Myth busters hovercraft

check out the clip here.

Hoverboard take two

discussion herehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

and instructions on how to make one HERE using magnets or HERE using a vacuum cleaner blower.

or you could just use a leaf blower...


instructions here.

Attention scientists

Happy Ground hog day

NatGeo Article HERE or watch this:



Well, I knew a groundhog wasn't a beaver.

And I knew it was also called a "woodchuck". What I learned is that it is also called a "marmot".
and no, it's not a big thing in the US, but was made popular with this movie:



and if you catch one, here are some yummie recipes:

Pray for those who hurt you

Father Z has posted a (tongue in cheek) prayer for internet thugs:

From faceless Facebook admin drones, spare us O Lord.
From tweeting Twitter idiots, spare us O Lord.
From loony Wikipedia liars, spare us O Lord.
From from heart-hardened spammers, spare us O Lord...

and then there is a prayer for protection against the demons that lurk in the land of computerdom:

From server memory resource difficulties, spare us O Lord.
From rss feed problems, spare us O Lord.
From DOS attacks, spare us O Lord.
From power outages and surges, spare us O Lord.
From viruses, trojan horses, and all manner of snares, Lord save us.

Factoid of the day

From a book review of "Soldering for God: Christianity and the Roman Legions"

Displaying a masterful command of the literary, archaeological, and numismatic evidence, Shean opens with a look at the social, moral, and religious status of the warrior in early societies, and goes on to examine the religious experience of the Roman Army. He then looks at the early Church and its relationship to the army and military service. Shean shows that, despite modern attempts to portray early Christians as pacifists, there was no inherent moral objection to military service in the early Church, noting, for example, that the many soldier-martyrs were persecuted for refusing to take part in pagan rituals, not for refusing to fight.

One doubts that Christian Romans fighting the barbarians were so naive to think the Huns or the various Goths could be stopped by a nasty letter, and when a country "turns the other cheek" it is the unarmed civilians who suffer the most...

Hail Fredonia!

Quick, before the copyright cops find out: DuckSoup



the story of a country going broke whose new president is appointed by the one they owe money to...

Watch what you tweet

Times of India reports on two Europeans deported for tweeted about planning to destroy America.

Instructive from the flap is a warning to social media schmoozers to refrain from casual talk about security issues. US security agencies have made no secret of the fact that they are developing plans -- and apps -- to scour the Internet for any potential threat to national security. Plans include trolling social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, looking for profiles and patterns that add up to threats.

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here, there have been bombs place on airplanes, so they do two or three checks of everyone going through our airports.

However, given the amount of illicit drugs going in and out, one suspects that someone is not checking everything. (Manila is a transit center for drug smugglers).

There is a worry that there are groups who would bomb to cause trouble, and they downplay these threats and incidents (blaming them on criminal activity, where the criminals are terror groups raising money by crime).

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we have gotten "headsup" about security from the embassy, but in this area the main danger is ordinary criminal, unless you get shot while talking business with the relatives of the wrong politician, like our nephew.

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They are filming the latest "Bourne Identity" in Manila, and for the last week our news program had "headsup" for which roads will be blocked off for the filming.
and no, MattDamon isn't in this one.

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the Russians are coming the Russians are coming!

actually, three Russian Naval ships are here making a good will visit.

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China is threatening the Philippines with sanctions over the Spratlys if they get too close to the USA.

Most of the US press makes it out as if President Obama is causing the trouble, and that China is "paranoid" about hostile powers encircling her, but when China starts making noise that she owns the Spratlys because Bronze age pottery might have been made by China has been found on some of the unoccupied islands, and when China starts putting military people on these unoccupied islands and China starts threatening Pinoy sailors whose families traditionally have fished in the area for hundreds of years, maybe China is the one starting the trouble.

One result is that the Phil gov't is using money much needed elsewhere to upgrade their Navy and Coast Guard.

And if you think the Philippines is angry, imagine VietNam, who once were part of China and have no desire to be gobbled up again.

and China is pushing terroritorial claims against India and Japan too....

Factoid of the day

I'm working my way through the audiobook of QuoVadis and one of the side characters is Petronius.

But the guy actually existed: Wikipedia:

Tacitus, Plutarch and Pliny the Elder describe Petronius as the elegantiae arbiter, "judge of elegance" in the court of the emperor Nero. He served as consul in the year AD 62. Later, he became a member of the senatorial class who devoted themselves to a life of pleasure, whose relationship to Nero was apparently akin to that of a fashion advisor....

and he may have been the author of the Satyricon,

Not only is he in QuoVadis but he is a character in Waltari's book The Roman...which I read so many years ago I don't remember reading about him. Waltari's best known book, the Egyptian, was made into a bad movie but is a good book about the life of Egypt during the reign of Ikhnaton.

cats and kitties oh my

Kitties and other chores keeping me and Lolo busy...four kittens being fed five times a day with a small one cc syringe is a lot of work (no, no premie babybottles here). Like babies, they have a "tongue thrust" which makes them spit out anything in the front of the mouth, so you have to place it half way in and drip it slowly. Two of the kittens figured out how to drink well, but the other two are slow and messy. One kitten is big enough to eat food, but not only won't eat food but fights when you try to feed him. Oh well.

