Speaking of Dictators (Sane and Insane)

It seems the Logo for the London Olympics

in 2012 is offensive to The Mad Mullahs of Iran.

The London logo shows the numbers “2012” in four jagged figures and until now has only been criticised for its design.

Now we are being told that, looked at in a certain light, at a certain angle, and with certain eye defects, it is the word “Zion”.

Zion is a term that can refer to the city of Jerusalem or Israel as the national home of the Jewish people. Iran does not recognise Israel.

Iran does not even recognise that the Holocaust is an historical event.

“Certainly other countries, including Islamic nations, will react to this racist logo and this would jeopardise the goals of the Olympic games in the world,” said Bahram Afsharzadeh, the general secretary of Iran National Olympic Committee.

He warned the International Olympic Committee that “negligence of the issue from your side might affect the presence of some countries, especially Iran.”

Obviously some members of the ruling class in Iran have been forgetting to wear their Tinfoil Hats.

The Merenge

The Merenge is another of those South American dances.

Wild music and wilder dancers are the keys to this vertical intercourse.

Even Golden Retrievers enjoy it.

Watch her tail! And the grin.

Found over at Gawker

While we are waiting

For the Quiz

Here is a short BBC video of rather strange events to keep you occupied. Just click on the image.

(sorry about the commercial at the start)

Sailor mistakes tiny island for UK

A man who thought he was sailing along the coast of southern England had to be rescued by emergency services after his motor boat ran out of fuel while repeatedly circling a small island in the River Thames estuary.

The man, who had no nautical guides and only a roadmap by which to navigate, had been trying to sail from Gillingham, about 35 miles east of London, to Southampton on April 19 by following the southern coast of England.

But he ended simply doing laps of the Isle of Sheppey, about 93 square kilometres in area, in the mouth of the Thames. Eventually a lifeboat and coastguard were sent to rescue him after he used up all his fuel and ran aground.

He told officials he had been trying to navigate by keeping the coastline to his right.

“He was attempting to travel around the UK from Medway to Southampton and had somehow lost his bearings and ended up travelling around the Isle of Sheppey,” said Robin Castle, a member of the local lifeboat station. “It seems he didn’t have the usual maritime charts or navigational equipment.”

– Reuters

Just where are Daddy P and the wonderful Lo, the Terrible Goddess?

Dating by Blood Type

People in most parts of the world do not think about their blood group much, unless they have an operation or an accident and need a transfusion. But in Japan, whether someone is A, B, O or AB is a topic of everyday conversation.

There is a widespread belief that blood type determines personality, with implications for life, work and love.

It is Saturday night and a speed dating session is under way in a small building in the backstreets of Tokyo. It is a scene repeated in cities across the world but this speed dating session in Japan has a twist. It is for women who want to meet men with blood group A or AB. One says she decided to narrow down her search for a boyfriend after a bad experience with a man with type B.

“Looking back it seems trivial,” she said. “But I couldn’t help getting annoyed by how disorganised he was.”

“I really would like someone with type A blood,” added her friend. “My image is of someone who is down to earth, something like that.”

Interest in blood type is widespread in Japan, particularly which combinations are best for romance.

Women’s magazines run scores of articles on the subject, which has also inspired best-selling self-help books. The received wisdom is that;

• Type A – dependable and self sacrificing, but reserved and prone to worry.
• Type O – Decisive and confident
• Type AB – well balanced, clear-sighted and logical, but also high-maintenance and distant.
• Type B – flamboyant free-thinkers, but selfish.

Burahara

“At the interview for my first job they asked me about my blood type,” said a man with blood group B, who wanted to identify himself only as Kouichi.  “The surprise was written on my face. Why? It turned out the company president really cared. She’d obviously had a bad experience with a B type blood person. But somehow I got the job anyway.”

Later, though, the issue of his blood came up again. “The president was the kind of person who couldn’t take her drink and at one company party she got drunk. So she sent B people home before the others. ‘You are blood type B,’ she said. ‘Get out.'”

There is even a term for such behaviour in Japan, burahara, which translates as blood group harassment.

Eugenics

The preoccupation with blood ultimately dates back to theories of eugenics during the inter-war years. One study compared the blood of people in Taiwan, who had rebelled against Japanese colonial rule, with the Ainu from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, thought to be more peaceable.

Stripped of its racial overtones, the idea emerged again in the 1970s.

Swinging

The Lett People of the Baltic coast devoted the period between Easter and St John’s Day to swinging.

Every peasant spent as much of his spare time as he could swinging from a tree, believing the higher he swung, the higher his crops would grow.

Eating Your Auntie is Wrong, Stephen Arnott

Cheese Throwing

In southern Bulgaria lumps of freshly brined cheese were thrown at newly married couples to promote fertility.

Cheese was also thrown at anyone coming to the table at the St George’s day feast, again to encourage health and fertility.

Some farmers even brought their livestock to the table so they could throw cheese at their sheep.

Eating Your Auntie is Wrong, Stephen Arnott

Surfing Alpaca Hits Teh Waves

Peruvian surfer Domingo Pianezzi has spent 10 years training dogs to ride the nose of his board when he catches waves, and now he is the first to surf with an alpaca.

