Now I just have to figure out how to turn all your output into sweet, sweet nectar.
I will refrain from making a big issue of the fact that the busy little bugs are secreting it out their asses.
(Latest tally: 10,018 entries, 962,538 total comments. Keep on adding to them!)
Can we just change the name from The Eternal Thread to The Walton Therapy Sessions?
Given the latest Catholic scandals I’m wondering whether my moniker is even less reputable than before.
No.
Seriously, I do want people to stop talking about my personal issues on this thread. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t personally mind at all – but it is clearly annoying some people, as was made very clear on the last thread, and I think it’s time for it to stop. I will do my best not to post any more complaints or self-pity.
40821
Newsflash: British Chiropractic Association just dropped it’s case against Singh. See Bad Science
Excuse my shameful improper English usage in last post, I was excited
Next week on promises sure to be broken…
Actually Walton you’ve come a long way, you just need to grab your self some self esteem.
I suggest picking up a large caliber handgun, a pit-bull and a big ass pick up truck with oversized tires and these hanging from the trailer hitch. And maybe take up chewing tobacco.
Seems to work for some people I see.
:-D :-D :-D
If you are implying that our shit is as sweet as honey, well then thank you. I do eat a lot of sugar, and it’s probably not a good thing.
Squatchtract — Legend or Lord
Noah, the unabridged version, (Complete with dinosaurs and death)
I’m going for quantum commentating:
.
(+10000)
Walton just needs to learn to be like me. I’m skinny, scrawny, am the quintessential geek, have no girlfriend, have a somewhat crappy job (producing reports no one will ever read,) live in a decent apartment, am likely to lose face with my family, and have been spending the past sixteen years or so perfecting a novel that I may not be able to release. However, I am brimming with self-confidence despite all my perceived failings!
Homeopathic:
shakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshakewank
(+10^30)
re PZ’s video link about ant farmers – This happens on the broom bush in my garden. Every summer I get out my magnifying glass and watch them.
The aphids are clustered in discrete bunches and the ants each seem to have their own “herd” of aphids to “milk”. I never see more than one ant per bunch of aphids. I’ve often wondered if they go back to the same bunch of aphids, or if they just seek out an untended bunch. I’ve wondered how I could mark the ants in some way so that I could tell if they return to same bunch, but I can’t think of a way to do it. I could hardly put a spot of paint on one, or tie a thread round it’s body, as they’re so small and either I’d kill it doing that or it’d probably die from “inhaling” the paint/whatever through their skin.
Anyone know the answer to whether they have their own herds”?
Fascinating to watch, though.
The ants only touch the aphids very gently once or twice and the aphids immediately raise their bodies and exude.
When I lived in Oz their was a colony of the green leafcutter ants on a tree that pushed up against my window. They used to get really agitated if I watched them, even from across the room. They’d all gather next to the glass and raise their little bums (Gasters ?) in the air. Quite spooky.
Enough about Walton. Let’s talk about me for a minute. (Yeah. That’s an Alan Parsons Project reference. I’m just that good.)
I tried to read The Wheel of Time a few years back. I made it to book 4, in spite of the bad dialogue and generally terrible writing style. I even enjoyed the first three. Then things stopped happening. He had more padding than a crash-test dummy.
I’ve really been enjoying George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. Very good, though he does tend to focus on food a bit too much. I don’t need details of all 77 courses, even if you’re drawing out the scene in which the king is poisoned. (Sorry about the spoiler.) But the dialogue is good (sometimes excellent, sometimes not-so-excellent), and things fucking happen. Heroes die. Bad guys do good things, sometimes even for the right reasons. Few characters are strictly bad, or strictly good. And, it’s getting turned into an HBO series — one season per book.
Also in happy tidings: Joss Whedon is set to direct Avengers. Maybe it won’t suck.
Okay. Enough about me. Back to Walton.
From the last itteration:
True, but you can’t make guacamole with Loschmidt. Though Avogadroes would be better for making quantumole as opposed to guacamole.
Good morning, ya’ll.
Has anyone else noticed that some testosterone-poisoned rednecks put the bull testicles on the back of their truck and still call the truck ‘her’?
*Looks around shiftily*
*Gives Pope Maledict DCLXVI “The Signal”*
Sheesh, I make lots of typos, misspellings etc, but “their” for “there”? Never done that before.
Little tiny brands. I’d suggest little tiny stencils, but the spray-paint tickles their antenna, and they wriggle too much.
I like a lot of the things people on this thread hate talking about :/
But it’s fair ’nuff I guess. I hate Scifi. Honestly I don’t like much fiction, but what I do like has pretty much never been Science fiction. My favorite book at the moment is Blood Meridian.
There have only been a couple Scifi film’s I’ve liked: 2001, Solaris, maybe a couple others…
@nigelTheBold:
I’m trying to write my own fantasy series. I finished the first book as far as a first draft and am currently busy with the first series of edits. Reading back on the first few chapters I realized that I write pretty terribly. I use the word ‘just’ and ‘a bit’ way too much, and adverb use peppers my thoughts.
However, I’m already on the fourth chapter as far as edits go, and I’m pounding through!
I will refrain from making a big issue of the fact that the busy little bugs are secreting it out their asses.
Wow, I didn’t realize creationists had their own insects they evolved from! I wonder if that fits into the whole complexity thing…
Nigel: There’s a teacher in Ohio who has a great way to mark small animals. Of course, the ant would have a cross burned into his
armleg, but . . .One of my favourite sci-fi series was Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series. When I was in high school, reading about people with absolutely no control over their lives, but still finding a way to make things work, was definately an upper for me.
Hey, if you haven’t seen this before, it’ll blow your minds (courtesy Bad Astronomy):
sliding scale of the universe
@Kevin:
Cool! Fantasy is harder to write than most folks might think. I’m more into “modern” fantasy, like Timothy Powers and Neil Gaiman these days, but I’ve been known to enjoy a good ol’ fashioned sword-and-sorcery story, like Song of Ice and Fire and the like.
If you need a fairly competent editor, just let me know. Not that I’ll be able to help. I’m not competent at anything. But I’d be willing to offer my incompetent feedback.
@iambilly:
Yes! Gateway is one of my favorite books of all time. I just re-read it about a month ago, before starting Asimov’s Guide to the Bible.
(I used to be really fond of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as well.)
Any other suggestions for good readin’?
correction to my comment #13 – not “leafcutter” ants, I meant the sort that sew leaves together to make nests, making bridges of ants to reach from one side of the leaf to the other so that they can drag them together before the sewing.
Caine (@725 previous):
My own never-fail tear trigger is an original Christmas song by the Roches, called “Star of Wonder.” It’s about what an anguishing choice it must’ve been for the shepherds to actually leave their flocks and follow the star (and also ahistorically uses the feminine pronoun for the shepherds, which rocks), and it gets to me every single time. It’s from their album We Three Kings, which is the Best.Christmas.Album.Evarrrr, and highly recommended, even to atheists.
cicely (@726 previous):
Heh! Anymore, bathroom time is the only time I have for reading actual paper books with my eyes (as opposed to listening to audiobooks, which I do essentially whenever I’m alone in my car). The bulk of my actual reading (most recently Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, and now I’m working on Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli’s Dangerously Funny, about the Smothers Brothers and their battles with censorship) is done in the bathtub. I know it’s stereotypically unmanly to take tub baths instead of showers, but a few years ago we installed a nice deep jetted tub, and it’s verrrry niiiiice!
Josh, OSG (@749 previous):
You’re imitating the wrong NPR voices: Carl Kassell is clearly the way to go (note that he’s retired from NPR news now, but still appears on Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me!).
Jadehawk (@various, previous):
Others have already given you great advice re your back pain, but…. I think you were just joking about “chopping them off,” but if you should seriously consider breast reduction, I’ll note that my mother had breast reduction surgery a couple decades ago, also for back pain. Based on the grisly detail in which she described the procedure (thanks, Mom; I’ll just go and gouge my eyes out now…), it seemed to me that there would be considerable loss of sensation involved. Now, that was a couple decades ago, and probably surgical procedures are much improved since then, but don’t fail to talk to your surgeon (if any) about the… er, lifestyle impacts of the surgery.
Until recently, I would’ve said it wasn’t big issue for Mom, since she was mostly past the boobalicious time of her life… but lately my 80+ yo widowed mother has taken up with an apparently hotsie-totsie (albeit also 80+) new boyfriend! Woo-hoo!
@nigelTheBold:
It took me a long time to get to where I am because I spent the vast majority of my time devoted to designing the world in which the characters interact. It is a fully fleshed out world, with a history and geography and I really do think that will shine through the most when I actually – hopefully – get published.
My first story is interesting because the main character – the hero protagonist – is a terrible fighter. He’s short (a race that’s a little bit under three feet tall) and doesn’t know how to fight. He’s clumsy, he gets homesick easily, he’s very quickly frightened, and he’s kinda dumb, but after spending as much time as I did writing the book, he kinda grew on me.
Plus the whole point of the book is summed up with the following statement, “True bravery is not being fearless, it’s being scared to death of something and still facing it.”
Sigh. Maybe not, but after the clusterfuck that was Dollhouse I’ll believe it when I see it. And aren’t there enough new ideas in the world? Why do they have to keep recycling old ones?
marking ants (2 linx)
Nigel: The Dune series (if you like history and religion). The Uplift Series by David Brin (the second trilogy is so stuffed full of bizarre concepts that it damn near blew my mind (and his ability to create different species, including different ways of thinking, is very good)). Eric Flints 1632 series is very good (he manages to create an alternative time line while keeping the history, and changed history, remarkably coherent). Brian Jacques Redwall Abbey books are fun reads — innocent, fun, yet thought provoking.
The history books I am currently reading include: The Three Orders (Georges Duby; Stefan Stamolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria (Duncan M. Perry (also a damn good banjo player)); Cataclysm — The First World War as Political Tragedy (by David Stevenson); The Big Burn — Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire that Saved America (Timothy Egan); The Road to Berlin (John Erickson). I am also reading the original Conan stories.
My current home library is down to about 2,000 books (I recently took about 300 to the library for their annual book sale, and about 30 to a local used book store (and I came back with 35 (don’t tell my wife!))). My library consists of modern military history, medieval history, paleaontology, geology, sci-fi and some fantasy. When I have money, I buy books. If there is any left over, I buy Cherry Coke, good scotch, and pumpkin seeds.
Re: tearing up.
The only time that I find myself actually tearing up is when I sing two songs — And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda and Green Fields of France. The only movie I can remember that made me cry was Platoon. I guess military pointlessness makes me very sad.
@iambilly (Re: Redwall)
The first books published are the better of the Redwall series, as it begins to get a bit samey after a while.
Sven DiMilo
Hey, thanks for that, but it sounds as if a painted ant is either cleaned by the others when it returns to the nest, or is ripped to pieces. (And I have enough trouble using superglue without sticking myself to something to try that option on something as small as an ant).
Kevin: I’m not that far in. Thanks for the warning.
yeah, it looks like it ain’t easy.
@iambilly:
Great advice. I’ve read the first three Dune books (gave up on God Emperor of Dune). I absolutely love the Uplift books, even Sundiver. I have not read the others — thanks for the tip.
Mmmm. Scotch. Scotch is why I drink beer.
#15 iambilly, responding to previous incarnation
(or however you choose to express powers)
Me, personally, I don’t particularly care for most Sci-Fi novels (although I’m a huge Sci-Fi movie fan… it’s a visual thing, I guess), and fantasy novels get repetitive to me. I am most fond of historical fiction… love Bernard Cornwell, for example… and just picked up the latest book in the Saxon Series, “The Burning Land”.
Will begin reading in the next few days.
Have you read Stalingrad and Berlin: the Downfall by Anthony Beevor? Staggering, both.
They’re. Out to get you.
Walton (@769 previous):
Try Stranger in a Strange Land. For real cognitive dissonance, read SiaSL immediately after re-reading Starship Troopers. Also, as a fan of parliamentary monarchy, you would likely enjoy Double Star, which is some of Heinlein’s best work, but is unaccountably not well known. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also of interest to people who think seriously about various forms of government, and may pluck your remaining libertarian strings. And I recommend Citizen of the Galaxy to anyone who’ll listen.
I’m not a huge Dick fan myself (wait… did that come out wrong? ;^} ), but I think freaking you out is the intended effect.
Wow. I luuuuuuved that show, and haven’t thought about it in years. Thanks for mentioning it.
Alan: Sorry ’bout that. The formatting didn’t come through the copy and paste of the quote. My bad. I claim liberal arts degree. Didn’t affect the joke, though.
You did notice the joke, right?
@Kevin:
Sounds like it’ll be good. Having a well-fleshed-out world is important for fantasy. The best advice my writing instructors ever gave me was, “Write fantasy as if you were writing regular fiction for the world you created.” Which means you need to know your world enough to write fiction for it.
Nigel:
Day of the Triffids. Best. Novel. Evvvahhhhh.
@RTL:
Ask this guy. I just saw some pictures of painted up ants on a SciBlogs site, though I can’t seem to find it now. They were painted for research, though some may just have been exhibitionists.
@nigelTheBold
You can say that again. Just because Martin spent the 80% of the book with one character doesn’t mean that character isn’t going to be unceremoniously offed with little or no warning (and often in an expository conversation between two other characters months later and miles away, annoyingly.) I find the series’ plethora of minor, incidental, and not-much-more-than-a-name characters to be more confusing than anything. One shouldn’t have to exclaim, “OK, who the hell is this guy again?” more than once or twice a book. Eight times per chapter is a bit overkill, IMO.
Having said all of that, few series’ major characters are so complex and developed.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Waltoning.
I always liked Heinlein’s juveniles, especially Have Space Suit Will Travel.
On a more somber note, Minnesota seems to be a good place to get drunk and kill people with your car.
@nigelTheBold:
It’s definitely matured as far as a world in my mind. A lot of my ideas used to be a little silly, and the world itself was rather unappealing, but now I’ve actually gone so far as to begin a baseline assessment of the actual latitude and longitude and climate and such of the world.
It’s crazy detailed, but I like crazy detailed.
#39 Celtic_Evolution
Bernard Cornwell – a sharpe author …
I think I’ve read all the series and re-read them occasionally.
I also like Patrick O’Brian although someone previously said they couldn’t get into them. Love the gentle humour between the 2 main characters. Going further back, I also read Lord of the Rings occasionally – a superb series of books. To invent a whole geography, history, mythology, languages is awesome.
I am not a specialist in SciFi although I would rather read it than view it in any other medium. “The pictures are better.”
E E ‘Doc’ Smith and Isaac Asimov are about as far as I go currently.
I am not given to weeping at all, but I do enjoy the two Eric Bogle songs that iambilly mentioned…however, given my intense enjoyment of celtic punk rock, I prefer The Pogues and Dropkick Murphys versions to the originals. My grandmother’s (Eileen, smile) favorite song was Fields of Athenry, and I’m also crazy about that one.
However, the saddest thing that I ever heard is the Cash cover of NIN’s Hurt. The video is compelling.
@Brownian:
I have to actively try to avoid this when my stories are written. What I intend to do is have my sister or someone read the book, and a week after they’re done, I’ll write up a little quiz, like so:
1) Who was?
2) Who was?
I’ll ask like… 5-10 characters. If she can’t tell me who they were, or confuse them, then I’ll have to either make them more important, or edit them out entirely. In one of the chapters I’m close to editing, there’s a character I can do that with, since he’s pretty much a carbon copy of the bad guy, and really doesn’t have a place in the story, and he gets offed the next chapter, anyway, so it’s not like he matters to the grand scheme of things.
@Cathal:
Another win. I love Day of the Triffids. The British miniseries was really pretty good. And I understand they have remade it, and it has Eddie Izzard!
#43 iambilly
I did.
AwefulAwesome!Cash and Strummer covering Redemption Song is also brilliant.
Oh, a discussion of planetary romance novels.
Kevin, your series sounds fun. Keep us posted.
I’ve read the entire Dune series at least four times now, and I get something new out of it each time (though I still find the second, fourth, and sixth books a little tedious.) It’s kind of a every-third-or-forth-summer tradition for me. When I was trying to put together a thesis proposal for a master’s in human geography, my supervisor kept warning me against straying too far into environmental/geographic determinism. I self-corrected by asking myself, “Is this something Frank Herbert would have written?”
Back to you, Walton.
AnthonyK: I’ve read both his Stalingrad and Crete. His research is good, as is his writing.
One of my problems is I started out as a WWII geek. So then I began studying WWI to figure out WWII. Then to the Franco-Prussian War and the other wars of German unification, but to understand that, I had to understand the Napoleonics and the French Revolution. One reason I am reading The Three Orders is to understand the tripartite division of French society which existed up to the French Revolution. Which means that I am reading far less 20c history and far more early modern and medieval history in order to understand all the different threads which created the unmitigated disaster of the last century.
Phew.
Glad to hear you’re having fun baking, Ol’Greg. I just made the best white bread I’ve ever done yesterday, I think. The sourdough didn’t come out as pretty, though, but I haven’t tasted it yet. I let it ferment for three days this time in the hope of getting some proper taste.
@Kevin,
That ‘character quiz’ sounds like a good process. I mean, Martin does seem to pull it off*, and the multitude of minor characters certainly add to the feeling of epic history that permeates the series.
*He’s very successful. Most of my friends have read the novels, and a few of them play the Magic-esque card game based on the series (One of them actually bought a replica of Longclaw. He’s also my downstairs roommate, and it’s reassuring to know a home invasion would likely end in a hilariously slapstick accidental maiming should he be home at the time.) I’ve seen them squeal like preteens at a Jonas Brothers show over casting decisions for the HBO series.
I used to keep a sponge around, but that turned out to be too much bother. These days I just throw in a little high-quality apple cider vinegar, and call it good. Oh, that and a 1/4 c of cheap beer, to help with the yeasty flavor.
That is so relieving to hear. I thought it was just me.
Brownian: The Dune books are also on my regular reread list. Along with H. Potter, the Ender books, the Gateway books, and the Uplift books.
As for environmental/geographical determinism, I find that there is something to be said in its favour. After all, a good arguement has been made that one of the limiting factors withing the Americas was the north/south orientation as opposed to the east/west of Eurasia (and (to a lesser extent) Africa). The Mayans and Aztecs were limited to the north by the Sonoran desert and to the south by the thick jungles of the isthmus. The Inca were limited by the Amozonian rain forest, the deserts along the Pacific Ocean, and the rain forests to the north. Not to say that there weren’t multiple very impressive civilizations extant throughout Central and South America, but the geography tended to limit cultural interchange, as well as multiple cultures within the same timeframe in a trading area. (very rough and going by what I remember, not being a specialist in the field).
In short, geographical determinism can be overdone, but it is a part of how we got where we are.
Heck, I’m pretty sure that if I could secrete honey out of my ass, I’d probably have a lot more people kissing it than I have now…
@Brownian:
Minor characters are good (to the point where I’m bringing several back to the second book of the series as main characters) but it’s a bit easy to make up these minor characters you see one time and they have no real purpose to the story. Nameless characters aside, there are definitely those who I’m guilty of elevating for no specific purpose other than to have them.
#808 previous incarnation AnthonyK
Depending how much ash there is you could get total failure of all engines within a few minutes. Or increased wear on the engines. The former has happened when (IIRC) a 747 flew through a cloud of ash off the Philipines (may have been Mount Pinatubo – Luzon, Philippines – 1991). It was then that people realised how bad conditions can be and bans on flying through dust clouds were instituted.
Currently, there is a major atmospheric inversion over the UK which is keeping the dust above about 20,000 feet (in old money). The difference from Pinatubo is that the current volcano is producing prodigious amounts of condensed steam but not much ash. The original fissure stopped erupting thereby causeing a build-up in pressure and an old volcano (totally under a glacier) relieved the pressure. Pinatubo was (still is) a stratovolcano and producing acidic and highly viscous lava. About a cubic mile of rock and dust was emitted. The Iceland volcanoes, being basaltic, are much less violent although the fire fountains can be impressive. The melted ice has already washed away bridges and roads.
