The .Gif Friday Post No.496 – Fluidity, Creepy Busker, Fail Bot

[Found here, here and here.]

Our Patio Rocks Harder Than Yours.

Listening to Classic Soul Instrumentals, waiting for friends to show up, and I spotted this. It’s been sitting in the WTF-To-Do-With-This-Baboso file for a while, so might as well post it.

Cliffside Path, China

As wonderful as Chinese tea is, it is definitely not something you’d closely associate with exhilaration, adrenaline and the fear of death. Mt. Huashan in China, however, manages to bring all of these things together by featuring a death-defying cliff-side mountain climb that brings daring visitors to a tea house 2,160 m (7,087 ft) up on the mountain’s southern peak.

Mt. Huashan has been a place of religious importance since at least the 2nd century BCE, when a Daoist temple was established at its base. Since then, pilgrims, monks and nuns have inhabited the mountain and the surrounding area. A network of dangerous and precipitous trails allows them to access the mountain’s five summits, each of which has a religious structure like the tea house on the southern summit. Together, these five summits form the points of a flower shape.

I don’t do heights very well – I get a visceral reaction when I’m too close to the edge – and this insane video spooked me just by watching it.

[Image found here. More info & pics here.]

This disturbs me.

[Found on a small cutting board in our kitchen.]

Death Valley Australian Style

welcome-to-australia

[Found here.]

He’s a fine upstanding young man who just needs a 27th chance in life.

stager

[Found here, via here.]

Medieval WTF

medeval-wtf

A long, long time ago this painting made complete sense.

There’s a wood-fired forge, anvils, metal working tools, a peacock, a gryphon(?!) a deer and a bigass possum watching a naked man without genitalia cringe as a woman takes an axe to a parrot while the wind is blowing.

It’s an illustration from a French manuscript entitled The Personification of Nature Making Birds, Animals and People [ca. 1405].

Okay, so Mother Nature had already finished creating The BirdsThe Animals and at least one of The People, but then she realized that the poor guy needed a pecker. If anyone else has a better analysis, post it, because I’m done here.

[Image found here.]

“Um, honey… It’s back.”

the-watcher

[Source: Our kitchen window.]

Bonus .GIF – A Cutworm Tapestry

worm-4worm-3worm-4
worm-1worm-2worm-1
worm-4worm-3worm-4
worm-1worm-2worm-1

Bunkessa found a cutworm and was nice enough to share it. My JASC program doesn’t allow me to combine them all without an incredible amount of cut-and-paste tedium, so we’ll settle for this combination of mirrored and flipped .gifs. The animation has not been sped up, that’s real time. Enjoy!

The .GIF Friday Post No. 473 – Death Defiance, Bouncing Bananas & Hypnocraft

banana-death

bananas

hypno-craft

[Found here, here and here. BTW, the secret to levitation may be found in here.]