Screech, the virtual dissection was uber cool! OTOH, don’t think I’ll be doing any KFC or Buffalo wings on Cheat Night this Friday. (Not that kind of cheating!! It’s the only night of the week I eat whatever I want thereby maintaining my svelt figger)
Dwyr, my apologies to ZipLoc and the fuzzy widdle puddy tat.
Swampy, be careful doing all that manly power-tooly stuff that you don’t throw out your back. Being under the weather two weekends in a row might make you cranky as, well, a bear.
Tupug (No cheesey straws on these thighs)
You can get your own cannon? Does this mean I could get my own cannon? That might cure me of my temporary contentment with my stuff. I mean a cannon. But it’s only six pounds. That’s not very big. I mean a small child could just stroll up and carry it away. What good is such a dinky cannon?
Well, here I finally am, and I am sad to say not one of you even asked where I was this week. *Sniff Didn’t anyone miss me at ALL!!! Gosh, I here I was thinking that I was finally becoming one of you…but alas, no one even noticed my absence. Oh well, now that I’ve whined, on to other mundane stuff.
I’ve been busy, what with moving offices and all. I’ve been ‘puterless here, and well, frankly, the set-up in my new office doesn’t allow me to cruise on the ol’ Straight Dope as much as I’d like. At home, I couldn’t get to any of my computers because the nephew (in from out of town) and my husband were hogging them. Sheesh! So I post late to the MMP, and I missed all the good stuff.
I don’t have any plastic owls, flamingo, or any other fowl. However, I DO have a sprinkler that looks just like a squirrel. No, I didn’t buy it. My MIL gave it to me. Ooh, ooh! Just a mile or so from me they had to capture a mama bear and her cubs and relocate her. She and her cubs were wandering around a housing development and scaring the neighbors and animals. Well, actually, last I heard they had captured mama bear and one of the cubs, but still had to capture the third cub. Poor 'lil Smokey, I hope he’s okay without his mama and all.
I also didn’t go to any of my proms. I don’t regret it. I didn’t go to any of my high school reunions either. From what I hear, I didn’t miss anything there either.
Well, I better do some real work. I just know that you missed me, you’re just being all stoic an all that jazz…
It’s a BIG gun Rue. It’s designed to shoot six-pound roundshot. I know for a fact that it will put a dog-food can full of concrete through both doors of a Toyota at 100 yards.
Some guy up in Washington county casts the barrels. Since he doesn’t run an actual armory he doesn’t drill out the vent hole. You have to do that yourself. They built the carriage in the school woodshop on weekends when my brother-in-law was in junior high. They always touch off a blank charge on the 4th and piss off the neighbors.
A couple of years ago they were going to do up a naval gun and carriage (carronade, I think) but the project got shelved.
I’m impressed that swampy knows what a houppelande is- not many people do.
I think I have been to Wal-Mart twice in my life, both times under protest. The second time was when we were in Arkansas last summer. It felt like a real genuine southern experience, standing in that Wal-Mart, watching my idiot friend from Ottawa buy cheap cowboy boots, and my idiot husband buy the ugliest redneck hat I’ve ever seen.
The friend wore the boots for the whole trip. He soon added a Confederate bandanna and a genuine reproduction Confederate army belt buckle. It was embarrassing to be seen with him.
I got a picture of a camo-covered truck. Is that manly enough?
Actually I don’t even have the beginning of a clue as to what that might be. I gather it’s something one wears to go all medieval on somebody, so I infer that it’s also scary, but really I have no clue. But thanks Lissla for thinking that I do, I guess.
Hi, Taters! Welcome to Rue’s MMP! This is where all the cool kids hang out. I hope you come back every Monday and toss your comments into the thread! Nice ta meetcha!
Bragging? Perhaps, but it’ll still put a major league hurt on a Toyota.
Those guys used to have an annual rite of spring where they’d gather up a dozen or so family members and friends, an old junker car, and a lot of guns. Then they’d take the whole shebang down to the sandpit. The more vulnerable parts of the engine on the junker would get armored up with steel plates and cast-iron skillets and the like and the steering would be lashed down in a tight turn, so the thing would go in circles by itself.
Then they’d all shoot at it until it stopped moving.
One year, after they immobilized the car through the incremental addition of small lead weights, they decided to see what the cannon would do to it. The answer to that question turned out to be “makes some durned big holes.”
Those guys are a hell of a lot of fun to hang around with.
