Friday, February 17, 2017
Squirrel Attacks Burglar
He should get a "Beware of Squirrel" sign to warn off any future home invaders. Joey is now regarded as a hero.
This Beetle Pretends to be an Ant's Butt
A newly-discovered species of beetle manages to benefit from army ants by riding around on them. Nymphister kronaueri is a small red beetle that clamps its jaws around the waist of the army ant Eciton burchellii and
tags along, unseen because it looks like the ant's normal backside.
Science writer Ed Yong calls it "A prosthetic posterior. A gluteus
extraneous. A beetlebum." Christoph von Beeren and Daniel Kronauer
discovered the beetle in 2014 in Costa Rica while following the
relentless army ants. Von Beeren and Kronauer were also relentless. They would watch the ants for hours at a time, sitting in fold-up chairs in the pitch-black jungle, and peering at the legions through headlights. One day in the spring of 2014, they realized that some of the ants looked a little odd. “The abdomens reflected the light differently, and the color was a little different,” says von Beeren. “Then, we noticed that they looked like they have two abdomens.”Not much is known yet about the beetle. Does it benefit by hiding in plain sight? Does it eat what the ants eat? Read what we do know about the butt beetle at The Atlantic. -via Metafilter
They collected some of these dual-derriered insects and put them in a vial. Back at camp, Kronauer shook the vial… and the back-up backside fell off. It was a beetle. “And it blew our minds,” says von Beeren. After working with USDA entomologist Alexey Tishechkin, he realized that the bonus-butt beetle was new to science. And he named it Nymphister kronaueri, after his colleague Kronauer, who helped to discover it.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Don't mess with granny's clean floor ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Today in History
| 1760 | Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements. | |
| 1804 | US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates. | |
| 1862 | Fort Donelson, Tennessee, falls to Grant‘s Federal forces, but not before Nathan Bedford Forrest escapes. | |
| 1865 | Columbia, South Carolina, surrenders to Federal troops. | |
| 1923 | Bessie Smith makes her first recording “Down Hearted Blues.” | |
| 1934 | Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden. | |
| 1937 | Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs. | |
| 1940 | The British destroyer HMS Cossack rescues British seamen from a German prison ship, the Altmark, in a Norwegian fjord. | |
| 1942 | Tojo outlines Japan’s war aims to the Diet, referring to “new order of coexistence” in East Asia. | |
| 1945 | American paratroopers land on Corregidor, in a campaign to liberate the Philippines. | |
| 1951 | Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war. | |
| 1952 | The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. | |
| 1957 | A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica. | |
| 1959 | Fidel Castro takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana. | |
| 1965 | Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument. | |
| 1966 | The World Council of Cult being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam. | |
| 1978 | China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties. |
Eine kleine hineymusik
Music Student Transcribes Song On Character's Butt In
"The Garden Of Earthly Delights"
This kleine hineymusik isn't anything great, but transcribing sheet music found in a painting is a great idea!
What to Do If You Get Food Poisoning In a Foreign Country
Here’s how to make the vacation nightmare a little less miserable
Governor, artists take aim at states' transgender bathroom measures
The perverts (aka wingnuts) however, think everyone is like them and they want to be left alone to continue to molest little boys in men's bathrooms while screaming about little girls being attacked by men in the woman's bathroom
Secret Service director stepping down
Dumbass Trump needs LSD
I cannot imagine how scary a Dumbass Trump trip could be, considering the many delusions he lives under.
Shepherds on Stilts
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
The REAL Valentine's Day (before the catholics stole it) ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Today in History
| 1798 | The first serious fist fight occurs in Congress. | |
| 1804 | New Jersey becomes the last northern state to abolish slavery. | |
| 1862 | Union General Ulysses S. Grant launches a major assault on Fort Donelson, Tenn. | |
| 1869 | Charges of treason against Jefferson Davis are dropped. | |
| 1898 | The U.S. battleship Maine blows up in Havana Harbor, killing 268 sailors and bringing hordes of Western cowboys and gunfighters rushing to enlist in the Spanish-American War. | |
| 1900 | The British threaten to use natives in the Boer War fight. | |
| 1925 | The London Zoo announces it will install lights to cheer up fogged-in animals. | |
| 1934 | U.S. Congress passes the Civil Works Emergency Relief Act, allotting new funds for Federal Emergency Relief Administration. | |
| 1940 | Hitler orders that all British merchant ships will be considered warships. | |
| 1942 | British forces in Singapore surrender to Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita. | |
| 1943 | The Germans break the American Army’s lines at the Fanid-Sened Sector in Tunisia, North Africa. | |
| 1944 | American bombers attack the Abbey of Monte Cassino in an effort to neutralize it as a German observation post in central Italy. | |
| 1946 | Royal Canadian mounted police arrest 22 as Soviet spies. | |
| 1950 | Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sign a mutual defense treaty in Moscow. | |
| 1957 | Andrei Gromyko replaces Dmitri T. Shepilov as the Soviet Foreign Minister. | |
| 1961 | Eighteen members of the U.S. figure skating team are lost in an airplane crash in Belgium. | |
| 1965 | Canada’s maple leaf flag is raised for the first time. | |
| 1967 | Thirteen U.S. helicopters are shot down in one day in Vietnam | |
| 1974 | U.S. gas stations threaten to close because of federal fuel policies. |
The Most Romantic Islands on Earth
How eating less can slow the aging process
There’s
a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to products that fight signs of
aging, but moisturizers only go skin deep. Aging occurs deeper — at a
cellular level — and scientists have found that eating less can … Read moreSpending All Day On Your Butt Ages You By 8 Years
But here’s how to dodge the health risks of staying desk-bound
Politics Has Made 29 Percent Of Us Worse At Our Jobs
Survey says our productivity has waned since the election
‘Irresponsible’ women are just a ‘host’ for their fetuses
“I believe one of the breakdowns in our
society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of
decisions,” the wingnut insisted.
