Depending on your perspective, this is either the most cute or the most disturbing thing you’ll see all day: a penguin being tickled. Don’t worry: it seems to like it…
funny
Testicle bumblebee
A short introduction to Dutch invective, performed by legendary Dutch standup group Don Quishocking. As found over at Kimberley’s — too good not to nick.
Linda Smith: five years ago today
Five years ago Linda Smith died. She’s missed still. Here’s a collection of the best bits of her from the News Quiz. As Jeremy Hardy said five years ago: “She sort of flirted with the listener in a way”. Here you can hear how she did that.
Proper hypocrisy
Via bOING bOING: libertarian saint Ayn Rand used to be on welfare:
An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand’s law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand’s behalf she secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor).
As Pryor said, “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out” without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently… She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
Now that’s proper hypocrisy!
Some links
Strange Horizons has put out their science fiction year in review and the interesting thing is: no mention of Iain M. Banks. Funny, for me Surface Detail was one of the best books I read this year, but no peep of it in SH’s list. Reviews elsewhere have been lacklustre as well, something that I’ve noticed before with the previous “new” Culture novels. It’s as if the original three novels have set expectations so high that everything that Banks has done afterwards is consciously or not compared to the impact the original trilogy had. Hardly fair, but perhaps inescapable.
Now for something completely different. We knew crows were clever, but they are even more clever than we thought. New Caledonian crows have long been known to use twigs to pry insects out of trees, but now experiments have proven that these crows know how to adapt their tools for multifunctional use by poking at a rubber spider with a twig. It sounds like nothing, but these are probably the first non-mammal species shown to have the mental capacity and creativity to not only use tools, but adapt them for other uses and, as the Wired article also notes, use them in sequence: using a twig to get a twig to get food. I’ve had co-workers who showed less promise…
Finally, would you like some cheese with that white whine?