Sunday, May 17, 2009

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: This isn't weird, but rather, stunningly cool: Artificial Owl, a blog devoted to photography of abandoned things throughout the world. Shipwrecks, abandoned military sites, old lighthouses that no longer glow, and more. I spent a long time yesterday surfing its archives. Go check it out.

:: Following a pointer from the above-linked blog, I was noodling about on Google Maps on the coast of Mauritania, when I saw this:



What do you suppose that is? A single dolphin or whale? A shark? A small boat that leaves a wake suggestive of those things? It's about a thousand feet off the shore. There are more of those visible as I scroll along the shoreline.

:: Two employees at Yellowstone National Park were fired for...wait for it...urinating into Old Faithful. The funniest part of the linked story is the matter-of-fact statement that "the geyser was not erupting at the time". Thanks for spelling that out!

:: Shamus linked a version of this video, one that had music added. I like the version without music better -- or, at least, I like "no music" better than the music selected for that version, so here's the no-music version. It's a timelapse-photography film of a cargo ship navigating the ship channel in Houston, TX.



It turns out that there's a lot of this kind of thing on YouTube -- just search "ship timelapse" and you'll find a bunch of videos. Here's one I particularly liked, of a cruise ship traversing the Panama Canal. In this one you get to see the timelapse of the locks filling or emptying, raising and lowering the ship; I like how the decks fill with people who want to watch the action when they arrive at the locks.



Cool!

:: And this certainly is weird: FOX has renewed Dollhouse, despite its lackluster ratings in a dead-end Friday night timeslot -- i.e., the timeslot that led FOX to give Firefly the heave-ho. FOX, doing right. Who knew.

More weirdness next week!

1 comment:

Lynn said...

Perhaps Fox has learned to fear sci-fi fans? Nah. Probably just another incomprehensible network exec decision.