Posts by BenWilson
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I dunno how hot house fires get, but steel needs something like 1370 degrees to melt, depending on the purity. Which is probably why the kiln doesn't get so hot - it may also melt.
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Before you unload on the drives, take the platters out. They make really cool drink coasters. They're so smooth and beautiful that everyone wants to know where you got them and how much they cost. At $200 a drive you can be a real snob about it.
I think the kiln won't work - it's a little known fact that hard drives are one of the few things that survive household fires. But surely they'd make an excellent casing for homemade fireworks, given that you can screw them together really tight. Make a loooong fuse.
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Grapefruit are scary
Heh, good old xkcd. It's a pity too, because they grow like weeds. My tree produced about 100 kg of grapefruit every year. I used to juice it, but now I'm on medication that clashes with it, I decided to use it for rootstock and hacked the thing down. My son's never got over it. Any time he's nervous about a stranger he threatens them with "Daddy CUT a TREE!". Now I've got to wait a hundred years for the ton of foliage to sequester, since annoying bylaws prevent me speeding the process up the way nature intended - with a match.
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Good show. I especially enjoyed seeing Comesky say with a straight face that the C word was totally inappropriate. A lawyer mate of mine has a lot of funny stories about his language in and out of court, and I've been on the turps with him a few times to form my own impressions. But he always said he was a damned good lawyer, a real streetfighter, totally for the client, and especially canny about police shenanigans, having been one himself for many years.
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u must be a baby boomer at heart
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Heh, riiiight, I see the silly hippie thing, but the connection to Herne Bay unaffordability angst is still lost...
But getting bitter on Baby Boomers is an end in itself. Who else is it that owns all the property in Herne Bay? What have they ever given me, except for life itself?
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Yes, it does make about as much sense as anarchy to take out bitterness at Aucklanders on Sydneysiders, and bitterness at house price hysteria on people honoring a strange Green ritual. When the rage can't be contained....
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Craig, you aren't really trying to tell us that ridiculous moral masturbation is confined to the bourgeois?
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From the outside the Falun Gong AND the Chinese attitude to them seem fruity. I got offered a flyer on top of Mt Eden once, and it took me my usual 0.5 seconds to size up that I didn't want it and say 'no, thanks'. But the behaviour of the Chinese adults who had arrived in a tour bus seemed bizarrely over the top. They yelled loudly and steered their children away like someone was trying to offer them drugs. It was alarming to watch group hysteria in action.
OTOH, I'd get pretty sensitive about someone offering my boy anything even the least bit religious or political, and if they persisted I'm sure I'd become alarming pretty fast too. Hence I say from the outside it seems fruity. From the inside, it's much the same as my FIL calling me from Australia begging me to talk some sense into a relative in Germany who had joined up with Scientology.
As I understand it, Scientology is all but banned in Germany so the parallels are strong. And, as with the Falun Gong, the ban is not working, nor do I think it ever will. The war on cults is every bit as stupidly self destructive as the war on drugs. It makes enemies out of families, criminals out of the law abiding, costs a lot of money to enforce, actively promotes the problem to children. Maybe the Chinese aren't any fruitier than we are.
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I actually have 2 of those torches, but the main reason is because I use torches so seldom that they always have nasty corroded batteries inside, which is bad for the environment, and more importantly, useless during a blackout.
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