Goats are tough. When I was a youngster we once visited someone who had few sheep and a goat. My mother and a friend and I were sitting under a tree and they were talking when a goat came up to the nearby electric fence. No one thought much about it until the goat bit down hard on the wire and would not let go. You could see it’s head spasm as the pulses came through. Eventually the wire broke and the goat went to the next wire and bit down. Same thing. Then it calmly proceeded to walk on through to get to some tasty vegetation. They had just repaired the fence recently and wondered who kept cutting the wire. Now they knew. Goats are tough.
Dogs can be tough too…or maybe just stubborn. We had an English Springer Spaniel when I was growing up, and when she was about a year or two old, we put in a pool. She, being a water dog, believed that the big watery hole in the ground was hers. We, being the humans who paid for it, believed it was ours.
We put her in a wood latice dog run. She ate her way out of that (not too many pieces of wood were found afterwards, so it wasn’t just chewing). We fixed the fence and put aluminum sheet along the bottom where she’d eaten her way out. She ate her way past it too. That’s when we put up the electric fence. It stopped her for a good two weeks before she discovered that if you bite it and pull, it stops hurting.
We gave up on keeping her away from and out of the pool.
Little Brother works on a dairy goat farm. When they get an urge to do something, they will do it. One day they had quite a few go MIA and were found way off on the other side of the farm. After they were gathered up and brought back, they did it again. At first, there seemed to be no broken fencing, or digging under, or any of the usual ways away from the milking barn. Finally, Brother saw a group making a break for it towards a fence. As he caught up, he saw how they were getting out. Two goats had jumped on the fence, pushing the wires down low enough for the rest to just hop on over! The fences were soon replaced.
Bulls are tough too. But some years ago, some of our big bulls found that barb wire fences, electric fences, and such–none of them hurt if two big fellows push a smaller one through them.
If the Darwin Award site is still around, there used to be a story there about a guy who lost his woman, decided to climb to the top of a power tower with a six pack, and drink way his sorrows. After drinking the whole pack, he naturally had to pee, and apparently did not aim away from the high-voltage power lines. Police found his body on the ground, and black, smoking hole where his crotch once was.
Fortunately for Fairportfan’s friend, the kind of electric fences meant to discourage animals from crossing property lines actually don’t have a very high voltage. They’re meant to sting, not kill.
The Wardenclyffe Tower, though primarily a communications apparatus, was a demonstration of how the charged regions of the upper atmoshpere could be made to oscillate. If the oscillation was made to be sustained, anyone on earth could theoretically tap into it for the purpose of electrical power. Free electricity for all…
I don’t think it lasted long enough to reach the ‘safety testing’ stage. Money (and image) troubles. He also didn’t know about earth’s ionosphere, and though the reflections he was detecting were from the Rockies. A standing wave in the ionosphere would be a great power source – but probably would eliminate radio and microwave communitation due to interference.
That reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain‘s notion of tapping the ionosphere’s Shumann Resonance frequency for the carrier wave for a global wireless internet (based on IPv7).
Unfortunately, the SCHUMANN WAVE primary frequency is less than 10 Hertz, varies in frequency as much as 11% over the course of a single day, and is heavily dependent upon lightning, sunspots and other ionospheric disturbances.
Close. It wasn’t safety that was the issue, but practicality. Tesla and Edison had this in common, at least: both weren’t at home with modern physics. It turns out that physics just won’t let you do that, but Tesla (and for that matter Edison, Coffin, and Westinghouse) didn’t have the knowledge we have today.
Yep. He had these great ideas, bui they Just Won’t Actually Work.
But the conspiracy theorists claim that his brilliant work was suppressed, just as they claim that Tucker’s brilliant design for a car ‘way ahead of its time was suppresed by the Big Auto Companies.
Wrong. Tesla had ideas that sounded great but wouldn’t actually work, and Tucker went out of business because he was essentially financing his startup car company with a pyramid scheme.
