for its very meaty flavor. Tasting it for quality control makes sense. Having a favorite raises a few questions.

A blue belt in jiu-jitsu only gets you so far when your opponent is a python and tapping out isn't an option. Mike Holston found that out in Indonesian farmland. The reticulated python, which he puts at 19 feet and just over 200 pounds, locked up one of his arms and both legs before he could stop it. His verdict while it tightened: this snake has a black belt in the jungle. Holston, known online as The Real Tarzann, says he wrangles these pythons because locals often kill them for meat and skin. He called this one the closest he's come in a long time to being fully wrapped up. 📹 TheRealTarzann on YouTube

Timothy Dexter told visitors his wife was dead and the woman walking around his house was her ghost. She was alive, which didn't seem to change his position. Then he staged his own funeral to see how people would mourn him, and about 3,000 showed up. Afterward he beat his wife with his cane for not looking upset enough. Being married to him sounds a lot less entertaining than hearing about him. He declared himself Lord Timothy Dexter and filled his yard with wooden statues of great men, including himself. The title was self-appointed, and so was the selection committee. The business stories told about him make even less sense. He shipped warming pans to the Caribbean, where they got used as molasses ladles, and cats to islands overrun with rats. Rivals talked him into sending coal to Newcastle, a coal-producing city, as a joke. It showed up in the middle of a miners' strike, and he sold it at a profit. Then there's the book. He published it without punctuation, and when readers complained, he added a page of punctuation marks so they could put them wherever they wanted. Even his commas were somebody else's problem. Disorthodox walks through the whole mess, and every time you think you've heard the most ridiculous part, there's another chapter.

Magellan's men filled their visitors' hands with gifts, then offered them iron shackles. In 1520, on the coast of Patagonia, eyewitness Antonio Pigafetta described the people they met as giants, so tall the sailors reached only to one man's waist. The first meeting began with a man dancing on the shore and throwing dust over his head, and Magellan sent a sailor out to dance right back at him. Later, Magellan decided to take two of them to Spain. His men loaded their hands with presents until they couldn't hold any more, then held out the irons as if they were one more gift. When the shackles locked, the captives cried out to their god, Setebos, a name Shakespeare would borrow for The Tempest ninety years later. They were probably Tehuelche, a tall people whose size was exaggerated in European accounts, but the shackles were there in the very first one.

Write a novel without the letter E, and you've lost "the," "he," "she," and "they" before you finish your first sentence. Ernest Vincent Wright did it anyway. His 1939 novel Gadsby runs about 50,000 words without a single E, and he wrote that he tied down the E key on his typewriter so one couldn't slip in. It sounds like a punishment, but this video argues it works in your favor. The sentence you'd normally write is suddenly unavailable, so you have to find another way to say it, and that search can take you somewhere your usual wording never would. The same thing happened with Green Eggs and Ham. Dr. Seuss's publisher bet him he couldn't write a book using just 50 different words, and he did. A restriction doesn't guarantee a good idea, but it won't let you settle for the first one. Try it in the replies: tell us what you do for a living without using the letter E.

Florian Märker looked down from a 160-foot waterfall in Oregon and thought the drop looked inviting. No death dive on record had come from that height. A death dive means falling flat with your arms spread and only breaking position at the last instant before the water. He says the fear disappeared the moment he left the edge and the fall played out in slow motion. The footage shows those same seconds from the outside, right up to the impact, which he says knocked the wind out of him for a couple of seconds. He came up with the world record, and one of the first things he heard afterward his mom saying, "I can finally sleep now."

Kids in Whittier, Alaska take the elevator down to the basement and follow a tunnel all the way to school without ever stepping outside. Their parents plan their lives around a mountain. The only road into town is a single-lane tunnel they share with the trains, and if you miss the last opening of the night, you're not driving home until morning. A lot of the locals own T-shirts that say POW, short for Prisoner of Whittier. Most of the town lives in one 14-story building the Army left behind, with the grocery store, the post office, and the church all under the same roof. Everywhere else, we spend our lives trying to put a little more distance between ourselves and the neighbors. In Whittier, the mayor lives in your building and your prom date might live down the hall.

Diego Poncelet broke the skateboarding speed world record on his very first day in Quebec, and he still wasn't satisfied. The old mark of 91.17 mph had stood since 2017 on that same stretch of Route des Éboulements, and it belonged to his friend Pete Connolly. Poncelet beat it by about a tenth of a mile per hour. Most people would have taken the record, hugged their buddy, and flown home. Instead, the two-time downhill world champion waited five days for the wind, temperature, and road to line up, caught a 6-to-9 mph tailwind, and went back up the hill. He came down standing up at 94.34 mph, faster than some people will ever go in a car, on a board with no brakes, at a speed where one twitch of an ankle decides how the run ends.