The greatest concern is that another volcano (connected to the same plumbing system) has erupted relatively soon after the first volcano and with greater force.
The wind in the UK is from the NW which is why we are affected.
Sooner or later one of several things could happen:
1) The wind changes direction and the dust no longer comes to the UK.
2) People realise that if the dust is above 20,000 feet then aircraft can probably take off and land with safety.
3) The second, bigger, volcano will erupt with unknown implications.
A good site to keep up to date is:
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/
(There are many others …)
Ash is very abrassive and can severely damage turbine fans. Back in the 1950s(?), there were some experiments regarding coal fired turbine-eletric locomotives and the two problems they could never get around were (1) the inefficiency of turbines when idling and (2) fly ash erosion of the turbine blades (which led to some rather spectacular failures). Not sure if this is the same problem modern turbofans have on jet aircraft but, having has some eyeglasses destroyed by ash (wood ash, at that) at forest fires, I know just how destructive it can be.
This happened with an airliner in Alaska. Mt. Redoubt blew (again) and the engines stalled when the craft flew through the plume. This would’ve been early ’90s or so, assuming my memory is vaguely correct.
Then I went over to Eruptions and discovered it is not the fly ash, but rather silica which can melt inside the engine. The part about the trains is still right, it just doesn’t transfer over. Sorry.
Wowbagger:
Hmm. I find you quite interesting, I’d be happy to listen to you. Being forced to listen to inane chatter? Ugh. I’m with you there, I want no part of that. Usually, when I am in my quiet corner at gatherings, if there’s nothing of particular interest to listen to or watch, I just zone out.
Walton:
Have you watched Firefly? You might like it. It was unfortunately short-lived Sci-Fi show by Joss Whedon. It’s on DVD, along with the Big Damn Movie, Serenity. Oh, and I love Mitchell and Webb. There are new eps of their show on BBCAmerica now. It’s about time.
Feynmaniac:
I know. That did make me feel better, but I was surprised by the amount of people who were upset by it.
Kel:
Oh yes, that one gets to me too. Parasites Lost gets me also, but not quite as much.
Here’s a link to the stalled airliner in Alaska. It was 1989, so I was almost correct for the timeframe.
Through the miracle of a competent pilot, the aircraft did not crash.
@nigelTheBold:
This flight too.
I tear up when I hear Moving to Florida but the butthole surfers
nigel@#51
stay well away from the recent re-make. there isn’t a lot of eddie izzard and it really wasn’t good.
@iambilly:
I agree with you about the effects of environment and geography, but I may have been trying to take it too far. I think I was looking for cyclicities in the incidence of certain cancers and correlating them with ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) fluctuations. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any relationship, and didn’t have much in the way of an etiological reason to find one, anyway.
*Sigh* No master’s for me!
Adding to Alan B’s comment, there was also an incident over Alaska in ’89 in which all four engines of 747 flamed out after flying through an ash cloud from the Redoubt volcano. Volcanic ash is chock-full of glass particles—something your body needs anyway, but it can wreak havoc on a jet engine.
Damn! I held out hope.
Thanks for the warning. I shall avoid it like the Pope avoids responsibility.
I see I was late in posting about KLM 867.
Fucking job, all distracting me from the important stuff, ‘n’ shit.
The 747 that lost all four engine due to ingestion of volcanic dust was a BA flight that over Indonesia at the time.
Wikipedia has details here
It would be possible to limit aircraft to under 20,000 feet but this would mean that some long distant flights might need to add a re-fuelling stop as fuel consumption is much higher at lower altitudes. There is also the danger that that the inversion layer that is currently keeping the ash above 20,000 feet dissipates and is not noticed immediately.
Brownian: I would bet dollars to donuts that there is a strong correlation between the ENSO and diseases associated with either malnutrition or sudden changes of diet, especially among the Moche.
*shrug*
why?
Bad Tiger
Captain Whatshisname
Sven: No ridiculous Garcia-like guitar noodling for starters.
What version was that on ? Surely not Marley’s ?
Last thread:
As may be; Avogadro was getting the blame for it, back when I did high school physics.
Also from last thread; Walton, if you’re looking for meatspace friends, it sounds to me like you need to seek out a RPG group, or maybe a sci-fi club of some sort. Pratchett, Python, Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5…add an interest in comics, and you’re practically overqualified! :D Granted, you’d have to sacrifice an evening of study time (and dipping into the Endless Thread), but decompression time is good. Have some.
The only thing that reliably gets me misty-eyed (for now) is the mass graves of WWI. So by association Flanders Field gives me a lump in the throat as well.
I’m not entirely sure what it is, that does it. But Man’s Inhumanity to Man is unfortunately more than reason enough.
@Sili, TUV:
I need to take a walk down the Mall one of these days – stop by WW2, WW1, and Vietnam – can’t do much about them, except honor those brave soldiers.
Oh, there is a lot of literature linking ENSO to various health outcomes, particularly with respect to infectious diseases like malaria and influenza. The linkage I was looking for was something along the lines of the changes in temperature and pressure and their effects on respiratory ailments as a result of cancer, akin to the effects seen in heat waves.
I didn’t get far in reviewing the literature, though. I think I dropped out long before I dropped out (having a supervisor who had also sort of dropped out didn’t help.)
Sili: There was at least one other time I had a very difficult time keeping th etears out of my eyes. When I was in high school, I lived in Sharpsburg. I also played trumpet.
After marching in the Memorial Day parade (in wool uniforms, up Cemetary Hill, while playing), the band members went their separate ways. I stayed behind at the cemetary to blow taps during the ceremony. Kind of an odd experience to stand amid that many graves, that many people who died in one day, and play taps. Filled my sixteen year old eyes with tears.
Brownian: I figured it had been studied. Never ran across the connection between heat and cancer.
Zinger.
But seriously.
No, I appreciate acoustic folk music for the straight-to-the-amygdala emotional power of a sincere performance.
Those guys, that song, that performance? It doesn’t work for me.
YMM, as always, V widely.
Anyone else around here remember the Digby Allen Space Explorer series? It was my first real introduction to sci-fi. The books were pretty much along the lines of Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, but IN SPACE! Too cool when I was 8 or so. Joseph Greene was the author. He only wrote 6 volumes, for 1959 to 1962.
http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/indexa.html
I used to own them all, but moving and loaning ruined that. I have managed to find only 4 of them online.
I have recurring nightmares these days.
Nightmares are shit.
The very first sci-fi book I ever read was a Digby Allen book, The Forgotten Star, I think it was. I was unaware that it was part of a series, though. I’d always done badly at reading in school, and didn’t read at all out of school, because the age-and-gender-appropriate material I was being given was all so boring. From there, it was straight into Heinlein’s juveniles, and Norton’s fantasies, with never a glance at the rear-view mirror. :)
From 1959 to 1962, not for, but you knew that…
Yeeup. Pretty much guaranteed to pick up plenty of men around these parts.
Katharine:
You have my sincerest sympathy. If your health care makes it possible (or your finances do), talk to a therapist/psychiatrist/whoever professional. I have found them very useful.
I am listening to the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And tonight, I will finish watching The Wrath of Khan on Netflix and the “Best of Both Worlds” TNG 2 parter (even though I find the conclusion vastly inferior to the cliffhanger).
*pops in
From the random quote box:
This reminds me of all those NOTW (Not Of This World) graphics on the back of people’s car. Everytime I see one of this I want to say “Then why is He still bothering it?”.
/random rant
Sigh. All my Pharyngula time is being eaten up by taxes and work. Life is so very difficult.
Haven’t had time to catch up yet today, so apologies if this has already been posted: Christ with a cock
The image of Jesus on the cross, cock intact, is disturbing some and others are saying, meh, it’s historical or maybe hysterical. There’s a poll too. The linked story is presented in a video, with the poll below it. Are you offended by Christ’s sacred cock?
Lynna: I like the poll asking whether I find it offensive of not. I do, but not for the reason they might think.
Then again, it is Oklahoma, so I’m not sure if ‘think’ is an apropriate word.
strange gods @#91: The trouble is that, on this side of the pond, every part of Rev. BDC’s plan is either illegal (handguns), ridiculously expensive due to various taxes (pick-up trucks, chewing tobacco), or considered unacceptable in polite society (plastic testicles). :-)
Volcanic dust is very bad for airliners. It doesn’t gnaw off the wings, but it can sandblast the pilots windows opaque, and stop the engines. Which is bad.
A plane can land blind if the engines are producing thrust and electrical power for the instruments, and a powerless plane can glide in to land if the pilots can see out the windows. But neither case is easy. Both together is awful.
Volcanic dust is abrasive, and can wear away the inside of a turbine engine, which is a maze of sharp blades whirling very fast in high heat. The heat can melt the volcanic dust, which then sticks to the blades, reducing airflow and throwing rotating parts off balance.
Turbine engines, commonly called jet engines, are a marvel of design, engineering and airflow, high speed and heat, tight tolernces and approaching limits. For instance, a ceramic blade as big as a thumbnail has cooling ducts inside it and air vents on the outside, and operates in gases hot enough to melt it while centrifugal force stretches it.
Volcanic dust pushes everything over the limits, and the engine quits, or maybe comes apart, which is very bad.
Lynna – #95
Heh… pulled this from the comments under the article you linked:
“I’m curious if the instructions given to the artist included “make sure he looks hung”.
I understand (from a TV show about airplane disasters) that volcanic dust does not show up on radar and thus areas where it might be must be given a wide berth.
Except it’s not even a cock! It’s a faithful copy of some poorly rendered abs from a famous and extra-super-holy crucifix in Italy that once spoke to St. Francis or some shit.
Here’s another poll that may have already been posted: ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced a musical called “The Book of Mormon” will be coming to Broadway in March 2011. Do you find this offensive?
The poll is on the Fox13 News site (based in Salt Lake City), which will start up an annoying video of some kind or other when you navigate there, but ignore the video and scroll down to the poll in the right column.
http://www.fox13now.com/
In other news, Larry King is divorcing his mormon wife. This is Larry’s 8th divorce, though he’s only had seven wives. He is accused of boinking the mormon wife’s mormon sister. The sister denies this, saying that she received gifts from Larry, who is very “generous.”
As for ants and aphids, I think that ants protect their own little herd and actually move them to fresh branches. In the presence of abundant food supplies, which means more or less all summer, aphids switch to parthenogenesis and are born pregnant.* When the plants start to dry up in fall, flying males are born and there’s a sexual generation to mix up the genes or next year.
*I wonder if whichever Star Trek writer thought of it for tribbles knew about aphids?
Sven is right. It’s just historically correct iconography and not really a cock-on-a-Christ, but it looks like bull cock. Perhaps we should just be offended by the anatomical inaccuracy.
As it happens, the Star Trek writer who came up with tribbles wrote a book about it (which i owned as a kid; it included the entire script). I don’t remember the aphid thing, but we’re talking about decades here.
I’m sure I could buy a nice handgun within 72 hours of landing in London. (TruckNutz, I suspect, are harder to come by.)
That should go nicely with the testicles on the supersized pickup truck, neh?
Posted in the wrong thread, dammit:
Hoo boy. I don’t wanna unduly influence the argument, but $5 says this guy is gonna pull his laconic faux-Socratic dialectic for at least six more comments until everyone gets so frustrated with him they unleash in a torrent of profanity and he runs off crowing victory after denouncing the tone. His ego is great but his skin is paper thin.
Who’s in charge of ordering trolls around here? Can we at least try to get one once in awhile who’s not an amalgam of every little-dick-syndromed-second-year-political-philosophy-major-with-a-masturbatory-fetish-for-rhetorical-gotchas ever?
or considered unacceptable in polite society (plastic testicles). :-)
You don’t have WalMart parking lots in the UK? Why, in such refined environs vehicular accoutrements like these practically scream wealth and taste.
My roommate recently bought a truck (for completely inscrutable reasons, as she won’t even put groceries in the back), but since she’s testicularily deficient I’ve been considering designing a variant for females and I’m having trouble coming up with a name. (Er, scratch that; reverse it: I’m having no trouble coming up with tasteless and offensive names for the product, but…)
Lynna:
Oooh, I hadn’t heard this. Se can only hope it’ll be offensive, eh?
Given that Larry King is roughly 187 years old, has looked like an extra from a mummy movie for the last several decades, and yet keeps finding women to marry him and women willing to cheat with him, I’d say his “gifts” must be very “generous” indeed!
The problem is with the shading, making the central muscles appear much more rounded than you normally see for a “cut” set of abs. It could easily be toned down to make them look “flatter” and mostly eliminate the cock effect.
Damn! Blockquote FAIL @109! My first sentence, before the blockquote, should’ve been preceeded by…
I must’ve left off the closing bracket of the first tag, turning the whole quote into an unparseable tag, and thus hiding it from view.
Or something.
<sigh>
Jadehawk re breast reduction: if you decide to go for it, ask about your surgical options. Those that preserve the nipple’s connection rather than chopping it off and re-attaching it, are more likely to preserve sensation. You should ask bout breast-feeding afterwards, if you care. There are some surgeons who work from under the armpit, so there’s no visible scar and less pain & disruption.
If you’re in Ontario and your doctor agrees that breast reduction may help your back pain, it will be 100% covered by your health insurance.
Herr Myers, might I suggest an apropos photo for the next incarnation of the endless thread that never ends it just goes on and on my friend some people started commenting and they’ll continue commenting because this is the thread that never . . . sorry.
Either come up with a video of “The Song That Never Ends” with Sherry Lewis and Lambchop or a photo of a truck’s balls. Either one would be pleasantly annoying.
Brownian: The Troll Fulfillment Office is wedged between the Ministry for Silly Walks and the place what has the arguments.
re 72:
What? Exactly what part of the body needs silicon dioxide? And the silicon dioxide dust from volcanoes is murder on the lungs; commonly known as silicanosis or “black lung disease”.
Truck balls? I saw a set at the high school yesterday. Yay for small-town Missouri.
There’s a joke about a conversation machine that asks the person’s IQ and then suggests various topics for conversation. The last fellow says his IQ is 75, and the machine says, “So how’s your truck running?”
Walton, speaking of IQ, you might try for a local Mensa group. The entrance tests are fun, and the people are various levels of socially dysfunctional. You might even get invited to a party before qualifying.
The crucufix is just bad art. Really, didn’t the artist think?
If you find representations of Jesus amusing, you might enjoy Jesus of the Week. The pictures are a bit small, but they are strange.
italic, bold, link,
@SteveM (114)
Actually, the correct term for the disease would be pneumonomicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
HAH! When do you get a chance to use that word in daily conversations?
fai
I used to live in small-town Missouri as well. While I don’t want to go back to living in a small town, there are things about Missouri I miss (like having my vote count for something).
I was just helping the numbers cause…
s, r, link,
Completely forgot to ask…
Is that what turned you off wearing underpants? ;-)
LOL!
<wistful sigh>
Please allow me a bit of snark… I consider avoiding such situations altogether better still. “First win, then go to battle” (Sunzi).
That I want to see. Over here (Austria) they’re so difficult to get that, as I repeat on every single gun-control thread, most bank robberies are committed with toys or other fakes.
Well… the self-admitted Mensa members who show up here on Pharyngula are without exception too stupid to bear for longer periods. Accordingly, at least one of them, the legendary Charlie Wagner, has been banned… I think more have been.
I was just fuckin’ with you ’cause you borked your link.
Twice.
@David Marjanovic:
Adding the clause “because you have to” to the end of that statement will more clearly reflect the point of the story.
I refuse to add a comment which will help boost your numbers.
Sorry; I was just channelling a bit from comedian Brent Butt in which he talks about alternative ways cigarette manufacturers could describe the amount of ‘tar’ in their cigarettes (“DuMaurier Regular: an excellent source of tar!”) to which a potential customer might respond with “Something my body needs anyway…I like that” from the 80s and 90s commercials for antacids with calcium.
I thought this was the local Mensa group.
No, just no – but then I’m pretty sure he’ll agree with me. If there were a local masturbation group would you join?
And thanks for the answers to the jet plane question. No visitors for a while?
UKIP will be pleased.
no; and in fact, their “boyshorts” are the only underwear I’d ever consider wearing again. Only sensibly cut women’s underwear I’ve ever seen.
Which doesn’t mean it isn’t illegal!
Actually, I’m no gun fancier, but I have recent experience that validates the original suggestion that Chicks Dig Guns©¹: During my family’s Christmas-break trip to visit family in Florida, my brothers-in-law, both of whom are sport shooters, took me, my wife, and our daughter to an outdoor pistol range, where we had the opportunity to shoot guns ranging from a .22 cal target pistol to a snub-nosed .44 Magnum revolver (that last one will get your attention!). I always thought of guns as a guy thing, but I noticed a surprising number of young women (i.e., realistically age-appropriate for our Extra Special Dumpling of Awesome), most of them apparently having a really good time. Many were there with fathers, brothers, husbands, or boyfriends, of course, but there a couple groups of 2 to 4 unaccompanied young women (getting, as you might expect, more than their share of solicitous assistance from the young men staffing the range).
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say a pistol range is a target-rich environment for young single men, but it’s something.
¹ Please note that my use of the term chicks here is not just pointless sexism; I’m riffing on an old Nike/Major League Baseball ad campaign whose tagline was “Chicks dig the long ball!”
also, a big, fat, PFFFFFFTTTT!!!!!!! To all you sci-fi haters.
David M:
And then there are those of us who joined in our lamented youth, only to flee at the first opportunity once we realized what we’d gotten into!
Although, I must admit that reading the pathetic¹ personals ads in the local chapter’s newsletter was entertaining.
AnthonyK:
That would depend entirely on the membership demographics, and frequency and format of the meetings.
Oh, did I say that out loud?
¹ And this judgment, mind you, is relative to my own romantic life at the time, which was a pretty pathetic baseline from which to measure patheticness!
Let’s not forget Vox Day’s Mensa credentials.
Damn. This is the Mensa meeting? Sorry. Wrong door. I’ll leave.
First time posting on a never ending thread… Can’t really feel a difference…
Re the ash and lack of planes. I’m in Copenhagen, and I’m absolutely fascinated by the fact the skies are totally empty tonight. Not ONE plane above us. When did that last happen? 80 years ago? 90?
And the tearing up thing got to me tonight. I’m usually quite dry-eyed watching films, reading, listening to music, but watched Lord of the Rings The Two Towers with my son for the first time (his first time, my … not first time) and the scene where Eowyn sings a funeral song at Theodreds funeral and the king cries… sniff. Silly me, but children dying in films make me go sniff more often these days.
Back to the regular scheduled programme… oh wait no, it’s an endless thread!
Joining a Mensa group would exacerbate every personality trait that we are currently trying to beat out of Walton. Or anybody else, for that matter.
@TrineBM:
Grats on losing your Endless Thread virginity! Now you’ll spend ungodly hours posting about silly / unimportant topics when you should be working, thereby watching your productivity tank.
Yay!
We can’t. He won’t let us.
That I can agree with.
What do you think of speculative biology? No boring humans in it… :-)
:-D
If it’s a group, is it still masturbation…?
(Erm, yeah. I must ruin my own joke. Thanks to The Thread, I have at least enough of an idea of what a circle jerk is, thankyouverymuch.)
Indeed not. He‘s not banned here only because he almost never appears.
Well, fuck! While I was writing my comment @130, I thought of something else I wanted to post, but decided to put it in a separate comment because it wasn’t related to anything else I was saying @130.
And now all I can remember about what I wanted to post is that it wasn’t related to anything else I was saying @130! Grrrrr!
I’m a bit sleep-deprived today, having spent a good portion of last night cleaning spilled dulce de leche ice cream mix out of the chest freezer where I was trying to chill it prior to putting in the ice cream machine. I only managed to not spill enough to make a single pint of finished ice cream, and cleaning up the other 3 pints worth was a royal PITA (and one that won’t really be finished ’til I’ve emptied, defrosted, and thoroughly scrubbed the freezer; so much for my Saturday!).
8 years 7 months and a coupla days ago.
