Category: Link Dump

Totally Brainwashed Hot Links

The Hickory Horned Devil is the largest caterpillar in North America (except for this one).

Watch this first.
Now watch that next [via].

Ondes Martenot was a precursor to the Ondioline which was a precursor to the Moog synthesizer.

Early electronic music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey ‎released an EP  entitled “Mister Ondioline” in 1960.
1. Parade Des Soldats De Bois – 0:00.
2. La Gavotte Des Vers Luisants – 3:04.
3. Le Siffleur Et Son Chien – 5:42.
4. Nola – 8:01.

Here’s my favorite version of “Nola.” Jonathan Edwards was brilliant.

It holds the record for the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of all vertebrates, and the latin name of Acanthonus Armatus translates into “Bony-Eared Ass Fish” according to this site. (Any chance that some wag tunneled under the fact-checkers at Wikipedia? Nope. Never happens.) On the other hand, the Bony-Eared Ass Fish is real.

Amateur photography: A collection of people who snapped.

[Top image found here, with no explanation.]

 

Big ‘Ol Honkin’ Hot Links

Soviet anti-U.S. posters.

Everybody wants to talk with Pee-Wee! Here’s your chance!

Choose a name for your game. Choose wisely, as it can’t be changed later.

Spiral-cut pinapple demonstration vid is pretty cool [via].

Fun Facts To Know And Tell: Take a regular deck of playing cards, shuffle them, and spread them out face up. IIRC, the odds of getting that particular sequence is calculated by factorial:
n! = 52! = (1 x 2 x 3 … x 52) = 8.065817517 E+67, or 1 in
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000, and you just nailed it. The ex post probability of getting that particular sequence is always 100%.

Hypershock vs. Warrior Clan is amusing. The winner took out the other Battlebots with brute force… and a rake.

[Top image from here.]

Live From Pyongyang, It’s Saturday Night Hot Links

THIS is just wrong.

There’s a bronze statue of Lt. Frank Columbo (Peter Falk) with a bronze beagle in Budapest. TRUE.

Robot prototype fail [via].

Tower Records was awesome. We’d spend hours in their Buena Park store combing through their vinyl, but the L.A. store was huge. I never knew the history until now [via].

Always order the largest pizza. Here’s why.

What do you need to know to become a Citizen of the United States? Here’s a practice test.

Guy moves massive concrete blocks by himself using only gravity and leverage [via].

I found this Tweet amusing.

[Top image made with I Can Haz Cheeseburger Meme Generator.]

Mono-polyrhythmical Hot Links

Kabardian, also known as Circassian, is spoken in the Caucasus. In the sentence “The men saw me,” the word for “saw” is sǝq’ayǝƛaaɣwǝaɣhaś, pronounced roughly “suck-a-LAGH-a-HESH”  [via].

Classic barking cat vid here.

Check out the Paterson-Zwick Construction. Need something a bit easier? Try this.

Untangle the web.

Your Colon Smells Great is the best blog post title I’ve seen so far this year.

I do not like them, Sam I Am.

Oktoberfest began Saturday and a man fights with his shoe.

[Top image from here.]

Homogeneous Diversification Hot Links

Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” was one of the best books I ever read twice. The movie version was kinda okay, but it ignored significant details IMO.

Top Ten Finalists for Best Illusions of 2016.

Communists are illegally crossing our southern borders. TRUE.

For only a few hundred dollars you can eat and study Greek philosophy at the same time.

Here’s an interesting Princeton Senior thesis. It explains a lot.

Launched on 17 October 1997, The Cassini Spacecraft has been messing around near Saturn for about thirteen years now, and it’s scheduled to crash and burn on 15 September 2017 after 20 years of service [via].

Making a very stressful salad.

[Top image found here.]

Anthropogenic Global Hot Links

From Twitter: “I had a floppy disk on my desk and my student said, “Oh cool, you 3D printed a SAVE button.'”

Twitterer plays the drums.

Looky what we found in 2016! It’s an interactive map of discoveries!

¡Viva La Venezuela! Ami Horowitz discusses income equality with NY millennials.

Spin a shiny new penny 10 or more times in a row and it will come up tails approximately 80% of the time. Here’s why [via]. What about flipping an undoctored coin ten or more times in a row? Are the odds 50-50? Not if I do it. It just takes practice – same flip, same height, same catch. Any bets? More coin-flipping cons here.

“Oops. Pardon me.”

“These work as screwdrivers, knives and various other multi-tools at the tip of your finger…  also you can shine them with Brasso.” DIY bullet casing hack is cool.

Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman, pictured in 1968 at top) named his stage persona after this. TRUE.

I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Hot LInks

“Look, I got this. Just gimme a coupla minutes.” –Cristobal Columbo circa 1492

The Great American Solar Eclipse is tomorrow. Plug in your location here to find out what time you need to start banging your pots and pans to drive the dragon away. If anyone tells you it’s safe to look at with the nekkid eye, he/she is a fool.
Don’t do it.

Apparently The Ancients blamed dogs for the temporary darkness of a solar eclipse.

Every time I hear it, it seems she’s singing about her cat. On the other hand, it’s a good Solar Eclipse party song.

The Mystery of the U.S. Navy’s Ghost Blimp is still unsolved after 75 years.

