Report Xapper's Profile

Always annoying when companies find ways to rip you off with extra fees…

Getting a self selected bad project early on might help toughen you up, or give you bad habits that will make it happen too often…

Well, mortgages aren’t quite like many forms of debt. At least you have an actual asset to offset them, unless you manage to go underwater (have a mortgage larger than the total value of the property, which is certainly bad). That actually happened to me, because the housing market went into a severe slump, but it only cost me about 45 K in the end over 7 years… I later made more than twice that back on another property, but I’m still annoyed from the first loss. But paying rent wouldn’t have been much if any cheaper, so it wasn’t really a big deal.

Yes, the non-cuckoo clock, with a variety of bird sounds, has a light sensor. Even if you aren’t bothered by the sounds at night, it also helps the battery to last longer.

My niece just got the autopsy results about a day ago, it said her death was caused by her failure to take her diabetes medication, and that her organs were otherwise healthy. But my niece says it appears to have been mostly based on her medical history, rather than the actual autopsy per se (i.e., lazy). For example, they never tested for gas (methane) presence, which was detected nearby. We probably won’t get any better results in the future…

Yes, very nice to talk to my cousin, and his presence caused my mom to behave better during his visit, not a small benefit. I actually had a little fun acting as a reasonably good host… And I got him to eat some of the leftovers my sister left behind (the kind of food neither my mom nor I would eat, but he liked). As well as sharing the food I do like…

Just hiding your info is probably safer… if you can. I have read many books set in dystopias where the characters had to maintain fake profiles to avoid government persecution, but it’s a risky process unless you really need it. On a small scale, of course, I have been through that during my hacking days at the university. Not something I’d want to do these days.

Well,at least your relatives have managed to keep out of the most dangerous stuff. I was a bit bemused that your uncle was so concerned about the pressure of the HK schools (since the UK isn’t exactly considered a slacker system), but I have heard about that kind of pressure before, to some extent.

I had thought about talking about some stuff related to how China reportedly treats its former citizens living outside China, but it is a rather sensitive topic. I saw a movie made in 1939 in the US, about how the German’s treated their former citizens living outside Germany during WWII (convincing them to act as spies and fifth columnists), and it was shockingly similar to reports about how China does it today (in terms of the techniques used). Of course, ‘reports’, especially compared to a Hollywood movie 80 years old, isn’t exactly evidence or proof, it just that they sounded so similar that it surprised me…

On another topic, about 6 weeks ago I ran into a weird email article, that said that because women are better at reading than men, when they hit a hard STEM course designed to weed out the less capable, it’s easier for women to switch their career path toward writing or journalism, which “unfairly” discourages women from a STEM path. So, because women have more options, they are being disadvantaged… Not one word of sympathy for the men who don’t have other options, and/or aren’t very good at reading… (Of course, this wasn’t a problem for me, I’m good at both math and reading.) Biochemistry is the ‘weeding’ out class encountered by the author of the above article (yes, female). It’s also a bit ironic that at UCI physics majors were forced to pass the same English lit classes the English majors took… who didn’t have to take the same physics classes as physics majors (this is all first year stuff).

That feghoot story about the bioluminescent shark lure was actually inspired by an article about the discovery of a glowing shark, and it was found in an Asian fish market…

Apparently jellyfish mostly use bioluminescence as a defense against predators, either to startle them or confuse them. It can also be used for warning purposes, or even as a type of burglar alarm. Not so much to attract mates for jellyfish.
Example article: https://www.reed.edu/biology/professors/srenn/pages/teaching/web_2010/mi_site/index.html

Jellyfish don’t have any real brain, just some kind of neural net to coordinate motion, fire their stingers and probably support some simple trophic behavior. Oddly enough, they do supposedly sleep, or at least spend part of their time dormant, the first animal discovered lacking a central nervous system to do so.

I suspected climax forest might be a bit obscure, but I have run into the concept occasionally.

What? Axe is a strange spelling? ‘Colour’ me surprised… (it’s spelled ‘color’ in the US). How is axe spelled in the UK, just ‘ax’?

If you want to switch this to email, I’m fine with that. (Though please don’t delete the stuff we’ve already posted in MAL, if you can avoid that. I’m not sure I’ve saved all the puns in there yet.) I’ll post my email with a PM shortly (not surprisingly, there’s a bit of wordplay in my email address). Though I'm not *actually* writing this in email currently, but in a Google Doc; that's what eliminated the extra lines. Not really relevant, I'm just being anal.

Related to our previous discussion about frying oil:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190823094825.htm

This topic sort of fascinates me (your mileage may differ):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/can-new-species-evolve-from-cancers-maybe-heres-how-20190819/

I was a bit alarmed by a new system for nuclear powered cruise missiles Russia is testing; they had one blow up recently, killing 5 nuclear researchers, and then lying consistently about it. I mean, sure, if the objective is to fly a nuclear bomb into your enemies territory & then explode it, worrying that the missile itself will leave nuclear contamination behind wherever it flies might seem like a minor consideration, but… Having it blow up during testing isn’t great.

My local library, where I rent DVDs, has just stopped charging a rental fee ($1), so now I can get them for free. Ironically, they started this new policy on my (dead) sister’s birthday. Also, one of the last DVDs I had to pay for featured the death of Iron Man…

======

I know I’ve sort of done this before.... *

What drives Pepper Potts absolutely up the wall?

The fact that whenever Tony Stark becomes Iron Man (wears the suit), it absolutely leaves all his clothes wrinkled up. And. He. Never. Ever. Uses. An. Iron.

(Claims it would violate the terms of his patent & copyright...)

(* ... which just makes it all the more ironic! Sort of…)
======

Imago - The final “adult” stage of a metamorphic insect, usually with wings and capable of sexual reproduction. Plural: imagines.

And for a butterfly, Imago stands for ‘I’m a go!’ (for takeoff…)
======

Bad Omen

Many years ago (about 18), my dad was taking chemo for his cancer, one that should have been fairly easily cured (Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma). I would drive him to his chemo; the office was located on an aptly named street called Sycamore. And the chemo definitely left him feeling sick-a-more…

On one of the drives, I joked “I’m getting more and more sick of Sycamore” (a reference to how it left him feeling). He was feeling so bad on his third visit, they cancelled the treatment and put him immediately in the hospital, where he spent the next couple of weeks.

And then he died… :( Basically a very bad reaction to the chemotherapy. Unfortunately, this is a true story.
=====

Euphoric: You for ick? Eu…

After listening to the beautiful sounds coming from a singer, an appreciative critic proclaimed “Euphony…”

But the singer was offended and stormed out, insisting loudly that she was NOT a phony…
=======

Harper’s Ferry - A Holey Mission

In 1859 a sort of terrorist attack by the abolitionist and religious zealot John Brown was directed against Harper’s Ferry, and the Arsenal situated there, with the intention of liberating the guns and ammunition kept there to arm a slave revolt they hoped to inspire. The Army caught them there and filled them full of holes, “arse ‘n all”.

This was the spark that is generally believed to have set off the American Civil War...
=====

I didn’t really have many feghoots this time, but there was one I was sort of gestating on. It would go something like this:

So cheesy...

I’ve been having bad dreams lately, which seems to have started shortly after I heard about the crash of the Israel moon mission a while back called Beresheet. The craft was carrying a large number of tardigrades, probably spilling thousands of the microscopic, dehydrated ‘water bears’ all over the lunar surface. As durable as tardigrades are, they can’t really live on the Moon, though they should be able to survive there for awhile.

But what happens if they manage to survive long enough for the intense radiation to cause them to mutate? Perhaps even mutate enough that they could actually survive, even flourish? I know, it sounds like lunacy, but it isn’t completely impossible… Is it?

What if they can flourish on a diet of lunar dust?

As you probably know, most of the lunar surface consists of ‘mares’ (latin for sea, plural maria), dark flat volcanic plains of basalt. What if the ‘water bears’ adapt to living in these lunar mares (seas)? And even, for no particular reason, develop bioluminescence?

We could end up with a weirdly green lit moon, looking like a piece of cheese covered in green mold.

That’s what’s giving me Lunar night mares...

It has been a bit longer than usual. I mainly noticed because of some significant news I got, right after I last wrote (it had probably already happened, I just didn’t know yet). I even considered writing another update message, but decided the news only glancingly affects you, so it wasn’t needed. I’ll get to said news a bit further down.

Where did the extra lines come from? Partially a result of moving text through three different editing systems; somewhere along the line, extra lines got inserted between paragraphs. I suspect it is the usual problem with CRLF; some editing systems store new lines as just a CR (carriage return, a character used to simulate the return of the old typewriter platen/cylinder all the way to the left, to make it easier to start a new line of text), but other systems use both a CR and a LF (a character that represents a Line Feed on a typewriter, that actually rolls the platen/cylinder forward a line). The ones that just use a CR automatically generate a LF when they see a CR, so moving text between such systems can cause a CRLF to turn into two lines, if the process is poorly handled. Clear as mud? It’s all old weird stuff... That analysis did suggest a possible solution, which I’m trying out right now…. I’ll see if it works in the end. Yep, it did, no more annoying extra lines.

I absolutely agree that Deep Six is getting ridiculously weak opponents, I was thinking the same thing.

Maybe she stutters when she is excited/nervous?

Yes, it’s a huge genre in the US, though it isn’t nearly as common as it used to be. I have seen westerns set in Australia too, which had some similar frontier issues. Some westerns are pretty good, but they also made a number of mediocre ones as well.

You may very well be right about flight rules banning liquids generally, I just know about the US ones, and even them I haven’t actually encountered in real life (they started up after my last flight).

It’s always quite annoying when you pick what you think will be an interesting project or job, and then it turns out to be a stinker, and you have no one but yourself to blame. Takes most of the fun out of complaining… It’s also pretty common to find that a company has made a poor choice of tools to use, picking them for some silly reason…

Oh well, the lack of debt is definitely a great benefit at least. Freedom from excessive debt is a great relief, and translates into a real increase in freedom of choice going forward.

Meditation can help in the future with health benefits. It can also relieve anxiety to some extent. Breath control is a key component…

No, the bird noises don’t bother me, I’m used to them. The non-cuckoo bird clock only makes loud noises when brightly lit, so it is pretty quiet at night. The cuckoo doesn’t care what time of night it is… but like I said, I’m used to it.

Around here the tradition is green cheese (even if that doesn’t really make much sense), but swiss cheese has the advantage of using the holes to stand in for meteorite craters.

Okay, since you brought it up, I’ll pass on the big news. (I apologize a bit for how I’m going to tell it.)

My sister is definitely not going to move back in with us to help look after my mother, after all.

She is dead. In fact, she was probably dead when I last wrote, her body just hadn’t been found yet. The last time anyone spoke to her was Wednesday, and her body was found on Monday, when her daughter asked the police to do a welfare check. I feel a little bad about ragging about her in the last message, but only a little. Nothing I said was actually incorrect. (I know you are quite fond of your sister…) She was 62 when she died, about a month short of 63.

She appears to have procrastinated so long she died before she could make the move. A move that might have saved her life. We still aren’t sure what she died of; there was a gas leak in the area, it was hot, she probably had the A/C off, and she had a lot of things wrong with her, healthwise, including not taking her diabetes medicine, because she couldn’t afford it (she didn’t have any prescription coverage, and didn’t even realize it). Supposedly they did an autopsy, but it’s taking awhile to get the results. She’s already been cremated, I think.

One of my cousins drove down on Monday to tell us (she lives about 40 miles north of us), since no one appeared to have our new phone number to let us know (except, of course, my sister), and no one remembered my email. My niece (my sister’s daughter) came down to visit us, on the way to make arrangements at the cemetery. I gave her a few thousand to cover the burial & incidental expenses.

My sister also managed to take our garage opening remote with her when she left, and it was lost before I realized it was gone (our car is programmed to be able to remotely operate the garage, but it was the only other working remote we had otherwise). That’s going to be a problem, since it is a pretty old garage opener, and when the car is being serviced or replaced, it’s going to be hard to get the garage open. Lots of complications…

On the plus side, I can now get myself named as the sole trustee, which will greatly simplify many of the financial matters in the future, including reducing the taxes to be paid when my mom eventually dies. And of course, I’ll now inherit my mom’s entire estate… Which means, among other things, I could continue to live in this house, which I otherwise couldn’t afford.

Still not sure how I’m going to handle my mom’s care on my own… At least there is now no chance I’ll get stuck looking after both of them at the same time…

If I sound cold blooded about her death, it’s partially because I’ve had weeks to get used to it, and partially because it’s kind of a coping mechanism for me, that I use for a lot of problems. It definitely was a shock, and it has also made me think about other stuff I’m procrastinating about, both in general and stuff that might kill me… My mom just can’t remember that it happened, so she isn’t traumatized. I mostly avoided talking about it very much for a while, but over the last couple of days I’ve started bringing it up. She keeps thinking my sister is still living with us, and just talked to her this morning, so I finally started correcting such hallucinations, to little effect.

Another thing that happened is one of my first cousins came down from Silicon Valley for 2.5 days to help us wrap up 4 years of taxes we hadn’t filed (embarrassed eye roll). He’s been our accountant for taxes for many years. It was actually a nice visit, even with the tax work. He even helped set up a new printer/copier I bought a few months ago, which helped a lot with the taxes. I was too busy to get around to it myself, like so much around here. We had some nice talks. He left Friday morning.

‘Get a gem in eye’ isn’t an expression (though it is a pun for Gemini), but it is possible to happen if you grind or shape gemstones or even set them.

Creating a fake internet history is only illegal if you use it to defraud someone, or use it to supply false info to the government. I.e., post fake info in a blog or tweet, probably not a problem, but creating a whole false identity would be.


We discussed using food delivery services a while back, and I was reluctant. Here’s another example of why:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746600105/1-in-4-food-delivery-drivers-admit-to-eating-your-food

Here’s an example of what seems to me like an incredibly idiotic article/theory going around:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201907/what-if-consciousness-comes-first


BTW, there has been a lot of trouble in Hong Kong lately, hopefully you aren’t planning on visiting soon, it might be dangerous.

===========

Give a country enough of Yur Rope…

During WWII, Germany wanted to have all of Yur Rope, and eventually ended up with enough of Yur Rope (Europe) to hang themselves.
========

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a loaf of bread…

A man was looking for something very special, that would make him stronger and hardier. A permanent buff that would be invaluable in his struggles within this fantastic world.

Finally, traveling through a forest, he came to a particular tree, that had a loaf of bread hanging from one of it’s highest branches. With some difficulty he managed to climb up the tree until he had reached the loaf, which he proceeded to eat… Thus gaining him the benefits of hy-brid (high bread) vigor…

Not that it did him much good when the bear ate him. :( The bear was too heavy for it to make it all the way up to the top of the tree, so it acquired the buff through an unwitting intermediary...

Don’t try this in your local woods…
=====

Once a sap, always a sap

Many ants can be found fossilized in amber, when they were trapped in pine resin/sap, which later hardened into amber.

One day a group of ants was randomly crawling over such fossilized ants in a piece of amber, when they discovered that they were the same exact species, and some kind of weird resonance (resin-ants) phenomena existed between them.

Unfortunately, all it did was make the ants seek out their own pine sap to get trapped in…

Not too useful, but definitely sappy.
=====

I always seem to be cough-y in the morning before I have my coffee*, which seems unnecessarily ironic….

(* I don’t actually drink coffee, but it is otherwise fairly accurate.)
======

The morning after my niece visited the cemetery where my sister is going to be buried, to make arrangements, I got an email recommendation from Amazon for the ebook My Sister’s Grave, by Robert Dugoni. At $1.99, it was a lot cheaper than the actual grave...
======

The Fisher of Men *

A mile beneath the ocean, far too low for any sunlight to reach that far, the deep diving sub floated in utter darkness, squeezed by the immense pressure.

