An 11-year-old boy in khaki shorts and a red polo shirt got the lawn-mowing gig of a life-time Friday when U.S. President Donald Trump put him to work in the Rose Garden.

Frank Giaccio, who goes by the initials FX, was so focused on doing his job that he didn’t even notice when Trump emerged from the White House to check out his work.

FX, who lives in the Washing-ton suburb of Falls Church, Vir-ginia, kept right on pushing the mower in a long, straight row as Trump walked alongside him.

When the boy fi nally paused, the president called him the “future of the country right here” and asked what he wants to be when he grows up. “A Navy seal!” Trump exclaimed. “Well, he’ll make it.”Standing with FX and his father,

Trump added: “We’ll bring them into the Oval Offi ce. Maybe he’ll be president.”

Just how did FX make it to the Rose Garden? The White House said FX had written to Trump to say he admires the president’s business acumen and runs his own neighborhood lawn-care business.

“It’s probably the biggest day of my life so far,” FX said afterward.

He added that his day was “jam-packed” with media inter-views, watering plants, mowing the lawn and visiting the Oval Offi ce with his dad. “It was a lot bigger than I thought,” he said.

FX said he normally charges US$8 per lawn but decided to mow the White House lawn free of charge.

According to a letter that White House spokeswoman

Sarah Huckabee Sanders read to reporters, the boy wrote that it would be his “honor to mow the White House lawn.” He also enclosed a menu of his services, which includes weed-whacking.

For this job, FX donned goggles and ear plugs and pushed a mower belonging to the National Park Service. He got to keep the black gardening gloves he used as a souvenir.

(SD-Agencies)

08 x kaleidoscopeCONTACT US AT: 8351-9441, LINMIN67@HOTMAIL.COM

Monday September 18, 2017

Icelandair just tries live theater to make trips funEVEN with a kooky safety video and a variety of fi lm offerings, long fl ights can still be boring.

But Icelandair is trying something new: An 11-hour immersive theater production took place last week on a fl ight from London to New York, with an on-the-ground bonus performance during the layover in Reykjavik.

“We’ve made theater in unusual places but never made a show that started in one country, bounced to another, and ended up in a third on the same day,” said Kate Hargreaves, Founder of Gideon Reeling, the London-based theater company that helped develop the program.

The cast was a mix of pro-fessional actors along with pilots, engineers, accountants, ground workers, cabin crew, and other real airline employ-ees who had volunteered to

attend a special stage school to prepare for the event.

The characters they played ranged from fi lm stars and fl ight attendants from vari-ous decades to business and leisure travelers, a perky party planner, a vulcanologist, and a farmer — as well as fl ight atten-dants from the past, present, and future.And the performance, which reeled out in entertaining, story-fi lled, one-on-one encounters at check-in, at the gate and during the fl ight, hop-scotched through time, with some actors playing multiple characters.

There were even a few sing-a-longs and several Ice-landic-themed meals during the “Ahead in Time” perfor-mance.Passengers met and had an opportunity to interact with Maria, dressed in a stylish suit

from the 1950s, who said she’d be fl ying the plane; Richie and Cynthia, hippies from the 1960s who met on the road and were hoping to get to Woodstock; Alex, an exuberant, if disor-ganized, backpacker from the 1990s in search of his passport; and numerous grandchildren and other far-fl ung relatives of Edda Johnson, a world traveler and former Icelan-dair fl ight attendant who had invited everyone to her birth-day party but (spoiler alert) was too busy traveling the world to show up.

Icelandair’s one-off immer-sive in-fl ight performance (and a series of on-the-ground events in Iceland over the next six months) was sparked by a recent UK-based study in which the majority of air travelers reported being bored during their fl ights. Three quarters of the study participants thought

the people on the plane, espe-cially the cabin crew, could have a greater hand in making the fl ight more enjoyable.

Responding to that research, “Our program aims to trans-form wasted time while trav-

eling into time well-traveled,” said Icelandair CEO Birkir Hólm Guenason, “We’re pleased to pioneer a new form of entertainment and value-added service for passengers.”

(SD-Agencies)

“Hippies” in Icelandair’s immersive theatrical performance. SD-Agencies

Oktoberfest marked in MunichVisitors reach for the fi rst mugs of beer during opening day of the 184th Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany on Saturday. Oktoberfest is the world’s largest Volksfest (beer festival and traveling funfair). Held annually in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, it is a 16- to 18-day folk festival running from mid or late September to the fi rst weekend in October. SD-Agencies

Boy gets lawn-mowing gig at White House

SCIENTISTS taking on the deep questions of whether cats are liquid or solid, how holding a crocodile infl uences gambling and whether playing the didg-eridoo can help cure snoring were honored Thursday at the Ig Nobel Prize spoof awards.

The prizes are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and are intended not to honor the best or worst in science, but rather to highlight research that encourages people to think in unusual ways.

“We hope that this will get people back into the habits they probably had when they were kids of paying attention to odd things and holding out for a moment and decid-ing whether they are good or bad only after they have a chance to think,” Abrahams said in a phone interview.

Some of the honorees tend towards the spurious: French researcher Marc-Antoine Fardin’s 2014 study “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” was inspired by Internet photos of cats tucked into glasses, buckets and sinks. The winner of the Ig Nobel in physics used mathematical formulas to con-clude that active young cats and kittens hold their physical shape longer than older, lazier felines.

Other work on the prize list has clearer potential for practi-cal applications.

Economics winners Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer con-ducted an experiment in which problem gamblers and non-problem gamblers han-dled 1-meter-long crocodiles before playing a simulated slot machine. (SD-Agencies)

VENEZUELA’S government this week urged citizens to see rabbits as more than “cute pets” as it defended a plan to breed and eat them even as the opposition says this would do nothing to end chronic food shortages.

The “Rabbit Plan” is an effort by the government of President Nicolas Maduro to boost food availability. Authorities have also taught citizens to plant food on the roofs and balconies of their homes.

Maduro’s adversaries dismiss such ideas as nonsensical, insisting the real problem is a failed model of oil-fi nanced socialism that was unable to survive after crude markets collapsed.

“There is a cultural problem because we have been taught that rabbits are cute pets,” Urban Agriculture Minister Freddy Bernal said during a televised broadcast with Maduro this week. “A rabbit is not a pet; it’s two and a half kilos of meat that is high in pro-tein, with no cholesterol.”

Maduro’s critics lampooned the idea.

“Are you serious?” asked Henrique Capriles, a state gov-ernor and two-time opposition presidential candidate in a video to response to Bernal. “You want people to start rais-ing rabbits to solve the problem of hunger in our country?”

Rabbit consumption is common in Europe and to lesser extent in the United States. The animals are more effi cient than pigs and cattle in converting protein into edible meat, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

(SD-Agencies)

Venezuela’s plan to beat hunger: Breed rabbits

Liquid cats, crocodile bets win Ig Nobel science prizes

Frank (L) and Donald Trump (R).