Zebra foal spotted

Via.  Not much discussion at the link, and I don't have time to look this anomaly up right now.

Addendum: another image (via) -

- which incidentally shows that zebras are black with white stripes, not white with black stripes.

You're not as crazy as this person

Via Le Café Witteveen

The "wide AM" - an uncommon variety of the 1999 Lincoln penny

The US Mint produced two major varieties of the 1999 Lincoln Memorial Cent (Penny). The most common variety for the Philadelphia-minted 1999 is the close "AM" variety...

In the word "AMERICA" on the reverse of the coin: The close "AM" meant that the letters "A" and "M" were very close and almost touching while the wide "AM" had the two letters separated much more. In Addition: The initials "FG" was closer to the Lincoln Memorial Building on the wide "AM" variety and it was further away on the close "AM" variety. The difference between the close "AM" and wide "AM" varieties are shown in the example image below... 

USA Coin Book Estimated Value of 1999 Lincoln Memorial Penny (Wide AM Variety) is Worth $518 or more in Uncirculated (MS+) Mint Condition 

I can't tell what year the source article was written.  Can any readers with numismatic knowledge estimate a current value for circulated coins?

Pesäpallo

YouTube link

This was totally new to me.  You learn something every day.

Pesäpallo (Finnish pronunciation: [pesæpɑlːo]; Swedish: boboll, both names literally meaning "nest ball", colloquially known as Pesis, also referred to as "Finnish baseball") is a fast-moving bat-and-ball sport that is often referred to as the national sport of Finland and has some presence in other countries including Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada's northern Ontario (the latter two countries have significant Nordic populations). The game is similar to brännboll, rounders, and lapta, as well as baseball.

The basic idea of pesäpallo is similar to that of baseball: the offense tries to score by hitting the ball successfully and running through the bases, while the defense tries to put the batter and runners out. One of the most important difference between pesäpallo and baseball is that the ball is pitched vertically, which makes hitting the ball, as well as controlling the power and direction of the hit, much easier. This gives the offensive game more variety, speed, and tactical aspects compared to baseball. The fielding team is forced to counter the batter’s choices with defensive schemes and anticipation; Pesäpallo becomes a mental exercise. 

A more detailed video presentation without the snide comments is here.

This is not a fish

It's a nudibranch (sea slug) that has evolved a flattened morphology in order to hunt in a pelagic rather than benthic environment.  Details at Deep Sea News.

Fried egg jellyfish

Or Phacellophora camtschatica, if that's easier to remember.  Image via.

Victorian mourning ring

Incorporating the glass eye of the dearly departed...

Via The Soul is Bone.

Found in the white of an egg

Apparently these are incidental calcium concretions.  Relevant discussion at Backyard Chickens, via.

Polymelia in pets

Explained at Neatorama.

Gray pareidolia

Gray

Pareidolia

Rocks on Lake Baikal

Via Reddit, whence also the link to this image:

Background music

Via Focal Museum.

Let's just call it a dinosaur and leave it at that...

Via ReplacesandcancelsthepreviousJohnnythehorse

John Paul Sartre and his crabs

Jean Paul Sartre’s fame was still several years ahead of him; he was then in his late twenties and employed as an unpublished and unknown philosophy teacher. At the time Sartre was writing a book on the imagination and he hoped that [mescaline] would induce hallucinations that would give him a new insight into his research. However, his lifelong companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir reported later that the plan may have succeeded all too well…
 
During the midst of his trip Sartre had received a phone call from de Beauvoir; a phone call that had apparently rescued him from a desperate battle with scrambled lobsters, octopuses and other grimacing sea-life. To Sartre ordinary objects had begun to change their shape grotesquely: umbrellas were deforming into vultures, shoes were turning into skeletons, and faces looked absolutely ‘monstrous’. All the while, behind him, just past the corner of his eye was the constant threat of the terrifying deep water dwellers. Yet, despite these horrible hallucinations (that seem rather uncharacteristic of the mescaline experience), by the following day Sartre had apparently recovered completely, referring to the experience with ‘cheerful detachment.’

However, in a later interview with John Gerassi, Sartre noted that in the days following his Mescaline trip he ended up having a nervous breakdown:

after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “O.K., guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang. 

The funny thing about Sartre’s crabs and lobsters was that there were generally only 3 or 4 of them, and he was always totally aware that they were merely figments of his imagination.

The rest of the story is at Blue Labyrinths.  With a tip of the hat to Anna and the other QI elves at No Such Thing As A Fish.

Image credit.

