Today I learnt

as I supposedly said, the replica bombe machine front and back and one of the part renovated huts.

There used to be a place called 'the kingdom of kandy'.

 An actual real land.  Part of what is now sri lanka.

Lets just take a moment to imagine the land of candy...

Also imagine being the king or queen of candy...

Gosh I did not know that......I shall try to introduce those words into everyday conversation from now on...... and watch the blank stares! lol

What a Real book and a Fake book are.
A real book is an accurate transcription of jazz music. If you were a guitarist and wanted to learn how to play a jazz standard. Someone will have done a chart of it. Melody and chords and it would be in the Real Book. Now because a lot of these were still within copyright a few years back you had to furtively go to a music shop and ask out of earshot of others for a real book. You might even have been asked for a musicians union card. The sale was mot strictly legal because of copyright. So Fake books were produced with near as charts not note perfect but enough to get round existing copy right laws. Now as many of the old standards are out of copyright you can buy a legal Real book. There now aren't you pleased you know that too.....

Yes you do need to know your Norwegians to play jazz.

I was struck by the colour and general look of of the bill which is much the same as our $10 bill....... now if only I could get 20 pounds uk (sorry that squiggly thing dont appear on my keyboard) for my $10 Can bill I would be over there in a flash!

some marine animals are just perverts


In 2010, California Department of Fish and Game biologist Heather Harris and colleagues reported 19 individual cases of male sea otters trying to mate with, and often fatally injuring, harbor seal pups in the Monterey Bay, Calif. area between 2000 and 2002 alone.


Delivered in the scientific deadpan required of such papers, the Aquatic Mammals report attributes the incidents to three male sea otters “observed harassing, dragging, guarding, and copulating with harbor seals,” persisting for up to seven days after the otters killed the objects of their misguided advances. The ordeal must have been horrific for the seals. The victims that were necropsied by veterinarians had lesions around the nose, eyes, flippers, and genitals, including perforations in the vaginal and rectal tracts. A painful and confusing end for the poor pups.


Why are these male sea otters killing seals? Strange as it may seem, mating is a relatively common cause of death for female sea otters as well. Male sea otters typically grasp the female from behind and bite her face, and this rough behavior was associated with the deaths of about 11 percent of dead sea otters discovered between 2000 and 2003. Still, the attempts to mate with seals requires an explanation. The identity of a pair of repeat offenders held a clue. At least two of the sea otters had been previously held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as part of their rehabilitation program for stranded and injured otters. There was nothing obviously wrong with these rehabbed otters, but the trouble they experienced early in their lives might have made them more likely assailants.


Male sea otters compete with one another for mates. If a male can’t find a mate because of his youth or inability to chase off competitors, Harris and co-authors suggest, he might search for a “female surrogate” that may take the form of a young otter or, as in their study, seal pups. This is especially problematic in Monterey Bay, where there are more male sea otters than females. The reason for this skew in the population is unclear, but it leaves male sea otters in a bind. The rehabilitated sea otters were released into an environment of intense competition and were at a disadvantage when it came time to find a mate.


Sea otters are hardly the only marine animals to behave in ways that make us cringe. Seals themselves have been observed to cause similar kinds of trauma when groups of males mob females. But if there’s any marine vertebrate that wins the title of the squickiest, it’s dolphins.


Less like Flipper and more like the megalomaniacal King Snorky of The Simpsons, a dolphin has a permanent smile that gives off a decidedly creepy vibe. Sure, dolphins may now and then help fishermen looking to snag fish, but dolphins’ intelligence and social complexity have endowed them with a suite of behaviors that make them seem less adorable than their carefully-groomed theme park images suggest.


The salty crew of Deep Sea News has been trying to counteract the cuddly image of dolphins for years. Without a doubt, dolphins are jerks. Male bottlenose dolphins will sometimes team up to target a single female and harass her persistently, forcing her to mate with them despite her attempts to escape. And delphine sexual aggression isn’t limited to members of their own kind. Dolphins have tried to force themselves on human swimmers, a prospect made all the more terrifying by the fact that they have prehensile penises. Dolphins kill other marine mammals and fish just for fun and commit infanticide. This only gets creepier given the recent suggestion that dolphins actually have names that they call one another. I can’t say I look forward to the day when scientists discover dolphin slurs. Seeing a dolphin at sea should be just as chilling as how many people feel when they see the sinuous silhouette of a shark.

