BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!

Subject: BS: Frickin' Disaster Looms!!
From: Rapparee
Date: 26 Jun 11 - 11:47 PM

We've got BS threads on gas fracking disasters, political disasters, earthquakes, nuclear disasters, tornadoes, hurricans...but do you REALIZE that the Sun -- yes! OUR SUN!! -- is running out of fuel and will all too soon burn itself out? Assuming that we aren't hit by an asteroid first? Or all the volcanoes on the Pacific Rim blow at once? Or England sinks, leaving Scotland, Wales and Cornwall bobbing alone in the North Sea?

Why are we so fixated on disasters? You can't stop them. I live inside the explosion area of the Yellowstone Supercaldera and if it blows, which it will sooner or later, I'm dead (along with a whole lot of other people). I can't stop it when it happens.

Bad things ARE going to happen and we can do our best to affect those we can. But we can't change the past and we don't know the future.

Why not laugh a lot instead?

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Leadfingers
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 06:29 AM

One day as I sat musing , sad and lonley , without a friend , a voice came to me out of the gloom saying "Cheer Up ! Things could be worse !"
So I cheered up , and sure enough , things got worse !

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 09:42 AM

Excellent point, Rapparee. Why aren't people here talking about Dachshunds instead of disasters? You can play ball with a Dachshund, rub its tummy, and give it treats, and you can't do any of those things with a disaster.

And why are certain people here fighting with other certain people EVERY frikkin' DAY OF THEIR LIVES about politics???? There's no hope they'll ever agree with each other, they just piss each other off and get stressed out over their daily shot of recreational political outrage. Why do they do it? They could, after all, be discussing Dachshunds instead. It wouldn't achieve anything if they did...but neither does their fighting over politics achieve anything. ;-)

Arf!

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 10:54 AM

Armed revolt is the only answer.

Aux Armes, mes Dachshunds! Pissez en son chapeaux!

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:24 AM

Disasters? We don't need no stinkin' disasters!

Entropy Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out!





In fact, entropy will get you if you DO watch out......

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:34 AM

"England sinks, leaving Scotland, Wales and Cornwall bobbing alone in the North Sea?"

Disaster?

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:40 AM

For some maybe.... the Armstrongs & Elliots will just scoot to the safe side of the line.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Stringsinger
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:53 AM

Fricking Fracking? Firewater from your tap.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 12:07 PM

The Fracking is something we can do something about, as a country at least. If it wasn't Exxon and Chevron and the boys wouldn't be spending millions on TV ads promoting it.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 12:59 PM

Not scared by asteroids, killer bees, volcanoes, supernovas?


I got yer scariest disaster right here!



THE BIG NASTURTIUMS


All of a sudden the big nasturtiums
Rose in the night from the ocean's bed,
Rested a while in the light of the morning,
Turning the sand dunes tiger red.

They covered the statue of Abraham Lincoln,
They climbed to the top of our church's spire.
"Grandpa! Grandpa! Come to the window!
Come to the window! Our world's on fire!"

Big nasturtiums in the High Sierras,
Big nasturtiums in the lands below;
Our trains are late and our planes have fallen,
And out in the ocean the whistles blow.

Over the fields and over the forests,
Over the living and over the dead—
"I never expected the big nasturtiums
To come in my lifetime!" Grandpa said.

—Robert Beverly Hale

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 01:12 PM

LOL! Very good.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 03:19 PM

Dave... hahahahahahaaa

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 04:22 PM

To hell with dachshunds! Let's talk about something really important, like cauliflower. Cauliflower is not actually a vegetable. In fact, it's not food at all. It's simply something to pour cheese sauce over. It tastes like nothing. It's like a group of brassica growers decided broccoli was far too flavorful for their liking so they selectively bred strains of broccoli until anything resembling flavor was bred out, resulting in cauliflower. One can eat broccoli with no more than a bit of butter on it, but nobody can eat cauliflower without first drowning it in a strong cheese sauce. So the question becomes, "Why fool with the cauliflower? Why not just eat the cheese sauce straight? Or serve it over a nice bed of shredded newspaper or Styrofoam packing peanuts?"

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 04:50 PM

B W L, Have you ever Shat shredded newspaper or Styrofoam packing peanuts?