A man ahead of his time. He leapfrogged over a bunch of unfortunately necessary steps. I want a car powered by a bladeless turbine – or one of his Flying Stovepipes similarly equipped………..
@Fairportfan: I’ve been in the antique auto/automotive history hobby for 30 years (my avatar & username are what they are for a reason), and I can tell you that Preston Tucker didn’t set out to hoax anyone. He certainly was something of a finagler, and was very naive as far as how to go about financing his company. But nobody would have gone to as much trouble as he did, especially build a prototype and 50 cars (all of which either survive or have been accounted for, BTW), if he was not genuine about what he did. Even the jury declared his trial a farce and handed down a ‘not guilty’ verdict. His biggest problem was being of a showman mentality and biting off WAY more than he could chew in the process; he also suffered from having several unscrupulous backers with huge conflicts of interest. Even the senator who investigated him–Homer Ferguson of Detroit–had a huge chunk of Chrysler stock in his wife’s name. So, yes, there was some blatant conspiring going on behind the scenes, especially considering the SEC and the government looked the other way when Henry J. Kaiser essentially did a similar thing earlier in building a different car than he advertised (one with front-wheel drive). As for the cars, Tucker tried to develop them on a shoestring budget and in a hurry. Some of his ideas didn’t pan out, but that doesn’t mean the cars are that bad. I had the rare opportunity to drive a Tucker some years back. Aside from the fact that it feels like you’ve got a huge load of bricks in the trunk, it isn’t that bad. It’s something one has to get used to, like any other car. And despite rumors, they all have a reverse gear, including the first prototype. For further reference, I suggest reading “The Indomitable Tin Goose” by Charles T. Pearson, available at most public libraries. Also the Tucker articles in the following magazines: Special Interest Autos #14, Dec. ’72/Jan. ’73 (an excellent article interviewing many then-auto execs and former Tucker employees, including the car’s designer), and Collectible Automobile Vol. 2 No. 2, July 1985. I don’t suggest the Francis Ford Coppola movie unless you simply want light entertainment. Generally speaking, the movie does basically follow the true story, but takes “artistic license” with too many of the details.
I didn’t say he was hoaxing anyone; he obviously believed in his company and planned product.
But he was relying in large part on selling dealerships for a product that was only hypothetical to finance making it real … which, i suppose, isn’t exactly a pyramid scheme (unless he was selling regional ditributorships to people who could then sell dealerships – i forget), but it’s not an inherently sound way to do it.
Also, i never said the Tucker was inferior to other cars of the period, just that Tucker Conspiracy Enthusiasts like to claim that it was so much better than anything in production that the Auto Establishment conspired to drive it out of business.
I do find your comment about driving as if it had “a huge load of bricks in the trunk” fascinating, though…
Now, if you want a documented case of established industry types conspiring to put a lower-cost competitor out of business, check out the way that the full-fare carriers blackmailed suppliers to put Laker Airways out of business.
(Incidentally leaving Dave (“Darth Vader”) Prowse stranded in Florida, where the members of an SF con he was attending took up a collection to get him home…)
That is true about the stock issue and the dealership sale. As for my comment about driving it, remember that the engine is in the back, which makes it VERY tail-heavy (42% weight in front, 58% weight in rear). It was kind of like driving an overloaded pickup truck; the oversteer was more than you’d find in a Corvair. It DID have plenty of power and snap, though; at 335 cubic inches (bigger than Hudson’s 308 c.i.d. six would be later), the horizontally-opposed six puts out 166 hp. and 372 ft-lbs. of torque–and that’s on 7.0:1 compression. So there was certainly no shortage of power–I made 60 MPH in no time–but the light-feeling steering had me a bit scared, so I backed off quick. NOT a car you want to gaze off into the cornfield with, because the next thing you know, that’s just where you’ll wind up. I only drove it a few miles down a county trunk highway and back, but it sure was different… the pre-selector for the gearshift took some getting used to as well. Not like the 3-on-the-tree-with-O.D. in my ’54 Kaiser. Plus the Tucker I drove also had its rubber-biscuit “Torsiolastic” suspension replaced with something more conventional; I understand that the unmodified ones are just pure hell to drive and they bottom and wallow about like a rowboat in the ocean!