Well, *almost* complete darkness; there was no trace of sunlight, no cheery reds, oranges or yellows… But there was some light, generated by many of the local denizens, who used flashes of (mostly) blue light or glowing spots to attract mates, prey, or for general signalling purposes. Everything from softly glowing jellyfish to the carefully directed beams from flashlight fish (aka, “le petite peugeot”), who used a special set of extra eyelids to cover and reveal light generated by special organs above their eyes like headlights, that housed bioluminescent bacteria.

But what has captured the attention of most of the crew is a glowing shark. This is not, by any means, the first glowing shark to be found native to the depths, but it was the first one to be observed in its natural habitat, instead of as bycatch in Asian fish markets… It was also much larger, though a bit oddly formed. Clearly a shark, it was also a rather weird looking one.

As they managed to follow the glowing shark through the water, one of the scientists noticed that most of the other bioluminescent light observable around them seemed to disappearing, especially directly ahead, around the shark. Was the shark scaring the other denizens into dimming their lights? Oddly, the dimming effect seemed to be spreading, until the only light visible (besides the shark itself) was coming from behind the sub, directly away from the shark.

That didn’t make much sense, the shark already swam through that area, why was it only dimming now?

Another of the scientists, suddenly struck by a terrifying conjecture, flipped on the sub’s outside lights (turned off to avoid affecting the visibility or behavior of the local sea life), briefly causing outraged outcries from the others, but revealed in the light was what looked like an enormous mouth, almost completely surrounding the sub. It was the mouth & body of the colossal fish that was blocking all the other bioluminescent light from being visible, a fish now revealed to have been using the glowing ‘shark’ as a very large fishing lure.

Except it was the sub being lured, and the fish that was angling for a catch.

(One of the scientists, considering the size of the fish and the lure, suspected it was primarily fishing for Sperm whales or giant or colossal squids. Shortly after that, none of the scientists suspected anything else…)
(To be clear, because they were all dead…)

(* Not to be confused with Jesus, who has been self described as a ‘fisher of men’, though he appears to have been more interested in the catching of ‘sole’.)

(Not much of a pun payoff here… But at least it continues the string of coming to a bad end stories...)
=======

An ant was investigating a woodsman’s shack, and encountered his main tool, an ax.

The ant immediately got very excited, and started crawling up the handle. After awhile, it reached the head; unfortunately (for the ant), the woodsman properly maintained his tools, and the head was well oiled to prevent rust. This made it difficult for the ant, but it persevered, and eventually reached the top, albeit in a rather damp and bedraggled state.

“At last!”, the ant exclaimed, “I’ve finally achieved my goal, the quest I’ve attempted for the last year. I’ve finally managed to climax!”

(no sexual meaning intended...)

(BTW, one of the things you probably won’t find in a climax forest is an ax to climb, since lack of disturbances, like logging, is one of the prerequisites for a climax forest. That’s a bit of irony, but seems to be quite literally true.)
======

A Sinister Turn

A student studying fighting techniques complained to his teacher that his attacks almost always failed. “Triangle” was the terse response he received from the teacher. The student’s baffled expression drew a more complete explanation:

“Try-angle. Attack from an angle, at a tangent, instead of always coming straight at your opponent.”

The student thought about that, then tried putting it into action; instead of coming in along the hypotenuse, the shortest and most direct path, he charged in at an angle, then abruptly turned 90 degrees to strike at the opponent. It worked! More often than not, the abrupt change in direction caught them a little off guard.

“Good. You not only triangled, you even managed to find the ‘right’ angle, and targeted their left side.”

“But teacher, I actually made a left turn at the end…”

“I meant a right turn as in 90 degrees; and it was the fact you turned left at the end that meant you attacked their left side. They were so surprised, it was like they were being attacked by a hippopotamus.”

“I never knew trigonometry could be so useful in a fight…”
=======

A Soggy Success

Standing up to his neck in the ocean, bargaining with mermaids and mermen for his products was not an experience Felix had ever expected to engage in. But since they primarily paid in pearls or beautiful shells, it turned out to be pretty lucrative for him.

It’s fortunate that he had already learned years before how to speak in Mer chants before he became a merchant himself…

Even if cats don’t like being wet.
======

A Fall from Grace

After he managed to trip the whole group of people into falling down into a large mass of ferns, the demon cackled in glee at the success of his in-fern-all plot.
======

In an alternate world, in which Japan adopted “advanced” technology on its own, well before Admiral Perry could force it, traditional elements eventually staged a rebellion. Dressed in Samurai outfits, they managed to briefly ambush the military leader of Japan, intending to kill him.

The leader of the rebels, approaching the military leader of the “modern” Japan, snarled “Shogun!” just before he was going to attack and try to kill him (with a sword, of course).

The Shogun whipped a revolver out of a concealed holster and shot him dead, and menaced his few remaining comrades with it until his own forces arrived.

“Was that enough of a ‘show’ for you,” he sneered…
=======

Cock a doodle #($*#)!

When you grow up on a farm, one of the annoyances a young child often has to deal with are roosters (aka Toms). They often have an overdeveloped sense of their own importance, jacked up on testosterone as they are, and often have poor tempers they take out on anything weak enough for them to bully. Since even the older members of the family (comparatively) usually went through a period of being harassed by a rooster as well, customs are to ‘cuss toms’.

Their habit of waking everyone up (loudly) in the morning just adds to the custom…

(BTW, much of this is loosely based on some of my dad’s experiences growing up on a farm. When he was a small child, he hated the bullying rooster so much he managed to get it killed via lying to one of his sisters, telling her she was supposed to kill him for dinner, when she was actually supposed to kill one of the hens. He got into a lot of trouble for that…)
=======

Watch where you sit

Assonance usually means repeated vowel sounds between nearby words, but it can also mean you’ve placed your “ass on ants” (usually means you also have ants on ass), which will not improve your writing at all… Not even to the ants.
======

I conceded people often would be very poor guests, but I can see dead people often would be even worse...

Yes, there is a warning, so that should normally be okay (sometimes I'm typing ahead when a button gets triggered, and questions get answered before I know they are being asked, which makes me sound sluggish...). I didn't have any problems last time... Or this time! Except cleaning up all the extra blank lines that get inserted when I copy/paste into MAL...

I doubt bite-bots will end up doing much better than hammerbots... There was another newish design recently, some sort of weird punch device that briefly slides a spinner forward just enough to slam the opponent, but it didn't seem to accomplish a lot. And of course, both Tombstone and Duck had surprising losses. Tombstone burned quite a bit, only getting counted out in the last couple of seconds (against his rival, rotator, who was voted most destructive bot last year), and Duck had another annoying loss by decision.

You do know that the interviewer is a new person this year, right? It's not like a bot whacked her in the jaw and gave her a stutter... :\

Few wild animals, even normally domesticated ones are gentle or friendly once they go feral. Wild stallions often maintain herds of mares, and try to keep them safe from men trying to catch them. There was a scene in a movie I saw recently, where the son of an established rancher went almost feral himself; he was trying so hard to catch this one white horse he deliberately knocked another cowboy (native American, who was working for his family) right off a cliff and killed him. Also shot a deputy, etc. At the end of the movie, his own father had to get into a gunfight with him, and killed him (the bad son was the one who lost).

The salt should be easy to transport back with you, but they might not allow you to transport 'dangerous' oil back (if you are flying; the US has all sorts of silly restrictions on flying with liquids). I'd just leave it behind where you are staying, the next person who stays there might find it useful. It doesn't sound reasonable to just throw the pan away though (if that's what your sister meant)... also wouldn't just leave old oil in the pan to get rancid and mildly contaminate new food being cooked there. Laziness is great, as long as it doesn't make you sick!

Everyone is launching satellites... If this continues, they will start launching garbage into orbit... (kidding)

Yes, I had a number of working experiences that shaped me to some extent. I'm lucky I didn't pick up much in the way of bad habits during my university/hacking days (some might debate that). The first company I worked at I was often clashing with the company president (small company), and the frustration from that is what killed most of my arrogance and ambition, there just isn't much point in fighting with the guy signing the checks. Even though I feel he deserves to get my best advice, if he isn't going to listen, so be it. The next company had a lot of smart coworkers, who were also occasionally making some serious mistakes (overestimating their capabilities), but once again, I had to live with it. The third company was the most bureaucratic, and I *really* didn't have much influence there. Things might have turned out very differently if I had ever worked at a well managed company that didn't end up messing things up for the company. Or if I was able to overwhelm everyone with my vast (& mythical) powers of persuasion... Or if I had worked at a large company with a lot of small to medium sized projects I could move around between -- that would have been fun.

Of course, my reluctance to move around all over the place was part of the problem, I never looked very far afield for jobs. I would have loved working for NASA, or something similar...

Living expenses tend to be quite low for students, but once you graduate, expenses go up a lot more (unless you are living at home with the parental units). Staying unencumbered with a spouse and children does keep costs down, but not completely. Do you still have some student debts to pay back to the government to look forward to? It's usually worth it to hang on to whatever money you can manage...

I'm not really into spiritual growth, aside from knowing who I am, and avoiding going down bad paths. I also enjoy meditation to some extent, or at least what I call meditation. Those are good ideas...

If they came up with a treatment that restored my health (mentally too) back to when I was 30 or so, would I take it? If it wasn't ridiculously expensive (saddling me with 40 years of debt or worse), probably. It would be fun to learn some new skills and start over. Imagine living in a world partially filled with restored old timers, working alongside people in their first cycle, it might produce some interesting social dynamics. There would have to be a lot fewer babies though...

Crickets are supposed to be one of the most nutritious insects... I once accidentally ended up with a mouthful of maggots (moth larva, they look much like fly larva), I did not care for the experience... (I managed to control my natural desire to spew all the food in every direction once I saw all the maggots floating in my bowl of cereal, and walked calmly and carefully down the corridor to the nearest bathroom and spit all of it into the toilet. Then dumped the cereal.)

Earthquakes vary quite a bit in how they feel, depending on the type, and what kind of soil the building is on, or how tall it is. Sometimes there are vertical shocks, sometimes horizontal rolling, side to side shaking, etc. I've felt several, but none of them were ever at dangerous levels where I was. Duration varies too. One of the worst was when I was a child sleeping in the upper level of a bunk bed, with lots of horizontal shaking.

The cuckoo clock actually belongs to my parents (singular now), they picked it up on a vacation to Germany. It still works, though my parrot did take a small bite out of it once (the decorative wooden exterior). She liked to chew on stuff like wood and cardboard, and I let her incautiously get too close once. Like I said, being called coo-coo always seems on target around here... Seeing the little bird come out is mildly entertaining. We have another bird clock, that plays the sound of a different bird at each hour (12 varieties); some of them are fairly droll.

The Pocket Sky doesn't seem quite as silly if you compare it to downing large quantities of caffeine all day...

The moon is traditionally supposed to be made out of green cheese...

The cuckoo joke was in the back of my mind when I first talked about cuckoo clocks. :\

The Wizard of Oz isn't a big favorite of mine (it's now 80 years old), but I did like the idea of a charlatan pretending to be 'great and powerful' while merely being a little guy behind the curtain. A lot of kids were scared by the flying monkeys, I've heard, but I barely noticed them. Near the end of the movie the Wicked Witch dissolved when a bunch of water was poured over her -- that was what I was referencing. BTW, the year the Oz movie came out was 1939, and is considered the high point of traditional movie making in the US; a lot of major movies came out that year, just before WW II, and shortly before the studios were forced to sell off their theater chains. Also shortly before television became a big deal...

The three main things that happened since I last wrote are mom related stuff, the results of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, and some Amazon Prime day events. In the later, I managed to score almost $50 worth of freebies, including Amazon Prime for 30 days (free shipping & access to Amazon video shows/movies), and Kindle Unlimited (free ebooks) for 3 months (+$5 in credit). I didn't actually buy anything...

I won't go into my mom's activities, except for one incident: She was going to the bathroom, and took off her diaper and soaked it in the toilet (no particular reason). Which caused the absorbent inner lining to swell up into a weird gelatin like substance, a bit like a slime monster, which she then shredded and scattered all over the bathroom. It was almost surreal, trying to clean up all the little slime/amoeba monsters, weird little cubes, and two large masses, which got into the carpet and onto the bottom of my sandals. It was a giant mess to clean up...

As for my sister... As you may recall, she spent 3 weeks here helping to look after my mom, then went home, supposedly to wrap up matters there and move in, a process I thought would take about a month at most. More than 2 months later, the only message I have received from her is to tell us my mom's niece (my first cousin) had died in the hospital. Just that and nothing else. I'm convinced she is trying for a vacation from having to deal with my mom, and extending it as long as she possibly can (without actually saying anything about it). Meanwhile my mom continues to fall down, freak out whenever I try to give her a shower (she got used to having my sister do it for 3 weeks) -- part of the reason she keeps falling down, etc. Can't say any of this surprises me...


People talk about how long it has been since the last time people walked on the moon, particularly since the first landing was almost exactly 50 years ago. But among all the usual reasons for the delay, there is a factor hardly anyone ever thinks about, or even knows about:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/18663203/apollo-11-anniversary-moon-dust-landing-high-speed

​This next article is a bit difficult to figure out. Let's say you want to image part of the interior of the human body, using visible light, but the tissue prevents you from seeing, randomly scrambling the light (turbidity). The usual technique is endoscopy, where you either insert a tube into the body, or surgically cut it open to see the area in question. But now they seem to have a new technique, where you can use ultrasound, not to produce a sound generated image, but to create a sort of virtual lens within the body's tissue to allow light to produce an actual light image. That's the idea that the following article is rather opaquely describing:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190717090342.htm

It took me longer than I liked for me to decipher that article... It isn't entirely clear whether the technique can work through bone, but the discussion about brain imaging *may* imply it...

How (and why) diagnostic imaging radiation can be dangerous:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190718150933.htm

​========
(A wide variety of feghoots...)

The Beat Goes On

A friend of a beat officer (police) was telling him about some new technology, like watches with GPS, heart monitors, etc.
The officer frowned at him, and spat out “Sounds very intrusive, far too much digital spying.”

Proudly waving his old beat up analog device, he proclaimed:

“Not on *my* watch!”
=======

Don’t stand out so much!

An unusual ant stood out because of the odd ‘pearlescent’ color of its exoskeleton. But what really annoyed the other ants was its strange vocalizations, which were quite loud and sounded like a cat purring.

Eventually some of the other ants were forced to tell it: “Purr less, ant!”

(Weak, I know.)
=======

The ‘Coarse’ of True Despair

I was touring a sculpture garden, and quickly realized each of the sculptures on display was of a wretched human being, all economically challenged. There were homeless people, migrant workers, minimum wage workers, servers of fast food, and beggars. And a few artists...

I also noticed that they all seemed to be carved out of the same coarse material, with variously shaped chunks of material embedded within the main matrix, giving them a somewhat untidy appearance.

I asked the docent leading the tour if all of the sculptures were in fact made from the same thing? She confirmed that they were, and told us that the choice of material was related to the overall theme of the works. All of them were made of porphyry…

To help illustrate the ‘poor fury’ they all suffered from.

Some might say they were also suffering from being portioned out from others (‘poor shunned’)...

(Porphyry can be pronounced similar to ‘poor fury’ (or ‘poor free’), and is a type of igneous rock with large coarse inclusions, usually feldspar or quartz, in a fine grained matrix.)
======

Just to continue the theme....

If you visit a poor man’s home, and find porcine presence all over the place, it is indeed a ‘poor sign’, of hygiene if nothing else.

If your dogs are overweight, you may find your porkers are poor curs.

If you spend all your time thrashing around in the water and spouting off, you might be accused of having poor poise (porpoise).

And just because something is portable, doesn’t mean it isn’t a poor table.

Receiving a portent might just mean you will sleep poorly, especially if it rains.

