If you aren’t up to speed with the current series of GOT and don’t want to be spoiled then don’t click (you have been warned!)
Author: Dan
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The first iPhone
Well, not really.
While in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) spotted what looked to him like an iPhone in a 350 year old painting.
“You know, I thought I knew until last night [where and when the iPhone was invented]. Last night Neelie took me over to look at some Rembrandt and in one of the paintings I was so shocked. There was an iPhone in one of the paintings,” Cook jokingly explained.
As the title of the painting “Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House” suggests the item is actually a letter, and that the artist, Pieter de Hooch saved his imagination for the painting rather than the titling.
Looking at the painting as a whole, of far greater concern should be the creepy kid looking in through the door.
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The Dales
So, the Yorkshire Dales are bloody lovely.
The waterfall is Janet’s Foss (home to a fairy queen) and the chasm is Gordale Scar. Below is a shot looking back over the fields between the two (click for bigger).
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Audubon’s fake species
John James Audubon is best known for his Birds of America; if you think you don’t know it, you do:
But it turns out that in his younger days he made up almost 30 species to prank a fellow naturalist.
During their visit, though, Audubon fed Rafinesque descriptions of American creatures, including 11 species of fish that never really existed. Rafinesque duly jotted them down in his notebook and later proffered those descriptions as evidence of new species. For 50 or so years, those 11 fish remained in the scientific record as real species, despite their very unusual features, including bulletproof (!) scales.
When he figured out that Rafinesque had also been naming mammals based on his time with Audubon, he started worrying.
In the descriptions he gave to Rafinesque, some of these animals had very odd features. The “three-striped mole rat” was attributed to a genus that had no business being in North America. The “white-stripe lemming” carried its young on its back, despite have teats on its chest. The brindled stamiter had its cheek pouches, usually an interior feature, on the outside.
What japes!
The “Brindled Stamiter”
The post title is just one of many terrible/brilliant puns used in titling the score to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. “Look Who’s Stalking,” “Past Their Primates,” “Aped Crusaders,” “Monkey See, Monkey Coup,” “Close Encounters of the Furred Kind”. There are many.
And it looks like it’s not just Apes that composer Michael Giacchino had fun with. The Star Trek Into Darkness soundtrack features “Warp Core Values,” and, “Earthbound and Down”; John Carter has “A Thern for the Worse” (and, of course, “Get Carter”); and Mission Impossible:Ghost Protocol includes the quite marvellous/terrible: “Kremlin with Anticipation.”
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