This is the best thing ever. Look at that cartoon! OMG I love it. And in the video, when the chick pulls itself up to its full height even though it’s basically still just a little donut! Thank you, @theredheadinquestion and @riorothbates!
(NB: plot of the book is nothing like the movies. But Tennant has several cameos in the movies on the strength of it, due to the unwritten Hollywood belief that Vikings ought to sound roary and Scottish)
This documentation of a barely-known species of small wild felid is incredible – it’s potentially the first active Chinese mountain cat den ever found! As documented in a recent blog post, a researcher working on a crane conservation project took photos of what he thought was a Tibetan fox, only to discover later that he’d actually photographed a cat so rare it was only discovered as a species in 2007! Researchers returned to the site later and were ecstatic to find that the cat was a mother with two young kittens. The placed a camera trap close to one of the den entrances and was able to record multiple days worth of footage before the family moved on.
Chinese mountain cats (Felis bieti) live in a very small, high-altitude range in remote northern China. They’re well-adapted to the harsh weather at those heights, with a stocky build and thick fur in the winter, and are often called “grass cats” by locals because they blend into the the dry grass of the alpine meadow habitats where they’re most often observed. What little information we have about these elusive felids comes mostly from observations by herders whose livestock graze in those meadows. The IUCN lists that no substantive knowledge has been gained about Chinese mountain cats since 2010, so this new footage from Shan Shui Conservation Center is a major contribution to the scientific understanding of the species.
This is the best thing ever. Look at that cartoon! OMG I love it. And in the video, when the chick pulls itself up to its full height even though it’s basically still just a little donut! Thank you, @theredheadinquestion and @riorothbates!
i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave”
at one point during the deal the professor turned to the woman selling it and he said “isn’t this just the most beautiful rubens you’ve ever seen outside of a museum?” (because the fbi had told him earlier that this piece had been stolen from a museum) and THEN he said “where on earth did you get it from?” and the group of people the woman had with her was like taxidermy-fox.png but the woman was like “inheritance” can you IMAGINE the fbi agent about to have a fucking aneurysm when this random guy you’ve brought in just to nod if it’s the right painting not only starts giving an impromptu lecture but then he asks how they got it
omg BLESS YOU for the link and the time stamp that was as glorious as described by the OP
holy gosh. So the painting was wrapped in a manila envelope and the professor did NOT appreciate this:
I was so outraged that they would have been so casual about the handling of this picture that I immediately scolded them and said “This is no way to wrap a Reubens.” And I said “Next time be sure you have in wrapped up in bubble paper….They all were kind of nodding and smiling sheepishly.”
