Alleged Nazi archives photo, dated 18 December 1942, of U-boats and very large shark off Capetown
The Discovery Channel happens to be reporting, by the strangest kind of coincidence, just at the beginning of “Shark Week,” several pieces of evidence suggesting that the giant Megalodon shark (fl. roughly 28 to 1.5 million years ago, during the Cenozoic Era, late Oligocene to early Pleistocene) is still with us.
Colts Defensive Tackle, Football Hall of Famer, and WWII Marine Art “The Bulldog” Donovan passed away last night at the age of 89. Donovan was a classic representative of Old School, Blue Collar American football, in the same tradition as Mike Ditka, Ray Nitschke, and Johnny Unitas. He was also quite an amusing storyteller as this appearance years ago on the old Johnny Carson show attests.
Weened on beer as a child, this gangly southern belle graduated to drinking straight gin from water glasses before she left high school.
The stellar success of her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter convinced Carson to move to the literary capitol of New York. Attending a ferocious flurry of cocktail parties thrown in her honor, she took no small amount of pleasure in shocking the gathered intelligentsia — not with boorish behavior (she was generally quite shy), but by showing them how much booze a young lady from the South could put away. Carson possessed a prodigious capacity for liquor and reveled in sending large proud Yankees staggering home while she drank deeper into the night.
Carson liked sherry with her tea, brandy with her coffee and her purse with a large flask of whiskey. Between books, when she was neither famous nor monied, she claimed she existed almost exclusively on gin, cigarettes and desperation for weeks at a time. During her most productive years she employed a round-the-clock drinking system: she’d start the day at her typewriter with a ritual glass of beer, a way of saying it was time to work, then steadily sip sherry as she typed. If it was cold and there was no wood for the stove, she’d turn up the heat with double shots of whiskey. She concluded her workday before dinner, which she primed with a martini. Then it was off to the parties, which meant more martinis, cognac and oftentimes corn whiskey. Finally, she ended the day as it began, with a bedtime beer.
Her recuperative abilities are the stuff of legend — she would rise the following morning, shake off her hangover like so much dust, down her morning beer and get back to work.
Michaela Bowling set a new British side saddle high jump record by clearing 6ft 3in at the The National Show at Aintree on Saturday 27 July.
Riding Laughing Larry, who is blind in one eye, they were just 3in off the world record.
Michaela, a regular showjumper and former point-to-point jockey, has been riding side saddle for a while, but this was only the third time Laughing Larry has been ridden aside.
Ireland’s Susan Oakes, who broke the record last year at 5ft 11in, finished second.
A man tried to smuggle his pet turtle through security in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport by hiding it in a KFC hamburger.
The incident occurred on the morning of July 29, when a man, surnamed Li, was about to board China Southern Airlines flight 345 to Beijing, Guangzhou Daily reported. As Li passed through airport security, X-ray screening machines detected a few “odd protrusions†sticking out of a KFC burger that the man had packed in his bag.
Airport staff determined that the protrusions looked suspiciously like turtle limbs, and asked to inspect Li’s luggage.
“There’s no turtle in there, just a hamburger,†Li reportedly insisted. “There’s nothing special to see inside.â€
Li finally acquiesced to an inspection after repeated requests from airport staff, who uncovered the pet turtle hidden inside the burger. When asked why he had devised this strange idea, Li said that he had only wanted to travel together with his “beloved†turtle.
After staff patiently explained that turtles could not be smuggled on board the plane, Li reluctantly agreed to allow a friend to care for his pet while he was away.
Certainly, one more piece of evidence that we live today in a world over-regulated by nincompoops. Why is it really a problem if a fellow carries a pet turtle on board an airplane, after all? The only problem is in the mind of the regulatory bureaucracy which reflexively takes the position that whatever is not compulsory must be forbidden.
I received this on Facebook. Looking for its source, I found it on several Middle Eastern (Turkish & Arabic) humorous image sites, titled “Last photo of Habib.”
James Delingpole has been arguing with lefies, and has learned a great deal about himself from them.
I think it’s time you learned a bit more about me. Be warned, it isn’t pretty.
Basically, my sex life is a mess. I’ve never had a successful relationship with women, owing to the fact that I’m misogynistic, immature and a braying right-winger with a face like a horse. And we haven’t even got on to the size of my penis yet which, as you can well imagine, is minuscule.
