Nic McPhee is looking for a solution to an odd problem: a bat died and rotted on some fine furniture, leaving a nasty protein residue. Give him some suggestions on how to clean wing of bat off wooden furniture.
This might call for the expertise of a witch.
…between one and twenty.
Then go read this article on Cosmic Variance (although I think it was a mistake to reveal the answer in the first paragraph and the title, so I stole my approach from present simple).
Many people sent me links to this list of bands that will turn you gay, but I held off on posting anything—it was too fishy. David Bowie, Melissa Etheridge, and Ted Nugent, sure…listen to a couple of tracks of those guys and you’ll only want to hang out with your fellow man. But Morrissey is listed as “?questionable?” and everyone knows the Grateful Dead make you lose interest in sex altogether, so I had my doubts.
Now Orac outs the author. He’s not a formerly gay televangelist; he’s a stand-up comedian.
Poor guy. I can sort of understand why he’d prefer to be known as an insane homophobe.
The Nielsen Haydens filled my morning with horror, so I’m going to make you suffer, too. Behold, a Danish disco band pretending to be Apaches:
It goes on for an interminable 4½ minutes; seriously, you’ve done your penance if you watch 20 seconds, long enough to spot the sequins and the Groucho mustache on the keyboardist. I recommend you turn it off before the Apache maidens emerge from behind the teepee—that was just too much.
Say, that Making Light thread led me to another cheesy video by Army of Lovers, and since I was soliciting suggestions for a menacing makeover, it gave me an idea: eyeliner and frilly shirts. A busty henchperson with exposed cleavage might also help.
Here’s a cuisine for a SF con.
Oh, yeah, baby…that’s what I need: a most macho suit of armor. I’m not sure that I believe that a 40 pound shell can stop an elephant gun, though, but it sure looks fierce.
I could have spent it building a scale model of the Battle of Helms Deep out of candy.
Maybe next year…
I really don’t know whether to believe this story or not. It’s a diary of a sailing trip that reports an encounter with a fellow sailor who had experienced serious difficulties.
We reported last time that Shigeo’s trip from the Galapagos to the Marquesas had been terrible — after about 1000 miles his autopilot had failed, something had gone wrong with his steering, his engine water intake had clogged temporarily, blowing his impeller, the intake for one of his heads had clogged, and, most important of all, something had slowed his speed down to 2 knots, even with full sails, a lot of wind, and the engine running. He basically drifted with the current for the last 2700 miles, taking about 8 weeks to cover a distance that his 42-foot Beneteau could easily have sailed in a fraction of that time.
That part doesn’t seem improbable, but the explanation for his boat’s sluggish performance is wild. Divers took a look at the hull, and found hundreds of strange circular scars all over it—they speculate that they are marks of a giant squid’s suckers.
Hmmm. I can’t believe that a giant squid would or could cling to a boat for 2 months, but I can’t think of any simple explanation for the strange marks. Any more nautically experienced people out there with a better alternative explanation? I’d be inclined to call it a hoax, but for the fact that there’s very little bang for the effort that would have had to go into it.
This is hard to do:
Now there are some unanswered questions. Can he scale it? Does it have to be on a vertical surface? Can he find the center? Can he draw a square with the same area?
