It seems like so many iterations of unfettered joy from our childhood haven’t made it to the modern age, and playgrounds are no exception. Gone are the days of metal slides that scorched the derriere in the summertime, seesaws that doubled as human catapults and the notorious merry-go-rounds that separated the weak from the strong. Good old fashioned character building—safety be damned!As it turns out, a few of these old relics are still standing. And footage of kids playing at one of these bygone parks is filling adults—particularly Gen Xers—with sweet nostalgia.Dubbing it the “Last Gen X Playground” by Ronda Schofield filmed a video of the local haunt in all its rusted glory. As the iconic 80s song “Maniac” plays in the background, we first see some kiddos swinging on a very odd contraption that sports a generic clown face. Then the camera pans out to reveal a metal slide weighted down by a concrete cinder block (classic), dilapidated rocking horse swings, and a spinning seesaw that’s certainly seen better days. But you know what? The kids today seem to like it just fine. @over40_slbmom Last GenX Playground!❤️ #genx #genxtiktokers #over50 #bestgenerationever #genxkid ♬ Maniac (Flashdance Version) (Re-Recorded / Remastered) - Michael Sembello While plenty of these staples have been replaced by safer alternatives, viewers on TikTok couldn’t help but reminisce about their childhood favorites.“The lunch ladies at my elementary school would give us waxed paper so we would slide faster down the slide,” one person recalled.The horse swings were my favorite,” add another. “Impossible when you get bigger, no knee room!”One even quipped “Metal slides on a hot summer day... getting blinded and burnt at the same time.” Ah yes, a simpler time. As people shared their recess war stories, it became all the more clear why many of these fixtures are no longer around. “Broke my leg on the spinning thing and got stitches in my chin from the teeter totter,” one person joked.Still, folks definitely felt their childhood come alive again after Schofield’s clip. Many felt it should be restored and kept a historic landmark of sorts.The pre-internet days might have been a little rough around the edges, but there was an undeniable rugged charm about it all. In many ways, it was easier for kids to just be kids, allowing for social interaction, reckless abandon and learning that a few knee scrapes doesn’t signal the end of the world.Those days might be behind us—and probably for the better, ultimately—but it’s still nice to hop back in from time to time. Now, where’s the vintage mall with cheesy glamor shots, vinyl shops, video game arcades and RadioShacks? This article originally appeared on 9.21.23

So many people dream of the day they get engaged and all of the fun things that come after that moment. It can feel like a whirlwind of activities: phone calls, picking the date, bridal showers, dress shopping and engagement pictures just to mention a few. With so many things going on that involve multiple people and locations, something is bound to go wrong every once in a while. Malia Makaila was in the midst of that rose tinted haze while taking engagement pictures on the street with her fiancé. From the looks of everything, things were going well, the mood was light and everything seems perfect. Well...that is until the soon-to-be groom noticed a strange woman staring at the giddy couple. Malia is completely oblivious to the stranger as she focuses on primping a bit before the next series of photos is taken. Eventually she couldn't stop herself from interrupting the photoshoot.The unknown woman sort of runs over into the frame of the photo and reaches out towards Malia's head, "sorry you just have one hair." The rest of what she says is inaudible before she reveals that she's a hairdresser after tucking the stray hair into place and walking out of frame. Malia appears delighted that the woman not only noticed the hair but fixed it. Chances are when the pictures came back the engaged woman would've been slightly miffed that her hair decided to make its own rules that day. Others were also impressed by the hairdresser's actions.Watch the sweet moment below: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Malia Makaila (@maliamakaila) "Sooo at first I didn’t even notice it. But after screenshots and close examination it looks as if there was in fact “one piece” like curled backward like over her shoulder. Shout out to the hairdresser, she real for that," one person says."I wish someone had stepped in to fix my wedding photo hair…you are gorgeous and the rescuer of stray hair is priceless," another writes."We should all be girls-girls," someone else declares."What are the odds of a hair dresser walking in to your photoshoot and stopping by to fix your hair. She was sent from heaven," one commenter suggests.The photos will likely turn out beautiful and thanks to that sweet hairdresser, there will be no need to edit a curly piece of hair doing its own thing. Here's to an amazing future for the beautiful couple.

