Policemen are vital for our country’s safety.

They deal with theft cases and many others.

Solving them all, and we don’t have to worry.

The policemen work day and night to protect us.

A big salute to these policemen with a smile!

A navy chore coat, pink tee, and olive chinos walk into a bar. They get along great.

The post Workwear, but Make It Spring appeared first on Primer.

Reuse or Recycle the trash you can’t put in your curbside bin.

Recycling is not easy.  It takes time, money, and more knowledge than I certainly had before learning about Ridwell.  Recycling is expensive, and many towns and municipalities are not able achieve optimum recycling practices due to the cost and lack of facilities.  Comingling of recycled items (one bin fits all) is easier on households, and less expensive for towns, but makes it more difficult to clean, prepare and reuse or recycle the items.  That means that for many Americans, home recycling efforts go to waste, and much of what they recycle ends up in landfills anyway.

A Landfill

I learned about Ridwell from ASE reader Susan W. and was impressed by what I read.  The founder, to clean out his basement and teach his children about caring for their environment, came up with a project where each week he would choose an item from his basement to reuse or recycle to keep it out of the landfills.  The items, like batteries, lightbulbs, used prescription bottles, and Styrofoam, would not be eligible for traditional curbside pickups. They would search for solutions as far away as necessary and send the items off to be reused or recycled. In Portland, for example, the curbside program doesn’t accept plastic clamshell packaging, and there’s nowhere else to take it. Ridwell found a partner in Texas that would take the boxes.  On the flip side, if a municipality changes their requirements and begins accepting house paint or batteries, Ridwell will stop taking those items.  Ridwell’s mission is to fill the gaps between local recycling and what customers want to keep out of their trash cans.  This will reduce the volume of trash that goes to landfills.

Ridwell’s founders began to pick up their neighbors’ items and soon they had 4,000 Seattle households participating, and Ridwell was launched.  It passed the 100,000-subscriber level long ago and is growing rapidly.  They now have over 250 people working to keep millions of pounds of out of landfills.

Ridwell is a popular subscription-based recycling service with two options for receiving subscribers’ items – bi-weekly curbside pickups in select U.S. cities, which costs approximately $14–$20/month or mail-in bags which start at $30 for the starter kit, and then $9.00 a bag after that.

Do you know about multi-layered plastic?  All the items in the above photos are housed in multi-layered plastic which are not allowed by local recycling systems. These bags and wrappers are made from multiple layers of different materials.  Ridwell partners with innovative specialty recyclers to turn them into new products like leach-free storm water drainage material.

Plastic film

Another item not allowed in usual recycling is plastic film.  Plastic film includes zip top baggies, bubble wrap, dry cleaning bags, FedEx and Amazon plastic packaging, the cling wrap that your roast chicken is wrapped in, and much more.  Ridwell sends it all to be shredded, washed, and melted into pellets.  It then is used to make other products like new packaging, composite decking material, and trash can liners.

How much really gets recycled with Ridwell.

Ridwell is not alone in their quest to recycle or reuse hard-to recycle items. Trashie is a similar recycling intermediary.  They bring efficiency and convenience into your recycling efforts with well-researched solutions – for a fee, well-earned if you ask me.  There is also TerraCycle, which is smaller and just added mail-in bags to its services, Retold which focuses on fabric recycling, and Pact which specializes in beauty product wrapping and packaging, just to name a few.

We applaud innovative ideas like Ridwell’s and other companies like it, that see a need and try to fill it.  Recycling is complex and many of us have guiltily put items in our trash that should not be there and could be repurposed into something useful for lack of an alternative.  For the cause, and the convenience, I hope these companies are successful, and are able to slow the flow of trash to the landfills.

The post Ridwell Recycling appeared first on Sharp Eye.

The house is on fire in Washington, D.C., America.

All the neighbors come running to check on the house.

A firefighter was called, and luckily no one was injured.

He brings the water pipe to blow out the fire.

The firefighter is capable of controlling the fire in the house!

There was a man who worked as a soldier in the war.

He used to write letters to his wife with the ink.

Just like ancient times!

When is the next episode coming?

What are you up to this weekend? I’m getting over the worst cold and cough (ahem), so tonight we are staying home and ordering Indian food.… Read more

The post Have a Sweet Weekend. appeared first on Cup of Jo.

