Welcome to another weekend and the final selection of perfectly timed photographs.
Since this is the last in this short series I am going to let the animals have the final word, or the final look might be more accurate.
Below is a mixture of domesticated and wild animals all caught on camera at exactly the right moment in time to produce fascinating and sometimes very funny pictures.
Hope you enjoy this final (for the moment) selection.
Well, if you haven’t guessed already from the title, the year may be new but the puns probably aren’t!
But I figured if we get some of these in early then there’s a chance that the year will improve later.
Strap yourselves in. Here we go.
Enjoy.
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Does chasing the American Dream not count as exercise?
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Protons have mass?
I didn’t even know they were Catholic.
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Is Marx’s tomb a communist plot?
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I was checking into a hotel the other week.
At the counter, a guy in front of me said curtly to the receptionist, “I hope the porn channel is disabled.”
Unbelievable what some people are into.
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I went for a job interview as a blacksmith yesterday.
He said, “Have you ever shoed a horse?”
I said, “No, but I once told a donkey to f*** off.”
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I’ll stop at nothing to avoid using negative numbers.
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An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all standing watching a street performer do some excellent juggling. The juggler notices that the four gentlemen have a very poor view, so he stands up on a large wooden box and calls out,
“Can you all see me now?”
“Yes.”
“Oui.”
“Sí.”
“Ja.”
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I’ve just taken up speed reading.
Last night I did war and peace in 20 seconds.
I know it’s only 3 words but it’s a start!
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I can’t see an end.
I have no control and I don’t think there’s any escape.
I don’t even have a home anymore.
Definitely time for a new keyboard.
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“Watch Back to the Future:- Tomorrow, on Yesterday” WTF????
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My laboratory assistant has invented a device that allows you to steal other people’s ideas and then permanently delete them from the subject’s memory. Why didn’t I think of that?
Hi folks, just a little additional blog post for today. I don’t do this very often, only when I come across something that isn’t really substantial enough for a full post, but which I nevertheless find amusing.
So here is a short video of hos they saw the recent US Presidential Election in Taiwan.
No, I’m not tilting at windmills, not just yet anyhow. And despite the play on words in the title, nor am I referring to Cervantes character Don Quixote. This post actually does concern a donkey, though. In fact animals in general.
It is a little known fact that donkeys kill more people than plane crashes. And at the end of August I read about a small town Texas mayor who was killed in an attack by his own donkey. He was Bill Bohlke and he was Mayor of Hollywood Park in Atascosa County, Texas.
That unfortunate event set me thinking of a number of things.
First I asked myself how the heck you pronounced his surname.
Then I wondered if Mayor Bohlke was a Republican or Democrat and how macabre it would have been if the donkey had done away with his elephant man rival.
And then I thought about the amazing and different ways people find to leave the mortal coil. I bet, like most of us, the last thing Mayor Bohlke thought was that some day he would meet his end from an attack from a randy donkey!
And then I marveled at how so many people, for no logical reason, have a romantic fantasy notion that animals are not inherently dangerous. They are.
And this is true for people who work with them every day and should know better.
For example, when I was growing up I would spend time at my uncle’s farm. He had a herd of one hundred or more dairy cows and every evening when I was there my cousin and myself would be sent out to the fields to bring the cows in for milking.
We had a couple of great little collie dogs to help us, not that much help was needed because the cows had a routine and once they heard us calling for them they made their way to the field gate and up the lane to the milking parlor, glad no doubt that they were about to be relieved of their burden once more.
With them came the bull. A huge brute of an animal and unbelievably strong. But he was docile enough, walked up with his herd of ‘wives’ and while they made their way into the queue for the milking machines he would usually lie down in the hayshed and munch on some of the hay.
As innocent (dumb) kids we would sometimes sit down beside him, even using him as a prop to lean against. He didn’t seem to mind a bit, we thought he was glad of the company perhaps.
Then one day as the herd was being ushered back out to the fields Mr Bull totally out of the blue decided he would like to kill my uncle.
Luckily us kids had our chore done in bringing the herd in to get milked. When the time came to take them back out again we were engaged on other vital business, I can’t remember exactly what but I’m sure it involved football, playing cowboys and Indians, fending off some galactic foe who was attacking earth that day, or some such vital stuff. But we could hear the commotion in the distance.
