pic o’ the day 2.0: Forest Fire

This photograph of a forest fire was taken by a team working for the Alaskan Interagency Coordination Center under the Bureau of Land Management. Click to enlarge.

Forest Fire by BLM

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the four seasons

It’s not exactly Vivaldi.

Canuckistani terroristNow, one thinks, one does, if one thinks at all well, that us Canuckistanis have some right to boast about our weather. Oh, other countries may have visible seasons; I’m sure England has snowdrops at some times but not others and maybe even snow on alternate leap years if you reserve ahead, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that no Canadian child grows to maturity without freezing his little face to a huge, immobile piece of metal at least once. And quite a number of them are familiar with the terrarium-like view of a livingroom window that looks out onto snow piled up halfway to the top; it’s a little like being Jacques Cousteau of the North in your semi-submersible split level, only without fish and sharks and other nasty, squidgy things slithering past the porthole, and thank God, I say!

Tell me about the weather.

Indonesia, a gecko's eye viewSo when I was in Indonesia, they did. Oh yes, they said, very obligingly, we have four seasons just like you. I gave them my “don’t MAKE me come over there and straighten you out” face, but they appeared to be serious.

Betel nut is a very strong drug, it seems.

Wherever I went, up and down the equator, through fields lush with banana trees, mountainsides covered in jungle and echoing with the cries of invisible monkeys, or cities of corrugated tin, thatched palm walls, and glittering skyscrapers airconditioned to the recommended storage temperature for sushi, people would insist that they had four distinct seasons.

Jacarta SkylineOne day, the oppressive and unvarying tropical sauna of heat and humidity, along with the banal and ubiquitous politeness of the people and their cruel and pointless insistence on this obvious absurd falsity finally became too much for me, and I snapped.

WHAT FOUR SEASONS?!?!?!?!?! What four seasons do you people have, in the name of all that is holy?!?!?!?!

They looked at me as if I’d suddenly pulled a broadsword out of my purse and was threatening babies. They kept their hands where I could see them. They moved slowly, so as not to startle me. And one of them answered my question, in a soft, calming voice:

“Mangos, pineapples, bananas and jackfruit.”
Duh.

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When Giant Pacific octopi attack

Octopus tattoo!

Metro passes along this beauty of an installment in our ongoing series When Octopi Of Various Kinds Attack. Yes indeedy, we here on the soggy left coast of the continent sure know how to welcome tourists.

By strangling them with our tentacles.

I saw a strand of red kelp drifting by. I noticed a line of white suckers running along it. Next something heavy dumped on my head. Another tentacle with delicate suckers curled in from below and pulled my mask away from my face, flooding it. I felt other tentacles squeeze the right side of my face and pull on my hood. I’d last seen my dive buddy peering into a crevice — he didn’t appear, although I turned around a couple times hoping he might take a photo. I tried to brush the octopus off my head, but he squeezed all the tighter…

The thing I like about this post most, though, is the way the diver doesn’t seem to think the attack by a Giant Pacific Octopus merits its own blog post, or really anything more vivid than a simple “and then it did this and then I did that and it let me live and then I went back down [ed. note: WHA????] and took some more pictures and they turned out well and…” The man clearly has icewater in his veins, so he should fit right in around these parts.

You just know that tattoo is going to be all over the Drive in about three weeks!

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tag cloud nine

raincoaster's tag cloud is so way taggier than yours, yo!So there it is: the raincoaster tag cloud, which idea I got from Seismic Twitch who got the Cthulhu chandelier from me so that is what you call fair trade. Thanks to WordPress.com and their security restrictions it’s not dynamic, but at least it does exist and feature Cthulhu rather prominently, even though it appears to imply that God hates Helen Mirren, which even if it were true I would have no way of knowing, so call off the lawyers and the priests already!

When you cast your bread upon the waters, it often returns to you in strange and unusual forms, even if an thousandfold. I mean, who needs that much bread pudding? But after casting nearly two thousand blog posts upon the blog pond, the internet gave a great heave and tossed the following back at me:

the raincoaster game!
Jessica Coen says so!

I have my own game! Mother would be so proud!

In moderately unrelated news, Google has recently re-jiggered their jigs and re-mastered their masters and greased up the series of tubes known as the internet and as a result my Page Rank, which had been a solid and more than respectobiggle 6 back in the day, but which had plummeted to a juicy 0 after the domain change, has clambered back up to a moderately impressive 5, although there is still lost ground to be regained. Operation Global Media Domination has suffered setbacks before, but it can no more be killed than it can be exorcise: like antimatter, OGMD is inherent in the very nature of the universe and should it be eliminated by some unthinkable and unspeakable metaphysical conflict, the existence of existence itself would cease to be, the snake would swallow its own tail, and the world as we know it would vanish in a puff of hyacinth-scented fairy dust.

And nobody wants that to happen, do they?

Got credited “submitted by” on BoingBoing for submitting Helm’s Deep in Candy, which they and TORn picked up: did fuckall for my hits, actually, and Technorati is still steadfastly refusing to see the damn link. They hate me. Mutual, babes, mutual. But I still get up to twenty hits a day from my comments on the Helm’s Deep post: very strange, but I’ll take ’em!

BTW, I outTechnorati BoingBoing on a search for Helm’s Deep in Candy. *thrilled*

Also, the Guardian picked up my Fart Tax story, which I got from the Guardian, and named it “Best of the web” but of course I didn’t get a screenshot. D’oh! Going on the resume anyway. It is a strange kind of incestuousness indeed that makes the participants BOTH look good, but god knows I’m not proud. Arrogant, yes: proud, no.

Rev it up, baby! 

In extremely-related news, I found this delightful little metric on Blogpond. How could raincoaster here resist something called EgoSurfing? I ax ya. My results, which vary between 10,000 and 12,000, give me a ranking of “Common” which is surely the first and last time someone will be able to get away with calling me that; you can insult me, but only if you manage also to give the impression that I am original in my sordid vileness: is that too much to ask?

Recently I was whining about the effect of blog quietude on hits and a friend of mine expressed complete bafflement at my interest in the subject; more than this, he managed to imply that working for fame was invalid, whereas working for money was right and good. More on this some other time, but being, as I knew he was, of a quantifiable turn of mind, I simply looked at him and quietly said “During the time I’ve been visiting you I’ve gone up seven thousand, five hundred places on Technorati.”

Where is your 2% annual raise now?

And finally tonight, also in OGMD news, we present some of the top searches that have led people to the ol’ raincoaster blog. Let us give thanks to Donnie Davies, may he rest in peace, Helen Mirren‘s tits, and the immortal triad of Beautiful Agony, Beaver Shots, and Blackzilla.

Strangely, nobody wants to look at Doug‘s beaver shots. They much prefer Lori’s. Maybe I should host a sort of photographic carnival of beaver shots, an internet-wide challenge for the best beaver shots out there. But that would artificially game the hits, and that would be so, so very far beneath me.

Wouldn’t it?

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albino octo

Vent Octopus. Don't giggle; it doesn't mean what you think it means

This weird critter is a vent octopus, ie one that hangs around geothermal vents in the seabed, looking for tasty crustaceans upon which to nosh. It’s true what the prosthesis designer on POTC2 believed: pale tentacles totally outclass mottled purple on the Ick Scale.

Pharyngula has some nifty images and explanation of an albino octo feeding frenzy at the local All You Can Eat in the Marianas Trench. Tube Worms on special!

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