Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:Destroy New York City? Post-apocalyptic NYC can't be any worse than it is today. Anything that causes people to move away from this dreadfully packed city is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'll come back in 50 years.

Snake Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Destroy New York City? Post-apocalyptic NYC can't be any worse than it is today. Anything that causes people to move away from this dreadfully packed city is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'll come back in 50 years.

I always thought that NYC is post-apocalyptic.
How else can it be explained?

geckzilla wrote:
I sometimes play that soundtrack and imagine myself as Snake Plissken.

Rob, of course the flooding didn't affect you, since you are in Eastern Canada (aren't you?).

Ann wrote:

Ann wrote:
Rob, of course the flooding didn't affect you, since you are in Eastern Canada (aren't you?).

Yup, you are. You are almost as far east as anyone can get in Canada - not quite, but almost. You are very close to Prince Edward Island, too, so you can almost wave to Anne of Green Gables.

• Rob never made it out of the New London orphanage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Green_Gables wrote:
<<Anne, a young orphan from the fictional community of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia (based upon the real community of New London), is sent to Prince Edward Island after a childhood spent in strangers' homes and orphanages.>>

Ann wrote:You are very close to Prince Edward Island, too, so you can almost wave to Anne of Green Gables.

rstevenson wrote:
I used to work for Parks Canada, the (real) guvmint department that takes care of (fictional) historic sites. So I've been to the (formerly merely fictional but now more or less real) Green Gables many times. Green Gables is very popular with Japanese tourists, who may have read the L.M. Montgomery books in English classes. Also, they are fascinated by red hair, or so I was told.

I live just a few km south of the Mason Jar line (aka the 45th parallel) and a little east of 63° W.

• My kicky-wicky has wed hair, or so I am told.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45th_parallel_north wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]Sundial at the 45th parallel in Senj, Croatia.[/size][/color][/b]

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<<In North America, the 45th parallel roughly marks the border between the United States and Canada between the St. Lawrence and Connecticut rivers (the northern borders of the U.S. states of New York and Vermont with the Canadian province of Quebec), where the parallel is sometimes called the "Canada line". The actual boundary of Vermont lies 5 furlongs [the camptown wacetwack's 5 furlongs, oh, de doo-da day] north of the parallel due to an error in the 1772 survey. The boundary here intersects Lake Champlain, which is shared by the two nations, with most of the lake lying in the United States.

The 45th parallel roughly bisects mainland Nova Scotia. Halifax is approximately 40 km south of the parallel. All of mainland New Brunswick lies north of the 45th parallel. The southernmost point in mainland New Brunswick, just north of the 45th parallel, is Greens Point, approximately 90 kilometres west of Saint John. Approximately two-thirds of Deer Island, plus all of Campobello and Grand Manan islands, are south of the 45th parallel.

The 45th parallel makes up most of the boundary between Montana and Wyoming. In Michigan, the Old Mission Peninsula in Grand Traverse Bay ends just shy of the 45th parallel. Many guidebooks and signs at the Mission Point Lighthouse describe it as being halfway between the equator and north pole. When the Grand Traverse Bay recedes below normal level, it is possible to walk out to the exact line. Farther west, the line roughly bisects the metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul. In Minneapolis there is a marker in Theodore Wirth Park. In the Western United States, the parallel passes through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, intersecting the Pacific coast in Oregon. Throughout the United States the parallel is marked in many places on highways by a sign proclaiming that the location is halfway between the North Pole and the Equator.>>

rstevenson wrote:
Contrary to scurilous rumour, I escaped the orphanage by pretending to be grown up.

http://loveline.wikia.com/wiki/Bogus_Calls wrote:
<<References to mason jars indicate that a given [telephone] call is a bogus call, and the caller’s story is entirely fabricated. The expression originated with a caller in the late 90s who would call the show with elaborate stories, eventually working in the line "She had a butthole the size of a mason jar." The phrase "mason jar" is also used by the hosts when they suspect a call is fake.>>

neufer wrote:...[the camptown wacetwack's 5 furlongs,

Beyond wrote:

neufer wrote:
...[the camptown wacetwack's 5 furlongs,

wacetwack's Did Elmer Fudd go streaking through Wikipedia at sometime, messing up da woirds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Big_Bang_Theory_characters#Barry_Kripke wrote:
<<Barry Kripke, Ph.D. (John Ross Bowie): An unlikable co-worker of Leonard and Sheldon's, who works in plasma physics, Kripke has a case of rhotacism where he pronounces the letters "R" and "L" as "W" in much the same way as Elmer Fudd from Looney Tunes. In his first appearance, he pitted his robot, the Kripke Krippler, against the men's robot, M.O.N.T.E., in an unofficial robot fight. On another episode, Sheldon attempted to befriend Kripke in order to gain access to an open science grid computer to carry out research, but it turned out to be futile, as Kripke had no control of the computer as Sheldon had thought. Kripke continued his antagonism towards Sheldon, when he pulled a prank on Sheldon when the latter was a guest on NPR's Science Friday. Sheldon tried to befriend Kripke another time when he was feeling left out from his friends, but Barry connected more with the others in Sheldon's new proposed group. Kripke purchases an iPhone with voice recognition technology, but due to his rhotacism, the device is incapable of understanding his verbal "wequests". In "The Cooper/Kripke Inversion", Kripke and Sheldon are forced to work together on a proposal involving fusion reactors, which involves the exchange of work. Sheldon is shocked to discover that Kripke's work is more advanced than his own, and he tearfully admits as much to Amy.>>

neufer wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]Judy Schmidt ?[/size][/color][/b]

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geckzilla wrote:
I sometimes play that soundtrack and imagine myself as Snake Plissken.

I've always pictured you as Snake Plissken.

geckzilla wrote:
I've read that the jet stream is to blame. Where is Art?

• The warming of the Arctic results in wild meanders of the jet-stream.

http://www.weather.com/news/floods-close-religious-pilgrimage-site-lourdes-france-20130619 wrote:
PARIS -- <<Heavy floods in southwest France have forced the closure of the Catholic pilgrimage site in Lourdes and the evacuation of pilgrims from nearby hotels. Floodwaters swirled Wednesday in the grotto where nearly 6 million believers from around the world, many gravely ill, come every year seeking miracles and healing. It has been a major pilgrimage site since a French girl's vision of the Virgin Mary there in 1858. "The flooding in France is the result of a slow-moving low-pressure system in the upper atmosphere that has tapped a moist atmosphere ahead of the system," said weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce. Lourdes Mayor Jean-Pierre Artiganave said on BFM television that the site will not reopen until safety can be assured. Rescue services are evacuating hundreds of people from nearby hotels.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Call_the_Wind_Maria wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<In George Rippey Stewart's 1941 novel Storm, he gives the storm which is the protagonist of his story the name "Maria". In 1947, Stewart wrote a new introduction for a reprint of the book, and discussed the pronunciation of "Maria": "The soft Spanish pronunciation is fine for some heroines, but our Maria here is too big for any man to embrace and much too boisterous." He went on to say, "So put the accent on the second syllable, and pronounce it 'rye'".

The success of Stewart's novel was one factor that motivated U.S. military meteorologists to start the informal practice of giving women's names to storms in the Pacific during World War II. The practice became official in 1945. In 1953, a similar system of using women's names was adopted for North Atlantic storms. This continued until 1979, when men's names were incorporated into the system. Although Stewart's novel is set in 1935, the novel and its impact on meteorology later inspired Alan J. Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe to write a song for their 1951 Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon, about the California gold rush, and like Stewart, they too gave a wind storm the name Maria. The lines throughout the song end in feminine rhymes mostly using the "long i" sound /aɪ/, echoing the stress pattern and vowel sound of the name Maria.

"They Call the Wind Mariah" quickly became a "runaway hit", and during the Korean War, the song was among the "popular music listened to by the troops". Vaughan Monroe and his Orchestra recorded the song in 1951, and it was among the "popular hit singles at the record stores" that year. Singer Mariah Carey was named after this song.>>

Beyond wrote:I read an article a while ago that said scientists that studied the artic warming, discovered that most of the ice melt occurs from below the ice. They weren't expecting that. Apparently some of the ocean currents are changing. Maybe it's one of those 10,000 or 100,000 year cycle thingies

Geneva - The Arctic's sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record, compounding concerns about climate change underscored by extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, the UN weather agency said Thursday. In a report on the situation in 2012, the World Meterological Organisation said that during the August to September melting season, the Arctic's sea ice cover was just 3.4 million square kilometres. That was a full 18% less than the previous record low set in 2007. WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud dubbed it a "disturbing sign of climate change."

Beyond wrote:I read an article a while ago that said scientists that studied the artic warming, discovered that most of the ice melt occurs from below the ice. They weren't expecting that. Apparently some of the ocean currents are changing. Maybe it's one of those 10,000 or 100,000 year cycle thingies?