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Archive for the ‘ Awesome ’ Category
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In honour of tonight’s epic moon, I thought I’d do a post about werewolves.
Back in ancient Greece they were regarded as cursed, and kind of like vampires they were condemned to go to hell. On the other hand, the ancient Egyptians had Anubis, guardian of the afterlife who looked an awful lot like a werewolf himself.
There’s a mixture of power and fear in the werewolf mythos, like they fill different roles for different cultures. For example, the warlike Vikings had “ulfhednar”, wolf-mentalists who wore wolfskins during battle:
Europe had the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which is thought to be several centuries old. We all know how that one ends.
Wikipedia has a pretty cool image from The Werewolf Delusion, showing an 18th century engraving of a werewolf nomming a person:
In our modern era, the fear of werewolves and their association with evil and the occult seems to have faded somewhat:
I mean what?
FACT:
Everyone knows that werewolves transform because of the full moon, but did you know you can tell if a person is a werewolf by their monobrow?
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This is a super cute video of a little bear who crochets himself! Watch out for the bunny and turtle!
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It’s been a busy week for space stuff – I’ve got even more astro links to share!
NASA have released the first ever stereo image of the entire sun. This basically means that you can see the sun in 3D glory 
A team from NASA has designed a deep space vehicle. Not only does it have the brilliant name of “Nautilus-X MMSEV”, it also has some pretty cool features, including a centrifuge to make gravity!
Scientists think that there might be another, huge planet in the solar system (kind of). If it’s there, it would be somewhere in the Oort Cloud (375 times further from the sun than Pluto), but speculation is that it’s four times the mass of Jupiter. Apparently scientists are looking at some data in April so it might be in the news again after that.
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So the best thing on eBay this week is a Blade Runner owl patch. This combines two of my favourite things – owls and patches. So tempted!
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- A star 20 times the size of our sun is speeding through space, creating an enormous bow-wave of dust and gas. (NASA)
- Chris Kotsiopoulos did a supercool 24-hour exposure of the sky in Athens, creating a picture straight from Le Petit Prince.
- Did you know that Fred Hoyle, Yorkshire astronomer, wrote science fiction? Well, he did, and it sounds totally awesome:
“…the bulk of the novel owes more to the thriller style of the John Buchan tradition, as the Cambridge hero battles across wild Irish landscapes fighting a series of murderous thugs and secret policemen.” (Ossian’s Ride)
You can download a supercool book about Fred Hoyle for free. Called Fred Hoyle’s Universe, it has lots of papers about the man himself and his contribution to astrophysics, astronomy, culture and humanity. Pretty cool huh?
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There have been lots of adverts recently for personalised cards from funkypigeon.com, which clearly found inspiration from moonpig.com. I have decided to set up a service called AwesomeOwl.com – if you send me $10 via PayPal, along with a message to your loved one and the “special occasion” you’d like to celebrate, I will email you a picture I have drawn using Paint.
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My current favourite owls are scops owls. There are lots of different species of scops owl, but they’re all super cute. This scops owl looks a little bit sleepy, like he’s just had a nap and woken up to find you’re looking at him. He doesn’t mind because you’re friends, but he thinks you’re a little bit weird:
These guys are having a nap, except the one on the middle right, who is obviously a trouble-maker:
This scops owl was just owling around. He looks a little bit shocked, like he’s just seen a lady owl naked:
Not sure what’s going on here, but I like it:
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