Jaceatoney

When mom tries to jump up onto a window sill and fails, her kittens’ flight instinct instantly (and adorably) kicks in…

(via Tastefully Offensive)

If you’re curious to know which Disney character most reflects your Myers-Briggs personality, you’re in luck. Pinterest user Galschjodt went through the trouble of identifying two Disney characters for each personality type from the famed psychology tool…

Weather Channel reporter Jim Cantore was in the middle of a live segment from the College of Charleston in South Carolina Tuesday night when a student came running right at him. Without missing a beat, Cantore moved to defend himself, delivered swift justice, and then carried on as if nothing happened…

(via The Daily What)

For a few minutes, a couple weeks ago, a quiet farm in Northern Italy became a scene of complete insanity as a boulder that had careened down the mountain behind the farm barreled through the barn like it was constructed of no more than toothpicks, leaving it utterly demolished…

This has happened before. But not for a very long time. Standing as a testament to the possibility of a massive rock falling off the mountain, the rock in foreground of this picture has been in the field for years…

Another rock broke free at the same time as the one that ruined the barn, but it came to a stop just barely shy of the farmhouse.

(via NPR)

Despite the thoroughness of the wreckage, no one was hurt in this bizarre accident.

Dutch newspaper Volkskrant recently released a funny “retrospective,” supposedly showing how bad French President François Hollande was at shaking hands with other leaders over the course of 2013…

Let’s look at those again…

Of course, it’s possible that these pics are selected to make him look silly. Shocking that a newspaper would do that, I know, but that’s what the evidence suggests…

So perhaps he knows how to shake hands after all. That bodes well for France, but it’s not nearly as funny.

(via Boing Boing, French Huffington Post)

A Taurus wagon demonstrates perfectly…

(via Reddit)

(via Mrs. Maria Matthiessen on This American LIfe)

Two Cirque du Soleil performers training on a teeter board…

Related…

If you feel like being astonished, watch this impossibly amazing balancing act

A group of about 10 chamois run along a mountainside in the French Alps trying to escape an oncoming avalanche. Several of them outrun it while the rest seem to give up and accept their frightening fate.

But then…

Related…

13 pictures of crazy goats on cliffs

Two guys pose with some big fish they just caught, when all of a sudden…

(via Tastefully Offensive)

Does a sponge absorb mercury?

(via Laughing Squid)

Selections from Honest Slogans…

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Previously: 8 logos of major brands redesigned to be more honest

(via Tastefully Offensive)

A couple weeks ago Redditor Dallin Smith posted this picture of his friend sitting in a chair that Dallin made out of retired climbing rope…

The chair is bolted to the rock 10 feet over the ledge of a 360-foot cliff. He and his friends hiked/climbed up the backside of the mountain to reach the precipice and then rappelled down to their insane chair.

Here are some follow-up pictures he posted for the thousands of people who saw his first pic and were interested in more…

After his pics were seen a couple million times, he ended up having to take the chair down and it is now in a much less spectacular location — his garage — as he considers what to do with it. He’s leaning towards auctioning it off on eBay.

The folks at Pine Tree Apple Orchard in White Bear Lake, MN have a makeshift but creatively effective way to see where they’re going as they drive their mower through the tall corn to form their corn maze…

John and Bill share the role of driver with John operating the pedals while Bill stands on a ladder steering with a length 2×4 that’s jury-rigged to the steering wheel.

A hunter filming a couple of bears on the ground below suddenly comes face-to-face with one of them…

(PG-13 language at the end)

When a load of ships need to be shipped or when an oil rig has been built but needs to travel to its permanent location, the Blue Marlin gets called. The enormous ship can carry 75,000 tons.

Thus, we see in the picture below that it can hold more than 20 regular sized barges….

And here we see it hauling the largest offshore structure in the world, BP’s Thunder Horse oil rig, which the Blue Marlin carried 16,000 miles from Korea to the Gulf of Mexico…

Sometimes, the ship gets a little break and only carries “small” oil rigs…

…or submarines…

…or a destroyer…

…or a couple of minesweepers…

…or a seafaring radar system.

Nothing this ship is hired to transport is small enough to be loaded with any crane, so the Blue Marlin’s deck is designed to be submersible. When its ballast tanks are filled with water, the weight sinks the deck 43 feet under the surface. The freight is then floated over the deck and the ballast tanks are emptied, causing them to resurface and lift the load out of the water.

In the photo below, the deck is submerged as the Blue Marlin offloads an oil rig…

This is all, obviously, highly-specialized and astronomically expensive work, but that doesn’t mean that there is any shortage of jobs for the Blue Marlin. There is so much demand, in fact, that the company that owns Blue Marlin is currently building an even bigger transport ship that will carry up to 110,000 tons.

(via The Daily Mail, Wikipedia)

In a series of maps titled Beyond “Soda, Pop, or Coke”, Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics, depicts differences in vocabulary and pronunciations across the United States as documented in the data collected with linguist Bert Vaux’s “Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes“…

Of course, it includes the classic question of what to call fizzy sugar water…

…but it also includes over 120 other interesting questions, many of which you wouldn’t even think to take note of.

