Here’s the article:
These events seem to happening a lot more lately. Is there any chance that this is space junk re-entering the atmosphere? I’d hate to think Putin is playing chicken with his satellites like he is with his MIGs…
From a news report last year: Asteroid strikes are far more common than previously thought.
600 Kt? Thats larger then a US Trident missile Warhead.
I’d be interested in knowing where the 5-600kt strikes were, and when.
ETA: Having read the article, I will bet AUS$1 that the meteor came nowhere near “a few hundred meters” of the two observers’ location. Meteors are famously responsible for all kinds of UFO reports that describe windows, jet flames, intelligent movement and “passing within a few hundred feet” when they are miles or even hundreds of miles away. Even pilots and astronauts have made such observational errors.
This is my favorite part of that article:
The hell is a Possum Plucker?
Probability suggests most were in the ocean.
For once, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Rev it up, drop a possum in one end, out comes a naked corpse and a separated possum pelt. Ewwwwwwwww.
Your whole bolded phrase sounds like something from Downunda Doc Seuss.
That sounds like a possum skinner. A possum plucker sounds like you’ve got possums with feathers. 
Or a possum that’s stuck up in a tree… I was picturing something you’d use to get one off of a branch or something.
Please tell me the poor possum is dead before that happens. 
Gogol it. It’s… amusing. I take it they are modeled after automated pluckers used by poultry farmers, hence the slightly odd name. Oh, they don’t skin the beast, just rub off all the fur (for felt or some such, I gather). So it is “plucking” rather than “skinning.” I used pelt in the sense of what you shear off a sheep, not skin off a carcass.
I dunno, this is the outback… :eek:
(Apropos of nothing much, Brian Daley had a little vignette in one of his novels, where far-future hunters were feeding their kills into a taxidermy machine. Through entirely appropriate actions, a vicious hunting beast got sucked into its maw, processed alive [and making ‘grisly sounds’], and came out looking “very lifelike.”)
What’s the market for plucked possum?
None. I am writing from distant second-hand understanding, but it looks as if there is a market for hunting and trapping possums to remove them as vermin (government bounty?), and then a market for the fur (felting, or some such?) - but what the carcasses are good for, I have no idea. Nor, I think, do I want to.
Perfect, prime, plated, plucked possum?..pretty pricey per pound.
The machine was obviously invented by Taras Bulba.
Not Abdul Abulbul Ameer? Or Ivan Skavinsky Skavar?
Hey, look, it’s Halley’s Comet!
True story: I dated a girl in high school named Hailey who drove her grandmother’s Comet.
What is the chance, if one went off in or near a populated location, that it could trigger a nuclear response from the country in question (if it has said capability), them assuming that someone launched a nuke at them?
What the heck else ya gonna make possum pie outta? Sure can’t use armadillo carcasses, tire marks on their back or no.
Around 1980? Shut up! Just shut up, damn you!
It probably did come within a hair’s breadth of happening a few times, only some of which we know about.
Now? Probably a great deal less. I don’t think any country has its nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert, and there would be time to differentiate a meteorite strike from even a single rogue missile (or ground bomb) attack.