In 2012 the US Navy it was reporters that it had decided to end its marine mammal warfare programme in which dolphins and sea lions were trained to detect mines and enemy divers (although the latest story about military dolphins suggest it might still be ongoing)..
The Russians had been training dolphinsatSevastapol in the Crimea since 1973 using them like the Americans, patrolling open waters but also carrying explosive devices. The Ukrainians were also in the game – although their dolphins went AWOL in the mating season!
Now it’s been announced that the Russian Ministry of Defence has ordered 5 dolphins raising speculation that it is reviving its soviet era programme. It’s prepared to pay 1.75m roubles (about£18,000) for two male and three female bottle-nose dolphins up to 2.7 metres long.
So it looks like the Russians want to pick up where they left off now they…
Within the past 10 months, I have been able to compile a reasonable amount of changes that have accompanied my life since moving to Australia. Moving to a different country is going to bring plenty of additions, revisions, and variations to ones life, some for the good, and some well… for the bad. Though, obviously not everyone will relate to everything on this list (especially since Iam the one writing this) Overall, I think this list paints a clear enough picture.
Here are the main ways and things that impact your life when moving from America to Australia
Working Environment
The working environment in Australia is something I cannot compare to any atmosphere I have worked in at home. Here, I do not worry that my boss is going to freak out if I am running 10 minutes late. They do not care if you are taking a bit longer on your lunch…
A study has found that the “dumb blonde” stereotype is unfair. American women with blonde hair seem to be more intelligent than women with other hair colours.
An economist studied 11,000 Americans, male and female, who had completed IQ tests.
The average IQ of a blonde white woman was 103.2 compared to 100.5 for a black-haired woman. 4.3% of blonde women had IQs over 125 compared to just 0.2% of black-haired women.
So why are blondes cleverer?
The answer may be simple – they lied about their hair colour. It turned out there were significantly more blonde females than males and yet hair colour is not linked to gender.
Jay Zagorsky at Ohio University who carried out the study thinks 1 in 6 blonde women were lying about their natural hair colour.
Blondes do benefit from their hair colour: blonde female fundraisers collect more money, blonde waitresses get…
Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing original is assumed here, and nearly everything in these pieces is built either on quotations from the historical personages themselves, or from the scholars who have written about them. [1] Born in 1882, the American painterEdward Hopper (1882 – 1967) made only three trips to the Europe, and these only over a three-year period, between 1907 and 1910. This compared to the duty many artists felt to not only go to Paris, but to live there. He later remarked that, “In my day you had to go to Paris. Now you can go to…
A sad postscript to my recent post on the Zeppelin museum was the news that the last surviving crew member, Werner Franz, has recently died at the age of 92.
He joined the crew as a cabin boy aged 14 and was on the ill-fated voyage when the airship exploded and was destroyed in 30 seconds on May 6 1937.
13 of its 36 passengers, 22 of its 62 crew, a ground worker and a pet dog perished. (At least one of the surviving passengers is still alive).
He never had the chance to fly in a Zeppelin again as the crash destroyed public confidence in airships even though they were twice as fast as any transatlantic liner.
He probably survived because he was in the mess stacking dishes and was doused in water from a storage tank which protected him from the heat and flames as he kicked open a hatch and jumped for his life before the airship hit the ground. He had the survival instinct to run into the wind and away from the flames then stood and watched with the other survivors as it burnt down to its skeleton.
He stayed in New York for 9 nine days, attended a dock-side memorial service, testified before the US board of inquiry and got in some sight-seeing before he went home on the Europa steamship.
He reached Bremerhaven on his 15th birthday and thought of his escape as a “heavenly gift”. He suffered panic attacks for years but wanted to make the most of the second chance he’d been given.
During WWII he was a radio operator in the Luftwaffe then joined the postal service at the end of the war repairing machinery. He indulged his passion for skating and became a coach, one of his pupils winning two Olympic silver medals.
In 2004 he attended the opening of a new museum in Lakehurst with his son and visited the crash site for the last time.
I enjoy the diversion of witty cartoons (especially those in The New Yorker magazine), and I’ve posted previously about funny cartoons that comment on American perceptions and stereotypes about Canada (for example, here and here). Below are a few others that may provide for some amusement.
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This one deals with the general lack of knowledge about Canada by many Americans:
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Americans know they share many similarities with Canadians and might be happy to think that’s true in all respects but every now and then something will remind otherwise — such as the finishing of a sentence with an “eh?” or a different pronunciation of a common word (like “about” pronounced as “aboot”) — even if they can’t put their finger on it:
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Of course, there’s the widely held perception of Canadians as being polite to a fault:
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This one, while showing two Canadian politicians, plays…
Truth Is Beauty. This 55 foot tall sculpture was a main attraction at Burning Man 2013– for a good reason.
There are two sets of greeters when you enter the Kingdom of Burning Man. The first are Border Guards. They check your passports, i.e. tickets. Then they ask the usual questions: “Are you carrying anyone else? Do you have a pet on board? Do you have guns?” Trying to sneak someone in can get you banned. Usually someone climbs on board and checks our bathroom. This time, the guy waved us on. We were disguised as middle-class retirees. We could have been someone’s grandparents. Heck, we are someone’s grandparents.
