Falling Sky

Nick, the Happy Sheep

Sometimes the daily news can just crush you down. Thank Jove then for stories like this that yank you back up with a smile, especially if you remember Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep:

Suburban comfort for massive ram

A huge ram has made himself at home in his rescuer's house after resisting all attempts to return him to farm life.

The 22st (139kg) sheep, named Nick Boing, was rescued by David Palmer as a new-born lamb three years ago.

But despite efforts to reintroduce Nick to his natural habitat, he prefers the home comforts of a Cardiff suburb.

[...] "He's part of the family. He comes in every evening, head-butts the cushions off the settee and watches TV.

"If the biscuit barrel is out he'll butt it on the floor because he knows the lid will come off. Come 11pm he'll have a swede or an apple and then he's out for the night."

[...] "He loves being shampooed and will lie on his back with his legs in the air for me to wash him."

[...] "Who would have thought it? Going up and down the street with a lamb is one thing, I didn't think I could do it with a sheep but there you are.

"He's such good company and he knows what's what, he's not stupid at all."

Nick Boing! NICK BOING! I'd never have come up with such a glorious name in a hundred years. Good lord, this makes me stupidly happy, as does this photo-gallery of sheepy domestic bliss.

Well, It Could Have Been The Death Star

Police say UFO was just the Moon [BBC News]

[...] The Control Room conversation, which took place in May, was recorded - and below is a transcript:

Control Room: "South Wales Police, what's your emergency?"

Caller: "It's not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there's a bright stationary object."

Control room: "Right."

Caller: "If you've got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It's been there at least half an hour and it's still there."

Control: "It's been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?"

Caller: "It's in the air."

Control: "I will send someone up there now to check it out."

Caller: "OK."

The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear.

Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"

Officer: "Yes, it's the moon. Over."

Aaaand Relax

Phew. After all that, I need pandas...

...a genuinely funny guide about cats through the eyes of engineers...

...and a cat playing a theremin. You know, the woo-OOO-ooo-ooo-OOH noise from Good Vibrations. The expressions are mint.

GLORIOUS.

Off to Glasgow tomorrow afternoon to preview this weekend's Enjoy the Taste of Scotland food festival which promises to be awash with top nosh from suppliers across this fair land - the missus-to-be and I will give it a jolly good blogging tomorrow, highlighting any particular products you should get your sticky mitts on. Given the huge amount of nibbles I plan on nibbling at said event, it's probably fortuitous that we'll be buying Wii Fit tomorrow. A weekend of board-based lurching, stretching and toppling over surely awaits, but for once it'll be in the safety of our own home.

Landing Now At Terminal 5...

Bravo to the BBC for the new iPlayer trailer, released on the 1st April for rather obvious reasons. Chuckle value aside, there's also some admirably realistic effects work in there (well, within reason) and it all looks very pretty. YouTube stream below, higher-quality iPlayer version here for the next few days.

They're All Up To Something

Portraits by Vincent J. Musi, National Geographic

If you've not seen this month's National Geographic, I'd highly recommend buying yourself a copy (or alternatively just read the articles online) as I found it one of the most enjoyable issues in recent times. Why? Well now, there's a fascinating article on Iceland and the tug of war between environment and economy there that's somewhat reminiscent of the drive for and arguments against wind farms in the Western Isles, with some suitably beautiful photographs of the volcanic landscapes. On top of that, there's a cracking article on my beloved Large Hadron Collider down at CERN, star of numerous Project Valhallas passim. The photographs are awe-inspiring in the magazine - especially this picture as a three page fold-out - and seeing them online doesn't do justice to the immense scale and mind-boggling intricacy on display. This stuff should be on the front pages of newspapers, for goodness sake! The article is highly accessible and you don't need to be au fait with quantum physics to appreciate what it's all about - even if the atheist in me rankles just a tad at the title, ultimately you can just construe it as saying that Edinburgh University's own Peter Higgs is God. Higgs be praised!

The highlight of the issue for me though is the cover feature, a genuinely fascinating and thought-provoking piece on animal intelligence. Having read a book on cat psychology while researching a story ten years ago I've always had an interest in the minds of animals, being particularly amazed by the story of Koko and All-Ball (nice to see Koko is still signing away nicely - there's a nifty photo blog of recent pictures on the Koko site). The National Geographic article justifiably focuses on four particular cases - Alex the parrot, Betsy the border collie, Betty the crow and Akeakamai the dolphin - all of which are quietly remarkable, but the portrait photographs taken to accompany the article reveal more instances of animal intelligence (be sure to read the notes below the photo). I'm particularly taken with the serenity of Azy the orangutan, the scarlet mischief of JB the giant octopus and the oddly alien image of Maya the dolphin. They all look good online - and you can watch video where the photographer, Vincent Musi, gives a commentary on how the sessions went - but, as with the LHC, they look their best on the glossy printed pages of the magazine. Great stuff, the kind of work that National Geographic excels at - and all the more reason for us to rue the day when dolphins develop thumbs...

Oh Lord, What Madness Hath Science Wrought?

Jesus christ.  Next thing you know they'll be able to hover, light fires and develop thumbs, and then that's us fucked.  Gentlemen, I give you... the future!

Cloned cats glow red in the dark

Cat's eyes are no longer the only things about them that glow in the dark, after scientists cloned a fluorescent feline.

South Korean Kong Il-Keun's team cloned cats after modifying a gene to change their skin colour.

The two Turkish Angora cats now glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light. The scientists believe the process could be used to develop treatments for human genetic diseases and could help reproduce rare animals.