***
Pardon us but your stupidity is showing.
Linguists have been discussing "Shit Gibbon."
by Taylor Jones
Earlier this week a Pennsylvania state senator called Dumbass Trump a "fascist, loofa-faced shit-gibbon."There was an excellent post on Strong Language, a blog about swearing, discussing what makes "shit gibbon" so arresting, so fantastic, so novel, and yet... so right (for English swearing. Whether you believe "shit gibbon" is "right" as a characterization of Dumbass Trump is a personal assessment each person must make for themselves).
The post, The Rise of the ShitGibbon can be found here. I highly recommend reading it.
Most of the post was dedicated to tracing the origins and rise of "shitgibbon." The end of the post, however, catalogues insults in the same vein:
wankpuffin, cockwomble, fucktrumpet, dickbiscuit, twatwaffle, turdweasel, bunglecunt, shitehawk
And some variants: cuntpuffin, spunkpuffin, shitpuffin; fuckwomble, twatwomble; jizztrumpet, spunktrumpet; shitbiscuit, arsebiscuits, douchebiscuit; douchewaffle, cockwaffle, fartwaffle, cuntwaffle, shitwaffle (lots of –waffles); crapweasel, fuckweasel, pissweasel, doucheweasel.
I've actually been thinking about insults like this a surprising amount. Ben Zimmer points out about "Shitgibbon" that "...Metrically speaking, these words are compounds consisting of one element with a single stressed syllable and a second disyllabic element with a trochaic pattern, i.e., stressed-unstressed. As a metrical foot in poetry, the whole stressed-stressed-unstressed pattern is known as antibacchius."
I argue that this is correct, but that (1) there's a little bit more to say about it, and (2) there are exceptions.
HOW TO MAKE A SHITGIBBON IN TWO EASY STEPS
First: I argue that the rule for making a novel insult of this type is a single syllable expletive (e.g., dick, cock, douche, cunt, slut, fart, splunk, splooge, piss, jizz, vag, fuck, etc.) plus a trochee. A trochee, as a reminder, is a word that's two syllables with stress on the first. Examples are puffin, womble, trumpet, biscuit, waffle, weasel, and of course, gibbon. Tons of words in English are trochees (have a relevant XKCD! In fact, have two! Wait, no, three! No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!). Because so many words are trochees, you'll have to pick wisely --- something like ninja might not be as humorously insulting as waffle.That said, in principle, monosyllable expletive + trochee seems to give really good results. Behold:
fart basket, shit whistle, turd helmet, cock bucket, douche blanket, vag weasel, (I'm gonna be so much fun when I get old and have dementia. Good luck grandkids!), shit mandrill, piss gopher, jizz weevil, etc. etc. I can do this all day.
So, it's not the fact of being a gibbon per se. Various other monkeys would work: vervet, mandrill, etc. However, crucially, baboons, macaques, black howlers, and pygmy marmosets are out.
Moreover, it's not completely unlimited. Some words fit but don't make much sense as an insult: cock bookshelf, fart saucepan (which I quite like, actually), dick pension, belch welder.
Others sound like the kind of thing a child would say: fart person! poop human! turd foreman!
Yet others are too Shakespearean: fart monger! piss weasel!
Clearly some words (waffle, weasel, gibbon, pimple, bucket) are better than others (bookshelf, doctor, ninja, icebox), and some just depend on delivery (e.g., ironic twat hero, turd ruler, spunk monarch, dick duchess).
VOWELS MATTER
For
a while, I've been discussing vowels in insults with fellow linguist
Lauren Spradlin. Note that when we talk about vowels, we mean sounds, not letters.
Don't worry about the spelling, try saying the below aloud. Spradlin
has brought my attention to the importance of repeating vowels
increasing the viability of a new insult of this form: crap rabbit, jizz biscuit, shit piston, spunk puffin, cock waffle, etc.I would argue that having the right vowels actually gives you some leeway, so you can get away with following the first word with --- gasp! ---- a non-trochee! Be it an iamb (remember iambic pentameter?) as in douche-canoe, spluge caboose, or the delightfully British bunglecunt (h/t Jeff Lidz), or even more syllables: Kobey Schwayder's charming mofo-bonobo.
As you can see, this is a hot topic in the hallowed halls of the ivory tower. If the above simple formulae have motivated even one person to go out and exercise their own creativity to make a novel contribution to the English language, then I've done my job here as a linguist. Different people get into linguistics for different reasons, but this, this is what I live for. Get out there and make a difference.
First Reported Massacre of Afghan Civilians Under Dumbass Trump
Stepson shot KKK chief Ancona in the head
White supremacists brutally attack brothers
Prosecutors aren’t charging a white teabagger agitator with terrorism in violent anti-Muslim plot
***
(He's white Nazi therefore he is not
a terrorist at least according to the Nazis ... excuse us, prosecutors
... that is, he is one of their own - to the rest of us he IS a
terrorist)
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