Office cubicle lip-syncing. This is what Sara, Molly, Sally, Megan, Mimi and I do after we close the office. We’re just not as good as these guys, so I cannot show you our videos yet. (Best part is the lady that refuses to participate.)

This one doesn’t really need explanation. Just start tapping your toes now.

30-year history of “Chap-Hop” by Mr. B, the Gentleman Rhymer. “Other rappers can’t stand me, but give me respect. They do give respect really. I mean they do act tough, but generally speaking, they’re awfully nice chaps.”

From Mark Frauenfelder and the Good.is blog:

William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family’s corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

Read the rest of the story here.
Here’s a link to William’s TED Talk.

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Paula Deen’s Deep Fried Butter Balls

It’s just up the road, and I missed it.

The What the Fluff Festival, a celebration of Marshmallow Fluff in its birthplace of Somerville, Massachusetts, brings new meaning to WTF. On Saturday, Fluff enthusiasts piled into the town’s Union Square to listen to Fluff-themed poetry slams, sample Fluff-bearing foods, and play games like “Fluff, Knife, Bread” (a modified version of Rock, Paper, Scissors).

The tradition all started four years ago when the gooey white stuff was receiving some negative press. A bill was proposed to limit the number of times a week school cafeterias could serve the “unhealthy” Fluffernutters, a regional sandwich favorite combining the joys of Fluff with peanut butter. In response, Mimi Graney created an event to promote Fluff advocacy. This year’s showing was especially passionate since the Fluffernutter may soon become the state’s official sandwich.

Meet the Ophryotrocha craigsmithi, a newly discovered species of bristleworm that eats only dead whale bones. But there’s a plus side to eating a carcass of an animal that large: a single whale can provide food for 20 years, to be eaten by generations of worms!

Once flesh-eaters like hagfish and sharks have picked clean a whale’s skeleton, the 0.8-inch-long (2-centimeter-long) worms go to work, said zoologist Helena Wiklund, a member of the University of Gothenburg team behind the study.

Generations of worms “could be there for maybe 20 years depending on how big the whale was,” Wiklund added. “Bones from a big whale last really long on the seafloor.”

But when the whale is finally disposed of, the bacteria-munching worms must find another whale carcass, and that could be many miles away.

How the tiny creatures hop from dead whale to dead whale remains a mystery. Some bristle worm species, though, have microscopic larvae that ride ocean currents, Wiklund said.

Mother Nature wastes nothing. Link (Photo: Helena Wiklund, University of Gothenburg)

Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare

The Curious Expeditions blog has an interesting piece on the origin of scrimshaw and it’s association with whaling.

A strange art form came out of the age of whaling, thanks to scores of sailors with many idle hours at sea. The artists are known as scrimshanders, and the work; scrimshaw. Scrimshaw is the art of engraving images onto a piece of ivory; in the whaler’s case, the enormous tooth of the Sperm Whale.

The origin of the word scrimshaw is unknown, but it originally referred to tools that sailors made out of whatever was available on board the ship, most often whale ivory, whalebone, walrus ivory, and skeletal bone. They hand-crafted implements to be used on the ship, such as belaying pins (thin bars attached to a post, used to secure rope by wrapping it around them), but it wasn’t long before the listless sailors turned to more creative pursuits. A sperm whale’s tooth is soft and can be polished to a pleasing gloss, and was the obvious favorite choice. Sailors carved their scene (often a beautiful woman or a ship) on the rocky seas with nothing but a pin. They then rubbed lampblack (a fine soot), or sometimes colored pigments made from fruit and vegetable dyes into the etching to darken the lines.

Scrimshaw was often made for the sailors themselves, as a memento of their voyage, or as a gift for loved ones back home.

Maine Maritime Museum Flickr set

I can think of a couple to add to this. Donald Duck with social anxiety disorder. The Smurfs with argyria. Barney Rubble, codependent to the narcissistic Fred Flintstone.