Thursday's Positive News

Editor OGN Daily
5 minutes ago
4 min read

Today's eclectic global collection of concise, positive news stories

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in 'The Rip' — Credit: Netflix

Wider Rewards

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon struck a deal with Netflix to offer performance-based bonuses for their whole film crew for their new movie The Rip - in a departure from how Netflix structures compensation, typically paying cast and crew an upfront fee determined in advance. “We wanted to institute fairness and address some of the real issues that are present and urgent for our business,” Affleck told The New York Times. Under the deal for The Rip - a movie that follows a pair of Miami cops that find hidden money - all 1,200 people involved in the nearly $100 million production will be eligible for a one-time bonus if the film meets performance expectations.

Creative Hilarity: Netflix spoof documentary, described as a "story that had to be told."

107 year old Elsie Allcock standing in the doorway of her home — Credit: All About Great Britain | Facebook

Same Home For 107 Years

They say that home is where the heart is, and for Elsie Allcock, her heart has remained in the same place for more than a century. 107 years, to be precise. She was born in a two-bed property in central England (Huthwaite, Nottinghamshire), toward the end of World War I in 1918. Throughout her 107 years living there, Allcock has witnessed both World Wars, five monarchs, and 23 British prime ministers. But her experiences aren’t simply limited to politics or world events - she has also lived through the birth of two children, six grandchildren, and over 30 great-grandchildren. “I’ve never left and I won’t,” Allcock says. “They’ll have to take me from here. No, I shall never leave.”

Hundreds of albatrosses nesting on the Pacific Ocean’s Midway Atoll — Credit: David Patte | USFWS

Nesting Season

While winter is raging for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather is balmy for the birds nesting on the Pacific Ocean’s Midway Atoll. As many as 75,000 pairs of Laysan albatrosses (or mōlī in Hawaiian) are nesting in the wildlife refuge on the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago. Laysan albatrosses (or mōlī in Hawaiian) return to this same nesting site every year and will reunite with their mates. If all goes well, the pairs will lay a single egg and stay on the atoll to nest. The nesting birds also include Wisdom, a 75-year-old albatross known as the world’s oldest breeding bird. Wisdom has produced 50 to 60 eggs and as many as 30 chicks have fledged in her lifetime. In 2024, Wisdom became the world’s oldest known wild bird to successfully lay an egg at the estimated age of 74. Now you can watch these brilliant snow-white birds via a 24/7 live cam.

Bic Lamp - a 6ft lamp version of the biro pen — Bic Lamp | Seletti

Writing's on The Wall

At a recent design show in Paris, Seletti unveiled something unexpected. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Bic Cristal pen, the Italian design brand has created a monumental version of the iconic writing instrument, this time in the shape of a lamp. Designed at a 12:1 scale, Seletti’s Bic Lamp clocks in at nearly 6 feet tall, and artfully reimagines the pen’s architecture, translating its plastic ink cartridge into a sleek, LED-filled tube. Just like its source material, the Bic Lamp will be available in three distinct colours - red, black, and blue - as well as in floor, pendant, and wall versions. The Bic Cristal biro was invented by Marcel Bich and Édouard Buffard and launched in France in 1950, revolutionizing the market with an affordable, high-quality writing tool that quickly became the world's best-selling pen.

US Wine Drinkers

Millennials have surpassed baby boomers as America’s largest wine-drinking generation. The Wine Market Council’s 2025 US Wine Consumer Benchmark Segmentation Survey shows that 31 percent of U.S. wine drinkers are now millennials, while baby boomers’ share has dropped to 26 percent, a significant decline from 32 percent in 2023. And in a plot twist that has surely surprised producers of ready-to-drink cocktails, spiked seltzer, and cannabis drinks, Gen Z is enjoying wine more frequently as well.

The opening page of a chapter on prayer in Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae. — Part of a page from Emendatio Vitae | Cambridge University

Medieval Best Seller

For generations, a misidentified medieval manuscript was hidden in a 474-year-old English boarding school’s library. After a careful new analysis, a medieval literature researcher can confirm the manuscript is actually the oldest and only known edition of Richard Rolle’s The Emending of Life - Emendatio Vitae - written in its original Latin. Most people today may not be familiar with Richard Rolle, but he was almost certainly the Late Medieval Era’s most widely read author. One of a handful of writers known as the Middle English Mystics, Rolle was born sometime around 1300 CE in Yorkshire, England, and spent the majority of his adult life as a hermit until his death in 1349.

Dropping The Question

A nervous Michigan man fumbled his wedding proposal, dropping the ring off a 118ft-high (36m) suspension bridge in a ski resort. “I was in complete shock. I can’t believe I did that,” said Trevor Van Camp, who’d brought his girlfriend, Danielle Jenkins, to the SkyBridge at Boyne Mountain to pop the question. Joined by a resort worker, the couple spent more than two hours searching the deep snow below with metal detectors, before eventually finding it. Jenkins said that losing and finding the ring did not ruin the special moment. “It made the proposal,” she said.

"The truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live." Graham Weaver

On This Day

the first practical automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine, made by Karl Benz

29 January 1886: German mechanical engineer Karl Benz patented the first practical automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine. Two years after Karl Benz first drove the car in public, Karl's wife Bertha demonstrated its feasibility in a trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim in August 1888.