Fun with Animals

Let's have some fun with animals today. On the 2nd Thursday of each month, I blog over at Design Style Guide. Each month I try to pick an interesting top, or I chat about furniture construction.

This month, in honor of Leonardo, the mummified duck billed dinosaur I blogged about on Monday, I choose Dinosaurs as my theme. The quilt pictured is Raptor by bbusbyarts. Click over to see the other groovy dino art I featured.

My very dear friend Gail, whom I have known for over 15 years, forwarded this photo via email to me last night. It gave me a chuckle, so I am sharing.

The original email read: "So, there I was . . . just relaxing in front of the T.V. and then the kids yelled, 'Hey Daddy, come see the kittens.' " Kittens, indeed! If you can't see what they really are, click on the photo and a bigger photo will magically appear.

And from my dear friend Diane, custom clothing embroiderer extraordinaire, came this beautiful video. See the copy below for the low down. I didn't feel like editing the poor grammar, so just bear in mind that I did not write it:

"The attached video is of dolphins playing with silver colored rings which they have the ability to make under water to play with. It isn't known how they learn this, or if it's an inbred ability. As if by magic the dolphin does a quick flip of its head and a silver ring appears in front of its pointed beak. The ring is a solid, donut shaped bubble about 2-ft across, yet it doesn't rise to the surface of the water! It stands upright in the water like a magic doorway to an unseen dimension. The dolphin then pulls a small silver donut from the larger one. Looking at the twisting ring for one last time a bite is taken from it, causing the small ring to collapse into a thousands of tiny bubbles which head upward towards the water's surface. After a few moments the dolphin creates another ring to play with. There also seems to be a separate mechanism for producing small rings, which a dolphin can accomplish by a quick flip of its head. An explanation of how dolphins make these silver rings is that they are "air-core vortex rings". Invisible, spinning vortices in the water are generated from the tip of a dolphin's dorsal fin when it is moving rapidly and turning. When dolphins break the line, the ends are drawn together into a closed ring. The higher velocity fluid around the core of the vortex is at a lower pressure than the fluid circulating farther away. Air is injected into the rings via bubbles released from the dolphin's blowhole. The energy of the water vortex is enough to keep the bubbles from rising for a reasonably few seconds of play time."