Coyote Buttes South 1, Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, AZ

Unearthing Ireland’s deepest fairy secrets and darkest myths

A fairy fort, with corn stooks of four sheaves each, in Loughinisland, Co Down, in 1962. Photograph: Michael J Murphy/duchas.ie

“A worldwide crowdsourcing movement is currently unearthing Ireland’s deepest fairy secrets and darkest myths. A voluntary collective online is working its way through transcribing 700,000 pages of folklore that were collected throughout Ireland between 1937 and 1939. This mass of previously inaccessible material was gathered by more than 100,000 children who were sent to seek out the oldest person in their community just before second World War to root out the darkest, oddest and weirdest traditional beliefs, secrets and customs, which were then logged into 1,128 volumes, titled the Schools’ Manuscripts Collection.

Half a million pages have been digitised by the National Folklore Collection, of which more than 100,000 pages have now been transcribed by volunteers, revealing the fairy situation in every townland, the types of leprechaun and butter churn common to each area, the names of people who tried to steal gold and what happened to them, or who had relationships with mermaids. There is material on local cures, holy wells, strange animals, travelling folk and spirits.”

The Irish Times

OMG. THIS IS AMAZING.

¡Corre a por ella!

How the media depicts the Apollo 11 mission:

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

Guys it’s a CRIME that this animal shelter’s video has on 24 views please give them the attention they deserve.

A columnar basalt staircase from Iceland (was actually not that easy to climb)

perezdesevilla

Steamboat Geyser, in Yellowstone National Park’s Norris Geyser Basin, is the world’s tallest currently-active geyser. And here we see it erupting. Impressive!

Steamboat geyser has been erupting pretty often for the last year and a half - not shooting the full football field in height it has before, but erupting every few days to every few weeks. Its behavior is totally unpredictable.

palaeoart

Finally got my new air compressor hooked up and we’re back in business on the fossil prep front. First up in the queue was the removal of the excess matrix and cleaning up on this Peronoceras subarmatum which I found on the Jurassic Yorkshire Coast a few months ago. I’ve been out of action on fossil prep for nearly 4 months so it’s nice to be back up and running