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Longest Running Thread EVER


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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

Unless there is something hard and/or sharp just off Josh's side of the bed' date=' a lob from your side would work. :eg:[/quote']

Not quite. She just clings to the side of the bed and climbs back up, mewing inquisitively. Or maybe that mew means, "Again, Mom! Again!"

 

. . . I wonder how cats perceive laughter . . .

Apparently it means, "I see right through you! I see you're a stupid, clumsy creature who I won't feed anymore unless I forget about your stupidity!"

 

Based on my cats' reactions to it, anyway.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

The Freedom Kittens will sleep on any clothes left on the bed' date=' and on our feet...[/quote']

Loki, the deceased Doofus Brother, was the same way. (He had a plush fetish, so if he had multiple options he'd always go for the velour.) We got in the habit of deliberately laying a cloth out at the foot of the bed for him. He'd sleep there every time, and the arrangement worked to everyone's satisfaction.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

Apparently it [laughter] means, "I see right through you! I see you're a stupid, clumsy creature who I won't feed anymore unless I forget about your stupidity!"

 

Based on my cats' reactions to it, anyway.

 

OTOH, a cat always knows when you're laughing at them. I've racked up assignments to several eternities in Kitty Hell from that.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

OTOH' date=' a cat always knows when you're laughing at [u']them[/u]. I've racked up assignments to several eternities in Kitty Hell from that.

Quite true. They're also usually good at telling when you're yelling at them, but I do have one semi-skittish little guy who runs away if I pick up a spray bottle. Poor thing.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

I think the worst incident in my history was watching Critter when she rolled a natural 18 on a Leaping test. From the window sill to the top of the bed, maybe 1.5 feet sideways and 6 inches up. She did a facer into the side of the bed and thumped onto the floor. Both my wife-to-be and I burst out laughing. I'm not sure she ever forgave us in the 8 years or so she lived after that.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

The Four Seasons:

Salt, Pepper, Mustard, Vinegar

 

Yes that's true.

 

Salt is the only one that I know. ;) The rest are foreign as far as my stomache is concerned.

 

Heathen ! What do you put on Fish and Chips then ? (That's Fish and French Fried Potatoes to the Yanks amongst us)

I have Pepper on dinners usually. And Mustard in ham cheese and tomato sandwiches. Or with dinners.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

Literally' date=' not-true, non-real, i.e., not of true blood. "Bastard" in swedish.[/quote']

 

There is an English version. Anytime you see Fitz- as a surname then that means that some one was originally the bastard offspring of someone. Such as FitzGerald is bastard son/daughter of Gerald.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

Heathen ! What do you put on Fish and Chips then ? (That's Fish and French Fried Potatoes to the Yanks amongst us)

I have Pepper on dinners usually. And Mustard in ham cheese and tomato sandwiches. Or with dinners.

 

I don't use salt. High blood pressure. I replace it in the list with garlic powder. I use alot of black and chilli pepper. Turkey and chicken are about the only 2 meats I don't use mustard with on sandwhiches. And I use vinegar all the time.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

I was sleeping when the second attack came.

 

I had gone down to the new house for the first time. It wasn't much of a house, really--more like a freestanding studio--but it had a view across the valley, and no neighbors. Plus it was all I could afford. The furnishings were ancient, as though the whole place were a time capsule from the seventies, but I didn't really care. After a cursory investigation of the house, I turned off the old TV and stretched out on the musty old bed for a nap.

 

I awoke to find a strange man using the bathroom, which was right off the front door. He was already on his way out when he saw me. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "I just bought this place," I answered. "that was my impression, anyway." Embarrassed, the man hurriedly apologized and left. Still groggy from the nap, I didn't protest, I just followed him outside.

 

A dozen people were standing around in the dirt by the side of the road, looking up into the overcast sky. Naturally I felt compelled to see what they were looking at, so I too squinted into the clouds. At first I couldn't see anything, but then I made out the outline of an airliner. It was mostly obscured by the clouds, so I couldn't tell for sure, but there was something--wrong--about its flight angle. "Pull up, pull up!" I implored, all the while hoping that the angle was just a trick of perspective and that the plane was not actually pointed at the ground. It disappeared below the trees, headed twoard the other side of town, and was replaced a moment later by an oily black mushroom cloud. In shock, I noticed that it had landed just beyond another, older such cloud, that marked where another plane had gone down.

 

Two planes had crashed within minutes of each other. I knew what that meant. And so did everyone else, because the roads was jammed solid with traffic. So I began to walk. As we walked up the hill, another plane came into view, creeping over the hills on the other side of the valley. It was moving painfully slow, and its crew was plainly trying to land it using only engine controls--the sabotage must have taken out the hydraulics. The plane bent and deformed from the strain of the rapid throttle changes, then stopped and slid sideways into the hill, rolling to the bottom out of sight. Weak cheers went up from the people walking with me. "At least that crash looked survivable," said the man standing next to me.

 

We resumed our trek towards the mountains. With the roads jammed with traffic, we headed for the new pedestrian tunnel that had been dug more to the north. This path took us over the location of the last crash, and we saw some survivors walking away from the crash site, which was encouraging. I thought about trying to help, but I had to find my family and make sure they were all right, so I kept walking.

 

I found my wife and kid in the now-crowded pedestrian tunnel, looking for me. People were streaming through the tunnel in both directions, so it was lucky that we were able to find each other. My wife was carrying the boy and a spare pair of shoes. I told her that, since traffic was better ont he other side of the mountains, that I would go and get the car and come back for them. I took the shoes, so that she would not have to carry them and the boy.

 

The pedestrian tunnel exited out into a deserted elementary school. I walked through the school and its silent playground, and got as far as the school's driveway, which was lined with very green trees. I then realized that splitting up the family under the circumstances was not terribly bright, so I went back to get them, but only after leaving the shoes in a plastic spiral slide in the playground, where they would not be found.

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Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

 

Interesting little paper in the AJ this month, on epsilon Eridani b, one of the closest extrasolar planet systems to us. Spectroscopy detected the planet and got an orbit solution, and that provided enough interest to get HST time to do astrometry (that is, precise measurement of the star's positions over time). If the data are good enough, combining those two lets you solve for everything in the system, including the orbital inclination, the true mass of the planet, and so on.

 

The next apastron for the planet will happen in the middle of September 2010, at which point the planet will be 1.7 arcseconds from the star. However, the most favorable time for trying to detect the planet directly by reflected starlight is late December next year. The infrared may offer a better chance; if you take their computed mass for the planet, the assumed age of the system, look up the infrared luminosity from theoretical models, and you get a difference in bolometric magnitude between the star and planet of about 18.3 (a little more than a factor of 20 million). If it wasn't so close to the star, that'd be an easy detection; the problem has always been one of dynamic range.

 

And, there's evidence in the orbit solutions for another planet in the system, one with a period of roughly 100 years.

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