Mario Maserati, one of the Maserati founders' brothers, created the company logo inspired by Neptune's Trident, which he precisely reproduced. One such intervention took place where the Piazza del Nettuno now stands: several buildings were torn down to make room for the fountain. The trident logo of Maserati, the luxury sports car company founded in Bologna in 1914, is based on the trident of Neptune. From Wikipedia: The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius), also called the hippo, common hippopotamus or river hippopotamus, is a large, mostly herbivorous, semiaquatic mammal and ungulate native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae, the other being the pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis or Hexaprotodon liberiensis). The name comes from the ancient Greek for "river horse" (ἱπποπόταμος). Coming from San Marco, it's on the right-hand side of the Rialto bridge. Looking more closely, you'll be able to make out two fairly obscene reliefs that have in fact, a great deal to do with the history of the Rialto bridge: one shows a man with a disproportionately huge penis in the shape of a nail, the other shows a female figure with her intimate parts placed over a flame-spewing votive bowl. The two figures illustrated one and the same story surrounding the construction of the Rialto bridge. After the wooden bridge had rotted or burned down several times, in 1507 the city administration decided to erect a stone bridge across the Canal. Decades of arguments about financing and design ensued, spurring the residents of San Polo, consisting of prostitutes, market traders, vendors and craftsmen, to make sardonic remarks. The man would call out: "Sto ponte i lo finira quando ch'ecl casso fara l'ongia" (if this bridge will ever be finished my penis will turn into a nail), and the woman jeered an analogy: " Quando che i finisse el ponte, me chiapara fogo la mona" (if the bridge should ever be completed my vagina will catch fire). Both jibes were completely typical of the Venetian people of the time, forever incorporating obscenities into their jeering chants. Indeed, construction on the Rialto bridge started in 1588, and it was completed in 1591. Now the joke was on the local people, and the city administration used the two reliefs to show that the doubters were now due some "nails" or "flames".

If you wonder why South Congress Avenue, one of the major thoroughfares in Austin, looks so deserted, it is because this photo was taken on Thanksgiving in 2019 while I was on a walk with the family to burn off some of the calories I had just consumed at dinner. People who create gorgeous photos ... then can't decide which one they want to use, so they divide the picture in half and show two views. Be decisive! Red pill, blue pill! There's no purple pill in the Matrix! Choose! Bologna's Fountain of Neptune (Fontana di Nettuno) was erected between 1564 and 1566, when Pope Pius IV decided to give the Bolognesi something they did not yet have: a public fountain. Was it just a gesture of goodwill? Not really. The monument is the result of a collaboration between architect Tommaso Laureti and Flemish sculptor Jean de Boulogne, known as Giambologna. Eyes that stare blankly off in some awkward direction like they are dead inside. I get depressed and feel badly for these poor avatars. SOMEONE SAVE THEM!Okay, so I publish a magazine in Second LIfe called Attention SL. I don't know if you've heard of it or not. We publish monthly, it's a lifestyle magazine featuring stuff in SL. People who have a new "love of my life" just about every month or so. Then they break up right as I go to press and I feel AWKWARD using the photo. What to do?

from the sale of each magazine goes to charities supporting the LGBTQ+ community and fighting the HIV / AIDS epidemic. Note: In the Wikipedia text below, most people will be surprised to discover that the closest living relatives of the the Hippopotamus are cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises, etc.). Hippos have barrel-shaped bodies with short legs and long muzzles.[34] Their skeletal structures are graviportal,[8]: 8 adapted to carrying their enormous weight, and their specific gravity allows them to sink and move along the bottom of a river. Hippopotamuses have small legs (relative to other megafauna) because the water in which they live reduces the weight burden. Though they are bulky animals, hippos can gallop at 30 km/h (19 mph) on land but normally trot. They are incapable of jumping but do climb up steep banks. Despite being semiaquatic and having webbed feet, an adult hippo is not a particularly good swimmer nor can it float. It is rarely found in deep water; when it is, the animal moves by porpoise-like leaps from the bottom. The eyes, ears, and nostrils of hippos are placed high on the roof of their skulls. This allows these organs to remain above the surface while the rest of the body submerges. The testes of the males descend only partially and a scrotum is not present. In addition, the penis retracts into the body when not erect. The genitals of the female hippos are unusual in that the vagina is ridged and two large diverticula protrude from the vulval vestibule. The function of these is unknown.