Commissioning several portraits might just mean you have poor traits.
=====

A congerie of conger eels. He can choose what he chews...
======

His Pasta Follies

A senior member of congress (with the unfortunate name of Donald) was frustrated by how much trouble he was having trying to legislate new laws. Everything seemed to take forever…

One of his colleagues, noticing a worse than usual hitch in his stride, joked that the way his ‘leg is late’ keeping up with his other leg might be the source of his problems trying to legislate. Some people were even starting to treat him like a lame duck.

“For Pete’s sake, just having a hitch doesn’t make me lame, and I certainly aren’t a duck! ...even if my name is Donald!” was his response.

“Well, the other part of the problem is that most people are sick of how self righteous you are, and judgmental about everyone else”, his colleague admitted.

“Me?! Everyone thinks I’m too self righteous!? Do you have any idea just how I picked up that injury in the first place?” Donald asked.

His colleague admitted ignorance, but guessed he might have gotten it in military service.

Donald laughed. “No, not at all. In fact, in my younger days I got into some disreputable activities occasionally (though it was mostly just youthful high spirits…). Some of my contacts back then hired me for a somewhat shady job in Italy, though I didn’t realize just how shady it was at first.”

“They wanted me to help them open a safe, one I was led to believe belonged to them. Supposedly they had just lost the combination to it, but didn’t want the embarrassment of revealing their mistake publicly. It wasn’t a very plausible story, but it gave me just enough coverage I was willing to attempt it. I was young…” :\

“I spent a couple of days in Italy while they were ‘getting things organized’, and had a chance to try several types of pasta. I got a little too fond of farfalle * (aka bowtie or butterfly pasta), especially with pesto sauce and salmon, which was quite rich (some might say eccentrich...).

“I had just stuffed myself with farfalle when they abruptly called on me to immediately open the safe, pronto (which is also how Italians answer the phone, ‘pronto’ [ready]). It was short notice, but I tried to swing (lethargically) into action. Unfortunately, my mind was just a little torpid from my recent meal, and I made a mistake, setting off a small anti-tamper explosive and injuring my leg. I only barely managed to get myself out of the country without either the police or my ‘contacts’ catching me, and I’ve had this ‘leg is late’ problem ever since, all because of too much ‘far folly’ (farfalle) in Italy.”

“Is far folly ever far enough? For some purposes perhaps, but it is never far enough to be effectively ‘safe’. If nothing else, it can make you fat.. Naturally, I dropped all of those kinds of shady activities after that, though I do retain a bit of nostalgia for my farfalles of youth...”

His colleague laughed, but “As amusing as that story is, I doubt it will help all that much with your current problems…”

(* farfalle can be pronounced much like ‘far folly’)

(This is actually a new kind of feghoot for me, more ambitious than usual. I gave it a name; the acronym is BDF, aka Bradoghoot. It’s a BRAided DOuble feGHOOT, where two stories, each with their own pun are braided together, ending almost simultaneously. Almost… Hopefully someday I can manage a triple one, or at least get their endings closer together.)
=====

By Even the Same Name...

My name was given to me by my father, as a sort of nasty joke. It was a Pa trick, but not really a patronym. For various reasons I grew to resent my name (yes yes, my name is Patrick) over the years, as a symbol of my father’s nasty sense of humor and possessiveness.

Then one day, while visiting a cousin’s farm, I passed a hay rick (aka haystack), and I suddenly leaned over and patted it (a pat rick), and since then I’ve felt more comfortable with the name, sort of taking ownership of it away from my Pa. We can all be so weird sometimes...

(This was mostly inspired by a British mini-series I watched; 5 one hour episodes, each about a different period in the life of a heroin addict who was sexually abused by his father, starting at the age of 8. Supposedly dark comedy... The show was called Patrick Melrose...)
======

There have been a number of empires and ruling dynasties in history, with a lot of infighting and dirty tactics used by the various heirs. Many of whom were doomed to ‘dy nasty’ as a result...

(Not even mentioning [at all] the actors on the TV show Dynasty…)
=======

Why does it seem emos shun all (other types)? Because they are so emotional…
=====

Ghost * in the Machine

I saw an ad for a company called DefendedReputation [name slightly changed, but no slur intended], designed to clean up your online presence, in case some malicious person has been leaving bad information about you on the internet (and maybe to scrub up any bad sounding but correct info as well). Pictures, gossip, facebook rants, etc.

I was worried about what my online profile might be saying about me, so I contacted them. They agreed to do an internet search about me for free, to see what might need to be cleaned up, then we would discuss possible mitigation (& costs).

When they contacted me after doing the search, they seemed a bit uncomfortable. “Is it even worse than I thought?”, I wondered.

They told me they had found nothing about me online. Absolutely nothing. I was a ghost… Well, they *had* found several people with the same name, but none who traced back to the real me. And many of the ones they found were actually dead, adding to my ghostly lack of presence...

“Do you think someone has deliberately erased my entire online presence?” I asked them, in a worried tone.

“Well, we can’t find any evidence of any significant online presence… Now or ever. It is difficult to disprove such a hypothesis, of course… But the most likely scenario is that nothing about you has ever existed online.”

“There certainly isn’t anything for us to clean up, there is no bad content about you at all. (or good content…)”

“But that makes me seem like a complete non-entity… How can a specter get any respect, and how relevant can a revenant be? Surely that can’t be good for my reputation? Your job is to defend my reputation! Start defending!”

“You don’t have a reputation! We defend against attacks or unfortunate information, we can’t really defend against an absence of information, can we? Why don’t you just start creating content in the normal way, and stop being a ghost?”

“What could be more suspicious than a person who seems to suddenly come out of nowhere? Surely you could create a backdated internet profile for me? One that casts me in a good light, of course?”

“That would basically be forgery; it’s one thing to make changes for defensive reasons against online attacks, it’s entirely another thing to create a totally fake online presence.”

“Are you suggesting I hire a forger?”

“No! We can’t suggest breaking the law, that would probably leave us open to some kind of conspiracy charge. You are veering dangerously close to entrapment...

There is nothing we can do for you. Please don’t contact us again, unless through our attorneys…”

Sadly, not only don’t I have any internet presence or recourse thereof, I also don’t have a pun to end this with…

(I do realize most of this is actually my own fault, ‘ghosted’ by my own petard...)

A ghost without a pun… That makes it even worse! I’m not even pungent!
(violently shakes my insubstantial chains)
(boo...)

(* I’m using ‘ghost’ in multiple ways to confuse things…)
======

Forewarned was not Four Armed

Two police officers arrived at the crime scene; one was older and more experienced, the other had just recently been promoted to being a Homicide Detective. It was a particularly gruesome scene, with dismembered bodies scattered throughout a hotel room, the floor steeped in blood.

The younger detective stared around the room with wide eyes, before finally losing control and vomiting in the corner, a particularly thorough regurgitation.

The older detective sighed and cynically said: “What did you expect? Or ate? That’s nearly as gruesome looking as the rest of the room”, gesturing at the steaming pile. “It’s almost enough to make you expectorate…”

The younger detective spat (just outside the room), to try and clear some of the vomit from his mouth. Then grimaced at what his senior partner had just said. “Sorry about that, hopefully I haven’t contaminated the scene too much.”

“Right after I gave such a nice warning speech, too, about keeping your stomach under control”, the other detective said sarcastically. “I don’t usually expect oration to be greeted with expectoration.”

“Maybe you should…”
=======

Slaughter is not the plural of laughter...

A week later, the same two detectives were examining another crime scene, perhaps even worse. This time it was outside, in a mostly empty lot. Empty, if you don’t count all the corpses…

This time the bodies had been mowed down by automatic gunfire, strewn almost artistically across the ground, a mass acre of dead bodies. A literal massacre.

The younger detective: “Do you think this is connected to the killings last week?”

“Different MOs, different kinds of locations, seemingly different kinds of victims usually means different perps.” was the reply. “OTOH, you rarely get mass killings of this magnitude so close together in time, either. Let’s not make any assumptions, and see where the evidence takes us.”

“And I thought I wasn’t supposed to expect oration this time…”

“Ha ha. You’d better hope the ‘Pro see’d your’ procedure, after the mess you left last time”, gesturing at the Lieutenant nearby.”
======

One thing you don’t want to be is part of a set of twin jewelers.

I.e., to get a gem in eye (Gemini).
======

(The following feghoot came from a book (If Crows Know Best) I’m reading. I thought it was pretty good, and I’ve only changed it (mostly) so it can stand alone, w/o reference to the rest of the story.)

A ‘Minor’ Misunderstanding

“There’s a soldier in the barn, Morie says.” Annora, wide-eyed and out of breath, turned and pointed. [Morie is a 4 year old girl, Annora is a young woman married to the MC’s older brother, currently missing along with the MC’s father.]

“He’s maybe dead,” Morie said, equally breathless.

“What makes you think he’s dead?”

Annora said, “I understood her to say she pissed in his ear.”

“Morie! Did you do that?” She nodded, refusing to speak further. Morie, who would not be taken to the bushes [to excrete] by her brother, had pissed in the ear of an enemy soldier. I could not credit it.

“Show me!” I commanded, meaning show me where he is. Instead Morie dropped to her knees, and before I could say anything, leaned forward and said, “Pssst, are you dead?”

Annora burst out laughing, and I could not help laughing, too.

[The enemy soldier actually is alive, but that’s another story...]

I don't think I clicked out of the message box, but then, I don't actually know... I'm biting the bullet and writing it in an email draft to start with. Of course, if I accidentally click the 'Discard' button now... 🙁

I liked Shatter's armor and wheels too, but hammerbots are rarely very effective. In their first fight, they actually knocked the head off their own hammer... They did manage to finally win one in the last episode (for me at least). Was it a Chinese bot they beat in their last fight? I've already forgotten...

I didn't have the same feelings about Witch Doctor getting married... But at least half of the competitors seem very young to me. The bot seems to be doing better, so maybe it actually helped?

Somebody tried the AI positioning before, and it didn't do all that well, but I suppose the wheels might make it work more effectively. Really, hammer bot != dangerous bot. Even a random bot that doesn't stop working is going to win some of the time...

Mammoth is interesting, though watching it get knocked/stuck upside down made it look a bit silly. If I recall correctly, Frog and Mammoth actually have the same 1-1 record. :\

Yeah, I still like Duck, especially after they got cheated last year. Gigabyte lost it's blades early on (knocked off its shell), but the shell was strong enough for it to win. Pretty close though. Kind of amusing to see some of the bots with 0-2 records, like Minotaur.

Wild horses have a natural dislike of big smelly humans getting on their backs and trying to ride them. (Of course, horses are even bigger and smellier, but at least they aren't trying to ride *us*.) So they try to throw (or 'buck') them off their back, jumping and twisting to toss the blighters off. In order to get a wild horse to tolerate a rider, you have to 'break' them, basically breaking their spirit or will to fight. For some horses, they may never stop resisting... Here's a short anecdote:
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-term-for-a-horse-that-cannot-be-broken

Do you mean when you have leftover oil in the pan/skillet/wok after you are done cooking? That's kind of a classic problem, since you don't want to pour it down the drain, since it will cause a clog fairly quickly. Many people who cook with oil a lot keep a large can or container under the sink they pour the leftover oil into, and eventually dispose of in the trash. I used to mop up the excess oil (when the quantities aren't too much) and put the paper towels in the trash can (usually in an old sealed plastic baggy). Don't try to reuse the used oil...

For some people, the more obscure the joke the better it is. I don't appreciate companies hiding stuff behind paywalls, even after I've signed up to receive emails from them, and all of the article links end up behind the wall... I spent well over an hour getting around this one...

Yeah, the flying thing is surprising, especially when it's about something so many millions of years ago. OTOH, there is reason to think it was easier to fly back then, because of higher oxygen content (hence the giant flying insects, and enormous pterodactyls they had).

I was also curious to know who the guy on the plane was... I wondered if it could have been Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon), or something like that.

My attitude toward work was different than the author's; I wasn't nearly as concerned about what other people thought of me, and I had a lot of outside interests to keep me happy w/o having to spend all my time at work. Heck, I retired at 40, and I already knew keeping up in my field was going to be increasingly difficult. I enjoyed meeting challenges at work, but was fully aware that many of them were deliberately sabotaged by my bosses. And after a few years early on, I mostly gave up on being ambitious, preferring to be a tech and not a manager primarily. OTOH, even though I stopped working at 40, I did also start to experience a quite a bit of unhappiness in my early to middle fifties (my forties were great), what with my bird dying & my mom getting worse and worse Alzheimer's. Coincidence, or just something nasty tends to happen around then...? My health certainly hasn't been as great over the last 10 years.

The problem of feeling irrelevant isn't one that ever greatly bothered me, I've never felt particularly vital or important, and that makes it less stressful (for me). The world's problem are mostly insolvable, and aren't worth the headaches of striving against constantly. I generally feel a very strong sense of conscientiousness, and I wouldn't want to feel that and 'vital' at the same time, at least not with many people. I'm vital to my mom's care (and my parrot's before her), and that's more than enough. If there was an adequate solution to my mom's care that didn't require my constant attention, I would gladly embrace it.

OTOH, my mental abilities have been a strong source of ego gratification my whole life, I just never felt a great need to constantly accomplish things with them, at least not things that bring public acclaim. I'm smarter than about 99% or more of the population (based on several factors), but that doesn't make me an intellectual giant. I've definitely worked with people who were smarter.

In general, the world is an interesting enough place to provide lots of entertaining material and intellectual pursuits, and I don't much care for attention. But I can see why some people would get depressed when deprived of such attention.

An awful lot of the author's attention seemed directed to finding ways to extend careers as long as possible, which doesn't seem necessary to me (I would like to retain reasonable intellectual capacity, but I'd rather use it for my own purposes, rather than being paid to do something for someone else). It's just as much of a mistake as spending your life trying to accumulate a lot of money or stuff.

I also think trying to spend your later years in spiritual growth is a mistake; either ignore it completely, or work on it throughout your life. And there isn't' much point to being afraid of death, it will come to us all (so far anyways), so get over it; you aren't essential or vital, just one more piece of a very large puzzle. The final retirement should be seen as peace, not something to fear.
---------

The Ashkenazi paper isn't short or easy reading. I was able to make sense of it (mostly), even though some of the words were being used in unusual (to me) ways. It helps that I've read about many of the ideas discussed, like the build up of harmful mutations in isolated populations, etc. I'm only around pg. 25/40 myself, it's hard to find uninterrupted time to focus on it. Still, the idea that a significant subpopulation of the world managed to breed for intelligence was pretty interesting. Even if the driving forces from before are now largely gone, the overall boost is still mostly there. I was a bit dubious about the article at first, but after reading through it, nearly all of my doubts were assuaged. It really doesn't seem like a fake.

I suppose you could use the A-salt gun to perform mild seasoning, but since each shot delivers only 1 grain of salt, it would be a lot of effort. OTOH, if you enjoy eating insects, you could shoot bugs over the pot and get a little extra protein and salt...

I didn't have an atlas, but after the initial pun about the Rome-ants, I brought up a Wiki page listing world capitals to help look for more puns, which is pretty similar w/o any pictures.

I didn't know about Pichu... The plot thickens...

We had a couple of sizable earthquakes in So. California over the last 2-3 days; I didn't feel the first one, but a day or so later there was one about 10 times stronger (M 7.1), which I did notice. I looked it up online, and discovered there was one just about 200 miles away at that time. Not a big deal (I don't think anyone was killed), but at least I know why things were squirming around for a few seconds.

P.S. I didn't notice at first, but our pendulum driven grandfather clock was stopped by the earthquake (at exactly the right time) -- it probably threw the pendulum's motion off with the shaking. The cuckoo clock was entirely unaffected...


The following article's headline (Flying salt shakers of death) ties into one of the previous discussions:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190625173456.htm
(less so in the contents)

This one ties into my joke about Apple developing a glasses based tech:
https://gearforlife.com/pocket-sky-blue-light-device/?_ke=eyJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJydXNjaGVyZXJAaG90bWFpbC5jb20iLCAia2xfY29tcGFueV9pZCI6ICJMdzRVQWIifQ%3D%3D

More about octopi:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190625102420.htm
(Of the octopus' 500 million neurons, more than 350 million are in its eight arms.)

