Once you start looking..

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Ten amazing urban wildlife experiences

You don't have to leave the city to see wildlife. Here are 10 of the world's great urban encounters.

He must 'bee' crazy

Gao Bingguo is covered with bees during an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for being covered by the largest number of bees, in Taian, China. Luckily for him he set a new record a for having 326,000 bees on his body at one time.

 

Woof

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Amazon Can Guarantee Delivery In Two Days..

.but what happens to it once it gets inside your house, well, that’s on you.

 

Cyanide & Happiness

 Explosm.net

Man Spent Ten Years Transforming Massive Hedge Into A Dragon

John Brooker of Norfolk spent a few hours a day over a decade transforming a hedge on his Frizzleton Farm property into an awesome looking dragon, and now he no longer has to worry about solicitors dropping by unannounced! via

 

Movies Made Better By Adding Godzilla

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Opposition wins Croatian elections for EU parliament

The opposition parties were the big winners in the Croatian elections for the European parliament. The right-centre political party Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and their coalition have got 6 mandates. It means they defeated the rulling SDP and their leftist coalition that got four mandates. The only other mandate went to the new party Orah that is concentrated on Croatia's sustainable development. Croatian Labour Party president Dragutin Lesar meanwhile has resigned after they failed to get a representative in the EU parliament.

 

Eurosceptic 'earthquake' rocks EU elections

Morten Messerschmidt, of the Danish People's Party, was among the Eurosceptic winners.

But many Socialists had a disappointing night - including their candidate for Commission president Martin Schulz.
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Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right

I don’t think I’ve ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by the video of Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a twenty-year-old son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost obligatory—but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez, almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment. And so there was something almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage to speak a painful truth: “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”
 Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true. 

 

Ready and waiting

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Stealing Food Is Wrong

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans

Millions of years before we humans came along, the earth’s oceans were a vast, unbroken web of whale song. The complex courting arias of humpbacks, the distinct clicking dialects of migrating sperm-whale clans, the congalike poundings of Pacific grays, the multi-thousand-mile moans and blips of massive blue and fin whales conversing across oceans at octaves well below our range of hearing, the nearly nonstop Arctic chatter of belugas: All of them are being drowned out now by our clamor. And yet a single beluga managed to make his voice go global again, and in the only medium left him: the worldwide web. The extraordinary history of Noc (pronounced no-see) resurrects a captive who somehow has found a way to speak to us, both literally and figuratively, of the true nature of his kind. continue

 

Cult of Leica

In 1914 optical engineer Oskar Barnack was working for Ernst Leitz when he designed the very first Leica, the Leitz Camera, or so-called Ur-Leica. The small handheld camera, one of the first to use 35mm film, finally went into production in 1925 following a long delay caused by World War One. It went on to revolutionise photography in the hands of the first photojournalists who set out to record the world on the brink of change. Today the German company produces a range of digital and film based cameras and a new purpose built factory at Leitz Park in Wetzlar, the town where the Leica was born, is being inaugurated. Here photojournalist Tom Stoddart, who works with a Leica camera, shares his thoughts on a number of classic photographs as well as the background behind his own favourite image. Interview conducted by Stephen Evans. Photofilm by Phil Coomes. Photographs courtesy Tom Stoddart/Reportage by Getty Images with additional pictures from Associated Press, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Yevgeni Khaldei, Leica Camera, Jeff Mermelstein, Rex Features and from Magnum Photos: Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Thomas Hoepker, Josef Koudelka and Marc Ribaud. Music by KPM Music. via BBC News

 

Elections Could Be the Beginning of the End for Europe

Four hundred million citizens in 28 countries are invited to cast their ballots for a new European Parliament this week, starting with the British and Dutch on Thursday. And for the first time, a motley band of anti-establishment radicals looks poised to thrive as Europe’s third political force, making the next five years a wild, bruising ride for the parliament in Strasbourg and also for their home countries. In France and the Netherlands, founding European Union nations, a pair of anti-Europe firebrands—the emblematic blond menaces Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders—may even outdo mainstream parties to win the day.

 

Do animals have friends, too?

Whether you're a human or a horse, it takes a lot of brainpower to support a complex social group – and that puts a limit on how many friends we can have.

 

Top 10 new species of the past year

The International Institute for Species Exploration has picked 10 of 18,000 species new to science in the past year, from a tiny skeleton shrimp at Santa Catalina Island in California to a translucent
 Croatian snail.

 

Can you identify these classic books by their covers?

We're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but good design can work wonders - as all publishers know. Can you name the novels pictured here?

 

Spock

Photograph by Kevin W Roy

 

Animals with Stuffed Animals

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So Glad To See You

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

 

How to get attention on the Internet

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A sloth peeps out in Manaus, Brazil

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A Wooden Canoe Built By Nick Offerman

The hustle of Hollywood isn’t exactly conducive to hobbies, especially not a mastery of woodworking. Yet actor and comedian Nick Offerman, known for his role as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, snuck in the time to build this 18 foot-long canoe called Lucky Boy.