I haven't but I suspect that the answer resides in that question.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 05:20 PM

I eat cauliflower with nothing on it but a little butter. I hate cheese sauce. Sue me!

Ah.....nothing like a little recreational outrage to get the juices flowing. ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: DMcG
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 05:25 PM

Yes, my loom is a bit of a disaster too. I think I misread the IKEA instructions so it now has werp and waft and that can't be right

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 05:30 PM

Cauliflowers are just cabbages with college educations.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: frogprince
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 07:10 PM

And brussel sprouts are just sick, perverted little cabbages.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 07:12 PM

Cauliflower, with your fav salad dressing, is meant to blend with broccoli, with your fav salad dressing, so that your anal sphincter is more gently assaulted in the morning. Now, I am no expert so ask Spaw but I am pretty sure cauliflower is in the "cushion" food group and simply a medium for proper broccoli digestion leading to broccoli farts, which, with the right cheese... well... there it is eh? Disasster may ensue.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 10:35 PM

Of all members of the cabbage family, collards generate the most fully flavored farts. Collards are also the most primitive members of the family, most closely resembling the wild ancestral plant from which all modern brassicas were selectively bred. The more highly refined brassicas such as broccoli and cauliflower only produce minor poots compared with the deadly stink bombs created by collards.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 10:46 PM

Learn to love cauliflower:

Into a large zip lock bag put cauliflower in big pieces, some olive oil, some rock salt, and zip. Shake and move till all is covered in everything. Undish contents of bag into overproof dish or cookie sheet and bake at pretty much any temp for pretty much any amount of time you already have the oven on for, like roasting chicken or whatever.

Yum yum yum.

Dachsunds are better on a spit, roasted whole stuffed with couscous, one per person. Raisins add something to the couscous.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:09 PM

Dachshunds are good on a spit, but they're already stuffed.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 27 Jun 11 - 11:32 PM

BWL I AGREE ABOUT THE C's

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 05:54 AM

About the C's what?

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 06:16 AM

Collards.

I wanted it to rhyme.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 06:44 AM

Forgive mentioning a real event:

Asteroid 2011MD passed 7.600 miles from Earth at 1:20 PM EST yesterday

It was estimated at 30 to 90 feet long, big enough for a meteor crater New Mexico sized event. Talking heads said it was the size of a tour bus.

It passed undeneath many of our satillites. This was the closest pass in 25 years.

Perhaps in this case, it was a tour bus.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 07:47 AM

Yes! A non ferrous rock blindly zipping around the Earth's orbit for millions of years without contact. Just like a chartered bus of little old ladies lost on the way to the Native American Reservation Bingo.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 09:45 AM

At 7.600 miles up wouldn't we have seen something? At least an airplane might have? That's only 40,128 feet altitude.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 09:53 AM

Gotta watch them full stops and use the curly ones in the right place.

LOLOL
Don T.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 03:38 PM

"the curly ones" are improper. SI designates spaces... 7 600 miles if it wasn't 7.6 miles (and why the 0s?). Of course, miles are outdated moreso than commas but the Yanks seem to think they are special when it comes to measuring up. You would think they would lead instead of follow on that one. Maybe they don't get base ten arithmetics?

And another thing... why are US gallons different from Imperial gallons? I could NEVER figure that one out. When I was an engineering student, we had to do all our assignments in three systems : SI, Imperial and Yank. Made 50% more work for me and I never understood why.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 04:50 PM

It all went quickly on the handy dandy slide rule. Remember those? I still have mine, in its hard leather case. We wore them like side arms.
Doubt if I could use it now, without practice and the manual.

My mind was conditioned to the one, true, all-American (U.S.) system.
If someone says 50 kilometers, I have to mentally convert to miles (x0.6 = 30 miles, rough calculation) before I can visualize it. Driving at 60 mph, it will take me roughly 15 minutes to arrive at the destination. What could be simpler?

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 05:03 PM

British and American tons are different too, and I think the Brits' are bigger...

And what about ounces and fluid ounces?

I remember slide rules, and the rackin' frackin' decimal point placement issue!

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 11 - 05:08 PM

100 divided by ten is ten. That's simpler. 12" times 32 pounds per slug is sluggish. Mass shouldn't be where you go on Sunday morning to pound the bible. Heck, you were in the biz... think of all the time you wasted with that antiquated system.