Furious about something, only he knew what, the bull roared angrily and ran towards my uncle who had been leading the way. With his head lowered he hit my uncle between his lower back and his knees and threw him up into the air like a rag doll – and my uncle was a BIG man. Very fortunately the bull tossed him into the air with such force that he went clean over the raised fence and hedge on the right hand side of the lane and ended up in one of the fields.
The crazy bull then tried to go after him but couldn’t get up the steep embankment on which the fence had been constructed. Another cousin, quite a bit older than us, saw the attack. He was in a tractor and he immediately had the presence of mind to use that to take the bull’s attention away from my uncle. The distraction seemed to work, because as suddenly as it had started it was over and things were back to normal.
But my uncle had learned a valuable lesson. Animals can be dangerous.
So had I, even though I wasn’t there at the time, but from then on I haven’t been a fan of bulls – not in Chicago or Wall Street either come to think of it.
Unfortunately Mayor Bohlke wasn’t so lucky with his donkey.
Did you ever wonder where some of the every day terms we use actually came from? Well, even if you haven’t, I have and I’ve put this post together to highlight some of the most interesting and unusual.
One of the most peculiar categories are units of measurement. For example, with regard to ‘time’ we often say things like “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” or, “Just a moment.”
Here’s the list.
Jiffy
Although used frequently by many people to denote a short but unspecified period of time, a jiffy is actually a real unit of time measurement. It is 0.10 seconds.
Shake
Another fairly commonly used term, again for an unspecified period of time, for example, “I’ll be with you in two shakes”, a shake is also a real specific measurement, namely, 10 nanoseconds.
Both Shakes and Jiffies are used for convenience in nuclear engineering and computing respectively.
Moment
How long is a moment? It is 90 seconds long.
Beard-second
A beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year, but used for extremely short distances such as those in nuclear physics. The beard-second is defined as the length an average beard grows in one second, which apparently is exactly 100 angstroms (or 10 nanometers). However, the Google calculator uses the beard-second for unit conversions of the value of 5 nanometers. It would be splitting hairs to say who is right and who is wrong.
beard-second
Barn, shed, outhouse
A barn is a serious unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei.It is one of the very few units which are accepted to be used with SI units, and one of the most recent units to have been established. One barn is equal to 1.0×10−28 m2. The name derives from the folk expression “Couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn”, and is used by CERN-type particle accelerator physicists to refer to the difficulty of achieving a collision between particles.
An outhouse is 1.0×10−6 barns and a shed 1.0×10−24 barns.
barn
Barn-megaparsec
This unit is similar in concept to the attoparsec, combining very large and small scales. When a barn is multiplied by a megaparsec (Mpc) – a very large unit of length used for measuring the distances between galaxies – the result is a human-scaled unit of volume approximately equal to 2⁄3 of a teaspoon (about 3 ml).
Hubble-barn
Similar to the Barn-megaparsec, the Hubble-barn uses the Barn mentioned above with Hubble Length, which is the length of the visible Universe as derived by using the Hubble Constant and the Speed of Light. This amounts to around 3.45 Gallons (13.1 L).
Donkeypower
Everyone is familiar with the term “horsepower” particular with regard to vehicle engines. Donkeypower is a facetious engineering unit is defined as 250 watts, or about a third of a horsepower.
donkey power
Rictus Scale
Earthquake intensity is normally measured on the Richter scale. However, a guy named Tom Weller has suggested a humorous alternative, the Rictus scale, which is a measure of earyhquake intensity linked to later media coverage of the event.
Rictus Scale #1 (Richter Scale Equivalent 0-3) Media Coverage Small articles in local papers
Rictus Scale #2 (Richter Scale Equivalent 3-5) Media Coverage Lead story on local news; mentioned on network news
Rictus Scale #3 (Richter Scale Equivalent 5-6.5) Media Coverage Lead story on network news; wire-service photos appear in newspapers nationally; governor visits scene
Rictus Scale #4 (Richter Scale Equivalent 6.5-7.5) Media Coverage Network correspondents sent to scene; president visits area; commemorative T-shirts appear papers
Rictus Scale #5 (Richter Scale Equivalent 7.5+) Media Coverage Small Covers of weekly news magazines; network specials; “instant books” appear.
