StoryCorps continues to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives – in a rather unique way. The volunteers are recorded and their reminisces are often then animated – and wonderfully so.
In A Family Man, we go back to 1955. John L Black is the eponymous hero of this tale, a man with a large family of eleven children and a backbreaking job as a school janitor.
His story is told by his son Samuel who recounts, particularly, the day when his father discovered him in a moment of dishonesty. This is a simple story told simply – and it is all the more for it.StoryCorps has recorded 80,000 stories since it began in 2003. Highly respected and enjoyed now, these humane stories will be cherished in future centuries.
Hold on to your hats for a whistle stop tour of Manhattan. Cameron Michael lugged 120-130 pounds of gear around all of Manhattan in order to bring you this astonishing footage. Not all of it, strictly speaking, was legally done but I am sure you will turn a blind eye once you have sat through this amazing piece of work!
What I particularly like about this stop motion piece is the camera work, strictly speaking the way that the camera pans while the stop motion is actually happening. This is a fairly new technique and has not been attempted successfully (let alone brilliantly!) by many people. Here it is seamless. Just awesome work!
Nature doesn’t need an audience. These wonderful orchids come from the south-eastern Ecuadorian and Peruvian cloud forests from elevations of 1000 to 2000 meters and as such not many people throughout history got to see them. However, thanks to intrepid collectors we do get to see this wonderful Monkey Orchid. Someone didn’t need much imagination to name it though, let’s face it.
Its scientific name is Dracula simia, the last part nodding towards the fact that this remarkable orchid bears more than a passing resemblance to a monkey’s face – although we won’t go as far as to be species specific on this one. The Dracula (genus) part of its name refers to the strange characteristic of the two long spurs of the sepals, reminiscent of the fangs of a certain Transylvanian count of film and fiction fame.
The orchid was only named in 1978 by the botanist Luer but is in a family containing over 120 species mostly found in Ecuador. Up in the cloud mountains the monkey orchid can flower at any time – it is not season specific. It scent resembles that of a ripe orange.
The examples seen here are all cultivated – though it remains very rare in ‘captivity’. For that reason don’t make a dash down to your local horticulturalist. Yet for those lucky enough to have one, if kept quite cool and in partial shade and it can thrive and flower. Like all orchids, however, it needs a lot of care and patience – so you may want to consider a cactus instead!
If you don't quite see why this orchid gets its name, then do one thing. Move back from your screen a few feet and take another look. Close up the similarity is good, from a distance it is astounding.
Acknowledgements
Kuriositas would like to thanks Flickr User dendrofan for her kind permission to share with you the first picture in this feature article. Please visit her website, Eerika's Bilder. Also, we would like to thank Flickr Users nolehace, Steve Beckendorf and Jose X, again for their kind permission to feature their wonderful photos. Please use the links to visit their photostreams - lots more great photography to be seen there!
Forgive the image related pun, but the Water Vole has been skating on very thin ice in the UK for a number of years. You and I know him as Ratty from Wind in the Willows but a rat he is not. Scarce, yes: rat, no.
In fact conservationists warned a decade ago that very soon there would be none left – extinction within the British Isles was it seems a done deal. However, the water vole has made quite a comeback in several areas, thanks to environmentalists and not least its own remarkable fecundity. The Ark in Space reports on this happy tale from the riverbank.
Some would said that it had to happen, that it’s inevitability was as certain as the sun rising in the morning. Today we can tell you that it looks extremely likely that the village of Dull in Perthshire, Scotland and the town of Boring, Oregon in the United States will officially be paired.
The townspeople of Boring (above) will decide shortly whether to pair up with their Scottish counterpart. The good citizens of Dull have already given their vote – an overwhelming yes. If the teenagers of Boring complain that nothing ever happens in their town of 10,000 now they can be threatened with a visit to Dull (below) which has a teenage population of approximately 10.Now here's a question. If someone from Dull is a Dullard, then what is someone called Boring called?
The real question is, perhaps, why this hasn’t happened before now given the obvious wry smile it would bring to the faces of visitors to and residents of both communities. Perhaps it was considered a little too ironic, a little too knowing? Perhaps the world was not quite ready for such a startling combination? Perhaps the idea was just too dull and, well, you get the idea.
It began, it seems, with a cycling holiday. Elizabeth Leighton, who lives near the village of Dull stumbled on Boring while she was touring Oregon on her bike. That evening she phoned her friend Emma Burtles, who lives in Dull (population 84) and proposed the link.
Ms Burtles got right to the task of bringing the two places together and it wasn’t long before the Boring Community Planning Organization was on board (as it were) and a vote is set. The Dull Community Council has given the idea the thumbs up and a street party has already been organized for later in the month. They must have a mole on the council in Boring.
Yet the two places cannot be officially twinned – this will be more of a link. The major obstacle is the difference in body count between the two communities. Boring’s population is close to 10,000 and Dull's is 84. As such the two places cannot be officially twinned. That’s pretty dull and boring if you ask us.
However, we do look forward to the massive tourism and merchandise frenzy that is just about to ensue.
If you had asked me which decade the design company Pentagram started then I would immediately say the seventies – the name is a dead giveaway, slightly new age-ish with more than a dash of the post Woodstock hippy! In fact the Pentagram, which has grown to be the world’s largest independent design company, was formed in 1972.
