Information is only available in Japanese, but I gather that KU Peacock is student club that raises peacocks. So far, they have 300 humans and 3 peacocks. The birds are named Sakatan, Sky Rainbow Hurricane God Phoenix (hey, that's what the translation software says), and Tanaka-kun.
I suspect that the species imbance will shift when peacocks observe the chauffeur service available to bird members. Why fly when you can ride? This rolling advertising system is bound to attract interest from local peacocks.
Kevin Parry, a master of stop motion animation, set a challenge for himself: to remake the animated Netflix logo using just ordinary arts and crafts supplies.
Parry created a set with a table and black cloth. Rather than moving the camera toward the N, created a rig under the table that pushed the N up to the camera. The N is actually three separate Ns, which he swaps out in order to create the grainy visual effect of stop motion animation.
As the N moves all the way up, he switches the framing to strands of yarn threaded into slots on boards, which gradually fill the screen and then disappear. The result is a highly effective visual take on an increasingly iconic image.
When she was seven years old, Ashley Peldon starred in the movie Child of Rage. Her role required that she scream a lot. This is when her ability to scream effectively and with variety was noticed.
Over the course of her career, Peldon has gradually developed a specialization: screaming. She adds screams to films and TV shows during the post-production phase to heighten the dramatic tension of the story. You may have heard her work in Free Guy, Paranomal Activity, and, appropriately, Scream.
Peldon has a lot more to offer than a Wilhelm Scream added into a soundtrack casually. She screams just the right scream for every occasion, as she explains in The Guardian:
As a scream artist you have to know the subtle differences between screams and determine whether they should peak at certain points, or remain steady for a very long time. I have to think: ‘OK, the character is scared here, but are they scared because their life is in danger or are they just startled?’ Those screams will sound very different. Ghost stories, for example, will often use a shrill, harsh scream because we need the audience to also experience fear.
The Manuscript Writing Cafe is a unique shop in Tokyo set aside exclusively for writers facing deadlines.
When they enter, customers report a writing goal to the manager. Specifically, they have to state a number of words that must be completed. There's a consequence for failing to finish the goal: they don't get to leave.
After paying an entrance fee, the writers can order coffee with unlimited refills. The cafe has WiFi and each writing station has a USB charger and a PC cooling stand.
About every hour, the manager stops by each writer and asks if they're making progress. The customer chooses whether the manager asks that question in a "mild", "normal", or "hard" manner.
"Hard" is, presumably, a vigorous application of the query.
World events have been rather boring for the past two years, so what's the worst that could happen?
The Guardian reports that archaeologists working in the ruins of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris during its reconstruction discovered a human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead. At some point during the 1300s, people in Paris decided that it was very important to bury whatever is inside the sarcophagus beneath the floor of the transept of the cathedral.
The transcept is the center of the cross of a crucifix-shaped cathedral. It is thus at the very heart of this consecrated ground.
The archaeologists are, as you might expect, doing this during the Easter season when, as historian Steven Van Impe points out, "people are known to come back from the dead."
The sarcophogus is made of lead. Why? I cannot find any lore about the properties of lead that would suggest why the people who buried it 700 years ago would use it as a construction material.
The Dodo introduces us to Patrick Seligman, a diver in Hawaii. On his occasional dives, he visits an animal dental office beneath the surface of the water. It's a section of reef inhabited by Pacific cleaner shrimp (Lysmata amboinesis), a species known for eating parasites and dead tissue from other fish. This symbiotic relationship allows the shrimp to eat and other fish to get clean.
Seligman opens his mouth near a shrimp and allows it approach him. Although some shrimp are skittish around the big human, others are willing to clean his teeth and pick up a free meal. After repeat visits, Seligman began bringing his friends for dental hygiene services.
The grocery store company Aldi tweeted out this disturbing menu plan for the Easter weekend. The company offers large chocolate shells shaped like bowls and proposes using them to serve soup.
This would not be a bad idea if the soup in question was some sort of dessert, such as a pudding or fruit.
But Aldi proposes serving asparagus, a plant that, to put it charitably, should not be served with chocolate. And there's more.
We all know a**holes. And, at some point, we're the a**hole in someone's story about some a**hole they met.
What makes an a**hole? By that I mean the person, not the anatomical feature. Researchers at the University of Georgia decided to find out what are the most common character traits ascribed to a**holes.
They asked 397 people to describe the single biggest a**hole that they personally knew. The researchers than arranged these traits according to the five-factor model of personality used by psychologists. A**holes tended to be high in neuroticism, low in openness, high in extraversion, low in agreeableness, and low in conscientiousness.
79% of identified a**holes are male and had an average age of 43, and 35% were current co-workers, bosses, family members, friends, or romantic partners, whereas 50% were former holders of those positions.
Getting ready for the arrival of a baby is a big job. Although my wife insists that childbearing fell heavier on her than me, I can tell you that preparing for fatherhood is no small task. There's a lot do, what with setting up a nursery and buying appropriate gear and such.
Why not outsource some of those tasks? Or at least one of the more difficult and time consuming ones: coming up with a name for the baby. Do yourself a favor and hire Taylor A. Humphrey, a professional in the field of baby naming.
You might think that choosing a baby name is an easy task. But you thought that installing a new septic tank was easy and look how that turned out. Leave the big jobs up to the professionals.
