Face 1: AirPano If you dream of travelling the world and seeing it all from a bird’s-eye view, these sweeping, epic panoramic photos by AirPano might be one of the best ways to do it. This team of Russian photographers and specialists travels the world to take stunning aerial photos of the world’s most beautiful locations.
“Although we usually photograph from a helicopter, we also like to shoot from an airplane, a dirigible, a hot air balloon, and a radio-controlled helicopter,” they write. The most interesting thing about their approach, however, is the fully 360-degree displays that they make available on their websites. Using AirPano’s special viewer, visitors can pan around and look in every direction, making them feel like they’re really on location.
CREATIVE THINKING SKILL: UNUSUAL PERSPECTIVE A bird's-eye view helps us see places in a new way --the way that birds see those places.
St. Basil's (Russia)
Central Park - New York City
Barcelona, Spain
Paris
Amsterdam
Argentina
Dubai
Pink Flamingoes of Kenya
Face 2 - China’s KINDERGARTEN Basketball Drill Team --In China, physical fitness is a really big deal. They believe it develops coordination, discipline, cooperation, paying attention, and develops athletes who might someday become a member of their country's Olympic team. SLIDE 2: As you watch this Kindergarten drill team think about these two things: 1. Imagine how many hours of practice this basketball drill must have taken the children to master! 2. AND just imagine how good the older kids are!!
CREATIVE THINKING SKILL: PRACTICE The more you practice, the more you can do!
Face 3: Willie Anderson
Some people are happy with a patio tomato on the porch.
Willie Anderson, 82, took container gardening to another level; he planted tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, okra, squash, peppers and eggplants in five-gallon plastic buckets in his yard in Red Banks, Mississippi. He now has plants in more than 1,000 buckets.
It’s easier to grow an entire garden if you’re planting everything in buckets, Anderson said. “There’s no hoe on the place,” he said. “We don’t need one.”
“You don’t have to have any equipment,” said his son, Ron Anderson. “You don’t have to have any utensils to farm with as far as hoes and shovels. You don’t have to have a tiller. All you do is plant, water and harvest.”
The garden is totally organic. “I use grass clippings, soybean stalks, cotton hulls — that’s the waste that comes out when they gin the cotton,” Willie said.
Ron came up with the idea of the bucket garden for his dad nine years ago. Willie always was a robust man, he said. He was in farming, raised hogs and cattle and went into the home building business with Ron and his other son, Mark Anderson. “He had a hip that deteriorated and he had to have hip surgery and replacement,” Ron said of his father. “When he had that, he was pretty much home bound and his hopes and dreams were just going down. He had cabin fever. He didn’t have anything to look forward to or to do. He couldn’t get out like he had all his life.”
Willie liked the idea of the bucket garden. “I was just tired of sitting up in the house,” he said.
Ron bought 100 buckets from Lowe’s and some Miracle-Gro potting soil. He said, “Dad, let’s try this and see if we can do this for your hobby.”
Ron punched holes in the bottoms of the buckets for drainage and put them on sheets of black plastic to keep weeds from growing around them. “We raised our own tomato plants from seed,” Ron said. “We planted one tomato to a bucket, one squash seed to a bucket, one corn seed to a bucket.”
Willie didn’t want to stay in the house anymore. “We got him a little four-wheel scooter and he’s out the first thing every morning to check his garden,” Ron said.
“You can garden in the shade,” Willie said. “It needs to get at least five hours of sunshine a day. That’s enough for the plants.”
Their first harvest was better than they expected. “We probably had about 10 cases of tomatoes that weighed 30 pounds apiece,” Ron said. “I sold them to some pizza companies in the Olive Branch area. They froze them and canned them for soups.”
Now they mostly give away the produce they don’t use. “I thought at first there might be a little money to be made in it,” Willie said. “But I don’t think there is. I just give what I grow to whoever wants it.”
They stopped using Miracle-Gro after the first year and went organic. “We don’t use any kind of chemical fertilizer and we use the same dirt year after year,” Ron said. “We plant them in the same pots every year. After people cut their grass and sack the grass cuttings on the side of the curb, my brother and myself go around with a trailer and bring home 20 to 30 sacks. He puts it around the top of the buckets. The grass fertilizes every time you water.”
