The Pryor Week #7: Something Uplifting

Hey. I hope you’re safe wherever you are this week.

I hesitated in sending out the usual Pryor Week last week, there was simply too much scary news covering the feeds and I didn’t want to add to it.

I’ve found myself in a consumption vortex, going down strange paths of learning. Reading and listening to subjects I wouldn’t have found myself digging into even two weeks before. It’s been enthralling and honestly somewhat demoralizing at the same time.

But don’t worry—either for my sanity or for my usual weird wordlings. I’ll go back and gather the more interesting stuff and share it soon enough. As for the sanity, I’ll go burn it off at the gym in a minute or two.

But for today, I wanted to cast a bit of brightness into the obsidianness of current world affairs.

Hopefully something below can cheer you up today.

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First up, the Pic Descrip:

That weird pseudo-painting pic up above is from a local gorgeous and occasionally slightly stinky canal here. I just can’t get over how stunningly beautiful the reflective lights are at night, despite the occasional wafts of nostril-flaring air.

But that particular pic contains three odd aspects:

1. I flipped it vertically and cropped it.

2. It’s just too damn pretty. I want to find the best shot and hang it on my brutalist wall.

3. Those bubbles you see are actually like 10,000,000,000 fish I’ve seen pop up only 3 times over the past year. They stretch out for kilometers on end and only appear (from what I can tell) during very specific weather conditions. My guess is it’s related to no wind and heatwaves, of which we’ve been in a (very welcome) one this week. I’m still trying to find an answer.

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This Week’s Pryor (Happy) Learnings

#1. Holy Moly

I don’t know how much/if photoshopped this picture is, but it is just awe-inspiring.

It’s called the Borgund Stave Church and was built in the 1200s. It was used all the way up until 1868 when it was converted into a museum. I’d like to visit it someday, but only in the summer, ‘cuz cold sucks.

#2. Travel the World at Your Desk

This week’s neat website I found is called Drive and Listen.

The concept?

You get a POV of a car driving around any of the many international cities on the list, while getting to choose which local radio station to listen to (I think the radio is live but not confirmed). I’ll have to play with it a bit more before I go traveling next time.

Seems like one of those high-effort but functionally useless ideas—the exact type I love to discover.

Note: I wish I could say this worked perfectly for me, but I could only get a few cities/channels to work. My internet isn’t the fastest at times—I hotspot unlimited data off my cell phone. Last year I had over 1 Terabyte downloaded on my phone bill.

😁

#3. Vikings and Magic

There’s a new offshoot of the Vikings show that I’ve been meaning to watch soon. So, when I came across this factoid, I marked it down to share with all’y’all’all (or however Southerners speak).

Apparently, ancient Viking smiths used bones of dead ancestors and animals to imbue swords with magic power. In the process of this, they actually were infusing extra strength onto the weaponry by creating something called “bone coal.”

“Researchers have conducted experiments that recreate the process of forging a sword using bog iron and bone-coal; the carbon from the bones can penetrate up to 3 millimeters deep into bog iron, enough to significantly strengthen the sword.”—Source

Note: The result was made possible through physics, not magic. Just figured I’d point that out because of…well, because of recent years I’ll just say.

#4. Elephantastic

There’s these groups of caves under a large inactive volcano in Kenya called Mount Elgon. The extra-interesting part of these caves is the culture of mining the local elephants developed over thousands of years.

And no, I’m not talking about the tragic use of elephants as industrial tools.

Elephants are one type of animal that requires a lot of sodium in their diet. And these locals learned millennia ago that if the land didn’t provide for their needs—the caves would.

So, these clever beasts learned to use their tusks to chip away at the walls to dislodge the salt-heavy rock. Other animals would apparently then run in to eat the leftovers.

It’s unverified if McDonald’s learned to attract large animals using salt in a similar fashion.

More reading here.

#5. Caw Caw Cawssholes

I’ll let this last one speak for itself, just look at the URL lol:

“In one of the more notorious dick-moves of the animal kingdom, parasitic cuckoo birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, forcing them to raise the cuckoo chicks as if they were their own. New research shows that female cuckoos conduct this bait-and-switch while scaring the crap out of their unsuspecting hosts—which they do by mimicking the call of a predatory bird.”

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