@JadeHawk:
Boyshorts are very attractive and kinda cute on women. I approve!
on the tears thing, I tear up very easily. I hate “tear jerker” movies because I *know* my emotions are being manipulated, but I get teary anyway. (I got all teary at UP, for example)
on SF: if you like fantasy, read Lois Bujold’s Curse of Challion. Not a dwarf, elf, wizard or dragon in sight, but a wonderfully rich universe (and I’m more than a little in love with Cazaril… something about “the breathtaking beauty of pain” as Lois says about another character in another series.). If you want to see world building done right, read Bujold.
For SF, read the Vorkosigan books, also by Bujold. Great fun.
For a smaller, more intimate universe and fantasy, read her Sharing Knife books, if you can get past the inherent vitalism that plays an important role in the universe and magic system.
Yeah, but – although I have been shooting before, and enjoyed it – I am not very co-ordinated, have not done any shooting for a while and have never fired a pistol, and so would not be particularly good at it on my initial attempt. So there would be no chance of impressing any of the young women (or indeed the young men). :-)
This is coming perilously close to the complaining-and-self-pitying-I-said-I-wasn’t-going-to-do-on-this-thread, so I’ll stop now. Back to work.
@ Kevin 135
Thanks! I’m not at work now, so no productivity-sinking at this moment. But tomorrow! Wooohooo.
Going to watch a Jim Jarmusch movie now so – no more endless threads for me right now.
Exactly
:-S
For fuck’s sake!
It’s not the goal, it’s the journey, stupid!
If you take a woman to a shooting range to show off your marksmanship, UR DOIN IT RONG!
Go there to have fun, if it’s something you enjoy doing. Laugh at yourself for how bad you are. Have a good time.
And as I’m sure people with more experience will be able to point out. You might get a chance to help her aim – if she wants you to – which may equate to “hey you, I’d like you to squeeze against me”.
And get off your lazy arse and book you ticket for Copenhagen. Only a few hours left of the early bird fee.
sounds interesting…. though, to be honest, I’d probably just use it to populate my own sci-fi writing with critters. :-p
I don’t find humans (or “humanoids” for sci-fi context) boring; their interactions are quite fascinating, as long as they’re not trying to interact with me.
Society is a spectator sport, as far as I’m concerned.
Becca @#141: I read one of the books in Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga. It was one of the best modern sci-fi novels I’ve read. I’m not familiar with any of her other work – I don’t get much time for recreational reading these days, sadly – but I do think she’s an awesome writer
Walton:
It’s not about impressing them; it’s about being where they are, doing stuff they like to do. If she (or he!) is a better shot (or is better at whatever) than you, let her (him) teach you. The activity is just a predicate for social interaction.
Hmmm…. Damn…. Why the devil didn’t I understand this when I was your age, and single?
Becca @ 141:
I will now dazzle you with my ignorance. What’s UP?
which is why once upon a time, I wanted to become an archaeologist; dead people don’t do small-talk either.
Caine, you haven’t seen Up yet? You are so lucky to have it still ahead of you.
I actually expected it to be cosmically stupid — an old man flies his house to South America using balloons? SRSLY? — but it turned out to be my favorite movie of the year. Effin’ brilliant!
Addendum to #148: The Warrior’s Apprentice. (remembered the title)
A year ago I lived at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, and I still get their newsletter. This week’s tells me that Saturday is the Khmer new year and that it will be celebrated exhaustively at the Cambodia house. Too bad I’m no longer around :-(
Sili (@146):
Great minds think alike, eh? ;^)
-Bill Dauphin@41:
Back in the early 70s, I worked in a bookstore. When people who had just read Stranger in a Strange Land came in grokking and wanted another Heinlein book, I suggested Farnham’s Freehold or Starship Troopers. But then, I’m evil.
I was also very pleasantly surprised at Up,and had a little something in my eye near the end of the movie. And, um, at the beginning, even though half of my brain was analyzing the blatant manipulation contained in the script to make me have exactly that reaction.
Bill Dauphin
I too was surprised at how much I liked this movie… and remember how stupid I felt that I was surprised… I’ve never seen a Pixar movie I didn’t walk away from being amazed at how much I liked it.
I wrote a review of it that expands on that theme a bit back when it came out here.
Some spoilers in it, if you do read it, but I warn you before hand.
DominEditrix (@156):
Heh! At least Troopers is good (the book I mean, not the movie, which I haven’t seen but have heard is execrable); recommending Farnham’s Freehold would be evil regardless of what else anyone had read!
I’m an unapologetic Heinlein fan, but I’ve always thought FF was a misfire. That and I Will Fear No Evil are the Heinlein books I’m least likely to re-read.
I actually expected it to be cosmically stupid — an old man flies his house to South America using balloons? SRSLY? — but it turned out to be my favorite movie of the year. Effin’ brilliant!
I cried at that movie, especially when I saw that he had a wife that wasn’t in the trailer!
“Oh boy, either she’s going to leave him or…NOOOOOOO!”
So I better don’t show you the one I’ve participated in? (Unfortunately I haven’t had time to do anything for… years. Consequently, the website hasn’t been updated since then. But it’s still up, and the mailing list for working on it is still running.) Assuming you haven’t found it long ago, I mean – but it sounds like you haven’t…
I only tried to say that, in most (by no means all, but most) sci-fi, the “sci” part is only part of the background for a drama of human psychology that could have worked with other backgrounds just as well (if not better), the extreme case being the Recycled IN SPACE! trope. Sometimes it feels good to break out of that and let the background speak for itself!
Good you didn’t become one, then – archeologists have lots of feuds with each other, closely following the rule that “the closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets”.
Walton: which one did you read?
If you really want an excuse to not study and fail your finals, join the Bujold email list. We’re currently discussing each of the Vorkosigan books in turn (We’re on Barrayar right now) – 30 – 60 highly intelligent posts on thought-provoking topics a day, easily. No, I won’t tell you how to join until after your finals are over. But it’s even dragging me away from following all the topics here… I’m glad I don’t have anything more productive to do with my days for awhile yet.
except that tonight I’m going with a friend to see a showing of Creator of God: A Brain Surgeon’s Story on the neuroscience of religion. I’m going with one of the most woo-soaked of my friends, so it should be an interesting discussion afterward.
Becca: The Warrior’s Apprentice.
Ah Up. And Wall-E. And The Incredibles. And Toy Story 1 and 2 – AND SOON TO BE TOY STORY 3 – I….I….
Sorry, had a Mensa moment there.
Yum Yum
Bill Dauphin, OM #138,
I have an ice cream maker story. My roomate has an old hand crank unit that always travels with him in his camp trailer. On one outing we packed up camp in a rush, and rather than doing all the washing up, we just filled the unit with water and put the lid back on to let it soak until we got home.
Long story short: nobody got around to cleaning out the ice cream maker. Me: oblivious of that detail. Three weeks later I put it in the backseat of my truck to bring it to a dinner party. The first corner I took, it tipped over and spilled half a gallon of rancid ice cream water down the crack of the seat.
Foul doesn’t even begin to describe the stench.
For weeks.
Constance Macmillan may not have gotten to go to her high school’s “private” substitute prom, but she’s coming to the Big Apple: she will be one of the grand marshalls at this year’s Gay Pride Parade in New York City. (The press release didn’t say how many grand marshalls there are, so I don’t know how big a deal this, but it’s definitely cool.)
–Vicki
re 117:
I knew that but didn’t want to sound too geeky :-)
It may have been surpassed by now, but back in the 70’s the longest word in the english language (that wasn’t a technical chemical name) was pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I was going to use that but thought it would be just “showing off”.
re Brownian @125:
I kinda assumed you were joking, but couldn’t quite tell.
@Walton #163 – I hope you’re planning something relaxing to do after your finals. A Bujold reading spree would be a wonderful thing… I envy you reading them for the first time.
Cordelia’s Hono(u)r is actually 2 books: Shards of Honor (Bujold’s first book) and Barrayar, which she wrote much later, and it shows a wonderful increase in craftsmanship. It explains how Miles came to be who and what he is, and is the prequel to Warrior’s Apprentice.
From what I’ve heard about the book here on the Thread, the movie is actually better, because the book has way too many Unfortunate Implications and, apparently, actually means them. :-S
<drool>
Do tell us afterward how it went!
Um, the Union Pacific Railroad? Big Yellow? Absorbed the MP, the D&RGW, the SP&S? Western Railroad? Had Big Boys?
Yeah. I’m back. The other door I opened had a bacon orgy going on, so I came back here.
Boygenius: I can top your horrible smell story.
In high school, I had a VW Microbus. One weekend, about ten of us (in two vehicles) went to WV to do some kayaking. As we climbed an endless hill (in 3rd gear, at 30mph), one of the gentlemen told me he needed to pee. I told him to hold it as no way do I want to stop on this 5% uphill climb. So he opened the sliding door and peed down the side of the car. Into the air intakes for the air cooled engine (I had extra air intakes low on the side of the van). Since it was chilly, the heat (so-called heat) was on. The entire van filled with the stench of vaporized piss. And, soon, vomit.
We opened the door, opened the roof, opened the windows, and kept right on going. When we stopped at the top of the mountain, the two people in the follow car asked if we had drivin through a godawful stench on the way up the mountain? I kept the heat on for the next week (with all windows, sunroof, door, everything open) and the smell faded. Except for hot summer days when the van was closed up tight.
boygenius (@165):
Well, the saving grace of having spilled it in the freezer is that the mess is frozen, and shouldn’t get nasty before I get around to cleaning it. The real bummer is that this particular recipe is really tasty, and I only got a single pint for all my
effortscursing.I’ll post the recipe if I remember when I get home… but it’s straight out of a cookbook.
And speaking of food and cooking… I recall that this august group had a prospective conversation about Top Chef Masters a while back. Any thoughts from anyone, now that the new season has begun?
Come on. That’s pneumonoultramicroscopic silicovolcanoconiosis, two words, an adjective in front of a noun. You can’t simply take the space out and pretend you’ve fused the words.
Oh, and, “pneumonoultramicroscopic” is nonsensical… ultramicroscopic pneumonosilicovolcanoconiosis at least sounds like it could mean something, though don’t ask me what a volcanoconiosis or indeed any coniosis might be.
Two series on my frequently-reread list are Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. and pTerry’s Discworld. Plus LotR, and a handful of others, such as Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy.
Hum… two “Garrett”s there… not quite sure what that means…
Bill:
Mm hmm. Allowing someone to teach you, up close and personal is a good way to…get to know them.
blockquote fail.
no it isn’t. reading it is like watching someone masturbate to a U.S. Army recruiting ad.
re 152:
Funny, that’s pretty much how I felt about all the Pixar movies until they’re released and then they all turn out absolutely brilliant.
David M. and Jadehawk:
I meant “good” in terms of writerly craft; didn’t mean to be endorsing the ideas, necessarily. Though it’s worth noting that the very point I was talking about — the cognitive dissonance between Troopers and Stranger (not to mention many other examples) — suggests that Heinlein wasn’t necessarily endorsing the ideas, either. My theory is that his books (at least from that period of his career) are more like thought experiments than polemical advocacy.
OTOH, Farnham’s Freehold and I Will Fear No Evil are both just painfully poorly crafted (Heinlein was seriously ill while he was writing the latter, and it shows).
Bill:
Yes, especially as I was the one who asked about season 1, having missed it. I quite enjoyed it. I don’t miss all the manufactured drama at all. It is rather fun, seeing their reactions to quickfires. They don’t like them any better than the regular cheftestants.
Ugh, iambilly. I once peed on sauna rocks in the recreation centre of a local technical college when I was old enough to have a pretty good idea of what would happen but young enough to still try it anyway. I managed to clear 300 people out of the centre AND escape blame. The place aired out fairly quickly, but for at least a few minutes I experienced what you must have had to deal with.
Bill, I don’t remember finding it very well written either, but maybe the testosterone poisoning was too distracting to really notice.
That’s a bit unfair, but I can see where you’re coming from. I loved Starship Troopers the first time I read it. Along with Tom Clancy novels, it was part of what caused my right-wing-authoritarian-hawkish phase (from which I was in the process of emerging when I first came to Pharyngula).
Unfortunately, I think it also had a slightly damaging effect on my psyche. During that phase of my life, I was painfully insecure. I felt like I wasn’t a “real man” because I wasn’t physically strong or tough enough and didn’t have much in the way of aggressive instincts, and that I needed to make up for it. Hence why I had really crazy aggressive right-wing views for a while. It was a bit like a variant of the “toxic masculinity” syndrome you talked about on your blog.
I’ve got over that phase of my life now, though, and accepted that I can be who I am, rather than trying to fit into some sort of heteronormativist mould about how “real men” are supposed to behave. Pharyngula actually really helped me on that journey.
re 173:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Nope, haven’t seen Up. I suppose I’ll get around to it eventually.
@178 Heinlein himself always said that you couldn’t deduce his politics or personal opinions from anything her wrote. He’d take a “what if” idea and would run with it to a logical conclusion.
I second the vote for Double Star – it deserves to be much more widely read than it is. Has some interesting connotations for the idea of “identity” – rather along the lines of what Pratchett does in Going Postal.
My re-read list:
Gateway, by Fred Pohl
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Heinlein
LOTR, by you-know-who (mostly because my daughter loves them)
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
The Drawing of the Dark, by Timothy Powers (hey, it’s about beer, fer cryin’ out loud)
Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Nordan
The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
All of David Brin’s Uplift books
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
There’re more. I don’t know why I like to re-read those books, but I really do. Isn’t that weird? It seems that once you’ve read a book, you should be done with it. That’s not the case, though, at least for me.
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Again.
Cough cough.
Apparently, the story behind this is that Chambers dictionary (I think) put this word in – an expansion of siliconiosis or some such word for the miner’s lung disease – simply as a way of having the longest dictionary word in English.
The real longest word, in the OED, is of course pauccinihilopilification, which is a pretty crap word IMO.
I actually enjoy “Starship Troopers” (the book) as a study of fascism taken to an extreme. Additionally, the question of why people fight, and die, for a country or a cause is dealt with in a thought provoking way. I do not agree with the politics or the militarism, but I do remember, when I joined the Army, thinking hard about why I would be willing to (potentially) lay my life on the line to defend our Constitution. My reasons (and my justifications) were far different, but I have to admit that reading ST before actually joining the military helped me to at least shape the questions I needed to ask myself.
Now, it is on my ‘worth reading but I don’t need to do it again’ list.
Heinlein really had a hard on for extreme economic libertarianism coupled with social authoritarianism. Not sure if that is what his actual philosophy was, but it sure come across in his writing.
nigelTheBold:
I’m the same. There are books (a lot of them, actually) I enjoy re-reading. American Gods is one of mine too. Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon are on my ‘to be re-read at odd intervals’ list as well.
(((Billy))),
You do have a better story, but I have to contest the assertion that you had a more horrible smell.
I would have hung a vaporized-piss-and-vomit scented pine tree air-freshener from my rear-view mirror just to mask the smell of the ice-cream water.
You had a car smelling of vaporised piss and vomit? You were lucky…
#106 strange gods before me
#108 Bill Dauphin, OM
Carrying a gun illegal in England? Carrying a butter knife is illegal!
The term “Offensive weapon” covers a huge range of items of which a handgun is only the most obvious. English Law states:
So. You get your gun in 72 hours and start to show off with it. You are arrested – assuming that the police did not jump to the wrong conclusions and shoot you as you wave your offensive weapon about. (The police do not regularly carry guns but they can call on specially trained officers who do. Many police officers carry guns in big cities in England.)You end up in Court and your “lawful authority or reasonable excuse”, strange gods before me, would be, what? To attract women … ?
How many years do you reckon you might get …?
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/offensive_weapons_knives_bladed_and_pointed_articles/
I would have to smell both to make a judgement. Anyone out there have the wonderful experience of both of these smells? A judge?
MHHNBS!
To brag on YouTube and then throw it into the Thames, I reckon.
cicely@716(previous subthread):
Ok. I was wondering was it so dusty… lots of cobwebs… and things in the shadows…
Actually, you reminded me of another, ah, quirk, which I’d never connected: Recalling where the feck something is. I either get it almost dead right, or hopelessly wrong. Which might be why I use the famous “pile up the shite anywhere” (floor, desk, shelves, couch, table, older piles…) filing method, much to the consternation of others:
“Do you have such-and-so?”
“Yeah, right here.” Goes across the room, stares at a few piles on the lab bench for a second, moves the two closest ones out of the way, and reaches in about one third of the way up a dusty stack near the rear, pulls out a few papers/books/whatevers, flips throught them, and “Here you go…”.
But I’ll never remember who the feck I gave the whatever to. ;-(
iambilly, I laughed out loud. That was well written, by the way.
I say to read all of Heinlein you can get. If nothing else, he can write his way into someone else’s head, as _Stranger_ and _Troopers_ show. _Starship_Troopers_ seemed to me to be an exposition of how a normal young man finds himself a trooper and how he rationalizes it–but mostly it’s a damn fine book.
Ray Bradbury hasn’t been mentioned–now there is a word artist.
The _Discworld_ books are marvelous. Buy all you can find and give the extras to people and force them to read.
Movie-wise, I really enjoyed _How_to_Train_Your_Dragon_. It has a lot of intersting sub-themes and subtle life lessons, and a nerdish hero and an amazing dragon. And some beautiful scenery. And Vikings! See it in 3D.
A revenge story that I heard from Australia went something like this:
A woman who had been cheated on by her husband left home. She kept the keys, however, and one day when the husband was out at work, she sneaked in, took down the hollow curtain pole in the front room , and stuffed it full of…prawns. It was summer time.
She then retired to a safe distance and watched.
After a few days, officials came to call. After a few more days men with tools came in, and floorboards were taken up, then replaced.
A few weeks later a “For Sale” notice went up.
She was there to see the removal van being loaded. One of the last things to go in, just before it drove off was….that curtain pole.
Jebus. Been off-line at work since 10 due to my work computer undergoing some maintenance/minor upgrades (still needs some more work tomorrow), and find 150 posts on this thread alone. I got some catching up to do.
Off topic:
Skeptic trumps:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RQjQvxtmK8A/S74J8HG9wuI/AAAAAAAAC1c/fikEmsC3uqQ/s1600/card+011+PZ+Myers.png
Just look at those checks. And, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100415/ap_on_re_us/us_day_of_prayer
*raises hand*
Horrible smells….
This one year, my husband and I decided to buy quite a bit of meat on sale, in anticipation of the upcoming spring and summer grilling season. We had no occasion to open the chest freezer for 6 weeks, but when we did….
There was no cold in the freezer. The meat, and everything else in the freezer, had gone bad, and rotted into a liquescent mess. Our assumption was that the freezer, still under warranty, had malfunctioned, and under terms of the warranty, the manufacturer would repay us the value of the spoiled food, so we had to take the mess out…one item at a time…and look for the price tags. If only it wasn’t that the total was going to be a substantial chunk of change…
All of which turned out to be a nastily moot point; the freezer was fine and functional. Seems the socket thingy that the electrical cord plugged in to had, at some unknown point, stopped working. No power, no cold. :( :( :(
We never did get the smell out.
Menyambal:
Yes, yes. I grew up with many of Bradbury’s words and stories in my head. Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man…
I was fortunate to hear him speak when I was in College. Fascinating man.
strange gods, there’s a reply waiting for you on the Confederacy thread.
I saw, but it’s going to have to wait a few hours.
blf:
Those things in the shadows would be Things. :)
Half an hour to buy the ticket, Walton and windy.
cicely,
You win. Malfunctioning chest freezer incidents trump scorched piss and rancid ice-cream water hands down.
Addendum; I use the same, serious-industrial-accident-in-a-printshop approach to ‘filing’.
I had a mouse crawl into my car and build a nest in the heater vent. It died when the fan kicked on. Cost me $90 to clean out and the smell lasted about 2 months. It made me almost throw up every day. I bet, though, that vaporized piss and vomit would make me do more than almost throw up.
Blech… mensa.
