It's like tempting the ocean to take your life. But it's also a joyous celebration of fearlessness and an astounding confidence that the judgments made are not the wrong ones :



But if you were a youth, if you saw this scene unfolding in front of you, if you were wearing a wetsuit, wouldn't you want to give it a try, too?

Scientists Don't Know Why Earthquakes Come In Clusters



They don't know how yet, but imagine if scientists could look at a pattern of earthquakes and predict an expected size and location for a devastating quake, allowing for necessary evacuations a day or two in advance, then we will have cracked one of the greatest, most devastating, mysteries of Mother Nature.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

The director of the Australian Seismological Centre in Canberra, Kevin McCue, said yesterday's quake in Japan, the largest recorded there, would not have been linked to the one that struck Christchurch last month.

''This earthquake is a rupture of the plate boundary,'' Professor McCue said. ''The Christchurch earthquake was not. It was an earthquake on the conjugate fault, a fault that's at an angle to the main fault and 100 kilometres away from the plate boundary.

...Professor McCue said earthquakes on plate boundaries often came in quick succession. ''We had a sequence of earthquakes in 1906 where there were at least six 'grade earthquakes' around the Pacific. And now we've had Chile last year and this one,'' he said.

''It's something we observe in all extreme events - they are clustered in time. That's what we observe they do but we don't have an answer for it.''

The Full Story Is Here

Earthquakes as the soundtrack of Planet Earth :

Tectonic: Earthquakes Generate Music in Realtime from Micah Frank on Vimeo.

Wait for the end, it's worth it :

If you were an alien and came to Earth and saw someone doing this with a piece of wood and some little wheels, you'd have to be impressed, surely. More impressed at least than the many wandering past in the background, completely oblivious to the rare skill & creativity on display :

This doesn't qualify as a "strange thing", but is sure is an awesome sight to behold :

Your Funeral, Terminator Style

Methods of cheaply disposing of the recently departed without polluting the environment & using up wood for coffins, or filling the air with smoke from cremations, get steadily more bizarre :

Promessa, in Sweden, has come up with a method of burial that negates the worst aspects of the disposal of remains. They want to freeze human bodies, then shatter them into a million pieces. The body is chilled to around negative 18 degrees Celsius. Once it's cold enough, it's submerged in liquid nitrogen. As the body becomes colder, it gets more brittle. Once it's brittle enough, it's shocked with soundwaves that crumble it into powder.And that's just the start.
And that's just the start.

Okay, Elephants might not be completely terrified of mice, but they certainly do seem to be afraid of them :



But are the Mythbusters wrong? Are elephants really afraid of mice, in the way some humans freak out when they see a spider scurrying towards them?

Or are these elephants in fact purposely trying to avoid stepping on them? Maybe they've had enough experience stepping on small animals as youngsters to not want to get squished rodent between their toes.

Also, it must not be forgotten, that elephants use their trunks like we use our hands. When they're looking around for fruit on a forest floor, their trunks are snuffling around through undergrowth and grass.

It might simply be they know enough to avoid small darting things because snakes, and some rodents, would bite at a trunk that accidentally finds them amongst the fruit and leaf litter around the base of tree..

Or maybe there's simply a kind of heeby-jeebies terror of small animals running up the inside of their trunks and getting caught.

Whatever the reason, the idea proposed by MythBusters that elephants are irrationally scared of mice is ridiculous.

Considering the (however small in scale) level of threat posed by rodents, spiders, snakes to a snuffling trunk, it makes sense that elephants would learn over the years to rear back and step cautiously around a quick moving something they've only just seen or become aware of.

Elephants can hardly be compared to a man or woman standing on a chair shrieking insanely because there's a mouse, spider or monster cockroach darting around the floor.

Elephants have far more dignity than that.

A Christchurch man survived the recent tragic earthquake and found this visitor in his hall :



The intruder, nicknamed 'Rocky', is being auctioned to raise funds for survivors of the February 22 Christchurch earthquake.

More Here

Dolphins Save Doberman

A beloved Doberman went missing in Florida and wound up in a canal, unable to escape. It took refuge on an almost submerged sandbar, and there it might have died when the tides rose.

