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Miss Universe Costume Competition
Month: August 2021
Doctor accused of sacrificing animals in his apartment for ‘Santeria’ witchcraft
After a tip-off from a neighbour, investigators found at least 22 farm animals in Emilio Otero’s three-bedroom apartment in New Jersey including goats, chickens and a dead pigeon.
A doctor has been accused of sacrificing livestock for Santeria witchcraft in his flat after investigators discovered 22 farm animals being kept in his New Jersey home on Thursday.
When authorities arrived at Emilio Otero’s property on Van Horne Street they were met with “seven to nine” goats, several chickens and even a dead pigeon nailed above a door.
The investigators from the Division of Environmental Health for Jersey City visited the apartment after a tip off from Emilio’s neighbours.
Animal service agents were called to the flat and they removed at least 22 farm animals that had been kept in the three bedroom property.
Gigantic Gun for bringing down Waterfowl
A Punt Gun, used for duck hunting but were banned because they depleted stocks of wild fowl
Called the “Punt Gun” this firearm of unusual size could discharge over a pound of shot at a time, and dispatch upwards of fifty waterfowl in a single go. A punt gun is a type of extremely large shotgun used in the 19th and early 20th centuries for shooting large numbers of waterfowl for commercial harvesting operations and private sport. “Used for duck hunting” isn’t the right expression for aiming this piece of artillery in the general direction of a flock of ducks, firing, and spending the rest of the day picking up the carcasses.
In the early 1800’s the mass hunting of waterfowl to supply commercial markets with meat became a widely accepted practice. In addition to the market for food, women’s fashion in the mid 1800’s added a major demand for feathers to adorn hats. To meet the demand, professional hunters developed custom built extremely large shotguns (bore diameters up to 2″) for the task. These weapons were so cumbersome that they were most often mounted on long square-ended flat-hulled boats called punts. Hunters would typically use a long pole to quietly push their punt into range of a flock of waterfowl resting on the lake and, POW. A single shot from one of these huge guns could kill as many as 50 birds. To increase efficiency even further, punt hunters would often work in groups of 8-10 boats. By lining up their boats and coordinating the firing of their single shot weapons, entire flocks of birds could be “harvested” with a single volley. It was not unusual for such a band of hunters to acquire as many as 500 birds in a single day. Because of the custom nature of these weapons and the lack of support by the weapons industry, they were often rather crude in design. Most were sturdy hand-built muzzle loaders fired with percussion caps.
The Punt Guns were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them. Generally the gun was fixed to the punt, thus the hunter would maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts themselves sufficiently small, that firing the gun generated so much force that it pushed the boat back.
In the United States, this practice depleted stocks of wild waterfowl and by the 1860s most states had banned the practice. The Lacey Act of 1900 banned the transport of wild game across state lines, and the practice of market hunting was outlawed by a series of federal laws in 1918.
The 2004 film Tremors 4: The Legend Begins featured a punt gun used in combat. This punt gun was custom-built for the film and was 8 feet 4 inches (2.54 m) long, weighed 94 pounds (43 kg), and had a 2-inch-diameter (51 mm) bore (classified as “A” gauge by the Gun Barrel Proof Act of 1868 in Schedule B). The weapon was not actually of this bore, instead being a large prop shell concealing a 12 gauge shotgun firing triple-loaded black powder blanks, with the barrel sprayed with WD-40 lubricating oil to produce a large smoke cloud on firing.
The Wild Wild World of Sports
Human/monkey on bicycle relay race
Polar Bear Volleyball
500 meter freestyle swimming relay
Salmon fishing derby Alaska
Tag
Feline underwater race
Skydiving competition
African motocross Zebra 500. In this photo a member of the audience tries to disrupt a competitor.
7 Years Together
What’s the feed bill for that dog horse?
Caveman Film
Caveman is a 1981 American slapstick comedy film written and directed by Carl Gottlieb and starring Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long and Barbara Bach.
Atouk (Ringo Starr) is a bullied and scrawny caveman living in “One Zillion BC – October 9th”. He lusts after the beautiful but shallow Lana (Barbara Bach), who is the mate of Tonda (John Matuszak), their tribe’s physically imposing bullying leader and brutish instigator. After being banished along with his friend Lar (Dennis Quaid), Atouk falls in with a band of assorted misfits, among them the comely Tala (Shelley Long) and the elderly blind man Gog (Jack Gilford). The group has ongoing encounters with hungry dinosaurs, and rescues Lar from a “nearby ice age”, where they encounter an abominable snowman. In the course of these adventures they discover sedative drugs, fire, invent cooking, music, weapons, and learn how to walk fully upright. Atouk uses these advancements to lead an attack on Tonda, overthrowing him and becoming the tribe’s new leader. He rejects Lana and takes Tala as his mate, and they live happily ever after.
How Antarctic bases went from wooden huts to sci-fi chic
BBC Magazine
How do you build in the most isolated place on Earth? For decades Antarctica – the only continent with no indigenous population – hosted only the simplest huts as human shelters. But, as Matthew Teller finds out, architecture in the coldest, driest, windiest reaches of our planet is getting snazzier.
Welcome to Brazil’s Comandante Ferraz Antarctic research station.