*blink*
Star Trek
*blink blink*
An aversion to the hoi polloi
*blink blink blink*
Pedantic libertarianism.
Holy shit Walton you might love it!
——————————————–
Yes I’m being unfair, I’m sorry mensa members who might take offense. Honestly I never tried to get into mensa, although I have friends who are members. The thought depresses me. I’ve jumped through enough hoops. At this point I’m only impressing people for cash money. Any friends I’d have to pass a test to talk to aren’t worth talking to IMO.
I really, honestly can’t go to the Copenhagen conference. Sorry. It’s a combination of lack of financial resources, and the need to maintain harmony with my parents (on whom I rely a lot, both for financial and emotional support). Plus, it’s only a few days after the end of my exams and there are a couple of things for which I have to stay here.
But I am glad to have been invited. And I really hope I can go to a similar meetup in the future, when I’m in a stronger financial position and which falls at a more convenient time.
Ol’Greg: I don’t blame you. I’ve never felt remotely attracted to joining Mensa.
I suspect that many people here do not read the Daily Telegraph. Probably the Garundia is more to people’s taste.
You will be missing something. Regularly the Telegraph puts up a series of odd photos or even exquisitely beautiful ones. Try rummaging about at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/
and follow the link to “Sign language” or “Where in the world?”
One of my favourites is:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/6261443/Sign-Language-special-animals.html?image=1
‘Dead squirrel trapped in the wall’ is also simply delightful.
Sounds like adipocere, or corpse wax. Usually solid or semi-solid, it can be very liquid under certain conditions. I once saw some autopsy photos in which a body that had been exhumed for forensic analysis resembled a speedily melting human-shaped lump of ice cream on the autopsy table. Apparently the smell was legendary, even with the vents working full blast. (In Edmonton, the ME’s office sits between a university-adjacent residential neighbourhood and the university farms. Residents are regularly bathed in unpleasant smells, all of which they blame on the experimental farms.)
Ol’Greg:
You aren’t being unfair at all. Mensa groups are um, frightening. On several levels. In my naive years, I joined. One meeting was all it took, I never went back or had anything to do with them since.
Floccinaucinihilipilificationary.
Sven: I have no rational justification for my taste in music at all. I love Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, and Bob Marley although I am fairly convinced none of this trio was all that gifted, musically speaking…YMMV is just apt in this regard.
I am sooo tempted to continue the Heinlein argument; they’re almost as fun as threads about Apple products! ;^)
But instead, I think I’ll talk about foodie TV.
Caine (@179):
I love Quickfires; the quirkier, the better!
I’m part of a group of couples that meets every 6 weeks or so at one of our homes for a cooperative dinner party around a particular food theme. It’s really more a social group than a gourmet club… which is just as well, because between the gluten-avoiders (my wife), the vegetarian, the one who prefers to avoid red meat, the (several) Jewish members who, even though they don’t keep kosher, prefer to avoid pork, the one guy who won’t eat anything spicy, and the other guy who won’t eat soup… the meals usually turn out to be pretty safe and boring. When I saw the Chinatown Gas Station Quickfire in the first TCM episode, my first thought was “that’s what we should do for our next dinner!”
My all-time favorite Quickfire is the vending-machine amuse bouche.
As for last night’s episode, I kinda’ thought Marcus Samuelson behaved like a bit of a jerk (I really wanted to say he acted like a dick, but I’m trying to purge myself of all genital insults). I think it’s fine for the regular cheftestants to be hypercompetitive, but I expect more collegiality from the Masters. Plus, he made that nice Monica (from Houston, no less!) cry. I hope he gets crushed in the Champions Round.
From the previews, it looks like fireworks in the next episode, no?
Bill Dauphin @156: I agree totally on I Will Feel No Evil. I first read it when I had the flu and was running a high temperature. I barely got through it, it was so dreadful. When I recovered [from the flu, not the book], I figured I’d reread it to see whether fever delirium had affected my perceptions. I can tell you, decidedly, that fever delirium had improved it no end.
I think that book came out during a time period when Ginny Heinlein was ill; she normally acted as first reader and de facto editor. Some years later, my then-husband was doing a cover painting for a Heinlein novel. He waded through the book, called the editor and told her he had some cover ideas. ‘You read it, she asked, ‘I didn’t’. When he asked how she could buy it if she hadn’t read it, her response was ‘Heinlein sells, no matter what.
Now do the same thing, please, after eating asparagus.
Ah, favourite SF books:
Heinlein: Moon is a Harsh Mistress (ultimate fav); Stranger in a Strange Land; Double Star, Starship Troopers. Loved the juveniles at an early age, Have Spaceship Will Travel; Podkayne of Mars; Red Planet.
A good book to read after Starship Troopers is Haldeman’s Forever War. Kind of an anti-Starship Trooper and just a damn good read. Haldeman is no as well known as he should be.
Philip K. Dick: Man in the High Castle; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; others all read. Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch I consider the best of all of them.
H.P. Lovecraft – SF or Horror? Take your pick.
Harlan Ellison – Most of his stuff, I Have No Mouth and I must Scream still freaks me out.
Norman Spinrad, not too well known now. I like his early works the best: The Men in the Jungle; Bug Jack Barron; The Iron Dream. His works are uncomfortable. I like that.
Lots of the Discworld stuff, but favs are the ones with Sam Vimes and the Watch. The Fifth Element is tied with Thud for my fav.
For space opera, always liked Saberhagen’s Berserker series. He also wrote several semi-tongue in the cheek novels from Dracula’s viewpoint. Best of these is the Dracula Tape, his version of what “actually” happened with Mina and Van Helsing and company. Old Friend of the Family, another Dracula book is odd and interesting.
Read all of Isaac Asimov as a teen, but have never been able to get back into them.
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke, is still a gem in my mind. The sequels left me totally cold. Not really fond of his other work.
Ray Bradbury, loved the Mars stories (The Martian Chronicles) and Fahrenheit 451 is another thought provoker. Also just enjoy the stories in Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Wow, this is way too long and have not even gotten to Zelany or the Ringworld or David Drake’s nightmare inducing combat stories.
Time to quit for now.
In grad school I taught a lab course in which we used live sea urchins. The animals came in on a THursday, we put them in chilled flowthrough-circulation troughs in the seawater room, and forgot about them until we needed them Monday morning. Apparently the seawater-circulating system had gone down sometime on Friday. Three-day-dead sea urchins marinating in warm, anoxic seawater make the second-worst odor I have ever experienced. I had to clean out the troughs (with my late buddy Mark). The word “gag” hardly suffices.
The worst one was encountered when cleaning out a disused storeroom in the same building. Somewhere behind and under years and years of stored records and teaching crap was a plastic bucket of the type in which preserved fetal pigs* are shipped for dissection. I opened the lid…
not for the first time…
but for the first time in at least a decade.
All the preservative was long evaporated, there were many many maggots (themselves long dead), and a stench that I sincerely hope the likes of which I will never transduce again. The three of us in the room vomited then and there.
O
M
G
*(fetal pigs are byproducts of the pork-packing industry and are sold to biological supply houses. Because no animals are killed expressly to be dissected (the pregnant sows become sausage), I consider them the ethically best choice for learning mammal anatomy)
The Heinlein book I’m least likely to re-read is Time Enough for Love. The immortal Lazarus Long is feeling suicidal because he’s bored. So his friends build a time machine to send him back to 1916 to meet his mother. What does he do when he meets Mommy? They mutually seduce each other (Mom Long is pregnant with Baby Lazarus). The scene where she gives him a lock of her pubic hair was unsettling to me.
Er, Bill @159.
Okay, so I’m working on becoming a “‘militant’ athiest.” What is the accepted protocol for when someone in my immediate vicinity sneezes?
And, no, I’m not being a jerktroll. Serious question.
The thread about the daft neurosurgeon contains quotes from the LOLcat Bible and jokes about quantum physics! Just to make sure that nobody misses it. :-)
Second worst and worst smell ever, or so I’ve read.
I stand in awe!
I’ll file this one under “patriarchy hurts men, too”…
Anything he wrote? Not even his predictions for the future? Start here for perspective.
WTF? What happened to antidisestablishmentarianism?
Also, the double c is not justifiable, and this means the word is no longer than Micropachycephalosaurus. But that’s not really a word of the English or any language, it’s under control of the ICZN.
?
Good idea.
Re: smells.
I’m pretty sure any parent can come up with some outrageous smell stories involving toddlers.
And, being married to a pathologist for 20 years has given me the added benefit of hearing a few “choice” tales, as well.
Slap her across the face and say “thanks for spreading germs, Typhoid Mary.”
And my effing typing is getting worse and worse as the day goes on. Sheesh!
Offer them a tissue and some Purell and ask if they’ve had their flu shots.
re: sneezing
I say “gesundheit”. It’s German for something like “to your health” so it’s pretty innocuous. Or I say “stop it.”
DominEditrix:
How cool. I don’t suppose there’s any way you could mention which book/edition without compromising your anonymity?
Bill:
I thought Marcus S. was okay, he strikes me as very intense. He’s certainly had an interesting upbringing. I’ll admit Monica got on my nerves though – women who can’t make it through a single sentence without going “full mommy” annoy me.
I really wanted to see Thierry go all the way through.
So it looks. For now. I don’t trust the editors too much. ;) Moonen is quite the hyperactive guy, things certainly aren’t quiet when he’s around.
My favourite bit about the gas station quickfire: Govind Armstrong saying we’re just here to fill up. Right?
Depends on who sneezed. For most people, a simple “Gesundheit!” will suffice, and does not involve god or ‘blessings’. If it’s Dane Cook doing the sneezing, common etiquette dictates it’s perfectly all right to push him off a bridge.
Damn, knew my brain would not let me quit. So, after a short stop to (it is hoped) get the names and titles right, my further favs:
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Stanislaw Lem – Solaris
A. E. van Vogt – The Weapon Shops of Isher
Walter Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle – The Mote in God’s Eye
John Wyndham – The Day of the Triffids
Daniel Keyes – Flowers for Algernon
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
John Brunner – Stand on Zanzibar
H. Beam Piper – Fuzzy Sapiens and some of his space operas.
Richard Matheson – I Am Legend (hated all the movies except the first one with Vincent Price)
:-(
Immediately reminds me of Mortadelo y Filemón: “And here we blow the contaminated air out of the uranium mine at high pressure”… My brother’s immediate reaction to that: another such quote – “although the minister for environmental affairs reassured there was no danger for him personally”…
…”and so I thank you for buying my overpriced products so I can invest my money in Microsoft stock”… </Simpsons>
My uncle, the gentleman, says that, if you want to be really polite, you simply ignore such a fauxpas.
Just when I think I’m out…. ;^)
JeffreyD (@223):
Except that… Haldeman himself is a Heinlein fan, and has said he considers The Forever War (which, BTW, really is a great book) more of an homage to ST than a rejoinder. Curiouser and curiouser, eh?
Also, up ’til your passing mention of Ringworld, I was wondering why none of the SF fans here seems to have the slightest interest in Niven?
‘Tis (@225):
Yeah, the frame-story of TEfL is… well, I think unsettling is a good term. And that same incest theme runs through much of his later work. But within the TEfL frame are some pretty worthwhile tales, IMHO. There’s (also IMHO) nothing of similar value in IWFNE, and Farnham’s Freehold is downright offensive. To a very great extent, I believe the common complaints that Heinlein is fascistic and misogynistic, and the slightly less common complaint that he’s racist, can be refuted by careful reading of the texts… but Farnham’s Freehold is, IMHO, all of the above, and bizarrely paranoid in the bargain.
Outrageous? The smell of baby poo has an asymptote. :-|
(All three of my siblings are younger than I. I know the smell precisely.)
Just “health”.
Thanks for the correction, David. :-)
#238 – Bill Dauphin, “Except that… Haldeman himself is a Heinlein fan, and has said he considers The Forever War (which, BTW, really is a great book) more of an homage to ST than a rejoinder. Curiouser and curiouser, eh?” Did not know that he was a heinlein fan, hell, so am I. :-)
In any case, I still think FW is the other side of the militaristic question. Haldeman is also a VN veteran and I think that shows in his more subtle treatment of being in the military and its effect on the mind.
And on that note, time for bed. Nite all.
Any suggestions on how to make reading the comments on this blog with an iPhone/iPod Touch less… impossible? While I really do appreciate my iPod, I do have gripes. Most especially (at the moment) the lack of a scroll bar in Safari, or some other method to reach the bottom of a large page faster. Only being able to scroll a bit more than one screen per “flick” gets really old on a long page.
re 198:
Since this is the “off topic” thread, I suppose it is okay to create a vocabulary tangent….
I have never heard of a curtain “pole” before, only curtain rods (maybe it’s just an americanism). But thinking about it, “pole” seems to always refer to a vertical cylinder (flag pole, may pole, stripper pole, fireman’s pole, barber’s pole, north pole, etc) while the same cylinder horizontally is a rod: “curtain rod”, “shower rod”, “hot rod”, etc.
why is that?
[not sure how “fishing pole” and “fly rod” fit into this scheme, though]
Once worked in the site office for a large chemical plant project. The very first thing to be built was the main sewage pumping pit, but at this stage the only bogs connected to it were those in the office complex. The pit designer had ommited one important feature – an air vent. All was well for several weeks until the day of imfamy when the level in the pit rose enough to switch the pumps on. The vacuum caused by the fall in level sucked all the water out of the ‘s’ bends and allowed the gasses in the pit to permeate the entire office. It was not the best workplace I have occupied.
re 243: sorry, underline was supposed to only be one word, not the whole paragraph.
By the way, nobody else seems to have noticed that little Kelly, the author of the essay, has finally (apparently) come onto the “Coming of Age in Florida” thread.
Re: bad smells:
Our lab keeps stocks of blowflies, which I am ‘lucky’ enough to maintain. They normally lay eggs in rotting meat, which we simulate with cat food. Combine ten day old cat food (kept at 27 degrees) with a writhing mess of maggots and you have a sensory experience to behold.
It’s the closest I have ever come to throwing up just from a smell. I keep a bucket in the corner of the room just in case.
I used to read a lot of SF, until I saw a bit that said a certain book’s space battle was based on the battle of Lepanto, or some such. I found an historical novel about that battle, and pretty much left SF and haven’t read much that’s been published recently, except for favorite authors like Niven and Cherryh.
One transitional writer was L. Sprague DeCamp. He wrote some excellent historical fiction in addition to fantasy and SF.
Mary Renault wrote excellent works set in ancient Greece, including novelizations of Alexander’s life–read _The_Persian_Boy_. She also did Theseus and the Minotaur in _The_King_Must_Die_, and the lives of actors and philosopher kings.
Bernard Cornwell’s work includes the Sharpe series, which the BBC made a good series out of, starring Sean Bean. (Another good BBC series is based on the Hornblower books by C. S. Forester.)
George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series is hysterically funny history.
Georgette Heyer invented Regency romances but wrote other historical fiction, some of which was novelization of actual events and lives.
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/04/pz-myers-is-witless-wanker-who-peddles.html
I think it’s been linked here before, but I didn’t want to sign up to comment on Massimo’s blog. But if you read that post, you can see a Professor of Philosophy misuse “ad hominem fallacy” like a common internet troll. Really sad.
I second the recommendation for Eric Flint’s 1632 series. However I admit I’ve got an ulterior motive. One of the short stories in a Grantville Gazette volume* is mine.
*Both ezine and hardcover.
And if the rod in question is flaccidly dangling?
Have I missed it or has nobody mentioned Iain M Banks?
If ever I own a boat it will have a ‘ship name’:
‘Lapsed Pacifist’ perhaps, or ‘Ethics Gradient’
maybe ‘Synchronize Your Dogmas’
Stan Rogers’ “Make and Break Harbour”:
I can see the big draggers have stirred up the bay
Leaving lobster traps smashed on the bottom
And they think it don’t pay to respect the old ways
That make and break men have not forgotten
Ah, yes. We had ‘dead squirrel trapped in the attic above the bedroom’ smell, which I imagine is somewhat similar.
I’m going to be entirely contrary to all y’all with the sci-fi (although I do like it too) and say that Barabara Kingsolver is at the top of my pantheon of favorite writers who I can reread ad nauseaum. The Poisonwood Bible was a big light-bulby step in my journey to godless heathenism, many of her essays in High Tide in Tuscon perfectly encapsulate parenting in the US, and all of her stuff is just chock-full of nicely fleshed-out ecological observations.
Well, if I did mean to say curtain “pole”, I note that it has been thoroughly pharyngulated.
SteveM
Even more tangentially (now there’s a word I’ve never used before), rods and poles are the same length, whether vertical or horizontal.
You will note, however, that I specified toddlers who, by convention, are experiencing all kinds of foods (and some non-foods) for the first time.
Then there are other toddler-associated horror stories.
——
I like Bujold’s older work. Her Sharing Knife saga was “meh” compared to Vorkosigan.
Currently, I’m working my way through the Hitchhiker’s Guide books for the first time.
I’ve read and thoroughly enjoy Pratchett’s books, and have introduced my children to them. We, also, have made Hogfather a Yule tradition.
sciencenotes #103 (jeez, it’s hard keeping up with this thread).
Really? (Not disbelieving, just surprised). I’ve never noticed “my” ants doing that. So they do have their own personal herd? Now I’ve got a mental image of an ant with a stetson and whip going “git along little dogies”. Maybe they have names for them too. Daisy, Buttercup, Primrose etc. Nice floral names.
Has no one mentioned Ursula le Guin?
Pffft. Science Fictionistas…well, it’s comics really for you guys, isn’t it? Bet you have to read it with your fingers on the words and your lips moving…
[Runs to hide under the bedclothes with a muffled “goodnight”]
AnthonyK, shut up. ;p I really enjoyed le Guin’s books when I was young. I haven’t read her for a very long time. Now that puts me in mind of Anne McCaffrey.
Wowbagger’s twenty recommended books (in no particular order):
The Chronicles of Prydain (series) – Lloyd Alexander
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Harry Potter (series) – JK Rowling
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Faerie Tale – Raymond E Feist
Magician – Raymond E Feist
The Shining – Stephen King
Pet Sematary – Stephen King
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
The Practice Effect – David Brin
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
He Died With a Felafel In His Hand – John Birmingham
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Oh, and anything at all by Kurt Vonnegut, and nearly everything by Terry Pratchett…
Wowbagger:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Really? I found that book to be so tedious. Took me the longest time to get through it. I thought the footnotes were the most interesting parts, and they were *very* long footnotes.
One book I happily recommend is A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
holy shit! Raising blowflies on catfood?! That’s hard core, man.
I know a guy who maintained a dermestid colony on roadkilled boxturtles, but blowflies? wow
What are they good for, researchwise?
…still catching up….
Foulest odours? Latrineless Mumbai slums, and, er, bacon.
SF? Again? Didn’t we have this same conversation quite recently? (Manages to restrain self and not repeat what he thinks of Heinlein).
Two unmentioned author I used to love –
Samuel Delaney – whose works include multracial gay porn SF, and
Alfred Bester, a friend of Heinlein :)
I would gladly try aphid honeydew. Even if it does come out of their posterior.
Anyone looking for good sci-fi:
Foundation Series – Isaac Asimov
Startide Rising – David Brin
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
Hyperion – Dan Simmons
And good comedy/sci-fi:
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series – Douglas Adams
Paul @#249, I hadn’t seen that!
Damn it, I left out Catch-22 and Picture This by Joseph Heller, and pretty much everything by John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules in particular.
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
I agree that it’s very slow-going, but I didn’t mind that because I simply adored the prose. It’s also why I like In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike – 700 pages long and pretty much bugger-all actually happens, but because of how it’s written it’s still compelling.
RTL:
“But I’m not an expert,” he snapped. “In this benighted nation of experts, I’m the last singing grasshopper in the ant heap.”
Carpenter snapped up the intercom. “Get me an Entomologist,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” Scrim said. “I’ll translate. You’re a nest of ants. . .all working and toiling and specializing. For what?”
