Weird News: Appetizer to Friday Nite Lite Cartoon Post

Good Afternoon, well late afternoon…

So nice to be able to say that my migraine is gone. That was three days of hell. Thank you to Mona aka Wonk and Boston Boomer for filling in for me the past couple days.

I have a cartoon post planned a bit later tonight, but I thought I would post some links to some strange news stories.

Check out the video of this bird diving 150 feet into the ocean, to get some dinner. Yes, all that way for some deep-sea tubelike worms.  Video: ‘Superbird’ dives 150 feet underwater in 40 seconds | TG Daily

Speaking of tubeworms…okay, now this is one strange animal. While working to fix a dam in Brazil, these Atretochoana eiselti, were found…and they freakishly remind me of that joke, is that a caecilian in your pocket, or are you happy to see me. Snake-Like Amphibian Found In Brazil, Makes Us Blush | Geekosystem

Last year, the Madeira River in Rondonia, Brazil was drained for a hydroelectric dam. At the very bottom, were six of these creatures, writhing about looking like penises, except that they’re all about 30 inches long. Now, biologists have confirmed that they are Atretochoana eiselti, an extremely rare species of caecilian with no known living population.

The A. eiselti were found last November, but the discovery was only made public after biologists confirmed the genus. Caecilians are limbless amphibians with rings like those of the earthworm. The A. eiselti is the largest tetrapod without lungs, breathing through its skin instead. It has fleshy dorsal fins on its back, and is thought to live in fast-flowing water.

You ready for the picture!

But of course, you’re probably not here to find out what we know of this enigmatic creature (which is almost nothing anyway). You’re here for visual herpetology.

Julian Tupan, a biologist from Santo Antonio Energy, the company building the dam, told The Sun:

Of the six we collected, one died, three were released back into the wild and another two were kept for studies. Despite looking like snakes, they aren’t reptiles and are more closely related to salamanders and frogs. We think the animal breathes through its skin, and probably feeds on small fish and worms, but there is still nothing proven.The Amazon is a box of surprises when it comes to reptiles and amphibians. There are still much more to be discovered.

Oooooof!

On we go.  I found this picture on Facebook:

It was shared by Being Liberal.

Earlier today, I saw this link and had to think about the phrase, “volunteer” and wondered if it should apply to these folks: Videographer had bottoms up view of nuclear blast, lives to tell tale | Fox News

George Yoshitake, Don Luttrell, and four other officers stood directly underneath an exploding nuclear warhead 55 years ago — and lived to tell their tale.

The blast was just a test, a bit of Cold War marketing designed to make the concept of nuclear war less scary for the public, but the 2-kiloton atomic explosion set off over the Nevada nuclear test site (and over the heads of those six men) was very real.

But then again, nuclear testing was nothing new for Yoshitake in the early 1950s.

The former Department of Defense cameraman was responsible for filming nuclear tests for the military, and was therefore involved in several nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific — always at a safe distance, anywhere from 5 to 20 miles from the blast.

On July 19, 1957, he was told to do something different and more dangerous than any of his other assignments.

“I had a call saying they needed me out for a special test,” the now 83-year old cameraman told FoxNews.com. “I found out when I got to Nevada that I was going to be standing at ground zero. It was going to explode 10,000 feet above my head!”  The government planned to detonate a nuclear weapon above a handful of men as a publicity stunt to prove that these weapons were safe if they were ever used for a counter attack against Russia.

“The general public was afraid of nuclear weapons, with good reason,” 88-year old Major Don Luttrell, the only other member of the operation still alive, told FoxNews.com. “They were concerned about the danger of people on the ground if we fired nuclear weapons at enemy airplanes.”

Luttrell, who has a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, believed that it was safe, so he and four Air Force colleagues volunteered for the demonstration.

See what I mean…take a look at the rest of that story. It is written by a participant in Fox News teen reporters. Not surprising is the fact that all the “volunteers” got cancer and most died at an early age.

This next story has some crazy x-ray images at the bottom of the page, you have to see some of the things people will ingest…or get impaled on. Woman Swallows Knife: X-Ray Images Show Cutlery Lodged In Atlanta Woman’s Esophagus (PHOTOS)

A 30-year-old Atlanta woman accidentally swallowed a butter knife during a demonstration for friends.

Real smooth.

A 30-year-old Atlanta woman with a history of bulimia accidentally swallowed a butter knife while attempting to demonstrate for friends that she no longer had a gag reflex, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The patient told doctors that she was holding the knife partially down her throat when something made her laugh, causing the utensil to slide into her esophagus, as seen in X-ray images obtained by The Huffington Post.

While laughter may not have been the best medicine in this case — the woman reportedly began vomitting blood and experiencing stomach pain — medical professionals at the Emory University School of Medicine did manage to perform an endoscopy and remove the cutlery without complications, the New York Daily News reported.

Ugh…according to the article, this is not the first time she has swallowed a kitchen knife.

Again, go look at some of those x-rays…wild stuff indeed.

Speaking of swallowing, cough…cough: Jenna Jameson Endorses Mitt Romney: ‘When You’re Rich, You Want A Republican In Office’

Yup, that Jenna Jameson.

Retired porn star Jenna Jameson waded into the 2012 presidential race on Thursday, choosing a San Francisco strip club as the venue to announce her support for GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

CBS San Francisco has her comments:

“I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office,” Jameson said while sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. “When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.”

With an estimated net worth of $30 million and a resume that includes 160 films, Jameson ranks as one of the porn industry’s wealthiest players.

Of course Romney is staying quiet about this endorsement. Unlike his other various supporters, i.e. Ted Nugent, I guess this one goes a bit too far?

Romney’s presidential aspirations have intersected with pornography and adult film stars before. Earlier this year, a clip surfaced showing Romney unveiling an effort to combat online pornography in 2008.

“I wanna make sure that every new computer sold in this country after I’m president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography and that parents can click that filter to make sure their kids don’t see that kinda stuff coming in on their computer,” he said at the time.

And last month, a former anti-porn prosecutor in the Reagan administration claimed that Romney’s campaign had vowed to “vigorously” crack down on pornographers once in the White House.

Hmmm, he lauds a racist, sexist, gun crazed wingnut supporter in Ted Nugent, but says nothing about being endorsed by Jenna Jameson.

One last link, first let me preface it with this typical response from those who are against evolution theories:

“I ain’t kin to no damn monkey!”

Well, I guess we can add elephants to that quote. The real rumble in the jungle: Scientists find elephants ‘sing like humans’ – but at a frequency so low we can’t hear them | Mail Online

It may not seem like elephants and Barry White would have much in common.

But it appears that both use bass singing to set the mood.

Researchers have found that elephants use an ultrasound rumble – often too low for humans to hear – to keep the herd together and for males to find mates.

Elephants employ the same voice mechanism as human singers to generate deep “infrasound” rumbles, scientists found.

It allows the animals to communicate over distances of up to six miles.

The low-pitched elephant calls, occupying a frequency range below 20 Hertz, may seem to have little in common with human singing.

But researchers have confirmed that both are produced in exactly the same way.

Experts had wondered whether, like a cat’s purr, elephant infrasound was generated by muscular ‘twitching’ movements of the vocal cords.

This mechanism can produce ‘arbitrarily low’ frequencies, scientists said.
Instead, it turns out the elephant sounds are made purely by air being blown through the larynx, or voice box, as in the case of a human singer.

Well I’ll be a pachyderms uncle!

See y’all later tonight in the funny papers, I mean the Friday Nite Lite post.