Story/ @bri.ng.schwartz

Photos / @juliacomita

Album Art Design / @stephiejae

Stylist / @andyomo

Hair / @adamesbrandon

Album Mastering and Producer / @jhevere

Morgin DuPont is anything but unlucky this Friday the 13th, as she basks in the release of Alchemy, her second EP. A departure from Pearls, DuPont embraces her ever-evolving identity. With lyrics more personal than ever, and a soundscape that is both vocal and rap forward, she staples herself as an inspiration for the New York girls who dare to be different, unapologetically.

Congratulations on the release of Alchemy. How long has this project been in the making, and what can you share about the development process of creating this EP? 

This project was born out of another project that I was originally working on. Originally, I was going for a more sad, emo, alternative route. But then life kind of inspired me to do a bit more dance, because I feel like that’s what the world needs right now. So it wasn’t necessarily planned, but I guess together with the project I was initially working on, I would say it’s probably 4 or 5 years in the making. 

“Reach Out” was the first single released from the EP. It’s such an anthem for us yearners. Have you had any memorable fan responses to the song so far?

I had one particular person who contacted me and mentioned that the song was super relatable, and that they’ve been struggling with being in a toxic relationship. They were searching for that gratifying feeling, that validation from the people who we love who aren’t necessarily the best for us.

I think people are going to love ‘I’m the doll’. Fans already love the snippets I have shared. I’m most excited for people to hear “Party from Home”, which is another track on the album. I just feel like it’s so relatable for those who sometimes feel a bit introverted and a bit tired of the nightlife and party scene. It’s almost contradictory in its sound, because it’s a very uptight, fast club type of record, but the whole premise of the song and the lyrics is talking about staying home.

Your message is incredibly raw and vulnerable. Has sharing about your experience in this way always come naturally to you? Or is that a confidence that’s been built over time?

I would say both. I’ve always been very authentic, and I’ve always been a person who follows the beat of my own drum. With that being said, following the beat of my own drum in front of an audience? Is that new to me? Yes. But I guess it is a little different when there are opinions that are shared when you put your life out there publicly. I am gonna be who I am, and I’m gonna always be unapologetic about it. But I guess it is a little new in a way, because it’s in front of people. I’m also an oversharer. I’m a person who kind of thinks everybody’s a friend in my head, so I kind of just spill all the beans and don’t leave much for the imagination. 

What advice do you have for other songwriters looking to tap more into the more personal parts of themselves in their work?

Walk towards your fear of putting your heart out there. Let the world have a piece of your heart. I think that’s where the best music lies, it makes a big difference. It hits different when it comes from a real place, when it comes from real-life experiences, and yeah, people can feel that.

What have been some of your biggest lessons learned so far in your own career?
Don’t wait for others to make things happen. I’m an independent artist, so I’ve definitely gotten a lot of no’s. At times working with other people, whether it’s producers or artists, people can be unreliable or they could have their own agendas that differ from yours.

I always like to work with people who do it for the love. We all want to make money, and a transactional relationship isn’t necessarily negative when it comes to the music business. It is a business, and everybody should be paid for their gifts and their talent. I’ve just learned to discern and enroll with the people who will do it for the art.

How do you think your identity as a native New Yorker informs your own artistic voice and point of view?

I’m a straight shooter, you know? Being a Puerto Rican tranny from New York, I have dealt with a lot of things in my life. Even my aesthetic, or how I present myself, is all an expression of rebellion. I don’t dress for somebody; I dress for me. I don’t create for people. I create for myself first. I follow the beat on my own drum and I think that’s very New York.

What advice would you say for other young trans creatives looking to push forward throughout the noise of the industry?

Embrace your uniqueness and your voice. Sometimes trans people experience gender dysphoria, and we can have a weird relationship with the sound of our voice. I want to inspire trans artists to embrace their voices, whether it’s masculine, whether it’s feminine, whether it’s everything in between, because it’s what makes you different. Do not let people put you in a box. Just be an artist.

Alchemy is being released on Friday the 13th. Do you have a relationship with superstition?