“To preserve the American Dream,” Carpenter answered hotly. “We’re fighting for poetry and culture and education and the Finer Things in Life.”
“You’re fighting to preserve me,” Scrim said. “That’s what I’ve devoted my life to. And what do you do with me? Put me in jail.”
“You were convicted of enemy sympathizing and fellow-traveling,” Carpenter said.
“I was convicted of believing in the American Dream,” Scrim said. “Which is another way of saying I had a mind of my own.”
Dr. Scrim, in Disappearing Act by Alfred Bester, 1953
If you don’t care for long but interesting footnotes, stay far, far away from Infinite Jest.
Most of the continuity, such as it is, has to be gleaned from them. Some are several pages long. Yes, single
footendnotes. (What a fucking mess that book would be with footnotes!)Calling all heathen hell-bound immoral atheists! I’m a long-time lurker and first time poster, and I believe I am in need of assistance. This guy is Mark Grungor: http://www.laughyourway.com/blog/sometimes-sex-is-just-sex/comment-page-1/ is a guy with no known credentials who goes around as a preacher/marriage counselor/full-time entertainer of sorts. A rather harmless kook really. Pretends to know science, tells us how God wants us to live our married lives…stuff like that. He has a blog too. Some is stupid, some is rather ‘well duh’, and some…well, the post I just linked too tells all. You see, we need to have sex as a married couple. No, not because we want to, because it’s a chore. Because it’s expected now that you’re married. Whether you want to or not, the baby Jesus wants you to get your freak on. Oh, and he compares this to cleaning toilets: after all, you don’t want to clean toilets either, but you have to anyway!
I disagree with him (whatever happend to just having sex when you want to?)…but it’s his commenters that are bugging me. One is a battered woman who agrees that women need to have sex whenever their man wants them to. Others are men who post scripture saying that women should obey men in everything… Pretty much, it’s chock full of ‘doesn’t matter if you don’t want to have sex, Jesus wants you to have sex.’
I’ve tried to talk some reason into that thread (I’m the poster named Amy with the novel-long posts), but it’s gotten down to “well…you’re an atheist anyway, so you don’t have morals, so it doesn’t matter.” Anyone want to lend a hand and join the fray? :)
Said Brownian, OM @251:
Then you need to go back to the previously mentioned stripper pole.
Gah, I can’t believe that I also forgot to include Hitchhiker’s in my list. I call myself Wowbagger for fuck’s sake. Sheesh.
Sven, the footnotes didn’t bother me, as I said, they were the most interesting parts. Some of them would go on for pages though, and by the time you got done with them, you had to go back pages and reset your mental gears to get back into the story.
Unlike Wowbagger, I didn’t find the prose to be all that, so Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a long slog to get through. I definitely won’t be re-reading it.
I haven’t read Infinite Jest, so I can’t say anything about that one.
Caine
Excellent topic weaving! Also great memory, or great google foo, or both.
Non sf, non fiction – one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in years is “the History Of Myddle” by Richard Gough.
(Amazon synopsis)
(Amazon commenter)
It’s also very, very funny. And hair-raising. The number of murders in a small village is incredible.
Way past my bedtime, night all.
RTL:
Moblog, where I have my photography blog, also has ‘groups’, shared moblogs. One of them is Quotation, and I posted a photo of a black and yellow grasshopper with that quotation.
My current favorites are Pratchett and Cherryh, but I like an awful lot of the authors others have mentioned.
Menyambal, I second the recommendation of Renault; for some reason, I always connect her books and Mary Stewart’s Merlin books in my mind. And tangenting slightly, have you tried Lindsey Davis’ Falco books?
Rambling – wish I could help, but I’m strung out writing an exam. Might have some time over the weekend if there’s still any ruckus going on.
Last night I broke my lurker status in sympathy to Jadehawk, so I figure what the hell.
I just want to point anyone interested to some EXCELLENT advice that John Hodgman gave the catholic church last night on Daily show. Since I am a novice poster I don’t know if I will do this correctly but the link is link. Or if that doesn’t work go to the Daily Show site, it is the first one up for now.
I can’t see that the link works in preview. Sorry if you just get a lot of nonsense.
Carlie – The ruckus is slow-going, certainly not fast-paced like here. But I’m sure there will be some fall-out left over from my heathen declarations for quite some time. Have some tea and de-stress :)
Partricia08, it appears your link works fine. In preview, if you run the cursor across the link, which is blue, the actual URL, with Firefox 3.5 Safari, and IE 6, appears in the bottom edge of the window. Same as you can view the link there from the thread.
@ Rambling Scholar:
I haven’t looked at the link yet, but I thought I might voice my opinion. Different people have different physical needs, and often times these people get married. I think it’s ok to have sex sometimes when you don’t feel like it for the reason that you love your husband or wife and want them to feel loved by you. Think about it this way, you had a terrible day and you want your husband to hold you, but he won’t because he “doesn’t feel like it”? It’s the same thing for a lot of people, men and women both. I’ve had a few female friends in the past whose husbands wouldn’t even touch them after they had children. Surprisingly, most of these guys’ problems stemmed from religious teachings about the shame of sex. As a result, they do not feel comfortable “disgracing” the mother of their children in such a way. So if some guy is telling people, “Hey, it’s ok to have sex. God wants you to” then maybe it will help some people overcome their shame. Who knows, he may just be trying to start the next sexual revolution, for Christians. I don’t know.
On that note, it does sound like the people posting are a little screwed in their thought processes. It shouldn’t be about “women always obeying their men”. Unless you’re into BDSM maybe…
Balzac is my favorite writer for comedy involving the catholic church.
Hi Nerd! Wave, wave!
Sena – I think perhaps I may have given the wrong impression. I have no problem with having sex if you don’t feel like it. What I was protesting was the idea that you must have sex even if you don’t want to. That “no” no longer exists in a marriage. In a different post he had given the impression of: “c’mon girls, us guys give you attention, so put out already or we’ll lose that attention. It’s just how our minds are.” (of course without citing anything) And in another he had said “even if you don’t want sex, do it anyway, you’ll like it eventually”. Yeah, it wasn’t so much “it’s ok to have sex”, it’s literally “you have to have sex, just like you have to clean toilets, like it or not.”
Anyway, just thought I’d clear up what I’d meant. If I have been misreading him, I’d definitely be glad to know that. It just pressed a few too many buttons for my liking. Thanks for the thoughts! :)
Sena, I’ve been following Rambling’s posts on the other blog and I wish the sentiment was what you are suggesting. That would be wonderful. But no, the main thought is that you (and it’s not obvious which partner they mean but it appears to be the woman) should have sex with your partner whether you want to or not because it says so in the bible. You must do your duty. Besides once you start you’ll enjoy it.
Eh, I suppose I might as well out myself as a born-again fantasy nerd. It was D&D in the ’80s, then a few years ago my little brother got me into World of Warcrack.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and I found ourselves at a second-hand bookstore in the small New South Wales country town of Holbrook. (It’s 400km inland but it has a great big navy submarine in the middle of town)
I thought to myself “I wonder if they have any Robert E. Howard books that I haven’t got.” Lo and behold, they did have one (something set in the Ottoman Empire, I think), but as I was taking it up to the counter another guy came in looking for Howard books. I gave him mine since he seemed to really want it.
I also recently picked up Gord the Rogue by Gary Gygax. Good on Gygax for inventing D&D and all that, but so far the book looks like a horrible attempt to rip off Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fritz Leiber – now there was a fantasy writer.
Spill, Patricia! How have things been going?
Caine – If you are refering to hot, middle-aged love affairs, things are pretty hot and slutty. *smirk*
I am, and oooooh! That’s grand news. :D
Sven #263:
The catfood is the more civilised option. They used to get liver from the markets that hadn’t been sold, chop it up, and store it in petri dishes in the freezer. Thankfully that was before my time, so all I have to do is open a can of cat food.
As for research, the flies are a major pest for sheep farmers and have developed resistances to a number of different insecticides. A lot of work has been done looking at these resistances specifically and also on the general process of insecticide resistance.
These days though, everyone in our lab has moved on to other organisms. So I’m just maintaining stocks in the hope that someone, someday will decide to do something with them. I guess that’s what Masters students are for.
Arrgh.
Damn it. Now it is my turn to whine.
I think this piece of shit has a bad mainboard. That computer was a damned lemon. From the first time I got it there were problems with damned near every component and now this.
I don’t think it’s the inverter because the computer does not even recognize its own screen as existing. Maybe the cable connecting it but I doubt it. I really do.
That thing was $$$$ too. I’m screwed. I don’t have another laptop usable for photographs etc. for my trip unless I use one from work, but I won’t have the software I need on it then. I mean I *could* but I shouldn’t.
More than anything though I’m just angry I got ripped off by this thing. Seriously I’m sure that the board is fried from overheating because overheating has been such a problem with that POS, especially since the first time around it had a faulty video card which was replaced under warranty but naturally only that and now it’s not under warranty anymore.
So… pissed.
Also needing reliable internet computer and instead on this crappy slow D400 till I bring my work laptop home I guess. The HP laptop has a backlight out and I haven’t fixed that yet (I know it’s just the backlight on that one).
A big part of me just wants to walk out during lunch tomorrow, pull out some money from savings, and buy the best motherfucking laptop I can get.
And I would actually, because that’s my style (and how I ended up with a piece of useless luggage that cost over 2k and never worked right), but I really need a powerful tower for editing (which is why I haven’t made any new stuff right now) and I don’t want to erode my savings that way. I’m fairly certain I will need a new car within a year, for instance.
I feel like punching a wall.
/rant
At work, so no time to check out the insane number of 300 comments posted since I went to bed last night, but hearing about the glass/sand vulcanic cloud over Europe this morning, I had to think how awfully off god’s timing has been this year, wonder what she’s preoccupied with !
First the historic gigantic hailstorm that hit Melbourne missed the atheist convention by one week exactly, and now we have the airspace over Denmark and half of Europe closed from this vulcano eruption, which is 2 months early !!
As Dan Barker said, if those had hit on the conference dates, we could have had a PR problem !!
Caine – It’s grand news now, but I had a visit from a bus load of my old church members on the sixth month anniversary of my husbands death, to remind me of my obligation to the church. That I needed to repent or go to hell. Someone in the congregation had seen me “with a man” in public…shock! that was not a church member.
They never quit.
Ol’Greg:
Boy, do I ever know that feeling. My sympathies. Had to finally give up on my ancient desktop this year, and forked over the money for my Asus laptop.
Patricia:
Oh, how sweet and caring. Unbelievable. That pretty much embodies the old saying with friends like these, who needs enemies? Oh, the hell with ’em. Getting your socks knocked off in style is a whole lot more fun.
IMO, Infinite Jest is one of the best novels of the 20th century. It is the greatest mind-fuck I have ever been subjected to.
*Spoiler Alert*
Immediately after finishing the book, I turned to the first page and read ~200 pages before realizing that the joke was on me.
DFW was a genius.
Apologies if this has been posted before, but I have just seen this wonderful April Fool – a sell your soul clause in an online software agreement, complete with the
Luckily for those of us that don’t believe in a soul, and those who have already sold said article, there was an opt out link (for a fiver discount).
For those who like documentary-style insights into history, rural and small-town life, and just travelling in back-road America, I most highly recommend William Least Heat-Moon. _Blue_Highways_ is his best known. He did a great book on Columbus and how his attitudes shaped the New World.
Cicely, I have read a couple of the Falco books, and found them too intense for me. But quite good.
I have dealt with a chest freezer. My Dad, as he got more senile, became less able to manage household appliances. His microwave oven failed because he tried microwaving a can of milk in it. And when his freezer stopped working in the summer, he just shut the lid and taped it shut. I discovered it about 3 weeks later. It was about six feet long, say, 18 cubic feet, and had been at least half full. I got to clean it out, bags and bags of sopping, rotting foodstuffs and watery bilges that smelled like dogshit. But that wasn’t bad.
What’s bad is having turtles in a kids’ swimming pool and having one about 8 inches long die just after you go away on vacation. Dead turtles have their own special pong.
TrineBM, in addition to the skies being empty, the sunsets are spectacular: volcanic sunsets from Flickr. Supposedly, the 1830s(?) eruption of Krakatoa affected sunsets around the world for two years.
Was that Ambulocetacean? Is Gates of Heaven Good? It sounds interesting in that look-at-those-funny-Americans kind of way.
Joe and I saw the premiere by accident; it was a surprise double feature with Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small and we were in a Herzog-fan fugue at the time. Herzog was there, and between the shows he ate his shoe* because he’d made a bet with Morris.
He ate his shoe and that wasn’t the damnedest thing we saw that night; Gates of Heaven was. We’d meant to go home early and couldn’t move from our seats. We have a copy of it and as I get older, it “reads” differently but I still like it. It’s not about anything so parochial as “Americans”—trust me.
*A Clark’s desert boot, stewed with lots of garlic and what-all else for um six? hours by Alice Waters. He used poultry shears to cut it into pieces, doused them with A-1 steak sauce and washed it down with lots of beer. IIRC a German beer but I forget which.
Les Blank** filmed this and released it as a short, “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”
**Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers
Sprout Wings and Fly
Always for Pleasure
Well, google him; lots more, including one about Werner Herzog making Aguirre, the Wrath of God. His son Harrod Blank makes movies nowadays too. You want Americana? There’s your source.
Patricia: It’s grand news now, but I had a visit from a bus load of my old church members on the sixth month anniversary of my husbands death, to remind me of my obligation to the church. That I needed to repent or go to hell. Someone in the congregation had seen me “with a man” in public…shock! that was not a church member.
Please PLEASE tell us you chucked them out on their collective ear. Please?
Holy good lovin’ shit, as my mother used to say.
Ring-tailed so I have read. But, being ants, they just pick up a nice aphid and move her.
Ron, Cool. I’ll have to check it out. I saw the Herzog shoe thing on wikipedia. I can’t believe you were actually there!
Slight correction, Nerd. You can preview the underlying URL of a link only if you have turned on the Status Bar (in Firefox, it’s in the View menu).
Worst bad smell that is easiest to make: A whole egg in a microwave.
I thought I could hard-boil an egg in a microwave if I put it in a big paper cup full of water. The water would boil and cook the egg, right? Wrong.
The egg exploded with a loud whumpfh and blew cup fragments, water, eggshell bits and partially ccoked egg out through the door of the microwave, all over the kitchen.
The smell was as bad as any rotten-egg smell I have ever encountered.
But not as bad as cleaning out an abandoned refrigerator.
Worst smell I ever experienced was nasty oysters.
When I was 15 we, as a family left for Europe on holiday for 4 weeks. However, being the party animals my parents are they’d kicked the heels up the night before with about 50 of their closest and, in their burgundied-up states had just whacked the leftovers in the fridge attached to the entertainment area. Somwhere over Singapore I can remmeber my father sitting bolt upright and making a rather rude exclamation when he remembers that said leftovers included 3 dozen oysters. He obsessed about having to clean out that fridge when he got back for the entire 4 goddamn weeks.
..of course it got even better in that the electricity went off the day after we left and shorted out the fridge so the oysters didn’t even have a grace period of rotting in the cool. Keep in mind this is north qld in the middle of summer.
‘Twas delightful I tell you.
@Monado 301: Well I was trying to get a chance to see a spectacular sunset, but was putting son to bed (reading Harry Potter right now… VERY IMPORTANT) and it was overcast in the boring way here in Copenhagen, so didn’t see anything spectacular at all. (insert moping)
They’ve closed the airspace above Copenhagen until 20.00 (8pm) tonight!!!
I must say I applaud the lovely book-lists on this thread. Lots of my favourites are there, and lots I’ve yet to read. And a sudden urge to re-read Asimov has emerged. Must. read. Asimov.
And I personally didn’t find Jonathan Strange and mr. Norrell tedious at all. I liked it. But maybe I should reread that as well, because I read it five years ago during a terrifying pneumonia-of-the-sort-that-would-have-killed-you-80-years-ago.
Three quirky books that I heartily recommend:
1. In Yana, the Touch of Undying, Michael Shea.
2. Grunts, Mary Gentle.
3. Tuf Voyaging, George R. R. Martin.
The worst smell I ever smelt was when I cracked a rotten egg into a hot frying pan. Not just a bit past its best, totally black and brown and ghastly. The smell was actually frightening. I ran to the far corner of the apartment and trembled there for a bit, but I had to go and at least turn off the gas, took me a while to get up the courage but I did it. I waited till it cooled down to clean it up and I have never got over it.
I’ve been on a Mark Knopfler kick for the last couple days for some reason:
Telegraph Road
Romeo and Juliet
Sailing to Philadelphia (with James Taylor)
Worst smell ever? Gangrene and pseudomonas colonizing the same wound. Pseudomonas is acually not an unpleasant smell at first, rather like fresh green apples. However, if around it for more than a few minutes it begins to cloy and gag you. Also puts you off apples for quite a while.
I wrote about my favourite SF books, and then tried to sleep with dozens of old friends clamoring in my head, “why was I not mentioned? I am wondeful!” for half the night. I refuse to start listing my fav books of all time, fiction or non fiction. I need to give the voices in my head a rest. Except for the one who knows where the keys to the flat are. Yeah, talking to you, where are the keys??? Think I need to take my meds, back later.
Some nice photos of the Icelandic volcanoes:
here
I’m sure you’ll all want to join me in wishing Benny XVI a very happy birthday.
I hear he’s invited lots of children to his party.
@315 Benny’s B-day and the Danish monarch Margrethes 70’th too. All of Denmark is one big bloody flag today.
Blech…
Why doesn’t he visit Iceland and look deeply into the volcano. Very deeply.
*Waves to Patricia*
I went to bed early last night and missed your visit. I hope the Pullet Patrol approves of your gentleman friend. (Although I suspect some corn will win their
crops, er hearts.)Monado, I stand corrected. I forgot about that, as mine is always on.
See? Unicorns do exist!
Now, if they could just come up with a stuffed, taxidermised Jesus…
Monado, Nerd: I regret to say that I use FireFox (latest version), but I’ve for years now worked in full-screen mode, and AFAIK the status bar in FF is not visible in that mode regardless of settings (it is in IE, but IE is too slow and crappy in other ways, so I no longer use it).
I’m forced to press F11 to toggle out of full-screen to view most URLs¹, it’s a pain.
—
¹ The ones with a TITLE attribute work OK, though.
floccinaucinihilipilification has the double C.
Wrote a composition in primary school – an early exercise in speculative biology, written from the POV of a six-limbed pseudovertebrate on its native planet – in which I mentioned that the water was undrinkable for visitors from other planets because it was full of antidisestablishmentarianism. I’d memorised the spelling and also knew that the longest words in English were names of chemicals, but hadn’t actually read the dictionary entry.
Weep-inducing reads: several by Connie Willis, but especially Doomsday Book. Writing as clever manipulation: she doesn’t construct realistic or deep characters, but you end up caring what happens anyway. (I mean, characters are not what I read fiction for anyway). Used to read Tolkien annually but have only dipped back in once in the last decade; the couple of times before that I read it in German so that, after a sufficient number of beers, I could impress geeky, German-speaking people by quoting “Komm nicht zwischen den Nazgul und seine Beute! Denn dich wird er nicht erschlagen, dich wird er davontragen zu den Klagehäusen, jenseits aller Dunkelheit, wo dein fleisch verzehrt und deine verdorrte Seele nackt dem lidlosen Augen überlassen werden soll!”.
Now I’m sitting in a room lined with bookshelves (and a couple of snake tanks) but it’s almost all palaeontology, herpetology and general reference. Most of my paperback fiction is in boxes but the high-turnover shelf (shared with rest of family) contains multiple titles by Connie Willis, Val McDermid, JK Rowling (the 9yo is on book 7 again), Greg Bear, and Neal Stephenson. Only one Heinlein there at the moment, SiaSL which I got recently – first and only other time I read it about 25 years ago would have been the expurgated version (the one without the gannet). Used to read Time Enough for Love fairly regularly, but don’t have time for that now. Saw the Starship Troopers movie and enjoyed it (more than, for example, Up!), but haven’t read that book.