What made Humans the fat primate? (Was it our brains? Fatheads...)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190626160337.htm

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190627121252.htm
(Mold in space)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190701144544.htm
(and a bacterium to the rescue)

How to develop the spider collective:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190702152809.htm
Now they just need to organize collective expeditions together while young...?
========

Recently a paid TV service (HBO, which I don't get) had a mini-series about Chernobyl, and the very bad nuclear accident that happened there about 30 years ago (operated by the USSR). The show was very well received in the US & the world, and was also popular in Russia. At first, that is; once the Russian government found out it was being well received, they started trashing the show, claiming it was blatant anti-Soviet filth and full of lies. (Of course, that begs the question of why that matters, the USSR was dissolved a long time ago, and Russia merely shares some geography with it.) A link to an article refuting the Russian government criticism:
https://www.polygraph.info/a/fact-check-russia-hbo-chernobyl/30004231.html

The Russians seem to be claiming the Chernobyl accident was 'Sure Noble'...
========

When experiencing an ordeal, you either succumb and be destroyed, 'or deal' with it somehow.


One of Shakespeare's plays, once quite popular, is rarely performed any more. Some women claim the play is misogynist. The play is called The Taming of the Shrew, and is about a man who tames a shrewish (ill tempered, nasty) woman into becoming his wife. (Also sometimes called Kiss Me Kate.) Not all women agree that there is a problem, and it was turned into a popular rom-com 20 years ago, called 10 Things I Hate About You, somewhat similar to Clueless, another modernized bit of literature cast using teenagers.

But now a days, no one wants to try and 'placate' the feminists and convince them the play is fine, since that would just set them off by (apparently) suggesting they 'play Kate' (the female lead of the play).
========
(long and a bit silly, mostly an exercise in dialog)

There’s something fishy about this...

I was walking along a medium sized stream/river, when I noticed a larger than average fish (roughly 10 - 15 lbs or so, though I’m not a great judge of such things) swimming alongside me, casting it’s eye at me occasionally. Being eyed by a fish like that seemed a bit odd, so I paused to stare back.

It opened its mouth, and in a very deep, croaking voice it spoke: “You don’t seem to be carrying any fishing equipment, I’m glad to see. Of course, that means you aren’t carrying any bait either…”

Astonished *almost* beyond words, I managed just enough sense to wonder out loud: “Why is a fish talking to me!?!”

“I could also wonder why you are talking *to* a fish?” it replied. “Are you sure one of your friends isn’t playing a prank on you?”

“Not entirely…” I responded. “Though I don’t have enough friends with such proclivities that it is very likely.”

“Less likely than a talking fish? And what kind of weirdo would use ‘proclivities’ in a sentence directed at a fish? In the unlikely event they found themselves in such a conversation at all?”

“You make a surprisingly good point, but really, in the unlikely event I am talking with a fish, why should I assume they have a limited vocabulary? And given the possibility that you might be some kind of supernatural entity, it might not be safe to be condescending…”

“What, like I’m Loki in disguise, or some other kind of shapeshifter? Or perhaps some kind of genus loci, or perhaps a nature avatar?”

“Or a talking robotic fish drone?”

“I very much doubt the likelihood of an *armed* talking fish drone… Though I could probably splash you a little.”

“Let’s assume you can, but don’t. This conversation is weird enough without also getting wet. In any event, you never answered my first question: Why are you talking to me? And do you have a name?”

The fish seemed to shake its head at me a bit, and then said: “What’s wrong with being wet? Anyways, I’ve talked to a number of people over the years, or at least addressed them, but none of them have ever actually talked back to me, at least not in any coherent manner. So to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, and was mostly just messing with you, to see what kind of response I got. Are you some kind of weirdo? Oh, and you can call me Phineas if you need to put a name on me.”

“Some kind, I suppose... I usually take things at face value, and just play the straight man. Not being particularly crooked after all… And Phineas, as in ‘fin’?”

The fish abruptly leaped out of the water, arching its back into a graceful curve and then flipping back into the water with only a small splash. Coming back to the surface, it flippantly noted “I’m not particularly straight and certainly not a man, but I can appreciate the general idea. Why over complicate an already bizarre experience? And don’t be so literal, this isn’t a littoral.”

“I do have another question for you: Why is your voice so deep? Even given the implausibility of you talking at all, hearing such a deep tone from a fish so much smaller than myself is disconcerting.”

“I’m not at all small, I’m actually above average size for my species. But the real reason is actually pretty obvious. I am a (bigmouth) bass after all…”

(“Isn’t that like assuming you’d find a perch * up in a tree?” I thought to myself… I never did get around to mentioning my previous conversation with an ocean sunfish. I also wonder why all the fish I talk to seem so hung up with puns...)

The bass took off at this point, and I realized that since it was a very popular game fish, it had probably just wanted to play with me; since I didn’t have any fishing gear, verbal play was the best option left…

(* Note that a bass is actually a variety of perch. Err, the ‘fishy’ kind of perch...)

(Another note: I thought I had detected a clue to the fish’s identity at one point, when he (it?) referred to ‘some other kind of shapeshifter’. Besides Loki, probably the most famous shapeshifter associated with water is Proteus (AKA the Old Man of the Sea). Proteus sounds like proton, and water with an excess of protons is alkaline, or a base. And what sounds like base? Yep, bass. But. I was wrong, because actually, water with an excess of protons (hydrogen nuclei) is acidic, not base. Duh. So probably not a clue, unless it’s just too tricky for me to figure out…)
=========

The Cosmic Microwave is trying to make all our wet poodles explode… Just background…

(The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, combined with the apocryphal story about people trying to dry off their poodles in microwave ovens and having them explode...)

Note how similar the various “designs” of mantis shrimp are reminiscent of battlebots…

Some of them are designed to rapidly stab their prey, others hammer their prey with specially evolved smashing limbs (and specially evolved shields), and others can fire shock waves produced by cavitating (collapsing) bubbles. (When the bubbles are used to knock out their prey, they could also be called 'captivating cavitating bubbles').
========

Humble Brag

Having a great “attribute” like humility is clearly ‘a tribute’ to how awesome one is.

(Not a great pun, but I’ve included it to help show off *my* humility…)
======

For bear ants, there are no taller ants, which is probably why there is no 'tolerance' or 'forbearance' for them.

(Partially inspired by the joke about Taller 8s.)

(There isn't such a thing as Bear Ants. There are some ants that get up to 1.5 - 2 inches in length, including ones called Bull or Bullet ants. Though that raises the question, why are 'Bull' ants miniature instead of Minotaur?)
=======

Chef or Shepherd?

A kid wanted to make a special meal for his parents' 20th anniversary, offering to make them a leg o’ lamb, his dad’s favorite.

Unfortunately, something got lost in translation, and he made them a lamb out of legos...

https://www.google.com/search?q=lego+lamb&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS724US724&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=a9fj9SCaR3DuyM%253A%252CWAR5M5_CpccaMM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kRVkK4aHMm5ISopeiqjL6lqOcftjw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQ3-eTwKTjAhWWsZ4KHYAoCi8Q9QEwAHoECAAQBA#imgrc=a9fj9SCaR3DuyM:&vet=1
=======

An unusually pinkish colored man had an enormous appetite, pretty much the only thing he ever had on his mind.

That caused many of his acquaintances to refer to his intense pig-mentation...
======

Why do I like having a cuckoo clock?

Because it’s always nice to be recognized.

(no actual pun here)
=======

Salad Din

The din of the ‘lettuce pray’ in salad roused the wrath of Saladin. The resulting crunching of salad din left the lettuce praying for salvation… but soon the lettuce was no longer salad in, but chewed up. Their be-leafs got flattened...

(* “Saladin” was a famous Muslim leader against the Crusaders, contesting with them for control of the “Holy Lands” in the Middle East.)
======

Sir Oolean

He of the white hair and blue body, who floats above the earth on (small) white clouds, too elevated to ever touch the ground… Not to be confused with djinn, who can have a rather similar appearance.

He was a rare example of an odd type of creature, which always have two different forms, nearly complete opposites of each other. Sir Oolean’s 2nd form is basically a mole (nearly blind underground tunnel digging rodent). These binary creatures are usually called Booleans…

Sir Oolean prefers his cerulean form...
=======
(Kid level pun)

There are two reasons witches generally avoid the beach.

1) Some witches are more or less allergic to water, it basically dissolves them. (Ref: The Wizard of Oz.)
2) Even witches that aren’t allergic to water tend to get rather sandy if they spend much time on the beach. Some people just assume they are Sand Witches… but many of the others just try to eat them.

Ugh. In my previous reply, I cavalierly dismissed the idea of writing it somewhere else (that automatically saves stuff) as too much work. And then, once again, I lost the whole message, almost at the very end (just before I added the jokes...). All it takes is a single keystroke (which one? I don't know) and the whole window disappears. And doing it late at night, makes my eyes so tired these days I can hardly see what I'm typing. Alright, I'm writing this time in an outgoing email draft. But not tonight, I'm too tired...

The new season of Battlebots is pretty good. Originally I actually summarized most of the 2nd and 3rd episodes, but meh. You'll see when you see it.

Rodeo is partly based on how people in the West used to catch wild horses, and then "break" them so people could ride them; using such untrained broncos is a good test of riding ability, even more so for the bulls. So mostly the animals aren't trained, though some animals are naturally harder to ride than others. As for ethics, I know that some ranchers refuse to let their cowhands practice rodeo techniques on their cattle, because it is hard on them, so... not entirely ethical.

I guess a castrato has an even harder time than a ballerina; the practice was outlawed in 1903 (kind of late...).

The uncertainty principle problem is probably my fault; it wasn't really much of a joke (except the part about the pupils of his pupils dilating, both because of surprise and metaphorically because of the darkness of uncertainty), just a straightforward description of how much impact it had on people's views about the universe.

The iron thing sounds unpleasant, had you considered wearing a filter mask of some sort, like people wear to avoid infections? (embarrassing as that might be...) There's a condition called Iron Lung that afflicts coal miners that is pretty serious... No irony intended...

You might try sea salt, it is supposed to avoid a lot of the sodium (but still taste salty), and olive oil (as well as some others) is actually healthy.

I actually had a lot of interesting links saved, probably too many to realistically include.

I got an alert about an article in Scientific American about what was supposed to be the funniest math pun, but couldn't read it because of a paywall. So I did some research, the joke was supposed to be about bases. Some of my research was on reddit...

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/74ul9w/give_me_your_best_math_puns_d/

https://www.reddit.com/r/puns/comments/c1c8kk/math_pun/

https://www.reddit.com/r/puns/comments/a5u0hg/eight/

​This looks like it might be the joke, though it is a bit obscure:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/ldNco.png


They could fly right after birth:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190612092945.htm
​
Only about a year or so ago, scientists finally thought they knew where heavy elements came from, but now they have another, better explanation:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613121042.htm

Back around 40 years ago, a friend pointed out I was using this technique w/o realizing it:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613133718.htm

How big tech firms set salaries for software engineers:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/14/how-much-google-facebook-other-tech-giants-pay-software-engineers.html

And for contrast, what happens when someone approaches the end of their career:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/

I originally had a lot of comments about that, because the way I've handled my career over the years was very different from what the article described. And I had very little trouble handling my early retirement, but software engineering isn't exactly the focus of his career focus...

This next link is something I ran across as a link provided by the author of a serial story I've been reading. It's pretty good, and the links he provides are often quite interesting, like this time. Unfortunately, it's a rather large document, and fairly dense reading (I'm still only 25/40 pages through it). The research article argues that the Ashkenazi jews of northern Europe were successfully breeding for increased intelligence for about 700 years, and largely succeeded, at the cost of a number of deleterious genetic diseases. Almost no other isolated group ever accomplished this (with one possible exception), and they have had a huge impact on intelligence focused careers among people of European ancestry, including people like Einstein. You could try skimming the early parts, where they summarize most of the detailed results later on, if you find it interesting.
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

I also have a copy of a Scientific American article about Free Will vs determinism, which might be interesting relating to what I wrote about the Uncertainty principle, though he goes about it quite differently. But it isn't particularly short either (though nothing like the really big article above), so I probably won't bother (if you want to see it, I could include it in a separate post, probably as a PM).

I ran into a weird product for sale on Amazon, called
a Bug A-Salt Fly gun (fires salt grains at small flying insects to kill them.)
======

Niches appeal at best

Don’t try your wishes
at lots of swishes,
And annoy the fishes
(nothing but net can leave
them served on dishes)
Leaving nothing but splishes.

Note that 'swishes' is a basketball term, where the ball goes through the hoop without touching anything but net. This is complete doggerel...
======

Not Exactly True Amore...

A female friend of mine traveled to Italy, hoping to find romance. Which she did, sort of…

In the Coliseum, her hotel room, some of the restaurants… Lots and lots of Rome ants…

She even felt a bit of a sinking feeling when she realized there wasn’t any buoyance… (boy ants) ...and thus never had any kind of chance/ch-ants.

She didn’t even want to imagine what it would be like in Antananarivo (capital of Madagascar), or what the drivers on their roads might be like...

Her travels to Ljubljana, the capital of S-love-nia, didn’t help a bit either… Neither did visiting Malé (Maldives).

Thinking about the ants she found in Rome, she thought she might try visiting a place devoted to bees, because she loved honey. But when visiting Apia, capital of Samoa, she didn’t find a single apiary…

Of course, she wasn’t stupid enough to visit Moroni (capital of Comoros), and she quit her travels before she got to Quito (Ecuador).
======

Trees are surprisingly religious. They have a very strong be-leaf system. Up until the Fall… That’s one area Christmas trees have an advantage, since they never Fell, something they like to needle the other trees about.

Of course, lettuce is even more religious; lettuce pray all the time. No one has a better head for it.

Grass tries to claim some kind of special status, but everyone just walks all over their be-leaf system.
======

One of the reasons why listening to a poet recite their work seems to go on forever is that they keep reversing...
=====

Shining Yellow Sun God

The Inca Empire was both the largest and most sophisticated empire in the Americas when the Europeans arrived. It was also one of five empires considered pristine, in that it was both indigenous and non derivative from any other civilization in the world.

The chief deity of the Incas was Inti, a sort of solar god. There were other deities, including two female ones: Mama Killa (Inti’s wife, a lunar deity), and Pachamama (Earth & fertility deity). The other female deities also had Mama in their names…

Some people of ‘Incan descent’ may still worship the incandescent* solar god Inti…

One of the most famous remaining Incan structures is Machu Picchu (Macho Pikachu?), not rediscovered until 1911. Do Pokemon have an Incan origin? I.e., of Incan descent?

* Incan descent ~ incandescent
========

Left, Right, Left!

A general had his men march in formation around the parade grounds for several hours, hoping the men would eventually learn something from the exercise.

About all they learned was information left blisters… Right?
======

Rivals

If you should ever travel to St. Louis, Missouri (on the southern Mississippi in the US), you might be puzzled to notice the complete absence of McDonald’s restaurants throughout the city, due to an ordinance forbidding them, passed many years ago. The reason: St. Louis considers McDonald’s to be their arch rival...

(This may be too obscure; St. Louis is famous for its extremely large (630 foot) Gateway Arch monument (constructed a few years after I was born), and of course, McDonald’s restaurants are known for their golden arches… shaped a bit like a giant M, and adopted at roughly the same time as the Gateway Arch construction.)
======

The Apple of my Eye

Apple, after reading about research that green light can relieve chronic pain sensations*, created a new product, special AR glasses that tint everything green, which they named iHurt. Some people derided it as just a more expensive version of green sunglasses...

An updated version was more subtle about it, using special subliminal lasers to produce a similar effect without noticeably tinting everything green, called iBall, which also enhanced vision in other ways. Among other ‘features’, it subtly drew attention to Apple product ads...

