The Goblin Shark. Its liver may account for up to a fourth of its weight. Found in deep sea but rare enough that little is really known about it other than its good looks.
An arresting image but no information about the type.
The Greenland Shark. Largest specimen ever caught was over 1000 kilograms. The flesh is poisonous.
So I might not want to be in the water but would love to be at this underwater restaurant in the Maldives.
I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.
The package:
Opened:
From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.
Thanks to Frank who passed this on to me. Not sure where he found it but the chaps above raised this lion from a cub but where forced by authorities to release it into a wildlife sanctuary when it grew to adulthood. They went back a year later to see if they could find it having been told it would not remember them. See below.
Most people in my neck of the woods hate magpies. Even the vegans among us are quick to take up arms against this bird. I kind of like them (the magpies that is).
Now I’m not saying they haven’t caused me grief from time to time. They pestered my last husky when she was a pup and then through the good years she actually caught a few of them, and then they had their revenge in her last few weak years. They would arrive in groups of three to five, and some would distract her while the others emptied her food bowl. And they can be noisier than a nightclub.
But I like the looks of them, and their obvious intelligence and resourcefulness. They are part of the jay family (we get blue jays around here too; just as noisy and an even finer looking bird) which brings me to the topic at hand….jaywalking.
Yesterday evening when I picked up the phone I was asked and I agreed to do a survey regarding jaywalking. They wanted to know my general attitudes toward jaywalking, whether I knew about the new fine hikes, and whether it would affect my behavior, and whether I knew about the jaywalkers who had died in the previous year.
The fine for jaywalking in this city is increasing to $250. I’m not sure how this compares to other bylaw penalties but the jump is from a previous $40.
I let the people know that I jaywalked each and every day, I would continue to do so but with a greater lookout for police, and that I considered it ridiculous. One of the questions was how many times a week I was inconvenienced by a jaywalker and I said never though I was often inconvenienced by people who without warning started across crosswalks without even looking. This was particularly bad in winter when icy conditions might make it difficult to stop. To me, crosswalks were a greater danger than people who were actively working around my vehicle.
By the time I hung up the phone I was incensed, and within the hour I was livid. Oddly enough, more than world hunger or fossil fuels or walmart, this was the issue that might galvanize my political soul. This is one that would get me onto the streets and up onto the ramparts. This struck to my very soul, this imposition on my pedestrianism, this imperialistic disregard of my rights in favour of the omnipresent automobile. The bastards!!
I went online to check out the bylaws and what constituted jaywalking and where. It seems everywhere you cross not at the end of a street or a designated crosswalk was jaywalking. In other words, I could hypothetically at three in the morning visit a neighbor who lives across the street on our shared cul de sac. No traffic even heard but the cop who lives between us and dislikes me could give me a ticket for not walking to the end of the block, crossing there and walking back.
Now that is an extreme. Quite frankly, I think I should have the right to cross the road anywhere I wish, in mainstream traffic if I wish, and let me determine if it is safe or not. I am happy to pay for my failure if I run in front of a car. The thing is, I think that though traffic should flow, people who happen to clothe themselves in an automobile should not automatically be guaranteed rights they did not have before.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I hate worse than a pedestrian who does not appreciate the killing power of a vehicle, one who steps out without looking (even a green walk at the light). What this bylaw is communicating to me is that I don’t have the brains to cross a road. That I cannot make the required calculations to avoid traffic and stay alive. It is also rather fascist in that it is telling me where I can and cannot walk, in the same city I pay my taxes.
Yes, people died jaywalking last year. And they will die this year. And people died falling off balconies too….should going out on your balcony be illegal? Odds are the people who died off the balconies and some of those on the roads were not paying attention, were a little oblivious to the fact that life requires attention.
Life needs a few reminders of what it is. It is not numb wandering in utter safety. There should be some danger in this world and there should certainly be some room for people who don’t mind a little of it. Those who worry about cars can walk to the end of the street and cross there. I won’t stop them from doing so. All I ask is the same courtesy.
Plenty of interesting news in the world today…
Apparently the jumbo squid’s beak is made of one of the hardest substances known, able to shear through the spine of foes but until now scientists were stumped as to how it was able to do this and yet maintain integrity at the base…why did it not shear right off. Seems there is a changing gradient of stiffness throughout the structure. “Scientists estimate that more than ten million squid live in a 25-square-mile (65-square-kilometer) area in the Gulf of California.”
