This came my way on Facebook without attribution or explanation. I tried researching it with small success. The photo clearly comes from Russia, and that front goose looking sideways is a Photoshop addition.

Yahoo explains the whole thing’s origin:

[T]he man in the photo is New York’s Zeddie Little, 25, who was taking part in the Cooper River Bridge 10k run, which was held on March 31, in Charleston, South Carolina.

Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) systems analyst Will King, who was just taking a seemingly random photograph of runners in the middle of the race, snapped the photo and uploaded it to his Flickr account.

“One of my friends commented on the picture and said something along the lines of ‘I dub this guy Mr. Ridiculously Photogenic,’” King said. “I thought it was a pretty cool comment, so I posted it on Reddit. For some reason it just took off from there.”

And QuickMeme has captioned responses.

Fred Lapides posted this intriguing photo today without identification or comment, the wretch.

I searched and found that the photo dates back to 2010 and comers from an article about Andrew Armour, a dive operator on the island of Domenica, who developed a personal rapport with a young male sperm whale. Grind TV

I was away from keyboard today visiting, photographing, and admiring the latest real estate acquisition of a local friend in fox hunting circles.

He is adding to his portfolio of properties an interesting pre-Revolutionary landmark, Walnut Grove farm, for some two and a half centuries the home of the Briarly family. Captain R. S. Briarly stepped out of the front door of this house to lead the local militia company against the British in the War for American Independence.

A stone set in the brick informs us that the small wing with bay window to the right was added in 1784.

In residence currently are five male peacocks.

click on picture for larger image

The upcoming April issue of the National Geographic will be devoted to coverage, including then and now photographs, commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, which struck an iceberg on April 15, 1912.

A video of Siobhan English’s photos of Irish hunting. 9:58 video. It could use a better sound track, but the photos are great.

An amazing photo slideshow from photographer Ken Graham of Maryland’s Potomac Hunt.

Getting a photo of the hunted fox is every hunt photographer’s supreme goal. Shots in which hounds are so close to the hunted fox that both appear in the same photo are rare and unusual and represent the ultimate trophy photo. This fox (who ultimately got away) happened to pick a line that took him almost on a collision course with part of the pack, producing sensational once-in-a-lifetime pictures.

One of my elementary schoolmates from back in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania posted this today on Facebook. I saved the image and ran a Tineye image search, and all I could find was this photo being used humorously as a user photo on a Russian chat board. I expect that this is some kind of European vole.

When he reverses course and dashes back right through their legs!

Polish photographer Tomasz Gudzowaty has a photoessay of Shaolin Temple monks meditating and practicing kung fu.

Hat tip to Visual News via Vanderleun.

These photographs by Walter Arnold of the derelict Scranton Lace Company were recently linked on a North East Pennsylvania Genealogy list.

Incorporated in 1897, the Scranton Lace Company in its heyday employed 1400 people, and was the world’s largest producer of Nottingham lace. It possessed the largest looms ever built, each of which stood nearly three stories tall, was 50 feet long, and weighed over 20 tons. During World War II, the company expanded its production line to include mosquito and camouflage netting, bomb parachutes, and tarpaulins. After the war, the company returned to producing cotton yarn, vinyl shower curtains, and textile laminates for umbrellas, patio furniture, and pool liners.

Its factory complex boasted “bowling alleys in the basement, a fully staffed infirmary, a staff barber and a gymnasium, and owned its own cotton field and coal mine. Its clock tower was a city landmark. U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s father and grandfather worked there.”

The Scranton Lace Company closed abruptly in 2002 with an announcement from the company’s vice president, in the middle of the daily work shift, that the company was closing “effective immediately.”

The photo essay is a moving testament to the scale of everything that has been lost as the American economy changed in recent decades to a postindustrial era and manufacturing in most cases moved overseas.

I normally prefer to avoid linking slideshows designed to extort large numbers of page views by playing on readers’ curiosity, but the Telegraph this time came up with a collection of photos of mostly quite interesting curiosities in Venice.