Seals with eels in their noses

Multiple cases have been reported.  If you're interested in this, you can read more at Live Science, where it is explained that marine scientists don't understand why this is happening, or whether it is significant.  It could be Obama's fault, or a sign of coming End Times.

Carrot

An heirloom variety called the Turkish Black (via).

More info at the World Carrot Museum.

A "rat king", three "squirrel kings" -- and three bucks

"Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported...

Most researchers presume the creatures are legendary and that all supposed physical evidence is hoaxed, such as mummified groups of dead rats with their tails tied together. Reports of living specimens remain unsubstantiated…

Specimens of purported rat kings are kept in some museums. The museum Mauritianum in Altenburg (Thuringia) shows the largest well-known mummified "rat king", which was found in 1828 in a miller's fireplace at Buchheim [above]. It consists of 32 rats. Alcohol-preserved rat kings are shown in museums in Hamburg, Hamelin, Göttingen, and Stuttgart. A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair.

The term rat king has often led to the misconception of a king of rats... The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, adapts a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann that features a seven-headed Mouse King as the villain..."

Image and text from Wikipedia. Credit to Neatorama.

Addendum #1:  Reposted to add this example of a "squirrel king" -

The Animal Clinic of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, got a surprise this week when a city worker brought in six squirrels fused together by their tails...

This particular group of six were nesting near a pine tree and sap fused their tails together. A city of Regina worker found the young squirrels and brought them to the clinic. The animals were sedated and the veterinarian team worked to untangle the mess of tails. Their tails were then shaved of the matted fur and they were given antibiotics to prevent infection.  (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

Addendum #2:  Reposted in order to add this related interesting phenomenon found by my wife at the Buck Manager website:

[T]hese three white-tailed bucks were found locked during the rut. The bucks were located on a ranch in east-central Texas and, from the information that I received, one of the bucks was still alive when the trio was found. Apparently, the antlers were cut from the dead deer and one very tired buck was lucky enough to run back off into the woods.

There are lots of comments at the site, some opining that the event was faked and arguing the method of death, and one who reported seeing a buck attack a pair that was already locked.   My wife found another example at the same website:

 "...there is nothing worse than finding a dead buck that you did not shoot, but how would you feel if you found not one, but three dead bucks on your property? Okay, it gets worse. What if those three bucks totaled 450 inches of antler? That is exactly what a hunter in the mid-West found on his Ohio farm..."

"They had the bank of this creek all tore up."

Addendum #3: And reader Lisa knew of a ancient example of the phenomenon involving Ice Age mammoths.

Addendum #4:  Reposted from 2013 to add this image found by an anonymous reader -

- of a squirrel king in Nebraska, with the victims, as in the example cited above, fused at their tails by pine tree sap.

Addendum #5:  Reposted yet again to add this "squirrel king" found locally here in central Wisconsin:

Their tails had become entwined with "long-stemmed grasses and strips of plastic their mother used as nest material," the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wrote on Facebook... "It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment," the post read.

Onychomadesis - shedding of the toenails - triggered by a fish pedicure

The fish didn't chew the nails off; they just damaged the nail plate, probably near its root.  I found the story at Gizmodo:

According to a case report published by her doctor in JAMA Dermatology, the woman’s toenails stopped growing and started falling off soon after she received a so-called fish pedicure... Six months into her nail troubles, she visited a dermatologist, who ruled out any known causes of onychomadesis, such as major illness or a side effect of certain medications...

“I do not recommend fish pedicures for any medical or aesthetic purpose,” Lipner said. “In addition to onychomadesis, there are also serious infections associated with fish pedicures.”

Photo via The Soul is Bone

addendum for the wordsmiths:  That's a new word for me.  Etymology onycho (nail) + madáō, “I fall off”(Greek).  Is there any other English usage of the madáō/madesis term???

Impressive tree shaping

Tree shaping is the process of modifying living trees into forms they would not normally achieve (LOTS of interesting stuff at that link, btw).

The embedded image is of the Sheraden House in Pittsburgh; the front entry is framed by twin sycamores (pix 1952 to 2017).

"Autonomous sensory meridian response" (ASMR)

YouTube link.

I first learned about ASMR while driving my car listening to a segment of This American Life.  It's fascinating.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and/or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial.

For those who want to explore the subject, Act Two of the TAL podcast is mesmerizing (just click the little forward arrow below "A Tribe Called Rest."  The entire segment lasts about 15 minutes, but try it for just 3-4 minutes...).

Reposted from 2014 to add the video above, depicting unintentional ASMR in the movies.  Via Kottke.