Image via 55chris on Instagram.

Here are some incredible photos of a wedge-tailed eagle attempting to carry off a 6-year-old boy in central Australia. Christine O’Connell from Horsham in Victoria state photographed the incident while at a wildlife show. Onlookers were shocked and terrified as the eagle tried to pick up the boy “like a small animal” with its large talons.

The park issued a statement after the attack:

“On Wednesday, 6 July, an incident occurred at the Alice Springs Desert Park where an eagle made contact with an audience member,” the park said in a statement.

“A thorough investigation regarding the circumstances behind this incident is under way and the eagle will be removed from the show while this investigation is ongoing.”

The boy was immediately rushed to the hospital following the incident and escaped with a few minor injuries. Glad he’s going to be okay. Whew!

Image via 55chris on Instagram.
 

Image via 55chris on Instagram.
 
via BBC News

 
David Cranmer is a sculptor but it might be more accurate to think of him as a mechanical engineer of some sort. Most of his whimsical creations are actually contraptions of some sort, and many have a musical element.

In 2013 he was commissioned to do an owl theremin, so that is what he did. It is pretty much just a regular theremin with an owl statue on top. I was hoping that somehow the owl would be tethered to the theremin and the movements of the owl would create sounds. But when you stop to think about it, that’s a pretty stupid idea, owls hardly move around anyway.

In addition to this Cranmer has also created the “Badgermin” (a taxidemied badger with a theremin inside), a programmable musical pig, and a pointless but amusing mechanical duck sculpture. He also designed the enormous locomotive stage element for AC/DC‘s Black Ice World Tour a few years ago.

I love the detail of the scrupulous and deadpan knob label “ACTIVATE OWL” on the control panel.

If you’d like your own custom-made animal-theremin, Cranmer is available for commissions. You can contact him via his website.  
 

 

 

More after the jump…

 
I had zebra finches growing up, and while they were sweet little birds, they had two major drawbacks—the after-hours chirping, and all the pooping. The chirping you could remedy with a towel over the cage. Regardless of the hour, any light on and they were under the impression they had to greet the morning dawn, but darken the cage and they’d shut up. There was no remedy to the pooping however, so you simply accepted that when you took them out to play, sometimes you were going to get bird shit on you, a small price to pay to have them cheerfully hop up and down your arm.

Artist Fabrizio Lamoncha has managed to actually utilize the talents of the zebra finch, with his Poo Printer, an enclosure with letter-shaped perches that encourage the finches to shit a sort of crude calligraphy. In Lamoncha’s own words:
 

A group of male zebra finches underwent this experiment with rigorous commitment. The author/captor, taking the role of some kind of 1984´s Big brother, is providing the implementation guidelines for the transformation of this countercultural attitude into a marketable artsy product. The observation of this group of non-breeding birds in captivity and the experimentation with induced behaviors has been rigorously documented for this task. This project researches in a hybrid, artistic and scientific framework the physiological, mechanical and social dynamics of birds under captivity in a simulated factory-chain environment.

The result is the Poo Printer, an analog generative typography printer using the bird-poo as the particle substance in order to slowly generate the Latin alphabet characters over a large paper roll.

 

 

 
A time-lapse video of the Poo Printer in action, after the jump…

 
Remember Darwin the macaque monkey who achieved worldwide Internet celebrity four years ago when he was photographed running amok, dashingly suited in a shearling coat, in an Ontario IKEA? The image of tiny forlorn Darwin launched a thousand memes.
 

 
Darwin, a prohibited exotic animal, had escaped from his owner’s car when he was spotted in the IKEA. His owner at the time was fined $240 Canadian dollars ($177 USD) for keeping a prohibited animal and subsequently lost a court battle to win him back.

Since then, Darwin has been housed at the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Ontario where he has lived a pretty normal monkey life ever since his days of Internet fame. Last December, VICE published a lovely interview with one of Darwin’s caretakers.

The subject of Dawrin the macaque in the shearling coat came up a couple of days ago when someone posted the following image to reddit simply titled, “My friend’s dog’s butt looks like the IKEA monkey.”

The post delivers on the title’s promise:
 

 
The resemblance is uncanny.

This is the best dog ass since the Jesus Christ dog ass:
 

 
Via: reddit

 
Walmor Corrêa is a Brazilian artist whose work has appeared in exhibitions in his native Brazil as well as Spain, Belgium, Germany, Uruguay, Ecuador, Austria, Chile, Argentina, the United States, and South Africa.

In two series of artworks, “Super-Heróis” (2005) and “Memento Mori” (2007), Corrêa endeavored to capture some ideas about the anatomy of superheroes and other figures of myth, including a cyclops (“Curupira”), a mermaid (“Ondina”), and Marvel’s Spider-Man.

