“Damn. Gotta pound out another exit, Danny. Guess I’ll see ‘ya on the other side, mate. Look after me missus.”
Category: True Stories
The Incredible FungiMan Releases Spores While Eating Your Lunch
[Found here.]
Amish Ice Cutters Rescue Stranded Ice Breakers Rescuing Global Warming Proponents Stranded in Antarctica
[Strutts News Services – Cleveland] Getting from Pennsylvania to Antarctica takes a while, but steady diligence always works.
Mennonites from around the globe are moving to free rescue vessels trapped in pack ice that threatens to crush the hulls of ships sent to evacuate a bunch of vapid idiots whose intentions were to view and compile data on melting ice during the Antarctica summer. The vapid idiots were successfully evacuated by ice breaking helicopters, and they’re now home safe and sound.
Those who volunteered for the rescue missions, as of this posting, are not, and nobody cares about those brave bastards.
EXCEPT FOR THE AMISH.
[Image found here.]
The Mothership
Hot Links of the 11th Dimension
In Dreams is an experimental film about childhood nightmares by Samuel Blain.
“I never forget a face.” Yeah, you’ve heard someone say it, but how would they know? I got a score of 91% and 82% on this test.
The Legend of Chuck Norris lives on. I’m amazed that I didn’t make it into the Top 50, or maybe I did…
Crashing Cell Phone Conversations At The Airport.
This Guy Travelled The Country In A Pink Tutu Just To Make His Wife Laugh During Chemo.
Very cool fractal art.
Yeah, it snowed in Cairo. BFD. Weather happens, and it’s not caused by humans. We don’t have that much power, never will, no matter what Mr. Catastrophe told you.
How long can YOU watch a kitten with nasal problems in front of a fire place? [via]
WorpDress just informed me that this our 2,609th blog post. Wish they’d warned me a few years ago. I’d have cleaned up the yard, re-caulked the tub and got rid of the meerkats (cutesy little standy-uppy weasel-lookin’ bastards).
Top image from Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 classic novella “Flatland.”
Christmas Arachnids
“An old European Christmas legend tells of a poor woman unable to provide the traditional decorations for the special holiday. A spider made his home in her tree and began to spin beautiful webs. On Christmas morning, the first light of sun struck the cobwebs, turning them to silver. When the woman awoke, she found the tree was covered with silver treasure. The spider had brought good fortune!”
[via]
Other versions claim it’s a German or Ukrainian tradition, and that either the Christ Child or Santa transformed the webs. Although I grew up in an area with a large German population, I never heard the story and can’t find an original source.
Yet, there IS such a creature called a Christmas Spider.
[Image found here.]
Phil Jones’ Contribution To The World
“I have a deep respect for anyone who is willing to put their face on a bus stop bench knowing what people do to them. I thought it would be fun to do my own take on our local realtor advertisements.” –Phil Jones
Phil Jones’ “take” is to dress up as the people in the bus bench back adverts and replace their portraits with his own. Look closer:
Clever innocuous graffiti from Minneapolis, and there’s more at his website. Susan and Annie liked it, too.
[Found here.]
Nothing Much Happened Today.
[Found here.]
The Best Crappiest Speakers Ever Made.
They looked like armadillos boinking a mailbox, and yes, they were speakers. They were virtually indestructible. They hung on the inside of your car window when it was freezing outside and wouldn’t allow you to roll it up all the way.
They were also easily stolen with a pen knife. Lupe had a wall of them in his apartment, all wired together and hooked up to his stereo for a tinny wall of sound. Listening to Led Zeppelin through a dozen drive-in rattlebuzzers was truly something to behold. Truly.
[Found here.]
Crumbling Dice & Exploding Billiard Balls
Cellulose nitrate was used to make dice from the late 1860s until the middle of the twentieth century, and the material remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.
From Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell, 2002.
[Via Wiki] Because of its explosive nature, not all applications of nitrocellulose were successful. In 1869, with elephants having been poached to near extinction, the billiards industry offered a $10,000 prize to whoever came up with the best replacement for ivory billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt created the winning replacement, which he created with a new material he discovered called camphored nitrocellulose—the first thermoplastic, better known as celluloid. The invention enjoyed a brief popularity, but the Hyatt balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes portions of the outer shell would explode upon impact. An owner of a billiard saloon in Colorado wrote to Hyatt about the explosive tendencies, saying that he did not mind very much personally but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound.
[Found here.]
Tacky Raccoons 