So I'm on the space station. Only it's more like a resort for smart people than an actual space station to do science on. Like where the Battle School kids would go if they needed a vacation.
There are, inexplicably, reflection pools, a full service bar, and (somehow) a panoramic night view of all of the planets. No beds, though. Only sleeping bags. And you slept in the halls.
Anyhow. It was kinda boring. All anybody ever did was talk back and forth to each other in lines from Shakespeare. I don't know why I rated enough to make it to the vacation station, but I felt a little out of my element.
Cost of raising a child, if that child is Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
http://pnis.co/hard1.html (pnis.co)
science!
I honestly never thought I would find a series of ads (www.youtube.com) this entertaining.
I love cats.
I KNEW I RECOGNIZED HIS VOICE. Also from this. Although this one (www.youtube.com) might be the best.
"Oh my god. It looks... it looks like a dog p3nis that's trying to escape. Run little red rocket, run!"
Actually, the Kwaj gym usually has people; the Roi gym on the other hand has been empty, but, unfortunately there have been a million seabees up there... usually working out shirtless, which is a level of brah I had yet to encounter.
In this instance, there was one other dude around. Still pretty weird.
It was fun, but pretty insane. It kind of went down like the plot to a bad horror movie:
So, coconut crabs are nocturnal (naturally). They typically make their nests in these mangrove-like trees (think lots of splayed roots with a hollow area in the middle). You have to go out when it's dark and try and spot them with a flashlight - they typically avoid light, so you try sneak up on them.
We drank at the bar until about 9:30, then decided to head out in the electric cart (SILENT). Us Americans and three Marshallese. We headed to the thick jungle part of the island, with flashlights.
We ended up catching seven (yes, they are technically an endangered species, but not on Roi). The first one we spotted with headlights on the cart. We found two more on the road before going into the jungle (we also stumbled into some ruins, found one there, along with Japanese graffiti). Note, I was ill-prepared and somewhat drunk... as in, wife beater and flip flops. Anyways, the creepiest thing about these guys is that if they spot you, they run away from you backwards, and they look like goddamn face huggers when they move. Luckily, Titus is adept at catching them, so he blasted through a few without problem. I tried my hand at catching them, and got my thumb all scratched up (turns out - small claws on their back legs, you have to hold them in a certain way).
Since we had all been drinking, we of course got lost in the jungle. I'm at the whim of the dudes with the flashlights, so I'm trying not to lose my flip flops or the coconut crabs I'm carrying (they were duct-taped, but one had to have been damn near 10 pounds). We finally find our way out, and head for a couple of celebration drinks at the bar, which ended with arm wrestling, because, MEN.
We cooked them up the next day. Like tuna combined with crab combined with subtle coconut sweetness. The jackpot is to eat is the soft abdomen. While it houses guts, it also houses what I think is the liver, that, when cooked, is fatty and delicious as hell to dip stuff in. Like a weirdly bitter queso.
So: success.
Part of the reason I haven't gone back to pursue a PhD. (www.npr.org) This was evident even years ago when I was at school. A real bummer.
I listened to that when it was on air. It's kind of depressing that this is my reality at work every day. Grants are drying up and harder to get. Scientists are jumping ship at major universities or getting ground down to the most basic, barely innovative kind of research. Private money is predominantly going towards tech innovation in science, which is good and bad. Good in that the capabilities and speed at which scientists can now run assays is greatly expanded. Bad because this new technology is so expensive good labs cant afford it, and the money they used to use in the past to buy new equipment is being spent on the new tech development.
Basically the only way to break even or make money these days is to chase whatever popular disease is in the media, or be developing boner pills, fat people drugs, or any of the various other First World Problem ailments.
So I will entitle today on Kwajalein 'Pest Day'.
I think I've told Josh about how the skimmers are infested with creatures of all types, but for those who are not in the know: we installed skimmers here a couple of years back, which are housed in small wooden storage shelters (the dog houses). We turned them off back in March, and no one has touched them since. Today, I had to crack open a few to get the batteries out of them, and, holy fuck, life. Mike, you might want to stop reading here.
First thing was that every skimmer house has literally dozens of long-legged spiders enveloping everything in webbing. These spiders aren't too creepy, but you have to break through them to get anything out of the skimmer houses.
Furthermore, even to get in, you have to get past the large jumping spiders that have created nests under literally EVERY padlock. These fuckers are territorial, and were jumping at my face constantly. I even picked one up on my body somehow that rode with me on the cart for a bit until it jumped on my hand, then tried to web away by attaching an end to my wrist. Crazy fuckers.
Then, the cockroaches. Grabbed a box in one skimmer, cockroach flew out at my goddamn face. I fucking hate cockroaches.
Then, the rats. While these guys hide well, they leave their droppings EVERYWHERE. Isn't there some disease caused by inhaling rat shit?