His art is done somewhat in the style of Leonardo da Vinci but also are reminiscent of the incredible images in the Codex Seraphinianus, which, if you haven’t read it, is utterly astonishing. “Memento Mori” was actually published as a book.

However, to his credit Corrêa’s work doesn’t seem derivative of either of those sources, just somewhere in the same corner of a strange universe.

Any anatomical studies, even cryptozoological ones, have a whiff of the NSFW about them, and these are no exception.
 

 

 
More after the jump…...

 
Today in Scotland a street campaign was launched warning the public of a highly toxic and dangerous man who is currently visiting the country. The public are advised not to approach this man under any circumstance or listen to any of the shite that spouts out of his mouth. The man is wanted for inciting racial hatred and very bad hair.

In other news, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump has arrived in Scotland.
 

 
With thanks to Neil McDonald.
 

 
On April 19, the state of Utah resolved that “pornography is creating a public health crisis.” There’s definitely a hinky stank to that resolution, as Jamie Peck explained after the resolution’s passage: “The resolution is based partly on pseudoscience and takes for granted that the only ‘healthy’ channel for sexuality is a non-kinky, heterosexual, child-producing marriage.” So if you are queer or trans or pansexual the state of Utah just might pass a resolution stating that your private sex life is “creating a public health crisis.” Utah. Land of Republicans, Mormons and… more Republican Mormons.

Either way, some law enforcement officers in the state have taken the hint. Abutting the state’s famous Great Salt Lake, the municipality of Weber County, which contains the city of Ogden, has acquired a dog to help with the struggle against demon porn.

You might think that sniffing for porn is an impossibility, because you might as well be sniffing for old copies of Newsweek or the L.L. Bean catalog, right? But you’d be wrong! It’s 2016, when was the last time you held a copy of Penthouse in your hands? Nowadays, porn = internet = computer technology, nobody’s looking for printed smut anymore.

The dog’s name, URL, is a hint as to the skills that are being brought to the task. From the same trainer that produced the doggie that helped snare vile pedophile and TV fast food spokesman Jared Fogle, URL is “trained to sniff out electronic storage devices such as thumb drives, cell phones, SIM cards, SD cards, external hard drives, tablets and iPads.”

So URL is also sort of an “office work product”-sniffing agent as well.

Weber County introduced the dog to the public on its Facebook feed on Tuesday. Here’s the text that went along with the post:
 

A NEW DOG IN TOWN

Say hello to “URL!” Utah’s first Electronic Detection K-9, or what some may jokingly refer to as Utah’s first “porn dog.” URL is a 16-month old, Black Lab, recently acquired from Jordan Detection K-9 in Greenfield, Indiana. He is only one of nine certified ED K-9s in the country, and the only one in the western states region. URL comes from the same trainer as Bear, the ED K-9 who played a key role in the arrest of Subway pitchman, Jared Fogle.

Specially trained to sniff out electronic storage devices such as thumb drives, cellphones, SIM cards, SD cards, external hard drives, tablets and iPads, URL offers a unique set of skills to aid investigators in fighting crime. Whether it’s child porn, terrorism intelligence, narcotics or financial crimes information, URL has the ability to find evidence hidden on basically any electronic memory device. He will assist our investigators on these specific types of cases, and he will also be used in our correctional facility to seek out contraband such as cell phones.

Now we realize some of you may be skeptical and wonder how is this possible? URL does not actually search for illegal materials, but rather his highly sensitive nose has been trained to detect the unique chemical compounds found in the certain electronic components.

Rescued from a shelter when he was a puppy, URL went through six months of training in Indiana before becoming certified. His handler, Detective Cam Hartman, also received nine days of expert training and the pair will have to be re-certified on an annual basis.

URL’s purchase was made possible through funding from the Weber Metro Narcotics Strike Force, and his acquisition has been strongly supported by the Weber County Attorney’s Office. The Sheriff’s Office will be responsible for his care and deployment as he serves the Northern Utah area.

 
As the good people of Weber County admit, URL may be known as a porn-sniffing K-9 officer, but he can also be used to detect “terrorism intelligence, narcotics or financial crimes information” because we all know that Utah is a hotbed of that shit.
 
via Death & Taxes

 
We already have the “Dump with Donald Trump” toilet paper. So naturally, the next inevitable crap-related Trump product is the the Poop Head Donald Trump Dog Bags. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to the shitty Republican presidential nominee.

Now whether or not these bags are biodegradable remains unclear. I don’t see any information about that on the website. I hope they are.

Each roll comes with 15 bags featuring Donald Trump’s head with a steaming hot turd on top. The bag rolls are $4.99 each.

 
via Death and Taxes

 
In 1968 the artist Brion Gysin invited Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones to record a group of traditional Jbala Sufi trance musicians—better known as the Master Musicians—perform at the village of Jajouka in northern Morocco.