The Corvair; now THERE is a car destroyed by lies and innuendo. Nader only really did tests that favor nose-heavy rear drive cars, like most of what came out of Detroit at the time. And he ran the Corvair through those same tests WITHOUT making any allowances for the engine being in the back. The same handling characteristics he castigated exist in MOST rear-engine cars, like Porsches. So yes, you do have to drive a Corvair differently from a Camaro. But that HARDLY makes it “unsafe at any speed.”
Actually, I have a grudge against the US government for helping to create the whole Tesla “secret invention” myth. For the last 10 or 15 years of his life, Tesla was living on slender (and dwindling) resources, and as contemporary interviews (like the famous yearly press conferences) make clear, he’d essentially ended his inventive life and become a prognosticator, making some very wild (and unverifiable) claims. An old publicity hound (he was a master showman in his prime) trying to stay in the limelight.
When he died (in 1943), the US government impounded his papers… and the rumor mill hasn’t stopped since. I’m comfortable in assuming they were all returned to his estate, because if there were any of those monster inventions in there — like the Death Ray — it’d have become obvious in the intervening half-century. Nobody keeps a superweapon secret forever, right?
Anyway, a long-winded way of saying that, wartime or not, the government handled Tesla’s papers badly, giving the conspiracists their grist.
Well, that certainly explains a few things – for instance, how Mayahuel acquired the funding from the political leaders of the time. I wonder if anyone else involved even understood just what Mayahuel had actually built?
Upon reflection, I suspect that not even Mayahuel understood what she had created.
OK, I now need to track down clues as to why Mayahuel decided to destroy the calendar machine. I have the impression – (I need to go reread the archives) that at the time Mayahuel decided to destroy the machine, she thought that Jin was dead. If I’m wrong, then her reasons for shutting the thing down must have been very, very compelling.
Any comic that has tried to put that much dry data into a strip has lost too many readers to continue because it can’t be made funny/interesting enough for the general public. Just like in books that use big/unusual words, it’s always up to the reader to look it up if sufficient interest was generated. I can’t wait for the next OED, it’s rumored to be electronic rather than dead tree. Now, if I could only afford/get the Britannica on disk…
Unfortunately such an event would have no effect on her. Otherwise it would be amusing to watch. Might be more painful than being tasered though. For humans that is.
Am I the only person mean enough to think that, given the same situation, it would be funny to tell Jin that pissing on spark plugs shouldn’t be ruled out due to the recent findings of [insert science-ish name here], and that we should let her give it a try?
Dear heavens…I just realized that I’m turning into my father.
If I asked my mother she would point out matter-of-factly that I’ve always been far more like my father than I have been like her, so I shouldn’t be surprised. You should see how downright giddy she gets whenever I do something that she recognizes as distinctly being “her.”
Well, the facial hair would be more of a problem than the crotch scratching I imagine. My father’s one of those types who reserves that kind of behavior for “behind closed doors.”
He sure can grow a wicked beard and ‘stache though (if the pictures from my infancy are any indication). 🙂
I always thought I would not want to be within a thousand miles of Miss Marple, or Hercule Poirot, or any of the like characters, since everywhere they went someone was murdered. Often several murders. Talk about the harbingers of death.
Actually, I always wondered if the worlds of Holmes, Marple, Poirot, etc., were just hyper-violent and we only knew about the murders occurring near the main characters? Those were more discreet and cultured times, after all; perhaps it was bad form to discuss a murder unless you were introduced to it 😉
I found a cracked distributor cap by checking to see if the points were making and breaking while (as it turned out) holding the cap with my thumb on the crack…
I was rather savagely bitten by a capacitive discharge ignition system, back when they were new. The usual type would shock you – the CD would chase you twice around the shop.
