Month: March 2012

Categories
Critters Home Base

Coffee table book? No. Cat table cat.

A glimpse of our new carpet-less reality.

Cat table cat

I laid my bathrobe on the coffee table for some reason that I forget (probably something to do with taking naps on that couch since it’s under a window that allows a lovely breeze into the house), and that table (and the robe) have now become a favorite vacation destination for the fearsome five. The only cat I haven’t seen take up temporary residence on the robe/table is Puck, but he’s a black cat, and it’s a black robe, so it’s possible that he was there, unseen, like a little furry ninja. A slightly fat little furry ninja.

We won’t be able to put in flooring for a while, and I need to duct tape the edges of the entryway tile and the kitchen/dining room tile so they don’t get chipped, but so far… I’m loving sweeping instead of vacuuming. It ain’t pretty, but it’s a hell of a lot cleaner, even if all of my decorating ideas (painting parking spaces for each cat, painting aircraft carrier stripes leading to the rest of the house) have been shot down.… Read more

Categories
Podcast Of Extraordinary Magnitude

Podcast: Concrete Bland

Concrete BlandHome improvements (maybe), landing strips, weather warning software, and a king-sized dose of music to make up for being gone for two months. Fair warning, this installment is nearly two hours long.

Listen here:
[sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/concrete.mp3″]

Right-click here and “save as” to save to your hard drive or MP3 player; leave feedback in the forums.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

Why go?

^^ This. Also, advance to approximately 41:55 on the clip below:

(Sorry about the Warner Bros. spamminess; to my amazement I couldn’t find the scene in question anywhere on Youtube. To me it’s one of the most memorable moments in the entire series.)

Sadly, looking through the comments on the Youtube/Neil deGrasse Tyson video, it quickly becomes apparent why the dream is dead: we’ve become far too invested in shouting at eat other instead of finding common ground. Everyone seems far too interested in finding reasons to be pissed off, and not interested enough in lifting their eyes to the horizon. Everyone’s too busy reacting to think for themselves, dream, and act on that.

That, more than anything, will be the doom of this country, if not the entire world. Will it matter which ideology is prevalent if we destroy ourselves, or if the next passing asteroid does it for us? Whatever supreme being you may believe in, remember that he or she supplied you with a brain to fill much of that large round thing above your shoulders. Surely there’s a better use for it than bickering or devising ways to “do the other side in.”… Read more

Categories
Critters

The Critter Census

Just for giggles, using this article about determining your pets’ age, I decided to do a quick “critter census” of our herd of pets. (If indeed such a label can be applied to our four-legged overlords.) Here’s what I came up with:

Xena is approximately 64 years old in dog years. No wonder she’s delegated guard dog duties to Gabby, who is now a rambunctious teenager: she’s getting ready to retire.

Olivia and Oberon are both running up on 40. No wonder they hang out with me so much these days. Puck is 28, and he’s still nuts – Pucknuts, that is. That helps him to keep up with Portia and Maria, who are both teenagers.

Pour in a four-year-old human on top of all these four-legged teenagers, and now you know why I’m going grey.… Read more

Categories
And Beyond The Infinite

Death from the skies!

Or… dust from the skies! I’m gonna go all Fred Baker on it and issue my very own…

Martian Tornado Warning

…because… check this out.

Martian Tornado

It’s a giant dust devil on Mars.

A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.

So… it’s giant Martian tornado*, in the late part of the Martian spring. People from Arkansas and Oklahoma should colonize this planet immediately (as I’m from Arkansas, I know of what I speak). We’d be right at home. Let’s land a few well-stocked trailers there and get going.

* maybe not a tornado formed from the same moisture-reliant convection structure that causes tornadoes in the American midwest, sure, but obviously there’s some kind of atmospheric shear making this happen – it’s the same root cause in the end.… Read more