* Such research does exist.
========

Putting Descartes before the Clock

A philosopher was tossing and turning at night, wrestling with a difficult problem. He eventually sat up in bed, and looked at his clock. Realizing what time it was, he thought to himself:
“I think, therefor 1 am.”

Snorting, he went back to snoring.
======

I was tracking a male were-leopard through the countryside of Nepal, on a course that was heading steadily toward the capital… When I abruptly found it: Kathmandu doo. The scat of a big cat...

Fortunately, I didn’t step in it.

(The capital is pronounced Cat-man-do.)
======

What the?

The various branches of Science frequently include the suffix -ology in their names, since it means “the study of”. E.g., meteorology, anthropology, biology, neurology, physiology, geology, etc.

But there is one area of study that seems rather weird: Theology, which appears to mean the study of ‘The’, the definite article. It might be definite, but it also seems pretty vague… Which come to think of it, does sound a bit like theology…

(Of course, I was deliberately ignoring the rules of building such words; if you combine a prefix that ends in ‘o’ with a suffix that starts with ‘o’, one of the ‘o’s is elided. So it’s really the study of theo, with does relate to religious matters. After all, biology isn’t the study of bi...)

I'm having a harder and harder time getting one of these replies to finish before the computer finds some way to trash it all. This time it threw me into another page to report abuse, w/o any way to get back w/o losing everything. That sounds like abuse to me...

My older sibling is quite troublesome...

The main thing that got people alarmed was that the first 60 satellites were strung out in a chain of lights, in relatively low orbit, so people could see them initially. I have seen satellites in orbit, including the Space Station; there are sites that tell you when various satellites are easy to spot from your location. I'm closer to the equator than you are, so that might help.

Might be both humidity and pollution, though humidity makes you hot and sweaty, and pollution usually has other symptoms.

That sounds unpleasant and unusual. Some people get lightheaded when they stand up quickly, because their body doesn't adjust quickly enough to the blood pressure drop, and being lightheaded can make you dizzy.

I've seen the first episode of Battlebots this season; they seem to be using the 2 hour format for both more fights and more background info on the competitors. They showed us a couple of bots going through testing (in a special bulletproof small room), one of them was kind of scary; it had a *huge* vertical spinner, that the builder had never run at more than 10% power before he got it into the testing area. When he did power it up, it quickly lost it's balance because of gryoscopic forces, flipped forward and smashed both itself and the floor (and dented the bulletproof glass). Needs work...

There were several interesting fights. There were two bots that were both the rare biting/crushing type, that had similar forms but otherwise looked quite different (animal form vs computer designed art sculpture looking thing). Both won their fights, but in one case they had to stop the fight because it got its fang stuck in its opponent's armor and couldn't let go. It was still given the win, sort of weirdly blaming the opponent for the sticking. Also saw Tombstone fight Lock-Jaw, and a new impressive bot called Cobalt (I think). Etc. Good stuff, and I didn't notice any really goofy looking bots (well, one did look like a frog, but that was mostly just some rubber armor). Roughly 8 fights, I think.

A rodeo consists of a number of different events; each competitor can sign up for the events they want to compete in. They probably go on for several days, and the events are organized in various places, a bit like a circuit (in terms of competitors moving around the country competing in different ones). Typical events consist of Bronco riding (hard to control horse), calf roping, Bull Riding (very dangerous, the bulls will gladly kill their riders or anyone else if given a chance), etc. The events are usually timed, and the more events you score highly in, the more money you win. For some events you use your own horse. I believe all these events take place on a schedule during the year.

They are just saying the effects of the Supernova radiation caused changes in weather conditions on Earth, causing hominids to evolve differently than they otherwise would have (e.g., lots of lightning causing them to spend more time moving around through grasslands, instead of staying up in trees). We already more or less accept that meteorite impacts can wipe out large numbers of species, this is less traumatic and slower.

If some nutcase or terrorist is controlling the nukes, it's harder to prevent them from doing a nuclear launch. N. Korea, countries in the Middle East, and India/Pakistan are all pretty volatile. But yeah...

Yep, weird people. They used to make people eunuchs to guard harems, and to keep young boy singers from having their voices drop (castrati). Really makes you want to develop your singing skills, eh? (In general I mean, you're too old already).

Compared to many other cereals, Cheerios probably aren't too bad, they aren't loaded with sugar at least.

Funk is sort of like depression, but usually of shorter duration.

Most animals have a lot of problems these days, which is what happens when you are 'living' in one of the great mass extinctions...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603123545.htm
This is fairly interesting, but almost completely ignores that in most cases of extra fingers or toes, the extra digits are useless, usually having no bones, joints, etc., and often just get cut off for babies. The family they mentioned was unusual in having an extra digit on each hand that was usable (almost like an extra thumb).
An article just about that family:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/fourteen-members-same-family-12-6448609
Makes me wish I had one of those extra digits on my hands... (the usable ones)

The #1 most lethal infectious disease in the world is tuberculosis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190604094254.htm
And it is getting more resistant to treatment, this may be a way around that.

Interesting, but also a bit icky:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190604084859.htm

When ladybugs attack?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ladybugs-swarm-registers-national-weather-service-radar-san-diego-today-2019-06-05/


I have a rather wide variety of 'jokes' this time; not necessary good ones, but quite varied...
=========

Kibitzers

God, the all powerful creator of the universe (or at least our local portion of it) decided at one point to create a planet. Earth, as it happens. Unfortunately, as soon as God decided that, large numbers of various entities (angels, archangels, thrones, cherubims, etc.) started telling God how they thought it should be done. Even the fallen (technically, falling, since none of them had gotten far enough to crater into Hell as of yet) had ideas and suggestions.

“Damnit!” shouted God (technically, “God damnit!”, given the source), “If I’m going to planet, I’m going to be the one to plan it!”

(God’s attitude helped turn Earth into something of a ‘dirty’ problem… God was still in a foul mood when Saturn was made, which is why it ended up wearing a hula hoop.

And the less said about Uranus the better...)
======

(Two different versions of this joke. First the mild version)

What do you say to a child that keeps wetting the bed?

