The look of love is most definitely in this male tortoise’s eye. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any animal make such an O-Face before! Just look at him! It’s kind of adorable in its own horny reptile sort of way.
Do lady tortoises not get any pleasure from copulation? She doesn’t seem too impressed to me…
Via reddit
Bogotá, Colombia’s Diana Beltrán Herrera is a sculptor who hand-crafts astonishing replicas of birds from paper. These sculptures are miles beyond origami. Via Amusing Planet:
Diana Beltran Herrera hand-makes the paper birds by building up layers to form the base structure, then glues on delicate feathers that are curled and splayed once attached. Wire legs are added and feathers are painted to make the models as realistic as possible. Each model takes from 5 days to 2 weeks to complete depending on size and complexity.
The mechanics are impressive, and the end results are truly lovely, but the birds represent to Herrera a way to address the disengagement of humanity from nature in an urban milieu. Here’s a pertinent passage from a recent Smithsonian interview.
“I had this knowledge of things living around me, but did I really know about them? I decided that it was time to play again, to rediscover the place where I was living.”
Herrera’s explorations began with birds. She observed local birds in her city of Bogotá and did Internet research on these species, identifying them and learning about their behavior and habitat. The artist also met with members of an ornithology group that provided more information.
“I discovered that I was living in a city full of nature, but somehow the traffic and modernism never allowed me to see what was living in there,” says Herrera. “With time, I started to find those plants, animals and life in general and felt astonished about each single thing, but the most recurrent animal was always the bird.”
Be sure to have a look at her projects page to see some of her stunning commission work, but first, enjoy these fantastic images. If you like what you see, and will be in Berlin this spring, Herrera will be participating in this year’s Pictoplasma Festival.
More after the jump…
Israeli artist Nirit Levav makes these rather peculiar life-size dog sculptures from recycled bicycle parts. Her series is called “Unchained.” The canines are mostly made from old bike chains, gear parts, saddles and pedals.
You can view more of “Unchained” at her Etsy shop. If you’re curious how much these puppies (see what I did there?) cost… they’re a pretty penny to say the least.
With thanks to Gail Potocki!
If only the horror writer James Herbert were still alive, he could appear on breakfast news and daytime television telling us all how he had prophesied such bone-gnawing terrors in his book The Rats all those many years ago.
For last year, we heard of poison-resistant, mutant rats over-running the south-east of England. And now, we have a ghost ship drifting towards Scotland, with a crew of cannibal rats.
Cannibal Rats?
The Lyubov Orlova, a former cruise liner, has been drifting across the North Atlantic for almost a year. The vessel, built in Yugoslavia in 1976, was abandoned in a Canadian harbor after its owners failed to pay the ship’s crew.
Shipping authorities in Newfoundland tried to sell the vessel for scrap to the Dominican Republic—the ship’s hull alone was valued at nearly one million dollars. However, the Lyuov Orlova was accidentally cast adrift during a storm. The vessel then drifted out of Canadian waters and into the North Atlantic.
Since then this ghost ship has been drifting slowly eastward ever since, with its only passengers—hundreds of rats, who have (according to “experts”) have been eating each other to survive their long arduous voyage.
The Lyubov Orlova’s wayward course has been picked-up by signals sent on the 12th and 23rd of March 2013, when two lifeboats fell into the water. (Rats leaving a sinking ship?) A week later, an unidentified vessel was spotted on the radar heading towards Scotland.
The Sun newspaper quoted Belgian salvage expert, Pim de Rhoodes, who said in his best Quint from Jaws:
“She is floating around out there somewhere.
“There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other. If I get aboard I’ll have to lace everywhere with poison.”
According to The Independent, Head of the Irish Coastguard, Chris Reynolds “said the ship was more likely than not to still pose a threat.”
“There have been huge storms in recent months but it takes a lot to sink a vessel as big as that,” he said. “We must stay vigilant.”
It’s almost like the pay-off to The Thing from Another World, but this time, if you’re in Scotland, or Ireland, remember:
“Wherever they are. Watch the seas everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the seas!”
You get the picture…
Now, in this video you can take a trip around the Lyubov Orlova, before it was a ghost ship full of cannibal rats!
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Mutant, poison-eating ‘Super rats’...coming soon!
Via the Independent
One thing is for sure: Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypte (yes, that’s right, “William in Egypt”—whatevs) is no Maru, the wildly videogenic Japanese feline whose winsome antics catapulting himself in and out of cardboard boxes have made his owner a thousandaire many times over. In Marker’s 1990 short Chat écoutant la musique, Guillaume mostly snoozes atop an electronic keyboard as a lugubrious jazz piano theme by Federico Mompou emanates throughout the room. A couple times he looks around, and towards the end (drama!) he switches position. Hey, he’s a cat—mainly he snoozes.