We've all been there. Standing in line to be seated at a fairly busy restaurant while your stomach growls in protest. But when two women left a concert August 22 in search of food, they had no idea they'd find themselves taking orders and cooking food. Sylvia Arrendondo and her mother Idalia Merkel went to a local Denny's in Texas and were seated by another customer before realizing the restaurant was extremely short-staffed. Instead of taking their business elsewhere, they decided to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Arrendondo wrote about the unique experience on her Facebook page where she explained that only two people were working. One was serving tables and the other was the cook. As for the man that was acting as host, seating new guests, he had no idea what he was doing because he didn't work there. He told Arrendondo and Merkel that his wife used to work at Denny's so she started helping to serve tables and he decided to help get people seated.The service industry has been hit hard by the pandemic and the subsequent "great resignation." Complaints about low wages, poor management and rude customers that abuse staff members are just a few of the reasons cited by people who have left the industry. It may be surprising for some to learn that the federal minimum wage for tipped employees like servers and bussers is just $2.13 an hour. The rest of the wage is supposed to be made up of tips, which, depending on where you work, may be split at the end of the night between other workers. This act of splitting tips is called "tip pooling" and is calculated by number of hours worked. Splitting tips after a long day of work dealing with customers who may not have been so kind would understandably make some people upset. But it didn't take a deep dive on the treatment of restaurant employees for Arrendondo and the other customers who helped out. They saw two seemingly college-aged kids doing their best to keep the place running and they didn't hesitate to jump in to help, completely unpaid. When asked why she didn't just leave, Arrendondo said, "We just looked at each other and it wasn't even a question. We both knew what we had to do.""This was probably the most beautiful act of American unity that I have personally encountered," Arrendondo told Upworthy. She added that the sole paid server would occasionally start to cry before being comforted by the cook, only to return the favor when he would get overwhelmed.Talk about community. These two kids had exhausted all of their resources, including calling their manager multiple times. And instead of customers getting angry, demanding better service or walking away, Arredondo and Merkel stepped up. The kindness of this group of strangers will surely stick with these employees and the people who were involved."The strength, courage and integrity by these two workers was beyond admirable. My mom and I have never been so proud and happy to help," Arrendondo told Upworthy. "After all, we have all been there."Eventually after some convincing, the two employees shut the restaurant down and Arrendondo and Merkel went home much more tired than anticipated. Still hungry, but full of gratitude and pride. This article originally appeared on 08.26.22

Email has been a regular fixture in our lives since the mid-to-late 1990s, with many of us having many different inboxes to manage from personal to work to organizations to side hustles. Our email life can become overwhelming and it definitely requires some effort to maintain it, but what that effort and maintenance look like varies drastically from person to person. Variations in email management have prompted many a debate amongst friends, particularly when one catches a glimpse of another's 20,000+ unreads on their phone and panics. "Why do you have so many unread emails?!? That would cause me so much anxiety!" says the one, while the other just shrugs and says, "I skip the ones I don't want to read and it's not worth taking the time to delete them," as if that's a perfectly reasonable approach. What do these reactions to emails say about each person? Is one right and the other wrong? Does one have good habits and the other bad?Some folks will make a convincing argument for orderly and organized inbox habits, touting the benefits of the "Inbox Zero" method in which you follow a few steps to keep your inbox cleared. Such habits can help those who feel overwhelmed by too many emails and can't ignore inbox clutter to feel more at ease.But before judging those with cluttered inboxes too harshly, though, it's important to note that our brains don't all work the same way. For some, keeping up a clear inbox causes more stress than ignoring emails and they feel that the time and attention it takes to manage it every day isn't worth it. Here's what psychologists have to say about people's email inbox habits and what they mean about our personalities. First, let's look at the reality of email and how much of it is even worth our time, because we all know a lot of the email we receive is worthless. Researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review, “Of the eight hours managers devote to e-communications each week, we estimate 25% of that time is consumed reading emails that should not have been sent to that particular manager and 25% is spent responding to emails that the manager should never have answered.”And that's just work email. Our personal inboxes are full of junk with seemingly endless waves of email marketing and advertisements masquerading as helpful information. Some of us understand that reality and see it as all the more reason to actively manage our inboxes, while some of us see it as a reason to simply ignore most email that comes in.According to research psychologist Larry Rosen, Ph.D. told Business Insider that people who routinely file and delete emails are often trying to avoid the anxiety that comes with seeing emails pile up. "A huge, exploding inbox releases stress-based neurotransmitters, like cortisol, which make them anxious," he said.Some of that anxiety could stem from perfectionism (or vice versa) and seeing notifications build up is a reminder of everything you're not doing or able to do. “It could be tied to feeling overwhelmed to the point that each unread notification is yet another piled task piled on top of a thousand others,” Jenn Hardy, a licensed psychologist in Maryville, Tennessee, told HuffPost.Rosen told Business Insider that people who stay on top of their inboxes are often people with a high need for control in their lives. "They need an external way to have control over the world," he said, so the idea of just letting emails pile up willy nilly is way too stressful. On the other hand, people who do let their emails pile up may feel an opposite kind of stress. The idea of managing it all creates anxiety, and they feel more comfortable just ignoring it. Ultimately, there have to be occasional purges, but that's preferable to the day-to-day maintenance stress for some. “They may find this works better for them, leaves them less stressed and helps them focus their time and energy on other matters," Hardy pointed out. Social psychologist Ron Friedman told Business Insider that ignoring email "can also mean that you recognize that [monitoring and organizing those emails] isn't helping you achieve progress," adding that recognition is "a sign of intelligence."Email ignorers might also just be more relaxed personality types in general. More Type B than Type A.“They may be less of a perfectionist type and go more with the flow,” Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in social media and anxiety, told Huff Post. “They may not see having unread notifications or clear inboxes as a priority, and they may not feel bad/guilty/shameful about being unresponsive.”The one solid argument for keeping your inbox under control regardless of your personality type is the environmental impact of data storage. Deleting emails may be fairly low on the rung of carbon to-dos, but it's a simple one that anyone can do. Plus, using the environment as an incentive to clean up your email habits might be helpful for people who actually want the Inbox Zero life but have a hard time getting motivated to do it. What's funny about all of this is how people's email worlds can be completely alien to one another. My friends look at my unread email notifications and chastise me for causing them anxiety (even though they're my inboxes, not theirs—just seeing the number in the bubble on my phone stresses them out). I, on the other hand, cannot even conceptualize how they keep all of their email inboxes cleaned up every day. Like, does not compute even a little bit.It takes all kinds of people to make the world go round, so as long as people are happy with their chosen methods, we can stop judging and even celebrate our inbox habit differences.

