short.
No, I'm not short, this issue is. You could care less about my
personal life but between moving offices, moving homes, packing,
unpacking, carrying, sorting and just plain every day work I'm
getting homicidal...stay out of Austin <snigger-BWA-Ha-ha-ha>.
The man who invented stress should spend time in hell with the
same man who invented ecoli.
Two quick articles from the Jank and we're off.
********************************************************************
[ From Jank,<billjank@ix.netcom.com> comes this disturbing News of ]
[ the Insane. ]
"Darwin award" Nominee: You all know about the Darwin awards -- it's
an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest
service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way.
Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke(tm) machine,
which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free
soda
out of it.
And for this year's nominee, the story is:
The Arizona (U.S.) Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal
embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road, on the outside
of a curve.
The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car.
The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.
The boys in the lab finally figured out what it was, and what had
happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow got hold of a JATO unit, (Jet Assisted
Take Off, actually a solid-fuel rocket) that is normally used to give heavy
military transport planes an extra 'push' for taking off from short
airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert, and
found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit
to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the JATO!!
Best as they could determine, he was doing somewhere between 250 and
300 mph (350-420kph) when he came to that curve....
The brakes were completely burned away, apparently from trying to slow
the car.
TODAY'S LESSON KIDS: Solid-fuel rockets don't have an 'off' switch...
********************************************************************
[ Also from Jank, <billjank@ix.netcom.com> we get a message from ]
[ God (or nature) that Alcohol is a big part of nature...I see ]
[ this as sign to have a party...now where is my light cruiser? ]
Enjoy Amigos! See you in outer space!
[ this was actually written by ]
[ John Michael Scalzi, II ]
[ Film Critic/General Columnist, The Fresno Bee ]
[ My opinions are my own. Mine mine mine! Go go go! Back back back! ]
[ http://www.cybergate.com/~scalzi ]
"Well, maybe just one more ham sandwich." -- Mama Cass
Here's a column I wrote for the Fresno Bee this week. It vaguely
touches on what you all talk about here in alt.beer, so I thought you
might find it good for a laugh or two.
--------------
This week, a million fraternity brothers rushed to join NASA. The
reason: scientists have discovered beer in space.
Well, not beer exactly. But they did find alcohol: ethyl alcohol, to be
precise, the active ingredient in all major alcoholic drinks (antifreeze
Jell-O shots, quite obviously, are exempted from this category). Three
British scientists, Drs. Tom Millar, Geoffrey MacDonald and Rolf Habing,
discovered this interstellar Everclear floating in a gas cloud in the
contellation of Aquila (sign of the Eagle, the mascot of Anheuser-Busch!
Hmmmmm).
Millar and his compatriots have estimated the size of this gas cloud at
approximately 1,000 times the diameter of our own solar system; there's
enough alcohol out there, they say, to make 400 trillion trillion pints of
beer. These guys are British, mind you; if you were to translate this in
terms of American beer (which the British, with some justification, regard
as fermented club soda), the amount of potential brewski just about doubles.
In human terms: remember that double-keg party you threw at the end of
your Junior year in college (the second Junior year)? Imagine throwing
that same party, every eight hours, for the next 30 billion years. You'd
STILL have beer left over. And boy, would YOUR bathroom be a mess! Simply
put, no one could ever drink 400 trillion trillion pints of beer, except
maybe L.A. Raiders fans.
The sheer volume of all this alcohol begs the question of how it
managed to get out there in the first place. Despite the simplifying
effect it has on the human brain, ethyl alcohol is a reasonably complex
molecule: two carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, and a hydroxyl radical,
all cavorting together in beery camaraderie. It's not a compund that is
going to spontaneously arise out of the cold depths of space. It can
lead to speculation: What is this cloud?
1. It's God's beer. After all, He worked for six days creating the
universe, and on the seventh day, He rested. And after you've had a hard
week at the office, don't YOU grab a beer? Since man is made in God's
image, it could be that this cloud is the remaining evidence of the
first, best Miller Time.
2. It's Purgatory ("400 trillion trillion bottles of beer on the wall,
400 trillion trillion bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around,
399,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall!")
3. Proof of an undeniably highly advanced but chronically
dipsomaniac alien society. This particular theory is shaky, however: it's
reasonable to assume that if the aliens were going to construct a nebula of
alcohol, they'd also have large clouds of Beer Nuts and pretzels nearby for
snacking. Advanced spectral analysis has yet to locate them.
The truth of the matter, however, is far more prosaic. In the middle of
this gas cloud is a young and no doubt quite inebriated star. As the star
heats up and contracts, sucking the dust and gas of the cloud into a
smaller area, complex molecules form as a result of greater intereaction
between the elements. Ethyl alcohol forms on small motes of dust in the
cloud, and then, as the motes angle in closer towards the star and heat
up, the alcohol is released from the motes in gaseous form. And there you
have it: an alcohol cloud. Or, as Dave Bowman might say, "My God! It's
full of booze!"
Enough with the science lesson, you say. Just tell me how to GET there!
Sorry, Chuckles. You can't get there from here. The gas cloud (which, by
the way, has the utterly romantic name of "G34.3") is 10,000 light years
away: 58 quadrillion miles. Even if you hijacked the shuttle and headed
out with thrusters on full, by the time you got there, the guy in
Purgatory would be done with his tune. You'd have had time to work up a
powerful thirst, but you'd also be, in a word, dead.
No, the Space Beer Cloud will have to wait for the far future, when men
can leap through the universe at warp speed. One can only imagine what
they will do when they get there:
Captain Kirk: My....GOD! Sulu! What....is....THAT?
Sulu: It's a free floating cloud of alcohol, sir.
Kirk: And we've just run out of Romulan Ale! Could it be a trap, Bones?
Bones: Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a distiller of fine spirits!
Kirk: We need that booze! But if we fly through that cloud, we'll be
too drunk to drive!
Spock: May I remind you, Jim, that I am a Vulcan. We are a race of
designated drivers.
Kirk: Well, all righty, then. Spock, drive us through! Bones and I will
be out on the hull. With our mouths... open!
To boldly drink what no man has drunk before.