“Urine a lot of trouble…”
~~~~~~~

(Now the one with more foul language)

What does a sergeant say to his men when some of them keep pissing their pants during combat?

“You little pissants! If you can’t keep from pissing during combat, piss on the ants instead of in your pants!”

Taking a deep breath and growling: “Urine in a lot of trouble…”
======

Dress for the occasion

There’s an old joke about a general who liked to wear red pants whenever he needed to lead his troops into a particularly difficult battle, so they wouldn’t get discouraged if he should happen to get wounded during the battle (the blood wouldn't stand out).

Finally managing to gain sight of the enemy troops, who vastly outnumbered his forces, the general instructed his adjutant: “Better get out the yellow pants instead...”

Then hearing that all of their allies had changed sides, and they were entirely surrounded, he muttered to himself: “I guess we’re going with the brown ones after all…”
======

Why do scientists spend so much time studying the Big Bang?

Because it cause most of the cosmos.
=====

A little too on the nose....

A powerful sorcerer, driven mad with grief from the recent death of his wife Ruth, decided to summon a demon straight from hell to demonstrate his overwhelming power and ruthlessness…

And punish the world that left him lacking in Ruth.
======

The Pen Ultimate!

Imprisoned for over a decade, I had finally gotten my hands on the Pen[1] Ultimate, the greatest and most powerful pen that had ever existed. Only with its aid would I be able to escape from the Pen[2] Ultimate, where I had been imprisoned so long. But only by means of their mutual destruction, shattering both and leaving me free to flee. Nothing else could destroy either.

The irony is that both have names that mean “second best”, but neither is; only because they both are types of pen that they ended up sounding second best. In a further irony, I too am known as the Penultimate [3], though in my case I really am… … and yet I am the one that will end up destroying the two actual Ultimates. And hopefully, someday, another...

Stealing [4] my will (as I have stolen so many things…), I initiate their mutual destruction, and immediately flee. There is no time to waste, He will show up very soon…

The Sword Ultimate showed up, surveying the broken remnants of The Pen [2] Ultimate. “Something smells -- Pee-U. I guess it’s time to demonstrate once again, that the Sword is mightier than the Pen...”

(perhaps to be continued…)


1: Writing instrument.
2: Prison.
3: Either the second to last in a sequence, or the second greatest in capability.
4. The correct usage is ‘steeling’, not stealing, but it’s funnier this way.

(Just a bit of silliness.)
========

On the Belly of the Beast

My friend was giving me a tour of her newish greenhouse. Upon entering it, I immediately saw rows of colorful plants running down its length, with various sized plants sitting on tables & shelves. Some of the plants were large enough that their pots rested directly on the floor, drawing my eyes down to the decorated tiles of that floor.

The tiles all had an odd design to them, like the swirled hair of a large animal. In fact, the whole room looked like the plants were growing on top of some over sized hairy creature.

Looking at my friend, probably with an odd expression, she laughed at me. “I admit, the design of the room is a little unusual, but I have my reasons for it.”

“I wanted a fur-tile environment for my plants to grow in…”

I blinked, and muttered to myself: “As long as you don’t get fleas…”
=====

A close whisk with death

I don’t drink alcohol, never have, but I still ended up almost crashing my car due to unexpected intoxication once. I was visiting a friend, who cooked up some kind of egg dish and offered me some. It looked interesting, so I ate it. It did taste a bit odd, but lacking any experience, I didn’t realize he had included an alcoholic drink* into the recipe. It was some kind of egg & cheese dish, which he whisked together, and I ate a fair amount of it shortly before leaving to go home.

I ended up weaving all over the road before I realized something was wrong and pulled off. I was briefly afraid I was having a stroke or something…

The whole extemporaneous meal ended up as rather a whisky business…

* Yes, I found out later it was whiskey he had added…

(No, I made this whole thing up. But there’s a reason I’m picky about what I eat. BTW, I stole most of the punchline from a commercial… though it had nothing to do with whiskey there.)
=====

Why some people in the West like to Razz Putin, Russia’s Mad Autocrat.

(He’s like a truncated version of Grigori Ras-putin.)
======

Uncertain Freedom

A Natural Philosophy professor was delivering a lecture to his class about the uncertainty principle and its impact on man’s image of the universe and his place within it….

“One of the simplest descriptions of the Uncertainty principle is that you can only know for certain a particle’s position or velocity, but not both. You can know where it is, or where it is going, but not both simultaneously.

At one time people believed in the idea of a Clockwork universe. That if you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, you could predict with exactitude everything that would ever happen, like a very precisely made clock that was perfectly accurate at telling time.

Of course, the Uncertainty principle directly undercuts that concept, making such information impossible to know even theoretically. Thus making the future unknowable and fundamentally uncertain.

We can’t know the consequences of our actions (or inactions), how to avoid danger or achieve our goals. But we also aren’t locked into a system of predestination or fate either, as if we were clockwork mechanisms. The future is dark and uncertain, but we have nearly infinite degrees of freedom in our possible choices in exchange. Our degree of sentience itself might have been impossible without the Uncertainty principle, though the resulting universe would have been much easier to understand.”

The pupils in the eyes of his pupils dilated, both in surprise, and also in an instinctive effort to pierce the dark, cloudy future just described…

Or was it just dilatory dilation?

(The humor, insights and students are all rather sophomoric…)
=======

The Parable of the Pair a Bull-ets

Once there was a drifter in the old west, who wasn’t doing too well. He was down to his last pair a bullets, and couldn’t afford to buy any more. Hopefully he could use them to raise some cash, though probably not by any honest means...

Camping out in the wilderness, he saw a jack rabbit, and thought about trying to shoot it for dinner, but decided it wasn’t worth a bullet.

He saw a man he recognized from a wanted bulletin, but wasn’t brave enough to try and take him on with only two bullets.

Finally he ran into a rattlesnake at close range, and automatically shot at it (in self defense), missing with his first shot but killing it with his second.

He looked at it wryly; all his bullets were gone, along with the chance to earn some money with them, but at least he was alive. It was better to be poor and alive then dead with a pair a bullets.

And at least the rattlesnake was more nutritious than the bullets…

(I mixed things up by putting the pun at the beginning. If you don’t like it, you could shoot me, except we’re all out of bullets. :\)

Sadly, when it comes to my sister moving, she does think having our mom pay her moving expenses is a given... And my sister moves more often than almost any person I have ever known, sometimes several times in a year. In a more general sense, some people don't hire movers when they move, they do it themselves (maybe rent a truck). I don't usually hire movers, and I've helped friends move a few times.

Apparently quite a bit; a year or so ago I read about a company that did launch stuff into orbit without permission, and got into a lot of trouble.

There has been a lot of talk about Musk's latest satellite launch, with people complaining that they will end up blocking the view of the night sky. Partly because when they are initially launched (or as the first 60 were launched), they start out in a lower orbit, so they are more visible in the beginning... In some respects it's a silly worry, but who knows what 12,000 of them might look like..
Some more info about Starlink:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-teases-starlink-internet-service-debut/

More like 40-60%? People vary a lot in what level of humidity they find comfortable. It's measured in terms of how much water the air can hold, which varies with the temperature (cold air can't hold much water). When the humidity reaches 100%, the water starts to precipitate out, as either rain or fog (small droplets of water suspended in the air). Very high humidity prevents people from cooling off via sweating, since the air can't hold any more water, the sweat doesn't evaporate.

Shivering is an automatic response of the body to try and warm up, by burning calories with small muscle movements. It might also be a psychological reaction to extreme fear or shock...

Vertigo isn't a reaction to fear of heights (though the word can also be used that way, sort of), but a failure in the body's sense of balance; you simply can't tell how your body is oriented (vertically), so you get dizzy or fall over. I was so dizzy I almost fell over just sitting on my bed... Actually trying to walk made me look like a pinball bouncing off the walls & furniture, while being extremely nauseous.

Scientists & medical researchers are already doing genetic programming; they may not have mastered the language, but they can accomplish some useful results. The article I referenced wasn't about the first time a cell had it's genetic code rewritten, but it was the largest organism so far, and represented further progress.

Yeah, and they've already updated the sensitivity of the gravity wave detectors, so they are detecting them a lot faster now, about 1 every month or so.

The new episodes are going to be 2 hours long, once per week.

Depends partly on nomenclature; does the Earth have one ocean, or many? Also, most of the oceans found so far are actually on moons... So technically, we could have more oceans than planets, but probably not...

It's both...

Dogs are carnivorous, but they are also omnivores, and eat a lot of food that isn't meat. Cats, on the other hand, are almost pure carnivores, though modern cat food can have some non-meat fillers. IAE, a dog eating fruit or other plants is not at all unusual or surprising. Though there are some fruits that produce unpleasant side effects for dogs, like some citrus fruits give them diarrhea, and the pits of some fruit are painful for a dog to pass...

Personally, I love that silly punchline, I doubt many people see it coming...

Ah, sorry, I forgot how much more popular rodeo is in the US, because of our Western (Old West) popular culture involving cowboys & such (not for me, just in general). I was thinking about a particular anime from a few years back, about girls being trained to joust with lances; there was a guy who used to do it, but got injured, and was now training the female MC, etc. It was a pretty silly anime, but I've seen that plot used a few times since then in anime, and it reminded me of this movie, though hardly an exact match.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190528095301.htm
General interest...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190530141522.htm
First they say radiation therapy has increased patient survival rates from cancer. Then they mention that 10% of patients treated this way (in the torso area) have their entire intestines die, which also kills the patient. :( Then they mention a protein, URI, that protects against radiation damage, but can also causes cancer... I'm over simplifying, but I'm not sure they are really making progress... (Though they seem happy that it might also protect against nuclear war.)

=======

The So Not Masculine Attire

Some shirts have a v shaped opening near the top, thus called V-neck shirts. They are pretty popular, since they show off the chest a little, and provide some ventilation to help cool one off in warm or humid weather.

But the main reason men like them is because no man would ever want to be seen wearing a eunuch (U-neck) shirt…
======

And to top it all off...

A group of professional baseball players were forced to conduct a summit upon the summit of a local mountain, to discuss some mitt that was stolen. Unfortunately, no one could sum it all up… Especially after some IT guys got involved...
======

The Reason eating Cheerios doesn’t Cheer People up

You might think that eating Cheerios would make people feel more cheery, but instead it just leaves people feeling more and morose (more Os).

(if that’s an obscure reference, Cheerios are a breakfast cereal that consists of little Os.)
======

Dr. Function...

...is a well regarded superhero, known as much for his cheerful and friendly demeanor (even while engaged in tense battles with supervillains) as his powers and abilities. Less well known is that he has essentially the same demeanor while not maintaining his official superhero persona.

He has indicated that he thinks this outward behavior is part of his function, to shun ‘funk’ as much as possible.

(“Funk” referring to a depressed or unhappy state of mind.)
======

Symbiotic Communications/ Nature’s Twitter

Many species of animals around the world either communicate with other species or listen in on their communications. Birds give out warning cries about the presence of predators, that other species react to. Ditto for squirrel and prairie dog behavior.

There is even a species of wild bird in Africa, the greater honeyguide, that will guide humans to the nests of bees; the humans get the honey (with axes and smoke), and the birds eat the beeswax (their favorite food). They listen for specific human cries (noises), to tell which humans want to be guided to a hidden beehive. The actual sounds used vary among human tribes, but the birds recognize them, though no intentional training of the birds is done. These adaptations with human tribes may have existed for more than a million years. The birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds (like cuckoos), so they aren’t even trained or taught by their parents, though they might learn by observing the behaviors of adult birds.
[Of course, some humans deliberately cheat the birds...]

You could easily imagine an entire twitterverse (so to speak…) of bird calls passing information around between a vast number of species.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/21/486471339/how-wild-birds-team-up-with-humans-to-guide-them-to-honey

(Everything except the 'twitterverse' idea is completely true...) (I may have brought this up before, apologies if this was a repeat.)
======

https://www.sciencealert.com/burn-out-is-now-officially-recognised-as-a-legitimate-syndrome-by-the-world-health-organisation

Owl’s say this is nothing new for them, they are always at risk of Burn-Out, due to forest fires. -- WHO (Worldwide Holistic Owls)
====

Cacophony *

As we arrived at the campsite, we encountered ‘misfortune’… A woman already at the campsite was doing *something* with a guitar, but if she was aiming for a tune, the result was a clear miss.

* This was real caca, nothing ‘phony’ about it… Definitely a miss for tune.
=====

Mental Lament

He tried to fund a mental fundamental organization, which was not well viewed, especially in the desert.

They tried to govern mental patient treatment, but it was seen as governmental interference.

His supple mental tricks were seen as merely supplemental to his true talents.

Their attempts to develop mental acuity failed because of developmental problems.

You can’t be overly temperamental if you want to temper a mental patient’s reactions.
=====

Etc.

His loco motives did not prevent the locomotives.

Although he pre-sent his present, it was not present in time.

His attempts to adumbrate [foreshadow] the bank’s use of a dumb rate were unsuccessful.

The fastest way to alienate our affections came when the alien ate our envoy.

It was impossible to domesticate the wild animal after our domestic ate it...

(Indoor servants used to be known as 'domestic's.)

In theory, it is "temporary", so she can arrange the end of her apartment lease, hire movers (which we are supposed to pay), etc. She is probably planning to go to mexico to buy prescriptions (which I discouraged, but it's her decision), etc. I don't know how long it will take, and she did it abruptly without any discussion beforehand (though she had talked about it very general terms several days earlier).

Well, once you finish school, grades shouldn't be an issue, but being evaluated for performance is likely to go on for most of your life...

Engineering is supposed to be pretty reliable... Wouldn't be very good engineering otherwise. No one wants their bridges & dams falling down all the time. Or metallic asteroids blowing up...

No, sleep, and the extra flexibility of having even minimal backup is better, even if it isn't exactly 'restful' in the more general sense of the word...

Well, the oceans don't rise and inundate the whole island very often... And the parent species won't last forever either. They only found evidence of it happening once (twice) in the fossil record.

I've read about some pretty miniscule and obscure studies before... I'm not sure there are any real limits on it. Someday someone might be studying obscure game software that some minor culture developed for brief usage, or analyzing someone's barely read blog, or the editing patterns of wiki articles about either of them... Or bidding patterns in obscure products sold on ebay...

Elon does do a lot, including getting into trouble (tweets & such). He's erratically inventive. His company recently launched 60 satellites simultaneously, as part of a long term plan to launch up to 12,000 of them for a single project. Since only about 5,000 satellites have ever been launched, and only 2K of them are still active, that is a lot of satellites. (Here's a link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/spacex-satellites-starlink/590269/
) Generally he plays the role of CEO, but some people keep trying to force him out of that role, for various reasons.

People live in a wide range of humidity, from 0% (Atacama desert) to 100% (rain forests). High humidity can cause a lot of diseases & fungi problems as well, and very low humidity can cause other problems. Ideally, you want the humidity somewhere in the middle-ish, if you can.

This describes the various clinical trial phases, and their purposes:
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/find-a-clinical-trial/what-clinical-trials-are/phases-of-clinical-trials
Part of it is to figure out what the side effects might be, long term issues of usage, and how it compares to other products.

One of my female teachers in either middle or high school brought in a recording of that 'Who's on First' routine to play for the class, which was where I first saw it. I have no memory what class she thought it was relevant to... but the class definitely was amused. And yeah, that's definitely an example of performance comedy, and is much less effective in the written form (too bad for my work).

I think the main times I've woken up shivering badly was when I was camping, and was too lazy to even put out my sleeping bag... Or when I was pretty sick. When I had vertigo a few years ago I was extremely cold when I woke up, basically drenched in icy sweat, which is pretty weird. Lack of sleep doesn't do that for me though...

Didn't sound like a fun trip...

This describes the creation of a moderately large artificial organism, and some of the interesting properties of such organisms.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48297647
Including growing only 60% as fast as the original organism.

Describes how the development of gravitational astronomy (gravity waves) greatly depended on the work of one man -- primarily his efforts to get money allocated to it, and how such issues can greatly affect the course of science.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/19/723326933/billion-dollar-gamble-how-a-singular-hero-helped-start-a-new-field-in-physics
(And lots of regular astronomers probably spent decades hating said efforts, pulling money away from their projects.)
Now of course, nearly everyone agrees it ended up being money very well spent.

Battlebots are starting up on TV again on June 7th:
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/2019/05/20/battlebots-to-premiere-friday-june-7-on-discovery-and-wednesday-june-12-on-science-channel-278213/20190520discovery01/

The headline, about more oceans than thought, could be interpreted to mean more oceans than intelligent species...
https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/05/new-pluto-data-points-to-more-oceans-in-the-universe-than-thought/

Yet another form of ice, but more interesting than usual:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hot-superionic-ice-may-be-natures-most-common-form-of-water-20190508/

I got lost on a chain of research about chitin... Previously I knew it as the primary component of the exoskeletons of insects & arthropods, but apparently it is used by a number of other animals as well, including fish scales, in amphibians, etc. What set me off was the discovery it is used by fungi as well, to form their cell walls (like cellulose is used in plant cell walls). I also learned about another type of amphibian, snake or worm like.
======

Like a phoenix...

There was a man once who suffered from depression and emotional angst. His only relief was his dog, a collie, whose antics kept him in a good mood. One of the favorite games they played was rolling melons down the hill in his backyard, which his dog would chase all the way down, until they smashed into one of the trees, and then she ate them (she loved melons).

Yes, her melon collie antics were always a good cure for his melancholy…

(Yes, I’ve done melancholy puns before, hence the phoenix reference.)

=======

(And here we have another old feghoot, one of the very first I posted on my AU blog, which I've managed to lose my own copy of. So I'm trying to recreate it as best I can. If you remember it, please mention if any parts seem to be missing or mangled.)

One Man Takes a Stand!

One man took a stand! It was an x-mas tree stand, but nevertheless, he took a stand!

But having taken a stand, he didn't know what to do next. And after taking a stand, he can't sit down any more (he tried, but the x-mas tree stand was *very* uncomfortable to sit on). And he doesn't even have an x-mas tree... Or any presents to put under such a tree. Not really surprising, since it was much closer to Easter...

But that's not important, what matters is, he took a stand! But lacking a tree, or the ability to sit down, or the 'presents' of mind to figure things out, he is feeling very lost and confused...

Eventually he looked up to heaven, raised his arms and wailed: "What's going on!"

Only to wake up in bed, quite confused. Looking around, he concluded he may have been dreaming...

Sitting up, and swinging his feet to the ground, his foot hit an uncomfortable object. Looking over the edge of his bed, he saw that his foot had encountered.... An x-mas tree stand?!?

Suddenly a look of enlightenment (satori!) appeared on his face.

Standing up, and picking up the x-mas stand, he held it over his head, and beaming happily at the empty room, he exclaimed:

"Now I understand!"
=======

As you may have gathered, I haven't managed to generate a lot of new puns lately... Tired...

I have been vaguely thinking about a story about dungeon diving, called Monster Mentors, but it is quite inchoate as of yet...

I watched an old movie recently, which oddly reminded me of a fairly common anime trope; it was about a former rodeo star, who retired after being injured. Another man hired him to help train his rodeo skills. At the end of the movie, the retired rodeo star decides to compete himself again (to prove that he can still do it himself). There was a romantic element, between the retired rodeo star and his student's wife, but she didn't really have any interest in him, and asked him to help convince his student to stop competing. Which, he sort of did, by getting killed while competing, which did succeed in getting his student to retire... Okay, the ending was definitely not like anime...

