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Have a Happy Thought:   You know when you feel the need to bang your head against a wall, or a desk? But you’re afraid of giving yourself a concussion?   Well, maybe (?) we have things to learn from woodpeckers.   Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) in Scotland. Image: Gary Zambonini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0   Side comment: the Latin name for the Great Spotted Woodpecker, Dendrocopos major, effectively translates to “big wood-pain”. Which is a mood. Side-side comment: despite “wood-pain” being the obvious name for all woodpeckers, only 12 species of woodpecker are in the “wood-pain” genus, out of a total of 240 species. Side-side-side comment: There’s another genus called Xiphidiopicus which as far as I can tell translates roughly to “divine sword woodpecker” or something like that. Which is an entirely different, and totally badass, mood!   Back to the main point: if you’re like me-from-a-few-weeks-ago, you’ve...

Have a Happy Thought: Sometimes the best way to express your feelings is through an inventive use of language. William Shakespeare was a pro at this, inventing many words , phrases , and yes insults that we use today.   You can benefit from this in your daily life by using a Shakespearean Insult Generator. Start with the word “thou” (to make it sound old-timey”, then choose one word from each of the three columns.   There are many sources for this on the interwebs, that all seem to have the same word lists. So I’ll just give credit to Scholastic , because why not?   Although to be honest, some of these could easily be compliments… I feel like I would immediately want to get to know someone described as a saucy hell-hated flap-dragon… If you don’t want to scan through lists, the Hawaii State Public Library system has put a button on their website   that will automatically generate a new insult for you.   Have a great weekend, maybe try your hand at ...

Have a Happy Thought: Over the past few years, we’ve all gotten used to QR codes, those square codes that you can scan with your phone. The predecessor to those codes is something much more familiar to us all… so familiar that we don’t even think twice about these being on almost everything we buy: a bar code. Bar codes are actually something invented well within the lifespan of many people reading this… and they could have looked very VERY different.   You see, in the early 1970s, a bunch of different companies were starting to experiment with their own bar code designs. And, luckily for us all today, a group within the grocery industry realised a) how useful barcodes could be for grocery stores, food producers, and everyone in between; and b) how opposite-of-useful it would be if there were 20 different kinds of barcode that would require 20 different types of barcode reader.   So they created a committee to standardise what would become known as the Universa...

Have a Happy Thought:   Maybe you’re at a pub quiz, or filling in a crossword puzzle. Or maybe you’ve just seen a whole bunch of birds and want to point them out but don’t want to get an ‘80’s song stuck in your head for the next few hours   And I ran, I ran so far away …  Image: ‘80’s band A Flock of Seagulls https://www.mondosonoro.com/blog-musica/a-flock-of-seagulls/   (sorry)   Anyway, maybe you want to know what to call that group of birds.. is it a flock of seagulls? ( are there even seagulls? Or are they just gulls ?)   And we all know that it’s murder of crows, but what about some of the lesser-known ones?   This website has helpfully pulled together a list of the most common ‘collective nouns’ for birds. Feel free to visit for the whole list, here are a few of my faves, and why:   A commotion of coots (they are very noisy honkers once they get going) A curfew of curlews (just fun to say!) A volery of wa...

Have a Happy Thought:   Sometimes, all you need is to learn about a weird but adorable creature. This is one of those times. Since I’ve already introduced you to wombats , may I now introduce you to… The pink fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncates). Image from Attis1979 on Flickr  Yes, this is a real creature! It’s native to sandy grasslands in central Argentina, and can grow up to 13cm in length (for reference, I have small hands and my hand is 17 cm from the heel to the tip of my middle finger) – so a real palm pal ! Image: Researcher Mariella Superina holds a pink fairy armadillo. PAUL VOGT, M. SUPERINA If you know things about armadillos, you will know that they are often defined or identified by the number of bands, or overlapping ‘plates of armour’ on their backs. For example, it’s the three-banded armadillos that can roll up into little balls, but the nine-banded armadillos can have anywhere from 7 to 11 bands. The tiny, pink fairy armadillo, meanwhi...