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Evil Bob is Missing!
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Started conversation Oct 22, 2002
I stopped by to mention that the 'what's wrong with h2g2 researchers' thread was for amusement purposes (porpoises?) only, and nothing in that thread should be taken seriously. The goal is to insult each other with absolutely no basis in fact. I prefer to post nonsense insults, such as 'your grandmother's muffins are phlegmatic and morose and must be destroyed before they coruscate.' The more nonsensical, the better. That's just me, though, and I do it for my own amusement.
As I'm scrolling through your page (nice work, by the way - you've spent a lot of time on the scroll bars and little boxes) your carefully veiled references to something or the other intrigued me. So I did a little find, and found that the game page is still there, but the home page is gone. CafePress is alive and well. I'm trying to figure out what exactly is hanging from the barbed wire fence - are those dried frogs?
Lentilla
Evil Bob is Missing!
Deidzoeb Posted Oct 23, 2002
You had me very worried for a moment there, Lentilla, but it's all a misunderstanding. If you were searching for that URL with "awkwardly" in it, you might have turned up empty. I had this stupid "free redirect" agreement with some company, and they allowed me to use awkwardly.org to redirect at my members.tripod.com website. Unfortunately, after using that cool address for a year, they pulled the plug and demanded money if I wanted to continue using it. So my website still exists, but it doesn't have that short and snappy address. If you know how "members.tripod.com" sites usually work, you can imagine how to put my membername "~evilbobdayjob" as a subdirectory of that site. ...And maybe the moderators won't obliterate this message, but one can never tell.
Anyhow, if you can't figure out how to get there, I can email the web address to you. I have some fiction on my website that has been deemed too dangerous to be within four or five links from h2g2, so they won't let me put a link to my main page. (That objectionable fiction has the kind of adult themes that any young child could find in a paperback in their public library or school library.) You know how it goes.
Thanks for the warning. I had to visit my website just to make sure it hadn't gone down for some reason, but it's still there.
The photo you couldn't quite identify was two frogs hanging from a barbed wire fence next to the slingshot that my father used to take those trophy frogs back in about 1967. It's just an odd picture, seemed perfect to use as a logo for a website called "AWKWARDLY."
Sorry I took things too seriously on the jokey insult thread.
Deidzoeb
Evil Bob is Missing!
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Oct 25, 2002
Glad to hear it's not gone for good... I'll track it down and check it out!
Yeah, it kills me. I was reading everything from The Kool-Aid Acid Trip to American Psycho to The Talisman when I was old enough to hold a book, and came out none the worse for it. Schools keep threatening to ban Mark Twain, but as long as the librarians are in charge of the libraries, I think we'll be all right.
No need to apologize. Just wanted to make sure you weren't horribly insulted! Cool...
Lentilla
Librarians keeping it real
Deidzoeb Posted Oct 25, 2002
I work in Ann Arbor (a very liberal college-town ) but I recently moved to Jackson, Michigan, which proudly displays signs at the city limits proclaiming it "Birthplace of the Republican Party."
*shiver*
In spite of that, I was happy to see a little disclaimer on the website for the library... "The Jackson District Library does not restrict access to material nor shield users from controversial information."
So I might like it here anyhow.
Librarians keeping it real
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Oct 26, 2002
Librarians are surprisingly liberal.. or perhaps not so surprising, considering how many books there are and how few fall into the 'safe reading' list.
Just curious... do you have a good link to that moon landing shot you mentioned? (Your dream world vs. real world thesis.) I'd love to see it. (My dad threatened to become a Flat Earther once upon a time; I think it would amuse him greatly.)
Librarians keeping it real
Deidzoeb Posted Oct 26, 2002
"do you have a good link to that moon landing shot you mentioned? (Your dream world vs. real world thesis.)"
Whoa, that was from an old friend of mine, "Prof. V." His thesis, not mine. He has some interesting points about the shape of the earth and the moon landing, but I never fully believed the whole thing. In his book, he drew some scribbles that were supposed to represent the "signature" in the bottom corner of the allegedly painted moonscape. I know I scanned the image of the scribbles, but if you're looking for an actual tv screenshot of what he was talking about, I never saw one. Maybe if I searched the web, I could find something like that or other people listing a similar event, but I haven't searched yet, and he never supplied anything beyond his own description of the event.
