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Garage Sale Find of the Week: D&D Manuals!

Ah the memories.  I don't think I will be dungeonmastering any campaigns in the near future but these are still rad just to page through them and check out the monsters... and demi-gods.

Asteroids vs. Volcanos!

A team of Berkeley paleo-everything-ists i.e. botanists, tologists, geologists, etc. have determined that it is a proven fact that a 10 mile wide meteor slammed into the Yucatan peninsula some ten-thousand years ago resulting in an ash, soot and sulphur explosion.  The explosion also triggered world-wide earthquakes reaching "Spinal Tap" scales of 11!  The ash, soot, sulphur and other crap coated the earth's atmosphere which resulted in a cooling period for the earth which killed the dinosaurs.

There is another school of thought who believe it was a chain of giant lava spewing volcanos some 700,000 years prior to the asteroid slam which began killing the dinosaurs because the amount of sulphur emitted from the erupting volcanos is much greater than the impact of a meteor.   Plus the mass extinction was well under way 300,000 years prior to the Yucatan incident.

It is difficult enough for me to plan anything a week in advance let alone trying to wrap my mind around a time-line of hundreds of thousands of years yet the light reflected from the planet at the time of the dinosaurs extinction has not even reached the edge of our own solar system.  So there it is, an argument which spans an unfathomable amount of time possibly concerning what started offing the life on this planet and what finished the job.  Regardless of which side of the argument you may or may not agree upon; contrary to popular opinion, if dinosaurs were still alive today some of them would be movie stars.

The Inventor Of The Internet!

Very rarely do celebrities actually invent anything. I tend to think of them as... as... well... celebrities and not really inventors but every once in a while a celebrity comes along and invents something.  Which brings us to the question of who invented the internet?  I don't know why this subject pops into my head every once in a while and when it does it plagues me.  You might think that Al Gore invented the internet which reminds me of a conversation my friends had last week that went something like this,
"I don't believe you."
"Well, I believe myself."
"If you believe yourself, that still does not make two people believing you.  You are still just one person."
Which maybe is the reason Al Gore mentioned he invented the internet a bunch of times.  Maybe every time he mentions it he thinks it is one more vote to change written history in his favor.
Maybe you think a science fiction writer like William Gibson or something invented the idea of the internet but none of what I've just written is true.  I might as well have just made up a story about it raining fish in Australia or something.  Oops, wait a minute that's true.
Ok. Here's the real story. George Antheil a pianist from Trenton, New Jersey meets his neighbor Hedy Lamarr in 1940 in Hollywood.  Lamarr asks Antheil a question about glands because she would like to enlarge the size of her breasts and the conversation quickly turns to large weapons.  Antheil said he would like to track her torpedoes around the neighborhood but Lamarr was more interested in recieving signals from many other friendly transmissions and dodge the enemies' radar field.
So Lamarr went home all hot and bothered and drew up this diagram which was the beginning of frequency hopping.  This same technology is still used today to transfer information over radio waves like for cell phones and internet use and stuff. So my candidate for the inventor of the internet (which of course is totally up for debate) is Hedy Lamarr!

VIDEO Deconstruction of UFO Footage

This video was remixed by an uber nerd. It just keeps getting better. I feel if there was commentary it would be something like:

"If we take a line from the circumference of the earth and curve it out to the object. It's virtually impossible to tell how large or how far away the object is due to the variable factors of the two measurements. The only way to explain this video is that there had to have been a shift in the frequencies allowing the videographer to see into the fourth dimension."

Millenium Falcon

Found this last week.  I thought it was super rad because the last time I saw one of these in the box with the original sticker sheet and the little catalog was 1981.  Shortly after that I believe it was eaten by sand worms in my back yard.

Best News Story of The Year - It's Raining Fish! Hallelujah!

Some kind of tornado at sea apparently picked up a whole bunch of fish.  Not only a bunch of fish but a bunch of the same kind of fish!  Picked them up into the air and made some kind of floating fish cloud then 326 miles later or probably farther since that is just the closest point to the nearest river dumped them on a town in Australia.  I love it.  Click on the picture for the full story.