Mimobdella buettikoferi, commonly known as the Kinabalu giant red leech, is a large bright orange-red coloured leech that is endemic to Mount Kinabalu, Borneo. It can grow to a length of 30 cm (12 in).
The Kinabalu leech feeds only on worms such as the Kinabalu giant earthworm, Pheretima darnleiensis [and] is usually seen during or after heavy downpours.
Well, never going to look at a plate of spaghetti the same way again.
That may just mean I imagine slurping down giant worms, note.
![[Untitled woodcut illustration of a hand with chiromantic lines and details].](http://i0.wp.com/prettyawfulthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/palmistry-woodcut-2.jpg)
Palmistry, also known as chiromancy, is the art of interpreting lines on the hand to evaluate someone’s character or foretell their future.
After falling into disrepute due to its associations with magic and witchcraft during the middle ages, interest in palmistry saw a resurgence during the 17th century, when scholars began to attempt to find rational and scientific foundations for the practice.
It’s interesting to see the common language of Western mysticism exhibited in this, with inevitable comparisons to medieval alchemy and astrology to Renaissance demonology.
From Jean Baptiste Belot’s Les Ouevres via Ridiculously Interesting.
Tipu’s Tiger is an 18th-century automaton or mechanical toy created for Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in India.
Tipu Sultan identified himself with tigers; his personal epithet was ‘The Tiger of Mysore,’ his soldiers were dressed in ‘tyger’ jackets, his personal symbol invoked a tiger’s face through clever use of calligraphy and the tiger motif is visible on his throne, and other objects in his personal possession, including Tipu’s Tiger.
The carved and painted wood casing represents a tiger savaging a near life-size European man. Mechanisms inside the tiger and man’s bodies make one hand of the man move, emit a wailing sound from his mouth and grunts from the tiger.
In addition a flap on the side of the tiger folds down to reveal the keyboard of a small pipe organ with 18 notes.
The tiger was created for Tipu and makes use of his personal emblem of the tiger and expresses his hatred of his enemy, the British of the East India Company.
Mechanica as a vehicle for political propaganda is an intriguing idea.
One wonders what might have happened had, say, the Greeks tried this with the Colossus of Rhodes, or perhaps the French with the Statue of Liberty…
Via Wikipedia.
Each piece in this “unnecessary” cutlery set by designer Lee Ben David has been shaped for use with just one specific type of food.
While researching the cutlery set, Ben David encountered an “absurd” amount of variation in the cutlery used in formal dining, such as a knife designated only to fish dishes and the salad fork.
“I’ve decided to demonstrate the extreme situation we’ve gotten into, using my very specific’ cutlery set, she said.
Some of these actually look kind of tempting…
Lee Ben David via dezeen magazine.
As Bethlehem police were investigating a stabbing last year [in 2009], they came across a backpack with an inch-thick binder stuffed inside.
The binder held the “Latin Kings Bible”, the gang’s manifesto. Stuffed inside its cover were hundreds of yellow-lined sheets of paper on which rules, codes, drawings, poems, prayers, rituals and symbols were collected.
The day after the stabbing, police returned to the home to find a large stuffed monkey with a noose around its neck dangling from a tree. The word “snitch” was scrawled on a note nearby.
The Latin Kings is a very large, highly organized, highly sophisticated Hispanic street gang thought to have originated in the 1940s in Chicago. Originally, it was created with a stated philosophy of “overcoming racial prejudice”, but it eventually evolved into a widespread criminal enterprise mostly street-level distribution of various narcotics, but also involved in other activities including money laundering, identity theft, burglary, assault, and homicide.
So, what kinds of information is contained in something like this? Here are some examples:
Via Sun Sentinel for the full story.
1964. An ordinary day turns out to be anything but, when Joe comes home to find out that his wife Betty hasn’t been cooking dinner.
And there’s a very good reason for that.
from on .
See, if this had been what Mad Men had been like, I totally would have started watching it.
Written and directed by Francesco Calabrese by Eppich Films and Withstand
An emerald green cat with a dragon tail and a yellow-black dog which looks like a bee… It’s not a scene from a futuristic movie, but an animal salon in southern Russia, where groomers turned a cat into a scary dragon and a dog into a buzzing bee.
The groomers from the southern Russian city of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, decided to stage a beauty contest among their clients.
And lest you think this is a thing particular to Russia, China turns their pets into tigers and pandas, and…well, you really don’t want to see what we do here in the United States.
Via RT.