Polar Bear

Walking On Water
Benjamin Hardman

Out of this world.

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future
AlphaPhoenix

This video is great, best thing I've seen in a while.

Walking the Dog

Dog Water?

I have upped my walking to 30 minutes. It's been a year since I got my new artificial hip joint installed and while I could walk comfortably since shortly after the operation, walking for a few minutes would cause the joint to start aching. After a while I was able to walk around the block (ten minutes), but this summer I have started tackling longer distances, like three or four miles. Great achievement, but it left me so wiped out I would need a couple of days to recover. Sad, very sad, as the great and benevolent Donald likes to say. But now I've been doing 30 minute walks every morning and all is well.

I go early in the morning, before breakfast and before I've taken a shower because if I wait till those two chores are done, life takes over and a walk takes the back burner which means it doesn't happen. While I am out, I will usually see about a dozen people, some are working (roofers and landscapers mostly), some are just out walking and about half of these are walking their dogs.

Today I noticed this little puddle adjacent to a paved walking path. Been by here every day for a week and today was the first time I noticed it. It looks like someone deliberately made this hole for drinking water for dogs, but it has a definite brown tinge from the adjacent asphalt paving. Doesn't seem like a good idea, but if it was really bad I suspect dog's wouldn't drink out of it.

Talking to Jack about his dog Ruthy yesterday. It seems like Ruthy likes to eat cherry pits she finds on the ground. Jack's neighbor has a cherry tree that hangs over the fence, and there's a cherry tree at a nearby school where they go for walks. So what's the big deal? Dogs eat all kinds of garbage, that's how they get that wonderful dog breath. Well, seems cherry pits are full of cyanide. If you just swallow them whole it's not a big deal, but if you crunch them up it doesn't take more than a dozen to send you to your maker. The crunch is the key, but dogs like crunchy things, so, yeah, you wanna take precautions.

Wasn't there a tune called Walking the Dog? Yes, yes there was:

Rufus Thomas - Walking The Dog (1964)
Reelblack One

Gator

Mundo animal
canalfalacompai

Cat Burglar

Stolen Gloves

Today is the annual neighborhood garage sale. Someone has taken the opportunity to hang up these gloves that their cat has stolen over the last year (month? decade?). 

Snake

Snake

Saw this critter alongside the garage today. Not the best picture, I was shooting blind. Couldn't see the screen with the sun shining on it, and he started slithering away about the time I got around to pushing the button. He was all of maybe 18 inches long.

CETI Whale Project

CETI Whale Project

Aljazeera has good video about the CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) Whale Project. All the stuff on YouTube is wretched.

Flying Squirrel

Sugar Glider
NA Daily

Cool. Seems like I'm always hearing about flying squirrels, but I don't think I've ever seen one other than the infamous Rocket J. Squirrel from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show and that doesn't really count, does it?

According to one of the comments, it's actually a sugar glider, not a flying squirrel. Wikipedia tells us that they are from southeast Australia. They are very similar to flying squirrels.

Duck Duck Go

I watched this three or four times and could not figure out what it was. Is it a man in a wingsuit? Some kind of weird bug inching along on the snow? What is it?

Oh.

Via The Feral Irishman

Marathi Oxen Race

बकासुर आणि बलमा गट पास पलशी मैदान फाइनल bailgada sharyat #बकासुर #bailgadasharyat #recommended #live
Pat Pratiyogita Dk

Feed the tags to Google Translate and it tells me the language is Marathi.

India State Maharashtra where the Marathi language is spoken

Maharashtra has a population of 112 million people , which is only one third of the population of the USA. How is it that they have ox racing but we don't?

Update May 2024 replaced missing video with another about Marathi Oxen racing.
 

Underwater Sand Castle

Sand Patterns made by Pufferfish

The BBC has a story.

Bulldog

Sergeant Stubby

Unherd has a story by Mary Harrington about bulldogs and society. This paragraph hit a chord with me:

Responsible owners of working-breed dogs will go to considerable lengths to acommodate their pets’ inclinations. But suggesting that we might occasionally need to extend the same consideration to (at least some) men will get you burned at the stake. So instead of seeking outlets for all those human traits we no longer have a use for, they’ve simply become low-status. In tandem, Pitbull ownership, and also what’s left of the style of masculinity it signals, is increasingly associated with the (often criminal) subcultures for whom such breeds are still useful as fighting or protection dogs, and where aggression, loyalty and so on remain socially valued. So, too, they also became symbols for what’s left of this style of masculinity. If they have subsequently become fashionable again, this is via the flashy aesthetic and live-for-the-moment worldview (and sometimes also active participation in the criminality itself) that percolates out of the aggressively macho produced in these subcultures.

Bonus word of the day: Priapism - a prolonged erection of the penis. Just in case you were wondering, like me.

Sloth

Sloth

Somebody sent me a picture of this sloth. I think it was Harvard.

