April 2010
95 posts
Baseball metaphors for sex →
March 2010
86 posts
“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
– Law of the instrument aka Maslow’s hammer (via isbower)
June and Jennifer Gibbons. →
June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963; Jennifer died in 1993), identical twins who grew up in Britain, are a curious case involving psychology and language. The twin sisters were inseparable, and had speech impediments that made them difficult for people outside their immediate family to understand.
When they turned 14, after a succession of therapists had tried unsuccessfully to get...
a brief interlude
hey guys, just wanted to thank those who recommended (hint hint hint cough hint) us, who are “ypaul, seananigans, ...
Year 10,000 problem →
The Year 10,000 problem (also known as the Y10K problem or the deca-millennium bug) is the class of all potential software bugs that would emerge when the need to express years with five digits arises.
The Long Now Foundation is attempting to foster the custom of writing years with five digits, so that the year 2000 would be written as “02000”. This would preempt the Year 10,000...
List of songs about California →
(seananigans)
“All of California and Everyone Who Lives There Stinks”
“Cali Iz Active”
“California Revisited (Everyone I Meet Is from California)”
“Kali4nia”
“Southern California Wants To Be Western New York”
“North Dakota cuisine includes Knoephla soup: a thick, stew-like chicken soup...”
– North Dakota - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I love reading about regional cuisines of America. So many things I’ve never heard of…
(via dkeen)
Leck mich im Arsch →
(via majorbuildings)
Leck mich im Arsch (literally “Lick me in the arse”) is a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with lyrics in German.
Sung by six voices as a three-part round, it is thought to be a party piece for his friends.
Rat king (folklore) →
Rat kings are phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, ice, excrement or simply knotted. The animals reputedly grow together while joined at the tails. The numbers of rats that are joined together can vary, but naturally rat kings formed from a larger number of rats are rarer.
Specimens of purported rat kings...
Elephant intelligence →
The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks and tried to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream but then the entire herd fell incredibly silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to...
Cryptophasia →
(via sesquipedalia)
Cryptophasia is a peculiar phenomenon of a language developed by identical and fraternal twins that only the two children could understand.
yitzytaughtme asked: What category would I put you in if I wanted to recommend you?
1 tag
South Talpatti Island →
South Talpatti Island as it was known in Bangladesh, or New Moore Island or Purbasha as it was known in India, was a small uninhabited offshore island that emerged in the Bay of Bengal in the aftermath of the Bhola cyclone in 1970 and disappeared at some later point.
Gaslighting →
Gaslighting is a form of intimidation or psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory and perception.
The classic example of gaslighting is to change things in a person’s environment without their knowledge, and to explain that they “must be imagining things” when they challenge these changes. Similarly, the Manson...
Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum →
The Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum is a food amusement park located in the Shin-Yokohama district of Kōhoku-ku, Yokohama, Japan. (The “u” in “Raumen”, referring to ramen, is intentionally spelled that way.) The museum is devoted to the Japanese ramen noodle soup and features a large recreation of Tokyo in the year Shōwa 33 (1958), the year instant noodles were invented. Within...
Weightlessness →
Russian scientists have observed differences between cockroaches conceived in space and their terrestrial counterparts. The space-conceived cockroaches grew more quickly, and also grew up to be faster and tougher.
1 tag
11th millenium and beyond →
Predicted events after year 1,000,000
10759: Lease to Guinness on St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin will come due for renegotiation.
100,000,000: In the documentary The Future Is Wild, scientists speculate that in 100,000,000 years’ time, the world will be very hot due to excess volcanic activity. Antarctica will be a lush rainforest. Creatures of this world include enormous ...
Bridget Cleary →
Bridget Cleary was an Irish woman killed by her husband in 1895. Her death is notable for several peculiarities; the stated motive for the crime was her husband’s belief that she had been abducted by fairies with a changeling left in her place; he claimed to have slain only the changeling.
Operation Midnight Climax →
The project consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York. It was established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several...
Spells in Harry Potter →
Lake Quarry Conservation Park →
Lark Quarry in Australia is the site of the world’s only known record of a dinosaur stampede. Fossilised footprints have been interpreted as a predator stalking and causing a chaotic stampede of around 150 two-legged dinosaurs.
1 tag
Small penis rule →
The “small penis rule” is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article in 1998:
“…For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small...
List of fictional pigs →
“On 10 March at 3:00 p.m. Chernenko fell into a coma, and at 7:20 p.m. he died as...”
– Konstantin Chernenko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via dkeen)
Ignacio Anaya →
Ignacio Anaya (died 1975), also known by the shortened form of his first name as Nacho Anaya, was the inventor of nachos.
dascenzo:
“The International Day of the Nacho is observed chiefly by eating nachos.”
Family tree of the Greek Gods →
Matsusaka beef
citationneeded:
Although not officially part of the Matsusaka beef standard, it is widely known that some cows also receive “happy endings” after their massages, which is believed to stimulate blood flow and improve marbling texture.
Link (Thanks, Ann)
Turritopsis nutricula →
Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.
Theoretically, this cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it biologically immortal, although in...
List of fictional countries →
(via zell721)
Raymond Robinson (Green Man) →
Raymond “Ray” Robinson (29 October 1910 – 11 June 1985) was a severely disfigured man whose years of nighttime walks made him into a figure of urban legend in western Pennsylvania. Robinson was so badly injured in a childhood electrical accident that he could not go out in public without fear of creating a public panic, so he went for long walks after dark.
U.S. color-coded war plans →
During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States military developed a number of Color-coded War Plans to outline potential U.S. strategies for a variety of hypothetical war scenarios.
War Plan Black was a plan for war with Germany.
War Plan Orange was a plan for war against Japan.
War Plan Red was a plan for war against Britain & Canada.
War Plan Indigo involved an occupation of Iceland.
War...
Great Pacific Garbage Patch →
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N. Estimates on size range from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi) (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean), or up to “twice...
Limerence →
(via impasto)
Limerence refers to an involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person. The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov to describe the ultimate, near-obsessive form of romantic love.
List of songs about killers →
List of awareness ribbons →
dkeen:
Makes me think of the Dead Fetus Twin Awareness week from South Park. Actual ribbons:
Silver for Congenital cytomegalovirus awareness
Teal for Agoraphobia awareness
Orange for Animal protection awareness
Pink and Blue for Genital integrity awareness
White for Multiple Hereditary exostoses awareness
Blue for chronic fatigue awareness
Pica (disorder) →
(via taskmaster)
Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g. metal (coins, etc), clay, coal, soil, feces, chalk, paper, soap, mucus, ash, gum, etc.) or an abnormal appetite for some things that may be considered foods, such as food ingredients (e.g., flour, raw potato, raw rice, starch, ice cubes, salt)
Few studies have been conducted to...