Nice to see I Can Has Cheezburger ready with a prompt response.

She Will Outlive Us All

All this, and eight lives still to go...

Cat, 26, could be record breaker

A 26-year-old domestic cat from Shropshire could be one of the oldest in the UK.

Pussywillow lives in Ratlinghope and is still "sharp in her mind and her eyes", according to owner Lin Brown.

The black cat, who now enjoys curling up by the stove, lived off animals she caught herself until she was 22, Ms Brown said.

[...] The family only started feeding the elderly feline after she survived an attack by a fox four years ago.

There's a nice radio interview with the owner featuring a Rayburn, bright eyes and the tale of the fox attack.  Meanwhile, in Japan, Starbucks might as well just give up...

Cat cafe soothes Tokyo's busy feline lovers

The 14 felines-in-residence at Tokyo's Cat Cafe Calico excel at their job of making customers purr with delight.

[...] Calico is one of at least three cafes that have opened up in Tokyo this year where visitors can mingle with cats as they enjoy a cup of tea.

Takafumi Fukui, the 34-year-old owner and a long-time cat lover, quit his job at a television game company and started the cafe in March.

"In Tokyo, it's not that easy to have cats," he said, explaining that tight housing regulations often forbid pets.

Visitors to Calico pay 800 yen ($7) an hour or 2,000 yen for three hours in a big room where 14 well-brushed and shampooed cats hang out. After a thorough handwash, the visitor can play with the cats, read comics or just relax.

The café website is a nifty read, despite being completely in Japanese.  The photo-pages alone could keep Cheezburger rich in material for months, while this little QuickTime movie amused me nicely.  Now, if we could just convince the Caley to do the same...

What's Wrong With Television Journalism In Four Minutes

A brief yet suitably stinging blast by Adam Curtis, he of documentaries The Century Of The Self, The Power Of Nightmares and The Trap, produced for an excellent news-focused episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe last month.

While we're at it, also check out Charlie Brooker's piece that followed, a more focused study of UK rolling news and how it's responded to the disappearance of Madeline McCann. No matter how low you think the media may have gone, it's still shocking, depressing and essential viewing.

One Terrifying Step Closer To Robomog

Or, IN UR BLUE CROSS GETTING MAH UPGRADEZ.

Bionic cat bounces back after death drop fall

Baby, a six-year-old female cat, has been dubbed a 'bionic cat' by Blue Cross veterinary staff after remarkably surviving two falls from a second-storey window.

The most recent incident happened in September 2007, when Baby accidentally fell from a window in her home in South London. Her owner rushed her to The Blue Cross for emergency treatment at the animal hospital in Victoria, London.

X-rays showed that Baby was lucky to be alive, having sustained severe injuries including multiple fractures in both back legs. To the surprise of vets, the x-rays also revealed two existing metal implants in both of her front legs, which had been inserted after a similar plunge when she was a young kitten.

[...] Jess Gower, Blue Cross chief veterinary surgeon at Victoria says: "Baby is an extremely lucky cat. A cat falling from this height will commonly sustain severe injuries, so we were stunned to find it was the second time she had done it! Now she has metal implants in all four legs, so the staff decided to call her the 'bionic cat'. She's had two lucky escapes but needs to be very careful to keep her remaining lives intact."

Don't Watch That, Watch These

Tiptoeing back into blogland after being off with the lurgee, here's three fine pieces of moving pictureness to tickle your eyes and cuddle your cranium.

First up, remember this post (and the hurried follow-up)? Months after that tease of a teaser, there's now a full trailer for what has been finally titled Cloverfield. By all appearances it is indeed a big mad monster movie, played for genuine frights a la the good bits of Spielberg's War of the Worlds. There's still sod-all sight of the monster in question in this trailer, but an awful lot of noise and destruction, plus watch out for the tantalising hint of parasitic nastiness splattering forth from within people, hopefully reminiscent of what happens to hosts in the excellent Resident Evil 4. Considering the apparent format of the film - discovered footage after the event - this could either end up an embarrassing wasted opportunity or a genuinely terrifying success. Fingers and tentacles crossed for the latter. NICE BIG 20MB TRAILER - or for HD click here and select your preferred size.

Meanwhile, in small-screen YouTube land, tip of the hat to Gorilla vs Bear for spotlighting this fan-made video for Radiohead's All I Need, a particularly lovely track from the excellent In Rainbows album. It's been made by editing together footage from Microcosmos, a feature-length nature documentary made by the same team behind Winged Migration and March of the Penguins (let's just pretend that was a silent film, shall we?). It's a cracking piece of work, marrying the music and insect footage together surprisingly well. Go on, have a watch.

Wasn't that nice? I'll tell you what else is nice - three little kittens having an adventure in the back garden, narrated in Japanese (and thankfully subtitled), soundtracked with Joe Hisashi's music from My Neighbour Totoro. See how they scamper, eyes boggling at the scary size of the outside world! Spotted, inevitably, on Cute Overload.

And, to balance that sweetness out, here's the finest opening to any film this year. Though it never got a proper showing on this side of the Atlantic, I quite enjoyed the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, being just as wilfully senseless, surreal and unapologetically obscure as any episode in the series. The best part of the whole film comes right at the beginning and has absolutely chuff-all to do with the movie itself, being a parody of those pre-feature animated segments selling horrendously overpriced and dubiously cooked refreshments from the cinema lobby. Here, though, the music is performed by rock daemons Mastodon and the lyrics are pure perfection (though sadly censored - boo!). "DON'T TALK, WATCH!" Too right. When I'm King, this'll play at the start of every film in the cinema.