Gysin had long been familiar with the Master Musicians having been introduced to them and “Joujouka” music by writer Paul Bowles in 1950. Gysin thought the music of “the people of Pan” would be of some interest to Jones. Jones agreed. He traveled with Gysin to Jajouka, accompanied by his then girlfriend Suki Potier, recording engineer George Chkiantz, and painter/folklorist Mohamed Hamri.

Morocco was a favorite holiday destination for the Rolling Stones as it offered easy access to marijuana. Keith Richards later described the experience as a fantasy where they were “transported” and…

You could be Sinbad the Sailor, One Thousand and One Nights.

Jones used a Uher recorder to capture the songs performed by the Master Musicians. These recordings included songs for Jajouka’s “most important religious holiday festival, Aid el Kbir” when a young boy is dressed as Bou Jeloud the Goat God in the “skin of a freshly slaughtered goat.” The boy then runs around the village as the music becomes increasingly frenzied. Gysin claimed this was a ritual to protect the villagers’ health. He said the festival harked back to an ancient pre-Roman festival Lupercalia, held in mid-February as a cleansing and fertility ritual to ward off evil spirits.
 

 
As Gysin later told Stanley Booth (and a very drunk William Burroughs) in a rambling tale in 1970—as recounted Booth’s book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—Jones and his companions were guests at traditional meal in the village, when Jones had an epiphanic vision—or more likely he tripped out—and believed himself to be a goat.

‘I would really like to talk about Joujouka and what that music is and what Brian got on tape and how it ever happened that he got there. How does he [Jones] appear in your book?’

‘Brian? As—well—sort of—as a little goat god, I suppose.’

‘I have a funny tale which I’ll tell you about just that. A very funny thing happened up there. The setting was extremely theatrical in that we were sitting under a porch of a house made of wattles and mud. Very comfortable place, cushions were laid around like a little theatre, like the box of an old-fashioned theatre, and a performance was going on in the courtyard. And at one moment—dinner obviously had to be somewhere in the offing, like about an hour away, everybody was beginning to think about food—and we had these acetylene lamps, giving a great very theatrical glow to the whole scene, rather like limelight used to be, a greenish sort of tone.’

[Okay Brion we get the picture it was very very very very very very theatrical…now get on with the story….]

‘And the most beautiful goat that anybody had ever seen—pure white!—was suddenly led right across the scene, between Brian and Suki and Hamri and me [...] so quickly that for a moment hardly anybody realized at all what was happening, until Brian leapt to his feet, and he said, “That’s me!” and was pulled down and sort of subsided, and the music went on, and it went on for a few minutes like that, and moments lengthened into an hour, or two hours, which can sometimes be three hours or four hours or five hours—-’

‘Long as it takes to kill a goat,’ Burroughs said.

‘—and we were absolutely ravenous, when Brian realized he was eating the same white goat.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘He said, “It’s like Communion.”’

‘“This is my body,’” I [Booth] said. ‘But Jesus didn’t eat himself, he fed the others.’

‘If he’d been sensible, he’d have eaten Judas,’ Burroughs said. ‘I’m gonna eat Graham Greene next time I see him. Gulp!’

Continues after the jump…

 
The honeycomb always serves as a constant tribute to balance and proportion in the structures found in nature, and Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck has found an ingenious way to incorporate the honeycombs found in beehives in her work: She induces bees to build their hives around and on pre-existing artifacts which are broken or missing parts.

The artist has worked with beekeepers and scientists for decades, and those experiences have informed her recent waxy works of art, which use as a starting point Edwardian figurines as well as dilapidated helmets, shoes, and sports equipment, all enhanced by structures that were created by apiarian laborers.

Dyck covers specific areas of the piece to entice the bees before she puts them in the hive. Eventually the honeybees “mend” the damaged parts with their honeycomb layers. 

As Dyck told The Creators Project,
 

While working with honeybees I discovered their methods of construction and their ability to mend the hive’s cracks and crevices with honeycomb, wax and propolis. I thought of the vast number of damaged figurines in antique shops and second-hand stores. I knew honeybees were masters of mending and decided to give a selection of these now unwanted, damaged, figurines to the honeybees. I was surprised that once the honeybees had mended the objects, the figurines became collectibles again.

Dyck also said, “Throughout my life I’ve had an interest in figurines and collectibles. I wondered about dust and dusting of figurines and of the glass cabinets containing these untouchable treasures. These collectibles were beyond my reach as a child and adult alike.” 

This unusual method requires a great deal of patience and knowledge of the ways of bees: “My patience is due to the honeybees themselves. They have routines; they must not be disturbed any more than necessary and only for a few minutes at a time.”
 

 

 
More after the jump…....