Right up there with Geena Davis’ nightmare of giving birth to Jeff Goldblum’s little baby ‘Brundlefly’ comes a story about a woman giving birth…

To a horse.

During a program about prophecy, a female member of the Worshippers of the World Liberation Ministry began screaming during a prayer session and began bleeding from her girl-parts.

Evangelist Silva Wealth, referred to as the General Overseer of the church told journalists that a revelation came that a woman among them had an issue and that something was blocking her womb.

Wealth claimed that as prayers from church-goers became more instense, the unidentified woman started delivering ‘the object’.

A cleric of the church wouldn’t go near the thing:

“I can’t describe the object. We have seen people that vomited several things during our service but not this type of thing. God has been blessing our ministry with prophesies and miracles, “he said.

That ‘object’ was a still-born horse.

As people begin to flock in droves to the church where this event took place, we can only imagine what kind of disturbing swag the inevitable gift shop is going to be pushing.

[The Nation]

About 50 years ago about 90 stations around the world had the capacity to transmit TV signals with enough power to reach Interstellar Space.  In many ways the only evidence of our presence as a civilization in this galaxy is all the television broadcasts these stations put out.  One of these stations was the BBC which transmitted with a signal of about 100,000 watts right in the middle of  the 41-68 MHz band.  So merrily, unwittingly, the human civilization on Earth broadcast its presence and culture to the larger Galaxy for more than 67 years.

To put this in perspective, and only counting with the TV signals, a 67 light-year radius  sphere of galactic space has knowledge of us and of our capacity for technology.  Within this 67 light-year sphere are contained at least 3000 stars and stellar systems.  Of these 3000 , at least 160 of them are G class stars very similar to our own sun.   So why does this matter?

Because, according to reports,  like a scene out of Carl Sagan’s Contact we are getting signals from space and they are our own!   Somewhere in deep interstellar space about 25 light-years away there is source of radio waves right smack in the 41-68 MHz band.   And this unknown object tentatively called the “Reflective Anomaly”  is beaming our own TV from 1963 right back at us.  This is great for us nerds because it means we can get back some of our lost classics like early William Hartnell Doctor Who episodes which the BBC in its wisdom erased to make way for masterpiece theatre or something like it on the very expensive early magnetic tapes.

Radio Astronomers are collecting and digitally enhancing these signals into usable recordings of  all the lost shows from that era.  The main article says that the “anomaly” is some sort of unexplained reflective material 25 ly away but to this observer that just sounds like they have no clue how this is possible.  They are refusing to consider the obvious.

Aliens!  The civilization who is doing this is situated just far enough away that they are about to experience the summer of love and eventually Men’s first landing on a non terrestrial object, the 1969, Apollo 11 Moonlanding.  They are beaming back our own signals because they have seen Doctor Who and they like it!  They are telling us that we might be friends,   that is until the catch a whiff of seventies and TV Gems like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and they decide we are all crazy.

I for one hope that our friends from across the void are just that. I mean an entity who likes the first Doctor can’t be all bad.  Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself : http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm

Who knows , it might just be a bit of iron ore left over from an ancient supernova which is aligned just right to bounce some of the stuff we earthlings put out into space.  But it’s kinda cool to picture some strange being witnessing our history and our collective culture in a planet far, far, away.

Update:  Alas, this particular story is a hoax, which I believe is appropriated for these heady days, but the idea is intriguing.    How long till we  see a signal from some civilization and will we enjoy their crappy TV. Perhaps we will never know.

Crime scene photo?

Nope.

Latest bath-salt/synthetic marijuana zombie attack victim?

Nope.

Bad timing with the Enterprise’s transporter?

uh…Nope.

This awesome piece of ugly mimicry is all-natural, folks.

It’s a fungus.

Called the Auricularia auricula-judae, this grotesque-looking piece of work is a fungus commonly referred to as Judas’ Ear, Jelly Ear or Common Ear Fungus. Fitting.

