Friday's Upbeat News

Editor OGN Daily
Oct 3
3 min read

Rounding off the week with an eclectic bundle of upbeat news stories.

some wide-eyed western barn owls peering out from hollows beside a statue of St. Peter. — Credit: Benoit Henrion | Bird Photographer of the Year

Peekaboo

This year’s Bird Photographer of the Year competition attracted more than 33,000 entries from across the globe, which ultimately delivered a 2025 winners’ list that captures the beauty, drama and diversity of winged wildlife at its best. The image OGN has selected is one of the winners, snapped by French photographer Benoit Henrion, featuring some wide-eyed western barn owls peering out from hollows beside a statue of St. Peter. If you would like to see more, go to Bird Photographer of the Year. If you're feeling inspired, you can now enter the 2026 competition. The annual competition raised thousands of dollars for the conservation charity Birds on the Brink, which funds grassroots projects worldwide.

Cover of 'What My Children Love to Eat' published in 1915

Whet Your Appetite

The Internet Archive is one of the world’s most sprawling digital databases. It boasts everything from radio shows, manuals, and CD-ROM software to social media videos, religious sermons, and hip-hop mixtapes. But aside from all that, the platform also happens to host a massive archive of nearly 13,000 vintage cookbooks. The Archive’s Cookbook and Home Economics Collection offers a compelling glimpse into how gastronomic culture has developed throughout the past several centuries. The majority of books originate from the United States and explore such diverse topics as cookery, textiles, budgeting, and domestic sciences, among many others. Although mostly spanning the 19th to 20th centuries, the collection’s oldest entry hails from 1475.

Love Food, Hate Waste

Whilst this website is designed for a UK audience, its helpful hints, tips and guidance to help you get the greatest value from your food - making sure it’s eaten and saved from the bin - are a great resource wherever you live.

digital billboard on California’s Highway 101 — Credit: marrylisaofficial | Tik Tok

Love Ad First Sight

A disgruntled dater has spent “cold, hard cash” on renting a dozen digital billboards along California’s Highway 101 advertising her availability for marriage, said the New York Post. Lisa Catalano, a 42-year-old singleton from the San Francisco area, paid for the campaign after getting fed up following a “string of dating app disasters”. The adverts direct potential suitors to her personal website. “This is not a joke. This is a serious, self-funded endeavour. I just want to find my husband,” she said.

Hockney's 'Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy' from 1968 — Credit: Christie's

Double Portrait

Beginning in the late ’60s, David Hockney painted a series of seven large-scale double portraits featuring friends and lovers, mostly in the art world. This November, one of those paintings will go on sale at Christie’s. Completed in 1968, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy was the first entry in the series. They are depicted in their sun-drenched Santa Monica home, behind a coffee table with stacks of books and a bowl of fresh fruit on it. Experts expect it to fetch at least $50 million when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s 20th-century evening sale in New York.

Ford & GM's Cunning Plan

Ford and GM have apparently worked up an interesting scheme to keep the expiring $7,500 federal EV tax credit from driving down sales. According to Reuters, the automakers are working with dealers on short-term programs that would allow customers to continue to receive the tax credit on leased EVs through the rest of the year. The programs will operate under each automaker’s financing arm, according to documents viewed by Reuters and interviews with dealers briefed on the plan. It basically works like this: Ford and GM will buy EVs from its own dealers by having their finance divisions put down payments on all the electric models in their inventory before the tax credit expires. The dealers will then lease the vehicles to customers with a $7,500 discount baked into the price.

“There is still so much in the world worth fighting for. So much that is beautiful, so many wonderful people working to reverse the harm, to help alleviate the suffering. And so many young people dedicated to making this a better world.” Jane Goodall

On This Day

3 October 1941: The Maltese Falcon, John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's famed 1930 novel, had its world premiere with Humphrey Bogart starring as Sam Spade. It is considered by some to be the greatest detective movie ever made.