From the same NORFANZ expedition as yesterday’s very attractive Mr Blobby photo. But as always, Squid is exquisitely beautiful while comparatively speaking the other sea creatures resemble nothing so much as a bloated and lethargic 45-year-old Kevin Federline. Who needs neon when they have Firefly Squid, eh? Can’t you imagine a party at the Aquarium beside a wall tank of Squid? Ah, better than a disco ball!
Ain’t he a charmer? You can see he takes after his daddy. I wonder if it’s true what they say about noses and…
The pic was taken by Kerryn Parkinson of the NORFANZ expedition by the Australian Museum. Mr Blobby is a Fathead (guess where they got the name?) or Psychrolute, and he is obviously loved for his warm personality. Or his staggering wealth; he’s no uglier than Aristotle Onassis, come to think of it.
Hmmm, is he single?
del.icio.us: say hello to Mr Blobby!
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via Digital Doodles.
Oh my god, they killed Squiddy!
ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS SHOW — EXCEPT THE BOTTOM TRAWLING — ARE ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. ALL CELEBRITY VOICES ARE IMPERSONATED… POORLY. THIS VIDEO CONTAINS COARSE LANGUAGE AND DUE TO ITS CONTENT SHOULD ONLY BE VIEWED BY SPANISH FISHERMEN.
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Technorati
Ah, how long ago it seems; geological ages ago, fast-vanishing in the rearview mirror of the hurtling cosmos. And yet it was only yesterday that I was the most popular blog of the half-million blogs on WordPress. Today I’m #52 #91. Sigh.
Sic transit gloria bloggy. At least I’m up to 65,000 59,000 on Technorati.
Keith Olbermann, you’ll always have a special place in my heart. A place closer, perhaps, to the part I use to play poker with than the part I use to store actual affection in, but that could all change over drinks sometime. Call me. Although this was far from your finest rant, it was worth a cool three thousand hits in 24 hours.
Salon, I’m going to have to start reading you more often. Link to me again and I may blogroll you; we can work something out. Have your pixels call my pixels. (If my guess is right they follwed me from a Gawker post about Salon’s disingenuous celebrity uterus coverage {gee, even Salon checks their trackbacks; even famous people like to hear what others are saying about them} and on which I blogwhorishly dropped a link to my own blog post about the infamous and unnameable Cthulhu ultrasound. Then they poked around until they discovered Keith. But this is just a theory, and we all know what the mainstream press thinks of Chtulhu-TomKat-BushBashing theories).
Mere moments ago I was linked to in DirtySpoke‘s review of Anal Amy. We shall see if this is better than Olbermann, hitwise. UPDATE: two hits. That would be a no, by a factor of 10 to the third power.
I’m going to let someone Catholic explain all this to Sister Mary Martha. Volunteers?
And in a special bonus section tonight, we’ll answer some questions that popped up via the Search Engine Referrals.
And now we return you to your regularly scheduled Communal Anarchist, Cthulhoid, short attention span Canuckistani blog.
and probably the ugliest as well.
I’m giving this the Squid tag, and Technorati can just sue me, because this has the central core of Squiddiness, the Platonic Ideal of a Squid-like quality, and that is that regardless how loathesome this thing may be you cannot possibly look away, nor think any thought but “KEWL” while you’re looking at it. It’s just frickin’ cool!
Besides which, it is a Sea Monster. Read on…
Technically speaking this is not an airplane. It’s a WIG (wing in ground, although you shouldn’t put it there cuz it really slows you down) or GEV (ground effect vehicle, which makes a helluva lot more sense, particularly if you already know what the ground effect is, and if you don’t, read on). Them military folks love their TLMs, don’t they?
Planes, as you may already know, have big wings because they need a lot of lift to get off the ground and start flying around and suchlike, which is mostly what planes do, although sometimes they just sit on the taxiway getting de-iced and making people impatient.
But if you’re not really going to fly per se, you don’t really need wings per se. What Orville and Wilber or, in this case Ivan and Sergei probably, discovered was that if you fly very, very close to the ground you can compress the air beneath the wings and get far more lift out of it, substantially reducing the amount of square wingage you need to get off the ground. Which brings us to the Caspian Sea Monster.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and couldn’t even if it wanted to, as back in the Fifties CS Lewis‘ publisher wasn’t publishing editions of the Chronicles of Narnia in the US, because of a copyright treaty dispute. So, no. Forget it.
anybody got a handy Russian/English translator?
One afternoon in the Sixties a bunch of Americans were sitting around the spy department, looking at some spy photos taken over Russia, and there on the surface of the Caspian Sea they saw the butt-ugliest thingamabobby they’d ever laid eyes on. It was so big and bizarre they dubbed it the Caspian Sea Monster. It looked kinda like a plane, with sawn off wings, but it was wildly out of scale; the damn thing was enormous. It was a monster.
It was, to be precise, 100 metres long, about 540 tons in weight, and was equipped with an alarmingly thorough cadre of ten jet engines. It was obviously meant to go somewhere, fast. Strangely, followup photographs never seemed to show the damn thing in flight, just skimming along the tops of the waves, and by that I mean an altitude of, say, three to ten feet. If it happened to be flying over the sea on a choppy day it would have been like driving through snowbanks until they got up to speed.
One wonders what the poor sturgeons thought of this humungous tin can, ripping over their heads at 350 mph. Can’t have been good for the caviar crop, I’m thinking. A placid sturgeon is a productive sturgeon. I’m pretty sure I saw that on a Social Realist poster somewhere, or if not then I just made it up.
One or the other, for sure, though.
Eventually the program wound down, although not without inadvertently producing some of the Caspian Sea‘s finest new reefs first. Attempts to raise sunken Sea Monsters were abandoned because of the weight and the fact that the Glomar Explorer was already booked for that weekend. There is a diversity of opinion about why the Russians ceased production, but best guesses include: there was a nasty crash in 1975/1980 and the Russians lost heart; the sea water rusted the hell out of the damn things; the Cold War ended and capitalism has no need for such toys; it wasn’t really big enough in the first place; what do you mean ceased production?
Apparently Boeing is working on an updated, and equally ridiculous-looking, iteration of the WIG/GEV/Sea Monster genus, called the Pelican. Don’t hold your breath for this one: the production announcement has been indefinitely delayed since 2002.
This is a turboprop-driven military transport with a 500 ft wingspan and is designed to carry 1300 tons of cargo over a distance of up to 10,000 nautical miles.
At an altitude of 20 ft.
Windsurfers are advised to be prepared to duck.
Source material is found:
and at The Register, although they’ll bleed you dry for pageviews with the story on four damn pages.
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raincoaster 