For here comes Zen Cat. When he purrs, it sounds like this: Ommmmmm….
Klytus, I'm bored! What plaything can you offer me today?
What an amazing image! It’s a composite, done in this manner (copied from the NASA Goddard Flickr page):
This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
The nighttime view was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights.
Stunning. Just wonderful. I love the whole world! Boom de yada! (Uh-oh…that song’s gonna lodge itself in my head now….)
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For my new Australian friends: Shark porn!
Because nothing says ‘Hello’ to folks from a land known for having lots of sharks amongst its barrier reefs like the sex organs of a boy shark. (Apparently those are called ‘claspers’, and the boy sharks use them for…gripping things while they are, well, you know.)
(I took this photo during a trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium last year.)
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A house around a tree
On Twitter, one of the Buffalo sports-talk radio guys likened building a football team’s offense around Ryan Fitzpatrick as quarterback to “building a house around a tree”. That struck me as a funny formulation, not only because it’s accurate as a football metaphor, but also because I was sure that somebody out there has already built a house around a tree. And sure enough, Googling ‘House around a tree’ turned up a pile of results. This one is the coolest (although admittedly I didn’t make an exhaustive survey). Look at this place!
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Some possible cover art
Actually, none of these are really ‘possible cover art’, but these images are kinda-sorta how I’d like the cover of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) to appear, if and when it finally comes out.
Well, there’d also have to be, you know, the Princesses. And maybe a spaceship or two. Ayup!
(I swiped these all from Tumblr…mostly here.)
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I have no idea what this is.
Grabbed from Tumblr just because it’s…weird.
It’s an illustration inspired by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. On that basis it makes a weird sort of sense. I like it! It reminds me of a more metaphysical version of the gonzo animations that used to take place on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
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Joining the Instacrowd
Yup, everybody loves to complain about Instagram, the photo app that has turned everyone with a camera phone into a snooty nitwit who thinks that taking a quick snapshot and applying a filter makes them into photographic geniuses. Yeah, I thought that, too. But the thing is…Instagram makes taking photos and getting them onto Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other places ridiculously easy. I think that’s the real attraction here: not the facile photos, but just how easy it makes it to get them out there.
So yeah…I’ve jumped on the Instagram bandwagon.
I’m not going to be using it exclusively, because my heart of hearts still belongs to Flickr, even though it’s…well, it’s right out of the Web of 2006. But it’s still more tailored to nicer photos, and I’ve got too many years invested in using it to just stop. Flickr isn’t as easy to use as Instagram, but so what? It’s not like it was ever hard to use. Viva la Flickr, says I! But also, given my 7-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet, I just can’t turn down Instagram.
Below the fold are some of my first efforts using Instagram.
(Note to self: blog about my new Carhartt overalls one of these days.)
It turns out that ramen noodles with a fried egg is really pretty delicious:
I’ve seen photos of ramen with an egg for years, right on the package, but never tried it. Yum!
We went to Pumpkinville the other day, and The Daughter took a nice photo of The Wife and I, which I Instagram’d:
And of course, stuff on the Internet must have cats:
Finally, my very first experimentations with what Instagram-filtered photos looked like involved photos of my recent pieing.
Yup, Instagram is pretty cool!
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Hey Mack! MOVE that thing outta here!
Oh, to see this on the street!
And you can bet that there was some cranky old-fart driver giving these folks the finger.
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An apple a day keeps the Republicans away?
President Obama keeps a bowl of apples on the table in the Oval Office.
Here’s a big selection of photos of the action in the Oval Office, as witnessed by the apple bowl. I assume they change the apples regularly — if those are the same apples after more than three years, well…ewwww!
(I almost titled this post “Obama Had A Heap Of Apples”. If you understand that reference, you’re my kind of people.)