Sjöröveren

Time for a big, wet, uncovered sneeze!

or, if you have the intestinal fortitude, a release of vapours from the fundament never fails to make your point!

Or those morons who can't wait the three seconds for you to drive past them and just pull out in front of you so you have to slam on your brakes.

This may be my greatest peeve of all! I hate it when I am driving in the left lane, already going 5-10 mph over the speed limit, and someone (usually a male barely into his 20s) comes up from behind me at over 80 mph, flashes his lights, expecting me to either 1: increase my speed to match his, and thereby increasing my culpability in breaking the speed limit) or 2: get into the right lane, so he doesn't have to inconvenience himself by obeying the law and prevailing speed of traffic. I would love to be able to talk to him, to hear his argument for my breaking the law so he can drive the speed he feels like driving. I used to slow down to exactly the speed limit, but now that these guys are shooting people, I just continue in the left lane, not changing speed. If I can get into the right lane at some point, if it's not too inconvenient for me. Every once in a while I'm rewarded by seeing the offending driver get pulled over; or even better, in the ditch, plowed deep into snow, without a prayer of anyone stopping to help.

I swear to god, I think most of these younger drivers have learned to drive while playing Grand Theft Auto, and think that those rules apply to real life. Yesterday, some kid tried to pull into my parking spot at the grocery store while I was backing out! My front wheels were still in the parking spot, and he was already driving into it! Did he think he'd get more points for getting there quickly?!?

What's the project you're building there? It looks like either a zoo or some kind of evil scientist's lair! I hope it's a lair, there's a lot of zoos out there.

Laudanum is an opiate - no cocaine in it. Cocaine, if memory serves, (doubtful at this time of the morning) was typical used by chewing the whole dried leaf, mixed with lime, wood ash, or some other mildly alkali substance. Still the way it is used today in the Andes. Cocaine as a recreational drug is quite recent - late 19th century I believe, when many plant-based medicines were being researched to find their active chemicals. Heroin, aspirin, nicotine and many other pharmaceuticals were discovered and/or synthesized around that time.

Belated Happy Birthday, Captain! Sounds like you were honored in style! You deserve only the best! Cheers!

Find someone who spins linen from flax. Real tow is the leavings of the flax plant after the usable fibers have been removed.

Ah, Mission, ye may have lost a tankard, but ye have gained a cheese grater!

OK, everybody stand back, and keep your wits about ye. It's My Captain's birthday, and it's going to get VERY WILD around here!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MERRYDEATH!

Okay, then I forgive you!

BTW, I know most of you have mailed your cards, especially Cannibal Chrispy and Rusty Nell, whom I think mailed theirs about a week ago. So far I have received no cards in the mail. Did you send them priority, or at a slower rate? I sure don't want to lose anyone's artwork!!!!!

Let me know approximate dates that you mailed them out. Thanks!

Mine were sent out 2/28 from a post office, via regular mail. You should see them by Wed. or Thursday of this week, I would guess. I scanned them too, so if they do go missing, I can come up with substitutes.

Sent mine this morning, just under the wire!

That is great! Don't start jumping for joy just yet. I'll do that for ye!

I used hair spray, and it worked great. Now, if it would only stop snowing, I could get these in the mail!

Thanks to both of you for the quick replies! I think I'll go the cheap route. Pinching every penny these days.

Sorry to hear about the computer problems. My best advice - get a Mac! Easier said than done, I know. You could always do it the way we did. Have a burglary, providing you're insured, of course. But there's no worries about viruses or trojans or such. They just don't exist for Mac. Not yet, at least. And the experts still say you don't need anti virus software for one, and we haven't had one problem yet.

I finished mine, but I have a question. They're water colors, and I haven't done those in a long time. Is there some fixative or clear-coat that I should put on them? Gesso or something? Also, Ransom, PM me with the address to send it to.

Jib, I've never actually played your game, but there's usually very large crowds of kids around it. I think it would be an excellent addition to the PW festival! I hope someone answers the phone at some point!

I still haven't started mine, but they shouldn't take long. I'll try to go get some proper paper today.

Glad you're out of the hospital and on the mend. Too bad about the lousy food. My dad was just in the hospital, and my sisters couldn't rave about the food in the cafeteria enough! A full turkey dinner with all the trimmings, as good as any home- cooked Thanksgiving, and only $3.50! So, if anyone is going to have surgery soon, make your way to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin for a great meal!

I've also got cadaver bone in me neck. We should start a club!

Who you calling a butt---- oh. Buttonhole.

Never mind.