It’s an eye-popping, futuristic design – a dark, sleek building, low and long, that is destined to be a temporary waterfront home for up to 65 people at a time.
The price tag is a hefty $100m (£80m). And while a Chinese company is building it, it’s not in China, and almost no-one will ever see it.
After the original burned down in 2012, the Brazilian navy launched an architectural competition for a replacement design – won by a local firm – and then awarded the building tender to a Chinese defence and engineering contractor, CEIEC. It was completed in 2018.
Image caption The upper block will contain cabins, dining and living space; the lower block will house laboratories and operational areas
Located on a small island just off the coast of Antarctica, it lies almost 1,000km (600 miles) south of the tip of South America. No scheduled air routes come close and it’s way off any shipping lanes.
And even if you could reach it yourself, like all Antarctic research stations Comandante Ferraz will be closed to the public. Virtually nobody other than the crews posted there will ever see it in the flesh. So why, you may ask, spend so much on architectural style? Wouldn’t a dull but functional building do just as well?
Brazil is not alone in paying for eye-catching design, though.
In 2013, India unveiled its Bharati station, with a similar modernist design.
Designed by bof arkitekten, Bharati overlooks the sea and is used to study polar marine life
It was made from 134 prefabricated shipping containers, for ease of transport and construction, but you would never guess it from the outside.
And the following year, South Korea opened its Jang Bogo station – a grand, triple-winged module lifted on steel-reinforced blocks, capable of supporting a crew of 60.
What is the explanation for this architectural flamboyance?
“Antarctic stations have become the equivalent of embassies on the ice,” says Prof Anne-Marie Brady, editor-in-chief of the Polar Journal and author of China as a Polar Great Power.
“They are showcases for a nation’s interests in Antarctica – status symbols.”
Those interests could be purely scientific. But a moratorium on mineral prospecting runs out in just over 40 years’ time, and every Antarctic player also wants to be ready to take advantage, should it not be extended.
Planting a dramatic building on the ice has become the modern equivalent of explorers of old planting a flag.
It wasn’t always like this.
In March 1903, the 33 men of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition landed on the outlying South Orkney Islands and built a dry-stone shack.
John Kerry visited the hut in November.
Then came a – relative – building boom, spurred by the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-58, a global project for co-operation in science. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which resulted from the IGY, suspended all territorial claims, but that led many countries to set about consolidating their presence in other ways, such as construction.
The treaty’s clause giving countries conducting “substantial research activity” in Antarctica a vote in meetings to determine the continent’s future was another incentive to maintain a physical presence.
The US’s sprawling McMurdo research station dates from this period. Powered from 1962 to 1972 by a nuclear reactor, it is the biggest settlement on the continent, housing a summer population of about 1,200.
The McMurdo station has a harbour, landing strips on sea ice and shelf ice, and a helicopter pad
The McMurdo coffee house serves hot drinks to workers and is attached to a small cinema – the chapel of the snows, a non-denominational Christian church, is nearby
Designed by Hugh Broughton Architects and Aecom, Britain’s Halley VI’s red module contains the communal areas
Halley VI, however, is Antarctica’s first relocatable research station. Its eight connected pods – like giant, colourful train carriages, which can be isolated to limit the spread of fire – sit on hydraulic legs mounted on huge, 8m-long skis. This means that the pods can be detached from each other, dragged by bulldozers to a new location, and the whole station reassembled.
That design is being put to good use, as Halley is currently being moved to avoid a chasm that is opening up in the ice nearby.
And Halley VI is both glamorous and comfortable.
Unlike earlier Halley stations, each bedroom now has a window to the outside
“All the newest bases look good as well as do the science – it’s a reflection of the priorities of our era,” says Anne-Marie Brady.
South Africa was one of the first countries to solve the problem of snow accumulation with its SANAE IV base, which opened in 1997. It was designed with stilt-like legs, which let snow blow under the building.
Germany applied the same concept to its Neumayer III base, which opened in 2009, with an extra refinement. Sixteen hydraulic pillars allow the entire two-storey structure to be raised every year by around a metre. The foot of each pillar is then lifted and replaced on a new firm base of packed snow.
Neumayer III always stands 6m above the ice – up to 50 people live there during the summer and nine in the winter
Like the UK’s Halley base, Concordia, an Italian and French research facility is used by the European Space Agency to study the physical and psychological effects of isolation – the nearest people are stationed 600 km (370 miles) away
Another element of Antarctic architecture that has become critical is energy efficiency. Most stations run on polar diesel, which is expensive, polluting and difficult to transport. Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth station, an aerodynamic pod raised on steel legs, is the first with zero emissions.
Since its inauguration in 2009 it has run entirely on solar and wind energy, and – even here – has no heating. The station’s layered design means interior temperatures are maintained from waste heat generated by electrical systems and human activity, and dense wall insulation reduces heat loss to almost zero.
Photovoltaic solar panels also provide electricity, while thermal solar panels melt snow and heat water for bathrooms and kitchens
If the Princess Elisabeth station looks like something out of a Bond movie, China’s latest Antarctic station Taishan – its fourth – has been likened to a flying saucer. It was rush-built in 45 days in 2013-14, and is intended to last only a few years.
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