Perks of the work...

Add me to the group of people who know at least some details about the 11 "off-nominal situations" (aka, "glitches") that occurred during Gagarin's space flight.

For all I know, such a group might populate a province in China, but I joined it yesterday.

Cheers...

Impromptu rule of translating thumb #478

If lettering on a graphic in a PowerPoint slide is not legible when in full-screen display mode, then it doesn't matter that such text can be made legible by copying the graphic, zooming in by 400%, applying a contrast filter, and then running the result through an OCR program that uses DARPA neural network algorithms.

It's illegible.

Just sayin'.

Cheers...

Hope it's warm where you are!

Water fell from the skies on Saturday in that sneaky way that, if you didn't notice the ground was sopping wet, you'd never believe it had fallen.

Not so yesterday.

When I went outside to go to the kids' place, the car was covered in something that may have been hail, once, but now looked like someone had dumped a giant Slushee on the vehicle. After I got back, the lights went out for about 30 seconds after lightning struck nearby, after which I could feel, rather than hear hail falling on the roof.

When I got up this morning, it didn't quite look like winter, but it surely didn't look like spring, either.



The PowerPoint file is gone. The space history article is gone. The short item received this morning for quick turnaround is gone.

I feel positively industrious today.

But cold.

Cheers...

The Chinese zodiac...

Visualize a baseball field.

Now see a rat, wearing a baseball uniform with the number 36, running through the legs of an ox that's standing athwart a baseline. The rat slides head-first for the bag. The baseman, Tony the Tiger tags the rat, but the umpire, Bugs Bunny (think of him as a hare), calls "Safe!"

Tony bellows, "Oh, that's just GREAT!" so loudly that Bugs is knocked over, rolling like a bowling ball past the bleachers until he collides with a group of Chinese exchange students getting to ready to parade around the field in a dragon costume during the 7th inning stretch.

The person with the dragon's head is knocked down, so now the costumed group looks more like a snake. The crowd begins to hiss.

Just then, a horse comes out of the dugout to argue the call, wearing the horns of a sheep. A monkey jumps out of the stands onto the horse's back, yanks the horns off its head, and throws the horns at the flagpole. The horns land on the very top, where they turn into a rooster, who immediately cries "cock-a-doodle-doo!"

The rooster's cry causes every dog within five miles to start barking uncontrollably, and a few moments later, a boar emerges from the center field bullpen, chased by dogs.

As it approaches the infield, the boar turns into a rat, wearing a baseball uniform...


P.S. Strange things happen when you've got Surfin' Bird stuck on an endless loop inside your head, as I do. I mean, have you heard...?


UPDATE of 07/14/12, via the Building a Master Memory blog:

• A large RAT jumps on the head of an OX.
• The OX gets really annoyed and charges into a TIGER.
• The TIGER is trying to eat a large grey RABBIT.
• The RABBIT runs back into his burrow and finds a Golden DRAGON hiding inside with his eyes glowing and breathing fire.
• The DRAGON's tail is like a SNAKE, slithering out of the burrow.
• The SNAKE wraps itself around the leg of a HORSE attempting to strangle the horse.
• The HORSE shakes its leg and a GOAT runs to the horse dislodging the snake with its horns.
  
• The GOAT tosses the snake up into a tree where it is caught by a golden MONKEY.
• The MONKEY laughs and shrieks, imitating a ROOSTER.
• Another ROOSTER is running in the farmyard chasing a DOG.
• The DOG is chasing the PIGS and trying to eat from their trough.