“Is a Hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool Opotamus?”*…
Dutch artist Florentjin Hofman, known for his massive sculptures (including his giant rubber duck), has floated a giant hippo, “HippopoThames,” down London’s iconic river.
Follow it’s progress past landmarks old and new here. And see more of Hofman’s work here.
* Mitch Hedberg
###
As we watch ourselves at the watering hole, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that George Franklin Grant was awarded a patent for the first modern wooden golf tee. Grant was a dentist, one of trio who patented golf tees: in 1922, dentist William Lowell designed a red-painted, cone-shaped, wooden peg with a small concave platform that was patented and became the worlds first commercially produced golf tee called the “reddy tee.” Recently dentist, Arnold DiLaura, patented the Sof-Tee, a tee that sits on top of the ground instead of in it.
Grant was a graduate of Harvard dental school, where he later taught– Harvard University’s first African-American faculty member. He was renowned internationally within his profession for his invention of the oblate palate, a prosthetic device he designed for treatment of the cleft palate.