The New York Post describes Humphrey's business. There's high demand for quality baby names and this consultant has a stash of the best. In 2020, 100 customers paid enough to give her an income of $150,000. She interviews her customers, digging into their family and personal histories to select a personalized baby name that reflects their lives and family traditions.
I see a lot of potential for this field. I should talk to Neatorama owner Alex about selling quality and high priced baby names at the NeatoShop.
Australian comedian Adam Hills is supposed to have top billing in this act, but the sign language interpreter steals the show. Her name is Catherine King and she is a master of her craft. Her ability to translate with not only her hands, but her entire body permits her to imitate accents that Hills uses. King's physical accents are perfect, as you can see as she switches between Dutch, French, Australian and Yorkshire movements.
I gather that King is Hills's regular interpreter. In this video of a more recent show, he introduces her and teaches the audience how to interact with a deaf performer.
Content warning: NSFW language (oral and gestural) in both videos. The sign for "wanker" is exactly what you'd expect it to be.
Blind soccer was developed in Spain in the 1920s. The rules are complicated, but they permit a spirited game with demanding challenges for athletes.
All of the players are blindfolded, except for the goalies and, for each time, a guide who stands behind the opposing team's goal and shouts suggestions to the players. The ball makes a sound when it moves and players have to say "voy", which is Spanish for "go" when moving toward the ball (or where they think the ball is).
It would be interesting to see similar adaptive versions for other sports, such as stock car racing, paintball, and field hockey.
WDSU News reports that a man in the Metairie neighborhood of New Orleans developed an inventive menthod to prevent thieves from breaking into his fancy Chevy Silverado: he rigged a flashbang to detonate if someone broke in.
A flashbang is an explosive device that triggers a temporarily blinding flash of light and a loud noise. Such devices stun and disorient people who are nearby.
The anonymous owner told reporters that his truck had been broken into frequently in the past. He was determined to find an effective way to deter thieves.
New Orleans police expressed their concern about the use of explosives to stop robberies.
Letters of Note is a blog that features historically significant, unusual, or sometimes amusing letters exchanged between people. A few days ago, it shared the funny correspondence between Justin Lee of Auckland, New Zealand and the national police force.
Lee received a ticket for speeding. When was he driving 100 KPH on a public road? On June 23, 1974. That was also, coincidentally, the date of his birth.
Lee wrote a letter protesting this ticket. He does not remember the date of his birth, so he asked his mother if she remembered him driving too quickly, or even driving, on that date:
[…] I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that – coincidentally – I was born that day!!
Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o’clock in the evening on that day in Porirua, which is not far from Wellington […]
For me to have traveled from Porirua to the foot of the Bombay Hills just out of Auckland by six thirty, I would had to have crawled into the first car in the hospital parking lot and headed for Auckland at around 1,000 km/h. For this reason, it is entirely possible that the constable who clocked me back in 1974 was holding his laser equipment upside down and instead of doing 116 km/h as per the infringement notice, it is more likely that I was doing 911 km/h.
Lee adds that his Nissan Bluebird, a robust and reliable car, was not, unlike Doc Brown's Delorean in Back to the Future, equipped with time travel accessories, making it even more unlikely that it was indeed his car that was recorded by police radar equipment.
You can read all of Lee's letter and the police response at Letters of Note.
Patricia Brennan, a biologist, specializes in animal genitalia, especially female genitalia. She began her exploration of this specialty when she observed the corkscrew-shaped penis of the great tinamou, a bird native to the Costa Rican rainforest. About 3% of bird species have penises, most often shaped like corkscrews. What was less well known prior to Brennan's work was what the receiving female genitals of various animals are shaped like and why.
Her work is the subject of a new article in Scientific American. It includes a lengthy exploration of duck vaginas, which are the most diverse vaginas among birds. The typical duck vagina is a "penis rejection machine" that requires the corkscrew penis to navigate complexly spiralled folds with inner pockets to trap unwanted sperm before it reaches the interior. Mating is enormously difficult and requires the cooperation of the female duck to achieve full penetration.
Brennan looked at mammals as well as birds. She learned that a dolphin clitoris is larger than a tennis ball. Why? It's because dolphins engage in sexual behaviors for pleasure as well as reproduction. It's possible that female dolphins may choose mates based on their ability to stimulate their clitorises effectively.
Why are you just learning these facts now? The author of the article, Rachel E. Gross, explains that biology, a male-dominated field, tends to be overly focused on penises and other aspects of the male, giving less attention to females. This bias can be traced back to Charles Darwin himself, whose Victorian moral sentiments avoided discussions of female sexuality and sex for purposes other than reporduction. Leave Darwin aside when you explore the wild world of animal genitalia.
Would you like to have your own Higgins boat? Very few of the 23,398 LCVPs built by the Allies during World War II survive to this day, but you can own a very similar and, in fact, improved landing craft. Hard Drive Marine, a boat builder in Bellingham, Washington, manufactures practical, civilian-use landing craft for people who need to land in places without docking facilities.
Among the company's innovations is the Maxgate, which is an articulated landing gate that drives spikes into the beach, then pulls the entire boat forward. After disembarking people and equipment, just reverse the system to push the beached craft back into the water.