Legend has it that the esteemed Mr. Tesla actually averted an even greater disaster by acting upon secret information he received from Percival Lowell … something about a killer asteroid headed towards Earth …
An effeminate and compassionate fellow seeking to make the world a better place through science, who was bullied and ruined by a greedy and morally bankrupt rival lacking who succeeded by stealing other people’s work.
Pretty much every geek can identify with Tesla. Although… his falling in love with a pigeon was very odd, but I suspect by that point in his life he had been so utterly ruined that it can be excused.
Lets see if I have this straight; the mcguffin, that Bud trashed, and tossed into the sun, could harness the power of a galaxy? And Nicola Tesla created a device that could also harness that same power? I wonder if this new mcguffin still exists, conveniently tucked away at the museum that Monica works at.
Electrical people are full of such puns, many having to do with the words flux, discharge, emission, excite, reluctance, resistance, sockets, and blowing fuses.
No, Edison just electrocuted everything else, from dogs to an elephant, and indirectly a human (the chair at Sing Sing was his idea, with secretly purchased AC equipment), all in an ultimately futile attempt to discredit Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. This is an appalling insight into Edison’s character that for some reason never makes the children’s books. The best reference to this was on Laurie Anderson’s “United States Live” album, where she does a brilliant piece about those times. Don’t remember the track name now, but it was on the 1st LP… side 2, I think.
Late Comment: The idea for using a rotating galaxy as a power source may have come from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Paul has promoted a book or something from it before. It may be a fairly common idea though; I don’t know.
Uh, no, I don’t think that will be strictly necessary, Jin.
A friend was out hunting and had an encounter with an electric fence he didn’t know was behind a bush before he found it the hard way.
Luckily it wasn’t a continuous stream and the shock caused his muscles to spasm and clamp down…
Goats are tough. When I was a youngster we once visited someone who had few sheep and a goat. My mother and a friend and I were sitting under a tree and they were talking when a goat came up to the nearby electric fence. No one thought much about it until the goat bit down hard on the wire and would not let go. You could see it’s head spasm as the pulses came through. Eventually the wire broke and the goat went to the next wire and bit down. Same thing. Then it calmly proceeded to walk on through to get to some tasty vegetation. They had just repaired the fence recently and wondered who kept cutting the wire. Now they knew. Goats are tough.
that hurt me just reading it!
Dogs can be tough too…or maybe just stubborn. We had an English Springer Spaniel when I was growing up, and when she was about a year or two old, we put in a pool. She, being a water dog, believed that the big watery hole in the ground was hers. We, being the humans who paid for it, believed it was ours.
We put her in a wood latice dog run. She ate her way out of that (not too many pieces of wood were found afterwards, so it wasn’t just chewing). We fixed the fence and put aluminum sheet along the bottom where she’d eaten her way out. She ate her way past it too. That’s when we put up the electric fence. It stopped her for a good two weeks before she discovered that if you bite it and pull, it stops hurting.
We gave up on keeping her away from and out of the pool.
Little Brother works on a dairy goat farm. When they get an urge to do something, they will do it. One day they had quite a few go MIA and were found way off on the other side of the farm. After they were gathered up and brought back, they did it again. At first, there seemed to be no broken fencing, or digging under, or any of the usual ways away from the milking barn. Finally, Brother saw a group making a break for it towards a fence. As he caught up, he saw how they were getting out. Two goats had jumped on the fence, pushing the wires down low enough for the rest to just hop on over! The fences were soon replaced.
Bulls are tough too. But some years ago, some of our big bulls found that barb wire fences, electric fences, and such–none of them hurt if two big fellows push a smaller one through them.
