Amateur photographer Ingrid Bunse snapped this photograph of a waterbuck with lop-sided horns while on safari in the Ongava Wilderness Reserve, Namibia. She said: "When I spotted this animal I knew I had to get a picture because it was so unusual - I've never seen anything like it. I don't know what caused the horn to curl like this but it didn't seem to be too bothered by it."It must have been that way a long time, judging by the way the tip of the horn has been burnished during grazing.
From 1856 to about 1882, he roamed the countryside until he began a now-famous clockwise circuit of 365 miles every 34 days, a route he followed for about seven years until his death in 1889...The modern controversy centers around whether his body should be exhumed from its current mislabeled pauper's grave, subjected to forensic testing, and relocated to a different site. You can read about that at the NYT or BoingBoing.
“What we do know is that as people got to know him, they feared him less and less and opened their homes to the Leatherman. It became an honor to feed him. People would miss church socials if they knew he was going to come through town, and these weren’t just ordinary townsfolk. Pretty prominent people helped him as well.”
Ms. Sutton said tanneries often left good scrap leather out for the Leatherman to use in repairing his suit, while townspeople left out food, tobacco and even money...
He was referred to as old, Ms. Sutton speculates, due to his grimy appearance and depressed demeanor. His clothing was pieced together out of small pieces of leather, stitched with wider strips of leather, which was worn over woolen underclothes...
The note is worn, and, in common with several of its fellows, it was carefully stitched together, obscuring part of the design. But if we could see everything, we would see that, on the front of the note, a figure representing Great Britain receives a petition of the Continental Congress. It is handed to her by an America, who is simultaneously trampling on a scroll marked SLAVERY and holding aloft a Liberty cap on a pole, a beacon for American troops who are hastening to the scene from the right.That explains the design, but not the curious denomination. There were no American "dollars" until 1792, so the dollar referenced in this bill would have been the Spanish one. But why have the bill in such an odd multiple? Any numismatists out there have ideas?
Meanwhile, George III (the figure at the center-left) is doing his best to set fire to an American city (perhaps Baltimore) already under attack from a British fleet. He's also trampling a copy of Magna Charta, just to underscore the point. Inscriptions along the sides read "AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN" and "PRO ARIS ET FOCIS" (For altars and hearths). The other side of the note conveys hope. Britain and America are shown achieving peace, with the reminder that "PAX TRIUMPHIS POTIOR" (Peace is preferable to victory).
The note was designed by Annapolis silversmith Thomas Sparrow in the summer of 1775. His initials are inscribed on the front and his full name on the back. This series of Maryland notes remains the most politically charged currency ever issued in the United States during wartime.
The Mosely Folding Bath Company advertised a folding bath in the 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog. This tub, disguised as a mirrored wardrobe, folded down and out of its wood casing into the room, revealing the heater above.The bathtub was not connected to drainage plumbing, so it had to be scooped out after use.
You can’t tell the ripeness of an orange by its colour, no matter where it’s from. If an orange is unpicked, it can stay on the tree until the next season, during which time fluctuations in temperature can make it turn from green to orange and back to green again without the quality or flavour being affected.Another interesting fact is that Alexander the Great artificially colored his hair:
Alexander the Great washed his hair in saffron to keep it a lovely shiny orange colour. During his time saffron was as rare as diamonds and more expensive than gold.
The story appears first in Petronius’ Satyricon (51 – early first century AD): ‘However, there was an artificer once who made a glass goblet that would not break. So he was admitted to the Emperor’s presence to offer him his invention; then, on receiving the cup back from the Emperor’s hands, he dashed it down on the floor. Who so startled as the Emperor? But the man quietly picked up the goblet again, which was dinted as a vessel of bronze might be. Then taking a little hammer from his pocket, he easily and neatly knocked the goblet into shape again. This done, the fellow thought he was as good as in heaven already, especially when Emperor said to him, ‘Does anybody else besides yourself understand the manufacture of this glass?’ But, on his replying in the negative, Emperor ordered him to be beheaded, because if once the secret became known, we should think no more of gold than of so much dirt.’Beachcombing notes that the story was retold two centuries later, and a different incident was reported in 79 AD:
Pliny the Elder (obit 79 AD), a near contemporary, reports that in the time of Tiberius, forty years before he brought out his Natural History, a new kind of flexible glass was produced that the Emperor did everything possible to outlaw, even destroying the workshop of the inventor (‘totam officinam artificis eius abolitam’).Fable/myth? Or true? There's a discussion at the link, with a addendum suggesting that the Romans might have invented tempered glass. A different possibility that occurred to me is that a craftsman could have acquired a large lump of relatively clear amber (does amber come in clear form?) and worked into the shape of a glass (? is that possible).
What's the most common answer on Jeopardy? That would be "What is Australia?" That response appears 208 times. In fact, thanks to the prominence of geography-related categories, the Top 23 answers are all places. (Click here for a list.) At No. 24: George Washington.There's more at the link.
...where's the best place on the board to find a Daily Double? Far from being randomly distributed, Daily Doubles are heavily concentrated at the bottom of the board. Of the roughly 10,000 such clues logged on J-Archive, 92 percent were in the bottom three (of five) rows. In fact, only two Daily Doubles in the archive ever appeared in the top-left corner, once in 1999 and then in 2003. The cell densest with Daily Doubles? Fourth from the top, far left—home to 834 of them, or 8 percent of the total.
As players descend the gameboard's rows, the clues get harder: 96 percent of clues in the top row are solved, 91 percent in the second row, 86 percent in the third row, 80 percent in the fourth row, and just 71 percent in the bottom row.
