Some people are tired of seeing "FML" comments

Jonah/Yunus meets the "big fish"

Jonah in the fish’s mouth by Giotto and workshop

Like many important Biblical characters, Jonah is also important in Islam as a prophet who is faithful to God (Allah) and delivers His messages. He is known to Muslims by his Arabic name, Yunus "Arabic: يونس", and also as (The One with the Whale "Arabic: ذو النون"). Sura 37 (equivalent to chapter 37) of the Qur'an is where the full story of Prophet Jonah is recounted...

Via Miss Folly.

Metropolis (1927) to be broadcast

More re this famous dystopian film here.  And Der Speigel has a report about the restored film being the featured opening presentation at the Berlin Film Festival this week.

Pix via Vintage Blog.

The entire movie can be viewed in 12 videos at YouTube.

Update:  The Turner Classic Movie station (TCM) will be broadcasting a special program on the evening of November 7 entitled "Metropolis Refound," detailing the restoration of the movie.  Earlier that same night their schedule shows a three-hour segment for "Metropolis," but I've been unable to ascertain whether that will be the original or the restored version.

"Virgin birth" documented in a boa constrictor

"The female [boa] has had not one virgin birth, but actually two, in spite of being housed with and observed to be courted by multiple males. "All offspring are female. The offspring share only half the mother's genetic make-up..."

First impressions suggested there was something special about these babies: all were female and all had a particular, rare caramel colouration. This colour is a rare recessive genetic trait, which is carried by the mother but not by any of the potential fathers... the baby snakes have inherited two copies of one half of their mother's chromosomes, including one W chromosome.

One other mystery is what prompted the female snake to give birth this way. "This female has given birth to sexually produced babies in the past, and only in years that she was housed with males has she produced offspring," Dr Booth explains. "It appears that some interaction with a male is required.

"However, why she does not utilise his sperm is at present unknown."

More at the BBC.

The Great Wall of Ston (Croatia)

One of my most pleasant memories is that of walking along the top of the Great Wall of China.  I never knew there was a smaller counterpoint in Croatia, until I read a post at Kuriositas today:

The walls circle the village of Ston and then climb up the hill to reach the Pozvizd Fortress.  They then follow a narrow strip of land (an isthmus) to meet with the walls of the village of Mali Stan.

When they were built, starting in the fifteenth century, they were heavily fortified – there are thirty rectangular towers and ten round ones dotted along the five kilometre stretch.  What was it that they were built to protect?  Apart from serving as a first line of defense for the fairly distant city of Dubrovnik they were constructed to protect a precious commodity – salt.

Photo credits Martijn Munneke and Wikimedia.

Old Walton Bridge

Depicted in a 1754 painting by Antonio Canaletto.  The structure of the bridge intrigued me (click it bigger to see what I'm referring to).  Here's what I found out:

In 1747 Samuel Dicker, local landowner and later MP for Plymouth, obtained permission to build a bridge at Walton. It was designed by William Etheridge and built by White of Weybridge to consist of "timbers tangent to a circle of 100 feet diameter" and was built so that a single timber could be extracted and repaired without disturbing the rest of the bridge. Old Walton Bridge was completed in August 1750 and acquired some fame, meriting an article in the Gentleman's Magazine, a report in Daniel Defoe's Tour in 1753 and a painting by Canaletto in 1754... The timber structure stood until 1783. 

Via Miss Folly.

Addendum: A hat tip to Pete, who searched the 'net and found an example of this type of bridge - the "Wooden Bridge" in Cambridge ("The bridge was built in 1749 by James Essex the Younger (1722-1784) to the design of William Etheridge (1709-1776). It has subsequently been rebuilt to the same design in 1866 and 1905.")

Second addendum, courtesy of an anon:

The bridge in Cambridge is called Queens' Bridge, because it connects the two parts of Queens' College separated by the River Cam. It is even more commonly called 'The Mathematical Bridge', and is popularly (but wrongly) supposed to be built entirely of wood.

(Queens' College was founded by two queens, one after the other, which is why the apostrophe goes after the 's' and not before it.)

"Convict Poker" at Angola prison

I heard about this event on an interesting BBC broadcast yesterday. 

Convict Poker - Four inmate cowboys sit at a table in the middle of the arena playing a friendly game of poker. Suddenly, a wild bull is released with the sole purpose of unseating the poker players. The last man remaining seated is the winner.

There is more about the prison rodeo at the Wikipedia link, and other videos posted at YouTube.  The movie highlighted in this video is not at my library, but I bet it would be fascinating.

This is the state of Rhode Island AND ....

... AND Providence Plantations.  I may have learned that at some time in my life, but if so I had totally forgotten it and only re-learned it because a proposal to shorten the official name of the state to "Rhode Island" was defeated during this election.

The name Rhode Island and Providence Plantations derives from the merger of two colonies, Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. Providence Plantations was the name of the colony founded by Roger Williams in the area now known as the City of Providence. Rhode Island, the other colonial settlement, was founded in the area of present-day Newport, on Aquidneck Island, the largest of several islands in Narragansett Bay.

It is unclear how Aquidneck Island came to be known as Rhode Island. In 1524, the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano noted the presence of an island near the mouth of Narragansett Bay, which he likened to the Greek island of Rhodes...

Image credit.

Addendum: As Boliyou points out in his comment, an alternative etiology for the name is Dutch explorers calling it "Roode Eylant" (Red Island).  That seems to make more sense to me.

Look at the shift in the voting electorate

In the 2008 presidential election year, young voters outnumbered older ones.  This year the ratio changed dramatically, with twice as many over-65s as under-30s.  Found at Yglesias.

Behind the mask

The election coverage coincided with my Halloween blogging vacation, so I had the unusual luxury of watching television and listening to radio coverage of the events.  By the time the post-election analyses were wrapping up yesterday, I suppose I had spent 12-15 hours monitoring the conventional media, and last evening it struck me that in that entire time, one item received absolutely no attention.

On election night I channel-surfed ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and for postelection coverage I also listened to NPR and BBC.  As I think back now, in all those hours of coverage by all those media outlets and all those analysts and commentators, I never heard a SINGLE COMMENT about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not a single word.  Of course, I could have missed it while switching channels, but every single viewpoint expressed focused on the economy and the policies of the Obama administration as factors in the election.  In 48 hours I NEVER heard the word "Afghanistan" or the word "war."

It's like it's not going on.

Another viewpoint

Credit Selin Jessa, via Neatorama.

Believe it or not, this is called a "pixie" frog

The colloquial name of this African mouse-eating bullfrog is derived from their Latin designation: Pyxicephalus adspersus.  Further details at The Telegraph.

Photo credit: Science photo library/Barcroft Media.

Halloween 1941

I like the apparently home-made costumes better than the store-bought ones today. 

Photo from the archives of LIFE, via Palahniuk & Chocolate.

Halloween 2010

Arachnids on the door and on one of the pumpkins, a cauldron with dry ice steam bubbling over a "fire" by the door, and for a guest greeter at the door - a 92-year-old witch having the first "trick-or-treat" experience in her memory because such things weren't done on her isolated farm in the '20s, and thereafter she mostly worked 3-11 shifts and missed out on Halloween festivities.  Personally, I had to change out of my Minnesota Vikings jersey because that uniform isn't scaring ANYONE nowadays...

Seven days without blogging...

... makes one weak.