Looks like your friend lost the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXH9BcHXsRY
If the Darwin Award site is still around, there used to be a story there about a guy who lost his woman, decided to climb to the top of a power tower with a six pack, and drink way his sorrows. After drinking the whole pack, he naturally had to pee, and apparently did not aim away from the high-voltage power lines. Police found his body on the ground, and black, smoking hole where his crotch once was.
Fortunately for Fairportfan’s friend, the kind of electric fences meant to discourage animals from crossing property lines actually don’t have a very high voltage. They’re meant to sting, not kill.
Ha !
Isn’t that from War Games ?
BTW , Bud looks hawt , in the last panel .
Yep, the general inside Cheyene Mountain said that line. TWELVE INCH FLOPPY DISKS! He he he!
“Twelve inch floppies”? I don’t recall that. I recall eight-inch floppies.
I actually used 12″ floppies. High school.
Yesss thank you I knew I remembered it from something.
Yup – one of my fave scenes from War Games, in fact 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uVunn6Vux4
The Wardenclyffe Tower, though primarily a communications apparatus, was a demonstration of how the charged regions of the upper atmoshpere could be made to oscillate. If the oscillation was made to be sustained, anyone on earth could theoretically tap into it for the purpose of electrical power. Free electricity for all…
And, if I recall, it was shown to be not exactly safe because theory and reality were two different things.
kinda like the calendar machine! 🙂
I don’t think it lasted long enough to reach the ‘safety testing’ stage. Money (and image) troubles. He also didn’t know about earth’s ionosphere, and though the reflections he was detecting were from the Rockies. A standing wave in the ionosphere would be a great power source – but probably would eliminate radio and microwave communitation due to interference.
That reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain‘s notion of tapping the ionosphere’s Shumann Resonance frequency for the carrier wave for a global wireless internet (based on IPv7).
Unfortunately, the SCHUMANN WAVE primary frequency is less than 10 Hertz, varies in frequency as much as 11% over the course of a single day, and is heavily dependent upon lightning, sunspots and other ionospheric disturbances.
Hey – if it were easy, everyone would already be doing it.
10 Hz.? You would not be able to put much info on 10 hz. Maybe slow morse code.
Close. It wasn’t safety that was the issue, but practicality. Tesla and Edison had this in common, at least: both weren’t at home with modern physics. It turns out that physics just won’t let you do that, but Tesla (and for that matter Edison, Coffin, and Westinghouse) didn’t have the knowledge we have today.
Yep. He had these great ideas, bui they Just Won’t Actually Work.
But the conspiracy theorists claim that his brilliant work was suppressed, just as they claim that Tucker’s brilliant design for a car ‘way ahead of its time was suppresed by the Big Auto Companies.
Wrong. Tesla had ideas that sounded great but wouldn’t actually work, and Tucker went out of business because he was essentially financing his startup car company with a pyramid scheme.
so not ‘power of the galaxy’ but ‘power of the atmosphere’… the same way lightning is made..
anyone know if ‘mythbusters’ has done this??
I consider Nicola Tesla’s Great Suppressed Inventions to be about on a par with the Wonderful Tucker Torpedo.
A man ahead of his time. He leapfrogged over a bunch of unfortunately necessary steps. I want a car powered by a bladeless turbine – or one of his Flying Stovepipes similarly equipped………..