My slide rule (over 40 years old) sits on my desktop and I use it more that my calculator for design work on accounta the calculator is too slow. The calculator is "accurate" but I leave that for the techs who fine tune the contract quantities... often they are off my estimates when the contracts are over but that's why we write in the +/- 15% rule.

Of course, I use Cadkey and AutoCad (AutoCad is a piece of shit compared to Cadkey but money talks eh?) for a lot of stuff, but my sliderule is cool when I am doing estimates.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 29 Jun 11 - 01:34 AM

": gnu - PM


" And another thing... why are US gallons different from Imperial gallons? I could NEVER figure that one out."

From a quick look in wiki, the answer seems to be that the U.S. uses the old U.K. system, whereas the U.K. changed some parts of its measuring system in 1824.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Jun 11 - 10:27 AM

I have several slide rules. I use them all the time, even now I'm working one with each foot while I type this. As for accuracy, well, they were good enough to build the Empire State Building, to fight WW1 and the Hun Hordes, build the Atom Bomb and the first Atomic Pile, to construct Boulder Dam, to figure out all those books of logrhythmic tables. BY GOD! If it was good enough for Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Madame Curie, Louis Pasteur, Enrico Fermi, Lis Metner, and Werner Von Braun it's good enough for me!

Now, addition and subtraction are, well, problematic....

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 29 Jun 11 - 11:37 AM

My father put much effort into getting me to learn the f**king slide rule back in the mid-60s, but I never liked the things. I was delighted when they were suddenly rendered obsolete by the electronic calculator.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 29 Jun 11 - 01:19 PM

Sorry, that should have read "rickin' frickin'" decimal point placement issue.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: ripov
Date: 30 Jun 11 - 10:18 AM

Those US miles are certainly smaller than UK ones! I reckon the early american settlers were traders that gave people short measure, and their customers were chasing them.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 30 Jun 11 - 06:22 PM

"Those US miles are certainly smaller than UK ones"


Ah, is that then why Americans seem to think they live in a big country :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: gnu
Date: 30 Jun 11 - 06:33 PM

autolycus... ": gnu - PM

?

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 30 Jun 11 - 06:50 PM

Ah, is that then why Americans seem to think they live in a big country :-)

Texas is actually smaller than Scotland.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 02 Jul 11 - 01:17 PM

gnu

If American miles are smaller than European/ Britsh/English/East Anglian ones, you'll get more miles numbers for your bucks.

That's the missing step to suggesting why the result might be as i suggested - bigger numbers.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 02 Jul 11 - 01:51 PM

I believe ripov was joking about the size of the miles.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 Jul 11 - 04:56 PM

Ah, yes, one of the differences between the Europeans and the Americans: Americans think that 100 years is a long time, and Europeans think that 100 miles is a long distance.

When we were in Europe one of my kids called them "fun-sized" countries...

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 03 Jul 11 - 08:11 AM

"I believe ripov was joking about the size of the miles."

I was essaying keeping the joke going.

One fun way to laugh at all this talk if disasters might be to regularly cross roads on foot without looking. I mean, we're all gonna die some time so what the hell. Or maybe not.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Donuel
Date: 03 Jul 11 - 10:06 PM

The disasters that honest caring people have devoted time and energy discussing, and seeking positive change, are the disasters that MEN have caused directly or indirectly and are things WE can do something about.

The sun growing unstable is not among the disasters that the intelligent people here have discussed in detail.




A 7,600 mile asteroid miss is better than a mile. If it had been 7.6 miles then the asteroid would have... but again these are the very disasters in which we have no appreciable defense and are not man made. The amount of money dedicated world wide to the tracking of earth crossing asteroids is a tiny fraction of what a busy McDonald restaurant makes in a year.

Now back to the you tube of the sleepy kitten...

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 04 Jul 11 - 02:14 AM

McDonalds, feeds real, immediate, personal needs. People are willing to pay for that.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 04 Jul 11 - 04:04 AM

Ah, now there's a person-made disaster -illness and death nurtured by junk food.

Subject: RE: BS: Fricking Disaster Looms!!
From: autolycus
Date: 06 Jul 11 - 03:13 AM

Oops. Was it something i said?