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Scarab Sages

Platinum is like a real-life Pokemon Evolution-Stone...assuming one considers slugs an improvement over snails.

Scarab Sages

Almost every castle seen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is in fact the same castle: Doune Castle in Scotland.

Scarab Sages

The German city of Konstanz managed to evade the mass-destruction of World War II by keeping its lights on - being extremely close to Switzerland, this counterintuitive bluff managed to fool Allied bombers into believing it was a Swiss (and therefore neutral, thankyouverymuch) city.

Scarab Sages

Maybe you weren't just acting irresponsible: The idea of schools giving homework hasn't always been viewed as a good idea, and (at least in the USA) has a suspicious correlation with periods of - what else? - mass moral panic over academic competitiveness with foreign rivals.

Scarab Sages

Australia once went to war with Venus.

Scarab Sages

The difference between what is and isn't "Broadway": It's not the streets, it's the seats!

Scarab Sages

The Grammar-Gurkha says: Stop saying "chai tea"!

Scarab Sages

Chinchilla fur is so dense that it suffocates fleas.

Scarab Sages

You know they've taken "political-correctness" in comic books a bit far when they replace Iron Man (or possibly Colossus) with a snail.

Scarab Sages

Antarcticans are sorely underrecognized for their hospitality!

Scarab Sages

Y'all sure about that wall?: A common bush found in Mexico and the Southwestern US could provide a life-saving treatment for the genuinely scary brain-eating amoebas known to haunt ponds and puddles (particularly) in the Southeastern US.

Scarab Sages

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
John Napier 698 wrote:
I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
Do a Google search for "Count Dracula"...and this is the image they lead the character's profile with.
*Severe eye twitching, followed by a lengthy stream of profanity* No. Just, no.

ERRATA: Let the record state for posterity that the image in question has continues to shift from one lead image to another, most of them of dubious fidelity to the nature of the character, and as of this posting consists of an image best described as 'obscure, but INCREDIBLY dorky.'


Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Australia vs. Venus? Who won?


I'm gonna say, Australia. Everything in and around Australia can kill you. Even some of the trees. And since Venus is a long way off it was fairly ineffective. And maybe Venusians even knew somehow that everything Down Under was venomous, poisonous, and downright inconvenient they just gave up.

Scarab Sages

Consider the following scenario: You are the wife of a younger man with a history of eccentricity and failure, and presently carrying his second child; he is absent from your life even more than his admittedly-busy schedule suffices to account for. You suspect infidelity, and track him down to the basement of one of his friends's houses. You burst into the room ready for a confrontation, and catch your husband with several of his friends...hunched together over a table covered in maps.

Your husband's name is Gary Gygax.

Scarab Sages

1 person marked this as a favorite.

The secret ingredient that defines nacho cheese is sodium citrate - AKA Na3C6H5O7.

Scarab Sages

You think YOUR area's seen urban sprawl? Cairo's gotten so big, the capital of Egypt is planning on moving out of itself!

Scarab Sages

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GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! The ozone layer is healing, and expected to make a full recovery in about 40 years.

Liberty's Edge

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I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! The ozone layer is healing, and expected to make a full recovery in about 40 years.

Funny...

I just read the same article yesterday.

Option 1: Great minds think alike.
Option 2: Fools seldom differ.

Liberty's Edge

2 people marked this as a favorite.
I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! The ozone layer is healing, and expected to make a full recovery in about 40 years.

I played a miniscule part in the elimination of CFCs. The company where I worked used Freon-115 in a process; I developed a replacement CFC-free process. As tiny as my contribution was, I am still proud to have made it.

Scarab Sages

The slightly-silly pointy shoes often associated with Medieval Europe-ish fantasy (albeit maybe not as much these days) were a real thing - and a pretty big deal in their time.

A similar design has very recently made a comeback among some Mexican clubbers.

Scarab Sages

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Lotteries (including buying and selling tickets) are constitutionally prohibited in the state of Nevada. Why don't you just go march your reprobate ass into a casino, like a responsible citizen?!

Scarab Sages

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Kirth Gersen wrote:
Aberzombie wrote:
Buc-ee's is a chain of convenience stores located in the Central, North, South, and Southeast regions of Texas. The company is owned by Arch "Beaver" Aplin III and Don Wasek and has its headquarters in Lake Jackson, Texas. The chain is known for its very large-format stores (relative to other convenience stores) and a logo depicting a beaver.
They're also noted for vast, meticulously clean restrooms and high base pay for employees.

