HHTDL's land rover and gar suction
The New York of Blondie. It’s always fun to see two famous people from completely different spheres interact with each other in sincere ways on Twitter. Here, Andy Richter uses a photo of a block of The Bowery to make a Trump joke.
Then Chris Stein of Blondie retweets it, to take it in another direction and add his connection to the photo:
And then he drops another photo that gives you a peek at the ambience galore inside Blondie HQ:
Sometimes I feel like I brave all the bad sides of Twitter to find this stuff and bring it to you, so that you don’t have to.
Inside the Dalai Lama’s old Land Rover. How do you fill out car title paperwork as a living embodiment of a timeless, nondualistic deity?
“The Land Rover came with original paperwork from India, which shows that the vehicle was registered by “His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” It also teemed with strange and shoddily maintained tools, such as a wheel wrench. “Someone welded together and repaired that wrench God knows how many times,” [Land Rover repair shop owner Michael] Green says. “But when I asked Tenzin, he said I could have it.” The car also carried a distinctive odor, especially on hot days. “They smoked like fiends,” Green says, noting that the car’s headliner was entirely stained by tobacco. “I don’t know if they got the good stuff, but whatever it was, you sure could smell it.”
(Photo from Michael Green shared here to help entice you to go read this article.)
This fantastic, colorful story is by Sabrina Imbler (twitter: @aznfusion) for Atlas Obscura.
A daring drive-by banana-ing (video):
Alligator gars suck. It still surprises (and maybe even delights) me when new discoveries are made about the world through mostly just straightforward observation. This story does also involve some high-tech tools - a high speed video camera and CT scanning hardware and software - but those seem pretty accessible today. If you had a hypothesis you wanted to test and a little determination, it wouldn’t be too tough to rustle those things up.
A recent study found, by looking closely, that the jaws of alligator gars create suction as they chomp, to pull krill and other foodstuff in to their hungry maws. This is also how big mouth bass get it done, but it was previously unknown as a gar thing.
“For the new study, [Dr. Justin] Lemberg used 17 alligator gars that he raised himself after picking them up from a fish hatchery in Warm Springs, Georgia, and driving them all the way back to Chicago in the back of his Honda Civic.
I love that image of 17 toothy, prehistoric looking fish all piling in the back of a researcher’s sensible economy car for a trip to the Midwest.
He then trained the gars to feed on pieces of freeze-dried krill held in forceps under bright lights, so he could use a special video camera that records at 500 frames per second (HD video for TV and movies is 24 to 60 frames per second). Surprisingly, when one of the gars was positioned against the side of the aquarium and couldn’t use its characteristic slashing motion, Lemberg could see the piece of krill it was about to eat start to move into the mouth as soon as it opened its jaws, then stay inside as it snapped them shut. That meant the gar was creating suction too, just like a big mouth bass. And it all happened in just 42 milliseconds.
“It was completely unexpected to see a gar simply open its jaws and see its food fall into it like that,” Lemberg said.”
Extra props to science writer Matt Wood at UChicago Medicine for this sciency fun article.
Various bananas at a protest in Portland:
(via @Thursday Bram)
Bonus banana: An audio documentary on pirate radio in London, essentially what feels like a proto-podcast, distributed on cassette along with Script magazine in 1973. (Found via @bengoldacre)
Those are all the bananas I have for you this week, and well more than your usual weekly allotment. You can hit “reply” and it’ll go only to me. Tell people you like/don’t like about this thing; it helps it grow. Thank you.