Greater Adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius)
This enormous prehistoric-looking stork grows to five feet tall with an eight foot wingspan and eats small unsupervised children. It is considered an endangered species and is called an adjutant because it walks funny.
[Image found here.]
Private FB group VOMIT CLOCKS defines them as
“A 1960/70s mid-century craft trend where one incorporated rocks or other items (dead insects, dried plants, glitter, shells, etc.) into a mold (clock, animal, trivet, plate) and then poured a clear or colored resin which hardened into the molded object. […] The vomit clocks’ jumbled contents often look like regurgitated vomit or a gelatin salad full of fruit chunks.“
The history, cleaning, maintenance and repair of Vomit Clocks may be found at The Vomit Clock Museum.
[Images found here and elsewhere on the internests.]
Stowlangtoft Hall, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England.
To make matters worse, Stolangtoft Hall is a nursing home…
[Found here.]
The World’s Ugliest Dog Contest celebrates its 25th anniversary today [21 June 2013] at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California. Twenty-five plus “beauty challenged dogs are foregoing their usual beauty regimens in preparation.”
[Images and description found at the Ugliest Dog Contest Contenders. Note that all of them are members of the breed the missus refers to as “Kikmi Dogs.”]
It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.
That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.
In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.
To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. Win.
Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. Fail.
Tacky Raccoons 