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He'd been roping a practice dummy all year, then something real floated by

Twelve feet of lariat, chest-deep water, and exactly one throw.

Fourteen-year-old Jory Thomas was at his grandparents' campground near the Yellowstone River, doing the thing he'd done nearly every afternoon for a year: throwing a lariat at a practice dummy on his family's ranch. Then he heard someone yelling for help.

A raft carrying four people had slammed into a bridge pillar upstream. Three of them made it to shore. The fourth was clinging to a cooler and moving downstream fast, not saying a word. As Erik Barnes reports, Jory emptied his pockets, grabbed his 12-foot lariat, and waded chest-deep into the current with the rope in his hand. "This current was pretty fast then, and he was moving pretty quickly," Jory said. "Only thing I could focus on was helping him get out of the water."

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And what did we learn?

In yesterday’s edition of The Daily GOOD, we shared one psychiatrist’s view that maybe you don’t really miss the 1980s; you miss something else.

What do GOOD readers think of the 80s? Over 60% of you gave it a mixed review, but what I learned from the first-ever poll response to get a hard zero percent is that either nobody under 30 reads this newsletter OR people in that demo don’t like answering questions. Fascinating…

• Totally tubular. Peak human civilization. (23.3%)

• Gnarly in spots, bogus in others. (61.6%)

• Weak sauce. The '90s did it better. (15.1%)

• I wouldn't know, I wasn't there. (0.0%)

Pop Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy

Stevie Nicks built a rock classic out of a Southern accent

One vowel, one misunderstanding, one of the biggest songs of her career.

Stevie Nicks wrote "Edge of Seventeen" after mishearing a single word in casual conversation, and the woman who said it had no idea she'd handed over a hit. Fresh off going solo from Fleetwood Mac, Nicks was chatting with Tom Petty's first wife, Jane Benyo, and asked how old she was when she met Tom. Jane's answer was ordinary. She met Tom at the age of seventeen. Her Southern drawl bent one vowel just far enough to invent a phrase that didn't exist.

In this story by Cecily Knobler, first shared on our sister site Upworthy, Nicks remembers grabbing the nearest surface to write it down: "I'm writing it on the menu, right!" Jane laughed, assuming she wasn't serious. She was extremely serious. The song landed on 1981's Bella Donna, climbed to number 11, and sits at 217 on Rolling Stone's greatest songs of all time.

Nicks has never been precious about where a song comes from, only about keeping it. She fought Fleetwood Mac for years over the ballad they cut from Rumours, and her catalog keeps resurfacing in places nobody planned, like the 85-year-old whose "Landslide" cover went viral.

Ideas

A Texan in England has 3 harsh truths for Americans eyeing the exit

You’ll miss home most in the cereal aisle.

Ashley Jackson had a plan. After twenty years in Texas, she packed up her family and moved to South Manchester for affordable healthcare, a walkable neighborhood, and proximity to her British husband's family. What she didn't have was a heads-up about everything else.

As Adam Albright-Hanna reports, Jackson has been filing dispatches from her adjustment period on TikTok, and her "3 harsh truths" video has struck a nerve. Two of them you might expect from any American landing in England. The third involves the cereal aisle, and it's somehow the one that hits hardest.

She's adapted in ways she didn't anticipate. The things she thought would be hardest weren't. The thing she thought was a loss turned out to be a gain. And nearly half of all Americans say they believe life is better somewhere else. Jackson is one of the ones who actually went to find out.

On July 28, 1866, President Andrew Johnson signed the Metric Act, and the United States made it perfectly legal to measure things in meters and grams. The bill was the work of Iowa congressman John Kasson, who had noticed as an assistant postmaster that metric units would save the country money on international mail. It passed both houses of Congress without debate.

Here is the catch, and it is the whole story: the law made metric legal, not mandatory. It was an invitation, not an order, and Americans have been politely declining ever since. Congress tried again in 1975 with a voluntary conversion act, then in 1988 declared metric the "preferred" system for trade. The nation responded by continuing to order a pound of coffee.

The joke has a punchline, though. Since 1893, the official U.S. inch, pound, and gallon have all been legally defined in terms of metric units. Every time you buy a gallon of milk, you are quietly using the metric system, whether you signed up for it or not. 

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