The second set of greeters serve as the Black Rock City equivalent of the Welcome Wagon. They even give you a package of goodies. These folks smile through the worst of dust storms, as do the Border guards. “I can see…
The burning of the Man is Burning Man’s signature event and is surrounded by ritual. (Photo taken by Kenneth Axen, a New Yorker who joined our California/Oregon group this year.)
Rituals have grown up around the burning of the Man that date back to the day when he was first burned in San Francisco on Baker Beach in 1986. He was probably soaked in kerosene and lit by a match, although I don’t know that. I do know that white gas, which I occasionally use to start campfires with when the wood is wet, has a little too much poof, like BOOM.
The days of lighting the Man with a match have long since passed, however. Now it is much more akin to preparation for the Olympics where eleven Greek women representing Vestal Virgins focus the suns rays using a parabolic mirror to create the fire that is then transferred…
My colleague and I were in Konstanz, on the Bodensee as the Germans call Lake Constance. It was our second trip there and we’d quickly had a trip round the lake for an hour or so to cool off in the 30 degree heat.
But we fancied a trip across the lake to Friedrichshafen. We’d read that were were a couple of good museums there, the Zeppelin museum and art gallery and the Dornier museum, and thought the best way to make the most of our time was to get the high speed catamaran. This costs €20, more than the ferry but takes half the time, less than an hour, which would give us time to visit both museums and get back in time for the football (it was Germany v Portugal in the World Cup).
We also knew from past experience that Sundays were quiet days with not much open, being a good catholic country I suppose, so that seemed ideal. However on checking the web-site it said that catamaran service didn’t run on Sundays however we could buy a combined ticket for €27 for the catamaran and the Dornier museum. So we changed our plans and decided to go on the Monday instead, wandered down to the harbour to buy our tickets (although you can buy them on the day at a ticket machine as well) and discovered the catamarans ran every day.
It was probably as well that we went on the Monday as it wasn’t so busy when we boarded our craft which headed out at great speed across the lake, taking the opportunity to shoot some photographs and enjoy a cup of coffee on deck. Arriving at Friedrichshafen within an hour we headed for the Zeppelin museum which was on the lake front next to where we landed.
We paid €8 to get in and were immediately directed to the cinema (no choice either with the guide ensuring we didn’t wander off).
Although in German the documentary film was a great introduction to the history of the Zeppelins until the tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey, America on May 6, 1937. The film didn’t refer to the war years but that was covered in the museum itself.
First we wandered round the art gallery which was interesting but we really wanted to see the Zeppelin museum. It is magnificent.
They have recreated the lounge and bedrooms as well as the latticework which supported the outer hull.
There were scale models comparing the Zeppelins to modern airliners and ocean liners and they dwarf them all.
Friederichshafen is where they built the airships and the museum includes material from the war years.
After the war it built one more for the Americans after getting special permission from its European allies (as the terms of the peace settlement didn’t allow airships over a certain size and the Americans wanted a big one!).
The arrangement was that after the crew flew it to America the shipyard had to be demolished so no more could be made.
Also based at Friedrichshafen was Maybach, originally a subsidiary of Zeppelin, which made engines for the them. Between the wars it manufactured luxury cars and during the second World War engines for tanks.
There is a wonderfully preserved Maybach Zeppelin car in the museum.
No-one knows why the Hindenburg caught fire. There are lots of conspiracy theories including the one featured in the film about the Hindenburg (which coincidentally was on late night TV when I got back from Germany) i.e. that it was an anti-Nazi plot to show the world that there was opposition to Hitler within Germany.
The fact that America wouldn’t let Germany have helium instead of the highly inflammable hydrogen was also blamed and the museum displays the many theories put forward.
After a visit to the souvenir shop we asked the way to get to the Dornier museum. Then we realised we had miscalculated. It was over 30 minutes bus ride away and the buses only ran every hour. A quick re-appraisal and we decided we’d rather have a nice lunch in the square outside and do a bit of shopping than rely on the bus service.
So we found an open-air Italian restaurant opposite the children’s play area featuring a Zeppelin. After enjoying our pasta and a local beer we wandered off to the nearby shops, including a C&A store which brought back memories of the late 1990s before they pulled out of the UK.
Then back to the boarding point where we travelled back by a different catamaran and enjoyed our return journey watching the boats and an airship travelling above the lake.
I recommend this trip as there is something for everyone including children.
Linguistic note:I was intrigued by the fact that while German boats and ships are given a neutral definite article i.e. Das Boot, Das Schiff, Das Kanu, the catamaran is given a masculine identity – Der Katamaran. Even the captain didn’t know why. As he said “that’s an interesting question”. Does anyone know the answer?
I notice my colleague has also posted today; we were chatting yesterday about the fact that neither of us had got round to it so now you have both of us writing about our experiences!
In 2012 the US Navy it was reporters that it had decided to end its marine mammal warfare programme in which dolphins and sea lions were trained to detect mines and enemy divers (although the latest story about military dolphins suggest it might still be ongoing)..
Mike the Psych's Blog 