Emotional numbness is the inability to feel much of anything. Things that used to make us feel happy or elicit a smile produce a weak response or nothing. Likewise things that should provoke us to anger or even tears result in an apathetic response. It is a lack of emotion where there once was emotion. One of the causes can definitely be depression. I feel that this symptom results from feeling overwhelmed and overburdened by life's challenges to the point where you just can't feel anymore. You are too tired and weary to emote. It can also be a protection against feeling too much as in after a trauma. It can be the process of shock where we simply cannot take in the emotional reality of what is going on. The mind is protecting itself from too much pain. The irony is that some of the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications we use to overcome mood disorders can also cause emotional numbness. My short lived experience taking amitriptyline and then Prozac gave me a feeling of being flatlined emotionally. I wasn't sad but I also wasn't happy. I was simply there. Some people achieve numbness through addictions to drugs and alcohol or even food. Addictions can be a way to escape very painful feelings and achieve that feeling of numbness. The problem with emotional numbness is that you may be avoiding pain but you are also avoiding all the good emotions too like happiness and love. It is like sitting on the curb and watching life pass by without truly living it yourself.
Wholphin, sometimes written wolphin, is the name given to a hybrid marine mammal born by crossing a dolphin and a false killer whale, the latter of which is actually a species of dolphin, despite its name. The only verifiable examples of this are the wholphins born at Sea Life Park in Oahu, Hawaii. One is an individual named Kekaimalu, born in 1985, that is a cross between a bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, and a false killer whale, Pseudorca crassidens.

 Kekaimalu, a female, was born at the sea park where her mother, Punahele, a dolphin, and Tanui Hahai, a false killer whale, shared the same pool. Kekeimalu has an appearance that is intermediate between her two parents. She is darker in color than her dolphin mother, and she has 66 teeth, as opposed to the 88 of a bottlenose dolphin and 44 of a false killer whale.


 In the animal world, hybrids are often sterile, but Kekaimalu has had 3 calves since her birth. One died after a few days, one lived to the age of 9, and the most recent, a female named Kawili'Kai, born Dec. 23, 2004, is five years old. Kawaili'Kai is more dolphin than her mother, as she was sired by a bottlenose dolphin. While she may still be considered a wholphin, she is 3/4 bottlenose dolphin and one quarter false killer whale. She is more dolphin-like than her mother, but larger than a typical bottlenose dolphin.

 Wholphins have been reported to exist in the wild, but their existence is difficult to verify in the absence of DNA evidence. Some species have been known to interbreed in the wild, such as wolves and coyotes, mule deer and white-tailed deer, and barred owls and spotted owls. As a curiosity, wolphins take their place with the other unusual man-assisted crosses, such as ligers (lion & tiger hybrids) and zorses (zebra & horse hybrids).

Ever wonder where the Windows XP default wallpaper came from?

One of the most famous wallpaper images is undoubtedly the default Windows XP image showing a blissfully relaxing vista of green rolling hills and a bluer than blue sky. The wallpaper, probably one of the most viewed images of all time, is aptly named ‘Bliss.’ Do a Google image search for just the word ‘bliss,’ and the first result is the Windows wallpaper.

For Dutch Windows users however, the name of the image is Ireland, which has mistakenly led many to believe that that’s where the image was taken.

BLISS
Have you ever stopped to wonder where the image was taken, or who took it? In fact, the image is so crisp you might have assumed it wasn’t real at all.
The man behind the camera  is American photographer Charles O’Rear. Don’t let his name fool you into thinking that the photo was in fact taken in Ireland. Bliss, as it turns out, is in California. In Sonoma County to be exact.

The photo was taken in 1996, years before Windows XP launched, and before the area was converted into a vineyard. In fact, a photo taken 10 years later from exactly the same spot where Bliss was shot, shows a disappointingly, dreary view:


The image has since made its way off of users’ computer and can be spotted in some of the most unexpected places. O’Rear himself has seen the image in the window of a restaurant in a Thai village and in the background of a TV interview with the Venezuelan president.

