Friday Snippets and Soundbites

What's up, ec readers? We hope you're having a wonderful week and are ready for a great weekend. Since snow has covered Nashville for a week now, our team is ready for some warmer temps and fun. And we thought we'd get that started with this week's "Snippets and Soundbites." Enjoy!

The Last Supper . . . in lint.
Familiar with Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of the "Last Supper"? Sure you are. I mean, who isn't? Well, one Michigan woman thought she'd put her own spin on the painting and recreate it using a different medium. But she didn't go the usual route and pick sculpture or watercolor or some other classical art style. Nope, she chose to recreate the masterpiece in dryer lint! In order to create her lint masterpiece, she had to do about 800 hours of laundry to get enough lint. Wondering how she got lint in the right colors? She bought new towels in the colors she needed and washed and dried them separately to make lint in the perfect shades. The good news for Laura Bell, the lint artist? Ripley's Believe It or Not heard about the lint recreation of the famous piece of art and is interested in displaying it in one of their museums in the near future. To learn more, go here.

Pop Quiz! 

Those words may be words you dread to hear on any given school day. And so do Idaho lawmakers, it seems, especially after this week. On Wednesday, public schools chief Tom Luna appeared before the Idaho state Senate and House education committees to make a presentation about new technology that is being used in Idaho public school classrooms. As part of the demonstration, Luna asked the lawmakers two questions about their state's history and gave them each an electronic device that functions like a remote and allowed them to input their answers. Luna asked when Idaho became a state and which town was Idaho's first capital—and 17 percent of the lawmakers on the panels didn't know the answer to the first question and 15 percent missed the second. Oops!

But we at ec think we should give them a break. But mostly because if we were asked the same questions about our home states or Tennessee, we'd probably fail, too! If you'd like to know more about this story, go here.

Oh, opossum!
First off, we'd like to say that we at ec find possums a bit creepy. . . but we couldn't NOT tell you the story of Heidi the cross-eyed opossum. No, this isn't the beginning of a children's story; it's true! Heidi lives at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany and skyrocketed to Internet fame after a local news station posted a clip of a report about Hiedi and her new home in the zoo. The zoo didn't expect much to come of it, but the clip gained Internet fame and now the station has developed 10 episodes featuring Heidi and a local stuffed animal manufacturer has adapted its line of plush opossums to include a white one with black ears and crossed-eyes. Heidi is also quite popular on Facebook and as of Wednesday morning, had more than 111,000 fans. If you'd like to learn more about this story, go here. Want to see a video of her and her crossed-eyes? Go here. We're also posting a link on our Facebook page. 

And if today's online edition of "Snippets and Soundbites" isn't enough news of the weird for you, please check out page 38 of this month's print edition of ec. Subscribe to ec here.