Just to add to this - the first picture is an unnamed novelty duck house near the ground of Pena palace. It's only a few feet high.

The second is the Torre da Regaleira.

If a chicken coop didn't have a lockable door, was on an island or raft in a body of water, and housed ducks instead of chickens, yeah.

I've got not horse in this race, but just in case people are interested, Davey Hearn is indeed white.

That's the exact point OP is making. Humans do primate things because they're primates.

The other catarrhine monkeys don't have umbrellas, though, so we're clearly superior.

I think you're on the money here, both in that "loud pipes save lives" is a poor excuse for unreasonably loud bikes -- since it's the use of the throttle as a kind of soft horn in traffic that achieves this effect, and that's possible with virtually any ICE motorcycle -- and that this isn't possible with electric bikes, which adds a risk. In either case, it doesn't serve as a defense for increasing the volume of regular motorcycles.

I'm dead impressed how you traveled back in time a few minutes before screenshotting your reply.

I'll never understand this. Motorcycles are fantastic vehicles (fossil fuel issues aside) -- they're agile, fast, and exhilarating. But none of that enjoyment comes from the noise they make; removing your muffler is purely a selfish, "look at me!" exercise.

I would find immeasurably greater pleasure in the use of my member to arrest the rapid closure of the door of a driverless carriage.

...if we're going with loquaciousness as the defining characteristic of Victorian english.

I don't even know how many instances, communities, and users I've had to block to stop seeing anime in my feed, and it still comes up regularly despite that.

That's not a particular criticism of the art form (though I do find the regular depiction of sexualized kids or infantilized adults intensely creepy) but it really is very common here.

It's not poor investors losing their savings

It's both. Trump has actively encouraged buy-in and credibly been accused of having first let key investors in on the ground floor, so the value skyrockets when it's announced, the insiders sell at substantial profit, and the MAGA marks see the bottom fall out of their "investment" shortly afterwards.

I'm not sympathetic with the victims, but it's still predatory.

According to the YouTube captions, the person in the first clip says, "Gente! Gente, acorda a corda, velho!", which is, "Guys! Guys, wake up the rope, man!"

The person in the second clip says, "Ai, meu Deus do ćeu!", which is apparently just, "Oh my God" -- going by tone, I wouldn't say the second person had noticed the issue, but it sounded like the first one did and was in disbelief.

This is an established phenomenon in linguistics, called betacism! There are several languages that have gone from V to B or vice versa over time.

Pretty much all V sounds in modern "native" English words would have been B sounds in its Germanic predecessors.

Thanks! I did wonder whether it might be a noun that was a cognate of "cord" (as in rope, cable, string), but I don't speak a word of Portuguese.

Don't tell anyone, but I am not a trained duckologist.

In fairness, July and August weren't inserted, they were renamed from Quintilis and Sextilis, literally the fifth and sixth months of the Roman calendar.

Much earlier, Pompilius (history about whom is largely legendary, and actions attributed to him should be taken with a grain of salt) introduced January and February and set the numbering out of line. These months were previously just lumped in as monthless winter days.

All Julius Caesar did was rebalance the calendar without changing the months. The rename of Quintilis was posthumous.

Gregory XIII then further tweaked it to give us the modern calendar.

Michel Vaujour had 28 years to serve for attempted murder and armed robbery; this was his fourth escape attempt. He made his way to the roof by threatening guards with a fake pistol and nectarines painted as grenades. On top of the jail he was picked up by his wife Nadine, who had taken helicopter pilot lessons especially for the escape. They landed at a nearby football pitch and fled in a waiting car.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/...

The couple’s hideout was right back in Paris. Bold or foolish, they stayed in the city where they had just staged a daring escape. Three months later, they were caught not opening a charming coffee shop but robbing a bank—again. In the shootout that followed, Michel took a bullet to the head but survived. He was soon back in prison, his sixth escape attempt with a new accomplice, Jamila, ending in failure.

- https://www.readingolive.com/...

Issue #1 or 5? You decide!

This got a bonus chuckle from me.

Any time closed source code gets made public, I'm immediately looking for the funny comments.

Editing in a few more:

Took a screenshot. Not happy about uploading a picture of a swastika, but wanted to capture it in case he backtracks.

::: spoiler :::