When I moved into a house in Adelaide some years ago there was a fairly voluminous library on hand-built shelves all round the pool room, but it was nearly all crappy (for all I knew) pulp westerns: all that seemed worth keeping was 6 volumes of the Flora of South Australia, one early book by Thomas Keneally, and Heinlein’s Double Star. Yeah, not bad.
Saw a guy on the train once reading Infinite Jest, and asked him if it was any good. He said something like: Put it this way: you can spend the same amount of money on a book a fraction this length, and in a couple of days you’ll need a new book to read. You can be bogged down in this sucker for a month! So I bought it, and same thing happened to me:
Anyway, here’s a thing: I have deliberately avoided buying or reading any Discworld books, though I’m reasonably certain Pratchett’s a genius. I’ll start on them some time soon: envy me!
A question about evolution…
While reading up on the topic, I’m seeing quite a polarisation between those who advocate gene-centred evolution and those who say that evolution happens at the level of the phenotype. For a layperson like myself, this is really a he-said, she-said situation. So I’m wondering if there are any articles or resources where I can look to understand this disparity more completely and from that further my understanding of the topic?
KOPD,
Try this for your iPhone page navigating pleasure. They are a life saver. I find the scroll to end and find in page to be invaluable.
http://www.ipuhelin.com/en/safariplus/
Also, I have recently discovered I suffer from a mutation of SIWOTI syndrome… SIWITNC Complex… Someone IS Wrong In The Next Cubicle… It maks it very hard to work when my cube neighbor spouts Faux News talking points…
John#319, you may be right. I’ve never used full screen mode. With my wide screen at home, that would be a lot of white space at the sides.
Kel, what I see is that changes to the regulatory gene stretches of the DNA will lead to the changes in phenotype. It is at the phenotype level where species differences are seen by most people. My two cents.
The case for gene level selection is well made by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. It could also be worth looking at George Williams on the subject.
Evidently there’s some denialism argument going on at the web page with the volcano pictures.
“Blind trust in people who stand to make considerable sums of money (USGS) if you believe them is not a good idea. ”
*headdesk*
Toothiest goodness ever!
It’s an Early Cretaceous bird with a snout full of teeth. If the authors got their terminology right (an open question), the teeth even have cutting edges instead of just being conical; and if they got the reconstruction drawing right (the grainy photo is more ambiguous), there are caniniform teeth!
And yes, it was big enough to bite you – the skull is almost 6 cm long. (1″ = 2.54 cm.)
More awesomeness: the first two of these papers explain the cold European winters of the last couple of years. Solar activity has been decreasing since 1985, and this shifts various weather patterns around, leading to cooler winters in Europe in spite of ongoing global warming (worldwide, the last two winters were among the warmest ever recorded). Strangely, I have full access; drop me or the authors an e-mail if you don’t.
:-o
Exciting. Heartwarming how small the world is these days.
ROTFLMAO!!!
Oops.
I can’t remember any toddler-specific smells, but I can imagine what can go wrong…
That book is all kinds of awesome.
Um. Dr Evil? That already exists, too. More precisely, it’s the barf of bees that have eaten aphid crap. Delicious, though not quite as good as some other kinds of bee barf. :-)
<headdesk>
WTF. Small-town America is such a fucked-up place (sorry for the pun) that that guy is actually an improvement!?!
A few more such stories, and I’ll get Jadehawk’s depressions for her. Or start screaming incoherently. Or both.
:-)
LOL!
As has been observed previously right here on Pharyngula…
– ajay
And if you haven’t turned on the status bar, there’s no hope for you anyway :-)
That’s the kind of smell that punches you on the nose till it breaks. The nose, not the smell.
ARGH. I just came here to complain that one of my facebook “friends” (someone in high school who never really talked to me but for some reason friended me) has a very happy birthday to “his holiness” as his status. Really???
Kel, I look at it as a synergy – the only way evolutionary changes can take place is through genetic mutation (and some epigenetics), but the phenotype is what selection works on. Which doesn’t explain much except that I think that people who argue that it is one or the other are full of crap.
Gene or phenotype? I need to read up on that myself.
I’d right now say that mixing and mutation take place in the genes, and selection acts on the phenotypes that they express.
Janet, that dropping a rotten egg into a frying pan story is awful. I grew up in a place where we raised our own chickens, and I still use my mom’s tricks to check eggs. I put each whole egg in water–if it floats, it is bad (this also rinses off any crud). I crack each egg into a little bowl, look at it, then add it to the work (this helps eliminate eggshell bits and gets me less hand-time over hot fat).
I mentioned that I cleaned out an abandoned fridge. It was apartment-sized, and I could have just thrown it out, but I needed it for my apartment, so I worked on it for a long horrible time. I left it out on the porch to air out, and the landlord threw it away. It was probably just as well.
Now he’s defending himself by quoting Wikipedia. It’s funny because the article itself states:
Kel: What Carlie said. Especially, the “full of crap” part.
Disgusting story: In my early 20s I worked as a research technician in a medical school (department of nephrology). Ongoing experiments required monitoring sugar-protein adduct formation in the urine of diabetics with proteinuria. So we would collect 24 hour voids from patients who were often massive (400lbs, 180kg). These people can pee a lot in a day. Anyway, I’d measure volume, and then take a little sample, and dump the rest down the commode. One of my lab mates thought for some reason that dumping urine down a toilet was unsanitary, and would place her void-cubes into the biohazard bin. It was my responsibility at the time to autoclave and dispose of waste weekly…normally this wasn’t a problem, because I would feel that the biohazard bag was about 8lbs heavier than I expected, pull out the void-cube and dump it. Long-story short: I missed a void once…probably no more than a liter of proteinuric piss, and autoclaved the whole thing. The cube exploded in the autoclave, and when I open the door, I was enshrouded by a cloud of vaporized pee-pee…I could taste it for hours, through several teeth-brushings.
Selection acts on the phenotype, but mutations are the only source* for diversity in the phenotype. The question is whether so many mutations happen that a phenotype that could be selected for always exists (mutationism) or not (selectionism). This could be answered by big experiments of the kind Lenski is doing (only bigger still), and those have never been done… at least that’s how far I understand this issue which doesn’t concern me much.
* Plus a bit of epigenetics, as mentioned.
Omega:
Thank you. I’ll check that out when I get home. :-)
Yeah… I saw that. They are employing what I think might be the funniest and stupidest arguments against AGW, yet the one I hear repeated most often from otherwise intelligent people:
It’s arrogant to think we can somehow effect such a huge thing as the climate.
That’s right. The evidence for AGW is significant, and includes loads of data, and is widely accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists.
And the best counter argument to that is a claim of arrogance. And the scary thing is that it works. People see that as a rational argument.
I simply have no idea how to counter such complete and total fuckwittery.
<headdesk>
I read on, but I wouldn’t have needed to.
John @320 – If you liked Starship Troopers there is an old book out there somewhere called Bill, the Galactic Hero that you would probably enjoy too.
Nerd – Sadly, I think one of the pullets is having vision problems. Normally she’d go in the pot with some dumplings, but this is one of the Arucana’s. Last year there was a failure at the hatchery of the Arucana breed, so I will baby her along until she starts running into trees.
Knuckle-sammich
AE
Next up at the Intersection: Pharyngula regular threatens AGW deniers with threats of violence and murder.
Uh, thanks (I think), Patricia. The only Harry Harrison I’ve read is Technicolor Time Machine, for which I prepped by reading Njal’s and Grænlendinga Sagas first. Pretty long time ago now, and I don’t own the books.
You guys’s stinky stories are cheering me up from my rageful thoughts this morning.
I’m pretty good with bad smells. Dead things, rotting things, blood, poop. Usually. It all has to do with expectation. If I come up on a dead thing I know damned well it will likely stink. An abscess… sure it’s going to stink. True horror is achieved when one has no idea what is about to happen and then *boom* all kinds of stink!
Every once in a while it just gets right in there.
I don’t know why exactly but some one I know pissed in a cooler sitting on the back porch. I’m pretty sure they did, because a cooler that had been on my back porch had been open until that day. Drunk and angry, and out in the sun all day I guess maybe they meant to dump it later? I have no idea, it’s not like my toilet was off limits or something. I asked later but no one would cop to it. Why they went to the trouble to put the lid on I don’t know, maybe they thought I’d notice it that way.
I did notice. I just didn’t think some one put the lid on the cooler because they’d peed in it. My mind doesn’t work that way.
That cooler had been left there by the previous occupants of my house and remained there until I decided to move it.
One bright hot day I started to pick it up only to realize it was rather heavy and sloshy. I knew whatever was in there would be gross, but I was barely prepared for the stink of six month old sun-simmered drunk piss.
I kicked that thing over into the yard and ran like hell retching the whole way.
Secondly…
I was in a “home” actually of a person who just doesn’t give a fuck. How can I describe the smell. Well, dogs peed regularly on the carpet. They were unwashed sickly half wild dogs and their heady pee had been fermenting in the Texas heat and darkness because of lacking electricity. How many weeks? I can’t say. I can only say that it smelled less of pee and more of horror.
Not to mention that the person in question had only low to moderate concerns for their own health. Not uncommon in people who have *other* priorities.
There was the smell of filthy sheets and the smell of foot fungus and rotting leather shoes… and mildew. Lots of mildew. Maybe a hint of vomit.
Sweet things, perfume, food, mixed right in with a little blood and filthy laundry. It was like fucking Bolero played in stink.
Standing there in pitch black for a second with no idea what is where and that smell pushing in like a funky cheese being poured over my face I thought … oh ffs I’m going to be sick.
I can’t, even today, believe that a human being could live in there. It’s tragic.
Paaaaaaaatriciaaaaaaaaaa!!!
Yeah, I gather Margrethe is turning a corner again. And according the headlines the prince consort did a Michael Jackson and dangled a grandchild over the balcony.
Funny to think that I used to be a bit of a royalist.
Wow. Ol’Greg, you do know how to paint a picture with words. Caused me to have a mild bout of synesthesia.
so I went to see the movie The Creator of God: A Brain Surgeon’s Story last night. Movie started at 6:30, I got home at 11, and it took me an hour of reading a trashy romance to come down from the high.
The movie itself is pretty, but not persuasive. The argument itself went something like this: There are and have been thousands of gods. Horrible things are done in the name of religion. Gods die when their culture dies out. Yoda is a god-like creature. Yoda is a creature of the imagination. Therefore god(s) is a creation of the imagineation: god does not exist. There was a very little neuroanatomy (less than I’d hoped for), mostly talking about how humans have the largest prefrontal cortex. Since humans are the only animal that seems to have religion, religion comes from the prefrontal cortex.
What impressed me, and the rest of the audience I think, the most was that he actually came out and said “there is no god.”
In the movie, he interviewed a bunch of people he met casually on his travels all over the world. These are ordinary believers, not theologians like Karen Anderson. They all had very concrete ideas of God – yes, he’s male – yes he’s a personal god who protects and takes care of people. One person did come out and say “god is love” but couldn’t define any of her terms, neither “god” nor “love”.
The fun part was the Q&A afterward, and then maybe 15 or 20 of us retired to a nearby pub. There was one creationist, one person pushing “we can’t make a bacteria, therefore God”, and someone else who seemed to be a Karen Anderson stylist of a transcendental god who was saying something about chickens, but I couldn’t follow his argument. There were a lot of us skeptics. A lot more neuroanatomy came out in the conversation afterward. The intellectual give-and-take was heady.
and Dr. Palavali bought me a glass of wine – thanks! I’ll have to repay the gesture sometime.
I did ask the question my daughter wanted me to ask (she chose not to come): if there is a “god spot” in the brain that, when stimulated creates feelings of religiousosity, if you took a religous fundamentalist and depressed that part of the brain, would they start being more skeptical? Dr. Palavali couldn’t really answer, and I think the research on that hasn’t been done. It’s a lot easier to stimulate parts of the brain than it is to depress activity, I think. Dr. Palavali admitted that our study of the brain is really in it’s infancy and there’s just a whole hella lot we don’t know yet.
My second question, over drinks, was whether Dr. Palavali knew of a skeptical organization in the Ann Arbor area. There is a student’s CFI group that meets out of Ypsilanti, and he’s going to send me the information if I email him about it.
I think part of the high I got was just being around so many like-minded people and enjoying the intellectual conversation. I’m mostly a stay-at-home Mom (with the emphasis on staying at home), and hanging out on blogs like this one and my book email groups is my primary intellectual stimulation. Plus, like Caine, I’m not overly social – while evenings like last night are great fun, they’re also exhausting for me, and I slept maybe 10 hours and still feel pretty drug out.
My woo-soaked friend had a lot of things she disagreed with Dr. Palavali about. He said that mind is what the brain does. My friend is really into “subtle energies” and feels that mind is a result of some sort of cosmic consciousness, and the brain is a filtering body that only lets us experience a small part of what the mind does/can do. or at least I think that’s her argument… it didn’t make enough sense to me that I could follow it.
I know, tl:dr. But I had to report anyway.
Today’s smelly story –
My 10 year old opened up the gaming magazine that came in the mail, and found an Axe ad with peel-and-smell sample. I was all “Noooooooo!!!! That stuff is evil!!!!!”
and he said, “I don’t think it smells bad.”
Yes, son. Yes you do. This is a Rule.
Ol’Greg, I can’t even imagine. Yech!
Antiochus, I hope that person got fired. Fired and then some.
Very glad to see Patricia’s having a good time! Enjoy sneering at the poopyhead church people, and threaten to call the cops if they come on your property again.
Re the longest word in English, any British child will tell you that the longest word in English is….Smiles, Because there is a mile between the S’s..(boom boom)
Andrew
I do computer repairs for a living, and was called out to the house of a woman who lives in the same village as I do.
I arrived, and was shown the computer. I also noticed that right in front of the computer was a huge dog turd that I know the woman must have seen (and smelt!) but she just ignored it like it was nothing unusual.
On top of that, she never paid me either.
Worst thing I’v ever smelled –
Many years ago, in my early 20’s, I went in to a Spencer Gifts store to find a tasteless gift for a buddy of mine. While perusing the shelves, I saw a container that was labeled “Canned Puke”. I should have simply put down the can and walked away, but being the stupidly curious young lad I was, I just had to investigate.
Upon merely lifting the lid off the can (which was just a tin can that held some weird-colored gelatinous substance), the odor hit me so fast and triggered my gag reflex so sharply I nearly lost my lunch right in the middle of the store. I couldn’t have inhaled the stench for more than a half second, yet it took me several minutes to stop gagging. I got stomach cramps over it I swear. I have no idea what the substance was made up of that made it smell so horrible, and I’m not sure I want to.
My understanding is that some genes are better at getting themselves copied than others, and that this selection will take place at the gene level not the phenotype (since at the time there is no phenotype).
Oh dear. If you’re getting tired of wasting all your time on TVTropes, try 1000 awesome things. I. Can’t. Stop. Reading. And. Laughing.
So I finally submitted my abstract for the Romer Prize session of the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. If I manage to get that prize (in October), that means 750 US$…
Not so subtle energies:
…Naturally, it was about 2 or 3 hours before the deadline.
Congrats on finishing and submitting the paper, David.
Unconventional Computer Modeled on a Cat’s Brain
Oh ffs: Nerd! Louis! Err…others! We chemists should be owning the stink subthread!
There is also the somewhat understatedly-described U.S. Goverment Standard Bathroom Malodor, which is decribed in more detail in an article about Stench Warfare. That’s right: research into making (non-lethal) stink bombs so goddamn awful, the enemy just has to run the fuck away.
Ol’Greg, that was about one of the most poetically evocative things I’ve ever read. Beautiful!
Giant Particle Accelerator Forms Above Thunder Clouds: A lightning researcher has discovered that, when particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds, 40 km above the surface of the Earth. The cosmic rays strip off electrons from air molecules and these electrons are accelerated upward by the electric field of the lightning discharge. The free electrons and the lightning electric field then make up a natural particle accelerator.
The accelerated electrons develop into a narrow particle beam which can propagate from the lowest level of the atmosphere (the troposphere), through the middle atmosphere and into near-Earth space, where the energetic electrons are trapped in the Earth’s radiation belt and can eventually cause problems for orbiting satellites. These are energetic events and, for the blink of an eye, the power of the electron beam can be as large as the power of a small nuclear power plant.
Could be valeric acid. Its volatile esters are used in perfumes, but when it occurs in too-wet compost that’s anaerobically decomposing, it smells like barf.
arrggghhh, the stink discussion triggered smell memories of taking care of my dying mother. Bathed and lotioned and perfumed, she still emitted the oddly sweetish stink of cancer. I could smell it on myself when I left her. I think that burning-tar-slathered-in-melted-honey smell invaded every crevice and every fabric in her room.
Grizzly bears stink.
On a warm spring day, an auditorium full of privileged children dressed in school uniforms stinks. Turns out that the rich parents do not wash the uniforms as often as they should.
From Wimp to Jock:
Or butyric acid. That stinks too. In fact it’s part of the vomit smell in vomit I think.
:-o
Awesome. Grammar evolves! :-)
X-D LOL! That’s a situation that should have been smoked out with poisonous, corrosive NO2 (see here, as I posted in comment 228).
…Wow.
Don’t plenty of primates have a larger one? Or am I confusing this with the frontal lobe?
Axe is indeed evil. Majorly so. <puke>
I don’t know why, but I want to recommend ammonia as an antidote. It’s like ramming knitting needles up your nostrils.
Indirectly: organisms that carry them will have higher reproductive success because of their phenotype.
Oddly the British Upper Classes also used to stink somewhat of urine during wet weather. It seems they rather like tweed, and tweed used to be dyed using stale urine as a mordant. When the tweed got wet, then began to dry it released a whiff of pee.
Oh, yes… I’m always looking for a new productivity sink…
Here’s one I recently discovered. Many hours lost…
*makes note for Copenhagen*
It’s not a paper, it’s just an abstract and a cover letter! The Romer Prize Committee will decide if the abstract gets accepted for the Romer Prize session; either way, it will go into the 200-page fine-print program volume; if it was accepted, I get to give a talk that will be judged…
That I doubt. Smaller, yes, but simpler? Let alone much simpler?
Aaaah yes. One up on butyric acid! (It’s pentanoic instead of butanoic acid, in IUPAC terms.)
That is not quite what I meant. My understanding is that some genes are just better at getting themselves passed onto the next generation regardless of how they improve the reproductive fitness. It can be viewed as a kind of competition within the genome, not between genomes or the phenotype they create.
Day saved! :-D
You’re telling me you want to chase me away? Good, that gives me time to figure out how to retaliate. :-)
How, when they’re all part of the same DNA molecule? ~:-|
David @ 360
He was talking fairly fast, and with something of an Indian accent (when he’d get really excited about something, he’d forget to use articles> so this may have been my misremembering rather than his mis-talking.
and hey, there’s nothing like a trashy romance to bring you down from an intellectual high and get you ready for sleep. or at least, me. I don’t know what would do it for you.
Taking a break from the bad smell marathon to relate another shooting range true story:
One of the spawn’s hobbies is target shooting and he mostly uses a .357 magnum, is quite a decent marksman, and does well in competitions. One day he took his girlfriend (now his wife and mother to the grandspawn) to the range for a little competition with her (she wanted a Biretta for Xmas the year before). He started first, landing all ten shots nicely in the black, and then it was her turn. (See how good I was? I’m a manly man…). Being a lady voluptuous in all the right places, she was attracting some notice from other gentlemen present, several of whom offered to give her tips and/or “assistance.” She declined gently, raised her piece and ripped off ten perfect shots in the exact center of the black. The spawn knows not to mess with the wife.
Oh, I forgot to mention, wife is a career soldier and has expert marksman medals. As the MasterCard commercials say, the looks on the other men’ faces was “priceless.”
Yes, and cheese, and rancid butter.
In fact, it’s part of a lovely little family that also includes acetic acid (or, when watered down to 4% w/v, vinegar), and caproic acid, which as you may gather from the name, has a “goat-like odor”:
I’ve just tracked a bottle down myself, and I can confirm this whole-heartedly.