@Fairportfan: I’ve been in the antique auto/automotive history hobby for 30 years (my avatar & username are what they are for a reason), and I can tell you that Preston Tucker didn’t set out to hoax anyone. He certainly was something of a finagler, and was very naive as far as how to go about financing his company. But nobody would have gone to as much trouble as he did, especially build a prototype and 50 cars (all of which either survive or have been accounted for, BTW), if he was not genuine about what he did. Even the jury declared his trial a farce and handed down a ‘not guilty’ verdict. His biggest problem was being of a showman mentality and biting off WAY more than he could chew in the process; he also suffered from having several unscrupulous backers with huge conflicts of interest. Even the senator who investigated him–Homer Ferguson of Detroit–had a huge chunk of Chrysler stock in his wife’s name. So, yes, there was some blatant conspiring going on behind the scenes, especially considering the SEC and the government looked the other way when Henry J. Kaiser essentially did a similar thing earlier in building a different car than he advertised (one with front-wheel drive). As for the cars, Tucker tried to develop them on a shoestring budget and in a hurry. Some of his ideas didn’t pan out, but that doesn’t mean the cars are that bad. I had the rare opportunity to drive a Tucker some years back. Aside from the fact that it feels like you’ve got a huge load of bricks in the trunk, it isn’t that bad. It’s something one has to get used to, like any other car. And despite rumors, they all have a reverse gear, including the first prototype. For further reference, I suggest reading “The Indomitable Tin Goose” by Charles T. Pearson, available at most public libraries. Also the Tucker articles in the following magazines: Special Interest Autos #14, Dec. ’72/Jan. ’73 (an excellent article interviewing many then-auto execs and former Tucker employees, including the car’s designer), and Collectible Automobile Vol. 2 No. 2, July 1985. I don’t suggest the Francis Ford Coppola movie unless you simply want light entertainment. Generally speaking, the movie does basically follow the true story, but takes “artistic license” with too many of the details.
I didn’t say he was hoaxing anyone; he obviously believed in his company and planned product.
But he was relying in large part on selling dealerships for a product that was only hypothetical to finance making it real … which, i suppose, isn’t exactly a pyramid scheme (unless he was selling regional ditributorships to people who could then sell dealerships – i forget), but it’s not an inherently sound way to do it.
Also, i never said the Tucker was inferior to other cars of the period, just that Tucker Conspiracy Enthusiasts like to claim that it was so much better than anything in production that the Auto Establishment conspired to drive it out of business.
I do find your comment about driving as if it had “a huge load of bricks in the trunk” fascinating, though…
Now, if you want a documented case of established industry types conspiring to put a lower-cost competitor out of business, check out the way that the full-fare carriers blackmailed suppliers to put Laker Airways out of business.
(Incidentally leaving Dave (“Darth Vader”) Prowse stranded in Florida, where the members of an SF con he was attending took up a collection to get him home…)
That is true about the stock issue and the dealership sale. As for my comment about driving it, remember that the engine is in the back, which makes it VERY tail-heavy (42% weight in front, 58% weight in rear). It was kind of like driving an overloaded pickup truck; the oversteer was more than you’d find in a Corvair. It DID have plenty of power and snap, though; at 335 cubic inches (bigger than Hudson’s 308 c.i.d. six would be later), the horizontally-opposed six puts out 166 hp. and 372 ft-lbs. of torque–and that’s on 7.0:1 compression. So there was certainly no shortage of power–I made 60 MPH in no time–but the light-feeling steering had me a bit scared, so I backed off quick. NOT a car you want to gaze off into the cornfield with, because the next thing you know, that’s just where you’ll wind up. I only drove it a few miles down a county trunk highway and back, but it sure was different… the pre-selector for the gearshift took some getting used to as well. Not like the 3-on-the-tree-with-O.D. in my ’54 Kaiser. Plus the Tucker I drove also had its rubber-biscuit “Torsiolastic” suspension replaced with something more conventional; I understand that the unmodified ones are just pure hell to drive and they bottom and wallow about like a rowboat in the ocean!
The Corvair; now THERE is a car destroyed by lies and innuendo. Nader only really did tests that favor nose-heavy rear drive cars, like most of what came out of Detroit at the time. And he ran the Corvair through those same tests WITHOUT making any allowances for the engine being in the back. The same handling characteristics he castigated exist in MOST rear-engine cars, like Porsches. So yes, you do have to drive a Corvair differently from a Camaro. But that HARDLY makes it “unsafe at any speed.”
