1) Soviet Russia believed that the most sensible way to operate a string of unmanned lighthouses along its northern coast was by installing each of them with their own individual nuclear reactor.
2) It is impossible to utter the words ‘groin strain’ without sounding just a tiny bit like a pervert.
A deliciously creepy animation…
Slight lull in posting, due to the heat-induced apathy as my brain melts like an afterburner-mounted Milkybar. Incidentally, that’s a confection which is apparently particularly suffering from the ban on television advertising of sweets to children, since adults aren’t exactly a target market. A Cadbury’s Flake can be pushed by a slow-motion naked babe in a bath; all the Milkybar can rely on is a speccy kid acting out cowboy fantasies before using the sweet as a bribe to make friends. Besides, Milkybars are just wrong - they’re the chocolate equivalent of the white dog poo you used to see around.
One of my regular haunts is Photoshop Disasters which documents catastrophic examples of inept image editing. This recent post is one of my favourites – either the housing crisis in America has meant people are moving into doll’s houses, or Godzilla has let his pet dog out to play.
I’ve seen my fair share of badly edited property photos, typically when someone’s added a lovely blue sky but forgotten to fill in the gaps where it shows through the branches of trees resulting in a horrible white halo like a severe case of arboreal dandruff.
The worst I’ve personally seen far transcends that though. Some years ago a client advertising in the magazine I work for sent through a scan of a photo that they’d obviously decided needed a little touching up. And by touching up, I mean cutting – with scissors and the trembling hands of a long-term alcohol abuser – a giant picture of a deer from another photo, and physically sellotaping it to the lawn in front of the house.
Imagine a collage made by an excessively hyperactive five-year-old in remedial class; a massive stag looming over a puny farmhouse, held back from the brink of a destructive rampage only by the wodge of tape clearly sticking it to the picture.
I don’t think the property sold - giant deer phobia is more common than you’d think.
There is a certain joy to be found in watching something be utterly destroyed.
Which I admit makes me sound worryingly like a Bond villain.
From here, which has many, many more.
The topic of fainting goats came up at a party this weekend. I do find that the concept of swooning ungulates usually makes ideal small talk in an informal situation – it’s mentioned in all the top self-improvement books. Basically, they’re the Norman Wisdom of goats, a breed that stiffen up and topple over whenever they’re surprised. Not generally the best of predator defenses, particularly if you’re halfway up a mountain, as goats often tend to be.
Let me demonstrate (don’t worry, no involuntary sky-diving in this; it’s all in a lovely green pasture):
Look at the poor things - they’re like a novelty domino rally. If this occurred in the wild, lions wouldn’t roar; they’d shout ‘Boo!’, leaving a field full of finger food without any of that awkward chasing and jumping.
Breed it into humans and we’ll end wars forever. One gunshot and everyone falls over…
In the bright sunshine of incipient summer the garden bench has been commandeered by a queen wasp (not a WASP or, thankfully, the various members of W.A.S.P.). Every ten minutes she helicopters in to pick up strips of wood, chewing industriously away before carrying off her spoils to her secret base. The bench is quickly becoming stippled with the marks of her labour.
I like to think that she’s building a host of tiny wasp-sized benches, ready for her future handmaidens to populate as they train to become fully fledged yellowjackets – a kind of insectoid convent school with a particularly lively uniform.
It gave me a chance to try a few close-up photographs, and the hankering for a proper macro lens on my camera in order to do an even better job. Unfortunately macro lenses are majorly expensive so it might be a wee while…
The sort of special effects that you’d normally see only in Hollywood when a volcanic eruption and lightning intermingle here.
I’m an information junkie. I thrive on collecting utterly useless information, facts that have no purpose beyond being interesting; indeed, worthy of the splendid Quite Interesting. I’m terrible at remembering dates, but tell me that houseflies take off backwards; that J was the last letter added to the English alphabet; or that the British shrew and the duck-billed platypus share the rare trait among mammals of being venomous; and that nugget of info will stick in some corner of my brain forever, serving no purpose beyond boring the non-trivia-obsessed majority at parties.
This is a serious affliction – it goes to the extent that I will enthusiastically refute, with full evidence, some of the false facts and urban legends that tend to bounce around. Things like the ridiculous claim that we only use 10% of our brain – utter balderdash, except perhaps in the case of footballers and anyone whose car stereo can be heard more than thirty feet away from their car.
As a gift to those doomed infovores with the same kind of all-consuming factual addiction as me, I bring you Wikipedia’s Unusual Articles list. It’s the sort of page that keeps me engrossed for hours, learning about such things as the US town sitting on top of a burning coal seam that is expected to smoulder for 250 years, the Korean belief that using an electric fan in a closed room will kill you, or the shortest war in history (38 minutes). There’s much, much more there to enjoy.
As ever with anything on the internet, where facts can sometimes be created more from a consensual belief rather than hard reality, if you’re ever going to use any of this information in place of smalltalk at parties, make sure you double-check it first lest you come up against a fellow info-addict and descend into the sort of claim and counter-claim spiral that ends with someone being to beaten to death with an encyclopaedia over an assertion that daddy longlegs are the most poisonous animal but that they can’t bite humans*.
* They’re not, even taking into account that what the British and Americans call daddy longlegs are different things: one being an insect, the other a variety of arachnids. See how I’m unable to resist blurting out useless info?
These are quite impressively disturbing.