by Grania
Good morning!
Jerry is back in the USA and sleeping off some jetlag,
To start off the day:
Good morning! Wishing you all a peaceful day 🥰 pic.twitter.com/0QVxJWwhq0
— James Rhodes (@JRhodesPianist) November 13, 2018
(Debussy’s Clair de Lune if you’re interested.)
In history today:
1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, is published in the USA.
1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days.
1918 – Czechoslovakia becomes a republic.
1921 – Foundation of the Communist Party of Spain.
1971 – Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars.
1978 – France conducts the Aphrodite nuclear test as 25th in the group of 29, 1975–78 French nuclear tests.
1995 – “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs.
Today’s birthdays :
1920 – Mary Greyeyes, the first First Nations woman to join the Canadian Armed Forces (d. 2011)
1922 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egyptian politician and diplomat, 6th Secretary General of the United Nations (d. 2016)
1953 – Dominique de Villepin, Moroccan-French lawyer and politician, 167th Prime Minister of France
1954 – Condoleezza Rice, American political scientist, academic, and politician, 66th United States Secretary of State
1972 – Lara Giddings, Papua New Guinean-Australian politician, 44th Premier of Tasmania
1982 – Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai
There are ominous overtones from Dobrzyń this morning.
Hili: This bodes ill.A: What bodes ill?Hili: A light rain from the clear sky.
Hili: To źle wróży.
Ja: Co źle wróży?
Hili: Mały deszcz z jasnego nieba.
And from Twitter today (ish): [Notes: if there is a white arrow, click on it. If there are graphic pics included in the tweet, please click on it too]
All this means is that screech owls grow up seriously triggered about everything.
Screech owls capture snakes and bring them back to their nest alive.
The snakes live in the nest and eat insect larvae. Nests with snakes have chicks that grow faster and die less.https://t.co/8j5rkcmCKs pic.twitter.com/2bzk4jXGUX
— Gabriel Foley (@birdnirdfoley) November 13, 2018
Whimsical Twitter
This cotton candy guy's wizardry is actually a brilliant application of the dynamics of vortices in fluids https://t.co/16o3stIhe3 pic.twitter.com/nrgafttGU2
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 12, 2018
In the immortal words of Matthew: Argggh!
Deep Blue is one of, if not the, largest great white shark ever caught on camera. This movie was shot by researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico in 2015 https://t.co/VCvZjhGZ2M pic.twitter.com/yU88xljgFW
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 13, 2018
Did you know Twitter:
Strange but true: According to the rock record, Tasmania was once attached to the Western United States! (This was perhaps a billion years before there was such a thing as the United States) https://t.co/G3GfnI76o2
— David Grinspoon (@DrFunkySpoon) November 13, 2018
The Writer’s Lament Twitter
Tfw you’ve written 25k words too many and now you have to boil it all down or the book will be so expensive even I wouldn’t buy it. Sigh.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) November 13, 2018
Not exactly physics Twitter
Only thing weirder than a non-Newtonian fluid… https://t.co/rRAG7Vi1OV
— Earthling (@ziyatong) November 13, 2018
The natural world is amazing Twitter
Insect of the day: what male mayflies lack in the longevity department they more than make up for in the eyes department. 📷 Matthias Lenke https://t.co/UEVKkPth1b pic.twitter.com/QqK5lKbYDe
— Ross Piper (@DrRossPiper) November 12, 2018
https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1062434795982974976
Adorable dogs Twitter
Most independent dog ever 😂🎾 pic.twitter.com/EbkB8wNJD1
— The Dodo (@dodo) November 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/CUTEFUNNYANIMAL/status/1062405508420812800
https://twitter.com/FluffSociety/status/1062057538110148608
The human race is doomed Twitter
1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi pic.twitter.com/5EAuiJhmXY
— Kate Julian (@katejulian) November 13, 2018
Silly Twitter
https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1062367130610556929
https://twitter.com/JohnBick4/status/1062132506646978563
Striking blows for Freedom Twitter
Twitter, ladies and gentlemen: pic.twitter.com/uGYITZCZWe
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) November 12, 2018
Cats are purrfect Twitter
https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1062324617270910977
Be excellent to each other.#WorldKindnessDay pic.twitter.com/l1qyR1SJ3y
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) November 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1062242623921029120
Current events Twitter
Everything about this is wonderful… pic.twitter.com/ydiBa6Vzpt
— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) November 13, 2018
As the Tweet author notes: Also remember that when this woman was born, women still couldn’t even vote in France & Germany… That wouldn’t happen until 1945 in France. (1918 in Germany.)
And finally, a baby elephant because they make everything better.
Baby elephant 😭
I want one
Retweet ❤️ pic.twitter.com/iReVBfTE0p
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) November 14, 2018
H/t: Matthew, Blue
What I would like to know is, who is the idiot filming Deep Blue.?
She’d better be in another shark cage.
I don’t think a shark cage would help if Deep Blue wanted you.
“Screech owls capture snakes and bring them back to their nest alive. The snakes live in the nest and eat insect larvae. Nests with snakes have chicks that grow faster and die less.”
Wow! That’s amazing. I presume those must be quite small snakes.
cr
What puzzles me is, why would the snake stick around an owl nest?
All the insect larvae there are to eat perhaps.
I found it hard to believe, until I clicked on the screen shot and read that the snakes are “blind snakes” http://www.reptilesmagazine.com/Blind-Snakes/,
https://www.birdnote.org/show/blind-snakes-and-screech-owls; and indeed, they are very small, and perfectly evolved to serve this purpose.
I’m guessing a screech owl nest must be a constant source of bugs for the snake to consume. Perhaps these snakes think they’ve died and gone to heaven.
That glass walkway in China – somebody has a really sadistic sense of humour.
But also, there’s some very fancy technology involved, to detect the pressure and generate the illusions of cracks.
(Personally, you wouldn’t catch me on a glass walkway like that, ever, regardless of fake cracks).
cr
ditto
Yeah, that’s a practical joke that I think goes too far.
Well, since China is working on a nation-wide monitoring system to score their citizenry’s “behavior”, this might be a sardonic test. If they get scarred, it means they don’t trust their government. Naughty, naughty, no travel for you!
“scarred” and “scared” both work here. 🙂
Thank you Grania! Some great snippets & I will miss the dog posts 🙂
Yes, thanks for filling in during Jerry’s absence. You always do an exceptional job. And like Michael, I thank you for the dog tweets that will disappear until Jerry’s next peregrination. 🙂
Really enjoyed this post Grania, as always. Excellent Twitter finds.
Walkway reminds me of the Capilano suspension bridge: https://www.capbridge.com/.
(It is featured in “Silent Killer”, an episode of the original MacGyver, for example.)