No, I’m just a hick.
When gametes are produce for example.
I was in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, when it started to rain. Every school group touring the National Mall stampeded into the museum to get out of the rain. Thousands of soggy children and young teens dripped all over the place. It reeked. I went into the men’s room and found a horde of pubescent boys using the hot-air hand-dryers to dry themselves. I had read the British term “fug”, but that was the first time I felt it.
The kid with the worst body odor I ever encountered started trying to cover up his problems with cheap, nasty cologne. As the parfumiérs would say, “The pleasing top notes serve to enhance the developing layers of underlying stank.”
#369
All these things are so fascinating to me. I’ve often thought that I would really like to become a “nose” for a perfume company. It’s not an easy career path though.
@Menyambal:
My 13-year-old son insists on trying various colognes (including – gak – Axe) to cover his newly developing “funk.” I, his loving mother, keep trying to gently convince him that actually using the soap that I’ve provided him while he’s in his 30-minute shower would be more to his benefit.
Then, I hide the Axe while he’s at school.
My stories about bad smelling people tend to end with body parts falling off. Maybe I should keep them to myself. The stories, not the body parts.
Ahhh, I recall those 30-minute adolescent showers. Soap, IIRC, had very little to do with it!
I’m amused by the ebb and flow and metamorphosis of conversation. Unless I’m mistaken, the whole strand of talking about bad smells traces itself back to my anecdote about spilling my not-yet-frozen ice cream in the freezer. The funny thing is, that story has no bad smells in it at all: I spilled fresh, sweet, liquid ice cream into a freezer, where whatever I couldn’t sop up froze and didn’t spoil. At this point, the freezer smells like homemade dulce de leche ice cream… which, I assure you, is the polar opposite of a bad smell. Hell, as a result of my preliminary cleanup efforts, even the garbage (which went to the curb this morning) smelled sweet this week!
It’s a funny ol’ world, innit?
Muslim women are showing one eye too many, according to a fatwa-spewing cleric. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7651231.stm
On another site, a woman suggested that they just require all men to wear blindfolds, which I think it a good idea since it’s obvious that it’s not possible for women to cover enough of themselves, nor to be invisible, as the muslim clerics would wish. Of course, they could just blind any man caught looking at a woman … or maybe just a public flogging if the guy only saw one of her eyes?
Years ago I was a busboy in a charming little Italian pasta and pizzaria (tablesclothes, candles, portly restauranteurs with thick accents walking the aisles and heartily greeting regulars; the whole schtick) and happened to cut myself on a broken dish. I dug through the first aid kit and grabbed a foil-wrapped lemon wipe, thinking it’d do to clean the wound. Something about it didn’t feel right, so brought the wipe up to my nose and took the kind of sniff first-year-chemistry-class instructors go into defib over their students doing. When I picked myself up off the floor, I checked the wrapper to see the license of the freight truck I’d just been hit with: ammonia.
Knitting needles up the nostrils is an apt description.
Good luck with the abstract, David!
I’ve also got a stinky meat story: some years ago my parents somehow got involved with managing and running a small abattoir, and as some sort of filial repayment for room and board I ended up ‘working’ there one summer. (I’ve got a nearly bottomless repository of stories from that summer, from driving around with my bloody smock sleeve pulled over a meat hook and waving to other drivers as the hook-handed maniac, to staying up all night slicing meat in an exhausted fog because the head butcher was an orthodox Jew and observed the Sabbath, meaning a weekend’s kosher butchery had to start at 12:01 AM Sunday morning.)
But my folks used their minivan to make deliveries, taking the back seats out and lining the rear with sheets polyurethane. Eventually, blood had leaked into every nook and cranny, and my dad tried to mask the smell with hospital grade orange- and pine-disinfectant. Now that’s a combination of smells I can still recall over a decade later, much to my chagrin.
A great student group initiates Canons for Condoms.
Nice.
My roommate put herself through university clerking in an emergency ward, and still picks up the occasional shift. Long ago I learned not to ask her how her shift went.
But don’t not share on my account!
And then there was the time a Russian palaeontologist visiting the Institut (where I was studying in Bonn) passed round an oddly-shaped plank (apparently) at a seminar. Didn’t smell very strongly after thousands of years in the permafrost, but I was instantly transported to a different corner of the zoo. The one with the rhinos. There was some discussion about how to identify the odor, but I don’t know if it came to anything. What’s the formula for diceroic acid?
The shape was as interesting as the smell: laterally compressed and curved, with one edge concave and the other mostly straight. The straight edge was the result of the rhino using the nose horn to sweep snow off the frozen grass. Maybe the last thing it was doing as it starved to death in a particularly hard frost.
Actually, I meant I need to find something else in order not upset your poor nose.
I attended university in Fairbanks, Alaska. There is a “cabin culture” there, in which poor college students rent cheap cabins near campus. My (then-girlfriend, now-wife) and I shared a cabin about 3 miles from campus, and would take showers in the morning, on campus.
Some people figured it’s better to forgo the shower. They would happily ride their bikes to and from campus, of course. The seemed to believe the liberal use of patchouli would be sufficient to cover up their conspicuous odor.
Nothing like eating campus food and being assaulted by the double-whammy of over-ripe cabin dwellers and heavy doses of patchouli.
This, tangentially, reminds me of a joke.
A woman goes into her doctor’s office, and describes her condition:
“Doctor, I have this ongoing flatulence problem. The thing is, they don’t smell at all, and they don’t make any sound, but they do cause my skirt to billow embarrassingly, like…like that. See what I mean?”
The doctor hesitates for a second, then fills out a prescription without even checking her, and tells her to start taking it right away.
A week later the woman returns in a state of distress. “Doctor! Since I started taking your medication, my flatulence has begun to smell horribly! What did you do?”
To which the doctor replies: “Excellent. Now that we’ve addressed your nose, we can try to figure out what’s wrong with your ears.”
Same difference. :-)
Do you mean transposable elements?
<keeling over backwards, chair included>
Wwwellllll, from comment 376 I gather that something completely different could be involved, but even that wouldn’t be worth it. No way.
Not at sunrise???
Oh. In that case, maybe I should use my sister’s roll-on that smells of roses, if she still has it. I had to use it when I helped her move from Aix-en-Provence to Vienna via Paris because I had forgotten my alum. Amazingly, not only did it smell very nice indeed, it completely eliminated any trace of my own smell…
Is this maybe a reference to transposons and the addition of multiple copies within a single individual? Because that’s some weird shit there. (professional sciency description)
Sorry David. I know it’s a terrible waste of water. We’ve cut him back from 45 minutes. I continue to threaten.
The next step is the timer, which cuts the water supply to a trickle at 11 minutes.
Are there any Mr. Deity fans here? I’m trying to find the episode where he’s explaining the trinity to Jesse – it turns into a regular “who’s on first” kind of mess-up. I very much want to show it to a friend, but I can’t identify which episode it was.
thanks.
Html fail. Sorry.
Mr. Fire, I’ve been off-line with the work computer upgrades. But now I using IE7. Wow!. Tabs…
I had a project a few years back that used 3-mercaptoproprionic acid (copper(II) scavenger). I used a respirator when anywhere near it, and removed it from the process a fast as I could.
Win.
Dept. of Really Bad Smells:
A coworker was driving home late one night, passing under a bridge when he ran over something pretty good-sized. The impact damaged his suspension, so he had to stop. When he went back to look, he discovered he’d run over a corpse, apparently a suicide who had jumped off the bridge. He tried to flag down oncoming traffic, but without success, and by the time the police arrived, the body was in several pieces.
Unfortunately, some of the fluids and fragments had worked their way into his car’s suspension bits and engine compartment. By the next day, the smell was horrible, and no repair shop would touch the car. Eventually he had the engine compartment steam cleaned, which got rid of the smell long enough to get the car repaired. But the smell came back, and eventually he sold the car for not very much money.
Oh man. That sounds like the worst of at least two worlds. EDTA didn’t fit the bill?
I don’t know if you’ve worked with alkyltin reagents (e.g. tributyltin hydride), but the more volatile analogs of those are pretty awful. Somewhere between the smell of burning plastic, rotting meat, and that nasty mix of sensations you get after your hands have handled dirty old coins. Yeah, that’s it – it’s what metal would smell like if it could putrefy.
‘Tis Himself, OM:
Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t like the scene where he has a threesome with his two female clones.
Today’s Dilbert is a funny one.
…That’s a typo for 8, right? Right?
Win.
More fun with organic tin compounds.
Indeed.
…and right after I had clicked “submit”, it dawned on me that my link leads to zinc, not tin, compounds. <wince>
The antidote to bad smells is good music.
Cream – Tales of Brave Ulysses
Those Are Useful Ants. The Most Useless Ants Are Termites & I Hope They Become Extinct!
It was a scale-up of an academic process. The old “but we’ve always done it that way” (since the ’50’s) on the part of the clients. Part of my job was to bring modern sanity, with modern analytical technics, to the process. Which I did. I removed the copper, which meant the scavenger could go too.
I thought of a good smell: nitrobenzene! The marzipan for mothers-in-law! Smells identical to or, if anything, slightly better than the real thing (benzaldehyde)! :-9 Oral intake is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Termites aren’t ants, they’re cockroaches. And pressing Shift at the beginning of each word makes what you write difficult to read.
Aaaaah, the Three Austrian Arguments: “it’s always been that way”, “it’s never been that way”, “[but if we allowed you to do that,] then anybody could come [and start doing something unheard of]”. Austrian comedians are incredibly cynical.
(UK Election warning)
That David Cameron, he’s so, like, down wiv de yoof, y’know?
Just saw a news clip of hom today at a school announcing a new Conservation election Education policy. Schools Got Talent. Yeah, we just don’t have enough of that in the world, huh?
School heats, then regional, then national finals. Winner gets to make a record helped by the maestro himself, Gary Barlow. (No link, if you don’t know who GB is, count yourself lucky, and don’t waste your time googling him).
And then down-with-it Dave said something about young people downloading their music…
…from YouTube.
To show/pretend how much he is in touch with modern Britain, funky Gordon Brown frequently refers to X-Factor, says how he and his wife always try and watch it, and has even written to a contestant, I think. (“SuBo”?)
/kicks the cat, and goes out for a pint, or two
Him
Conservative
Why don’t the ants sing, like jo;;y farmers tend to do?
Somehow I’m not surprised that Cameron gets confused about Parliament and Big Brother.
Is Nick Clegg really all that and a packet of crisps?
I saw Ann Widdecombe quoted about him: “The LibDems have never been in guvmint, so they have no experience being in guvmint, so it’d be very unwise to put them in guvmint”, so I’m inclineder to like them even more. Another Tory said their ideas “are outside the mainstream and a little bit eccentric”. Hmmmm – and that’s supposed to be a strike against them?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8625850.stm
Well then you’d like to see a video of flaming arcs of diethylzinc now, wouldn’t you?
I have never smelled 3-mercaptoproprionic acid; is it as pungent as 2-mercaptoethanol? I use that all the time and it smells like a singularity composed of concentrated egg-salad and taco farts.
(OK…I know, I know…not even smell can escape a singularity…I’m just talking highly concentrated stank)
How can there be a whole subThread about bad smells? Ewwww.
And I just love the juxtaposition between the discussion of smells and the discussion of the British general election. :-)
Cameron and Brown being trounced by Clegg made news over here, too. Is there… hope?
:-(
…and Austria has a candidate for president (elections in 2 weeks) who says kindergarten can damage the brain. I’ll spare you the rest of his nonsense and just mention that his party got 0.6 % of the vote in the latest elections for parliament.
I wish. About says IE7. I now have XP SP 3. Updated Office so I can now access versions from 2007 (base 2003). And a bunch of other things. Took our poor IT person about 8 hours, which was also time I couldn’t access it to do parts of my job. Cheaper to have bought me a new computer…
Of course.
“If you don’t have zinc, you can’t smell anything.”
:-D
Nope; it’s the obnoxious young stinkweed proto-Lazarus who prevents the seduction attempt in the car from succeding. She’s preggers with one of his siblings. Later, she sneaks up to the guest bedroom and they go after it.
I spent almost the entire day with no internet, no email, no access to the servers at the other end, no access to printers, no nothing. The power supply for our router got crushed (probably by a custodian). Of course, we don’t have a spare power supply. So we hook up an 8 plug hub. For an office with 13 addresses. So we piggyback a second 8 plug router. Which doesn’t have a power supply. So we now have 8 working addresses (not all are actually used by people or printers). Fun day. Plus, I got to escort Smokey Bear around while DCNR took photos for some fire prevention posters.
Regarding body odor:
Not sure if I should tell this one or not, but, since I’m pseudonymous here, what the hey.
I was at a fire in Montana back in September of 2000. I worked from 1600 to 0900. I had to be at a road gate from 1630 to 2000 and 0700 to 0900. The showers were open from 1700 to 2000 and 0700 to 0900. I went eight days without a shower until my shift changed. Then, one day later, the showers left the fire camp.
Actually, everything left the fire camp and I was left, alone, in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains with nothing but my pickup truck (no testicles), some Cuban cigars gifted me by a Canadian fire crew (thanks, mates), three hisotry books, on paleaontology book, and a couple of cases of Gatorade and water. The local Forest Service office ran a hot breakfast and a bad lunch out to me in the morning and a hot supper in the evening while I waited for four days for the contractor to come and pick up all of the structural tents used at the fire — mess hall, comm unit, doc unit, medical, ops, plans, etc. The good news was that, for the four days I waited, I was on the clock around the clock — 8 hours of regular time and 16 hours of overtime (what can I say, I’m an OT hound). I even slept in the truck, parked across the road (the truck, not me (well, I was in the truck)).
When I got to my hotel in Butte (spending the night in a hotel on the way home from a fire is relaxing and very kind to fellow airplane passengers) I took a shower. Then a bath. Then another shower. Then I went out to dinner at a fantastic Chinese restaurant which had been around since the 1910s. Then I went back to the hotel and showered again.
Unfortunately, the nomex I wore had not been washed. Sweat and woodsmoke create a wonderful smell — remeniscent of smoked Gouda. It was not a Bolero of odor, but, on the Denver to Chicago flight, it was remarked upon. My explanation (two weeks at a forest fire) eliminated complaints. And I had to turn down multiple offers of beers from those who appreciate wildland firefighters.
And I was also informed, after the flight, by an attendent, that my snoring was actually louder than the jet engines.
Anyway, that’s my personal hygiene body odor story about myself. At work, we often get visitors who are not well acquainted with. . . .
[headdesk] Don’t speak ill of visitors.
Cicely:
I don’t remember the details anymore; I certainly won’t be re-reading that mess. The whole Lazarus and his sexy mum scenario left a bad taste in my brain. Heinlein could have easily condensed that whole book down to “live a super-long time, fuck everyone and breed, breed, breed!”
Oooh I feel so special! I got my first death threat from DM on my blog and I’m not even famous.
Hell, I’m actually pretty killable. Maybe he’ll catch a flight down.
So funny since I rarely post about religion. In fact right now my computer woes have got me barely posting about anything at all :(:(
Sorry Ol’Greg, but he’s not very exclusive with his threats. I got the same treatment on YouTube for commenting on a Depeche Mode video.
Makes me glad my blog is pretty much just dead space. I only have it because signing up to comment on BlogSpot pretty much gave me a blog, so I went ahead and went the extra step to set it up. I don’t have anything worthwhile to say anyway.
You deserved it for commenting on a YouTube video. :->
Brownian:
Yeah, I got three months ago on my photo gallery. I think the only thing that would make him happy is if he got to be Wowbagger* for real.
*Not our Wowbagger. Adams’ Wowbagger.
Just for the lulz, I thought I’d share here that De Dora used to be a news writer and editor at foxnews.com (it’s part of his blurb at CFI). Maybe that’s why he took the whole “creation myth” shtick as presented on Fox News?
Note: This isn’t an ad hominem, as I’m not trying to argue against a position. I’m just sharing information I found amusing.
Are you saying he stalks Depeche Mode videos, and actually remembered you?
Off topic but
HAPPY NEW YEARS! (for the third time this year)
I’m usually too annoyed by trolls to participate in threads they are spewing in, but I have to say that having an opportunity to take a crack at using God to disprove God was fun. I think I’m starting to understand why you all are always asking for better trolls. :-)
It looks like I’m going to have a very “interesting” weekend / next-week. A few days ago a bunch of notices appeared warning that, for a bit over a week starting tomorrow (er, today), several streets in my area would be used for some film—including the street where I live. This is kindof understandable since there’s a fairly grand-looking old house overlooking the Mediterranean Sea at the end of street, and I can easily see it being a movie location/set.
So tonight, after I stumble home from a fine dinner and many beers listening to a local covers band, what I find in the sideyard? A fecking movie set. Some trees have been trimmed back (a bit too aggressively, I’d say (looks like I won’t have any apples this year ;-( )), scaffolding erected (probably for lighting (right outside my bedroom!)), the lawn mowed, and power cables running everywhere.
Gaaahhhh…
This certainly looks to be very high up on the list of “weird things that have happened outside my front door”. Up to now, top of that list was the day the Secret Service closed the street (different street, city, and country) because Bill Clinton was having dinner a few metres away, the day Micheal Gorbachev came to town and passed by in motorcade, and the time a stage in the Tour de France started a few metres away.
p.s. Since I only rent the back apartment, it’s not too surprising that all this is a surprise to me… There’s no obvious reason anybody would need to get my permission (unless they wanted to film inside my apartment), but I am a bit surprised nobody bothered to warn me…? (Or maybe the famously incompetent La Poste ate the letter?)
Latest excuse for child-raping: Mexico bishop says porn, tv to blame for priest abuse.
Millions watch porn without feeling attracted to children. If priests can’t then there’s something wrong to begin with.
You guys do more harm to your cause than we ever could.
Groundhog Day is on TV right now.
Frickin’ love that movie.
Awww, way to rain on my parade bleacher boy!
Yeah, he hasn’t figured out my youtube. It’s my old name and I guess that’s too much research even for him.
lol
It’s not easy to respect children? WTF? How about this, Bishop – you don’t have to respect them, just stay out of their pants. These excuses get lamer by the second.
Aarrgghh! Lamer and wrong, wrong, wrong! Holy shit. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. I don’t even know how to begin to express my disgust and contempt.
Hmm. Bad smells. Mostly not a problem for me because I stick to bones that are nice and dry and have been buried for long enough that the squishy bits are all gone.
However, we got a call from a neighboring county sheriff. A citizen had found a small ice chest–about the 2 six-pack size–on the side of the road all closed up with duct tape. They opened it and found what you find when a mammalian body has been decomposing in an environment that does not allow fluids to evaporate. Soup. Really, really nasty soup. With bubbles and bits of stuff floating in it and a whole bunch of bones at the bottom.
They brought it to us so I could tell them that the bones in question were not human. If it was human they would need to save all the soup so they couldn’t just pour it out, so there I was in our parking lot, wearing two lab coats, three layers of gloves, a bandana around my hair, safety glasses (in case of splashes) and a dust mask, with a large ladle, scooping up bones and examining them. Even in open air, breathing through my mouth, with that filter mask on it was almost unbearable.
It was a dog. Young but not a puppy, but (cue Significant Music) no head. Why someone would leave a package like that on the side of the road, I cannot imagine.
I went home immediately, scrubbed and scrubbed and I still could smell the damned thing for hours afterwards. I honestly think the smell got into my sinuses and every so often they would drop more of the ‘eau de canis” into the back of my throat.
Dominance and exploitation != sex.
Celibacy is one of many things that lead to this kind of horrid confusion.
otrame, sounds like you needed a gas mask, not just a dust mask.
I always laughed at the wood working shows where the folks use the same dust mask they use in sawing and sanding for varnishing. The solvents are not impeded or absorbed by the dusk mask. A half-face respirator with organic cartridges are required. For something like the putrefied dog soup, SCBA or supplied air line works best. Funny how all those TV stars don’t wear them…
John and Nerd,
Of course it wasn’t the right equipment. It was very much make-do. We are an archaeology lab, not a forensic anthropology lab. We did the best we could.