Sorry if the authorship of that piece was confusing. It was a small book that a pen-pal of mine published. I posted it on the web after he passed away. He usually gave away copies for free to people, so I figured he wouldn't have minded if it were posted on the web for everyone to read.
Librarians keeping it real
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Oct 31, 2002
I've always thought trying to prove that the Earth was flat was an interesting intellectual exercise, but fruitless, really - why not speculate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? (Simple - measure the feet of the angels, measure the surface area of the pinhead, and divide.)
I went looking, and found an amazing plethora of sites about the moon landing. Most of them took themselves seriously... each 'believer' has their own theories. This one I thought was pretty funny.
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~akapadia/moon.html
Check out the Hall of Shame on this site, if you can find it. Full of angry e-mails responding to the webpage.
Librarians keeping it real
Deidzoeb Posted Oct 31, 2002
Cute. That picture of the prop man standing in background of moon photo sounds similar to what Prof. V was saying.
After a little more thought, I wonder if the signature at the bottom of the moonscape could be only proof that the news was showing an artist's rendition of what they thought the moon looked like, and some viewers thought that it was meant to be a photo of the real moon. Like if viewers tune in to CNN today, they'll inevitably see a little clip of patriotic images before stories on Iraq or their "America Strikes Back" segments or whatever. Viewers who don't understand the way they operate may think that these images are all new clips of things that happened today, although the rest of us would realize they're more like an artistic expression to prepare you for the story (almost like BRANDING their stories)? If a person noticed a quick image that was taken from 1991 during the Gulf War, they might accuse CNN of using doctored images of this war or something.
But there are several ways V might have been mistaken about the meaning of what he saw. Even if CBS had been using faked photos, it doesn't mean the whole moon landing was faked.
Here's another one for you, from the Flat Earth "proofs": if the Earth is round and spinning at 1000 miles per hour, then why aren't there 1000 mile per hour winds? Wouldn't the atmosphere remain relatively still while the Earth spun under it? This doesn't prove to me that the Earth is flat, but I'm not sure what the answer really is. Wouldn't it seem like there should be massive winds? Doesn't it seem like humans and all objects not screwed down would fly off the surface of the Earth, like a toy sitting on a turn-table that flies off when you turn it on?
I actually asked a few of these questions of my Earth Science prof in college, but I didn't want to ask all the questions V raised, because it would have taken an entire class or two.
Librarians keeping it real
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Nov 5, 2002
Hmm.... good question! I don't know the answer, but I can make something up!
If I had to think about it in terms of physics, I'd throw out terms like mass and gravity. Air has mass, just like everything else. Gravity drags everything down - this is the reason why people have to wear breathing apparatus when they climb Mt. Everest - the air's a little thin at the top. At sea level, it's positively soupy. Even with gravity, we still lose a bit of atmosphere to vacuum - on the Moon's surface, they've found there's about 12% of the earth's atmosphere floating around. Not enough to breathe with... maybe just a few more seconds before your head freezes/boils.
Of course, I haven't taken physics, so everything I know is from old sci-fi books or my pop.
As a child, lying on the ground and watching the clouds, I remember having the realization that gravity was the only thing holding me on, and I clutched at the earth in terror. My one and only bout of agoraphobia!
Perhaps people would have found the pictures easier to believe if they weren't so boring! No fanciful rock spires, no aliens made of sugar - just lots of gray rock and dust. I suspect the photo Prof. V. mentioned was framed so that it caught a bit of masking tape with writing on it at the bottom of the window. Can't have nappy old masking tape on the window; might make the lander look shoddy and poorly made. (Got to look good... what would the Russians think?) So the camera was quickly moved to a closeup of the window.
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Evil Bob is Missing!
- 1: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Oct 22, 2002)
- 2: Deidzoeb (Oct 23, 2002)
- 3: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Oct 25, 2002)
- 4: Deidzoeb (Oct 25, 2002)
- 5: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Oct 26, 2002)
- 6: Deidzoeb (Oct 26, 2002)
- 7: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Oct 31, 2002)
- 8: Deidzoeb (Oct 31, 2002)
- 9: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Nov 5, 2002)
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