Forty years is quite an achievement and to help celebrate they have created this ever so stylish animated blowing of their own trumpet. It’s very clever too – doesn’t once mention the company name until the end and it is something of a surprise to see just how much design they have been involved in over the decades. Their work remains as ingenious today as it was four decades ago – so happy 40th birthday to Pentagram.
A little girl owns a magical necklace. Knowing this you think she might take better care of it but she allows it to be stolen by an errant cat! The result is shown in this wordless animation by a group of students from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
I love the colors used in this animation - as well as the full attention given to both the way the characters look and move. It is pretty difficult to make a silhouette interesting, but these students pull it off with panache! The movie was directed by Doug B Horak and produced by Harshit Desai. The animation was supervised by Colin Byrd with a team of animator comprising of Kris Vaughan, Phyllis Zhu and Chris Cheresnowski. Music was provided by Doug Perry. Altogether this is an outstanding group project. It will be interesting to see what they come up in the future!
One of the rarest sights in the sky took place last night and early this morning – the Transit of Venus. It began just after 6 in the evening in North America and was visible to most as a tiny black dot - unlike this extraordinary image from NASA Goddard.
Seen above in Ultra High Definition, this rare event (which your grandchildren might see if they live to a good age) happens when the planet crosses directly in the path between the Sun and Earth, becoming observable against the solar disk.
Above, the transit seen from Albuquerque in New Mexico and Romeoville, Illinois. The past decade has seen something of a renaissance in popular interest in astronomy and this event has given both experts and amateurs alike an opportunity to capture this amazing phenomenon. Here we present photographs from the experts (NASA) and ordinary people – in an extraordinary collection of images.
Somewhat obscured from view in Starkville, Mississippi, and again the same in Maharashtra in India, the planet Venus looks tiny as it crosses the surface even though it is the size of the earth. Clouds will always be a problem for both amateur and professional observers. The view of many eclipses have been blighted by too much cloud cover - yet despite the weather the photographers above manage to capture the moment wonderfully.
These shots were taken in Houston, Texas and Barcelona in Spain. Venus is sometimes called our ‘evil twin’ as conditions on the Venus could not be more different. If life exists there it is, to coin a phrase, not as we know it. Although it once had oceans all its water evaporated in to its atmosphere. It is now believed that is microscopic life evolved and persisted on Venus then this is where it may be.
The US space agency NASA has given us the best possible views of the event through high-resolution images taken from its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), both in orbit around the Earth.
NASA has also given us an idea what the event must have looked like from deep in space with these two remarkable artist's impressions.
The images are taken from this remarkable animation from NASA.
Washington DC and again cloud obscured the best views (top) as they did in Germany (the shot with the wind turbines). Yet only six transits have ever been recorded as having been observed - in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 and most recently in 2004 and so a little cloud is the least of our worries. This is because the transit is invisible to the naked eye and so without magnification, the event went unobserved, even though it has taken place 53 times between 2000 BCE and 2004.
Dave Malkoff in Los Angeles managed to get this great shot of Venus on a Wire. Yet many amateur astronomers in the world over were disappointed. In many places it was cloudy with no sun visible. However, with the data collected from around the world it is hoped that this remarkable event will help in the search for planets around distance stars which could support life.
If you have missed it this time, perhaps these pictures will make up. Otherwise you might want to consider suspended animation. The next transit of Venus will not take place until 2117.
Over at the Ark in Space they are having a break from creepy crawlies, endangered species and ferocious beasties and instead have presented the world with an awesome gallery of uber cute kittens. This sort of thing may have been done before but the big difference here is that all the fantastic pictures are licensed through Creative Commons, which means the photographers have given their permission for their work to be shared. In other words, the pictures are not ripped off, like so many kitten and cat pictures on the net. It is proof too, that you can put together a marvelous gallery of images without breaking copyright. So, why not pop over and take a look at possibly the cutest kittens on the internet?
One of the most stunning but least known stretches of American coastline, Flattery Rocks in Washington, north-western most of the United States, is nothing short of a revelation. Many of the rocks here are stony outcroppings uncovered when the tide is low. Others, however are lofty pinnacles scattered with salal shrubs, salmonberry and conifers.
On the south side of Cape Flattery you can find these remarkable sea stacks. A stack is formed through geomorphology – erosion which is totally natural. The inexorable force of water and wind slowly but surely created cracks in the headland. These cracks enlarged and forced a collapse, leaving the stacks isolated and standing alone.
Yet, China this is not. The area offers a landscape unique not only to Washington but among the most stunning in the whole of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.
The area consists of almost 900 islands and rocks, stretching for over a hundred miles along the state’s coast and it makes up part of the Olympia National Park. People are forbidden from exploring these small islands, most of which are designated as wilderness – and little wonder. The area is a critical haven for 14 species of seabirds which number over a million at peak times. This is not to mention mammals such as harbor seals and sea otters plus many a passing whale.
Wildlife simply abounds along this coastline, from Cape Flattery down to Cape Alava – hundreds of thousands of birds nest here each year including puffins, petrels, cormorants and gulls. In the winter, eagles and falcons nest and roost here. To protect them people must stay at least two hundred yards away from the protected islands, which form part of the Flattery Rocks National Wildlife Center.
Yet wait - there's more. From cape to cape (as it were), the area is positively crowded with sea stacks and more can be seen at nearby Cape Alava. Tskawahyah Island stands out particularly, with Bodelteh behind it.
