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Jewel performing at The Theatre in Coquitlam, British Columbia in 2008.

At 19, Jewel turned down a million-dollar record deal. Decades later, she says it was the best decision she ever made.

Jewel turned down a million-dollar signing bonus while living out of her car. She went to the library first to understand why she had to.

By Tim Mercer

Before Jewel sold 30 million albums and earned four Grammy nominations, she was sleeping in her car in San Diego. She hadn’t chosen the situation romantically — she’d been fired after refusing her boss’s sexual advances, lost her paycheck, and couldn’t make rent. Then the car was stolen, leaving her fully homeless. She was 19.

It was in the middle of all of this that the music industry came looking for her.

Jewel had found a coffee shop that was going out of business and struck a deal with the owner: she’d bring people in, and she’d keep the door money. She started playing five-hour sets of original material on Thursday nights. Four people became twelve, became twenty, became fifty. A bootleg recording ended up on the radio. Record labels started showing up.

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Take control of your chaotic inbox

Spam. Promotions. Phishing links. A messy inbox is more than annoying. It’s risky.

Proton Mail shields your inbox from invasive tracking and junk clutter by default. No creepy ad sorting. No surveillance. Just clean, simple organization designed to protect your focus.

You shouldn’t have to fight your email to find what matters. Proton Mail keeps your inbox safe, private, and easy to manage — so you can stay productive, not distracted.

His neighbor kept stealing gas from his backyard. His two-part revenge ended with a police arrest.

Handcuffed man being lead away by the police.

His neighbor kept stealing gas from his backyard. His two-part revenge ended with a police arrest.

He spent a week filling his gas can with urine. His neighbor handled the rest.

By Tim Mercer

For a while, the homeowner couldn’t figure out what was happening. His five-gallon gas can kept coming up nearly empty, even though his lawnmower had a one-quart tank. The math didn’t add up.

He had a suspicion about the neighbor but no proof. So before security cameras were cheap and ubiquitous, he did something resourceful: he set up an old laptop with a webcam pointed at his backyard and configured it with motion detection software. Within days he had his answer. The neighbor walked into his yard and took the gas — literally five minutes after the homeowner left the house. He had it on video.

He didn’t confront him. He had a different idea.

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That’s family right there. 🥹

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15 pop song ‘oopsies’ that were kept in recordings, turning mistakes into iconic moments

The Beatles and David Bowie

15 pop song ‘oopsies’ that were kept in recordings, turning mistakes into iconic moments

Who knew there were so many “happy accidents” in famous songs?

By Annie Reneau

“There are no mistakes, only happy accidents,” Bob Ross assured us. In the case of over a dozen popular songs, mistakes didn’t just turn out to be happy accidents, but ultimately became iconic moments in music.

Musician and teacher David Hartley compiled 15 examples of mistakes in well-known songs that you can’t unhear once you know about them. Most will be familiar to pop music fans, who may or may not know that they were actually unintentional.

Hartley’s video goes into the details of these 15 song elements that weren’t supposed to be there:

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Image of the Earth and Moon taken from outer space

Why don’t space photos ever show stars? NASA’s explanation is simpler than you’d think and a photo from Artemis II proves it.

It comes down to basic camera science. The same rules that apply to your phone apply to cameras 400,000 kilometers from Earth.

By Adam Albright-Hanna

Every time NASA releases a stunning image from space of something like the Earth glowing against blackness, or the Moon’s cratered surface in sharp detail, the same question follows: where are the stars?

It happened again when NASA’s Artemis II crew, which launched April 1, 2026 and flew around the Moon before splashing down in the Pacific on April 10, began beaming back photos from their historic 10-day mission. The images were breathtaking. The backgrounds were pitch black. And the conspiracy theories started almost immediately.

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