ankewehner.de

Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Once upon a time in Gürbetal, Switzerland, there was a car parts dealer who after finishing cannibalising old cars parked them on his property. This happened from the 1930s to the 1970. A lot of the cars are still there.

Official website (German)
Forest of Sleeping Cars flickr sets by elessar_ch
Album on mth-fotografie.ch

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Steampunk webcomic find: 2D Goggles – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Some rule of cool and/or funny revisionist history in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace didn’t only design a working computer in theory, but it actually got built.
Updating schedule is “a batch of pages whenever I have them”; so far there are the “origin” chapter plus two episodes, and a bit of smallstuff. Lots of links to the creator’s research material in the author’s notes, just the right thing for some types of geeks.

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Deep Sky Colors
Astronomical photography.
Wired.com had a step-by-step example of the photo postwork which I found very interesting.

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Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris
A study of different versions of letters in graffiti tags.

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Villafane Studion pumpkin carvings
Pretty impressive, particularly the Predator.

Just some stuff I thought was interesting.

Amazing Earth Photos: Solar Eclipses from Space – The “Field of Science” site linked from that page has bigger photos, but not all, in particular the one of Central America is missing.

The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee – The greenest architecture I have seen yet. (Link via Neatorama)

Giant Pterosaurs and how they lift off – I may have linked that before, but in case I haven’t, well, I just think everybody should see the image of a pterosaur the size of a giraffe at least once.

Ninja-Pirate-Zombie Cupcakes Flickr set. Braaainssss!

Dark Roasted Blend: Jet Engines on Trucks (For Fun and Profit) – Blog entry with quite a few photos. I particularly like the fire-engine on steroids built from military leftovers.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity – 20 minute video speech on creativity, how people think about it/creators, and how said creators might deal with problems brought by those attitudes. Gets a bit very spiritual at the end, but all in all interesting and funny. She gets plus points for not using any slides. (Link via Jessica Douglas’ DA gallery)