Then there’s my unfortunate educational background. You’d think it would be an advantage having had an excellent private education at Malvern followed by a stint reading English at Oxford. But God, you couldn’t be more wrong. From public school all I learned is arrogance and a sense of entitlement and a lofty disdain for the poor while my English degree, being a mere “humanityâ€, is worthless and leaves me especially ill-qualified to comment on any issue which has to do with science.
And it’s not just that I’m ignorant about science, either. I’m actually anti-science. Perhaps it’s all the money I’m paid by Big Oil, perhaps it’s because I’m mentally ill, or perhaps it’s just because I’m plain evil but, would you believe it, I’m on a personal mission to disseminate ignorance by deliberately distorting the truth about issues like climate change because it doesn’t accord with my selfishness and greed and refusal to alter my rapacious lifestyle for the common good.
Did I mention my mental illness? I think I did but it really can’t be mentioned often enough. I’m sick, warped, perverted – not to mention stupid, childish, puerile, irresponsible, silly, flippant, sexist, racist, disablist – and totally wrong in the head. It’s all down to the lack of love I received as a child, which turned me into a rampant attention seeker. The kind of upbringing I have scarcely bears thinking about but what we can say with confidence is this: the values imparted to me by my parents were so perverse that they created the veritable monster I am today.
Per the 1940 Federal census, the Gladsky family (Joseph and Sophia, their three children, and Joe’s father, born in what became Poland but was then the Russian Empire) occupied 422 West Lloyd Street in said town, Shenandoah Borough, Schuylkill Co, PA. Sophia is about 31 in this photo. … Joe died in Fairmont, West Virginia in 1961, age about 57. His son, Joe Jr., died at 73 in New Jersey. Sophia herself died in New Jersey in 1996, aged 89 years.
Some interesting touches in this shot are the rather worn armchair with faint shadow of an antimacassar on the back and the apparently new widow casings and baseboard.
I was born ten years later on a farm my father bought after the war in Locust Valley, but around 1953 my mother forced him to give up the farm and move back into town. In those days, working class families were lucky to own a single automobile, and most women (including my mother) never learned to drive. Living out in the country without transportation was naturally unpleasant for her.
We wound up living across the street and one block west from Mr. & Mrs. Gladski (with whom we were not acquainted as far as I know), at 515-517 West Lloyd. My father also worked as a coal miner at Maple Hill (the last of the collieries to shut down). Maple Hill ended mining operations in 1954. While working there, my father was once (briefly) buried by a cave-in of coal. He was able to dig himself out, but the fall had knocked his miner’s helmet off and one rock split open his scalp. He had to go to the hospital to have the wound stitched up. When he was an old man, you could see blue particles of coal embedded in the skin on top of his head.
Needless to say, I am old enough to remember this style of domestic furnishings. Mrs. Gladski was a good looking woman with the kind of aquiline nose which has always seemed to me to be a distinctly Polish feature.
James Delingpole contends that hostile exchanges on issues in today’s news between left and right on Twitter and on other Internet venues of expression of opinion are really minor skirmishes in the ongoing battle for civilization.
What all these disparate issues are really about is the things they’re always really about: the bitter, ongoing struggle between those on the one hand who cleave ardently to the statist religion of equality, diversity and sustainability in which society’s “best interests” are decided by an “enlightened” elite of bureaucrats, technocrats, petty officials, social workers, Local Agenda 21 groupuscules, administrators, UN and EU apparatchiks, Guardian editorial-writers, grandstanding politicians and members of the BBC Trust. And on the other, those of us who have sufficient faith in human nature to take the view that – barring the odd safety net here and the occasional piece of protective legislation there – the best route to creating a more fruitful, enjoyable, richer and, yes, fairer world is for us all, pretty much, to be left to live our lives the way we want to live them, unencumbered by confiscatory taxes, Nannyish government edicts and pettifogging regulation which seeks to micromanage every last detail of our daily existence from how many different coloured bags we put our rubbish in to the degree to which we’re permitted to be rude towards our enemies on Twitter.
I know which side I’m on. This columnist here seems to be equally sure which side she’s on. You can all decide for yourselves where you belong on this ideological battleground. But don’t kid yourself that this is a war where you can just sit on the sidelines or where there’s a “reasonable middle ground”. Ultimately, it’s about liberty v tyranny; about freedom of speech v creeping state control; free market capitalism v anti-growth collectivism; personal responsibility v suckling on the teat of the state; optimism v pessimism.