Then, the lizards and geckos. These guys are everywhere, but they're actually rather adorable. They have this bizarro slinky run. But, never try to grab them, they just shed their tails like crazy (and the tail writhes around in super disgusting fashion). In two cases, geckos had laid eggs on the top of the door frame. I had no idea what they were (thought they were tiny bird eggs, about the size of a pinky nail), until a couple fell down and cracked. I went to grab one of the cracked eggs, and it literally EXPLODED into a fucking lizard as I touched it that did the slinky run away from me. Just insane.
Then, the flies. These guys are everywhere and impossible to kill, but at least they don't bite.
I figured the skimmer houses were a pretty sweet trail with pests, until I went to lay out on some chairs next to the public pool (to read). I get up and sit by a nearby table (to change position), when suddenly I am caught in a swarm of hornets. Note I am only in shorts, so much exposed flesh. So obviously I bail, about as fast as Josh would but minus the flailing. I look under the table and there are a dozen hornets just hanging out... and a nest in one of the cracks, that I LITERALLY RUBBED MY FUCKING LEG AGAINST. I have no idea how I wasn't stung. Fucking. Hornets.
i read this entire post.
after the long legged spiders i was hyperventilating
after the jumping spiders i started eating my shirt to slow down the hyperventilating
after the cockroaches, i had to hold in a hork
after the rats, i had a dry heave
i came back to it a while later after calming down and started hyperventilating again with the gecko tails, and was back to eating my shirt with the fucking hornets
this is why i'm only willing to spend limited time in the tropics approximately once a year
You should buy a machete. Good for spider webs and moving things around a little bit farther away than arms reach.
Also my experience with rats has been rather positive, except that they are really resistant to anesthesia and will chew through their own skin and into their bowels sometimes if they have injection site irritation... which is gross. And what you might be thinking of is Hauntavirus, but that's usually more mouse pee rather than rats.
Agree on hornets. Fuck those guys.
Assumed this topic had already been discussed but couldn't find the thread. Maybe that's for good reason.
I've been rewatching some S4 ST:ENT eps. I've complained before about how awful this series was, but always believed that the fourth season redeemed the series. I think I was wrong.
The multi-ep arc with Brent Spiner and the augments was pretty decent. The several ep arc about the corrupt Vulcan government and their eventual political restructuring and theological reawakening is great, on par with some DS9, but ultimately pretty niche in its appeal.
The one-offs are wretched. The one with the wheelchair bound inventor of the teleporter. The silicon based life forms that take over their bodies. Temporal Cold War.
I'm struggling to find why some episodes are pretty decent and many are unwatchable. Certainly, there are some episodes that appeal to me mostly based on their significance in the Star Trek universe, and this can make a middling episode much better for me although I recognize that this benefit is reserved for a very small segment of the viewing audience.
Mostly I'm just posting to bait Erik and maybe Josh into another conversation about ST. Sorry everyone who doesn't care.
Don't you ever feel like you have to apologize for talking about Star Trek. Don't you *ever.* This is a safe place.
Being ENT, I'll have to defer to Erik on this one. Glad to hear there are at least a few delicious nuggets.
Also, somewhat related, this is the book we're reading at the moment: Redshirts
I went through Enterprise pretty quickly, so there isn't really a whole lot I remember. Or, rather, a whole lot that I thought was worth remembering!
The show, much like Voyager before it, had huge potential. And, again, like Voyager, capitalized on this potential pretty rarely of the course of it's run. The good episodes were excellent (and often just fleshing out of things alluded to in other series... as you say, niche appeal), such as the Borg episode and the Klingon virus episode.
However, the show was just directionless. After lackluster Seasons 1 &2, they decided to do an entire arc in The Delphic Expanse with the Xindi and the Temporal Cold War (which is a stupid as fuck thing to reoccur throughout the series... even worse than Q). It was more like Voyager lite. Then the fourth season came around, and they went, again, in another direction; much like you, I thought the Season 4 was the start of what they should have been doing all along... which is to say, short story arcs expanding the canon, not just rehashing things throughout the series. And then, BOOM, before it could gain traction the series was canceled.
I still think that Season 4 was the best season, and would have ramped into something decent. But Enterprise is the worst. Most is harder to watch than even the Original or Animated Series!
4.0/5 - The is a great EP if you love diverse guitars. This band has three guitarists that all employ somewhat different styles, and the lead singer is practically a clone of Claudio Sanchez (of Coheed & Cambria) in both looks and timbre... in fact, the band name (Mandroid Echostar) even sounds like it could be a goddamn character in the C&C storyline (The Armory Wars). Anyways, short but sweet, and making me want more! Technical and catchy.
So I'm in the room I lived in during college. The house has become a dorm, strangely enough. A bunch of college kids are hanging out in the hallway, and the room itself. I'm moving back in.
Josh: "I used to live here. Back when I went to school. For three years."
College Kid: "Yeah? Cool, dude."
Josh: "Before it was... all of this."
Other Kid: "Cool."
