This Week's Pencognito!

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Images of the Day

The annual JR East Suica Penguin display in Tokyo

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Sudden outbreak of Japanese penguin meme on Twitter

• Master Blaster 6 hours ago

Since the beginning of December there has been a massive influx of penginkora (penguin collages) on Twitter. A penginkora is an image of a penguin chick surrounded by adults all of whom have their mouths and eyes wide open as if yelling at each other.

It seems the basic rules of a penginkora is to give each penguin a caption. Beyond that it’s Thunderdome baby.


According to Net Lab, the source of this image was originally a part of a photo essay titled “Documenting the Antarctic” from June of this year on MSN SankeiPhoto. Something about the image of an adolescent screaming while surrounded by shouting adults seemed to register with netizens and led to this image going viral. Your basic penginkora is simply the image with some speech bubbles. Enjoy some of the most popular ones translated from Japanese into English:

 

Image: Twitter

“Made for people who have a deadline.”

Image: Twitter

“I began studying computer programing.”

 

Image: Twitter

 

Image: Twitter

 

Image： Twitter

From there people began adding other little touches to give the meme more depth such as this one highlighting the lack of major chain restaurants in some of the relatively more rural prefectures of Japan.

 

Image： Twitter

 

Image: Twitter

And those are just the tip of the penguin inhabited iceberg as more and more penginkora flood onto the internet. In fact I’m going to try and make my own.

BWAHAHAHA!…Ha!…heehhhh… Okay fine, you do better! Here’s a blank penginkora. All you have to do is put in your own captions. If you link them in the comments section below I can add them to this gallery, or you can join the fun on Twitter by posting your image with  ペンギンコラ in the caption. Have fun!

 

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'Adventures of the Penguin King' Review

Adventures of the Penguin King is too cliched, canned and cutesy 
 

"Adventures of the Penguin King" was filmed on the Antarctic island of South Georgia.

By JOHN DeFORE 

The Hollywood Reporter

Published: 05 December 2013

Hollywood is used to the phenomenon in which two identical-sounding films hit theaters within months of each other — be they killer-asteroid blockbusters or literary biopics — often with each spoiling the other’s chances with ticket-buyers.

Such would seem to be the case with the nature documentary Adventures of the Penguin King, which like the recent Imax short Penguins observes the breeding habits of king penguins on the Antarctic island of South Georgia. The earlier film was narrated by Sir David Attenborough and this one by Tim Allen, but the stories are uncannily alike.

Here, the producers trade the first film’s unsatisfying gimmick (its cinematography wasn’t well suited to Imax-size projection) for another: 3-D. For Adventures, the Penguins filmmakers take the same general approach as they did the first time: telling their elementary-school audience we’re watching a single penguin and his mate (buried in the credits is the disclaimer, “featuring several King Penguins”) in order to anthropomorphize the mating cycle and gin up suspense when orcas and other predators approach.

But where Attenborough’s script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen’s reading of Philip LaZebnik’s cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate clichéd humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

ADVENTURES OF THE PENGUIN KING (C)
Directed by Anthony Geffen. PG (brief mild language). 76 mins.

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Real penguins waddling into Ilford town centre next weekend

 

Penguins @ London Zoo

Lizzie Dearden, Reporter Friday, December 6, 2013

You would expect to find them waddling around the snowy wastes of the Antarctic but penguins will be marching down Ilford High Road next weekend.

The birds will be visiting the town centre on Saturday (14) and will be splashing around in their pool outside Waterstones.
Visitors can watch penguin parades and feeding, along with regular “snow”, from 1-5pm.
There will also be an outdoor Christmas market on the day.
The event is part of a programme of festive events run by the Ilford Business Improvement District.

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Counting penguins for conservation

Posted: Dec 05, 2013  

By Natasha Stenbock

San Diego, California News Station - KFMB Channel 8 - cbs8.com
SAN DIEGO (CBS 8) - Penguins are iconic birds of the South Pole, yet researchers are concerned about their populations. Scientists from Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute are learning more about the species with the help of drone-like technology.

Hundreds of thousands of birds in a harmonious buzz are doing what you and I do on a daily basis -- talk. It's the communication between penguins and chicks that Dr. Brent Stewart is investigating. "We had an expedition to the Antarctic but we started in South America. From there I joined a boat, a tour boat went to the Falkland Islands to southern Georgia then to the Antarctic Peninsula, and then came back to South America, and that took about three weeks of sea time," he said.

Among thousands of birds, how does a penguin know which chick is his or hers? Is it smell, sight and sound? And which species dominates this icy kingdom? Stewart is answering these questions, conducting surveys with new technology from a bird's eye point of view. "The population surveys… if you had a couple dozen elephant seals or penguins it would be easy to do but these colonies are massive and you could get up to 300,000, 400,000 penguins in a colony," Stewart said. "So we can't really do that in a couple of hours even. And the goal there was to use some small multi-rotor, remote control multi-rotor aircraft to get up in the air and to get a real perspective and also to collect high-def video.  "What I really like about it is it can be a stable platform rather than flying over very quickly, we can hover we can quickly move it in one direction, spin it around to get different perspectives."