I’m not the type who’s gonna go frantic about splitting a pole, or knock on wood. I don’t necessarily believe I feel like I’m definitely more powerful than that. However, I do believe in synchronicity, numbers, and the power in numerology and astrology. I believe in a higher source, a power – the power of my pussy! When I released “Reach Out”, it was on 11/11. Little things like that do make me feel like I am aligning with something bigger. It’s not just any day, it’s Friday the 13th! 

I feel lucky to have basked in Morgin DuPont’s words of inspiration during our conversation, and to have a new soundtrack to my Spring. As New Yorkers begin to defrost and gather, I’ll remind myself to stay true to who I am, relating especially to songs like “Party From Home” as a self proclaimed extroverted introvert. Her brave and rebellious voice is a needed one in our current music landscape. As our Trans, LGBTQ and Latinx siblings and loved ones continue to face the unspeakable, Alchemy is a reminder of what it looks like to speak truth to power. 

CONNECT WITH MORGIN DuPONT:
INSTA / YOUTUBE

The post MORGIN DUPONTS PUSHES HER LUCK THIS FRIDAY THE 13TH WITH ALCHEMY EP RELEASE appeared first on LADYGUNN.

Romanian Liviu Alexa spent twenty-seven years as a journalist investigating corruption, organized crime, and the rot hiding in plain sight across deep-actors. He built the country’s most-read Substack, Strict Secret, exposed politicians and power brokers, and made enemies in all the right places. 

Then, at forty-six, he picked up a brush and started painting what words could no longer contain.

His first solo exhibition, “We Are The Apocalypse,” opened at the Cluj Art Museum in February 2026 and immediately became something nobody anticipated: a phenomenon. 

The museum reported record-breaking ticket sales for thousands paying visitors, far exceeding most solo exhibitions held there in recent years. Paintings sold for up to 55,000 euros, prices unheard of for a debut exhibition by a self-taught artist in Romania. 

Critics scrambled to explain how someone with no formal training could command figures that established artists spend decades chasing. The explanation might be simpler than they want to admit: Alexa has spent his entire adult life learning to see what others refuse to look at, and now he’s making that vision impossible to ignore.

The work itself is overwhelming in the best sense. Massive neo-expressionist canvases saturated with what Alexa calls “rotten golds, nicotine yellows, and bruise purples” – a palette that feels both sacred and decayed, like Byzantine icons left to weather in an industrial wasteland. 

His subjects draw from religious iconography, but stripped of comfort and reassembled for the digital age. Madonnas bleed emoji tears. Saints wear Formula 1 headsets and stare into screens instead of heaven. The Last Supper happens over Zoom, disciples frozen in their little rectangles, connection lost. Angels slouch in tracksuits, scrolling their phones with the bored indifference of teenagers waiting for something that will never come.

Nothing is mocked, exactly. The irreverence isn’t adolescent provocation – it’s something sadder and more honest. Alexa isn’t attacking the sacred; he’s documenting what we’ve already done to it. The profanation happened without him, through the slow erosion of meaning in a world where every symbol becomes content and every mystery gets flattened into a meme. His paintings don’t desecrate. They witness.

The canvases are large because the apocalypse is large. They’re dense because chaos is dense. They’re colored with an almost obscene vibrancy because the world we’ve built is colored with obscene vibrancy – screens glowing, feeds refreshing, notifications pinging, everything loud and bright and empty. Alexa paints in the visual language of overstimulation because that’s the only language left that anyone understands. “Subtlety is a luxury for eras that have time. We don’t have time. We’re already in the fire, wondering why it’s getting warm”, says the artist.

The title of the exhibition – “We Are The Apocalypse” – isn’t metaphor or hyperbole. It’s diagnosis. 

“We keep waiting for the end to arrive from somewhere outside: a comet, a war, an alien invasion, some external force that will finally bring the reckoning. But that  apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s already here. We’re making it, day by day, through everything we choose to ignore, tolerate, consume, post, destroy. The end of the world doesn’t look like fire from the sky. It looks like us, staring at our phones, watching it all burn in real time and hitting the heart button”, Liviu Alexa insists.