Male blue wildebeest become sexually mature at about 2 years of age, while females can conceive at 16 months if adequately nourished. Nevertheless, most females do not start to breed until a year later. The mating season, which lasts for about 3 weeks, coincides with the end of the rainy season. This means that the animals are in good condition, having been feeding on highly nutritious new grass growth, and the conception rate is often as high as 95%. The mating season, or rut, typically begins on the night of a full moon, suggesting that the lunar cycle influences breeding. At this time, testosterone production peaks in males, resulting in increased calling and territorial behaviour. The activities of these sexually excited males may also stimulate female to come into estrus. Working at the Austin Motel, you hear it all. Many locals have grown up calling it simply 'the penis motel,' though we prefer the more stately designation 'The Phallus Palace.' It seems as if each new person that encounters the sign imagines they are the first to notice something familiar in its magnificence. No doubt Freud would have had something to say about such widespread pattern recognition. On a drive to our next safari camp, we were able to spend almost an hour watching a group of 20-30 hippos in a river. Most of the hippos were just side-by-side in a main group but, around the perimeter, there were almost continuous face-offs between two or three pairs of male hippos who were trying to show dominance by opening their mouths almost 180 degrees, displaying their very long teeth and pushing up against their opponent. In 1995 a japanese trawler sank because a russian cargo plane dropped a living cow from 30,000 feet Having said that, I have come up with some pet peeves. Things that I see every month or trends that have cropped up and refuse to die.

This is not a slap at any particular person. I'll put in something about myself straight away, just so I'm in on the criticism. I hope you all chime in with one of yours, tell me where you agree or educate me if I sound stupid. The call for submissions had a few stipulations. In all photos, the subject needed to be seated, the photos needed to be in portrait format at a 5x7 aspect ratio, and we wanted to avoid mirror selfies. There is a great deal of scholarship on the "seated portrait," which we will not go into here, but for our purposes, the requirement had the effect of making the portrait a deliberate act. In that way, the photographer was more likely to consider the messaging and emotional content of the photograph, and how feelings of isolation and loneliness were impacting their lives during the pandemic. The aspect ratio and orientation were chosen for presentational purposes. As curators, we wanted to ensure that the images formed a collection and that changes in the physical dimensions and orientation would not detract from the collective message(s) contained within the collection. Since 1938 the Austin Motel and its landmark neon sign has been a fixture of South Congress Avenue. The sign is arguably the best known of Austin's iconic neon. In an Austin Monthly feature in 2020 on "The History Behind Austin's Most Iconic Neon Signs," Madeline Hollern writes:I find Jays very difficult to photograph as in my area they are extremely shy and wary of humans. Although I know they can often become indifferent to humans in urban parks where they are not persecuted. It took me ages to manage a half-decent photograph of a Jay, then my next target was to capture one with its crest raised. Yesterday I achieved this ambition when I was photographing a nesting Tawny Owl. This Jay spotted the owl and started calling and raising its crest in agitation. I turned my attentions from Owl to Jay and managed to capture this photo with its crest raised high in a Mohican style. There was the added bonus that it perched on a photogenic moss-covered oak branch too. Desperately centered photos. Stop it. Stop it now. Only your mom takes photos with everything dead center. (Okay, my mom does. Her vacation snaps are the worst. She goes to places and takes photos of her ancient friends and nothing of the scenery, but that doesn't stop her from wanting to show them to me. Including the duplicates.)

Giambologna was summoned from Florence, where he was working at the court of the Medici, to create a bronze statue of Neptune. Giambologna took his inspiration from ancient Greek-Roman statues. He designed Neptune with a strong body, but depicted an older face to symbolize the strength and wisdom of the pope. A hippo's lifespan is typically 40–50 years. Donna the Hippo was one of the oldest living hippos in captivity. She lived at the Mesker Park Zoo in Evansville, Indiana in the US until her death in 2012 at the age of 61. The oldest hippo recorded was called Bertha; she had lived in the Manila Zoo in the Philippines since it first opened in 1959. When she died in 2017, her age was estimated to be 65.

Get great features with your free account

Harshly lit faces. Just because you have a cool lighting system (LUMIPro, love you) doesn't mean you need to turn up the high beams on your face. Find the sliders. Turn down the glare. I always try to capture catch light in the eyes of the birds and mammals in my photos but it's sometimes difficult to even see the brown eyes of a dark colored mammal, of any large size, because, if the entire animal is in the photo, its eyes are usually so small they're almost impossible to see. This certainly is true when photographing wildebeest so I purposely zoomed in on the eyes of this animal.