Cougar Dream

Ashland Cougar

I have just arrived at an old house. There are two or three other people there already. The place is a little scruffy, but habitable, kind of like a house rented out to students near a college campus. It's getting late so I go to bed. I sleep for a couple of hours but now I need to use the bathroom. (That much is realistic.) One of the other people is wearing a bathrobe and is slumped across a desk. Seems everyone is asleep. All the lights are on in the kitchen so I set about turning them off. If I turn them all off, it will be completely dark, but there is one that is blocked from shining directly into the other rooms, so I turn it on. It's like a candle lamp with a vertical glass tube about a foot tall and two inches in diameter. But it's not a candle. There are two pull chains hanging from the side of the tube, one near the bottom and another about halfway up. I pull the first one and something in the tube starts rising from the bottom. When it gets about halfway up I pull the second chain and it continues stopping a couple inches short of the top. The light is now on.

I head to the bathroom. I have to go through another room to get there. When I get there, there is what looks like a body wrapped up in a blanket propped up on the toilet. It's not a body, it's a dude who is feeling poorly. He offers to move, but I tell him not to bother. He looks miserable and I am not going to contribute to his misery. Back in the previous room I notice there is a young woman wrapped in a blanket and curled up in an overstuffed armchair. I realize this must be the couple that we were expecting. She too offers to make the toilet available, but I decline, I tell her I'll go water the shrubbery in the backyard.

I head out the backdoor. It's light enough to see, it's either a full moon or street lights, in any case nothing like my real pitch-black backyard. There isn't as much shrubbery as I expected, and the neighboring houses are maybe a couple dozen yards away, so I start walking across the yard. The house in back of ours is adjacent to an empty lot. I start walking across the lot. The lot fronts on a road and there is a slight embankment there. There is a tree by the road. I walk up to the tree and look across the road and that's when I see three cougars (mountain lions) prowling the hillside on the other side of the road. One of them notices me and starts walking in my direction. He's about as far from me as I am from my back door. I look for something I could use as a weapon and find a couple of rocks about the size of a billiard ball. Do I scream? Call 911? Throw a rock? Run? Instead of making a decision I wake up.

Note about the picture. In my dream, the cougars were in black and white. Ask Google for photos of cougars at night' and all the pics are either in full color or have glowing devil eyes.

Why do US sanctions fail?

Platypus

The USA seems to have sanctions against half the world, but they don't seem to have much effect. I've kind of wondered about this for a while, but I never got anywhere with it. Today I came across this article on Aljazeera which sheds a little light on the subject.

Why do US sanctions fail? Because a platypus isn’t a bird
by Aaron Schneider

Basically, all countries can be categorized as evolving on the left or right evolutionary branch. Sanctions can be effective against the countries on the right branch, but will be ineffective against countries on the left branch.

Miniature spider crawling across the tabletop

Saw this guy crawling around on the patio table, so I thought I'd see if my smartphone camera could capture him. He's just a speck in the video, he's hard to see and sometimes he disappears. The video is a little herky-jerky because when I looked at the camera I kept losing track of him, so then I would look at the table and find him and now I have to check the camera position to see if I have him in the frame. He's really tiny, maybe a sixteenth of inch across the span of his legs. Given his red coloring I think he's a mite of some sort, probably fell out of the tree hanging over the patio. Of course, given his small size he could have blown in on a wind from half way across the world.

Smartphone let me upload the video direct to YouTube, so plus one for Western Civilization.

Alligator

Shallotte River Swamp Park

The Shekel notes that there are now big alligators in Michigan. Michigan? Isn't it a little cold for gators? As The Dodo explains, evidently not:

North Carolina’s Shallotte River Swamp Park is home to 12 alligators rescued from captivity. As the recent extreme weather system moved through the area, the water they inhabit froze over.

So, rather than allow themselves to get trapped under the ice, or risk freezing in the colder air above, the alligators did this instead.

They protruded just the tips of their noses through the surface as it iced over, allowing themselves to breathe while remaining mostly submerged.

Squid with Headlights

Taningia danae

This deep sea monster is equipped a couple of unusual photophores:

The size and shape of lemons—each nestled within a retractable lid like an eyeball in a socket—they are by far the largest photophores known to science.

Via Schneier on Security

Texas Dairy Farm Fire

Seems like there have been an awful lot of fires at food processing plants lately. I can't tell if there really has been a significant increase in the number of incidents or whether our communications channels have improved so much that we are hearing about them more often. Or maybe conspiracy theories sell, so more people are writing reports about these kind of incidents.

I suspect that food processing, like grocery stores, run on very thin margins, so some operators might be inclined to skimp on safety items like fire prevention. I mean, nobody's going to care very much if a bunch of animals get killed, they were all going to be killed anyway.

South Fork Dairy, Dimmitt, Texas

But this dairy farm fire that Bayou Renaissance Man reports on is pretty phenomenal: 18,000 dairy cattle killed in a barn fire. How can you get that many cattle in one barn? It must be pretty big barn. It is. Using Google Maps distance measuring feature I find that the barn is 800 feet by 2,400 feet. This thing is half a mile long and covers 44 acres.

South Fork Dairy - West Texas Farmland

What's even weirder (from my point of view) is that it is all by its lonesome in the midst of a huge expanse of agricultural fields. Dimmitt, Texas must be a very strange place.

18,000 cattle. Butchered you could get about 500 pounds of meat from each animal. At a half pound of meat per day, that would be enough to feed everyone in Dimmitt for a dozen years. Or enough to make 36 million quarter pounders.

Kazakh Eagle Hunters in Mongolia

Kazakh Eagle Hunters in Mongolia - Kah-Wai Lin Photography