Actually, I have a grudge against the US government for helping to create the whole Tesla “secret invention” myth. For the last 10 or 15 years of his life, Tesla was living on slender (and dwindling) resources, and as contemporary interviews (like the famous yearly press conferences) make clear, he’d essentially ended his inventive life and become a prognosticator, making some very wild (and unverifiable) claims. An old publicity hound (he was a master showman in his prime) trying to stay in the limelight.
When he died (in 1943), the US government impounded his papers… and the rumor mill hasn’t stopped since. I’m comfortable in assuming they were all returned to his estate, because if there were any of those monster inventions in there — like the Death Ray — it’d have become obvious in the intervening half-century. Nobody keeps a superweapon secret forever, right?
Anyway, a long-winded way of saying that, wartime or not, the government handled Tesla’s papers badly, giving the conspiracists their grist.
Well, that certainly explains a few things – for instance, how Mayahuel acquired the funding from the political leaders of the time. I wonder if anyone else involved even understood just what Mayahuel had actually built?
Upon reflection, I suspect that not even Mayahuel understood what she had created.
OK, I now need to track down clues as to why Mayahuel decided to destroy the calendar machine. I have the impression – (I need to go reread the archives) that at the time Mayahuel decided to destroy the machine, she thought that Jin was dead. If I’m wrong, then her reasons for shutting the thing down must have been very, very compelling.
Who says you can’t learn anything of value from the funny pages?
To be honest, I didn’t learn much of anything from the strip; I had to go to Wikipedia to read what the Wardenclyffe Tower was.
Any comic that has tried to put that much dry data into a strip has lost too many readers to continue because it can’t be made funny/interesting enough for the general public. Just like in books that use big/unusual words, it’s always up to the reader to look it up if sufficient interest was generated. I can’t wait for the next OED, it’s rumored to be electronic rather than dead tree. Now, if I could only afford/get the Britannica on disk…
The OED on CD has been around for years; sadly, not yet on Kindle. However, the Britannica is.
When I was younger, I learned how to go down a big wooded hill in a little red wagon with my stuffed tiger. 😀
The limp is hardly noticeable anymore.
Calvin, is that you?
😀 That creek never had a deep enough spot for ballistic re-entry…
Yes, I just spent some time finding out what a Wardenclyffe tower is. Learning is fun! Thanks Paul!
Unfortunately such an event would have no effect on her. Otherwise it would be amusing to watch. Might be more painful than being tasered though. For humans that is.
Hmm, I’ve had days like that.
Now I want to go research Tesla’s work again. 🙂
Am I the only person mean enough to think that, given the same situation, it would be funny to tell Jin that pissing on spark plugs shouldn’t be ruled out due to the recent findings of [insert science-ish name here], and that we should let her give it a try?
Dear heavens…I just realized that I’m turning into my father.
Egad! There aren’t many things worse than that. Just ask your mother.
If I asked my mother she would point out matter-of-factly that I’ve always been far more like my father than I have been like her, so I shouldn’t be surprised. You should see how downright giddy she gets whenever I do something that she recognizes as distinctly being “her.”
Sounds like a good thing, actually. Except, of course, for the facial hair and crotch scratching.
Well, the facial hair would be more of a problem than the crotch scratching I imagine. My father’s one of those types who reserves that kind of behavior for “behind closed doors.”
He sure can grow a wicked beard and ‘stache though (if the pictures from my infancy are any indication). 🙂
Do you mean Uro-Capacitive Discharge Therapy?
😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrabfVmWmdo
Mythbusters!!!
Thank God there are no patrons near enough to overhear them, Jin’s comment is the sort of thing that might cause a fatal spit-take.
Interesting that Bud is talking to May about this. Now that Jin’s no longer trying to fix the universe, Bud’s becoming the most proactive of the GGG.
Remember, Bud spent an unknown length of time with May in the demon realm. Notice she had worn down shoes when she came back. 🙂
Yes, she had to ask how long she’d been gone. That sequence could be a book in itself (hint, hint)… 🙂
Indeed.