By way of contrast, German supermarket chain Lidl is noted for abysmal quality-control, and even moreso for downright-Orwellian treatment of its employees.

Scarab Sages

The word gas - as in, what we breathe, fly through, and put in balloons - comes directly from the altogether-too-much-maligned word khaos/kaos/chaos.

Scarab Sages

What Internet-user is not inevitably faced with the dilemma of not knowing where to place blame for a malfunctioning/nonfunctional website? When that one bad bulb goes out, downforeveryoneorjustme.com can help!


Despite fighting on opposite sides of the United States Civil War, Union general (and future United States President) Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) and Confederate general James Longstreet (1821-1904) were close, lifelong friends.

Grant and Longstreet had met as students at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the 1830s, and became inseparable during their time at school. After graduating (Longstreet in 1842, Grant in 1843), the pair were both posted to the same regiment at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, where Grant married Longstreet's cousin Julia Dent (historical records are somewhat unclear, but it is likely that Longstreet served as best man at his friend's wedding). Later, both served together in the Mexican-American War, with Longstreet being wounded during the Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexico City campaign.

At the end of the U.S. Civil War, Longstreet was present during General Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant in 1865, and was able to reconnect with his friend after years of fighting. Despite being on opposite sides of the bloody Wilderness campaign, neither man bore any hard feelings toward the other, and their first meeting after the surrender involved the pair sharing a box of cigars and sitting down for a game of cards.

During Reconstruction, Longstreet supported the growing Republican Party, eventually endorsing Grant during the latter's successful presidential campaign. Due to his postwar support of the United States and his involvement in championing the civil rights of former slaves, Longstreet has been denigrated by many Confederate-leaning historians and writers in the years since the war.

After Grant's death in 1885, Longstreet was present at the dedication of Grant's Tomb in New York. In the years after the war, Longstreet served as a state police officer in Louisiana, as a U.S. Marshal, and as postmaster general of Gainesville, Georgia. Later, he served the federal government as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes, as well as U.S. Commissioner of Railroads during the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Scarab Sages

Rod Serling, celebrated creator of The Twilight Zone, served in the U.S. Army during World War II. The war left him "bitter about everything and at loose ends" - and saddled for the rest of his life with what would today be called PTSD. The war illustrated to him the cruel, ironic, and surreal nature of life and death via incidents such as seeing a friend of his killed by a crate of food dropped by a friendly plane overhead.

Scarab Sages

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The jug marked with "XXX" seen in many cartoons is a reference to the process of making moonshine, which takes 3 rounds of repeat distillation.

Scarab Sages

This Machine Kills Fascists: After they invaded Czechoslovakia, the country's Tatra line of automobiles became a favorite for high-ranking Nazi officers - and consequently got so many of them killed that the Allies jokingly claimed them as a secret weapon!

Scarab Sages

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
...The war illustrated to him the cruel, ironic, and surreal nature of life and death via incidents such as seeing a friend of his killed by a crate of food dropped by a friendly plane overhead.

Hmm, it would seem I was so taken with the story I forgot to make the obligatory joke about "supplies"....


I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:
The war illustrated to him the cruel, ironic, and surreal nature of life and death via incidents such as seeing a friend of his killed by a crate of food dropped by a friendly plane overhead.

According to George Feifer's book Tennozan (1992), written about the Okinawa campaign, stuff like this happened a lot in the Pacific Theatre, particularly on Okinawa and in the Philippines. Incidents specifically mentioned were one where a Marine was crushed by an air-dropped crate whose parachute failed to open, as well as several in which US aircraft either strafed and/or bombed their own men (thinking they were the Japanese) or dropped supplies on the Japanese (thinking they were friendlies).

Scarab Sages

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Who's Even Surprised By This Point?: Crows really are as smart as the ones in Aesop's fables.

As a matter of fact, their abilities don't stop there: They can not only use tools, they can craft them.

Also, they snowboard.


We also Uber on eagles.

Scarab Sages

1 person marked this as a favorite.

*gruff, smoky, slightly sociopathic voice* "I love the smell of victory in the morning. Smells like...CABBAGE."


That was great!

