Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Jet-propelled sheep

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I can’t help but think that this is one sheep that I wouldn’t want to be standing behind when it passed gas…

Shaboom the sheep’s favorite meal consists of animal feed made from nitrogen-based chemicals and other dismantled gun propellants — one of the more creative uses Albuquerque company TPL Inc. is finding for unwanted military munitions.

(via Prairie)

Dark Fairytales

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There’s what looks to be an interesting art show opening tomorrow at the Roq la Rue Gallery called Dark Fairytales.

All of the work revolves around the title’s theme, “Dark Fairytales.” The artists were asked to work with existing fairytales — either the “classics” (such as the Grimm Brothers, or Hans Christian Andersen’s stories) — or stories from myths and legends around the world. They could even make up a fairytale of their own.

I won’t be getting home from work in time to hit the opening, but I’ll see if I can get down there sometime this weekend to check it out. Looks like there could be some interesting stuff there.

(via Kirsten [not Kirsten, though])

Stonehenge again

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Last February, dad noted a story that I then mentioned also, regarding the possibility that Stonehenge might have been intended to resemble feminine genetalia (cold, hard, and immobile — apparently the designer didn’t have a very good sex life).

Five months later, the story is spreading (so to speak). Looks like we got the scoop on this one, dad! ;)

(via Iki)

Greetings, Earthlings

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Just something cool: a weblog from space, written by NASA Science Officer Ed Lu from on board the International Space Station.

At night, the dominant thing you see when you look down is thunderstorms. Lightning lights up the clouds in sometimes spectacular displays. At any given time at night, especially over the tropics, you can see one or more lightning storms going on. The lightning flashes illuminate the clouds from within, and ripple through the storm systems. I enjoy turning off all the lights in the docking compartment, and watching thunderstorm systems at night through its sideward facing windows. The southern Indian Ocean is a great place to watch thunderstorms.

As we near Australia, if you look towards the horizon southward you can see the aurora. The aurora look like glowing green curtains which move upwards from the top of the atmosphere. The curtains intersect the atmosphere in a curved line, which appears as a bright green line south of Australia. There are times when we actually fly through the aurora, and you can look downwards and see the green glow below you. Sometimes there are traces of red along with the predominant green. We’ve taken some time-lapse movies looking towards the horizon as we fly past the aurora.

(via Craig Suchland)

Linky love

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After getting a comment from Iki about the Homeland Security Chokers, I wandered over to her site (er…his site? I think Iki’s a ‘she’, though, this being the ‘net, Iki could be a secret super-evolved marmoset [which, incidentally, would probably be really cute] and I’d never know) and noticed that I’d been chosen as Iki’s Aortal site of the week (you can see the link midway down the sidebar)!

I thought that was fairly cool, and, never being one to let a good deed go unpunished, I wanted to promote sending a little traffic Iki’s way, too. So, here you go Iki — with my readership, you might get, oh, three or four more hits from this! ;)

And for what it’s worth, I think Entertainment Weekly temporary tattoos could be the new trend for the summer season.

Harry Potter Uno

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Ooers — there’s a Harry Potter Uno game that looks really cool! I found this review from sirriamnis:

Game Review: Harry Potter Uno is more vicious and high-scoring than the normal Uno game. This is due in part to:

Draw 2s are now Draw 3s.

There are two new cards, the Howler which is wild and will let you see all of another player’s hand (Ok, technically they’re supposed to shout out their entire hand, but with the sizes of the hands we were accumulating last night, not really practical) and the Invisibility Cloak card, also wild, which lets you cancel the action of any card played on you like Draw 3s, Draw 4 Wilds, Reverses, Skips, what have you.

I think the Howler contributes most to this. As it was used multiple times to let us see what an Uno-ed player’s remaining card was, and then we heaped on the new cards with glee.

We had some massively big scoring hands last night. But a good time was had by all.

I’m ordering one for me right now…