We sent one of last year's kittens to the farm to lower the mouse population. She is half wild and is usually hiding in the spare bedroom...she is always bringing in mice or birds to eat (which we have to find and clean up) so she should be okay if she stays inside the storage area away from the dogs.


Joy and most of the staff is at the farm harvesting the dry season rice.
Theoretically we could grow a third crop, but are not sure it's worth the work and risk of it getting drenched by an early monsoon (which usually arrives in June).

Lolo is doing better the last few days: He had a bad chest infection about 3 weeks ago and left him tired and coughing but now he is getting his energy back.

LEGO LOTR

LEGOLOTR





via TORN

The Hobbit for Dummies

explained HERE
Plot

Thirteen dwarves want revenge on a dragon, so Gandalf gives them a hobbit and sends them across Middle-earth with a secret and a map. They meet goblins, elves, giant wolves, a shape-changing bear and a town on a lake. Gandalf keeps disappearing to talk to the wise people of the world while Bilbo turns out to be more than meets the eye (which isn't saying much).

Musical interlude of the day

Headlines below the fold

will nastiness by republicans lose the LDS vote?

Uncle Orson explains why not...the Democrats are worse. Sigh.

and DaveBarry instructs you on how to make your home Primary proof.

The good news is that here in the Philippines, the law mandates a short election season.
The bad news is that here, politics is a blood sport...sigh.

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Will Iran try to close the Hormuz strait to distract folks from the Syrian massacres? Strategypage Podcast discussion HERE

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works for us!

LATimes story on raising backyard Talapia in Baltimore.

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Pythons eat Wildcats ? Who wudda thot?
and racoons and rabbits and deer...

maybe they should send in a couple of Cajuns... more HERE.

or send in this guy:

Blind Fargo hunter bags alligator in Florida Everglades

Read more here: http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2012/01/he-was-aiming-for-a-deer-but-what-the-hell.html#storylink=cpy

(Via DaveBarry)

Puppies and kittens oh my

Someone threw some kittens into the garbage heap in the nearby vacant lot...

alas too small to eat on their own, so Lolo and I have to feed them with a small syringe.

The bad news is that with our dogs, who are hunters by breed, manage to kill three out of four kittens we rescue, and once in awhile even kill one of the adult cats...sigh.

-------

And Sophie, the skinny one year old white dog, had three puppies last night. One looks like Papa dog (brown) and two are white, so maybe Snuffy is the father of these two.

Caring for all the new life keeps Lolo young at heart.

Miscellaneous links

More on the Inquisition:

MariaElena of Tea of Trianon who wrote a book about the Cathars links to this article on the clerical opposition to the Inquisition and preaching against that group.

and people mix up the Papal Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition, and the witchcraft trials (which occured in Protestant areas). Indeed, witchcraft is not only in Christian cultures.... Professor Teofilo Ruiz gives a short talk here on the subject (alas, his university course podcast is locked)



the lectures on science/religion/magic course at Berkeley that I linked to earlier this week also discusses the topic, and again gives one the intellectual history behind the ideas behind the violence.

It's not a defense against these judicial star chambers, but if you don't understand history, you are condemned to repeat it
------------------------
not really related, but MariaElena has published a short essay by one of her uncles who lived in the Philippines during world war IIu a

Podcast of the week

Some podcats or program downloads from the BBC are now on their site.

• The complete In Our Time archive in audio, dating back to 1998, sorted by subject
• The complete Reith Lectures - over 60 years of lectures in audio and/or transcript
• Desert Island Discs - the complete castaway choices database was launched in April with over 500 programmes available to listen and download
• A History of the World in 100 objects - all 100 episodes in audio and transcript (podcasts here)
• Bookclub - the complete archive, browseable by author

more suggestions HERE

Nice news below the fold

Congratulations to Brian Sibley for winning the BBC Drama awards for his serialization of the Gormenghast novels for BBC4...

more about the project HERE.

since the BBC removes their programs quickly, alas, I can't find the programs to download (except via illegal P2P).


Geeks know Mr. Sibley for his dramatization of LOTR and Narnia for BBC radio...

Geek joke of the week

You just can't be too safe

Pottstown Middle School, a school in Pennsylvania, is banning the wearing of fuzzy open-top boots, including Uggs, because students have been stashing mobile phones in the footwear.