Shocking behavior isn’t the sole province of marine mammals. One naturalist was so thoroughly disgusted with the sexual behaviors of Adélie penguins that his observations were hidden from view for almost a century.

Known as Pygoscelis adeliae to scientists, and as the Socially Awkward Penguin through memes, the Adélie penguin was one of the subjects that caught the attention of scientist George Murray Levick while he ventured to the South Pole with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. Levick wrote an entire book about the seagoing birds on his return, describing the impression of the elegant avians like so: “When seen for the first time, the Adélie penguin gives you the impression of a very smart little man in an evening dress suit, so absolutely immaculate is he, with his shimmering white front and black back and shoulders.” But the species shocked and horrified Levick so much so that his four-page report “Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin” was purposefully omitted from the official expedition findings and distributed only to a small group of researchers considered learned and discreet enough to handle the graphic content.

While visiting Adélie penguins rookeries, Levick was shocked by the activities of what he called “hooligan cocks.” Males accosted and copulated with other males, females that were injured, chicks that had tumbled from their nests, and corpses. In desperation, some male Adélie penguins tried to mate with the ground until they ejaculated. Levick recorded these behaviors as aberrations from the norm of nature. “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins,” he confided to his journal.

Later researchers rediscovered what Levick had seen. Rather than being deviant, the behaviors were a regular part of penguin life, triggered by males associating a rather flexible interpretation of a female’s mating posture with receptiveness. As Natural History Museum, London ornithologist Douglas Russell and colleagues reported in a preface to Levick’s belatedly-released report, this behavior is so ingrained that when a researcher set out a dead penguin that had been frozen in such a position, many males found the corpse “irresistible.” In a bit of weird field work, the same researcher found that “just the frozen head of the penguin, with self-adhesive white O’s for eye rings, propped upright on wire with a large rock for a body, was sufficient stimulus for males to copulate and deposit sperm on the rock.” I fear I’ve just made the Socially Awkward Penguin seem just that much more socially awkward.

Dolphins take drugs.

dolphins are like really just a bunch of fuvkin scoundrels ain't they.

getting wasted, shagging anything that moves, generally taking the piss. oh look at us all so super intelligent, and pretty and everyone loves us. they're like a frat house or something? a frat house getting away with murdering porpoises and its ok, cos everyone loves dolphins

So it was pointed out to me today that in a certain shoppe, the bananas are actually in the veg aisle not the fruit aisle.

And like, thats something an nothing really, and I know where they are, but I just never twigged they're in THE WRONG PLACE AND ITS TOTALLY BLOWN MY MIND. IT'S ALL SO WRONG!

Its been bugging me all afternoon, and maybe forever now.

Bananas aren't strictly fruit, so they shouldn't be in the fruit aisle.

They're herbs.

Oranges are not the only fruit. Because of tomatoes, for one.

Strawberries aren't fruit. And walnuts aren't nuts.

It's very complicated. I blame the EU, judges and the BBC.

The Daily Mail.

Whenever in need of a bit of rage and anger, I often pop over to the DM website and click on an article or two. If not immediately incensed enough, I'll dip a toe in the comments section, where the scummiest low-life in the known universe often posts.

I can't stay more than a minute before Apoplectic Fury has been restored.

Thanks, DM!

...for nothing. You're a shitload of Nazi shit.

I've been learning some science shit;

*did you know that plate tectonics or continental drift as its also known, which is the theory of the land masses of the earth very slowly moving around the planet, splitting apart, bumping together etc, wasn't widely accepted by the science community till the 1960's!!!

*at any one moments there are 1800 thunderstorms in progress around the world. that's 40000 a day!

*no-one really knows what dodos actually looked like. it had been made extinct by the late 1600's- long before photography, and the few contempory paintings were based on 'unscientific descriptions' of the day. there are no preserved dead specimens, though the ashmolean museum did have one, but threw it on the bonfire in the 1700's after it went musty.




mmhhmm. science shit (c)