Half of Brits have been injured by biscuits. How far the mighty empire has fallen.
Category Archives: Weird
Appropriate Name
And now for something completely different: a near-miss for the Darwin Award. A man who was shocked and burned chasing a rabbit. His last name was Asher.
As is often the case, the Freeper comments are quite entertaining.
Just In Case Things Weren’t Bad Enough
Joe Biden has been acting president.
Birds Of A Feather?
A picture has surfaced that may depict Hitler playing chess with Lenin. There is cause for skepticism, of course:
Historian Helen Rappaport, who has just written a book called “Conspirator: Lenin in Exile”, said the etching was probably a “glorious piece of fantasy”.
She said: “In 1909 Lenin was in France and there is no evidence that he was in Vienna.
“In October he went to Liege in Belgium and in November he went to Brussels. He would have visited Vienna before and after that year.
“He liked the place and went there because he travelled around Europe on trains, but he wouldn’t have been there long enough to meet a young Hitler.
“He was also as bald as a bat by 1894 with just hair on the sides of his head.
“And when in exile he was not known as Lenin and instead used a number of aliases.
“The person believed to be Lenin in the etching may well have been one of his revolutionary or Bolshevik associates who was misidentified.
“It may even have been an Austrian socialist with whom he associated in the Second International.
So, maybe it wasn’t Lenin. That right winger Adolf Hitler was hanging out and playing chess with some other socialist.
So When Does School Start, Again?
And these people want to take over our health care? One of the reasons that the administration is tanking in the polls is that it increasingly looks like the gang that can’t shoot straight.
Animal Cruelty
Oh, the humanity.
You Couldn’t Make This Up
Reportedly, in the telecon last week where the president informed the rabbis that he was a partner with God in matters of life and death (I think I know who he thinks the senior partner in that relationship is), the music on hold was Deutschland Uber Alles.
Hilarious.
[Update a while later]
Didn’t he say back during the campaign that determining when life begins was above his pay grade? I guess now that he’s gotten a promotion to be a co-God, he’s perfectly comfortable with deciding when it ends.
A Strange Product
I’m shopping at American for flights from SFO to LAX, and they have a variety of non-stops for fifty-nine bucks. But what’s bizarre is that they offer one-stops as well (e.g., through Seattle, or Dallas). And they only charge four hundred bucks for them. How many people buy one? You have to really want the miles, and like riding in airplanes. I wonder if it’s just an artifact of their reservations software, that no one has bothered to fix? Or if they’ve ever actually sold one?
Moving Day
Some thoughts on solar-system engineering:
One idea out there is to change the orbit of a good-sized asteroid or comet — about 100 kilometers in diameter — so that it swings by one of the inner planets and then back out to, say, Jupiter. As the cosmic tow truck passes our target planet, it uses its gravitational attraction to tug the planet in the desired direction, then hurtles back to slingshot around Jupiter, picking up more energy in the process. Repeat a few thousand times with a few score asteroids and there you go: Mars in your backyard.
This technique has been proposed as a way to drag Earth away from the ever-brightening sun that otherwise will eventually snuff out life on our planet. It has some downsides, though. One is that each time the asteroid comes by it’ll exert a tidal force ten times greater than the moon’s, wreaking havoc on the oceans and weather. Another is that some Poindexter on the relocation team is bound to make a unit conversion error along the way, and when the asteroid slams into the Earth — well, that’ll be a real pisser. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about things like that if we’re moving Mars or Venus: if we make one planet go boom, we’ve still got a spare.
Once we get the planet where we want it, though, we’ve still got our hands full. However bad the environment on Earth is, Venus’s is worse. Atmospheric pressure is roughly 92 times ours, the planet has no free oxygen or water to speak of, and the surface temp is hot enough to melt lead. Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere but its temperature, while chilly, isn’t so bad, and it’ll get warmer when it’s closer to the sun. That alone might cause enough melting at the Martian poles to release ice-bound CO2 and create a greenhouse effect. If not, we can always try focusing the sun’s rays with orbital mirrors or crashing (smaller) asteroids into the ice.
I don’t see a calculation of what would happen to Venus’ surface temp if it were farther out. Most terraforming plans of either planet don’t generally include moving them to a better location, but it’s worth thinking about — it is, after all, the first three rules of real estate.
On Being A Chicken Abortionist
Some meditations. I, too, have sinned, and probably will again in the morning.
On the other hand, there’s the old saying in management seminars about dedication to a project: in a ham and eggs breakfast, the chicken was “involved,” but the hog was committed.