In many respects, we the people of Earth are pretty savvy, technologically and otherwise. We can read genetic code, interpret the faintest glimmers of light from the night sky to learn about the makeup of unimaginably distant worlds … and that iPhone is pretty cool, too! But we still, after all this time, haven’t found the perfect way to dispose of a dead whale. The most infamous example of this is the legendary Exploding Whale incident which happened on the Oregon coast in 1970. (I was truly surprised to discover, after a quick search of the _floss archives, that we have never posted this video. Let me rectify that right now.)
So if you can’t cut them up (too gross), bury them (tough to dig them deep enough) or blow them up (as established above), what can you do? Actually, explosives are still a common tool for whale deconstructors, but typically the carcass is hauled out to sea first, where the flying bits won’t muck up the shore (or crush any parked cars … see video). But even this doesn’t always work, as evidenced by a failed attempt in Iceland in 2005, when after a controlled explosion split an out-to-sea whale carcass in two, the halves drifted right back to land. Worse still was an organic explosion, which occurred while whale necrologists were transporting a carcass through the Chinese city of Tainan, Taiwan in 2004. (more…)

Paddy Issues
I’m not sure if you guys have realized, but Miss C’s been posting some incredible links over on the right side of our homepage, and she updates them! If you haven’t been checking them out, here’s just one of the great posts you’ve missed out on.

Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety. This year’s creation — a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — has begun to appear (above). It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September.

And here are a few others they’ve worked on. Pretty unbelievable. Be sure to check out PinkTentacle for more rice paddy updates, and the rest of Miss Cellania’s Morning Cup o’ Links over to the right.

The topic for today’s virtual mixer is books. Give us your literary trivia and author tidbits, tell us what you’re reading, or plug your own book. We could use a few summer recommendations.

Like we’ve done with the previous two Harry Potter installments, my wife and I ordered two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which will arrive tomorrow. That doesn’t leave me much time to polish off Then We Came To The End, a novel by Joshua Ferris about life at a Chicago ad agency. If you ever worked in advertising – or any company where layoffs were involved – I can’t recommend this book highly enough. (Read the first few pages here; if they don’t load right away, click ‘Excerpt’ on the left.)

Now go on. Chat. Start being all interesting and whatnot.

Some people have a junk drawer. Some people have a shoebox of memories. But not me. I have a Ball of Wires.

The Ball spends its days overflowing a 31-gallon plastic tub. It contains my collection of audio/video, computer, and telephone cables, assembled over a decade of roaming the US, connecting things to other things. The Ball is hopelessly tangled — it takes a good ten minutes to disentangle any given cable you want from the Ball — assuming you can find it in the first place. I’m constantly removing cables from the Ball, but somehow it continues to gain mass and needs semi-annual upgrades into ever-larger plastic tubs.

Witness more details of my secret messiness after the jump.

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Have you ever thrown away a garbage can? My wife and I recently moved to a new house and found ourselves throwing out several old garbage cans. It’s kind of funny to think the thing you used to collect garbage has to be tossed in a larger garbage container.

Likewise, there are words that are used to describe aspects of themselves which I find equally entertaining. Etymology is a good one. Ever wonder what the etymology of etymology is? Well, it’s from a Middle English word: etimologie, which is from an Old French word: ethimologie, which can be traced back to the Latin etymologia, which, as you might have already guessed, goes back to the Ancient Greek, etumologia. Etumologia has two roots: etumon, or “true sense” and logia, or “the study of.”

Another good one might be when someone uses the word question as a question. For example, the other day I was telling my writing students that they should avoid clichés unless they’re using them in dialogue, because, well, people really do speak in clichés; so there’s nothing wrong with that. One of my students raised his hand and asked, “Question?”

I nodded and he went and asked away. But the idea here is that the word for a question became a question, as in: “David, can I ask a question, please?”

Can any of you loyal Wrap readers think of some other hall-of-mirror-type words?

