Kickstart: Pamper your pooch, boost a business

Man's best friend has also turned out to be a great business partner.

West Paw, a Bozeman, Mont.-based maker of dog toys, says its business has increased thanks to people adopting animals during the pandemic. Dog owners finding themselves spending more time at home with their pets are also spending more on toys, West Paw CEO Spencer Williams told CNN Business.

West Paw does its own injection molding and other production — and has a loop process to collect and recycle old dog toys back into new ones — and Williams said when COVID-19 first began spreading, he worried the company would have to shut down.

Instead, it began making PPE for area health care workers, and by late spring found that orders were climbing for dog toys again.

"We found that not only are independent pet stores surviving, they're thriving because people were coming in and saying, 'Not only do I want pet food, I want to buy something that's going to make my pet happy,'" Williams said.

No matter how you voted this year, you probably walked away with an "I voted" sticker.

People living near Rochester, N.Y., have gotten into the habit of placing those stickers on the gravestone of Susan B. Anthony, one of the leaders of the fight for votes for women. While they meant well, a spring cleaning of the Anthony family gravestones early this year found that the stickers' adhesives, and cleaning products used to remove them, damaged the stone.

So voters who headed to the Mount Hope Cemetery this year had to settle for placing their sticker on a clear plastic cover placed over the stone.

Patricia Corcoran, president of Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery, wrote that the stickers are part of a "touching experience," but with the protective plastic, they will now no longer do any damage.

A sculpture made of reinforced plastic in Netherlands managed to do more than just look pleasing to the eye. The scupture in the shape of a whale's tail held up a metro train that managed to overrun the end of the tracks near Rotterdam.

The piece called — I kid you not — Saved by the Whale's Tail kept the train car from dropping more than 30 feet into the water below. (I can't directly add the photos of the train sitting on the sculpture because we don't have permission, but if you click through to the link you won't be disappointed.)

Maarten Struijs created the sculpture of two tails emerging from water beneath the elevated metro line in 2002, according to The Guardian. He referred to the material used to make it a "reinforced polyester."

"I am amazed that it is so strong. When plastic has stood for 20 years, you don't expect it to hold up a metro train," Struijs told The Guardian.

It wasn't clear what caused the train to overrun the end of the line, but no one was injured. Local officials say it could take some time to remove the delicately balanced tram from the sculpture.