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.
3 August 2007 – Whelped
3 August 2008 – 1st year Blogoversary 3 August 2022 – 15th year Blogoversary!
As of this date, there are exactly 5,860 posts in our archives, 9.7K comments and over 2.8M referral links that comprise
Steal, lift, purloin, burgle and abscond with anything you find here, just link back and give us credit for finding the stuff before you did.
We’ve featured the Top 11 Posts every year since 3 August 2008 and this year is no different.
The numbers adjacent to the titles indicate ranking for the previous 12 months, followed by the previous year’s ranking, and the third number is for all-time popularity (August 2007 – August 2022).
“NR” denotes “Not Ranked.”
Click on any image below and it’ll take you to the original post. So let’s go!
No. 11/2/35 – Bigass Ammonite Fossil is not a Bigass Ammonite Fossil
No. 10/NR/423 – Monetary Disfigurement
No. 9/NR/17 – Meet The Beetles
No. 8/NR/352 – The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel
No. 7/NR/405 – The .Gif Friday Post No. 377 – Break Dance Bear Classic, Morticia & Gomez Dance Hard & Buster Keaton Escapes From Himself.
No. 6/NR/258 – The .Gif Friday Post No. 606 – The Twerk Police, A Dumpster Dumper & A Chilla Gorilla
No. 5/8/36 – Kluck Klams – The Ghost of Walt Kelly Speaks
No. 4/NR/82 – Professional Shadow Puppetry
No. 3/NR/14 – The .Gif Friday Post No. 445 – Demolition Demon, Roll Survivor & Rock This Way
No. 2/3/47 – Pelicans Trying To Eat Other Animals
And the NO. 1 POST for the past year:
The Most Terrifying Bird In The World
Posted on 1 June 2021, this garnered a surprising rank of 1/NR/58. That’s a hella score for barely one year since posting it AND THE BIRD IS PURE AWESOME.
This year it occurred to me that I might add one more category – AUDIO.
For several years I’ve been posting .mp3 files of rare (and not so rare) recordings, along with a few oddities. The most popular this year was a stunner; I found a recording ofan agitated penguin and slowed it way down.
Thanks for all your visits, comments, favorites and linkys, and I wish you all the best.
Bunk
P.S. Follow @bunkstrutts on Twitter for automatic updates and ephemeral inanities; ditto for you folks on Facebook. Both accounts are spam-free. Also, muchísimas 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. In any case, we appreciate it, and a dime a day keeps the meerkats away. Cutesy little standy-uppy weasel-lookin’ bastards.
The colorization of this photo shows you exactly what it was like to go night fishing in Hawaii years before it became an official state of the Union. At the time, Hawaiians used spears to catch fish in the shallow part of the ocean or along the more rocky terrain. The kukui-nut torch that this man is using isn’t just to light up his evening, it draws in fish to the his position.
In order to get a bright enough torch fishermen would wrap the kukui nut in leaves and attach them to a pole and light them on fire. To make them brighter they wrapped more leaves around the nut and then they would add roasted kukui nuts to a hollow sheath of bamboo and light those on fire as well. Even in the middle of the 20th century this was a way to remain close to nature while taking from the sea.
"The greatest difficulty that the human mind has to contend with is lack of concentration, mainly due to outside influences.
If, by one stroke, we can do away with these influences, we will not only be benefitted greatly thereby, but our work would be accomplished more quickly and the results would be vastly better.
[...]
It will be noted that the glass windows directly in front of the eyes are black. The construction involved the use of ordinary window glass, the outer glass being painted entirely black. Two small white lines were scratched into the paint, as shown. The idea of this is as follows:
The writer thought that shutting out the noises was not sufficient. The eye would still wander around, thereby distracting attention. By having the two white lines scratched on the glass, the field through which the eye can move is comparatively small."
Prescient satirical concept… or perhaps he was serious:
According to [Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, 2015] Gernsback himself may have been “an undiagnosed Aspergian”: “His peers regarded him as an unsociable figure who remained coolly distant from the communities he created. The people he counted as friends tended to be prominent scientists, influential politicians, and other notable figures with whom he corresponded by mail; historian James Gunn observed in Alternate Worlds that he was ‘a strange mixture of personal reserve and aggressive salesmanship’.
Silberman refers to the Isolator in particular as Gernsback’s “most blatantly autistic creation”.
Read the full description of The Isolator from the July 1925 edition of Science and Invention.
The Fokker D.VII is the only aircraft mentioned by name in the Armistice demands of November, 1918. Germany was ordered to surrender “1,700 airplanes (fighters, bombers – firstly, all of the D 7’S and all the night bombing machines)” (number of aircraft to surrender are not always the same).
In the end, not all D.VII’s were handed over. Some were flown back to Germany by their pilots and hidden in sheds. From the ones that were flown to the collection points of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, some were wrecked during landings or taxiing. After the war, some were sold abroad. Anthony Fokker flew from Germany and smuggled six trains with sixty wagons each full of aeroplanes and tools to Holland. Among these were 120 D.VII’s.
Tacky Raccoons 