A huge, fast-spreading sinkhole opens up in Texas :

Everything looks spectacular at 1000 frames a second :

Do You Get The Feeling Humans Are Not Supposed To Know Cats Can Do This?

'Shelf' clouds, occasioally seen but not often caught on video in such detail, are beautiful, remarkable and just a little bit freaky :

How Japanese Zookeepers Deal With Attacks From Escaped Animals : Poke It With A Stick, Fall Over

Two videos that show how Japanese zookeepers rehearse emergency response scenarios for keeping visitors safe in the event of, say a rhino rampage....


...or a clearly angry and agitated polar bear :



This overacted transquilised 'ape' collapse is some beautiful work.

There Really Was A "House Of Horrors"



A house with false walls, corridors that lead nowhere, windows that open only onto brick walls, has become a staple of both horror movies and crime fiction, but such a house really did exist, in Chicago, in the last years of the 19th century :

....a maze of windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions.

Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests. He tortured and killed them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate.

The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack.

The builder of the house, Dr Henry Howard Holmes, is known as the United States' first documented serial killer. He admitted to the murders of more than two dozen people, but he may have killed as many as 250.

A Harpers Magazine examination from 1943 goes into more detail of this horrific house :

...in 1892 he built on the opposite corner the enormous, improbable structure later to be known as his murder castle. It was more than a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, huge and ugly, with three storeys and a basement.

There were “staircases that led nowhere in particular,” blind passageways, hinged walls, false partitions, rooms with no doors and rooms with many doors. All these centered on the second floor of the gloomy, forbidding structure. Holmes’s own apartments were at the front of this floor. A trap door was cut in his bathroom and from it a short hidden stairway led to a windowless cubicle between-floors in the heart of the house; from this a chute dropped straight to the cellar.

Behind Holmes’s apartments were various rooms labeled in contemporary newspaper sketches as “five-door room,” “secret room,” “mysterious closed room” (behind this last was a “dummy elevator for lowering bodies” to the basement), “the black closet,” “room of the three corpses,” “sealed room all bricked in,” “blind room,” “another secret chamber,” “the hanging secret chamber,” and so on–nearly forty rooms in all. Near the rear of the house was an “asphyxiation chamber–no light–with gas connections.” Here the large purchases of gas fixtures becomes meaningful; it apparently was Holmes’s practice to lock victims in this sealed, asbestos-lined room and to turn on the gas. Immediately behind the asphyxiation chamber was another chute down which the bodies could be dispatched to the basement. Some of the rooms on this second storey were lined with iron plates, some had false floors that concealed tiny airless chambers, nearly all had gas connections.

The cellar was perhaps the most remarkable section of the building. It was fitted with operating tables, a crematory, pits containing quicklime and acids, surgical instruments, and various pieces of apparatus which, resembling mediaeval torture racks, never were satisfactorily explained.

The minds of some humans.

I know tornadoes don't really qualify as a "strange thing". They are, of course, very normal. But the citizen reporter footage of the brutal, deadly wave of tornadoes in the United States are too spectacular not to post here. This from Springfield, Massachusetts



The Aftermath :

If the activities of humans on Planet Earth are being watched by an alien civilisation, what would they make of Brits chasing discs of cheese down slippery, sodden hillsides in the cold and fog?

This is what you get when you enter 'Cherokee', the name of an American Indian tribe and culture that thrived for longer than the United States has existed, in Google Image search :



Via Reddit

Humans, we do some very, very stupid, and very strange, things :

I Never Wanted To See Darth Vader Do That

By Darryl Mason

Before you watch this, remember you cannot unwatch it, for now at least there is no way to burn the memory of seeing this from your brain. You can still look away. It's not too late :



Surely George Lucas only allowed this so there is something much worse out there than the Star Wars Holiday Special (see below)?

I don't know what's sadder, the fact that this authorised Star Wars Disney show of so little imagination actually exists, or the riot of absolute disgust Dance Off With The Star Wars Stars has provoked amongst 40-something males who truly believe the original Star Wars movie was the most important event of their childhoods and George Lucas doing anything to stain its memory is like the Pope vomiting on the Bible, over and over again. An attitude best summed up by this YouTube comment :

George Lucas killed my dreams with the prequels, this digs them up out of their graves to defecate on them with a continual stream of piping hot effluent.

I think George Lucas may actually now be trolling the most hardcore of Star Wars fans. If so, Dance Off With The Star Wars Stars is most definitely working.

Anyway, I don't know what Star Wars geeks are complaining about. It's not like George Lucas has only been taking Stars Wars and turning it into spin-off crap for the past decade. He was doing it within a year of the original film's release :



The Star Wars and Disney association that led to that stage show did, however, produce a great piece of poster art :

Grabs from a series of aerial photos of the wreckage left behind by the deadly tornado that swept through the American city of Joplin :











It seems like there is a city-smashing natural disaster in the US every couple of weeks now.

The Full Set Of Aerial Photos Are Here

More incredible tornado footage from the storms currently shredding the American mid-west :



And this from Denton, Texas :

The Florida Soft Shell Turtle specialises in busting the most common turtle-related cliches :

NASA UFO Photos Released
These are all screengrabs from a series of photos of unidentified objects shot by an astronaut in Earth's orbit, and were published on a NASA website :













More On This And Source Links Here

This Is What It's Like To Be Standing Inside A Massive Tornado

Easily, the clearest, most vivid footage anywhere online of a hurricane passing directly overhead. From the Tuscaloosa, Alabama tornado swarm on April 27, 2011 :



You can't blame the cameraman for backing away from the windows when he did. More than 230 people died in those tornadoes.

Bizarre Bird Carcass Found In Iran



Locals in northwestern Iran claim the above bird lived in a local cave. A skull like that of a reptile, canine teeth, small wings usually found only on flightless birds. What is it? Nobody knows yet :

The locals found the feathered bipedal creature, which seemed to have died a few days ago, near a remote village of Meshginshahr, IRNA reported on Sunday.

The avifauna of Iran includes a total of 527 species, none of which are similar to the found creature; however, the discovery needs ornithologists to verify the claims.

Scientists believe that fossil evidence demonstrates birds and dinosaurs shared many features such as hollow bones, gastrolith in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors.

Did a time portal from the age of the dinosaurs open up there recently? Or is it another long thought extinct bird?

Locals are claimed to be hiding the carcass, but hopefully this won't be the last we hear about this creature.

Presumably there'll be enough undamaged genetic material to work out exactly what it is. Then it can be cloned, and sold to zoos around the world.

Imagine one of those harrassing you on a beach for a hot chip? Here! Take them! Take them all!

Baby aardvark. That's all. Just a hairless, baby aardvark :

Galaxy's Most Wanted Terrorist Ben Kenobi Killed

It really suits him, doesn't it? He looks right at home :



From the Galactic Empire Times :

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber.

The whole story is excellent, and many of the comments are hilarious.

More Quality Journalism From Rupert Murdoch

This apology printed in the UK Sun newspaper is mind-boggling :

In an article published on The Sun website on January 27 under the headline 'Gollum joker killed in live rail horror’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15ft into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line.

His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn’t go drinking on that date every month. Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum.

To think they made all these things up about someone who had just died. Appalling.