Category Archives: amusements

amusements

Oddity of the Week: Dog Food Taster

Professional Dog Food Taster Is Actually a Real Job
Pet owners sneaking a nibble or two out of their pets’ bowls, out of curiosity, is completely understandable. But eating dog food for a living? Now that’s pretty hard to digest!
So what exactly does the job entail? Well, as the name suggests, it pretty much involves tasting dog food to make sure it meets a premium brand’s exacting quality standards. Tasters regularly open sample tins of each freshly made batch of dog (or cat) food, and then proceed to smell it, and eat it.


Well how did you really think pet food companies did their testing and quality checks?
From www.odditycentral.com/foods/professional-dog-food-taster-is-actually-a-real-job.html

amusements, natural history

Oddity of the Week: Eggs

It isn’t just birds that lay eggs, in fact there are far more egg-laying species than there are placental mammals. So naturally the eggs vary a lot and can be quite weird …
Birds
There are over 50 breeds of chicken and the colour of their eggs is dictated by genetics. All eggs start out white and any pigment is deposited during the egg’s 26-hour journey through the hen’s oviduct. What’s more, you can often predict what colour a chicken egg will be by the hen’s earlobes. (Bet you didn’t know hens even had earlobes!)


Leghorn chickens lay white eggs and have white earlobes, while chickens with red earlobes lay brown-shelled eggs — but of course there are exceptions. Araucanas lay blue-shelled eggs and when you cross them with a breed that has eggs of a different colour the dominant blue-shell gene makes the resulting eggs blue, pink or even green.
The tinamou (an ostrich relative) may have evolved bright turquoise eggs to attract other females and encourage them to lay their eggs nearby, creating a sort of safety-in-numbers strategy for avoiding predators. Curiously the tinamou’s eggs are also as shiny as Christmas ornaments.
And cassowaries have bright, almost fluorescent, green eggs.
Insects
The green lacewing creates a silky stalk on which it hangs its eggs. This keeps the lacewing larvae safe from predators — and cannibals. The insect also coats the stalks with a chemical defence against ants.
Many butterflies and moths lay beautifully sculpted and shaped eggs, like this owl butterfly egg …

Sharks
The horn shark has a spiral-shaped egg which looks like a natural drill bit and allows the mother shark to screw the egg case into hard crevices making it tough for predators to get them.

The egg cases of other sharks and rays — often called mermaid’s purses — come in a variety of shapes from sculpted flatfish-like to ravioli shapes. These egg cases are not like birds’ eggs in that the case is porous with both water and oxygen able to flow through to the growing embryo.
Based on Weird Animal Question of the Week: Oddest Eggs of the Animal Kingdom.

amusements, ramblings

The Amusements of 2014

A review of 2014 in things that have amused me during the year.
Product of the Year
In third place we have these magnificent Magical Unicorn Slippers
In second place, is something I find slightly disturbing: Cussons Mum & Me Bump Smooth & Glow Pregnancy Shampoo


But the winner is the Chinese Automatic Sperm Extractor as installed in a Nanjing hospital.

 

Auction Item of the Year (from our local auction house)
In third place we have: a set of 25 antique glass eyes in fitted case.


In second place: A Second World War papier-mâché helmet .
But pride of place must go to: An old French roll of loo paper.

 

Name of the Year
Two names stood out for me this year, and I can’t decide between them:
Rev Nims Obunge — a non-conformist minister from Tottenham.
Patriarch Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, Supreme Head of the Universal Syriac Orthodox Church who died on 21 March this year.

 

Best Named Organisation of the Year goes to the US National Fenestration Rating Council who were mentioned in the 12 April edition of New Scientist.

 

Best Oxymoron
Again we have two contenders.
Finest quality recycled paper, which is the proud boast on the paper towel dispenser in the toilet at my doctors’ surgery.
And the Vegan butcher’s shop which has opened recently in New York.

 

Recipe of the Year
This is one from the archives: Christmas Candle Salad


Just what were they thinking?!??!

 

Book Titles
These are books I’ve come across (don’t ask!) during the year rather than books published during the year. Again there are several contenders, none of which, I hasten to add, have I read:
The Jewish-Japanese Sex & Cook Book and How to Raise Wolves by Jack Douglas (1972)
Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian London by John Simons (2008)
You’ve Had Worse Things in Your Mouth Cookbook by Billi Gordon (1986)
But the winner has to be:
Harlequin: Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fuck, a Pantomime by George Augustus Sala (circa 1877)

 

Best Academic Paper Title
There was really only ever going to be one contender here. The prize has to go to a paper about stopping nose-bleeds with bacon, which deservedly won on IgNobel Prize:
Nasal packing with strips of cured pork as treatment for uncontrollable epistaxis in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia which is available on PubMed.

 

Headline
There have been just so many wonderful headlines during the year, but I managed to whittle the list down to these three:
‘Penis soup is something I’ll treasure for ever’: Adventurer Simon Reeve reveals the most stomach-churning dishes he’s encountered, Independent, 2 February
Warwickshire man nose-pushes Brussels sprout up Snowdon, BBC News, 2 August
But by a short head the winner is
Mick Jagger has 19-million-year-old species of ‘long-legged pig’ named after him, Guardian, 11 September

 

Best Named Animal
Magistrate Armhook Squid (Berryteuthis magister)

 

Sport of the Year
Again there are three contenders:
Wheelchair Curling — I still can’t work out how you get curling tongs large enough.
Underwater rugby, BBC News, 24 May
But best of all was Penny farthing bicycle polo, again BBC News, 24 May

 

Best Research Project
What Happens When You Play Music Through A Squid?

 

And finally …
Best Tweet
Yellow snow warning for Wales, @BBCNews on Twitter, 26 December
I guess the culprit must be all those sheep!

 

Let me know your favourite amusements of the year — and don’t forget to start collecting for 2015!