full offense but any white male director in hollywood who treats actresses like they are expendable or just objects for their own personal pleasure need to be thrown in jail to rot for the rest of their lives
there’s something poetic about the idea of surviving the most inhospitable environment in the universe and the several-mile fall from it through the power of technology and then being lain low by a fucking bear
I really feel this sums up Russia
This may be the cover story
they do not fool me
they brought that machete with them to fight Space Monsters O.O
Oh, it was much funkier (and so much more idiosyncratically Russian industrial) than that.
It wasn’t multiple weapons; it was one weapon, the TP-82:
The top two barrels are 40-gauge shotgun barrels, while beneath it is a 5.45x39mm rifle barrel (that’s the AK-74 round, basically the Russian answer to the M4 and other Western rifles designed for 5.56mm NATO).
Take a look at the buttstock; see how it’s got a sort of cloth wrapper unfolded, and there’s clips and other stuff? That’s because the buttstock was the machete. The whole thing was part of the standard issue survival kit for cosmonauts, and it was in service from 1986 to 2006.
But, why, you ask, did they design such a thing?
The Восход-2 (Voskhod-2) mission, in which Alexey Leonov became the first human being to execute a spacewalk, was beset with technical problems (as happened with hair-raising regularity in the Space Race era of the Soviet/Russian space program), most of them hit during reentry. Leonov wrote about it, so I’ll forgo the details; suffice it to say they came down hundreds of miles away from the planned landing zone, in heavily forested Siberian wilderness (taiga), and mission control had lost radio contact.
This happened during the mating season for both bears and wolves. And the survival kit had just one small-caliber handgun (given the year, 1965, I’m assuming a Makarov), which would do only marginally more damage to an enraged, seasonally-horny bear or wolf than the cosmonauts’ most caustic mat (barring a stupendously lucky shot).
Fortunately, Soviet aircraft found the landing module in fairly short order; unfortunately, there was no way for helicopters to put down anywhere even close. So warm clothing and blankets were air-dropped so that Leonov and the other Voskhod-2 cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, wouldn’t freeze to death overnight. (And a good thing, too, because the landing module developed an electrical fault such that the heater wasn’t working but the fans were going full-blast.)
A rescue party on skis arrived the next day, and built a fucking log cabin within the day so that Leonov and Belyayev had a much warmer and more comfortable place to recover for a night before setting out on skis to the nearest place a helicopter could pick them up.
Yes, a fucking log cabin. Because Russians.
Anyway, Leonov — at that point a national hero — told his superiors that the piddly little Makarov¹ was, as far as Siberian wildlife was concerned, roughly equivalent to yelling at them very loudly while poking them with sticks, and told them that if there was any chance future cosmonauts might have to contend with such circumstances, they needed to be issued something rather more authoritative an argument winner.
1. Don’t get me wrong! I adore the Makarov as a design; in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with inexplicably abundant ammunition, it’d be on my short list of weapons I’d like to have, along with an AK-47 and a pump-action 12-gauge, because I know it will basically never stop working. Russians have a long history of building absurdly reliable firearms. But 9x18mm Makarov, as a round, is right at the bottom end of useful for general self-defense.
lmao on the edinburgh zoo site it says “there is a daily penguin parade at 14:15 but it may be cancelled last minute as it is a voulntary parade, we do not coax the penguins with food, and they may not want to go out” lmao anarchopenguinism
this is the cutest goddamn thing i’ve ever heard
I saw the penguin parade. It was a very slow parade, because the
pingüinos take their sweet time and aren’t very fast walkers to begin with.
can I volunteer to be a penguin
I feel like the world needs to know the context of the edinburgh zoo penguin parade, becausr I’ve been going there my entire life and I only found out about this the other year.
So a while back (I can’t remember exactly when but I think it was some time around the 40s/50s), a bunch of penguins escaped. A keeper left the gate open so a bunch of penguins just… followed them. And the people loved it. Look at these adorable birds outside their cage just following that guy around! So they get all the penguins back inside and realise that none of them really ran off, they just followed the keeper and went back inside and crowd thought it was amazing, so why not make it a regular thing? Get enough people there that if one of them goes to make a run for it (which at least one has in the past), they can’t get past the people, and let the ones who want outside have a little wander. So every day, they get a crowd, they open the gate, and whatever penguins want to get out can go, waddle about, squawk at people, and then hop back inside.
Also, one of those penguins is Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III, Colonel-in-cheif of the Norwegian King’s Guard. This isn’t really related to the parade at all, I just love the fact that there’s a penguin in the Norwegian army
Reblogging with Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III inspecting his troops.
stephen hawking was literally one of humanity’s best
If in some unexpected series of theologically improbable circumstances, Stephen Hawking somehow encounters Margaret Thatcher in the afterlife, I hope that he shall be able to live out this small dream. I would like to think the universe is generous and organized enough to offer this to him, for he loved and served it well.
Israeli archaeologists unveiled on Monday a 2,700-year-old clay seal
impression which they said belonged to a biblical governor of Jerusalem.
The artifact, inscribed in an ancient Hebrew script as “belonging to
the governor of the city”, was likely attached to a shipment or sent as a
souvenir on behalf of the governor, the most prominent local position
held in Jerusalem at the time, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.
The
impression, the size of a small coin, depicts two standing men, facing
each other in a mirror-like manner and wearing striped garments reaching
down to their knees. It was unearthed near the plaza of Judaism’s
Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.
“It supports the
Biblical rendering of the existence of a governor of the city in
Jerusalem 2,700 years ago,” an Antiquities Authority statement quoted
excavator Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah as saying.
Governors of
Jerusalem, appointed by the king, are mentioned twice in the Bible, in 2
Kings, which refers to Joshua holding the position, and in 2
Chronicles, which mentions Masseiah in the post during the reign of
Josiah.
By copyrighting his property as an artwork, he has prevented oil companies from drilling on it.
Peter Von Tiesenhausen has developed artworks all over his property in northern Alberta. There’s a boat woven from sticks that is gradually being reclaimed by the land; there is a fence that he adds to each year of his life, and there are many “watching” trees, with eyes scored into their bark.
Oil interests pester him continually about drilling on his land. His repeated rebuffing of their advances lead them to move toward arbitration. They made it very clear that he only owned the top 6 inches of soil, and they had rights to anything underneath. He then, off the top of his head, threatened them that he would sue damages if they disturbed his 6 inches, for the entire property is an artwork. Any disturbance would compromise the work, and he would sue.
Immediately after that meeting, he called a lawyer (who is also an art collector) and asked if his intuitive threat would actually hold legally. The lawyer visited, saw the scope of the work on the property, and wrote a document protecting the artwork.
The oil companies have kept their distance ever since.
This is but one example of Peter’s ability to negotiate quickly on his feet, and to find solutions that defy expectations.
I feel like this is really important.
“You only own the top six inches.” I own every inch from dust to Hell’s breath. Fight me.
Cheloneuniverse 