Saturday, October 17, 2026

🌿 Good News

Massive 70lb Dog the Size of Baby Hippo Sheds Pounds and Gets New Home (opens in a new tab)

Good News Network reports that a very large shelter dog that weighed about as much as a baby hippo has lost the extra weight and now has a new home. The large bulldog called Peggy Sue had reached 70 pounds (32.5kg) before she arrived at the RSPCA’s West Hatch Animal Centre in England.

Why it's cozy: Staff had to carry Peggy Sue in a crate when she arrived, and a foster carer's step-by-step exercise plan got her moving again.

📖 Audiobooks

A Christmas Carol (opens in a new tab)

Charles Dickens spends one Christmas Eve walking Ebenezer Scrooge from a cold counting-house back toward his own life. The warmth is the point: a dinner, a family, and a man who chooses them before morning. A LibriVox reading lets you hear the whole night through, which is worth starting when you want a story that ends warmer than it began.

Why it's cozy: The Cratchits feast on one small goose, and Scrooge knocking at his nephew's door proves it is never too late to join the table.

🎬 Cozy video

Alice and the Three Bears (opens in a new tab)

Play Alice and the Three Bears

The Internet Archive credits Walt Disney for Alice and the Three Bears, dates it 1 December 1924, and marks it public domain. The page opens with the bears cooking, until Baby Bear runs to the pond after a frog for the recipe. It is worth a watch when you want a short kitchen tale that stays with the bears.

Why it's cozy: A recipe that calls for hops sends Baby Bear off hunting frogs, a silly pun that keeps this century-old kitchen cartoon light and sweet.

🪶 Quote · public domain

“There is no place like home.”

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Why it's cozy: Asked why anyone would leave a beautiful magic land for gray Kansas, Dorothy picks her dreary home anyway, a pull every homesick reader knows.

📚 Cozy book

Under the Whispering Door (opens in a new tab)

Wallace Price dies and is not finished with it. A reaper brings him to a tea shop run by Hugo, where the dead pause before they go on. T. J. Klune's novel gives Wallace a short stay among the living to notice the life he rushed past.

Why it's cozy: Hugo's tea shop gives a hurried man somewhere to sit still, and the misfits who gather there become the family he never made time for.

🍵 Cozy news

A 17-year-old has given away 400 bikes and taught hundreds of kids to ride (opens in a new tab)

Good News Network reports that Jonathan Thai of Alpharetta, Georgia, started the Pedal Forward Foundation after a local bike workshop for kids shut down. He has raised $30,000, collected 400 donated bikes and 500 helmets, and run more than a dozen free clinics where children go from balance bikes to riding safely near traffic. For a family without a car, a bike is a way to school and to work, and new chapters have opened in New York and Tennessee.

Why it's cozy: Partly inspired by his parents' childhood in rural postwar Vietnam, Jonathan hands local kids a bike, a helmet and patient lessons, which is community care on two wheels.