This 7:28 trailer for Human Planet, a BBC Ethnographic Travelogue series scheduled to begin broadcasting in March, has some striking images. Photographer Timothy Allen did the voice-over.

I tend to try to avoid posting unsourced, unidentified photos, but consistency is the hobgoblin and all that. Click on the image for a larger version.

I once learned that rather more of these ancient colonial era fowling pieces survived in New England farmhouses than I ever would have suspected. It was probably the combination of unwieldiness and striking decorative value (once they became obsolete, they were the ideal object to hang over the mantelpiece) that caused them to be preserved.

From Nothing Via by way of Vanderleun.
————————————
Gerard Van der Leun identifies the original source as the Jooney Woodward site, from Britain (!).

From Buzz Feed: “30 Ways (some facetious) That the World Used to be Cooler.”

I make serious efforts to bar my wife from publishing photographs of me at sporting events and in the hunting field, but for some unaccountable reason I do feel a sense of gratification when I find myself accidentally present in a photograph of that kind of event published elsewhere completely independently.

I was, therefore, tickled to find, in the latest Virginia Sportsman, a feature article on last Spring’s Virginia Hound Show, which shows me sitting and leaning on my cane while watching professional huntsman Dennis Downing putting a couple of our own Blue Ridge foxhounds through their paces in the English ring. (My face is hidden behind the elbow of a photographer snapping a picture.)

The LA Times reported recently that a pair of sharp-eyed brothers apparently discovered two previously unknown photographs of Old West legend Wyatt Earp, one as a small boy, in a family photo album that they purchased in an antique shop in San Bernadino County for $50.

They could make a lot of money selling the photos at auction (if experts agree on the identification), but they have expressed the intention of keeping and licensing the images.

Chances are that it would not take them over ten years to rebuild a destroyed landmark.

A nice car interior shot from Rodger the Real King of France via Vanderleun.

The photograph seems to come from Go Moose via Theo.

Hat tip to Curmudgeonly & Skeptical via NothingVia via Vanderleun.

Hat tip to Push the Movement.

Shiv disguised as a wooden crucifix; found in an inmate’s cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, sometime around 1994; intended for use in an escape or as a general weapon. At that time a lot of crucifixes were fashioned in prison woodshops until jailers finally figured out their true purpose.

More neat and ingenious items.

Hat tip to Marc Steinmetz Photography via NothingVia.

Via Vanderleun. No further sourcing available.

11 more photos

The tidal bore on the Qiantang River in Eastern China is the largest in world, commonly reaching heights of 9 m. (30’) and traveling at speeds up to 40 kph (25 mph).

Tourists travel annually to stand on the dike at Haining and admire this striking demonstration of Nature’s power, but this year an off-shore storm (Typhoon Nanmadol) added a little extra oomph to the incoming tide and last Wednesday more than 20 people were injured.

Looking at the photos, I was surprised that the news reports don’t mention dozens of deaths.

Daily Mail story.

HuffPo report & slideshow

Girl reporter gets wet

The caption for the photo said: This picture was taken in Puerto Rico shortly after Hurricane Irene ravaged the island. Yes, that’s a shark swimming down the street next to a car, and this is exactly why authorities in NYC are warning people not to go swimming in flood waters after a hurricane. Sharks go where fish go, and fish go where water goes, and if that water (and those subsequent fish) happen to be right outside your front door, then guess where that freakin’ shark’s going to be?!

The Washington Post spoiled all the fun by identifying the shark photo used for the pranked image.

Real source of shark.

Hat tip to Vanderleun who found the Mircea Costina photo via Dmitry.

Wikipedia says that it is perfectly safe to swim in the immediate vicinity of Whale Sharks, Rhincodon typus, the largest extant species of fish which can reach a length of over 40’.

Whale Sharks are docile, only eat plankton, and the worst thing that can happen is the Whale Shark might accidentally bump you with his majestic tail.

Still, the diver in the Daily Mail photo looks concerned about getting sucked into that enormous gaping maw with all the plankton and finding out the hard way what those more than 300 rows of tiny teeth can do.

Who knows? The occasional diver may go nicely as an accent with one’s plankton.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.