So how much did O’Rear get for taking what is considered one of the most famous photos of all time? A non-disclosure agreement prevents him from revealing the actual figure, but according to Napa Valley Register, O’Rear stated that it was:
“extraordinary” and second only to that paid to another living, working photographer for the photo of then-President Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky.
Taken with a medium format camera, the most surprising fact about the image is that O’Rear claims that it wasn’t digitally manipulated.
Either way, the present day reality is a far cry from the idyllic image that Windows abandoned with the advent of Windows Vista.

JW Van Wessel found the exact coordinates of the location, and thanks to Google Street View, you can get a 360 degree view of the area, and see exactly how it looks today:


Behind where O’Rear stood, you can see more vineyards:

 

While to the left and right is little else but endless highways:


 To give it a try yourself, just go to Google Maps and enter the following coordinates: 38.248966, -122.410269.

Remove DVD Scratches With A Banana

Scratches on discs happen. After one of our favorite DVDs started to skip after receiving a few too many scratches we started to look for a solution to salvage it. Sure there are DVD scratch removal devices that you can buy, but why waste money when there is a solution to be found right in our own homes? Using toothpaste, a banana, a rag and window cleaner we will show you how to remove scratches from a DVD and with any luck the unplayable will become playable.

Instructions :

1. The first thing you do is apply toothpaste on the scratched surface of the DVD. Next, rub the toothpaste gently into the DVD using the rag. Let this sit for about a minute.
2. Remove the toothpaste from the DVD using the rag. Then take the cut banana and in small circular motions rub the banana into the DVD. After you have applied the banana to the DVD, you will then take the peel and use this to rub the DVD in small circular motions.
3. Clean the DVD using the rag. Make sure to remove all the traces of the banana and peel. Spray window cleaner onto the surface of the DVD and continue cleaning the DVD. If you are lucky, your formerly unplayable DVD has now been salvaged!
We experimented with using just toothpaste and just the banana, but we received the best results from using the toothpaste first and following it with the banana.
Top deck passengers aboard the Cabrio during his inauguration trip on the Stanserhorn mountain

The Swiss have taken cable cars to new heights with the launch of the world's first open-air doubledecker cable car system, offering spectacular views of the Swiss Alps.

The Cabrio, which soars up the Stanserhorn mountain near the city of Lucerne at a 1.9km (1.2mile) height, can carry 60 passengers at a time, with room for 30 on the open-air top deck.

The top deck of the Cabrio can hold up to 30 passengers

It comes in the same week that London launched the Emirates Air Line cable car which can carry up to 2,500 people an hour from the Greenwich Peninsula, on the south side of the river, to the Royal Docks on the north.

A young girl waves from the top deck of the Cabrio

The Emirates Air Line cable car towering at 90m (300ft) pulls the 'short straw' compared to its Swiss counterpart.

Boris Johnson takes a ride on the new Emirates Air Line


From the outside it all looks real, the signs look real, the products inside look real, even the staff who work there (think) they are real Apple employees, working for Steve Jobs, however the Apple store in Kunming in the south-west of China is in actual fact a fake.


U.S blogger BirdAbroad who visited the store was convinced at first that it was a real store. Then she noticed that the signage said ‘Apple Store’ – and Steve Jobs’, something which would not be seen in a genuine official Apple store.

According to BirdAbroad, upon closer inspection, she noticed other things that weren’t quite right, she wrote on her blog: “The name tags around the necks of the friendly sales people didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation ‘Staff’. Also, the stairs were poorly made and the walls hadn’t been painted properly. This was a total Apple store rip-off. A beautiful rip-off – a brilliant one – the best rip-off store we had ever seen. Even the salespeople genuinely thought they worked for Apple.”

BirdAbroad was convinced though that the products on sale looked genuine, even though they weren’t.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that BirdAbroad was absolutely correct, the store is a fake.

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