"It happens when there's a heavy snowfall and some wind at a time when the water is cold enough to freeze but due to motion it is prevented from doing so.From foamymilkyway, where there are additional photos of this phenomenon.
Conditions must be: Water temperature at zero deg. C., snow falling into the waves and combining together as the waves roll it along; think of it rolling a snowball on a liquid surface rather than a field, I'm sure you get the idea.
In Cape Breton this phenomenon is known by local fishermen as "a Lolly".
The photograph, which shows an object with three humps breaching the surface of the lake, is said to be the best evidence yet of what some claim is a monster... It was taken on a camera phone by Tom Pickles, 24, while kayaking on the lake as part of a team building exercise with his IT company, CapGemini, last Friday.More details at the link, but more interesting is that a search for more information on "Bownessie" led me to a "List of reported lake monsters." There must be almost a hundred there, from Canada and the U.S., Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia. And so many unusual names: Ogopogo, Cressie, Mussie, Mokele-mbembe, Muc-sheilch, Lagarfljots Worm, Brosno Dragon. Lots of links for cryptid enthusiasts to explore.
Mr Pickles said he saw an animal the size of three cars speed past him on the lake and watched it for about 20 seconds. He said: “It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away. At first I thought it was a dog and then saw it was much bigger and moving really quickly at about 10mph. “Each hump was moving in a rippling motion and it was swimming fast. Its skin was like a seal’s but it’s shape was completely abnormal – it’s not like any animal I’ve ever seen before."
This is believed to be the eighth sighting of a long humpbacked creature – known by local residents as "Bownessie" – in the past last five years.
In Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, a cyclops was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of its forehead. The classical plural is cyclopes [you learn something every day...]. The name is widely thought to mean "circle-eyed".There is another possible origin of the legend:
Given their penchant for blacksmithing, many scholars believe the legend of the Cyclopes' single eye arose from an actual practice of blacksmiths wearing an eyepatch over one eye to prevent flying sparks from blinding them in both eyes...
Text from Wikipedia. The image is "Marcel Marien, L'introuvable, 1937. Glass, acrylic glass, 11 x 27 x 18 cm. Coll. Sylvio Perlstein, Antwerp © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010," posted at ArtDaily as an example of a surreal art object. Via Uncertain Times....prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls – about twice the size of a human skull – that may have been found by the Greeks on Crete and Sicily... the large, central nasal cavity (for the trunk) in the skull might have been interpreted as a large single eye-socket. Given the inexperience of the locals with living elephants, they were unlikely to recognize the skull for what it actually was...
Why the population of the fortress city – the Blue City as it is universally known – took to painting their houses in various shades of blue is not completely certain. Yet most believe it is to do with the prevailing caste system in India.From an interesting post with several dozen photos at Kuriositas,
The world’s worst [?] flesh-eating plant lives in the jungles of Borneo. It’s called elongata and it’s one of several strains of Raffles’ pitcher plant. Like its relatives, it has distinctive pitcher-shaped leaves that can lure insects into a watery grave. But unlike other strains, elongata is strangely incompetent at catching insects. Instead, it lures bats into its pitchers, and lives off their poo...
Elongata looks much like other pitcher plants, except for its giant traps. They’re around four times larger than those of its relatives, they don’t contain much fluid, and they don’t emit any noticeable smell. At such a size, you’d expect the pitchers to be swimming in insects. But when Ulmar Grafe from the University of Brunei Darussalam looked inside the giant pitchers, he found six to seven times fewer insects than in other pitchers. Instead, he found small bats...
In the pitchers, the bats get shelter from predators and the elements. But what does the plant get in return for providing a living bat-cave? In a word: faeces. The bats defecate into the pitchers, providing the plant with at least a third of its nitrogen, packaged in neat dollops.
Blowtorch, a life size mechanical horse, was the pet project and creation of W.J. McIntyre, a Swift Current, Saskatchewan inventor... Blowtorch’s body was fashioned from sheet metal. A nine hp gasoline engine provided the “horsepower.” Small wheels were hidden under his hooves. The legs slid back and forth. A foot throttle controlled the speed; a brake cable slowed it down... McIntyre rode his mechanical steed at local fairs where its peculiar lurching gait delighted the crowds.The rest of the story is at the Saskatchewan Western Development Museum web page. Posted for Funder and her readers (someone obviously thought a mechanical horse was a good idea at the time...)
After McIntyre’s death in 1965, Blowtorch was put out to pasture. Neglected and almost forgotten, the elements took their toll... That’s when Allan Jacobs, a welder at McIntyre’s shop, spotted the tired horse and decided to do something about it...
On a $20 dare by Jim, Jacobs headed for the fairgrounds astride Blowtorch in the 1968 Swift Current parade. However, disaster struck when the horse’s tiny wheels got stuck in an expansion joint on an overpass. The jolt was more than Blowtorch could take and the poor horse lost his head. Jacobs managed somehow to put the head back on, holding it in place with the halter and bridle. But things did not go well for long. As they turned a corner, Blowtorch snapped a leg bolt, and down went horse and rider. Jacobs, dressed as a cowboy, pulled out his toy gun and “shot” the crippled horse as the crowd roared its approval.
But this was not the end of Blowtorch...
“In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.” (p. 179)I wonder if other countries also use the word "Stop" on signs, but not in the native language.
Jewels commemorating the dead were widely worn during the 17th century. This mourning buckle contains panels of woven hair, decorated with an elaborate inscription in gold thread and a small enamelled skull, all set behind rock crystal. The inscription, partly in Latin, tells us that the piece commemorates Elizabeth Harman who died on 11 April 1698, aged 27.