Helen
First used by author Isaac Asimov, Helen is now a measurement. It is named after Helen of Troy who apparently had a face so beautiful that a thousand ships were launched to rescue her.
Thus 1 Helen is equal to this number.
A face that could only launch one ship would therefore be a milliHelen.
A face that would sink ships would have a value of -1 milliHelen!
Helen of Troy: The face that launched a thousand ships
MegaFonzie
The MegaFonzie is a fictional unit of measurement of an object’s coolness.
It was invented by Professor Farnsworth in the Futurama episode, “Bender Should Not Be Allowed On TV”. A ‘Fonzie’ is about the amount of coolness inherent in the Happy Days character Fonzie.
The Fonz – So cool
Wheaton
The celebrity Wil Wheaton is a keen user of Twitter, and when he attained half a million followers this number was deemed to be ‘1 Wheaton’. As few Twitter users have millions of followers, the milliwheaton (500 followers) and microWheaton are more commonly used.
Wil Wheaton – Wesley Crusher, Star Trek The Next Generation
Mickey
A ‘Mickey’, named after Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, is the smallest computer mouse movement that a computer can detect, less than 0.1mm.
Mickey Mouse Mouse
Nibble
Still with computers, a Nibble is half a Byte.
Garn
NASA is well acquainted with a problem called ‘space adaption syndrome’, more commonly called space sickness. It is the result of some astronauts finding it difficult to acclimatize to unusual gravities or pressures. One astronaut who was particularly prone to this type of sickness was named Jake Garn, who apparently vomited ‘explosively’ on an orbital flight. 1 Garn means a person as sick as Mr Garn was, with a corresponding scale for those less afflicted.
Jake Garn, the sickest astronaut in the universe!
Warhol
A ‘Warhol’ is a unit of fame or hype, that is derived from Andy Warhol’s famous pronouncement that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”. Thus
1 kilowarhol — famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric “nine-day wonder”.
1 megawarhol — famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years.
Andy Warhol’s infamous Campbell Soup
Jolie
A ‘Jolie’ is unit that denotes the amount of international aid a country receives when it becomes the cause celebre of a prominent celebrity. In 2005, International Rescue Committee calculated that Darfur received $300 per capita in aid, while DRC received $11 per capita. Hence, a Jolie can be thought of as a 27x increase in aid receipt.
Angelina Jolie
Kardashian
The ‘Kardashian’ is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day.
The mind-numbingly boring Kim Kardashian
Horse
Horses are used to measure distances in horse racing – a horse length (shortened to merely a length when the context makes it obvious) equals roughly 8 feet or 2.4 metres. Shorter distances are measured in fractions of a horse length; also common are measurements of a full or fraction of a head, a neck, or a nose.
Horsey
Nanocentury
A ‘Nanocentury’ is a unit of time measurement sometimes used in computing. The term is believed to have been coined by IBM in 1969 from the design objective “never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response”.A nanocentury is approximately 3.155 seconds although Tom Duff is frequently cited as saying that, to within half a percent, a nanocentury is pi seconds.
Dog year
A ‘Dog Year’ is a unit of measurement equal to one seventh of a year, or approximately 52 days. It is primarily used to approximate the equivalent age of dogs and other animals with similar life spans. It is based upon a popular myth regarding the aging of dogs that states that a dog ages seven years in the time it takes a human to age one year. (In fact, the aging of a dog varies by breed; dogs also develop faster and have longer adulthoods relative to their total life span than humans.)
pluto
Stoddard
The Stoddard is a measurement used by political campaigns to determine the density of a canvassing area. It is measured in doors per acre.
Mac Index: purchasing power parity
The Economist’s ‘Big Mac Index’compares the purchasing power parity of countries in terms of the cost of a Big Mac hamburger.This was felt to bea good measure of the prices of a basket of commodities in the local economy including labour, rent, meat, bread, cardboard, advertising, lettuce, etc.
A similar system used in the UK is the ‘Mars Bar’ (US readers think ‘Milky Way’). Tables of prices in Mars Bars have intermittently appeared in newspapers over the last 20 years, usually to illustrate changes in wages or prices over time without the confusion caused by inflation.
fasab 