Mr Pianezzi, 44, has introduced his alpaca Pisco to the waters of the Pacific Ocean over the past several months. Unlike dogs, an alpaca does not instinctively jump into the sea for a swim. But Mr Pianezzi says Pisco, named in homage to the distinctive Peruvian liquor distilled from grapes, is getting used to the water.

The duo caught three waves on a three-metre yellow longboard on Tuesday at a small break south of Lima, Peru’s capital. Pisco, wearing a flotation vest, crouched on the board while taking off on each wave and cruised for a few seconds before bailing into the water.

Mr Pianezzi, who teaches surfing to kids and has competed before at international contests for people and their surfing dogs, came up with the idea of hitting the waves with an alpaca while visiting Australia.

“I’ve surfed with a dog, a parrot, a hamster and a cat, but when I was at a competition in Australia I saw people surfing with kangaroos and koalas,” he said. “So I thought that as a Peruvian, it would be interesting to surf with a unique animal that represents Peru.”

Mr Pianezzi says some people have accused him of mistreating Pisco by taking a mountain animal into the ocean. But others regard him as an innovator.

Peruvians raise alpacas, a species of South American camelid, primarily for their warm wool and occasionally for food.

I’m not sure what the NDL will say about this

Spirit Tigers

Malaysians thought that the corpse of a sinful man would be tortured as it lay in its grave.

However, if God was merciful, the man’s ghost would be released in the form of a spirit tiger which would return to protect its human family.

The family kept the spirit tiger nourished on eggs.

It could be asked for favours but it was considered improper to request it to eat another family member.

From “Eating your Auntie is wrong” by Stephen Arnott

Obedient Wives

In Mormon tradition a dead wife was laid to rest with a veil over her face.

Only the husband could lift the veil and, if he did not do so, his wife would not be resurrected.

According to some, the threat of not lifting the veil was often used to ensure obedience in life.

From “Eating your Auntie is wrong” by Stephen Arnott

I’m not even going to comment here!

Cat Whack

The people of Kelso, Scotland, used to place a cat in a barrel of soot and hang it between two poles.

Men would then ride under the barrel and hit it with clubs and mallets.

The object of the sport was to smash the barrel without an angry, sooty cat landing on your head!

From “Eating your Auntie is wrong” by Stephen Arnott

What does a St Bernard carry round its neck?

St Bernards have never, ever carried brandy barrels.

The dog’s mission is entirely teetotal – apart from anything else giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake – but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them.

Before they were trained as mountain rescue dogs, they were used by the monks at the hospice in the Great St Bernard Pass – the Alpine route that links Switzerland to Italy – to carry food, as their large size and docile temperament made them good pack animals.

The brandy barrel was the idea of a young English artist named Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73), who was much favoured by Queen Victoria. He was a renowned painter of landscapes and animals, best known for his painting The Monarch of the Glen and for sculpting the lions around the base of Nelson’s Column.

In 1831, he painted a scene called Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller featuring two Sr Bernards, one of them carrying a miniature brandy barrel around its neck, which he added ‘for interest’. St Bernards have been saddled with the association ever since. Landseer is also credited with popularising the name St Bernard (rather than Alpine Mastiff) for the breed.

Originally, St Bernards were known as Barry hounds, a corruption of the German Baren, meaning ‘bears’. One of the first lifesavers was known as ‘Barry the Great’, who rescued forty people between 1800 and 1814 but was unfortunately killed by the forty-first, who mistook him for a wolf

Barry was stuffed and now has pride of place in the Natural History Museum in Berne. In his honour, the best male pup from each liner at the St Bernard’s Hospice is named Barry.

Sometimes, the Hospice’s duty to provide food and shelter for all who ask can prove troublesome. One night in 1708, Canon Vincent Camos had to provide food for over 400 travellers. To save manpower, he had a device built like a large hamster-wheel attached to a spit. Inside, a St Bernard trotted along turning the meat skewer.

It’s estimated the dogs have made over 2,500 rescues since 1800, though none at all in the last fifty years. As a result, the monastery has decided to sell them off and replace them. with helicopters.

"The Book of General Ignorance" (John Lloyd and John 
Mitchinson)

Giant Water Slide

I don’t know if this is a WIN for success or a FAIL for imagining it!

Thanks, Mick

Who is America Named After?

Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant.

Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot – the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Cabot to whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorised by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the West.

On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, pre-dating Vespucci by two years.

Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: ‘ … on St John the Baptist’s day [24 June], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew‘, that clearly suggests this is what happened.

Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term ‘America’ to refer to the new continent.

The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemullers great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseermuller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502.

This suggests he didn’t know for sure, and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name ‘America’ was known and used was Bristol – not somewhere the French-based Waldseemuller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced ‘America’ with ‘Terra Incognita’ in his world map of 1513.

Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the term ‘America’ for his discovery.

There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diernem’s Land or the Cook Islands) .
America would have become ‘Vespucci Land’ (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.

From “The Book of General Ignorance”

click to biggify

A Puzzling Tongue Twister

Read each line aloud without making any mistakes. If you make a mistake you MUST start again without going any further.

This is this puzzle
This is is puzzle
This is how puzzle
This is to puzzle
This is keep puzzle
This is an puzzle
This is idiot puzzle
This is busy puzzle
This is for puzzle
This is forty puzzle
This is seconds! puzzle