I remember telling one of the deputies, “I don’t normally deal with this sort of stuff, so if I throw up, you guys don’t get to laugh.” She thought that was funny for some reason.
Do any of you have any idea why I kept getting waves of that smell for hours afterwards, even when absolutely everything that had been anywhere near it had been either discarded or scrubbed to within an inch of its life?
otrame:
I don’t think you really want to know.
Unless it’s specifically the “waves” aspect of it you’re asking about. In that case – no clue, but it is curious.
Wowbagger, LeeLeeOneIdiot is back:
I wish that post had started with:
“Hello, my name is LeeLeeOne. I am a woodcarver. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I barter for my Internet time. I use solar and wind energy for my electrical needs….”
Warning: this is not only a Worst Smell story, it is also The Saddest Story Ever Involving Kittens.
About 8 years ago I lived in a carriage house apartment above a private family garage. My stairs took me up to an enlosed porch – the kind you sit and drink beer on in the summer – before getting to my front door. I stored some junk and stuff on the porch, so it wasn’t exactly a nice sitting place (this figures later in the story). The street I lived on was semi-rural, and there was a field and woods behind the main house. The family I rented from had a passel of dogs and cats, and I had a cat, so everyone’s animals came and went as they pleased, coming into which house had the door propped open and food in a dish.
So, when a pregnant mama kitty came ’round my door at night, it was no surprise, and I let offered to let her in, but she just wanted to sleep out on the porch. I got used to seeing her at night, and left food out for her. Then after a few days, she stopped coming around. Some while later, I could hear this plaintive kitten mewling. Drove me nuts, because I couldn’t triangulate where it was coming from. I was finally able to coax the kitten to come to me out from under some of the boxes/furniture I had on the porch.
I brought her inside, gave her milk and water, and let her sleep in my apt. at night. But, she always wanted to be let out in the morning, and I never knew where she went during the day. I’d come back at night, and she’d be crying pathetically on the porch again, underneath the junk, and I’d have to try to coax her out.
Then the smell came. Deep, dark, sweet-and-also-rotten. Over the course of a few days, it became absolutely stomach-turning – I can’t describe it. Because I’m kinda wimpy, I went and got my landlady Joyce to come upstairs with me and haul out all the junk on the porch so we could get to the attic and figure out what the hell had died.
Well, we discovered mama kitty had died in the corner of the porch behind all the boxes and such, and had decomposed rapidly in the summer heat. It was so bad (warning: not for the squeamish) the body was subtly undulating from all the maggots in it. I don’t know how we got through shoveling up the body, hosing down the maggots, and bleaching the floor. I vacillated between horror, nausea, and feeling like I was going to faint (it was really, really awful).
The saddest, most horrible part was realizing that poor kitten had been born on my porch, and mama kitty had died some short number of days after giving birth, and presumably nursing at least her one kitten until its eyes opened and it could walk around. Baby kitty had stayed by her body after she died, probably trying to nurse, and she was crying because mama kitty was dead and wouldn’t respond.
I have to stop right now because I’m crying just like I knew I would:((
KOPD, I’m still waiting to hear the details of bartering for internet service. She/he has been asked about that, specifically, more than once.
My stench story:
This was when I was a submariner many years ago. The Engine Room head (toilet in land-lubber speak) flushed into Sanitary Tank #4. The discharge valve for the tank wouldn’t open so the tank couldn’t be emptied. Someone had to go into the tank to fix the valve. There were six of us junior Machinist’s Mates and we drew cards to see who would go into an almost full shit tank to fix the valve (luckily it was at the top of the tank). I lost.
I stripped naked, put on an EAB (Emergency Air Breathing mask), and lowered myself into the tank. I had to crouch low to get at the valve, which meant I was literally neck-deep in shit. It only took four or five minutes to fix the valve, but those were the among longest four or five minutes of my life. I climbed out of the tank and went immediately into the decontamination shower. I didn’t take the EAB off for several minutes. I used most of a bottle of shampoo on my hair and body and I still smelled of shit, at least to myself, for several days.
? “The minute you walked in the room (BUM! BUM!), I could tell you were a man of distinction, a real big spender. . . ”
There are some who’d pay for that. Try any random Republican after-hours get together. To each his own perversions. . .
(ducking and running)
Josh:
ROTFL. *Zing. Perfect.
I don’t get it. What is the leelee person talking about? Oh, I just don’t have the energy tonight.
Bleh… make it simple. I’m exhausted.
Good question, Ol’Greg. People keep askin’, but no answers are given. Apparently, LeeLeeTheSuperiorBeing believes that living a ‘barter only’ lifestyle is supremely superior to all of us terrible people, and while she/he does handle filthy lucre now and again, it’s not the same as when we do it. Oh, and we’re all responsible for the corrupt actions of mega-corps because we buy stuff.
Poor little baby cat. :(
Ol’Greg, no one knows what LeeLeeOne is talking about; it’s not just you.
Now, mind, I did make fun of LL1 with a prostitute reference, since she/he had it coming, but I do approve of the barter economy in principle, when applicable. Being able to trade favors (no, not those favors, Caine, you dirty girl) and services with your friends and neighbors is a good thing. I like being able to borrow my neigbhor Betsy’s mower in exchange for a gallon of gas or a casserole, since I don’t have to buy my own mower. It’s cool to run grocery store errands for the old folks on the block, and know they’ll check my mail and feed my cats when I’m out of town.
But LL1 seems to be off on some holier-than-thou tangent.
Oh, cicely, I know, I know. Still breaks my heart.
Oh boy. How did I miss a whole post about Hobby Lobby?
Eh… I don’t deal with them much. They don’t really carry the kinds of specific materials I need.
Buuuuut I can’t get all eco holier than though. I used to work with some of the worst paints out there, the ones that sign painters use. Also with resins and plastics. These things require care, masks, filters, special disposal, etc. They don’t have much there that I need.
I think I went there once and was surprised that they had liquin so I picked some up. The cashier didn’t ring it up. Apparently she thought it was a beverage I brought to the store and didn’t realize they sold it.
Yeah… hobby lobby. Guess I’ll go read through the comments.
It’s hard to keep up with everything here. And really, you’re probably not missing much when it comes to that topic.
“Hobby Lobby” does put me in mind, though, of a joke business my best friend and I keep trying to get off the ground. Sort of a singles chat line for the sartorially inhibited:
“1-900 Frottage Cottage, may I help you?”
[Crossthredulation of an OT comment]
Kieranfoy,
I don’t think so.
However, to properly respond, I need to know what you consider “common courtesy” to be, and how do you consider that the norms of Pharyngula differ significantly from that.
Josh:
Yes, Jadehawk and I were just discussing that in the HL thread. It’s a matter of routine here to trade homegrown vegetables, herbs, etc.
My husband trades a future sixer of home brewed Irish Stout for organic two row barley every year. I trade handmade soap for garden plants, etc. A wealth of that sort of thing goes on here, especially living rural. My husband recently agreed to fix up a friend’s motorcycle for six months of free meals & drinks. (Friend owns a restaurant in Bismarck.)
Ooo, what kind of restaurant (you know I love food)?
Bartering is especially important when you live rural, no doubt. It’s not just about the material goods and services people need to exchange (those are important), but about building up relationships of mutual obligation and dependability. Knowing that you can count on neighbors to come to your rescue if the roof caves in, or your pipes freeze, or you’ve run out of food and “civilization” can’t get to you as fast as your neighbors can.
I’ve also found it’s important to people like me who live in “cities” (as far as Vermont has anything resembling those. .lol), but who aren’t rich. Most of the people in my neighborhood are like me: relatively young singles, couples, or families, buying their first modest houses and having to think hard about household economies and living frugally. It’s a great economic bonus to most of us to know we can trade labor (maybe Rob and Kel can help me put in new floor joists, and I can help them install storm gutters or give them a week’s worth of home cooked food) and skills without spending money. It makes a modest income go a very long way.
That exchange also helps build up a sense of social and friendly interdependency that’s comforting and pleasant.
Feynmaniac:
Thanks for that description, gave me a good laugh.
Look who shows up on Pigliucci’s post on PZ: J.J. Ramsey.
Seriously, does this guy scour the internet looking for any posts relating to PZ?
I’m not convinced there would be an Internet right now if bartering had remained the main economic system, but IANAE (I am not an economist) nor am I a sociologist. But in my limited knowledge, it seems that under barter systems, people tended to specialize less, having to take care of most of their own needs themselves. Money is so much more flexible than bartering for goods. I mean, how big of a pile of wood carvings would it take to barter for a house? And what am I going to do with 30,000 wood carvings? Build another house, I guess.
Josh:
Mexican. Real Mexican, a rarity here in the whitebread state.
I don’t know that it’s especially important, it is very much the done thing though. It’s as you say, it helps in so many ways, economically and as a bonus in the societal sense.
Bismarck is hardly rural, and there’s constant bartering going on. My husband does a lot of electrical (wiring) for people, sometimes for an exchange of goods or services, sometimes it’s for cashy money, just a fair amount less than they’d have to pay a company to do it.
When you do things for people a la bartering, it does draw you closer in a community sense, and if there’s an emergency, there’s the serious bonus of someone not shooting your ass off if you show up at their door at 3 a.m. ;D
Oh, and did Potato Famine Jones ever give an indication of where he/she was from? It’s weird, but I just set up somebody’s email account the other day with something very similar to that name as the password.
I don’t think so, but I was curious about that also.
A story evoked by Josh#438:
Mine is NOT a sad story about kittens, it is creepy story about maggots.
I once worked on a job that had us living in tents on the back yard of a sheep farm (free range ranch). They were having a bad year. Pneumonia was killing about 10%. For carcass disposal they dug a pit 8ft x 8ft x one backhoe blade. One fine summer evening some of us took a walk over to the pit (archaeologists: we like dead things). There was no wind, very quiet. We could HEAR the maggots “chewing” from about 25ft. Then, when we were on the edge of the pit, we could SEE the carcasses not very subtly undulating. There was no bad smell. But sometimes, when waking from a nightmare, I can still hear it and see it.
Also, leeele1(whatever) seems to be about 14 years old, and y’all should be nicer to the kiddies. No matter how fucking brain-dead they seem, they need instruction, not a 2×4 upside the haid.
A search of LeeLeeOne yields a lot of results. She’s on other atheist blogs now and then, Hemant’s, RDnet and Mr.Deity. No surprise to find her on HuffPo! Also a ’07 post here on Pharyngula, which doesn’t quite square with her current persona.
Snippet:
And, snippets from the HuffPo LeeLeeOne:
Apparently, she didn’t always go with this whole ‘eschewing money’ shtick.
@kiyaroru:
Shudder. I know you’re right. I could hear those nasty things chewing too, but I had blocked that memory until you (thanks) reminded me. Ugh, life and death is so dreadful gruesome I can barely stand it.
I’ll tell you, though – ain’t nothing like the smell of dead human . “Oh, the troubles I’ve seen. . . ”
Huh, whaddayanow.
Apparently, last night I slept through a 3.8 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter only a few tens of kilometers away.
re:Josh#462
If you have not read Mary Roach’s Stiff, you should. It is funny, creepy and deeply respectful.
I find the thought of the DEATH EVENT less dreadful and frightening than the thought of the pile of goo left behind.
So right! It’s a fabulous book, as is anything Mary writes. She’s been an electronic pen-pal/correspondent of mine for years.
/Kw*K
Stiff was a good read. I was most fascinated with Susanne Wiigh-Masak and Promessa. I quite like the idea of corpses being turned into organic compost. As I doubt that will be anything close to a reality in the U.S. by the time I die, I’m going with donating the bod to science.
So, I just got back from PZ Myers’s panel discussion this evening with Bob Bossie and Sunsara Taylor (mentioned here). It was an interesting evening, although the format was a bit limiting to all of the speakers. (I would have preferred PZ giving a lecture, personally.) The subject was “morality to change the world”. Bob Bossie said little of anything specific, so the main views were PZ’s and Sunsara’s. Sunsara was advocating (as you might expect) for revolutionary change uprooting the predominant modes of society and replacing them with a communist framework. PZ was advocating for much more gradual change, arguing that immediate revolutionary change is probably impossible, and what we should do now is work to plant the seeds of a better more moral society in the future. And of course PZ being PZ, he particularly stressed the role of promoting critical thinking and skepticism.
(This is of course my take; hopefully PZ will share his own take later on.)
One thing I found particularly noteworthy was after the panel discussion, when the meeting was braking up and people were coming up to talk with individual speakers, Gregory Koger came up to thank PZ. Some regular Pharyngulites may remember a few blog posts about an incident involving Sunsara Taylor and the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society. PZ criticized the EHSC for their behavior disinviting Sunsara from speaking, and particularly for “dispatching police officers to handcuff and arrest the videographer” (who was Gregory Kroger).
Apparently the case against Gregory Kroger is still ongoing, and the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society is still pressing criminal trespass charges against him, which I find appalling. In fact, there was a court appearance just a few days ago during which he and his lawyer were apparently held in contempt of court for having a website and discussing a care, in apparent flagrant violation of their civil rights. (I say apparent, because so far I’ve only heard one side of the story so I’m withholding judgment, but it sounds pretty bad.)
If anyone reading this has any influence with the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society, I hope you will put pressure on them to get them to drop the charges. I understand that won’t make the contempt charges and any other state charges go away, but it would help, and be a step towards acknowledging that the way they have behaved in this whole matter is not exactly the ethical ideal they should be striving towards.
It’s quiet…too quiet….
Update on the Merion school laptop spying incident, here.
Oh, that Mexican bishop blaming the Church’s problems on homosexuality and a sexual culture also blamed sex ed. Did anyone ever teach these fuckers about taking responsibility?
One thing I like about Latin culture is the brutal honesty. So I loved this:
another useful form of barter in cities is trading service-industry perks. since most minimum-wage service industry jobs try to attract employees without properly paying them or giving them proper benefits, they usually get various free foods. but it’s not precisely possible or sensible to eat nothing but dozen old bagels, or nothing but milk and coffee, etc. so instead you trade perks with others, and it comes out to halfway nutritious daily meals for free for everyone
I know of at least two cases where one of our cats got into the house to have kittens, but couldn’t get back to take care of them. One time on a top shelf in my parents’ bedroom.
I have to say I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about barter. I do see the good sides, but unfortunately the step from barter to a moonlight economy is a short one, and I do have some sympathy for the tax people cracking down hard even on what may seem ‘innocent’ cases of barter.
that’s because you come from a civilized country, where taxes are the means of community support.
this is not such a country.
Jadehawk:
I remember that well from my long ago waitressing days. That was waaay back in the early ’70s, and our employers in the food service industry had a hell of a nerve to call what we got a paycheck. Starvation would have been a real threat if not for tips and the perks, which did get bartered.
Oh. I know, I know.
Catching up on both the last thread and this one for what I missed.
Ring Tailed Lemurian – Saying I did not strike you as a juvenile wanker may be the nicest compliment I ever received on this blog. Thanks. I found you non juvenile as well and found no evidence of wankerhood when we shook hands. :^)
*makes note to shave before Copenhagen*
Sili,
Oh. I thought JeffreyD was referring to a lack of spooge on the hand…
John, was referring to both hair and genetic detritus. Sili just has a cleaner mind than most of us. (laughing)
Whilst I don’t shave—and have the beard to prove it—I’ve always understood one stands before a mirror…
JeffreyD, I know… Couldn’t resist the juvenile joke. :)
Abandoning the Hobby Lobby thread for one where the discussion is more interesting.
I own a small business and I’v found that bartering is much, much easier when you’re the king/queen. In the past any time I arranged a trade in kind I always ended up having difficulty justifying it to my bosses. They always felt that the value that I got for our stuff didn’t equal the value of what we received. Even when I had actual cash values for labour and everything. The subjectivity inherent in bartering is downright maddening. Mind you, those bosses were difficult about everything.
These days it’s much simpler, all of our signage has been done by barter for instance. I’m now in a rural town and I used to joke that we took all forms of payment except goats and chickens. We lost a chook to a fox recently so I’m now seriously canvasing customers for payment in chickens.
FossilFishy:
Definitely rural. :D
I think that, in countries with a Goods and Services Tax (GST), most bartering is part of the “black economy”, and it either reduces Government funds (and thus services) or causes other taxes to rise; therefore, it benefits its practitioners at the expense of the community at large.
John Morales, I LIKE juvenile jokes, go for it!
I was remembering the great line about masturbation: Cheap, clean, convenient, and you never have to walk home alone in the rain.
Ciao
John, that came up in the HL thread, along with the point that someone who claims to live by barter alone voluntarily withdraws from society, and doesn’t contribute to society.
well, the U.S. doesn’t have a VAT.
and even so, I just cannot honestly say that a poor community which fills the gaping holes in the social safety net (like the food barter to prevent malnutrition* I mentioned earlier) with cooperation and barter is on the same level as the “buddy” deals of businesspeople trying to avoid paying taxes.
Though, now I’m really interested in the legal aspects; at which point does a neighborly favor turn into black market labor?
– – – – – – – –
*you know, just like I can accept theft to prevent starving, even though I generally think theft is a rather bad idea.
Indeed. If that stupid sod of a subject won’t cough up the goods, trinkets, or cute virgin daughter, you can always toss him in the dungeon and collect anyways. Simple and effective, albeit a loyal troop of guards with big axes, and a castle will strong walls and a deep moat, are useful precautions if the silly sods ever organise.
Caine @486, ah, thanks.
I’ve not followed that thread, because I’ve never before heard of Hobby Lobby and neither the OP or first few comments held any interest to me.
I’ll check it out.
John, I think it was ambulocetacean who brought up the societal aspect; and if I remember right, is in Australia.
It’s also sex with someone you love.
Long ago, in the Land of Lame Excuses ……..
Another day, another pathetic attempt to shift the blame! This time one Bishop Felipe Arizmendi has the gall to claim that all the porn which is available is forcing priests to sexually abuse children. Yes, really!
I have questions for him. What are priests doing sitting all day watching porn on the internet? Don’t they have work to do, or praying, or something?
I would love to hear from him, too, how this explains the well-documented goings on in the 1950s in Ireland, pre-television, pre-internet, pre-electricity in some cases. I am not holding my breath.
(Apologies if someone has already caught this: I am not keeping a firm grip on all threads.)
Josh, OSG – no idea if you, or anyone else here, is interested in Gay history. However, you are the OSG so I use your name as a post point. Anyway, there is a short and fascinating little documentary called Gay Sex Before Zippers at
http://www.archive.org/details/ssfHAYBVDCT
I found it very interesting, but I love most social history.
BTW, lots of free books and movies at archive.org, just look around. Funny (unintentionally) sex ed films from the 50’s, and free downloads of movie classics such as Reefer Madness and Sex Madness, Night of the Living Dead, etc. Great site on which to waste loads of time.
I rather liked how The Grauniad reported a recent statement by the UK branch of Child Rapists International (at the end of a larger article, Vatican climbdown over sex abuse remarks by senior cardinal (my emboldening)):
Any idea how many lesbians and how much bacon is needed to appease Eyjafjallajökull? Come of think of it, there’s a few virgins around, which have a long tradition of doing the trick…
Queue to jump in forms on the left please. Bacon to the right.
I’m sure my Aunt Lucretia is a virgin, despite having two offspring. A woman that prudish couldn’t possibly have had sex. Besides, if you looked at her husband, that’d be enough to put any woman off of sex forever.
‘Tis Himself @ #491 – yep, with someone you love. However, if you sit on your hand for 30 minutes first, putting it to sleep, it can be like “gettin strange”.
Wow, I really need to start taking my meds on a regular basis.
Exactly. It’s one of those pesky shades-of-grey things.
Speak for yourself!
I hardly need a mirror to see my palms …
Your self-loathing is so cute. :P
Well, someone has to pick up the slack when Walton isn’t around. Nasty work, but it has to be done.