Alexa has no formal art education and makes no apologies for it. “I didn’t study painting at university,” he says. “But I studied people. For twenty-seven years, through files, through sources, through documents. I’ve seen evil in all its forms – not the cinematic kind, but the banal kind, the kind that wears suits and signs papers and goes home to dinner with its family. At some point, what I was seeing no longer fit into words. Not because I couldn’t find them – I’m actually quite talented at writing – but because some things, when you articulate them too clearly, become bearable. And I didn’t want them to be bearable. That’s why I say: I paint what I cannot write. A painting doesn’t judge. It places a vision before you, the author’s vision, and leaves you alone with it.”

This relationship between journalism and art isn’t coincidental – it’s causal. The same instinct that drove Alexa to expose hidden truths now drives him to expose hidden feelings, the ones we bury under irony and distraction and endless scrolling. His investigative background shows in the work’s relentless honesty, its refusal to look away or soften what it sees. These aren’t paintings that flatter the viewer or offer easy comfort. They’re paintings that implicate. You don’t stand in front of an Alexa canvas feeling good about yourself. You stand there feeling seen, and not in the Instagram sense of the word.

The technical execution matches the conceptual ambition. Alexa works in thick impasto, aggressive brushwork that leaves the surface scarred and textured, paint piled on paint until the canvas itself becomes a battlefield. There’s nothing polished or refined about the application – it’s urgent, almost violent, as if the images had to be forced out before they escaped. The result has a physical presence that photographs can’t capture. You need to stand in front of these paintings to feel their weight, to see how the light catches the ridges and valleys of paint, to understand that they’re not just images but objects, things that exist in space and demand space.

His influences are visible but not derivative: the emotional intensity of German Expressionism, the religious confrontation of Francis Bacon, the saturated chaos of Neo-Expressionists like Basquiat and Schnabel. 

But Alexa isn’t imitating any of them. He’s processing the same human darkness through a different lens – the lens of someone who spent decades in the trenches of investigative journalism, who knows exactly how the powerful abuse the powerless, who has seen the documents and followed the money and watched the guilty walk free. That knowledge saturates every canvas. You’re not looking at art made by someone who imagines evil. You’re looking at art made by someone who has catalogued it.

And then, less than two months after his debut, Alexa did something that shocked the Romanian art world even more than his emergence: he announced a second solo exhibition. 

“FILCAI” opens in April 2026 at Kulterra Gallery in Bucharest, and it represents a radical conceptual departure. Where “We Are The Apocalypse” dealt with religious iconography and digital decay, “FILCAI” reimagines a traditional Transylvanian card game as a vehicle for pure contemporary art.

The concept is audacious. Filcai is a card game played in Transylvania villages and commuter trains, a working-class pastime with roots in Habsburg-era resistance. Its original deck, designed around 1835 by Hungarian painter József Schneider, featured characters from Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell – a coded act of defiance against imperial rule. 

As Salvador Dali did with the Tarot cards almost 50 years ago, Alexa is redesigning all twenty cards as large-scale paintings, replacing the original figures with a menagerie of decrepit heroes, forgotten gods, and reimagined Romanian folklore characters. 

The Ogre, once a princess-stealing monster, now works as a garbage collector, picking up discarded hearts that people throw away on Facebook. Cleopatra delivers for Glovo. Icarus has upgraded his wings. 

The Flyer, a Romanian mythological seducer, has grown old and turned gay since he can no longer conquer women. Pinocchio, after therapy with a personal development coach, has decided to build Gepetto himself – and, even more, to construct the mother he never had.

This is contemporary art at its most conceptual and its most rooted. 

Alexa is taking something deeply local – a card game known perhaps only in the depths of Transylvania – and transforming it into a universal statement about mythology, class, and the survival of meaning in a disposable world. He describes it as a bridge between highbrow art and life with blisters on your feet, an homage to those who commute back and forth just to put bread on the table. The ambition is staggering: to make an obscure regional card game into an international artistic voice.

Two solo exhibitions in four months. Record-breaking sales. Critical attention from a scene that didn’t know he existed a year ago. Alexa isn’t building a career in the conventional sense – he’s erupting into visibility with a force that suggests decades of pressure finally finding release. Whether the art world can keep up with his pace remains to be seen. What’s certain is that he’s not waiting for permission, not following any established path, not doing what debut artists are supposed to do. He’s making his own rules, and so far, they’re working.

The post LIVIU ALEXA: THE MAN WHO PAINTS WHAT HE CANNOT WRITE appeared first on LADYGUNN.