📰 Print-Your-Own Mini-Zine
Here's the whole front page of the good-news web, shrunk down to fit in your pocket. Hit PRINT ME!, feed your printer one sheet (Letter or A4, doesn't matter), make one little snip, and fold it into a tiny 8-page booklet of the six most recent OSSmile posts. 📎
Picture a cart on a busy street corner in Mexico City. Somebody orders. The vendor picks up an ordinary bag of Doritos — the exact bag you'd buy at any petrol station on the planet — and, instead of opening it at the top, slices it open lengthwise, down the side. The bag flops open like a canoe. 🛶 Then the loading begins. Cucumber, cut into batons. Jícama , that crisp white root that tastes like an apple and a…
★ The bag is the bowl. Vendors slice a chip bag open lengthwise, pile everything inside, and hand it over with a fork — no plate required. 🍟
📷 Dale Cruse · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Here is a fact that ought to be impossible. The Kalahari takes its name from the Tswana word Kgala — "the great thirst." It is a place named, quite literally, after not having any water. And scattered across that red sand, in the driest part of the year, you will find melons. Round, pale, fist-sized, sitting on the ground like someone left a picnic out. 🍈 They're called tsamma melons , and they are one of the loveliest pieces of…
★ The word 'Kalahari' comes from the Tswana *Kgala*, meaning 'the great thirst.' The tsamma melon grows there anyway, full of water. 💧
📷 Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Somewhere in Mexico right now, a kid is tearing the corner off a tiny foil sachet, and squeezing a ribbon of red-brown sauce over a little bundle of wobbly candy strands, and then holding the whole thing up to admire it — because it looks, unmistakably and on purpose, like a miniature plate of spaghetti and sauce. 🍝 It's called Salsagheti , and the name tells you everything: salsa (sauce) plus spaghetti . The "noodles" are long, soft, watermelon-flavoured gummy…
★ The name is a pun you can taste: salsa (sauce) + spaghetti = Salsagheti. It's a candy that looks like a plate of pasta. 🍝
📷 Product photo · Lucas / Skwinkles (livelucas.com)
Somewhere in a warm patch of ocean, an animal the size of a lentil is about to do something that sounds like science fiction and is, in fact, just Tuesday for it. Meet Turritopsis dohrnii — the immortal jellyfish . It is smaller than your pinky nail, see-through, and has no brain, no heart, and no bones. And when things go badly for it — a bad injury, a starving stretch, or simply the creeping arrival of old age —…
★ Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed the 'immortal jellyfish' — a full-grown adult can revert to its juvenile polyp stage and grow up all over again. 🔁
📷 Dr. Karen J. Osborn · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Picture a stadium. Somebody stands up, throws their arms in the air, and sits back down. The person beside them does it. Then the next. Then a whole section, and suddenly there is a wave travelling around fifty thousand people who have never met, powered by nothing but the willingness to join in. Now shrink that to a grassy patch of the North American plains, and replace the crowd with small, round, extremely earnest rodents. 🐿️ The move A black-tailed…
★ The move is called a ‘jump–yip’: the prairie dog rears up, throws its front paws skyward, and calls out a ‘wee-oo!’ 🙌
📷 USFWS Mountain-Prairie · Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)
There is a hillside in southwestern Turkey that, from a distance, looks like a mistake. A great white shelf spills down the slope in tiers, blinding in the sun, as if a glacier wandered several hundred miles too far south and decided to stay. Locals in the valley have called it the same thing for centuries: Pamukkale — cotton castle. 🤍 It is not snow. It is not ice, or marble, or salt. It is rock that water built —…
★ Pamukkale means 'cotton castle' in Turkish — for the shimmering snow-white limestone surface. 🤍
📷 Jean-Marc Astesana · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Printed from ossmile.blackmesalabs.org — a deliberately tiny website about good news and happy nonsense. No algorithm. No infinite scroll. Just the world being quietly wonderful.
Photos used under Creative Commons; attribution stays on each page. Read the full stories online, and mind the construction signs. 🚧
✂️ How To Fold Your Zine
- Print the sheet above — landscape, one side, any paper size.
- Fold in half the long way (top edge down to bottom edge), then unfold.
- Fold in half the short way three times to crease all 8 panels, then unfold flat.
- Cut the slit: fold the long way again and snip along the centre crease through the middle two panels only (the dashed red line below).
- Push the ends together so the cut pops open into a +, then fold it all flat into a booklet. Pages read 1 → 8 in order. 🎉
Tip: the top row prints upside-down on purpose — that's what makes the fold work. Trust the process. 🙃