Bromides! Whether in the chemical or the cliche form, life isn’t as savory or functional without them. But contrary to where this post might seem headed, I’m not going to poll you about your favorite bromides (David’s already done that, anyway). Bromide–or ‘mine–was discovered by a 23 year-old French chemist in 1826; it resembled chlorine and iodine, but was neither; it smelled terrible, thus the Greek bromos, meaning stench. As it evolved, it was used to treat “hystericals” of all sorts, usually in a potassium bromide. When I was nervous–but not yet hysterical–before a job interview, someone recommended I take some bromides. I felt as though someone had prescribed me mead. But lo, there is a homeopathic form called kali bromatum (aka the more imperial “Bromide of Potash”), and I’ll have to testify that it worked. I suppose the logic was that if I injested some bromides before I went in, I wouldn’t feel any compulsion to unleash any other kind of bromides.

Crossing at the 14th/9th/Hudson intersection reminds me of the Assault challenge on American Gladiators. Except nobody’s firing tennis balls at me. And I’m not given any softball grenades. And Larry Csonka is not involved.

OK, maybe that’s a bad analogy. But yesterday – simply trying to cross the road – I was nearly run over, and witnessed several near-accidents. Something was amiss.

That something was the traffic lights.

Armed with a heightened sense of caution and a Canon Digital ELPH, I returned to the scene today.

Am I crazy, or are these signals hopelessly mixed? (more…)

Wanted to remind everyone that there are only 24 hours left on the Harry Potter Spoiler Contest. (Click here to read and enter.) Winners will be announced Monday morning, and we’re giving out mental_floss t-shirts and books to the entries that make us grin the widest.

So my bandmates recently adopted a pair of cats — mother and daughter (the latter a youngish kitten). The kitten needs to be weaned, but didn’t seem to be doing it on her own — so I’m borrowing the mother (Emma) for a week or so in order to force the issue.

I haven’t had a cat since I was a teenager. I always had a cat when I was growing up, and loved them, but in my nascent adulthood have generally shirked responsibility for things that needed care and feeding (except for my African Violets and guppies — subjects of future posts, to be sure). So now I have a temporary cat. This leads me to ask you, dear readers: what do you do with a borrowed cat?

My list so far includes:

1. Make my own LOL Cats. Have camera, will follow cat around till something funny happens. This could take a while.

2. Spoil cat with liberal applications of cat treats. I have learned in the first half hour that cat responds favorably to bribes. Research note: cat appears to prefer chicken over fish flavor, or perhaps is full.

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A great part of Britain’s identity is wrapped up in the fact that it’s a part of Europe, but it stands apart, quite literally, as an island. According to new sonar studies of the Channel which runs between Britain and France, that wasn’t always the case. Until about 200,000 years ago, Britain was a peninsula of Europe, and could be walked to from mainland France — as many early humans did. So what severed the soil? An almost unimaginably huge flood, possibly triggered by a small earthquake, pushed a giant, river-fed lake through the narrow isthmus which once stood where the English Channel now flows; then, the proverbial dam broke. At its peak, the flood may have discharged up to a million cubic meters of water per second, making it one of the most significant known megafloods in the Earth’s history.

To Pacific Northwesterners in the know, this may sound a bit familiar: the beautiful Columbia River Gorge which separates Oregon and Washington wasn’t there a few hundred thousand years ago, either. The end of an ice age sent huge amounts of rocky glacier meltwater cascading (no pun intended) from eastern Washington toward the sea, and with it, it took some really significant chunks of what was then simply the Cascade mountain range. Which is why the Gorge boasts some of the highest and most impressive waterfalls in the country; until that precipitous flood, those were rivers flowing through a more or less uninterrupted mountain range! At its height, the waters were over 1,000 feet deep, moved at more than 90 miles per hour and carrying house-sized boulders. Perfect for a little x-treme tubing, ice age style.