I’ve always been fascinated by the Marianas Trench, the deepest recorded part of the ocean just off the coast of Japan. I think of this 36,000 ft. deep trench as a sort of inverted, underwater Mount Everest, and I remember watching a PBS special when I was a kid in which a giant white ’sea spider’, ensconced in gnarled exoskeleton,  was found in the trench, and it was 8′ tall and ghostly and grotesque and otherworldly. The potential for horrifying sea monsters and undiscovered species aside, the vast, crushing depth of it is actually mind boggling. How mind boggling? This much. Note the infinitesimal dot sitting atop the water. That’d be you.

(Via DF)

I love photos of storms – so much power and emotion in them.

And it's beginning in Wills Point, Texas:

Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds.

Allen Dean, a spider expert at Texas A&M University, has seen a lot of webs, but even he described this one as “rather spooky, kind of like Halloween.”

The only thing that disgusts me more than a spider is a gigantic, stinking web of millions of spiders spreading across several acres.  No fucking thanks.  Even at 38 years old, I cannot accept the fact that spiders aren't malevolent hellspawn that consume flesh and poison souls.  Burn them all.

Link

Clusterflock:

Monkeys are funny, you bet. But the proverbial barrel of monkeys? I think that just about anything would be funnier than a barrel of monkeys. Imagine being in a barrel filled with screeching, scratching, shitting monkeys. That's no way to have fun.

Exactly.  I've never thought that idiom would be fun at all.

For reasons unbeknownst to be at the time, I grew up with four cats, which I cleverly named in matching pairs: Sugar, Spice, Thunder and Lightning. Back then, when I was nine years old, this with the national criteria for genius and the most reliable harbinger for future success (that and creating small musical instruments out of soap), so wipe that smirk off your face RIGHT NOW. It's because of my extensive experience with cats that I am allowed (and qualified) to say this, which unfolds into part of my destiny: cats are evil. Many of you who are mysteriously and self-destructively still drawn to cats will argue this, and that's fine, because you don't know any better. One day you will though, and you will look back on this post -- which you should cut out and place, folded, in your pillowcase as a ward against nocturnal cat evil -- and think yourself a fool for not having listened. If you're more empirically-minded, you might need more than my deep, intuitive knowledge that cats will eventually spiral you into a haze of depression and regret. If so, no worries. Meet Oscar, the Death Cat. Oscar is a cat who, like other felines, is drawn to human misery and despair. Once drawn to such elements, Oscar exacerbates them, killing his targets. Oscar resides within the dementia unit at Rhode Island's Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where he makes his rounds, quietly selecting victims and sending them off into the nether.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours. Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

First off, let me clarify: no cat is friendly to people once the kitten stage is done. Calling a grown cat aloof is no different than calling water wet -- completely and wholly redundant. Strangely, the nurses and parents of the victims at Steere House have developed a fondness for this cat that skulks around and kills people who otherwise could be enjoying bingo or gumming a bagel. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, as any horror movie fan knows that the greatest evil is extremely adept at deception. In fact, before industrial pollution came to be such a problem in Western and European civilizations, cats could shapeshift to hide their intentions -- and very beings -- much more readily. Thankfully, cats have devolved away from their inherent demonic form, so in this sense they are more earthly now than they ever have been during the course of human history. What this means is that now is the time to strike, to begin the uprising, to help blueberries finally weave their way into the fabric of humanity's salvation, but that's out of scope for this blog post. Chances are you're shaking your head, slowly backing away from the computer, refusing to believe what you are reading. Need more proof, do you?

If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.

There's a shocker: a cat acting in accordance with self-centered pleasures like a warm blanket and, oh I don't know, DYING PEOPLE. Because I have such keen, otherwordly insights into the minds and designs of cats, I am immune to their powers. However you are not and I fear for you. It is with your safety in mind -- NAY, YOUR VERY LIFE -- that I provide this warning to you, cleverly disguised as a daily blog post, because, as you probably don't know, cats have a spiritual aversion to blogs. You have to go now. Protect yourself. Get to the bunker, find the shotgun, and prepare. The Reckoning is imminent. Godspeed.

I saw this a long time ago and was recently re-acquainted with it via Mental Floss. Like MF, I can't believe this hasn't made an appearance on GF yet. Exec summary: an 8-ton beached whale is decomposing in the summer sun, attracting onlookers and emitting hellstench. How to dispose of it? Can't bury it, nobody wants to cut it up into tiny chunks so...dynamite, of course. A half-ton of it. Placed somewhat randomly around the carcass by a guy who admits he doesn't know how much TNT it will take to disintegrate the creature. Yes, you read that right. Without further ado:

There are ways to handle driving on ice, and then there are ways not to. I'll let you figure out which one this video depicts. If I didn't know better, I'd say this is staged. It's not.