Marker’s short film, one of five animal-related movies that comprised his Bestiaire, would probably fail as YouTube click bait, but it succeeds as a dreamy meditation by one of cinema’s most challenging experimental directors, best known for Sans Soleil and La Jétee, the latter of which Terry Gilliam (not Guillaume, not from Egypt) improbably transmogrified into the frenetic time-twisting thriller Twelve Monkeys.
Two guys discover a skunk spinning around in circles in the middle of a street of with a styrofoam cup on its head. They decide they’re going to help this poor feller out, but since it’s a skunk, a plan of action is required!
Via reddit
There’s nothing “ew” about these one-of-kind vintage porcelain dinnerware pieces with realistic hand-painted ants by German artist Evelyn Bracklow. I’ve seen other dishes with ants painted on ‘em before, but not this well executed. In fact, when I first saw these, I gave them a second glance.
A few of the pieces are available at Bracklow’s Etsy shop, La Philie. FYI, they’re not cheap.
Via Everlasting Blort and This Clossal
It’s the kind of thing you would expect to see in some B-movie horror, where a ravenous cockroach crawls into a sleeping victim’s ear, and starts burrowing towards their brain. It will involve lots of screaming, gore, thrashing about and flying chunks of splattered brain. You get the picture. Well, for one man in Australia this was almost what happened, when a cockroach paid him a nocturnal visit.
Hendrik Helmer awoke one morning from uneasy sleep with a sharp pain in his right ear. At first he feared a poisonous spider had crawled into his ear during the night, and hoped it would not bite him.
Helmer then attempted to suck out the intruder with a vacuum cleaner. When this failed, and the pain became excruciating, he tried squirting water into his ear, but to no effect. As Helmer explained to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
“Whatever was in my ear didn’t like it at all.”
A concerned roommate rushed Helmer to a local hospital, where a doctor put oil in his ear. Alas, this only forced the 0.8 inch cockroach to burrow deeper, where it eventually began to die.
A mutant cockroach from ‘Bug’ (1975)
According to Mr. Helmer, it was around the ten minute mark that the cockroach began to stop burrowing and began “the throes of death twitching.” The doctor put forceps into his ear and removed the cockroach.
“She [the doctor] said, ‘You know how I said a little cockroach, that may have been an underestimate.’
“They said they had never pulled an insect this large out of someone’s ear.”
Mr. Helmer said he would not be taking any further precautions to stop any other nocturnal invaders, although his friends have been so perturbed, some are now sleeping with headphones on.
However, cockroaches crawling into people’s ears whilst they are asleep, is not uncommon, as the following video shows.
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And here are those little critters in the horror movie Bug (1975)
H/T the Daily Telegraph
If you didn’t have enough reasons to love Vincent Price, here’s one more.
Vincent Price loved animals, in particular dogs, and his favorite dog was the one he owned, a dog called Joe.
Vincent was so enamored with his four-legged pal that he wrote an entire book about him called The Book of Joe, in 1961, which begins as follows:
“This is a tale of how I went to the dogs or, to be numerically correct, to the dog. Now please do not expect this book to end with a glorious proclamation of rehabilitation. Not a chance. After fourteen years I’m incurably hooked on, intoxicated by, and addicted to - my dog Joe.”
I had never heard of Mr. Price’s foray into canine biography before, but now have it on my growing list of books I would like to read, and going by some reviews on Good Reads, it sounds like a treat:
If you are ever lucky enough to find this out of print and rare book, you will be delighted by the WONDERFUL stories it contains. Told as elegantly and masterfully as only Vincent Price could tell. I could hear his distinct voice within every written word. A real rare gem for Vincent Price fans or Dog lovers in general.
This book tells not only the story of Joe but of other Price pets. Including apes, camels and roosters, just to name a few. The book is somewhat auto-biographical in nature as it relates to his love of animals. Sometimes sad but often hilarious, I laughed more often than I cried. I always enjoy a happy ending and so Mr. Price deliveres as the climax and ending becomes triumphant yet poignant.
This book helped me remember that the world lost not only a great Actor when Mr. Price died, but a loving husband, father, gourmet cook, art critic, and one of a dog’s best friends.
It appears Vincent Price’s The Book of Joe is a much sought after and rather difficult to find book, so I guess until I’m lucky enough to own a copy, I will have to make do with these charming ink drawings by artist Leo Hershfield, which illustrate Mr. Price’s book.
More from Vincent and Joe, after the jump…