Was he the New Guy, I thought him an old hand who ‘dressed’ himself.
The chapter title lets you in on the generally spooky religio-sexiness of the book. I think.
CalMeacham: I actually learned that from a lady who did tours in Mystic Seaport when we went there one summer on our way to Newport. Perhaps she was messing with me?? :dubious: I never read Moby Dick, so I didn’t know whether that was mentioned in there or not. And that thing about the whale penis sheath is cool. Maybe I should read Moby Dick. 
Almost everyone has seen the little wild violets often seen in lawns as weeds. But, did you notice that the flowers are flipped over backwards and held upside down?
If you stood in the middle of Grand Central Station, New York, for a year, you would absorb as much radiation as you would if you ate a luminous-dial wristwatch.
(This fact appeared in an issue of Omni - I think it was the one in which George R. R. Martin’s story “Sandkings” was first published - and has stuck with me ever since. If only because they never suggest why anyone would do either one of these things … )
Nooooooo!!! Don’t do it! Read the cliff notes! Read an abridged version. Read a fifth grader’s book report on the abridged version.
Any of those will be far more exciting than the actual book.
The only thing I recall from my reading of Moby Dick is the scene where Ahab tosses the sextant to the deck and it shatters.
Melville took something like five pages (it seems in my memory, at least ) to describe this simple action. The implications were dealt with for the rest of the rather lengthy chapter, it seemed.
whimper
Of course, FWIW, I also find Dumas’ style difficult to enjoy, too - so YMMV.
**Your SINGLE favorite piece of information **
“You have been selected from a large group of applicants to fill the position.”
Banana plants are herbs, technically, not trees, because the stem does not contain true woody tissue. I dunno why I like this factoid. Maybe because “Shall I add more oregano or banana leaves to the sauce?” makes me giggle. And now they’re radioactive; cool. Or hot, rather.
They’re also sterile, and without the ability to stay one step ahead of diseases and pests by modifying their genome through sexual reproduction, they are vulnerable to calamity. Researchers who have tried crossing them with crappy-tasting wild bananas have thus far merely come up with slightly-less-crappy-tasting bananas.
a.k.a. Hjalmer Hvam
And 0.1 millirems per year if you sleep with your spouse (so much for safe sex). http://web.reed.edu/ehs/radiation_safety/ancillary_radiation_safety.html
273.1 or is it 273.15? http://home.comcast.net/~igpl/Temperature.html
Nice site, Muffin. I was about to pontificate about how 0.1 mREM/year is not a hazard.
I suppopsse that would depend on whose spouse it is with whom one is sleeping.
I didn’t say that there weren’t hazards to sleeping with certain spouses - just that the radiation dose isn’t one I’d worry about.
Forgive my ignorance, but I’m a chemistry guy, not biology. How is it that we still have bananas (B-A-N-A-N-A-S) at this point?
Stupid song.
Vegetative propogation?
Couldn’t these both be right – if the Giants derived their orange from the Dutch EIC flag?
At standard pressure, pure water freezes at approximately 273.15 K.
Completely OT, but doesn’t “syringe” rhyme with “orange”? At least somewhere in the world, there’s an accent which makes this so. Any comments?
Replanting shoots that grow from the base of mature stalks, according to: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/05/BUGF75VU791.DTL