Scarab Sages

Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, OM, GCMG, GCVO, KCB, DL (22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941) was a British Army officer, writer, founder and first Chief Scout of the world-wide Boy Scout Movement, and founder, with his sister Agnes, of the world-wide Girl Guide / Girl Scout Movement. Baden-Powell authored the first editions of the seminal work Scouting for Boys, which was an inspiration for the Scout Movement.

After having been educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell successfully defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. Several of his military books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training in his African years, were also read by boys. In 1907, he held a demonstration camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp, which is now seen as the beginning of Scouting. Based on his earlier books, particularly Aids to Scouting, he wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Sir Arthur Pearson, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Boy Scouts Association.

The first Scout Rally was held at The Crystal Palace in 1909, at which appeared a number of girls in Scout uniform, who told Baden-Powell that they were the "Girl Scouts", following which, in 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell started the Girl Guides Movement. In 1912 he married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to the Scouting and Girl Guiding Movements until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. His grave is now a National Monument.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:

Who's Even Surprised By This Point?: Crows really are as smart as the ones in Aesop's fables.

As a matter of fact, their abilities don't stop there: They can not only use tools, they can craft them.

Also, they snowboard.

My wife and I were watching a parliament of crows in the back yard, and one of the crows was holding something in his beak. My wife wondered what the crow was holding.

"I don't know," I said, "Tell him how pretty he is, and maybe he'll drop it." The crow immediately turned around and started walking away from the house.

My wife chuckled and said, "I guess he knows that story!"

Scarab Sages

“Once people realize there’s a problem, they tend to fix it”: China and India are leading the way in making The Blue Marble green again.

Scarab Sages

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The Bakken Formation is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The formation was initially described by geologist J.W. Nordquist in 1953. The formation is entirely in the subsurface, and has no surface outcrop. It is named after Henry Bakken, a farmer in Tioga, North Dakota, who owned the land where the formation was initially discovered, during drilling for oil.

Besides the Bakken formation being a widespread prolific source rock for oil when thermally mature, significant producible oil reserves exist within the rock unit itself. Oil was first discovered within the Bakken in 1951, but past efforts to produce it have faced technical difficulties.

In April 2008, a USGS report estimated the amount of recoverable oil using technology readily available at the end of 2007 within the Bakken Formation at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, with a mean of 3.65 billion. Simultaneously the state of North Dakota released a report with a lower estimate of 2.1 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken. Various other estimates place the total reserves, recoverable and non-recoverable with today's technology, at up to 24 billion barrels. A recent estimate places the figure at 18 billion barrels. In April 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey released a new figure for expected ultimate recovery of 7.4 billion barrels of oil.

The application of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies has caused a boom in Bakken oil production since 2000. By the end of 2010, oil production rates had reached 458,000 barrels per day, thereby outstripping the pipeline capacity to ship oil out of the Bakken. There is some controversy over the safety of shipping this crude oil by rail due to its volatility.

This was illustrated by the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, in which a unit train carrying 77 tank cars full of highly volatile Bakken oil through Quebec from North Dakota to the Irving Oil Refinery in New Brunswick derailed and exploded in the town centre of Lac-Mégantic. It destroyed 30 buildings (half the downtown core) and killed 47 people. The explosion was estimated to have a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) blast radius.

As of January 2015, estimates varied on the break-even oil price for drilling Bakken wells. The North Dakota Department of Natural Resources estimated overall break-even to be just below US$40 per barrel. An analyst for Wood McKenzie said that the overall break-even price was US$62/barrel, but in high-productivity areas such as Sanish Field and Parshall Oil Field, the break-even price was US$38-US$40 per barrel.


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Though LASER (commonly, "laser") and TASER are both acronyms for devices that use directed energy, the acronyms stand for completely different things:

LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, which is derived from the earlier MASER (Microwave Amplification " " ") device. The acronym was coined by Gordon Gould in 1959 to replace the earlier term "Optical MASER."

TASER was originally TSER, which is an acronym of the title of the 1911 children's novel Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle. The TASER, developed in 1974 by Jack Cover, was named after the titular device due to their similar usage.

Scarab Sages

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Paris may soon wish to rebrand itself "the City of Lights(abres)".

Scarab Sages

It's official: We now know why zebras have stripes (because African savannah-flies are just that awful).