Hmmmm…
scoff scoff
I always thought I would not want to be within a thousand miles of Miss Marple, or Hercule Poirot, or any of the like characters, since everywhere they went someone was murdered. Often several murders. Talk about the harbingers of death.
And if you value your life don’t go anywhere *near* Crozet, Virginia.
Actually, I always wondered if the worlds of Holmes, Marple, Poirot, etc., were just hyper-violent and we only knew about the murders occurring near the main characters? Those were more discreet and cultured times, after all; perhaps it was bad form to discuss a murder unless you were introduced to it 😉
OUCH!!!!
And I’m just talking about wet hands when I got bit by one.
Do not want to feel that again … any time soon.
I found a cracked distributor cap by checking to see if the points were making and breaking while (as it turned out) holding the cap with my thumb on the crack…
I was rather savagely bitten by a capacitive discharge ignition system, back when they were new. The usual type would shock you – the CD would chase you twice around the shop.
Bzzzzt!
Sometimes, somebody tries to blame Tesla for the Tunguska incident. But not for sponge migrations.
Legend has it that the esteemed Mr. Tesla actually averted an even greater disaster by acting upon secret information he received from Percival Lowell … something about a killer asteroid headed towards Earth …
Tesla is really the geek’s poster boy.
An effeminate and compassionate fellow seeking to make the world a better place through science, who was bullied and ruined by a greedy and morally bankrupt rival lacking who succeeded by stealing other people’s work.
Pretty much every geek can identify with Tesla. Although… his falling in love with a pigeon was very odd, but I suspect by that point in his life he had been so utterly ruined that it can be excused.
~D.
not that odd when you consider that his hobby was Giving himself x-rays and electrical shocks
LOL!! Jin makes me laugh.
I take her so seriously and then she says something like that. XD
Bud’s the cutest of them all.
I love War Games, so awesome. ‘The Only Winning Move is Not to Play.”
Obviously, a shameless PLUG fro Wapsi Square (snicker)
Lets see if I have this straight; the mcguffin, that Bud trashed, and tossed into the sun, could harness the power of a galaxy? And Nicola Tesla created a device that could also harness that same power? I wonder if this new mcguffin still exists, conveniently tucked away at the museum that Monica works at.
Or possibly plans exist in Phix’s library. Most likely, though, it will all have something to do with Celtic crosses and stonehenge.
More likely in a government warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.
In South Africa with the lost tribe of Israel and the Ailien post office
Head stuffy, too many words in comments, head hertz now.
Love Jin but Bud hot too. Caveman out.
Head ‘Hertz’ now — snerk! Great pun on the topic!
Electrical people are full of such puns, many having to do with the words flux, discharge, emission, excite, reluctance, resistance, sockets, and blowing fuses.
Ugh, these puns are re-volt-ing. Watt’s the matter? Wire you doing this?
Cool! Props for Tesla! A true genius of modern society! Edison had nothing on Tesla!
maybe a better grasp on medicine… that it wasn’t healthy to electrocute yourself
No, Edison just electrocuted everything else, from dogs to an elephant, and indirectly a human (the chair at Sing Sing was his idea, with secretly purchased AC equipment), all in an ultimately futile attempt to discredit Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. This is an appalling insight into Edison’s character that for some reason never makes the children’s books. The best reference to this was on Laurie Anderson’s “United States Live” album, where she does a brilliant piece about those times. Don’t remember the track name now, but it was on the 1st LP… side 2, I think.
I believe it was Edison who wanted to call the process of being electrocued as being “Westinghoused.”
Actually Tesla worked for Edison for a short period.
Late Comment: The idea for using a rotating galaxy as a power source may have come from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Paul has promoted a book or something from it before. It may be a fairly common idea though; I don’t know.
Huh, so in order to fix Jin’s schizophrenia, she invented a doomsday device.
She is clearly an ancient mad scientist.
I thought Mythbusters disproved that one… no wait. That one was confirmed. Nevermind.
!!! Unnecessary image! Five yard penalty! Still 1st down!