I wrote most of a reply, then my computer rebooted while it was supposed to be asleep & I lost it all... Oh well. :(

Yeah, I did try to make it sound at least somewhat humorous, though it was also disturbing at the time. My mom got bruised a bit during the x-rays, but otherwise is in much better physical condition a week later (still no word on what the x-rays found). It's been a bit hectic the last couple of days, my sister abruptly went back home yesterday after spending 3 weeks here, and my mom has been cranky ever since.

I just *seem* older. Yes, I do feel rather degraded... Fortunately, I don't have to worry about grades any more.

Not according to the engineering calculations; you should be able to heat up the iron nickel sufficiently to get it soft enough that the vaporized water vapor will stretch the asteroid instead of blowing it up. In theory, but having it blow up is still a possibility...

GPS calculations already depend on relativity... Hopefully they will figure out it eventually, instead of frustrating theoretical astrophysicists forever...

Yeah, having so many interesting properties depend on such a small magic angle is somewhat amusing.

That an article about AI pun generation would have so much accidental verbal humor in it...

It's been busy lately, trying to keep two cranky women from blowing up is time consuming, even if I did get more sleep than usual.

Those wrestling robots were weird... So many of the "fights" were rather arbitrary, with the robots falling over randomly. Except that last robot, as you mentioned.

I did watch the latest OnePunchMan episode, which did have at least some plot progression, even if Saitama seemed to spend too much time in the bathroom...


A species of birds went extinct, then seems to have resurrected itself again. Or at least a species very very similar, in the same place.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/africa/white-throated-rail-extinction-scli-intl-scn/index.html

This isn't really anything new, but it always amuses me when experts do so poorly
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future/588040/
If you recall, I spent 2-3 years or so participating in a very similar predictive group, doing quite well myself.

Different kinds of intelligence in different social insects - wasps vs bees
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190508093708.htm

There was an interesting article about an Elon Musk company developing neural link technology, using a concept called neural lace borrowed from a SF author, allowing direct human/computer interconnections, similar to what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, though not as advanced. But the article has disappeared since I saved the link... Here's a short wiki link to the company, which just raised 39 million in financing 2-3 days ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink
-and- another short article:
https://gendermed.org/elon-musks-neuralink-closer-singularity-simply-singular/

Also read about some 99 million year old amber than had an ammonite in it (a very small one). It's quite rare for sea life to appear in amber, since it comes from fossilized sap from trees in a forest.

Another article about how the flu is more dangerous when humidity is low; in past, there were reports that the virus lasted longer in low humidity, making it easier to infect someone. This article claims low humidity inhibits parts of the immune system, including mucus clearing by cilia, release of interferon to signal infection, and inhibited repairs of airways damaged by the virus.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190513155635.htm
(A humidifier in dry areas might be a good idea)

A surprisingly promising treatment for Alzheimer's.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190513100559.htm
=======

Shiny!

After they met ALEC*, few people were surprised to find him metallic.

* Autodidactic Lifeform Enhanced Cybernetically
=======
(weird humor)

The Doc you meant

A hospital administrator stopped a man in the corridor to ask him “Is this the document you were looking for?”, while gesturing with a set of papers.

“No... You see this picture of Dr. Hoo on the first page of *that* document? Taken while standing on first base? Can you see the document he is holding up in the picture? That’s the doc I meant.”

“Wait, you meant the Doc, or the document he is holding in the picture in the document I’m holding?”

“The document being held.’

“But the document I’m holding is not the doc you meant…?”

“No, the document held by the Doc.”

“So, the doc you meant is the one being held up by the Doc in the picture of the document I’m holding? That’s the doc you meant, or rather, the document held by the Doc in the picture in my document?

“Yep!”

“Here,” handing him the document he had been holding out and taking off…”

“That’s *not* the doc I meant!”

“Hoo’s on first…”
….

A bit of a homage to the old Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg&loop=0

(Not as good, of course, many consider the above one of the very best comedic sketches of all time.)
========

Vitreous Humor/ Humorous Humors

The oddly shaped glass mirrors warped the shapes of people reflected in them, which was certainly more amusing than getting poked in the vitreous humor (eye).

(Vitreous humor is the gel like substance that fills the eyeball, between the lens and the retina. Vitreous also means glass like in appearance.)

Aqueous Humor is what happens when someone falls in the water accidentally, though it can also cause glaucoma, which isn’t as funny.

(It's also the substance between the lens and the cornea, in a different part of the eyeball.)

Who knew the eyeball was so humorous?

I haven't read most of it, I just read this part of the manga after OPM, season 1 ended. So it's a bit of a coincidence... Hopefully OPM with get past this martial arts competition arc soon. While OPM is busy at the tournament, all the monsters are going berserk...

Yeah, the latest with my mom is that she somehow hurt her leg or hip, and now can only barely, with help, get up or down the stairs (while making lots of noise, because of the pain). We took her to her doctor today, who sent her to get x-rays. *That* was quite the ordeal, especially for the poor x-ray technicians, with my mom screaming and carrying on, demanding to leave, people asking what was going on, etc. My mom actually hit one female technician in the face... (too weak to actually cause harm). There were 3 technicians vs my mom, and they only barely got the x-rays done -- kudos to them for succeeding. And she has no memory of her condition, so she's constantly hurting herself because she doesn't remember, like every few minutes or even seconds. She did seem slightly better today than yesterday...

Well, I have gone horseback riding a few times, so I'm somewhat familiar with horses. There's an old expression, "Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow" (a silly expression...), but it does point up how much horses sweat. And how vain women can be...

You might, or it might end up like countries not using nukes. Satellite systems are pretty expensive, so it isn't something to casually mess up.

Kind of odd, though there are some countries where that isn't possible, like North Korea.

Having your facilities degrade over time isn't uncommon, but also not inevitable. I'm not quite as sharp as I used to be... (I just turned 60 today.)

I believe it *was* intended to show off how good the apple phone is at taking pictures or videos.

Yeah, he should get some kind of punishment beyond a restraining order, but I don't know if he will or not. It's pretty much an attempt at stock manipulation...

There's an old idea for how to make a large space habitat with a metallic asteroid like Psyche; you drill into it, pack it with water (or ice), seal the ends, slowly heat the whole thing up with solar mirrors until the water boils and causes the molten asteroid to balloon up from the pressure (like a super sized popcorn kernel), creating a large, hollow metallic structure you can rotate for gravity. Though I think that plan is a bit ambitious for this particular one, it's too big.

Always a possibility, there's a long history of such mistakes, but I vaguely seem to remember several fossils were found in the same area, reducing the likelyhood. Another possibility is that all they found were fossils of tiny larva, and the adult form was very different (they mentioned that the larval forms of many crabs look similar).

So much of current scientific theory is built upon Einstein's theories, that ignoring even his mistakes seems like a bad idea to many. Other people think the whole theory of the Big Bang, inflation, dark matter & dark energy is like a big house of cards w/o a lot of real solid evidence... Not that we have any particularly good alternatives.

Mildly interesting, with some nice graphics/video:
https://www.sciencealert.com/extraordinary-black-hole-shoots-out-wobbling-jets-as-it-devours-a-star
The whole thing looks like some super-super-sized weapon, blasting away in almost every direction.

Some scientists think they have found a new form of dementia, that looks a great deal like Alzheimer's but has a different cause, that might account for almost half of all suspected Alzheimer's cases. I didn't bother to include the link...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190502104805.htm
Where did a lot of our heavy elements come from?

Another longish article about a new hot area in physics
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-twisted-graphene-became-the-big-thing-in-physics-20190430/

https://www.wired.com/story/comedian-machine-ai-learning-puns/
(AI puns, and a female researcher named He He)

I made a few puns this week, but nothing probably worth including. Still better than the ones made by the AI... Thought about making a feghoot about pine-oak-ia (Pinocchio), but never got around to it.

It's part of what they call the 'mosquito abatement program'. They look for any standing water that they might breed in; fortunately, this is a semi-arid climate, so they are few enough that it isn't prohibitively difficult to deal with. We do have a fair amount of marshy areas, but most of those are salty, I think only fresh water ones are a problem.

Um, I haven't watched it yet, so I don't know. But kappas are sounding weirder by the moment...

In the last episode of OnePunch, I actually recognized a scene from part of the manga I had previously read, though the anime had vastly shortened it (where the fencer and the ball thrower were fighting the antagonist trained by martial artist (I've forgotten all of their names...).

She remembers her fine, but she still freaks out anyway... Freaking out is just one of her 'freek'uent behaviors. :(

I think a lot of mammals sweat, except for some very hairy cold adapted species (dogs, descended from wolves, are famous for using panting to cool off, basically sweating with their tongues). Large mammals, like horses, cows, etc. are particularly sweaty. Probably plenty of available sweat to bee available...

Countries develop the ability to blow up satellites in case they need to fight a war -- blowing up the enemy's satellites robs them of GPS, communications, and observational abilities (spying), all of them important both tactically and strategically. Technically, there aren't supposed to be any weapons deployed in space, by treaty, but ... Things will get very messy if a large scale conflict ever takes place (even partially) in space.

It is hard to make major progress without putting in a fair amount of work... If you are lucky, it can be fun work.

I think the reason owls are so popular is because their faces somewhat resemble human faces (compared to other birds), and they are quite cute, with their big eyes, etc. Chickens aren't nearly as visually appealing. Not eating owls might actually make them more popular (e.g., babies...).

Yeah, no one would want to have their mind directly hacked... Hackers are the worst... (!) I wouldn't use it unless I could at the very least turn it off whenever I wanted, and with at least some reasonable assurance of decent security. Still be pretty scary...

Why would age (experience) make you more gullible, w/o accompanying functional problems? (Aside from becoming increasingly left behind by technology.) IAE, they seemed pretty sure it did correlate with future Alzheimer progression risk, based on the study results.

Ants' behavior, like a lot of small minded animals, does seem heavily driven by scents & such. It's actually amazing how such simpleminded entities can exhibit such complex collective behavior, but it does seem like even a few simple rules can produce complex swarm behavior. Insects that use their eyes as their primary sensory input are usually focused on fairly specific targets.

(I actually started thinking recently about writing a story from the viewpoint of the early clown beetles, showing how they first learned to infiltrate ant nests & such, which was highly dependent on the exact properties of the specific ant species they were sneaking into. Not that I have anything resembling proof of whether my wild theories are at all correct, but it's at least somewhat plausible.) Anyway, yes, it does seem ants lack the visual processing ability to clearly distinguish ants from non-ants.

Well, we did have the missile toe pun previously...

Toe bee or not toe bee, that was the unexpected question. Though bees usually do toe the line...

There is a recent ad from Apple on TV lately, that shows a bunch of quick nature related scenes, including one very short scene of a centipede crawling rapidly toward the camera across a plant, which is revealed to be a Venus Fly Trap when it closes over the centipede. Rather striking...

A somewhat interesting recent story that used restraining orders, albeit for rather different reasons:
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-tsla-restraining-order-tslaq-model-3-fsd-demo/

A proposed space mission to an asteroid:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/289840-nasa-preps-mission-to-most-interesting-asteroid-in-our-solar-system
It has so much metal in it, it's estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion dollars.

I decided to look up the asteroid Vesta as well, discovering something rather amusing:
https://www.space.com/12097-vesta-asteroid-facts-solar-system.html
I quote:
"In August 1798, a group known as the Celestial Police formed to search for this missing planet." (that was believed should have existed where the asteroid belt is located.)
It was the 'Celestial Police' name for the group that amused me. The rest of the link is only worth reading if you want to know about Vesta.

This newly discovered extinct crab has gotten a lot of attention recently, because it so different from other crabs (& cute):
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/crabs-swimming-species-hunting-colombia-javier-luque-yale-university-a8884286.html

This might not be terribly interesting to you, but I was rather surprised to find out you can get Cherenkov radiation in a vacuum, which seems impossible at first impression.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190425104247.htm

Lots of attention to the recent report/claim that the universe is expanding faster than scientists can currently account for, but for some reason I failed to realize the corollary that this implies the universe is about 1 billion years younger:
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900067951/new-study-says-universe-expanding-faster-and-is-younger.html
=====

On the High C’’s

A man bought what was reputed to be a pirate treasure map; it was a pale yellow-green color (parchment with some mold growing on it), similar to chartreuse *.

Naturally, it was a fake, as might expected from the color (chart ruse). But it did turn out to be an interesting palimpsest (chart reuse) of an old musical composition, so it wasn’t a total loss. :\

* An odd color, named after a type of liqueur made by French monks.
=====

Recent unfortunate events had left him both blue and cyan* (sighin’).

* a blue-green color

Well, there are a lot of diseases spread by mosquitoes, but the only ones I can think of off hand are West Nile Virus, St. Louis encephalitis and malaria. The more often you are bitten, the amount of the diseases present in the local mosquito population (and other species that mosquitoes bite), and how weak your immune system is are probably the main factors. I know my parrot had St. Louis encephalitis when I got her (messed her up a lot), probably picked up from mosquito bites, and the non-malaria diseases are common in local birds, especially crows. Malaria is apparently pretty easily picked up, but some of that might be from how common mosquitoes are in tropical climates (i.e., lots of bites). My dad apparently caught malaria while serving in the Pacific during WW II, though I never observed any symptoms. Locally, I don't think people catch many diseases from mosquitoes, though local health organizations usually monitor it, and they do try to kill off mosquitoes whenever possible (spraying still water sources) & testing dead birds. You probably don't have a lot to worry about...

I'm not at all sure I'll like Sarazanmai; some of the comments I've read about it made it sound a bit obsessed with anal sex... I was starting to wonder if it was some new Boku no Pico type of trap... I will try to at least start watching the first episode.

The second episode of One Punch Man did have a funny bit about Typhoon's sister (she's jealous of her powerful sister, and has her own mafioso-ish organization of guys she uses to pressure weaker heroes, and tried to pull that on the MC. She got shocked by how many powerful friends and followers he had, and was lectured by him about how a hero should act. Err, sorry if that had too many spoilers...

Originally, I had so much trouble getting along with my sister I told her it would actually be easier for me to look after mom on my own, and she was so annoyed with me she moved out. Now, several years later, my mom has gotten much worse, and my sister is having a lot of trouble where she is currently living. Very little money, hardly anyone in the area she knows, and because it's out in the desert, there is hardly any good health care places nearby. And she is having a lot of health problems. So both of us could use the change (we sort of simultaneously surrendered, though I did start it); even if my sister doesn't actually do very much, she can at least watch my mom enough to give me time to get at least a few things done.. Right now, my mom won't even left me use the toilet without freaking out.

I don't know about the frequency of police calls related to restraining orders, I don't think they are super frequent, compared to other kinds of police operations, but I don't think they are super rare either. Though I'm probably basing that on cop shows on TV I've watched, to some extent...

Perhaps some day you might become infested with the reading bug... as unlikely as that may seem. Lovecraft is famous for his purplish descriptions (though he did write one story called the Colour out of Space, so his descriptions weren't all purple...).

Oh, here's an expression I ran into recently in a book: wǒ kào (holy shit, or similar expressions). Mandarin I presume. Apparently the expression is much milder when kao is used instead of cao.

The bees were already well known, called 'sweat bees', attracted to sweat. Apparently these ones found tears just as appealing...

The black hole thing was more interesting for the technique used to collect the image, than the fairly low res and expected image that was produced. And the way a bunch of people tried to make a thing about the woman who helped develop the algorithm, and the backlash that generated (sigh, people...). There is a lot more space related activity lately, which is nice after the rather long period of limited activity caused by discontinuing the space shuttle. Of course, now India is blowing up satellites as a test, creating a bunch of extra debris in orbit, which isn't a good development. Not that they are the first country to do that.

Oh, there are some well known fairy tales about a frog who claims to be a prince transformed into a frog (usually by a witch), who will be turned back into a prince if he can get a pretty girl to kiss him. There are a lot of variations, tropes, expressions and memes related to the idea, and my comment just implied that most such frogs are lying.

Well, the song is over 100 years old, and is very widely used at graduations in the US, but apparently not in the UK, which I didn't realize (though I did suspect the possibility enough to put in an explanation). A further explanation:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-does-every-american-graduation-play-pomp-and-circumstance-180963504/

It has been a while. Vermillion was more active before I joined AU, but we had enough overlap for me to appreciate some of his posts.

Making some good friends and learning a bit sounds like a reasonably successful first year. And some spectacles are probably better avoided... unless you are nearsighted. :\

Well, they also serve who merely test and document... If those are areas he isn't good at or dislikes, he may have been happy to have your help. Did you spend any time reading through his code/work? That might have been helpful, for future projects, especially if you thought about possible modifications you could have made (just as thought experiments, probably). You might have come up with useful suggestions...

I did learn a fair amount about programming (especially in my first year at university) reading programs written by other more experienced people.

I include this article summary mostly because it reports on how popular owls are among the public.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190415163936.htm
The Who-man connection remains strong!

This was one of the most interesting links I've included in awhile:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190412094736.htm
It's not only promises great possibilities for the future, but is also a bit scary in terms of how it might get misused. I'm dubious about being incorporated into a global superbrain... Is collective thought any better than a collective economy? ...though I love the idea of such easy access to information. I had already read about the early experiments mentioned. I'll probably be dead before it's implemented. :(

Somewhat good news about the possibility of my impending dementia:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190415172151.htm
I am not easily gulled by scammers -- too suspicious. Sad that such a common problem is preyed upon so relentlessly by scammers. We got called 9 times in one day by one group of spammers, and two more the next day.

Ran into a couple of articles about battlebots, mainly about one being developed locally.
https://lbpost.com/life/999946963-battlebots-daisycutter/

https://lbpost.com/life/discovery-channels-battlebots-episodes-to-be-taped-in-long-beach/
Apparently episodes were being taped about 1.5 hours drive north of where I live, but I didn't discover this until shortly after the sessions were over with (not that I could have reasonably taken my mom to one).

Freeloading beetles:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190417153809.htm
Myrmecophiles... Might make an interesting subject for a feghoot... Hard to have an elaborate society w/o freeloaders. Clown beetles... Interesting that the beetles managed to switch hosts...

Census Bureau data reports that the island of Puerto Rico lost nearly 4% of its population from Hurricane Maria, the biggest single drop in its recorded history. O..o
=======

Toeing the Line