Blowing stuff up, or into pieces is nice, but I want to fling better. You remember Northern Exposure, when Chris made a catapult (or was it a trebuchet?) and flung a piano? That was beautiful.
Speaking of missing MMPers, now we have Taters back, but what about Scout? I thought her trip was last week. Roll Call!
That was a trebuchet Ashes[sup]2[/sup], trebuchets work on the counterweight principle, catapults works off the tension from a bunch of twisted up rope, or hair, or whatever. (I’m sure there’s something wrong with that sentence, but I’m not clear as to just what it is.)
Taters! How y’all is? I’ve missed you terribly! I can’t stop thinking about those days and nights we lay in each others arms on the beach at Waikiki, until our arms fell asleep… oh wait, that was somebody else.
Nevermind.
BTW Ex, I now I have a visual of you skeet shooting with a six-pound cannon.
I wanna go too.
A friend of mine had a little house on lake Champlain in VT. He also had a small cannon. Well, it might be more of a mortar than a cannon. It’s about 8" long, and the bore is just the right size for a can of OJ concentrate. We used to go out there on the weekend and see how far out into the lake we could launch canisters of frozen, concentrated orange juice. Then his father had the idea of removing the concentrate from the tube and putting in cement. Now those things would go so far we couldn’t even see them splash down. We don’t think they made it to NY, but if they did, sorry about that Ex. We really didn’t mean to bomb your state. (Disclaimer: We had binoculars to make sure that nobody was in the line of fire. We even used them. Most of the time.)
My friend’s family also had an old farmhouse in upstate NY (don’t remember where) that we would go to for a little skeet shootin’ and ATV riding (usually not at the same time).
Fishing: I used to go fishing all the time in VT. We did a lot of ice fishing, too. We used to make neat frozen fish sculptures. We would clean the fish on the ice, and then stick the bodies and heads together to make mutant fish with three heads and two tails. If it was cold enough, they would freeze together in just a couple of minutes, and bam! you’ve got some modern fish art. Of course, this probably only seems like fun when you’re out on a frozen lake in the middle of winter with a bottle of whiskey and dead fish for entertainment.
Let’s see - Cannons, skeet shooting, ATV ridin’, and fishing. How’s that for a post?
FCM, the belching and scratching go without saying. How can one play with cannons without belching and scratching? Is it even possible?
And for the chainsaws, I (gulp) don’t have one. I did spend a summer using a maul to cut firewood, though. Does that count? I belched almost the whole time…
Just read in the paper today that a pit bull attacked a little girl hereabouts. That’s pretty bad but the grisly part is that it tore off part of her scalp. Doctors at the hospital said they needed to reattach it so the police went out to find it. And they did…in the dog’s stomach. Just…ick.
But it was reattached and all is well. Except for the dog of course.
For a little extra grisly-I once tried to rip my face off. Just the upper half.
(Actually it wasn’t intentional-I’m extraordinarily clumsy.)
One trip to the emergency room, sixty stitches later and my face is in one piece again. I got a cool scar running down my forehead and the chance to see my own skull. Which was kinda neat and grisly at the same time.
Warning: anyone overflowing with testosterone may want to quit this post right now. Because I like happy endings.
[sub]Disclaimer: I’m late to the thread, having just got back in town. I didn’t read the first 2 pages, but since it’s usually a hijack-o-rama, I figure I could hop on in and not “disturb” anything.[/sub]
This is truly bizarre, Ashes. I recently bought a can of the Sugar Free Red Bull. I, too, find myself needing to work up the courage. I’ve smelled regular Red Bull, and it smelled a bit like cough syrup. So I’m not sure I’m gonna like it. It’s probably been in the fridge for about 3 or 4 weeks now. But my can is silent. Should I be worried?
Did you know there is a small post-15th century cannon called a falconet? Nothing like an owlet, but the falconet would win in a fight between an owlet and a falconet, since the falconet belches gunpowder and small cannonballs, whereas the owlet just belches bits of mice and other critters.
Owlet! Owlet! Owlet! (Awwww! How cute!!!)
**scroll down, but there’s other interesting stuff there!
(And I’m the one who knows what a houppelande is. Heck, I own a couple of them.)
Still rereading this and still confused. What happened to the second cub? You mentioned one cub, and the third one is still on the lam. Or are there only two cubs and you meant to write three ‘bears’ (although “The Three Bears” has already been written several times over and over)?
It was a mama bear and two cubs, Screech. So the “third cub” was/is actually the second cub, but the third bear. No further word on the whereabouts of the aforemetioned baby bear so far.