I don't recall ever seeing any surgical instrument with quite that design before, but MAN OH MAN what a beautiful blade! You are a master, sir!

I love item #50: a Sudanese child's broadsword! I thought that I was the only one who bought my kids actual edged weapons! I always figured that they would only play too rough once, and I'd never have to bug them about it again.

Thanks to everyone here for commiserating with me. It's been a few days now, and I'm still not really used to the idea of being unemployed. I guess like many men, I tended to define myself by what my job was, and now that I don't have a job, defining myself just gets a bit more vague. But I'm not down in the dumps at all. I've learned not to panic at the unknown, so I'm taking stock of my situation with a level head.

But I am still mad about the whole thing! All the employees were divided into 3 groups: laid off permanently, laid off - subject to recall, and retained. I was in the first group. When my supervisor learned I was in the first group, and not the third, he was PISSED! He wasn't consulted at all about who to keep and who not to, and he was forced to keep some dead weight (for unfathomable reasons) and lose me, who he considered to be "one of the few who gets it." And if people do get called back, I won't be on that list; more dead weight would come back before me. I talked to him a bit, and he said he would try to change some minds of upper management, but he's not hopeful and neither am I.

I think this was done purely for cash flow reasons. They can't do the work that they already have in house with the people they kept, so I figure they looked at how much money they had, how many people they could pay with that, and got rid of everyone else. Because the prospects for more new projects for them seem good. The stimulus package is sending something like $5 billion to Minnesota, and much of that for road and bridge construction (remember the 35-W bridge collapse? We mapped the wreckage. Many of the photos published that you may have seen were taken by our aerial photographer.) Management says all of that money is for "shovel ready" projects, meaning someone has already mapped it, now its time for the construction crews to move in. But the state legislature hasn't actually allocated that $5 billion yet, and the MN Dept of Transportation is notorious for getting all the money they want, when they ask. (They didn't ask for enough for bridge repair in the past, obviously. Heads rolled for that.) So I think management may have been over-reacting a bit here. They may want some of us back before too long. Now if I can just get onto the recall list somehow.

And I know there's so many people out there right now in the same boat, competing for the same few jobs. Trying to figure out how to make my resume stand out, having not done one for some time. And no, MadL, I do not have the honor of being a veteran, so those folks will be in line in front of me -- which is only right. One of the guys laid off on Monday had just come back from his tour in Afghanistan that day only to be told he didn't have a job anymore. That stinks big time, and I hope he has some legal recourse. But he's 27, unmarried, fresh out of the military and with a college degree that isn't moldy like mine. He's pretty upbeat about his future.

So I should probably get busy with getting my future in order.

Thanks again everyone!

The 2nd pic you posted looks like the one I was thinking of. Guess it wasn't as easy as I thought, eh? Reminder to everyone: don't let me design your ship!

Hope everything goes well for you, Rumba!

I saw a post here a year or two ago about a sail powered tanker that was in development. Looked nothing like a traditional sailing ship. 4 or 5 masts, sails contained within the spars. All sail management was done via a computer on the bridge, and the trim was set automatically using remote sensing. The entire ship could be operated by less than 10 people, who were there mostly to keep things repaired. Plug in your origin, destination and some waypoints into your GPS, push the "weigh anchor" button, and its off to the galley to microwave nachos and watch DVDs!

I hated POTC 3 not for its lack of history -- I had no expectations of it being anything of the like -- but for its claptrap, hodgepodge, self-indulgent storyline. It seemed to exist only as a vehicle to showcase one special effect after another. Some were pulled off with skill (the stone/crabs, the maelstrom) some were amateurish in their execution (the final explosion sequence, as the ship disintegrates behind Beckett. It's rear projection was as obvious as stuff my kids do at home with our computer. Effects like this were fine in the 1960s, but 40 years later, it just looks crappy. Geez, you're DISNEY fer cryin' out loud! Spend a little more money and make it look good!)

Ultimately, the whole thing just failed to come together for me. I left feeling unsatisfied and rather taken advantage of. If they do make a 4, I will wait until I hear at least a dozen good reviews from people that I can trust before I hand over any money.

And as far as historical accuracy in films go, even the ones that go to great lengths to be as accurate as possible, such as Master and Commander (my all time favorite film, BTW) have a handful of historical inaccuracies in them. But do they spoil the film? Not in the least. If you want complete historical accuracy, build a time machine or quit complaining. I'll forgive all kinds of historical inaccuracies if you give me a good film. But give me a really bad film, like POTC 3, then I won't be very forgiving.