It turns out Don ‘Magic Toes’ Smythe has a brother, who has his own unique toe related nickname. He too attempted to be a dancer, but because of a neurological condition, that caused his toes to be permanently numb (basically, always asleep, with very poor circulation, possibly caused by over stressing his feet), he was very inept and graceless. So, no ‘magnet toes’, or ‘twinkle toes’, he was known as ‘comatoes’ (comatose). Because his toes were in a coma (even *shaped* like commas, more or less, because of atrophied muscles). He also managed to burn his feet, and only narrowly avoided being called ‘toastoes’ (toast toes)...

The visa thing is annoying, because you need to get pre-approved, and pay a fee. But it does last for 3 years.

We don't have a *lot* of mosquitoes locally, but if you wander outside during twilight, getting bitten is a risk. Including catching diseases from being bitten...

Hmm, I guess I can see (based on the MAL summary) some of the appeal for the anime Sarazanmai, though I'm not at all sure how I'd feel about it. I'll try to find some time to at least watch the first episode. BTW, I do appear to be watching One Punch Man season 2. I skipped the recap start, but have watched the first real episode. Seems as good as I remember, without being so complicated it's hard to follow late at night.

I might even end up with enough free time to watch other anime this season, since I think my sister is going to move back in with us in a month or so. I finally realized that I simply can't handle all the issues related to my mom without any help, and my sister seems interested in helping out (she needs a lot of help too). Hopefully we can bury the hatchets previously deployed and at least maintain an armistice. Time will tell...

Probably my preference as well (glasses).

Well, computer scientists have been using proofs for years, but this does appear to be a step up. Someday we'll have AIs doing large scale proofs for us...

We're barely capable of human ethics...

No, twinkle-toes is not a name I would aspire to... :\

If you can establish that you are at risk of being attacked by someone (ex-spouse, crazy acquaintance, etc.), you can file (in court) for a restraining order, that limits the person from coming within a certain distance of you, especially at home or work. If they violate it, you can call the police. Not sure what the penalties would be, but it is supposed to be a deterrent, though also considered weak against really dangerous people.

In Flew Enza was kind of a weak title, just a joking reference to influenza, roughly similar to the disease mentioned.

So the story didn't seen too long? It certainly wasn't heavy on puns...

I recently was reading some stories from a well known author (both generally and to me personally), that were written *before* I was born. I was struck, quite unexpectedly, to realize that my style resembles his more than a little. He's much better at descriptions (and writing in general), but a number of stylistic elements were similar. I certainly wouldn't have expected our writing to be so similar, out of all the authors I've read, he has a pretty famous & distinctive style. Of course, this was early in his career, so some of his stylistic elements were still being developed, but it still mostly sounded like him. I'm tempted to put more effort into my descriptions, to get even more like him, but I'm afraid that would lengthen my stories a bit more than I would prefer...

Speaking of eyes again...:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/asia/bees-found-in-taiwanese-womans-eye-scli-intl/index.html

This would be quite scary if it wasn't very small, and extinct:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cthulhu-sea-fossil_n_5cad7dfee4b0e833aa330e5e

The Israeli lunar mission crashed on the moon a few days ago. It was called Beresheet, leading to at least one comment about “Does a Beresheet in the woods” (no, it splats all over Luna, while mooning the moon). I think it was going about 300 miles/hour when it impacted. There was a prize goal it was trying to accomplish, but even though the prize had expired, and the mission crashed, they were given $1,000,000.00 anyway, so they could try again. Meanwhile, while the Israeli's were bombarding the moon, the Japanese were bombing an asteroid, intentionally in their case.

======

How do you know amphibians can’t be trusted?

It’s in the name: am-fib-ian. Definitely not a prince.

(You probably know this, but ‘fib’ is a slang term for lies.)
=====

Psychopomp* and Circumstances

A man came to his inevitable if somewhat tragic end, and met Death (Charon) when he came to collect him. Skeletal in appearance, with nothing but a skull for his head, and lightless eye sockets that seemed to extend backwards forever. “My, you’re more tall than I expected. Rather ironic, since you’re not”, the man said.

“Taller?” Death replied.

“Mor-tal.”

“Not too bad, “ Death responded gravely, “though I have heard it before. It’s hard to kill at comedy with some audiences, even using gallows humor.”

“Even though comedy is basically ‘come die’, it probably works better with eggs.”

“I’m not a big fan of Easter… Come this way, the ferry awaits us both.”

The two of them, a lengthy skeletal assembly and the even less corporeal soul, began to walk down toward the water, where a wooden boat awaited them.

“I say,”, the soul inquired, “how do you manage to propel the boat? Sheer force of personality, or…?”

“I skull” (scull - a type of rowing) came the reply.

“Of course, that’s using your head!”, earning him a dubious glance from Death.

They boarded the ferry, and proceeded across the water, eventually arriving at a dock.

“Is this where your keep your ferry when not in use?”

“This is my berth”, Death agreed, “though it is rarely not in active use.”

“The berth of Death!”, the soul exclaimed, “though which must eventually pass the result of every birth.”

This time Death just ignored him... (He recognized a reused pun when he heard it.)


* A spirit that transports the dead to their final destination is known as a psychopomp, which is basically what Death (or Charon) is here. The connection between ‘come die’ and eggs is clearer if you spell ‘die’ dye. And of course, 'Pomp and Circumstances' is associated with graduations, the name of a traditional song.
=======
(another longish one)

Vermilion Flames*

Scientific projects are usually lead by a single scientist, the Principal Investigator (PI). But on the occasion I’m now describing, two different senior scientists both wrote up similar, intriguing and complementary proposals, and the funding agency rather quirkily decided to approve their proposals, but make them both co-Principal Investigators for the project Thus providing a cautionary tale against such practices…


The project related to investigating new methods for generating gravity waves, particularly high frequency ones. Since the only gravity waves ever detected by science were created by the catastrophic collisions of massive objects (black holes or neutron stars), this was not at all an easy problem to solve. Still, they had an idea about how it might be done.

<Skip Science Babble: /On>

To wit, using Bose-Einstein-Condensates (BEC) to create cold, relatively compact collections of bosons (a type of particle, not to be confused with nautical bosuns), all in exactly the same quantum state, which are then caused to vibrate at a high frequency.

Although such BEC collections are compact, none so far created have ever been at all massive enough to have much of a gravitational significance. Both PIs had ideas for how to create more massive BECs, and suggested in their proposals that the BEC’s singular quantum state would magnify any resulting gravity waves, perhaps enough to be detectable, at least at short ranges. They also wanted to create multiple simultaneous BECs, and have them resonate with each other through the use of coordinated matter lasers, further ramping up the result.

<Skip Science Babble: /Off>

In a few words, a pretty complicated and highly experimental set up.

Both PIs were pretty senior PhDs, and were irritable and arrogant. They didn’t get along very well -- in fact, they fought like starving, rabid weasels. They were so good at rowing (fighting), they should have competed as a two person sculling crew... They had a fairly large number of graduate students, but their constant fighting eventually drove all the other PhDs off the project.

Their mutual dislike and competition ended up moving the project along much further than most outsiders would have expected, but they did have one fundamental disagreement they couldn’t settle: what the final, optimal frequency should be. Even as they set up the configuration for the first experimental test of the final system, it was still up in the air. 2*PI are round, and it was time for their next round of fighting...

Each of the 16 BECs were cooled, fed, and vibrated to a neutral frequency, a fairly time consuming process. While one of the PIs was verifying the settings and initial results, the other PI moved the frequency setting to the value he believed was optimal, until PI #1 noticed and yanked the control setting to his frequency. The two PIs continued to struggle with the frequency settings, yanking it back and forth, inadvertently setting up a complex beat that further amplified the resulting gravity waves. Suddenly the local space-time seemed itself to be vibrating, until…

A rip in the fabric of space-time itself (portal) seemed to open up near the center of the lab equipment, a dark depthless surface, out of which large shadowy tentacles extended, coated with vermilion flames. They groped and thrashed around the lab, creating a chaotic and surreal scene, narrowly missing both PIs, but latching onto several of the BEC installations. With immense force, the seized installations were wrenched loose into the air, and then sucked back through the portal (cue weird sound effects). The feeling that space-time was shaking died away, along with the odd vermilion light and the portal itself.

The two PIs stared around at their nearly entirely wrecked lab, disbelief on their faces. “Did our gravity waves somehow affect a neighboring cosmos, irritating them sufficiently to reach out and shut down/wreck our apparatus?” “That’s a preposterous suggestion, nothing like that could possibly have occurred!” “There’s a well known theory that the reason gravity is so comparatively weak is because parts of the field extend into other dimensions!”

The two continued to argue, prompting one of their grad students to remark “When you are working with a pair of docs (paradox), no explanation of what happens is possible.”


*I came up with this (more or less) several years ago, but was reluctant to post it on AU, for fear the title might offend Vermillion, one of the older members of the site, best known for his flaming prowess… Or just be so obscure as to annoy everyone who reads it. :(

In Flew Enza

A male individual was being held in an interrogation room by federal agents, though he didn’t seem particularly perturbed. One of the agents was questioning him:

“As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Drake, a few months ago we had a worldwide outbreak of some type of flu like illness. It spread with unbelievable swiftness, managing to infect at least 5 billion people, probably the most virulent viral infection ever seen. And yet, it seemed to be quite mild in its symptoms, only causing people to violently sneeze for a few hours, w/o causing any other significant symptoms, and not having any apparent long term effects. Prepubescent children were unaffected, as were the elderly.”

Drake merely nodded.

“Scientists who have studied the virus believe it was genetically modified, most likely weaponized. But we haven’t figured out who did it or why it was released. No credible claims have been made to be behind it, otherwise we would probably assume it was a dry run or threat demonstration. No country, racial or ethnic group was targeted or excluded. We’re rather stumped.”

“But we have managed to figure out one thing: Where and when it was released. We also know who patient zero was.”

Pause. “It was you Mr. Drake, you were patient zero.”

“I’ll save time and admit I wasn’t just an innocent dupe, selected at random to be the starting point. I had the virus created to my specifications, and did make the initial release. No harm to any living creature on Earth was intended, and I have no intentions of making or causing any further disease releases. My goals *appear* to have been fully accomplished.”

“Thanks for the confirmation… But we still have no idea why you did it. Aside from a very brief burst of alarm in the world media, there doesn’t appear to be any long term result. The whole thing seems to have been superfluous. Highly alarming to world governments, but ultimately pointless.”

“I assure you, it wasn’t pointless, though calling it superfluous isn’t *completely* wrong, since the virus was related to a superflu (which makes it super-flu-ous).” (Drake indulges in a brief smirk.)

“The virus subtly modified infected patient’s DNA to release a particular protein into the overall environment, and continue to do so after virus itself was no longer viable or present. Before you get alarmed, the protein released is harmless to anything on the planet. Producing it uses negligible resources, both generally and for individual ex-patients, can’t cause allergic reactions, and so forth. It is now widely dispersed throughout the world, and should remain that way for hundreds of years.”

“What possible reason for doing something like that could you have? Do you have any idea of the risks involved? And did you have to use *people* to manufacture and disperse this mysterious chemical? The whole thing sounds insane, like the behavior of a crazy supervillain from a comic book! And now you’re practically doing a monologue!”

“Ah. Yes, I can see how it might seem that way. The problem was, very little warning of the impending threat this was intended to deal with was received, and my resources were quite limited. And the threat is catastrophic, or at least it *was* before being dealt with.”

Drake paused for a moment, not quite as calm as before. “There is no way anyone would believe me, under any reasonable circumstances. Either I acted, or no one would. Once the threat was widely known, it would be too late. In a sense, I was immunizing the entire planet in advance.”

“What, you created a disease to immunize everyone against another disease? Sort of like a vaccine?”

“Only by analogy, the threat isn’t a conventional disease... There isn’t much point in trying to convince you right now, but in an hour or so events should make you more receptive. Is there any chance we can set up a monitor, to watch the major news event I’m talking about? I’m not the source of the threat, though the defense I’ve put in place will become apparent pretty quickly. Once again, no living entities on the planet will be affected adversely.”

“Seriously? We certainly aren’t going to give you any access to news broadcasts!”

“Suit yourself, but I’m probably the only one on the planet that can explain what is going to happen, even in retrospect. I’m trying to be helpful, not threatening you, or extorting anything. I’d tell you now, but you just wouldn’t believe me yet. Well, if you don’t want to watch events live, you can just record what happens, and then I can explain it as best I can afterwards.”

The agent shook his head, and left the room. Meeting with his superiors, he said “This guy sounds like a complete nutcase, but none of our scientists have any idea how he could have designed the virus, given our current technology. It’s easy enough to make, but too hard to design as of yet. It’s hard to see how he couldn’t know something we don’t, implausible as that also sounds.”

“Go ahead and keep an eye on the news for an hour or two, and then see what happens.”
…

About an hour later, outside the UN building in New York:

A truly historic event takes place, an obvious only semi-humanoid alien appears before the building. For no apparent reason, nothing can approach it within 30 feet (force field?). After a few moments, it starts to address the people present, loudly in English:

“I am, as should be readily apparent, an alien. I am here to declare ‘a lien’ on your planet, Earth, claiming it for my own race & civilization. This is our only announcement. We will…” Violent sneeze, followed by an immense indrawn breath, then… it exploded. The entire body of the alien violently exploded, splattering over the inner surface of a now visible sphere. Then everything, exploded body and sphere, disappeared, as abruptly as it had first appeared, leaving only the panicked spectators.
….

“Okay, you’ve had a chance to view what happened, was that some kind of weird special effects show?”

“Don’t be silly, no one could have done that. It was an actual alien, member of a rather aggressive species intent on claiming as much territory for themselves as possible. Much like the Spanish and Portuguese splitting most of the world between them with the Pope’s blessing several hundred years ago, they don’t consider humans much more than annoying animals. Their own hypocritical laws require them to make an announcement, but nothing you could have said or done would have stopped them from taking over. And clearing nearly all of humanity out of the way very quickly.”

“But, that doesn’t really explain what happened!”

“It was the virus, and the protein it spread around the world. Like I said, it wouldn’t hurt any lifeform on Earth, but it was specifically designed to produce a very violent reaction in any of the aliens exposed to it. They had already studied Earth, and knew it was safe for them, at least until the virus appeared, during the brief interval between the survey and their arrival to claim Earth. But now, the planet is completely useless to them, and it would cost them more to clean it out of the environment than the planet is worth. The virus has given a few hundred years of safety, hopefully you’ll be more ready for them by then.”

“As part of their announcement here on Earth, they also broadcast their claim (a lien) to the other neighboring aliens in this general area of the Galaxy, some of whom may attempt peaceful contact in the near future, and may be of aid in technological development.”

“Fortunately, almost no evidence other than visual was left behind, so you can probably cover up the whole thing as a prank, at least for now.”

“And that’s pretty much my entire explanation; I’ll be leaving quite soon…”

“What the heck!? What makes you think we’d let you wander off? We need a much more thorough explanation. It isn’t even clear we won’t throw the book at you for your reckless behavior. And how could you possibly know all that? Unless…”

“I’m another kind of alien, lending a little hand by sabotaging the other aliens? Gee, I wonder…”

‘Drake’ vanishes from the interrogation chamber.

“I’ve seen people invoke their ‘inalienable’ rights before, but that was ridiculous…”

(This whole thing got completely out of control, I have no idea why it got so long, though the ‘interrogation’ format was probably part of it. Oops.)

(BTW, I named the man 'Drake' because of how the English Sir Francis Drake caused so much trouble for the Spanish in the New World. And there are 3 puns in the whole story.)

We now have over 500 posts on here. I guess my last one was #500. (I actually went back over them recently, mostly just for the feghoots & puns, which weren't as common as I thought.)

Apparently not just a Visa, because they are adding it soon. Might need permission from Europe before coming, rather than automatically allowing it.

Yeah, and we crisscrossed it several times. I swear, the NE parts of the US are horribly humid during the summer, with lots of bugs & mosquitoes.

Well, after thinking about it, I doubt the naval battlebots would work very well, given the lack of long range weapons. But they could use dirigibles for air combat, with lifting bodies filled with helium. Then they wouldn't move as fast, and you could focus on puncturing the opponent to win, so they lose lifting capacity. Seeing them slow crash might be amusing. Or just several balloons bouncing off each other...

Most of the ones I mentioned were literal; My Mother, the Car was about a guy with a very old Model T car, whose mother died and reincarnated into the car, able to animate it. My Favorite Martian was about a guy with a (secret) Martian who was his friend, etc.

Let's just say... No. It was too racist to even hint at, shades of the KKK.

Well, I don't want any serial killers targeting me, but I still think knowing it was someone who was close to me would be more disturbing.

Well, that was the original idea, but later on some people started seeing evidence that the dinosaurs were already thinning out well before the asteroid strike, so there was some controversy.

Yeah, I wondered about how the research had gone as well.

Too long! A little spellbinding though...

Another potential way to reshape corneas, without lasers or scalpels.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190402081524.htm

When mathematical proofs and code intersect
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-evercrypt-library-creates-hacker-proof-cryptography-20190402/

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18296113/google-ai-ethics-board-ends-controversy-kay-coles-james-heritage-foundation
The AI ethics board only lasted a week...
======

The Return of “Magnet Toes”!
(Complete with excessively long backstory!)

Long ago, Don “Magnet Toes” Smythe was a young boy with a mother who was a professional dancer. He adored her, and wanted to be a great dancer as well, studying hard. She came up with a very odd method for enhancing his dance skills: she wanted to attach LED lights to his toes, so people would call him twinkle-toes (parents… such odd ambitions).

But to make attaching & detaching the LEDs easy, she decided to have magnets implanted in his toes, which would hold the LEDs in place. Basically replaced his toe bones with rare earth magnets… It doesn’t really sound like a good idea, especially for a dancer, but again: parents. In the end, the procedures were done, but the magnets were considerably stronger than intended. And by increasing how much his feet were attracted to the floor, they made him slower and less capable at actually dancing... The LEDs were abandoned, but he still had magnetic toes. Later he discovered that they greatly improved his climbing abilities, allowing him to actually walk up walls, as long as he walked over the studs in the walls. Carefully…

So, instead of being known as “twinkle toes”, his nickname became “magnet toes”. Life can be cruel...

Many years later, as the CEO of an investment company, he had some trouble with the local city council. There were several things he sought their approval of, to improve his business, but they weren’t inclined to support his ideas. He kept on making requests though, and eventually came to be seen as an extremely annoying pest by the council, to the point they refused to listen to or meet with him any more.

He sued for access, and lost. He appealed, and lost. Again. The council filed a restraining order against him, preventing him from approaching them within 100 feet (500 toes?). He became increasingly frantic, even to the point of climbing the walls (literally, in his case). In the end, he became in-council-able about the matter… (It didn’t help his mother was on the council…)

(A bit of a sad backstory. Originally I made him the one pushing for the surgery, but then changed it to his mother, which was actually sadder.)
=======

Many people have a sort of vague impression that the Irish are a bit ill-tempered, who's ire is easy to raise. But then again, it *is* called Ire-land…

There was no path Nor way through those Po’-lands. (Po’ can be slang for poor, esp in Louisiana) (I'm making country name puns again.)

Why does having a foot long centipede land on you often prove fatal?
It’s a hundred foot fall…
======

A trainee cook was making a pizza, under supervision. “Finish it,” he was told.

“All of it?” the trainee asked. “Olive it!” he heard back in confirmation.

“Okay, now I’m confused… Does it need more olives, or not?”
=====

Avoid a void,
O void ovoid.

When he took off his polarized sunglasses, his eyes looked so cold, they still seemed like polar eyes.
=====

My next one is soo long, I'm sending it as a separate post. Unfortunately, don't assume that length is the measure of quality in this case...