WEDNESDAY #1950

Ever wonder if Stradivarius violins are really better than other violins, or if the name just makes them seem better? A recent study blindfolded professional violinists and found that they couldn't tell the difference between violins constructed by 18th-century Italians and those made by modern manufacturers.

(reminds me of Coke changing their formula)

I love shit like this...

There's a woman painted in this moth. Give it a few minutes and I will show you later on...

For the first time, the European Union began closely monitoring the deaths of bees during the course of a year. The results have been somewhat encouraging, with death rates lower than expected in 2012-2013.

 I just happened to stumble across that cartoon during a time I've been thinking about ghosts...

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Sadly, for millions of Americans, the answer is yes. Have none of them really thought about how silly that is?

This child gets it...

(Mercy? Have they even read the book?)

Notre Dame men’s coach on Women's sports…"They act like a bunch of girls."

If you want to end a conversation with me, just preface your comment with "That ain't nothin'......"

Have you ever heard of James Chadwich?

Are you one of those people who knows who has hit the most home runs? Or exactly who won the best actor Oscar for the last five years? Or 

Well, James Chadwich discovered the neutron in 1935. I think the least we could do is remember his fucking name.

 This looks very similar to OOMVO...

...without the bite.

I don't hate people...I really don't. But you have to ask yourself, how many illegal immigrants are too many? Is it where it stands today at about 11 million? Can we absorb...say, 55 million? Should any illegal get free stuff (translation: some of my money)? I think you should be able to ask these questions without being accused of hating immigrants....but maybe that's just me...

After a years-long mission, a NASA spacecraft captured seven particles of interstellar dust as those bits whooshed around the solar system at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Then, it returned the dust to Earth. Scientists are now studying those grains for clues about the birth of our solar system.

(I've got a thing about interstellar dust. I have yet to have all my questions answered.)

This is still my very favorite piece of public art...

 It's got it all: social commentary, history, and, of course, the art itself.

 Betting your life on a rope made in a crowded factory manned by little, underpaid Chinese children...

There’s a chance that the mystifying phenomena we call lightning would not exist without cosmic aid. The same high-energy particles that light the night sky with colorful auroras, scientists think could also explain a longstanding problem in the process of lightning production.

I appreciate people who work very hard just to make me smile...

All jokes aside, Justin Bieber is a piece of shit.

I've said it before, and I will say it again...now...

 The information age is changing people. I believe that such things as gay bias, marijuana laws, and religion simply can't survive internet scrutiny. The extraordinarily fast change in attitudes for gay rights and legalizing weed and the now non-issue of talking snakes can be laid squarely at the gate of people having access to millions of minds and not just those of their family and neighbors.

Average length of PhD dissertations by major...

I think there should be a soccer rule change that allows each player one opportunity to smack another play in the face with a closed fist just once during the game…no eye gouging or nut shots.

How many smoke stacks did the Titanic have?

 Three. The fourth is an air intake.

What a dreadful place is reality….....for most people.

Young guy asked me what’s the best car to have sex in? I said, “At my age….an ambulance. It’s got everything I might need.”

Woman in the moth...

Can anyone think of the polite scorn for a Canadian?

Brave or just fucking stupid?

Or are the crocs just lazy and/or well feed?

Have you ever gotten drunk just so the waffles would taste better?

There are roughly 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique ways to order 52 playing cards. That’s more than there are atoms on Earth. Which means that any time you pick up a well shuffled deck, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and might not exist again.

(facts like that give me a hard-on)

One of my most often repeated lies: We’re not lost.

Hunger Games as a metaphor for today’s America. They invent a conflict (Iraq) and we, because we are human, honor the combatants.

My jury is still out on Obamacare...

Like Social Security and Medicaid, they sounded good until they get fucked up by the same government that created it.

For my Alabama friends...

Watched a documentary about dragons. Said that after finding large fossilized bones of dinosaurs, what else could early man deduce? Then many of them found fossilized footprints in stone and it must have scared the shit out of them...thus they invented something that satisfied all the evidence...much like religion does today.

 What the fuck have those people been smoking?

A Christian friend went to see Noah and then complain that it's not "historically accurate".

These are called Urban Explorers...

I, of course, would head straight to the abandoned building with a decent camera.

Company makes wooden sunglasses made from broken bats of big leaguers...

 At $500 or so....no thanks.

The big question is, if all the dinosaurs died at the same time at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary…(K-Pg, formerly K-T) because of bacteria, parasites or astroid, then why isn't that layer completely filled with dinosaur fossils. It is not.

I like to visualize that very thing. It makes me smile...and humble.

Young friend of my wife has a brain tumor. This is how he's dealing with it...through humor...

When I visited Google images for Saturday's post, I ran across these two images from my wife and I's travels...

 Unless you read the posts, this will make no sense to you, but it was funny as shit...

Mighty Taco, a Buffalo-based restaurant chain with locations in western New York, announced that Putin is banned from dining on the company's Mexican food after annexing Ukraine's Crimea region.