Guess we'll have to keep hiding the cellphones in our bras....

and BEWARE OF THE HAGGIS

It's not just haggis: Here it happened with KamotengKahoy


and beware of the exploding churros

like the previous post, these are from DaveBarry...

The "WAGD post of the day

The Sky is Snoring! the Sky is Snoring!

You're ready to face the first big conspiracy theory of 2012.

Just last week, citizens in the Malaysian city of Kota Samarahan reported they were kept awake two nights running because the sky was ... snoring?

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/is-haarp-making-the-skies-snore-above-malaysia-or-is-is-jay-man/story-fn5fsgyc-1226252382901#ixzz1ktvYaQ9G

Stuff below the fold plus rants

What if they gave a protest and no one noticed?

Get Religion reports on the lack of reporting of huge prolife demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco...

and they report on the controversy of "Mormon underware".
considering the ridicule I endured for wearing a simple Catholic medal in college, I don't blame them for the secrecy...
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Kathleen Hale, the last of the Bloomsbury group, has died.

The obituary includes a cheerful (?) vignette of her bohemian life that could be interpreted differently: a secretary so underpaid that she sold her hair for necessities, children forced to collect firewood and churn butter (both of which are hard work), going unclothed in chilly England where there is no central heating, and an unsupervised "lord of the flies" environment for children...

The group was just an ordinary group of snobs, anti Semites, one sided"pacifists" and useful idiots who hated rules and ordinary decent folks who follow the rules

------------------------------------


Is the Inquisition the precursor of modern totalitarianism?

Except of course they weren't that efficient, and they were established to stop the spontaneous killing of witches by neighbors, and stop genocides by governments under the guise of religion...

--------------------------
Heh: John Tyler's grandson says Newt Gingrich is a jerk.

Wikipedia on John Tyler.

Tyler...sided with the Confederate government, and won election to the Confederate House of Representatives shortly before his death.... his presidency is generally held in low esteem by historians; today he is considered an obscure president, with little presence in the American cultural memory.^[1]

(What, no quotes from Hitler's American cousins?)
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Native American population is growing...

Some of this is good news, but some is an artifact, because a lot of white folks who find they had a Cherokee great grandmother think they should have preferential treatment, stealing places from those who actually suffered discrimination in the past...

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Audiobook of the day: Edward Lear's book of nonsense.

The work includes the "Owl and the Pussycat" and a recipe for Amblongus Pie, which begins "Take 4 pounds (say 4½ pounds) of fresh ablongusses and put them in a small pipkin."

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Craft item of the day

Make your own giant origami Trojan horse.

Video of the day

A Malaysian rice company commercial for (chinese) new year.

Watch it and try not to cry.



(heads up from FR)

Hello Kitty item of the day

see more Must Have Cute

you can buy it HERE

and if you aren't into monopoly, you can buy HelloKitty Yatze and HelloKittyBingo...


and for the geeks in your life:

Klingon Monopoly is also available

Botany lesson of the day

lyrics HERE.

Factoid of the day

I'm listening to Professor Bulliet's world history(on youtube here) and he is saying that there are numerous mounds in southern Ukraine that predate ancient Mesopotemia, but that much of the archeology there is in other languages or is recent work, and of course for the layperson, there is a lot of fake stuff out there which is influence more by politics than reality.

The end of the ice age and the filling of the Black Sea in 5500 BC might have resulted from climate change...does this have anything to do with noah's flood?

and what about the drying of the climate?

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a 1996 article about this from the LATimes.

the Scythian are actually Bronze age and may be a mixed population (the Greeks called any of the horse riding "barbarians" of the area Scythian, but the real controversy is the earlier settlements in the neolithic times.

Some of this mixes up with "indo european" vs semetic racism (and don't get started with the Dravidian vs aryan origin of Harappa or the Chinese Han embarassment of having "white mummies"which are either were Indo European or Turkish in origin).

then the DNA/RNA studies are "MYGO" and getting into the act.

The "WAGD" (not) post of the day

MISSED!

A small asteroid the size of a city bus zoomed between Earth and the moon's orbit Friday (Jan. 27) just days after its discovery, but it never posed a threat to our planet, NASA says.

The asteroid 2012 BX34 passed within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT).

Going where no toy has gone before

then there is this:


but this is my favorite:

Poor Dumbo

Improbable research has an article on an episode where they did a public dissection of an elephant in 1681.

youtube report HERE.

Ah, but the silliest elephant experiment was giving a male elephant LSD.

It had to do with checking if schizophrenia/psychosis was behind the amok of male elephants.

Alas, the elephant died...

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Factoid of the day

The first air war was the Turko Italian war in Libya in 1911...



yes, StrategyPage has expanded to youtube.