Here are a few…

(via Business Insider)

A silly bit of Russian ingenuity…

The curious and creative source of this music makes listening to it pleasantly endurable (though there’s really no need to watch the whole video — you’ll get the gist after half a minute)…

(via b3ta)

A new fishing kayak was released today called the Predator (top), which appears to be Old Town's answer to Hobie's popular Pro Angler model. Both yaks are part of a trend toward bigger, more comfortable fishing kayaks that trade range and speed for customizable versatility. Both the Predator and the Pro Angler feature highly stable multi-hull designs, extra-wide beams, and adjustable, removable seats that emphasize angler comfort (they look almost like deck chairs). Both are great kayaks for big-bodied anglers, those who want to stand up while fishing, and those who need lots of cargo space for carrying livewells, coolors, and other bulky gear. Both boats feature slip-resistant decking as well as mounting plates that let you attach rod holders, GPS mounts, or other accessories without having to drill holes in your hull. Both were designed to accomodate trolling motors. 

Which kayak is better? I've not yet fished from either boat, but at first glance note three major differences between the Predator and the Pro Angler. In the Pro Angler's favor: Hobie's patented Mirage Drive lets you pedal your way across the water, leaving your hands free to rig rods, jig while trolling, or send text messages to your buds about all the fish you're catching, all without slowing down. It's an amazing technology that makes a huge difference in the number of fish you catch. In the Predator's favor: The 12-foot Old Town boat weighs just 68 pounds, which is 30 pounds lighter (and two inches narrower) than the 12-foot Pro Angler model. This makes the Predator a lot easier to transport than the Pro Angler, which can be a real challenge to get onto a roof rack. Also, at a $1,199 MSRP the Predator costs less than half of what you pay for a Pro Angler.

Find details for both boats below:

Old Town Predator MX

Length: 12 feet
Width: 34 inches
Weight: 68 pounds
Max Capacity: 375-400 pounds
MSRP: $1,199

Hobie Pro Angler 12

Length: 12 feet
Width: 36 inches
Max Capacity: 500 pounds
Weight: 98 pounds
MSRP: $2,849

In this promo for Jim Gaffigan’s book Dad Is Fat, we see first hand why ”Jim is the best dad in the world!”…

If this doesn’t make you smile today, you need to go back to bed…

(via Voices)

When in doubt, be a patriot…

(via Reddit)

About a year ago, Chaos Life posted a kama sutra of sleeping couples and have now come out with a second list of creative co-sleeping arrangements. Here are both installments…

(via Laughing Squid)

New Zealand might just be one of the best places on earth to sight fish for huge wild trout. It's more like hunting than fishing there.

The fish you see here is legitimately my largest, wild, river-caught trout on a fly rod. It was ten pounds almost exactly and was caught on the south island of New Zealand.

In NZ they typically measure trout by weight and not by length, like many of us here do. Here's the funny thing...New Zealand uses the Metric system, but every Kiwi we ran into used pounds to measure their fish. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why the rest of the country went with metric measurements while anglers used the imperial system. Then I thought about it a little harder. This fish would have been about 4.5 kilograms. I simply think they use pounds because it just sounds bigger.

Anglers are a funny bunch and deal with fish sizes in many different ways. Anyone run into this phenomenon or anything like it anywhere else?

I've mentioned in this space in the past that "River Monsters" is not my favorite show. I think that's because I'm too into fishing, and look at it with an angler's eye instead of the eye of non-fisher folk who tune in purely to be entertained. My biggest gripe was always that the fish made out to be man-eating "monsters" are no monsters at all. Apparently, I'm not the only one that felt this way, because writer Kyle Hill over at Scientific American recently published an open letter to Animal Planet about how he can't stand the "demonization" of these fish. And guess what? Host Jeremy Wade himself answered.

You can read the entire letter from Hill, plus Wade's response here. But just for a point/counterpoint highlight:

Hill: Here is a list of the descriptive words you chose to use in episode titles for River Monsters: killer, man-eater, assassins, flesh-eaters, demon, death ray, horror, predator, mutilator, flesh ripper, chainsaw predator, electric executioner, slayer, mauler, face ripper, killer torpedo, slasher. I understand that the show takes unexplained deaths and attacks and investigates them, but you are turning these typically harmless fish into actual monsters. 

Wade: ...people should have a healthy fear of these fish — in certain circumstances. But this is not the same thing as demonizing them. The fact that I put the fish back into the water conveys a very strong message, which most of the audience instinctively understand. I say this because out of all the hundreds of mails I’ve received, only a handful have been along the lines of: “Why did you put that man-eating fish back in the water?”

It's a pretty interesting exchange. Let me know what you think.

If today’s international boundaries existed two or three hundred million years ago…

(Click the pic for a bigger version.)

(via Reddit)

A roadside shrimp vendor in Baton Rouge jumped in front of a truck to try to stop a guy who stole his sign. The sign snatcher didn’t stop, so the shrimp seller ended up going for a ride on the hood of the vehicle. Then this happened…

It turns out that the driver was on his way to deliver this guy to a police station anyway. Apparently, at their destination the two men and the police worked it all out. No one was charged for anything.

(via WBRZ, Reddit)