SATURDAY #3397

One Of My Very Own

EMAIL: ralph.henry.at.folio.olio@gmail.com

NEWSY BIT

NORMAL WEAR AND TEAR

Worn marble stairs leading to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I've posted that image a couple of times because I find it extraordinary. As I understand it, they once tried to flip the steps over to solve the problem only to discover somebody else had already done that. Anyway, I ran across a plethora of images of normal wear and tear I hope you enjoy as much as I did.

And mt favorite...

If you have or run across examples of such wear, please email them to me. Thanks.

And to a lesser degree, I like to travel on the gray roads. Abandoned roads slowly being reclaimed by nature.

WHAT IN THE NAME OF...

What in the name of pyrotechnics is going on here?

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What in the name of Child Protective Services is going on here?

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What in the name of culinary abominations is going on here?

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What in the name of the laws of physics is going on here?

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What in the name of epicranial aponeurosis luster is going on here?

His head is probably a lot brighter than his future.

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What in the name of species preservation is going on here?

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What in the name of normal human caution is going on here.

THE MALE HUMAN PREENER

We need to kill this trend with fire.

We all understand that women will do just about any kind of preening if her magazines tell her to.

And I mean ANYTHING!

But one of the differences between men and women is that MEN DO NOT PREEN.

This guy is getting his eyebrows waxed for the first time.

HIS EYEBROWS WAXED!!!!!!!

Men, there are rules for manhood and they don't include eyebrow waxing, body or ball shaving or other pubic trimmings. 

Write that shit down, y'all.

THINGS YOU MAY OR MAY NOT KNOW

45 years ago the last US combat troops left Vietnam and the South Vietnamese were left to defend themselves. Two years later the last of their territory fell to the troops of the North. And now they are a major tourist attraction. Go figure.

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Soon high bandwidth, low latency, affordable internet will be available planet wide with the FCCs approval for SpaceX to throw 4,425 low earth orbit satellites up at a cool $10billion+.

The service will be superior and cheaper to operate than any existing land-based infrastructure thanks to photons moving 40%-50% faster thru vacuum than fiber optic cables and be able to easily bypass any regional restrictions and ISP monopolies via direct connect.

Satellites are to be made in-house for a cheap $2 million per unit, 18 satellites can be placed per launch with a projected 45 Falcon9 launches for the initial 800 unit network at costs far cheaper than any country or competitor which will become more efficient as the project expands, funding future SpaceX development beyond Earth.

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1940 Stout Scarab rear engine bay opens like a beetle's wings

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Found throughout the Indo-Pacific, Ctenoides ales is a striking saltwater clam with colorful tendrils and a peculiar talent long known to divers: It produces flashes of light that at first glance look like flickers of neon or ripples of electricity. Hence its nickname, the “electric" disco, clam.

(RH: Looks a little sexual, don't it?)

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"So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed. On day 560, a little more than eighteen months into the experiment, the population peaked at 2,200 mice and its growth ceased. A few mice survived past weaning until day six hundred, after which there were few pregnancies and no surviving young. As the population had ceased to regenerate itself, its path to extinction was clear. There would be no recovery, not even after numbers had dwindled back to those of the heady early days of the Universe. The mice had lost the capacity to rebuild their numbers—many of the mice that could still conceive, such as the “beautiful ones” and their secluded singleton female counterparts, had lost the social ability to do so. In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long before their death ruining their spirit."

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I'm thinking the rolling option would save on battery life.

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My friend once hit an owl with his car and took the body to the Department of Wildlife to see if it would be okay to mount it. He was promptly arrested for being in possession of an endangered species. They eventually let him go, but not without telling him that being in possession of a single feather would be illegal.

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That actually works. We would beg our school bus driver to speed up over bumps to get the rush.

PEOPLE WHO THINK TOO MUCH

And then...

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UNUSUAL PEOPLE

I'd pay good money to watch her do that naked.

Her, too.

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WHAT SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY BELIEVE

A frequent stool mate at my bar uttered these words: "I gave up seafood for lent, so Sunday night I'm going to cook me up a big mess of scallops." I looked at him and said, "You are a religious person?!"

He said, "I'm Catholic."

I said, "You actually believe that we are all born with original sin because a rib-woman was talked into eating from a magic tree by a talking snake?!"

And he said, "I'm old and I do whatever the hell I want to do. It makes me feel good, so I do it."

I but nodded and let this honest man live the rest of his life unmolested.

Even though his medieval voodoo bullshit was repugnant to me and everything I consider sane. I rank it as my high point of personal self-restraint.

I find it odd that I look at a scene like this, with the pointy hats and costumes, and think how utterly ridiculous it is, but other people see nothing unusual about it.

To me, modern people who still indulge in Dark Age rituals are hilarious.

I am overjoyed that all church attendance is declining around the globe. I credit the internet and believe within two generations there will be far more atheists than believers.

And later I came upon this...

Now we all know that placing stones on a tomb does nothing for the dead. It is a testament to future visitors that you were there paying respects. But, hey, who the hell cares. An innocent gesture that makes the griever feel better.

But with me, it has never been about people having strange make-believe coping mechanisms. The problem arises when these ancient superstitions reach into our courts, classroom and, god forbid, Congress. 

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I will never look at a photo like that without thinking of that line in one of my OOMVO.

"Hide the eggs."

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And in a very relevant phenomenon...

Studies have found that people who believe conspiracy theories tend to report greater feelings of social ostracism, to perceive themselves as possessing information that others do not have, and to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events. In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph Parent and Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, identified a number of factors that predispose people to believe conspiracy theories: many, for example, have recently lost a job, or belong to a party that has fallen out of power. The throughline? Powerlessness.

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