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Albino Monday: Kevin Richardson, star of the new documentary “The Lion Whisperer”, and his white lions.
Today’s long read is by Hyperbole and a Half, called Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving. This was a lot of fun to read.
Timewaster of the week: How long can you last with a chicken on a raft. I lasted 34 seconds.
It’s fourteen minutes long, but this animated map shows all 2053 nuclear detonations that occurred during the 20th century.
Is this a satellite image of earth or a painting by Van Gogh (thanks, Peyton)?
Sixty stunning satellite photos of Earth.
Jenny Odell has created a series of collage prints made from google satellite images. One is made up of 125 American swimming pools.
Morford: In your mind, well and nicely blown, Mark delves into a bit of marine biology.
Weird statues from around the world.
From unpasteurized milk to the truly wormy and disgusting casu marzu, Saturday’s slide show is banned food.
If you've got a strong stomach, here's a video about casu marzu. I had trouble getting through it, and people actually pay to eat this stuff.
Pet Corner: Meet Stewie, a Maine Coon who holds the record for world’s longest cat.
Some of the movies that changed moviemaking, like Citizen Kane and Star Wars, are obvious. I wouldn’t have thought of Supersize Me being on this list, but I guess it makes sense. You can watch the whole thing at Documentary Wire.
I've waited to mention this nutrition website, but I've been following this custom diet/fitness plan for five weeks. It's a bit of work to document your food intake and energy burned each day, but I've been enjoying the process. I started five weeks ago and have lost eleven pounds so far, without having started the fitness part because I haven't figured out how to find the time yet. Tomorrow morning is my weekly weigh-in. Following their guidelines, I've never eaten so well and never really feel hungry. I highly recommend it.
[Update: Supersize Me is down on that site, so you can watch it at Snag Films.]
Geek Stuff: Here are some products inspired by R2-D2.
Play! The flying spaghetti monster game. Use your mouse to convert people into Pastafarians.
iPod Shuffle:
Click me.
Tuesday coonhound blogging: A few weeks ago, just before the leaves came down.
Welcome to the Grilled Cheese Academy.
Even though I agree with him only about half the time, I’ve always seen Christopher Hitchens as one the most fascinating public figures. The Guardian has a good story and interview about him and his recent battle with cancer.
Stuff you should know: How to write 85,000 books (in under five years). Philip M. Parker did just that.
Albino Monday: Long-tailed weasel (via Hans).
Don’t worry, God will save us from climate change. So says the congressman who wants to head up the committee that deals with energy policy and its effect on the environment. Guess which party he belongs to?
Timewaster of the week: The inception button.
The peanut comet emits a trail of cyanide.
Fifty floors of a Russian office building at night.
Morford: Dear tea party: You will now get yours, is a follow up to his last column aimed at young Democrats.
A British panel show discusses the absurdly crazy American Republicans.
At first I wondered why the rapture index is still so high, now that Republicans have more power. After all, most crazy people love conservative rule. Until I realized that a high rapture index is what these nuts actually want.
What if these Tea Party dopes had been around in 1773?
Saturday’s slide show is plans for an Hawaii-sized island made of recycled plastic.
Pet Corner: Meet Jack, the sheepdog who was so good no one knew he was blind.
The National Institute for Health (for some reason) has an amazing flash presentation of Konrad Gesner’s entire natural history volume called the Historiae Animalium. Published in 1551, it was the first pictorial catalogue of the animal world. You can zoom in on texts and rotate images on each of the 4,500 pages. Wiki has the details of Gesner’s work. Naturally, the Catholic Church included this work of science in its list of banned books when it was published.
Here are some statistics and facts about drowning, and what they are calling "circular entrapment", which doesn't sound like much fun.
Animal of the week: A ninety-six tentacled octopus.
Famous boat captains, from Ahab to Mr. Tennille, compared.
The new FDA approved drug Despondex is now available to cure the insufferably cheery.
Sally was on the right track for yesterday's trivia. It’s a massive fish kill in the Mississippi Delta, most likely a side effect of the BP spill. It includes various fish species, crabs, stingrays and even a dead whale in the stew.
Trivia (12 Biomes points): What’s this? Click it to see better.
I’m sure nobody reading this has used an actual dead-trees phone book in ages (I could be wrong), yet they still keep coming year after year. I didn’t realize it was because regulations require telcoms to print them. Finally, some states are being granted exceptions, and soon I’ll need to find something else to tear in half. Cue Tea Partiers enraged for one reason or another.
Find out how your town’s public transportation system rates. Just type in your address into Transit Score (via Raj.)
Hump day musical interlude:
Tuesday coonhound blogging: Creole's third birthday was this past weekend, so I figured I'd re-post my favorite shot of her. You can click it if you'd like.
A third of all described dinosaur species may soon be wiped out. They may just be different growth stages of other identified types.
Stuff you should know: The three most common uses of irony.
Now we’re cookin’: The encyclopedia of spices.
Albino Monday: Learn about Johnny and Edgar Winter.
Eating soil bacteria may make you smarter.
We’re going to need a bigger bowl. This goldfish weighs 30 pounds.
In today’s long read, the Huffington Post chronicles America’s Worst President plagiarizing the writings of his advisors for his new book.
Meet Marcel, the shell with shoes on, which could be the most adorable animated short you've seen all year.
For this week's Green Thing, take Toyota’s 10% challenge. Drive with a glass of water on your dashboard without spilling it and you’ll reduce your fuel consumption by ten percent. There’s even an app for that. I’m going to try this for one month, even though it’s risky (if you’ve driven in Rhode Island, you know that this kind of driving will get you run off the road). I get about 45 mpg now, and I tend not to be an efficient driver at all. With this challenge I should get a little over 50 mpg, assuming I survive. I’ll keep track of the mileage meter before each fill-up and we’ll see how I do.
Ten failed McDonalds products, including the pineapple and cheese burger, created in the sixties for Catholics who couldn’t eat meat on Friday. It was called the Hulaburger.
Psychology Today explains why atheism will eventually replace religion.
I haven't caught a male octopus in years. Because of their size, they are harder to find. This is Lahr, and he hasn't left that conch shell in nearly two weeks.
Still, he watches everything that goes on around him, and his color and pattern change with the activity he sees (he's not a fan of flashes, and this pattern above is his response to cameras.) He took his first crab from one of my staff's hand yesterday, which is a pretty big step for him.
Check out the first item in this entry from November 21, 2005. I received it today, and it was a really creepy feeling. Also, I didn't realize I've been doing albino mondays for this long.
Geek Stuff: How to play video games “together”.
Play! Centipede. This was my all-time favorite study break arcade game in college.
Cool Site of the Week: The Apollo 11 launch slowed down to 500 frames per second, and narrated by an expert.
iPod Shuffle:
Animal of the week: The sand dollar, an animal that can clone itself.
Trivia points go to ch2. It's the Aurora borealis from space.
It’s Movember in Australia, the month where the men grow mustaches.
Go to Google maps. Click on “get directions”. Type in Japan as the starting point and China as the destination. Click on “get directions” again. Scroll down to step 43.