84 year-old folk artist Denny Lunn tells some stories [via].

The last Blockbuster store is still open for business.

An honorary statue in New Orleans, depicting a famous military figure on a horse, was defaced with the words “Tear It Down” recently. The honored warrior was captured, tortured and killed by fire decades before Europeans even knew about this continent, and centuries prior to the founding of the United States of America. TRUE.

Walter E. Williams on Rewriting American History.

[Top image from here.]

 

Candy Colored Hot Links

Major Tom?

Monitor lizards can count up to six. Nobody knows why they stop counting at that number.

Some people will jump off a 33 foot tall tower for $30, and some people won’t.

There’s a lobster loose.

Awful graphics, but the information is interesting when you interpolate it. $100 in Mississippi or Alabama buys about 32% more than it does in New York or California (and a whopping 36% more compared to Washington D.C.).

One-sided negotiation is not negotiation.

This scene creeped me right out.

ICYMI. Yeah, it’s blogwhoring. Hit the tip jar if you don’t like it.

[Top image: The posterior of a 1956 Volkswagen Beetle, found here.]

Australian Body Surfing Hot Links

This is what you get when you Google Fireworm.

Keep the carburetor out of the dishwasher.

Ladies and Gentlemen, due to a shift in the space-time continuum, we’re going to monitor the situation.

The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly is kinda fun [via].

Dog scales a 12′-10″ wall.

A Dr. Thomas Sowell Primer.

Conan O’Brien, once president of the Harvard Lampoon, allegedly spent a night in jail following a stunt he pulled as an undergraduate. That story (with other unrelated pranks) found here.

How to swap pianos and not hold up the concert.

This is my favorite piano etude. I’d rename it “The Stupid Deadline Song.”

[Top image is a screen cap from this, found here.]

Tacky Raccoons’ 10th Year – The Top 11 Posts

Tacky Raccoons Be Crawlin' 300
On Friday, 3 August 2007, the date of our first posted post that was posted, the world twitched imperceptibly, a global nanoflinch, an earthquake with the power of a morning fart, or less. It’s not our 10th Anniversary, because Day One doesn’t count, but Day 366 does, so this is really a Birthday Celebration. It goes like this:

3 August 2007 – Whelped
3 August 2008 – 1st year Blogaversary
3 August 2017 – 9th year Blogaversary

On the other hand, there are now 3,981 posts in our archives.

TEN YEARS OF STUFF!

Steal, lift, purloin, burgle and abscond with anything you find here, just link back and give us credit for the source.

As with previous years, we’ve celebrated those posts that received the largest number of hits, not only for the past year, but for the entire life of Tacky Raccoons, and this year is no different.

We’ve featured the Top 11 Posts every year since 3 August 2008 and this year is no different. There are some surprises, and I still don’t know why some get an exorbitant amount of hits while others fade.

Previous Top 11 hits are linked here.

Earlier years’ decisions hold for these posts:

10/10/10 10:10:10 and 10:11:10 11/10/11 are hereby relegated to the sub-category of Inexplicable Honorable Mentions.

The numbers adjacent to the titles below indicate ranking for the previous 12 months, followed by the previous year’s ranking, and the third numeral is for all-time popularity (August 2007 – August 2017). “NR” indicates Not Ranked.

Click on any image below and it’ll take you to the original post. So let’s go!

No. 11/nr/272 – The Best VW Repair Manual Ever.

babe-cannon

No. 10/11/14 – Babe Cannon

SNAKE

No. 9/2/2 – LOL FERRET: Episode 1

IntroducingtheBeatles

No. 8/8/156 – Introducing The Beatles – COLLECT ‘EM ALL

No. 7/19/64 –  The .Gif Friday Post No.185 – 80 Beetles

mardi-gras-boobs-and-beads 150

No. 6/6/30 – Beads, Beer, Boobs & Blues = Heureux Mardi Gras!

No. 5/4/4 – Giant Woolly Bear Caterpillar Discovered Near Las Cruces, NM, Predicts Global Warming for Decades to Come


No. 4/7/188 – 11 September 2001 – Never Forget.

No. 3/nr/135 – The .Gif Friday Post No. 445 – Demolition Demon, Roll Survivor & Rock This Way

mrgoogle_cropped1

No. 2/3/32 – Hello. I Am Mr. Google.

And the Number One Post for the past 12 months is once again:

MEET THE BEETLES

Meet The Beetles 0.1

Posted on 17 July 2011, “Meet The Beetles” wins again with a score of 1/1/25.

Thanks for all your visits, favorites and links, and I wish you all the best.

Bunk

P.S. If you haven’t done so already, visit
The Official Cutting Edge, State Of The Art and Wave Of The Future Tacky Raccoons Store
for trendy and stylish accoutrements. If you don’t see what you like, or you want something a bit different, leave a comment or use the “Write Bunk” link in the sidebar.

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P.P.P.S. Muchisimas grassyass to those of you who contributed to our PayPal Donation Account. We’re not in this for profit and we don’t beg, but that doesn’t rule out blogwhoring as far as you know. In any case, we appreciate it. After all, a dime a day keeps the meerkats away. Cutesy little standy-uppy weasel-lookin’ bastards.