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All this time America unfairly pegged Hunter Biden as the Prodigal Son. Testimony in a Wilmington, Delaware, court of law Wednesday proved him instead the White Rick James. He’s not like the real Rick James, a guy who could sing and write catchy songs and draw a crowd with his charisma, but rather like the caricature of Rick James hilariously depicted on the old Chappelle’s Show decades ago. Zoe Kestan, a dancer Biden met in a Manhattan strip club, described him as “charming” and “charismatic.” What woman would not say the same of the Superfreak? She testified Wednesday that Biden played a song by the indie-folk band Fleet Foxes, necessitated by the lateness shutting down the house’s music, as he hired her and a colleague to dance for him in a private room for 30 minutes (Does his iPhone music library not contain Scorpions, “Rock You Like a Hurricane”?) of the gentleman’s club. This is a celebration, b—h! Kestan, in her continued liaisons with Mr. Biden in Malibu, Manhattan, and points between and beyond, noted that he “would want to smoke as soon as he woke up.” The president’s son, she said, smoked crack “every 20 minutes” in private and every hour in public. I’m Hunter Biden, b—h! A resourceful Biden, after feeling “ripped off” by his crack dealer (possibly Tron Carter?), began to cook crack from traditional powder cocaine, she testified. Was the president’s son Tyrone Biggums and not Rick James all along? She identified baking powder, spoons, bowls, and chopsticks — but not, crucially, egg and cinnamon — used to make and take the crack in photographs presented to her in court. Her beau skirted the law as he skirted his dealer. He’s a habitual line-stepper. Kestan testified that she kept in physical contact with Biden into September, just a few weeks before the October 12, 2018, application for a Colt Cobra .38 special on which he claimed, as a gun-shop worker who testified Wednesday watched, that he neither took illegal drugs nor suffered from any such addictions. I drunk some wine and I’m just getting started, b—–s! Rick James and Hunter Biden both ran afoul of the Navy Reserves within months of joining: Biden by popping positive for cocaine on his first drill weekend; James by going absent without leave to Canada. Both ditched their first names. Both men faced legal repercussions for questionable behavior while in the company of multiple women. Here they part company. Rick James was a rock star who behaved like one better than perhaps any. Hunter Biden is the son of the president of the United States who behaved like one worse than perhaps any. One finds sympathy for Biden in that he lost his mother and sister in a horrible car wreck, more recently lost his older brother, and destroyed his own family through his addictions. Much of that sympathy dissipates when one realizes that the crimes he stands accused of amount to the very areas of the federal code his father so zealously sought to strengthen. As president, Joe Biden pushed for tens of thousands of new IRS agents to audit tax cheats. The federal case opening in September in California against Hunter Biden portrays a man who wrote off expenses on his tax returns on such illegitimate pursuits as hookers, a sex club membership, and strippers. The government says he owes it over a million dollars. Both in the U.S. Senate and the White House, Joe Biden championed, and instituted, stricter gun laws. Even those who oppose most of his gun control measures think it unwise to sell firearms to people who smoke crack cocaine every 20 minutes. So, to push stricter tax and gun policies while demanding Hunter Biden receive a Get Out of Jail Free card just highlights the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do mentality of so many directly responsible for federal laws. The no-one-is-above-the-law line so liberally tossed about during Donald Trump’s trial now yields to cries for mercy. Cocaine is a helluva drug. So is partisan politics. The post Hunter Biden Trial Again Proves Cocaine Is a Helluva Drug appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.