h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

when folks take money from the public purse, they don't get to have moritoriums on criticisms of their performance. seems to me nasa lost most of fhe 'right stuff' about the same time the old nazi scientists retired or died.

onto topic...

australians are the only nation to eat the animals on their national coat of arms.

Is Great Britain the only nation with a totally fictitious animal on its coat of arms? (the unicorn)

Not unless nobody's got a dragon on theirs.

The floor of the Cavern Club, made famous by the Beatles, is 1.78 meters below sea level.

cool. so in their day, without an actual stage, only 3 beatle's haircuts would have been above sea level.

Fortunately, Matthew Street is about three quarters of a mile away from the Mersey and it's not flooded that far in living memory, or else the history of popular music might have had to be rewritten.

"Who knows what might have been if the Mersey hadn't broken its banks that fateful night in 1962... at least ten of our best and most promising popular bands, and Cilla Black, were drowned in the tragedy..." Liverpool Echo)

Either that, or "Yellow Submarine" would have needed to be written five or six years ahead of time...

>>when folks take money from the public purse, they don't get to have moritoriums on criticisms of their performance. seems to me nasa lost most of fhe 'right stuff' about the same time the old nazi scientists retired or died.<<

Criticisms are fine, I, myself, am critical of the direction NASA is heading. But jokes about the astronauts who died are not criticisms.


A. I wasn't asking on the behalf of NASA, I was asking on behalf of only myself. I just don't want to hear anymore jokes about people either I, or my friends and coworkers, knew personally.
B. I find them in very poor taste.
C. I've heard most of them already.

zero. so your argument is that if you have heard something before folks ought not to post it? or that the internet needs to self regulate to accomodate your personal sensbilities?

i have no objection to you requesting this. but you ought to have no objection to others rejecting it.

if you go back and read what was actaully posted; it said nothing derogatory about the astronauts themselves- merely the ineptitude (if that word is strong enough: some might argue criminal negligence) of nasa itself.

in any event, it is sometimes said that humour is tragedy revisited. while i personally wouldn't accept laughter at a funeral (tho it needs to be said many wakes ARE filled with jokes and anecdotes), making light of in the aftermath of disaster is a common enough and natural enough thing to be doing. some might even argue that it is part of the healing process. so lighten up.

onto topic.

A survey conducted by Auto Express magazine in August 2006 revealed that just 745 of the 807,000 Marinas sold in Britain are still on the road - fewer than one in a thousand. This made it officially the most-scrapped car to have been sold in Britain over the previous 30 years.

It is impossible for a duck's quack to echo. Even in scientific experiments, we haven't figured out why.


Proudwart

Mostly I just didn't want it to start running rampant like the vomiting underwater.... see what you made me mention.

Actually, according to an episode of Mythbusters, the ducks quack does echo, you just can't differentiate the sound of the echo from the original quack. Ever tried to get a duck to quack on cue?

Blue hair dye on reddish-brown hair results, for some reason, in green.

That sounds like useful information.

Oh no! You're right, it does!

*thinks*

Err...there are seven other people in this room. That's useless, right?

A horse's foot is actually one toe which grew and enlarged with the toenail becoming the hoof capsule as we know it today... Unless you dont believe in evolution.

Royal Navy ships still carry cutlasses.

The U.S. Naval Academy no longer teaches celestial navigation.

The Frisbee(tm) Flying Disc was named after the pie tins used by a New England bakery. College students discovered the tins could be tossed and flung. The brand name embossed on the most commonly flung tins was "Frisbie's Pies".

once can accept the fact of morpholgical change and not accept darwinian evolution, particularly speciation.

I can't say that I see how.

Those same pie tins were referenced in the third Back to the Future movie, when Marty threw one at Mad Dog to disarm him.