To irrigate, they attach water hoses to sprinklers atop 10-foot landscape timber posts, which are stuck in the ground. They use one sprinkler per each group of 350 buckets. “All I do is turn the faucet on,” Willie said. “It wets everything down in about an hour and a half. It usually lasts about a week if it’s not too dry.”
They’ve experimented with different vegetables. “We had a cabbage big as our granddaughter,” Willie said. “I got a cantaloupe this year. It’s ripe down there now. It’s the first one we’ve been able to raise in the buckets. We haven’t been able to raise a watermelon. I don’t believe the bucket’s big enough to raise a watermelon.”
They haven’t tried everything. “We haven’t grown any field peas, but they’re so simple to grow,” Willie said. “I don’t see a problem with them.”
Plastic buckets aren’t the only container gardeners can use, Willie said. “These gardens can be grown in a plastic shopping sack like you get at the grocery store if you want to, but they’ll only last one year and you’ll have to redo it every year,” he said. “I have done it. It’ll work. But the plastic will rot out by the end of the year.”
Ron, his mother, Geneva, his wife, Gidget, the grandchildren and a hired man help with the garden. Willie basically oversees the garden.
Willie also gives the plants pep talks. “I say, ‘Now, y’all got to do better than that,’” he said.
“He does go down there and talk to them three times a day,” Ron said.
Garden writer Felder Rushing, a former Extension Service urban horticulture specialist, is a fan of bucket gardening. “I have grown veggies and herbs in five-gallon buckets in my Mississippi garden for years,” he said. “So cool. So easy. Just the right size. Can’t grow a decent tomato or pepper in anything smaller. And no worries about soil diseases.”
Rushing doesn’t stick with drab-colored buckets. “I spray paint mine to make them more cheery.”
As for Willie’s 1,000-plus bucket garden, Rushing said, “I totally agree with the sentiments of Mae West, who once said too much of a good thing is — wonderful.”
Commercialappeal.com,. (2015). Bucket crops: Mississippi man takes container gardening to another level. Retrieved 6 October 2015, from http://www.commercialappeal.com/entertainment/lifestyle/home/bucket-crops-mississippi-man-takes-container-gardening-to-another-level-ep-1211661529-324126561.html
CREATIVE THINKING SKILL: ADAPT Just because a thing seems impossible to do, there are always way to change it, adapting it so you can do it!
Face 4 - Kristen Griest and Capt. Shaye Haver
For more than 120 days, 1st Lieutenants Kristen Griest and Shaye Haver have ground it out at Ranger School, the Army’s famously difficult school designed to build elite leaders capable of withstanding the rigors of combat. They’ve withstood fearsome weather, exhausting hikes, sleepless nights and simulated combat patrols designed to test their reaction time, teamwork and tenacity under fire.
On August 21, 2015, the two women became the first female soldiers ever to graduate from the course at Fort Benning, Ga., receiving the coveted black and yellow Ranger Tab alongside 94 male counterparts. Griest, a military police officer from Orange, Conn., and Haver, an Apache helicopter pilot fromCopperas Cove, Tex., are among a group of 20 women who qualified to attend the first gender-integrated Ranger School. They are currently, the only two female soldiers to complete the program. But know this --they won't be the last! Lamothe, D. (2015). These are the Army’s first female Ranger School graduates.Washington Post. Retrieved 6 October 2015, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/08/18/these-are-the-armys-first-female-ranger-school-graduates/
Creative Thinking Skill: PERSEVERANCE Never give up. Keep on keeping on! Falling down and getting up again. I CAN. I WILL!
Face 5: Not Impossible Lab
Not Impossible Labs makes the impossible, possible by creating technology based solutions in the areas of health, mobility, and communication. These innovations change the quality of life for so many and are made possible to everyone who needs them. Not Impossible Lab finds and tells compelling stories about real people using technology for the sake of humanity. Not Impossible encourages others to add their talents to those of others actively helping others. This shared commitment to others creates an ongoing cycle where collaboration (that means working with others) inspires innovation, making innovators continually looking for new and better solutions to improve lives. Check out their website to the many, many wonderful things that are now "NOT IMPOSSIBLE" because of those who work to make the impossible happen for those in need.