Jousting

I just watched a BBC video of the medieval knight Willam Marshall, and learned he got his fame and fortune by entering and winning melees and jousting tournaments (before he became famous in English politics) The video mentions lots of modern folks joust nowadays.

So, who can afford a horse and all that equipment?

No problem: Try wheelbarrow jousting:



and yes, it is narrated by the Tolkien professor...

Podcast of the week

I found two entertaining lectures by Tom Shippey on Tolkien and middle English on Swarthmore college's page.

The Roots of middle earth:

Audio [50:04m]: Download

Tolkien book to Jackson:

Audio [50:06m]: Download

there are other good lectures on the link if you like current events and modern type literature.

Minoans

Marine archeology article here

The wreck provided tangible evidence of an astonishing array of contacts and trade between the different cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East in the late Bronze Age. The Ulu Burun ship sailed at around the time that Tutankhamun ruled Egypt, and “it is far more important than Tutankhamun's tomb as a contribution to our understanding of the period”, according to Wachsmann. “This goes to the nitty gritty of the world. It's Wall Street in a ship.”

archeoblog comments:

I didn’t know that no Minoan ships had ever been discovered. Me, I’m still waiting for the rush of perfectly preserved Black Sea wrecks to come to light.

the destruction of the Minoan civilization is now thought to be due to the Santorini eruption, with the Mycenean Greeks invading and taking over. How this fits into the myth of Theusus and the Labyrinth is anyone's guess.

And another confused story is the relationship between the Minoans and the Phoenicians and the Hyksos...and some wonder if two centuries later the Trojan war caused the Bronze age collapse, with the Sea People migration and ultimately the resettlement of the Mycenean Greeks as the Philistines.

There are so many conspiracy theories about this that it may take another century or two to figure it out.

Dr. David Nieman's series on the Hyksos suggests that Minoans were part of the eastern Amorite empire. Part one of several short snips of his lecture on the Hyksos is here:



yes, it's Indiana Jones city of Tanis...

Cooking in the good old days

The FeedingAmerica webpage has a new cook book from 1803

here's an example: How to make Mead:

To make Mead.
To thirteen gallons of water, put thirty pounds of honey, boil and scum it well, then take rosemary, thyme, bay-leaves, and sweet-briar, one handful altogether, boil it an hour, put it into a tub, with a little ground malt; stir it till it is new milk warm; strain it through a cloth, and put into the tub again; cut a toast, and spread it over with good yeast, and put into the tub also; and when the liquor is covered over with yeast, put it up in a barrel: then take of cloves, mace and nutmegs, an ounce and a half; of ginger, sliced an ounce; bruise the spice, tie it up in a rag, and hang it in the vessel, stopping it up close for use.

a list of their vintage cookbooks digitalized and on line can be found HERE.

cat item of the day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Ghost ship

a modern day "flying dutchman" ghost ship found in Spain.

For more than three years she wandered the sea, devoid of a captain or crew. But last week, she was found off the coast of Spain, about 3,500 nautical miles from her home in Nantucket.The Queen Bee, a 26-foot pleasure boat, was left to drift after stormy conditions threw her passengers overboard off the coast of Nantucket on Aug. 25, 2008. The ghost boat was found 20 miles off the northern coast of Spain on Jan. 17, the US Coast Guard said today.

I was going to say this was a Bermuda Triangle mystery, but Nantucket is a bit north of that area.

:

Ship diasters take two

Does this ship look familiar?





From the UK Guardian (hat tipe DarkRoastedBlend)

Anyone who sat through Film Socialisme may have suspected that the Costa Concordia was heading for trouble. The cruise liner was the setting for the first "movement" of Jean-Luc Godard's ambitious, infuriating 2010 picture, serving as a self-conscious metaphor for western capital ploughing through choppy waters.

The "WAGD post of the day

The cruise ship disaster near Italy again raised the question of ship safety, and like the Princess of the Stars disaster, pointed to the importance of the captain and crew being trained to put safety first.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

and in the US, cruising up the beautiful coast of the Alaskan panhandle is in vogue, and Popular Mechanics muses: What would happen if a similar accident happened on one of these ships?

(Headsup via instapundit)

Well, it's been awhile since a passenger ferry had an accident in Alaska but this site lists a few, including that last major disaster: that of the steamer Princess Sophia

more at Wikipedia: which includes the controversy: because the captain hit a reef and even when rescue ship arrived refused to evacuate (waiting for high tide so they could launch the lifeboats and have rescue ships closer to the crippled ship) and then was hit by a storm that resulted in the disaster.

Film of the week

quick, before the copyright police find it:

Savannah Smiles is at Youtube. LINK

Musical interlude of the day