bird 2 freedom

Great picture of A Walrus's reaction after being presented with a fish cake for his birthday ♥♥

The art of watermelon

Polar Bear makes a friend


Near Hudson Lake in Manitoba, German wildlife photographer
Norbert Rosing spotted a polar bear coming near his sled dogs.

He took pictures of what he thought would be the end of his dogs. Apparently the bear came back every night for a week to play with the dogs.

japanese fake pool

Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich created this illusion of people walking underwater called The Swimming Pool, for The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

the Amount of Sugar you Consume

      Ana Julia Torres kisses Lion





Ana Julia Torres kisses Jupiter, a lion rescued from a circus 12 years ago, at Villa Lorena shelter, in Cali, Colombia. Torres, 52, a teacher, founded the shelter, which protects about 600 animals seized from drug traffickers, circuses, animal traffickers, or abandoned by their owners.

World's Largest Goldfish

It might look like an enormously generous
fairground prize. But no goldfish bowl in the world
could contain this catch. The orange koi carp weighs
30lb – the same as an average three-year-old girl –
and is thought to be one of the largest of its kind
ever captured

   Extreme Close Ups of the Human Eye!!

 


The End of the World:

       Location : Nullarbor Cliffs, Australia.

 



Real Super Man

Johan Lorbeer is a German street performer. He became
famous in the past few years because of his"Still-Life" Performances, which took place in the public area. His installations includes "Proletarian Mural" and "Tarzan", which are famous in Germany. Several of these performances feature Lorbeer in an apparently impossible position.

Ticket Of TITANIC

The Krubera Cave, the deepest known cave on Earth.

Located in the Arabika Massif of the Gagrinsky Range of the Western Caucasus, in the Gagra district of Abkhazia, Georgia’s breakaway republic.

kSan Alfonso Del Mar resort. It is located in Chile.

In 2007, natural disasters create a depth of 300 feet sinkhole swallowed a dozen homes in Guatemala – killing 2 and causing thousands of people were evacuated. The sinkhole was caused by rain and underground waste stream.

In June 1991, the second largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century* took place on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, a mere 90 kilometers (55 miles) northwest of the capital city Manila. Up to 800 people were killed and 100,000 became homeless following the Mount Pinatubo eruption, which climaxed with nine hours of eruption on June 15, 1991. On June 15, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide were discharged into the atmosphere, resulting in a decrease in the temperature worldwide over the next few years.

Mount Pinatubo is part of a chain of composite volcanoes along the Luzon arc on the west coast of the island (area map). The arc of volcanoes is due to the subduction of the Manila trench to the west. The volcano experienced major eruptions approximately 500, 3000, and 5500 years ago

The art of writing a restaurant menu incorporates more than a nice layout: psychology and marketing both play big roles. While the local mom-and-pop restaurant may not have done a lot of research into how to sell more meals with the right menu design, you better believe that any big chain restaurant invests time and money into creating menus that make your mouth water and your wallet fall open. As a consumer, a little awareness of the strategies menu designers use can help you bypass all the marketing gibberish, letting you focus on getting the best value and the best meal. Here’s five.

1. Half-way Down the Page: Depending on the size of the menu, there are hot-spots your eyes naturally fall on. On a one-page menu, the hot-spot is about halfway down the page, for instance. You’ll find two different type of dishes in hot spots — high-margin meals and signature meals. The signature meals are those that the restaurant knows it knocks out of the park — these are the meals that they bet will have you coming back time and again. Price and even cost-margin aren’t major considerations for these dishes because a restaurant owner can usually assume that if he can get you back in the seat time and again, you’ll keep spending money at the restaurant.
2. High-Profit Margin Dishes: The second type of dish that is typically highlighted are those particularly profitable for the restaurant, like pasta dishes. Pasta is inexpensive to serve, even with a fancy sauce and meat or seafood. That doesn’t mean the pasta dishes are bad, or even that they’re priced out of line with the rest of the menu. They’re just the dishes with the highest profit margins for a restaurant.
3. Hierarchy and Organization: Most menus are organized along the lines of how a meal might be served — appetizers, salads, entrees, and so on. But within that traditional hierarchy, a menu designer has a lot of freedom. Research has shown that readers look at the first and last items in a section. It is useful to look at those items (they’re often signature dishes) and may be the dishes that the owner makes the most money on, but looking deeper into the menu can provide some interesting alternatives.
4. Specific Ingredients: Menu writing is meant to make your mouth water, with descriptions of seafood from a specific location or vegetables loaded down with adjectives. There’s a reason for all those descriptors, though. Not only are writers making food sound as appealing as possible , but they’re also providing an introduction for anyone encountering a particular ingredient for the first time. You may not recognize the name of every fish in the ocean, but hearing the location it comes from, even as broadly as the Pacific Ocean, can reassure you that it is at least somewhat familiar.
5. Recommended Items: Your waiter will almost always have a recommendation or a special to tell you about — and it can come off as a rehearsed spiel. It can be designed to highlight the same dishes that the menus are meant to promote, but you can also use that spiel as an opportunity to get an honest opinion about what your waiter has tried.

