Kara Jean

athousandmilesaday: ANTOINE MARCHALOT

Three Pancake Tortoises have hatched at Gladys Porter Zoo in Texas. The first tortoise began to pip on March 31st, followed by two more hatchlings on April 1st and 10th. 

Found on rocky hills and savannas of east Africa, Pancake Tortoises have unusually flat and thin shells. These flexible and agile tortoises are excellent climbers, and escape from predation by fleeing or squeezing into tight crevices instead of hiding in their shells. Due to habitat loss and poaching, they are listed as a vulnerable species by the IUCN.  

Photo credits: Gladys Porter Zoo

In the wild, Pancake Tortoises live in isolated groups, and many individuals may be found sharing the same rocky crevice. Males compete for females during the breeding seaon in January and February, and nesting occurs in July and August. Females generally lay one egg at a time, but may lay several eggs over the course of a few months. In captivity, females will breed year-round, with an incubation period of four to six months.  The tiny young are independent as soon as they hatch.

im in nebraska

pictureboxinc: Sun Ra on location in California for Space is the Place,early 1970s

ucresearch: video (footage shot by NASA and ESA using the Cassini spacecraft)

pappubahry: Eruption of the Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, photographed by New Horizons, 1 March 2007, during its gravity-assist Jupiter flyby on its way to Pluto.  I’ve brightened the pictures so that some detail on the darker part of Io is clearer.

The gif covers about 8 minutes of real time.  If you count pixels and look up Io’s diameter, it looks like the plume’s “only” being thrown up to an altitude of 200km or so.  But in fact the volcano is in the opposite hemisphere to the one we see here (albeit at a high latitude of about 67 degrees), and the plumes are reaching a height of over 300km.

There is much more detail about this volcano at the Gish Bar Times blog.

gk2nist: George Herriman - Krazy Kat July 11, 1939

This thing —

to motivate the lazy Poors to become better parents, Stacey Campfield (R-HardKnoxville) has introduced a bill that would cut Temporary Assistance to Needy Families benefits by up to 30% if children fail to make “satisfactory academic progress”

— by this guy, is busy advancing through the Tennessee Lege. Some Democrats are like “meh,” but other Democrats are like “eh.” The state’s Department of Human Services does not oppose the bill to stop feeding children if they are dumb.

[KnoxNews]

wonder-junkie:

1. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante And Virgil In Hell, 1850
2. Johann Henry Fuseli, Sin Pursued by Death, 1794-1796
3. Johann Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, circa 1782
4. Francisco de Goya, Witches in the Air, 1797-1798
5. Louis Boulanger, Les Fantômes, 1829
6. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, Circa 1880
7. Eugène Grasset, Trois Femmes et Trois Loups, 1892
8. Eugene Delecroix, Illustration from Goethe's Faust, 1828
9. Odilon Redon, La Mort: C'est moi qui te rends serieuse; enlaçons-nous (Death: It Is I Who Makes You Serious; Let Us Embrace) from La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) (plate XX), 1896
10. Jean Delville, Idol of Perversity, 1891
11. Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx (Der Kuss der Sphinx), 1895
12. Paul Gauguin, Madame le Mort, 1891
13. Julien Adolphe Duvovelle, Crâne aux yeux exorbités et mains agrippées à un mur, 1904
14. Cyanotype by Charles-François Jeandel
15. Anonymous spirit photograph, 1910
16. Hans Bellmer, The Doll (face and knife), 1935  
17. Still from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, 1922
18. Arnold Böcklin, Shield with Medusa's Head, 1897
19. Paul Dardé, Eternelle douleur (Eternal Pain), 1913

lustik: AMELIE VON WULFFEN - Alex Zachary Peter Currie

Alan Taylor offers a gallery highlighting the Strange Beauty of Salt. Previously: Dead Sea Salt Formations.

turbofolk: Ilustracion para el tema Costa Samiengo de Szentes incluido en el recopilatorio de Seara Records

animationsmears: DuckTales - “The Golden Fleece” (1987)

RIVAL TURF

Work It

In the old days, Mars was peopled by one vast thinking vegetable, and the Moon was peopled by stick-wielding bat-men and moth-winged moon maidens.

From the Smithsonian Institute Image Collections:

This portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the "discovery of life on the moon." In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons.

The first order of business for Earthlings? Enslave the Moon men and slaughter the Moon animals!

Other discoveries made in the moon from Sigr. Herschel (Via Meine Kleine Fabrik)

In 1910, the Seminole Indians lived in the Florida Everglades, just 50 years after fighting a guerrilla war against the U.S. government. Recently discovered photos give a rare glimpse into the tribe's hidden past.

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Remember just a few scant months ago when we got mad at Missouri? Oh, sorry. We’ve probably been mad at Missouri for one thing or another several times of late, because Missouri. But one time we got mad at Missouri because they let horrible private vendors run their school lunches, and said horrible private vendor fired a worker for having the goddamn temerity to feed one of the urchins an actual nutritious lunch instead of the poor-kid-all-dairy-cheese-and-milk lunch? We thought we were pretty much at peak outrage over horrible things that could be done to poor schoolchildren as far as holding their meager food hostage. NOPE.  Attleboro Massachusetts goes H.A.M. and makes sure that kids get no fucking food at all:

As many as 25 students at Coelho Middle School were denied meals or told to throw their lunches away Tuesday because they could not pay or their pre-paid accounts did not contain enough money, school officials said today…

Parents said they were told by their children that some pupils in the cafeteria line had already picked up their lunch and were told at the checkout they had to throw it away.

Victoria Greaves, 11, a fifth grader at Coelho, said a cashier told her to throw away her lunch because there was not enough money in her account. She said she threw her meal away and got nothing to eat.

What is this we don’t even. These people LITERALLY took the already-existing food out of poor kids’ hands by making them throw it away. How is this even a thing, America?? There’s a predictable circular firing squad about how it wasn’t the school’s fault it was the vendor’s fault it wasn’t the vendor’s fault it was the school’s fault, but you know what? We do not care! We give no fucks whatsoever for that explanation, because someone, somewhere, figured that the right thing to do was to pry food away from poor kids’ warm not-dead hands, because wasting food is more better than giving kids food if they can’t pay.

We don’t even have anything else to say about this, snark-wise, because terrible reality has far outstripped our abilities to hyperbolize, and that’s saying something. Can we just say, though: Why can’t we send vendors like this to, you know, the Pentagon? “What’s that, your pre-paid account for fighter jets has run out and you’re borrowing money to pay for them? NO FIGHTER JETS FOR YOU. THROW THEM AWAY.” And this way, only lawn ornaments go hungry.

[Sun Chronicle]

enzantengyou: ブラックサタン首領の正体

——comix: by Hicham Amrani