Found all over the world on elder trees, the fungus is bland-tasting but occasionally used as a remedy for a sore throat in Asia and Europe.

In America it’s probably beneficial when used as a remedy for freaking out annoying children.

[Kuriositas]

For all of our WeirdThings fathers. A male seahorse…doing something you don’t have to…giving birth.

You’re welcome.

Happy Father’s Day
[YouTube]

Carnivorous plants are as sneaky as they are creepy. What they lack in speed, they make up for in shady tactics to attract and snag prey.

The standard ‘Pitcher Plant’, shaped like something you’d pour Evil Nectar-flavored Kool-Aid from, draws its intended prey into the bell portion of it’s diabolical design. Once the prey slips on the wax-like coating covering the interior of the plant, it falls into the bottom of the pitcher and the plant’s digestive enzymes begin the horrific process of breaking down its latest victim. Some of the bigger species of Nepenthes Gracilis (the Pitcher Plant’s fancy latin moniker) have even been seen luring, trapping and digesting small birds.

Why are we rehashing something a lot of our readers might know about?

Evolution.

Something unique is happening to help keep trap more prey into the Pitcher Plant. The thing is developing a new trick.

On top of the large ‘bell’ portion of the plant is a lid. Up until this new discovery, Pitcher Plants have only used the lid for keeping out rain. Now the underside of the lid has developed its own advanced waxy coating that potential food feels securely attached to. The trick is that the feeling of security that an insect feels clinging to the underside of the lid is a sham! A raindrop hitting the top side of the lid will cause most insects clinging underneath to be knocked down into the Pitcher Plant’s sweet death-nectar.

Let’s just hope that these things don’t decide that developing legs might be something fun to do.

[Discovery News]

Tentacle Bento, a MUCH spicier niche game than Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, made its way onto the crowd-funding project site, Kickstarter. Within one week, Tentacle Bento rocketed past its $13,000 goal by over $17,000!

The game’s objective is to “get your slimy tentacles on as many of the students as you can before time runs out” by assuming the role of a tentacled monster. This has not set well with some critics of both the game and Kickstarter for allowing this project to even be available for funding.

On the other side of the fence are the games creators who included this on Bento Tentacle’s Kickstarter page:

In the long history of horrible combinations of tentacles and school girls, we have taken a cheeky satire look at the genre to create a silly, if not innuendo rich, product. We are firmly against the depiction of violence against women in any regards.

Currently the Kickstarter page simply states, “Funding Canceled”.

Soda Pop Miniatures, the creators of the game, have moved the project to a another site to be privately funded and have already accrued the $13,000 they needed to complete the project.

Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik of Penny Arcade also chimed in on Twitter saying that “It’s okay for things you don’t like to exist.”

While everyone is up in arms about this whole mess, it sounds like Tentacle Bento is going to be about as horrendous and shockingly graphic as that deleted scene from Goonies.

Which is to say, not at all.

[The Daily Dot]

Elon Musk got his close-up beauty shot last night on CBS’ venerable newsmagazine 60 Minutes. His company SpaceX was the subject. Here was our favorite impression.

The biggest geeks about SpaceX work at SpaceX.

Every employee interviewed shared the same Big Sky optimism. They are doing what they are doing because this is a pivotal moment in the history of space and… well… they’d like to go to space and this is the best way to do it.

Which is why we root for them.

The organization really has a dot com start-up vibe to it. Not a shock considering Musk’s background but it is awesome to see in action.

The money quote from Garrett Reiseman, an engineer and astronaut who spent time on the International Space Station now working with SpaceX as a consultant.

“If you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA. If you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Watch the full segment above.

So Penn & Teller create their own show on the Discovery Channel debating the legitimacy of various claims. Now, Jamie and Adam of MythBusters fame are invading P&T’s turf with a live stage show.

See how these things escalate?

The pair begin a 31-city tour this Sunday in Los Angeles’ Nokia theater.