New Yorkers will line up for anything except, it turns out, free rat samples. Yesterday we rushed out of the office assuming we'd have to beat back throngs of hungry curiosity seekers at the Allegra LaViola Gallery, where chef Yuri Hart was grilling rat as part of artist Laura Ginn's show "Tomorrow We Will Feast Again On What We Catch." We just assumed since we'd put out a free food alert that at least some of you guys would show. But you let us down. Because really, it wasn't that bad. We've had worse tasting meat from supermarket bargain bins!
Now, over the years we've tried quite the menagerie of meats—if you are going to be a carnivore might as well embrace it, right? As far as air-breathers go, this list includes chicken, duck, goose, quail, pigeon, cow, horse, donkey, lamb, pig, deer, rabbit and guinea pig (they call it "cuy" in Ecuador), so we couldn't really turn down the chance to add another species to the list. Especially since we've definitely spent more than a few hours over the years planning for the coming zombie apocalypse.
In the end there were just a handful of people in the gallery's basement yesterday. Which was probably fine; it was quite hot in there. The artist was on hand, however, bringing out trays of rat prepared by Hart behind a white curtain. Sadly, she was not wearing the hand-made rat dress she wore to the recent full rat dinner—though it was on display. Two types of rat hors d'oeuvres, both with roasted rat meat, were being served. One was rat served straight up on a thin cracker while the other was rat served with a blueberry glaze on a thin slice of bread. And honestly, the straight-up rat meat was more to our palate. Not surprisingly, it wasn't too dissimilar to its rodent relative, the guinea pig.
The flesh itself, ripped in small bits from the rat carcases by Yuri, didn't have too strong of a flavor, actually. Kind of chewy, not fatty and slightly gamey. The most memorable aspect of it was a slight metallic aftertaste which was easily washed away with a free glass of wine (possibly due to whatever the animals, raised as feeder animals, grew up eating). Because the animals are so small, and their little bones so sharp, the meat was served in tiny pieces which can make it hard to focus on. Would we eat it again? We aren't setting up traps behind our apartment building, but never say never. As the chef put it when we asked if he'd cook with the rodent again, "I said after the dinner that that was it, but here I am cooking rat again."
The real obstacle to mainstream acceptance of edible rat is really the negative associations most people have with the word rat. The vermin have such an awful reputation that it is hard to get excited about eating it. "We need to come up with another word for it," Ginn mused to us. After all, when people eat pigeons—which are just flying rats—they just call it squab!

Last night Matilda the Algonquin Hotel cat celebrated the reopening of her home at her annual Cat Fashion Show. This is the latest Matilda's second fête, and this year she partied in a hotel suite instead of with the usual runway show... but costume was required of all felines. Click through for the latest in cat style: from bunny suits to top hats.
Sadly, the event has been on the decline after it hit its peak in 2010, but we're hoping for a comeback in 2013. Bring back the catwalk, Algonquin!
If you're keeping track, this Matilda is the hotel's 10th cat—the first was welcomed in from the streets in the 1930s, and in that spirit this annual event helps out other shelter cats. Last night there was an adoption center set up by Bideawee, and requested donations of $25 are going to NY Save.

The results are in! After weeks of public nominations, the 6 finalists for the 8th annual Vendy Awards have been announced. The chosen 6 street vendors will battle it out on Saturday, September 15th on Governors Island for the opportunity to win the prestigious Vendy Cup and title of Vendy Award Winner.
The nominees are: Tortas Nezas, Citifield mainstay known for their tortas; The Cinnamon Snail, vegan pastry and food truck; Uncle Gussy’s, who have been pushing their Greek fare 51st St and Park Ave for 41 years; Hamza and Medina Halal Food, which specializes in chicken and lamb gyros; Piaztlan Authentic Mexican Food, longtime Red Hook Ballfields taco cart; and Xin Jiang Prosperity Kebabs; Lower East Side kebabs "made with love."

Don't feel like waiting on line to judge the grub? For the first time ever you can purchase the early entry VIP package. $145 will afford you the opportunity to hang out with some well-known foodies, take a street food mini-tour (in which you get a personal meet and greet with one of the vendor nominees), cooking demos, and an all-you-can-eat food experience an hour before the commoners arrive. Money raised will benefit the nonprofit Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center, which advocates on behalf of vendors.

Have you ever wondered how much your favorite accessory will last? We have the answer, but it depends on various aspects, such as: what accessory did you choose, how large/small it is, but basically everything consists of how much importance you give. And here, we can add its cleaning time. Do you respect it? Because, as far as we know, every accessory has a time cleaning that must be respected. But, how many of us give any importance to this fact? Almost none of us, and that’s why we are talking today about ways of *cleaning a watch with a Toothbrush*! How to clean a watch with a Toothbrush Why with a Toothbrush? Because it is slightly cheaper and you can find it everywhere! Though, this is not the only thing you will need in order to *clean your watch* perfectly. The next accessories which should be noted on your list are: a nonabrasive cloth, toothpick, soft-bristled toothbrush, liquid soap and water. After picking up all the things on the list, first thing you will use is the nonabrasive washcloth. Its usage would be to *clean your watch* from filth. In addition, you would be required to be gentle with your accessory, so in order to get rid of smudges and dirt you will have to wipe your watch easily in a circular order. The next thing on the list, the toothpick, will be used for pieces of debris’ extractions from your watchband. Moving on to the next thing on the list, we face the real subject of this article, which is the toothbrush. Take the soft-bristled toothbrush and soak it in a mixture composed by warm water and liquid soap. Next, also with a careful touching, scrub your watch’s clock slightly not to get wet the timepiece’s gears and also, scrub your watchband. The last but not the least aspect you need to take into consideration is to dry your *cleaned watch* using again the nonabrasive washcloth. After its dryness, you will be able to show him again the big world. This process can we repeated, as long as your timepiece gets filthy. But also, remember that you need to have a gentle touching so that your watch will not get any damage after the process it will be subject to. As a result, your timepiece will be more than glad to look so shiny and also, you will receive many compliments involving your things