Over the course of his career, American trombonist and bandleader A. Glenn Miller (1904-1944) scored 16 number-one records, as well as 69 top-ten hit singles, more than Elvis Presley (38 top-tens) or the Beatles (33 top-tens) did in their careers.


During the 1880 U.S. Presidential election, Democratic Party candidate Winfield Scott Hancock was mocked for his inexperience by supporters of his Republican counterpart, James A. Garfield, by printing a pamphlet entitled "Hancock's Political Achievements," which contained nothing but blank pages.

In the end, Garfield was elected president, and served for just over six months before being assassinated by mentally unstable former supporter Charles J. Guiteau, after which Garfield was succeeded by his vice president, Chester A. Arthur. To this day, James A. Garfield remains the only sitting member of the United States House of Representatives to have been elected to the presidency.

Scarab Sages

Casio Computer Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and commercial electronics manufacturing company headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Its products include calculators, mobile phones, digital cameras, electronic musical instruments, and analogue and digital watches. It was founded in 1946, and in 1957 introduced the world's first entirely electric compact calculator. It was an early digital camera innovator, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the company developed numerous affordable home electronic keyboards for musicians along with introducing the world's first mass produced digital watches

Casio was established as Kashio Seisakujo in April 1946 by Tadao Kashio, an engineer specializing in fabrication technology. Kashio's first major product was the yubiwa pipe, a finger ring that would hold a cigarette, allowing the wearer to smoke the cigarette down to its nub while also leaving the wearer's hands free. Japan was impoverished immediately following World War II, so cigarettes were valuable, and the invention was a success.

After seeing the electric calculators at the first Business Show in Ginza, Tokyo in 1949, Kashio and his younger brothers (Toshio, Kazuo and Yukio) used their profits from the yubiwa pipe to develop their own calculators. Most of the calculators at that time worked using gears and could be operated by hand using a crank or using a motor (see adding machine). Toshio possessed some knowledge of electronics, and set out to make a calculator using solenoids. The desk-sized calculator was finished in 1954 and was Japan's first electro-mechanical calculator. One of the central and more important innovations of the calculator was its adoption of the 10-key number pad; at that time other calculators were using a "full keypad", which meant that each place in the number (1s, 10s, 100s, etc ... ) had nine keys. Another distinguishing innovation was the use of a single display window instead of the three display windows (one for each argument and one for the answer) used in other calculators.

Casio Computer Co., Ltd. was formed in June 1957. That year, Casio released the Model 14-A, sold for 485,000 yen, the world's first all-electric compact calculator, which was based on relay technology.

In the 1980s, its budget electronic instruments and its line of affordable home electronic musical keyboard instruments became popular. The company also became well known for the wide variety and innovation of its wristwatches. It was one of the earliest manufacturers of quartz watches, both digital and analog. It also began selling calculator watches during this time. It was one of the first manufacturers of watches that could display the time in many different time zones and of watches with temperature, atmospheric-pressure, altitude, and even Global Positioning System displays.

A number of notable digital camera innovations have been made by Casio, including the QV-10, the first consumer digital camera with an LCD screen on the back (developed by a team led by Hiroyuki Suetaka in 1995), the first consumer three megapixel camera, the first true ultra-compact model, and the first digital camera to incorporate ceramic lens technology.

Liberty's Edge

My hovercraft is full of eels - and the eels are full of COCAINE!

Scarab Sages

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Love, Death & Robots (stylized as LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS) is an American adult animated anthology television series on Netflix. The 18-episode first season was released on March 15, 2019. The series is produced by Joshua Donen, David Fincher, Jennifer Miller, and Tim Miller. Each episode was animated by different crews from a range of countries. The series is a re-imagining of Fincher and Miller's long in-development reboot of Heavy Metal.

Netflix released the first trailer for the series on February 14, 2019.
Voices throughout the series include Topher Grace, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Gary Cole, Samira Wiley and Stefan Kapičić.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
David M Mallon wrote:
Over the course of his career, American trombonist and bandleader A. Glenn Miller (1904-1944) scored 16 number-one records, as well as 69 top-ten hit singles, more than Elvis Presley (38 top-tens) or the Beatles (33 top-tens) did in their careers.

In 1942, Glenn Miller (age 38, too old to be drafted) joined the U.S. Army, and was transferred to the Army Air Corps. His plane was lost over the English Channel on December 14, 1944.

How I wish he had survived the war. I love his music.

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