And it seems that our beaks function better after -well you see the headline. I do believe I see a marketing opportunity here. Either a portable nose prod to take to dinner to get the full experience, or perhaps packaged with good bottles of wine.
The punchline is that (and maybe a punch in the nose would also have worked then) fear is the motivator.
In order to cut down on unnecessary infections, when you are planning to have yourself nailed to a cross, make sure to sanitize your nails, and the whips too, if you are into flagellation.
Just ran across this when I was looking at crucifixion images. Hadn’t seen it before but I like it.
1. From Urban-ism…
2. From DesignSpotter
3. From Australian Consolidated Products:
I wonder if this was a factor in that unfortunate incident this week where the woman wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for two years?
4. Enough sitting around..
5. Now for a few things that really shouldn’t glow but do; the things you can do with jellyfish genes:
or
6. Back to the source (or least a close relation):
The above was arrived at via SciencePunk. What you are looking at is a visualization of the oceans and the atmosphere gathered into drops and displayed against the earth; oceans on the left, atmosphere on the right.
I find this almost but not quite as amazing as the galactic objects comparisons reported on here.
A little closer to home is the large/small dog comparison, and this disparity has scientists arguing over whether they really should be considered the same species. What seems to keep the family together is that all breeds are compatible. (In the case below I think we might try to avoid testing the hypothesis.)
And finally, the largest and smallest fish.
Maybe its just me but isn’t conservation about preserving life?
The following is excerpted from an article in my local paper entitled:
Female hunters shouldn’t settle for hand-me-downs:
Kelly Semple, 42, has been awarded an Order of the Bighorn by the Alberta government. The awards recognize outstanding contributions to fish and wildlife conservation.
She has spent more than 20 years as an advocate for conservation, hunter education and the wise stewardship of Alberta’s natural resources.
Semple’s role in a youth mentor program run by the Hunting for Tomorrow Foundation taught her that women can be easily turned off the activity if they start out improperly equipped.
Often, when women start off in traditionally male activities they don’t show up at the sporting goods store and ask to be fitted with good equipment, Semple said.
Instead, they’ll use hand-me downs from a male influence in their life. So, often the equipment doesn’t fit right or is oversized and “too much bow or too much rifle.”
Now it’s one of the things Semple insists on with the female youth she mentors.
“If you don’t have equipment that fits, you it really takes away from the overall experience and it can turn a lot of people off very, very quickly.”
Another challenge she encounters more each year is the plethora of video games and entertainment tools that desensitize people to the reality of life and death.
“A lot of the video games that the kids play are really quite graphic. The unfortunate part of that is it creates a layer between understanding the life and death cycle and understanding that when you kill something you, and it, are forever changed. It’s not as easy as just flicking a switch and picking up the game again.”
So this award winner for conservation is concerned that potential hunters will be turned off by the experience and may not want to kill more animals. Or that somehow it is a pure experience because it teaches you that death is final.
Kind of go by the philosophy that if I want to show my appreciation of life and death, the most meaningful way is to not kill because I have a pretty good idea that killing leads to death. (And by the way, on the government’s Sustainable Resources website the award is described as being given to champions of fish and wildlife -kind of makes you hope that these people never become your champions).
Somehow ties in with a recent wolf kill being proposed here because elk are threatened (in other words, there are not enough for hunters to meaningfully understand life and death).
How about culling the hunter population instead (and no, I don’t mean killing them, just stopping them). Meanwhile on another coast they are having a big deer hunt because there are too many. Too many for whom? Nature tends to work these things out eventually without bullets or red vests.
Just one of those times when a man’s fancy turns to oh, Candied Bacon Ice Cream (discovered on SeriousEats).
Still hungry, I know I am. How about some fine lamprey?
In Portugal, it appears that a local feastworthy item is this parasite cooked in its own blood. Don’t know about you but I am getting hungry just writing about this.
Here’s a more flattering shot of this Dapper Dan. Kind of like one of those detachable shower heads, or a vacuum cleaner attachment.
Here’s the scary part but I have picked one of the prettier shots out there. These fellows and gals are as good as we are at crashing the fish stocks. And on an unrelated note, they have no bile ducts and die heavily jaundiced. They can also handle about 100 times the iron levels in their blood that we can and are being studied for applications for human hemochromatosis, a fairly common disease in those of European descent.
And now for something completely different, phew, here’ s a cool Blue Seeds video.