For the first time, Stewart was able to use the UAV in a truly wild environment to capture these penguin colonies from a perspective no one has seen until now. "We're counting the birds from the photos, hi-res photos. We can zoom in on them and count each bird, but it's going to take another month, two months to count," he said.

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Image of the Day (A Parental Scolding)

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Check out this blog! (Video)

Click here to check out the New England Aquarium's blog.

Heron flies in to save penguins

News from the Boston Standard, Lincolnshire

Published on the 05 December 2013 

Fundraising activities are going on at Boston’s Heron Food store to raise money to help endangered penguins in the wild.
The store chain is supporting ‘Project Penguin’ by The Deep in Hull – to help 18 vulnerable species of penguin in the world.
Staff at the Wide Bargate store are looking for clubs and groups to help with bag packing, doing a sponsored walk, bake sale or any other ways they could offer to help raise money over the next few months.

This Saturday they have a bag pack at the store and are looking of people and local businesses to get involved and help out.
There will be collection buckets in store and a raffle which ends on Saturday afternoon. Tickets are £1 each and the prize is a trolley full of food worth £35.

For details about ‘Project Penguin’ visit www.thedeep.co.uk/project-
penguin

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Birdworld penguin man helps chick-rearing project in Cape Town

• By Henry Bodkin

5 Dec 2013 

A Birdworld staff member is jetting off to South Africa to help hand-rear penguin chicks before releasing them back into the wild

Birdworld's penguins Punk and Pickles

Birdworld expert Jack Williams

A penguin expert from Birdworld in Farnham has been flown to South Africa to help rescue chicks abandoned by their parents.

Jack Williams, 27, has joined a Cape Town project that searches for late-hatching chicks, and hand-rears them before releasing them into the wild.

Mr Williams has built his expertise at Birdworld over the past three and a half years, where he has successfully hand-reared two African penguins, Punk and Pickles.

The two-week scheme will help many African penguins and other imperilled seabirds make it through the first few months of life, bolstering the threatened wild population.
 Mark Anderson, manager of Birdworld, said: "Jack was the obvious choice for someone from Birdworld to share our knowledge and protocols with this important conservation project.

"This is a great opportunity for Jack, and we are sure he will return with valuable knowledge to further our breeding success."

Mr Williams' visit to South Africa will be documented in a new television series presented by Michaela Strachan, The Great Penguin Rescue, which premiered on the Eden Channel last week.

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Image of the Day

Sound the alarm...people coming!, a photo by larken81 on Flickr.

African penguins at Boulders Beach, South Africa

Penguin Ice Adventure set to be Sea Life Centre's new hot attraction

• By Gary Young

4 Dec 2013 

Birmingham centre to become home to colony of Gentoo Penguins

Gentoo Penguins

Birmingham is set to get a chilly Antarctic blast - but it's got nothing to do with the weather.
The National Sea Life Centre Birmingham has announced a new Penguin Ice Adventure attraction, set to open in time for the Easter holidays in 2014.

The new habitat will give visitors the chance to come face-to-face with a colony of Gentoo Penguins.
Offering a real insight into the lives and quirky habits of the Gentoo, Penguin Ice Adventure will offer multiple viewing platforms to watch the birds as they dive beneath the freezing waters and play in their icy home.
With indoor temperatures of eight degrees Celsius, visitors will need to wrap up warm, although the playful penguins will feel right at home.

Guests will be able to hear the unmistakable trumpeting sound of the Gentoo as it throws its head back and communicates with its feathered friends.

With interactive experiences, visitors will be able to touch the iced environment that the penguins call home as well as do their best imitations of the waddling birds in specially designated areas within the attraction.
There will also be opportunities to watch the penguins being fed three times a day.

Gentoo Penguins

  Amy Langham, General Manager at The National Sea Life Centre Birmingham, said: “Penguin Ice Adventure promises to be very different – it will give people the opportunity to journey into the Antarctic and explore the world of the Gentoo Penguin.

"The birds - which are classified as near-threatened on the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List - have been bred together at Sea Life Centre Melbourne as part of our Breed, Rescue, Protect programme and are being transported here to their brand new, specially-built home.

“We want to inform and educate our visitors about the hardships that sea and marine creatures face, whether as a result of global warming, threats from mankind or natural occurrences but at the same time we want people to meet this colony and get to know the penguins as they thrive in their carefully created habitat that will give a real insight into the personalities and quirks of these beautiful birds.”

As well as the Gentoo colony, Penguin Ice Adventure will feature the cold water-loving lumpsucker fish.
The feature represents a £2.5 million investment for the attraction which has seen a record number of guests since it opened in 1995.

The attraction in the heart of the UK’s second city is already home to more than 1,000 creatures including Hammerhead sharks, a Giant Sea Turtle, seahorses, otters and rays.  In addition to Ice Adventure, highlights include an interactive rockpool, a 4D cinema and the 360 degree ocean tunnel.

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