Explains Adam…

We worked hard to port what we like about “MythBusters” onto stage without doing something that was just a big boring science demonstration show. And what we decided to do was to spend a couple of hours messing with the audience, with the way they see things, with the way they see themselves. We’ll demonstrate something where A plus B equals C, and bring an audience member up and show them that even though it looks like that might be the case, we can demonstrate situations in which it’s not. We have a sketch in which we physically manipulate the way people see and their ability to complete actions onstage — so in addition to the general idea of perception as the way we think through things, we’re going to be messing with actual perception.

Hmmm… live on stage, messing with perception. If they end with a bullet catch, things might get ugly.

Andrew Smith was commissioned by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not to create this moving sculpture constructed from found items including railroad lanterns and an old bicycle.

Really amazing looking piece of art.

[YouTube]

Okay, it’s not bigger on the inside but this TARDIS themed door to a DVD closet is the coolest DIY project you’ll see today.

Thanks to Steven Lauren on G+ for tipping us off to it.

Find a few more pictures AFTER THE JUMP…

[TheRPS]

(more…)

What I wouldn’t give to be in this car.

A Missouri mom was taking her children out trick or treating when she saw what looked to be an unidentified flying object. She followed the craft around for well over an hour with her excited kids cooing in the background.

UFO Casebook has the full video.

Here is her description:

When we first saw it, it was as if it was approaching us with its bottom facing us, (as if on a vertical orientation, and as it retreated, it turned flat (or horizontal), at times moving very slowly, then accelerating very quickly.

It would completely disappear from time to time. We followed it, both of us taking turns videotaping it with our phones. It at times acted as if it was playing a game with us, hiding, then appearing very close so we could see details, including a dome-like appendage on the bottom-center.

Then it would speed off, eventually making a complete circle over our area and winding up hovering over the neighborhood where we had originally been headed. It disappeared again, as we got out of the car to go tell our friends, and many people in the neighborhood came running up asking if we saw it, too!

Check out the full video at Casebook…

[UFO Casebook]

Men are funnier than women, according to a new study out of UC San Diego.

But only barely, a scientist quickly added realizing he still has to go home to his wife.

And men mostly found other men funny which accounts for the slight advantage, added a young lab tech whose blind date arrived awkwardly while the announcement was made.

Although those qualifiers are not true (nor funny) the facts remain that men tested funnier on average than women, if just barely.

…the study’s first author Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology and a Ph.D. graduate of the same department, “The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype.”

Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier.

So how do a pack of intellectuals measure what is funny and what isn’t? Why a controlled version of a New Yorker cartoon caption contest, of course! (tea cups cling as pinkies arise) Each volunteer wrote captions for the legendarily erudite scribbles and then had they rated by other test takers. The study also tested to see if funny captions were more memorable.

[Science Daily]

Here is world famous mentalist The Amazing Kreskin on why he wasn’t sweating all the Rapture talk by Harold Camping one week ago:

“I immediately checked my predictions for this year, and finding nothing regarding such, went on with my life.

“Of course, if we are to respect for even a fleeting second the pronouncement of this holy man and his conviction, we certainly would expect that he turned over every single solitary penny of his possessions to a charity by the day before the end of the world. Not doing that would label his pronouncements as phony as a $3 bill.

“Of course this holds true as well for all the individuals who were ‘passionately certain’ that the end of the world was definitely coming. Unless they relinquished all of their life savings, the question becomes, ‘Why haven’t they entered politics, where lying through one’s teeth is clearly one of the basic skills of the profession?'”

Someone is predicting the end of the world. Let me open by Trapper Keeper of yearly predictions. Hmmmm…. Hines Ward wins Dancing With The Stars, The Hangover II is boring, Sarah Palin announces she is running for president. Nope, nothing in here about the ascension of all God’s children into heaven. Case closed.

Thanks to Dylan for passing this along.