Periodically I give Wilson’s site a quick check to see if there is anything new up there for me to spend money on. Today I was rewarded for my curiosity with a shocking image, a shocking image, I tells ya. Wilson put a classic book to the torch, as you can see here.
I trust that this was just a singe and not a full scale immolation…. For more fire related pics, check them out for yourself at Robert Wilson Photography.
A Wired article today reminded me of something that has always bothered me: why do contests have skill testing questions? Apparently there is a law that requires companies to have a way for people to enter for free, so they always have had a test of some sort for the winner. That way the game isn’t completely left to chance, but requires skill instead. Ya right. It’s not the case in the US, by the way, where you aren’t obliged to do anything to get your prize.
Weird. But now I know.
The best part about writing this blog is that I don’t often have to make stuff up. RSS is a wonderful source of fodder for this page, and it certainly hasn’t failed me today. I give you the following article on The Register, which is part of a series of “ask a doctor” type of articles.
It describes the strange condition of Gigantomastia, which is Latin for “a visit from the booby fairy”. Apparently it is a very uncommon condition (1 out of every 28,000 to 100,000 pregnancies) for pregnant ladies to wake up to find a sudden and rather permanent, uh augmentation shall we say.
“A 24-year-old woman, pregnant with her second child, had a “massive bilateral breast enlargement†during her 19th week of pregnancy. After the baby was born, it took 6 months of medical treatment for her breasts to reduce back to their normal size.”
Not to make fun of what probably was rather traumatic experience (ok I’m making fun of it a bit), but I recall a scene from Bruce Almighty similar to this….
Anyway, that fun aside, there’s just a gold mine of information up there:
- Why do we close our eyes when we sneeze? – The short answer is so that our eyes don’t pop out of their sockets….
- Why do some people have three nipples? Which happens to be known as pseudomamma, and I now officially will start referring to someone I know by that name. You know who you are...
That’s enough for today, methinks.
Judas Priest, but this is one frigging big bunny. Take a look at this sucker, this is just ridiculous. Apparently there has already been some investigative work to see if this is just a nice Photoshop job, and it seems to be on the level. It weighs 22lbs, and can mistake your arm for a carrot. Does anybody remember the Bugs Bunny episode where he was a prehistoric saber-toothed bunny? This kind of makes me think of that….
Anyway, I saw this on the very good Table of Malcontents. Photo credit from a link there. Previous bunny rant by me here.
If you remember I picked up a story about how the pot plants in Afghanistan grew to monstrous proportions and were impossible to kill? Well, it turns out that this is probably an exaggeration of the truth. Slate has a good article on how “factual liberties” in drug stories are never corrected, unlike medical stories or financial stories, etc.
So there you go, the mutant monster marijuana plants of Afghanistan are probably just regular pot plants. Huh. It just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
When I saw this news article about researchers finding a dolphin with “legs” I immediately remembered reading an article in the Onion that rings so incredibly true it’s amazing. The Onion’s take is hilarious and worth a read, it had me crying the first time I read it:
“I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, ‘Holy f@$*,'” said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. “That’s it for us monkeys.”
Indeed. It’s funny as hell, but it’s also very cool that they have such a direct link to dolphins having once had limbs (the actual article, not The Onion spoof).