But two dolphins decided they could help by alerting humans to the dog's precarious location.

At least, that's how this story read to me, you tell me I'm wrong :

It all started when D'Alessandro and her husband, Sam, walked out of their home....to go fishing. Behind the home is a canal where "we saw these two dolphins and they were splashing and making this big commotion.

Dolphins usually swim through the canal behind the home, as it leads into the Gulf of Mexico, but this time the dolphins weren't just passing through.

"They were just there, in one place, splashing water against the canal wall," she said.

Why would dolphins help a dog in distress? Compassion? Empathy? Maybe one just wanted to prove to the other that he knew how to get humans' attention.

Or maybe it's a mammal code of behaviour not as preciously human as we once imagined.

Dawn Of The Zombie Puppies



He was just one of five puppies euthanised by a vet. His little body was checked for signs of life, nothing, he was tossed into a bin with the bodies of other dead animals.

But the next day :

an animal control officer looked into the bin and discovered that the one pup somehow survived.

"He was just as healthy as could be," Scott Prall told News 9.

The puppy has found a new home.

The Bizarre Origins Of Valentine's Day

How did Valentine's Day begin? With the whipping of women with the hides of recently slain dogs and goats in Ancient Rome :



From NPR :

From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.

The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked," says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival – or longer, if the match was right.

The Full Story Is Here

Fuck A Duck!

"One of them is raping me, I don't care."



Isabella Rosellini's educational videos on the secret sex lives of animals are some of the strangest things you will find on the internet, and man, that is saying something.

Rosellini wrote, produced, directed and stars in all these videos at the Sundance Channel. Educational and entertaining.

And one more, just to prove that dolphins are nature's kinkiest creatures. "Blowhole sex, anything goes".

Back Again

Right, been a bit slack posting to this blog over the past eight months, but many e-mails and comments have convinced me it's time to dive back into the strange, scary and wonderful things this planet has to offer.

I haven't lost my fascination for such things, I just wrote and linked to those kinds of stories on my Twitter stream here :

www.twitter.com/DarrylMason

Thanks for your kind words, and click my profile to get my e-mail address if you think there's something bizarre and fucked up I need to know about, or just message me on Twitter.

Darryl Mason.

In New Zealand, you can now buy robotic legs that will help paraplegics to walk again. Cost? About $150,000 :



From Discovery News :

Two New Zealand inventors have produced what they claim are the world's first robotic legs to help paraplegics walk again.

The bionic legs were road-tested publicly for the first time Thursday by 23-year-old Hayden Allen who was told five years ago he would never walk again after being paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident.

Allen said the experience of being able to stand up and walk when strapped into his robotic legs was fantastic and he felt like a normal human being again.

The Full Story Is Here

Did you know the Nazis made a Titanic movie in 1943? Me neither :



From Cracked :

The whole production was a disaster from start to finish. The director, Herbert Selpin, was imprisoned and killed for not being nearly Nazi enough and saying mean things about the German Navy. And only once the most expensive German film up to that point was finally finished did everyone realize that the general public wouldn't really care for a disaster film when Germany itself was being bombed to hell.

The film was pulled from cinemas after its debut and only shown in Paris, before being banned altogether. And then in 1945 the ship the movie was filmed on was sunk, killing way more people than the actual Titanic disaster.

The whole project came to symbolize the complete and utter failure of the Third Reich, which isn't bad for a film where the complete opposite was meant to happen. And to add insult to injury, Germany's enemies the Soviets loved the film for its anti-capitalism message, the Brits stole some of the scenes for their own superior version a decade later, and James Cameron would eventually rip off some of the plot in his own sappy Hollywoodized version.

Al Qaeda is now recruiting.....monkey terrorists :

The baby boy lived for only a day, and 150,000 people came to see him.

Monkey-Faced Piglet Born



Sure it's a mutant, but this kid doesn't care :

“Our son likes to play with it, and he stopped us from getting rid of it. He even feeds it milk,” said Mr Feng’s wife.

Beastly And Beaky



BoingBoing has a good discussion on what the hell this creature washed up on a beach actually is. Equal votes for escaped experimental mutant and excellent Photoshopping exercise.

Did whatever-this-is really die giving the finger?