Buzzed!

[rejectomorph]

I was wakened by an alarm fly today. It's unlikely to happen again, as I believe that I killed it. It was buzzing around my head and landed on me a few times. I swatted at it, and finally hit it. It made that angry buzzing noise a fly makes when it actually gets smacked, but not killed outright. I haven't heard it since, so I'm pretty sure it crawled away somewhere and died. I can't find the corpse. The fly was in the room yesterday afternoon, and I tried several times to get it out, opening the window screen whenever it lit there, but the fly was too stupid to take advantage of the opportunities for escape, and always flew back into the room. I tried swatting it a few times, too, but it was too quick. When I finally succeeded in smacking it while I was still half asleep and had my eyes closed, I was so astonished that I immediately became wide awake.

I preferred waking up when I had an alarm cat. A purr is a much better way to be awakened than is the buzzing of a fly. Unfortunately, the last cat doesn't like to sleep on my bed, so I no longer have an alarm cat. I'll be pleased if I no longer have an alarm fly.

Too hot again today. In lieu of an actual post, ere are a couple of amusing links:

The planes, the planes! They're trying to poison us! (Somebody will make a conspiracy theory for absolutely anything!)

The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks. I don't think they're being "too" sarcastic.

Comments

[static-eddie.livejournal.com]

"The cloud-forming contrails that conspiracy theorists find so ominous are "perfectly natural," Minnis says. The odd grid and parallel-line patterns are easily explained as contrails blown together by the wind, scientists say."

Having lived near Lockheed Dobbins Airforce for many years, I think it might even be easier to explain as regular, intersecting flight paths?
especially if you're near an airport where they're sending up plane after plane along similar exit paths...

I've heard about the contrail conspiracy before and can buy into it to some degree considering cloud seeding... I mean, there are those with the resources and inclination (so to speak) to test just about anything... I recall reading a news article about using planes to seed storm clouds over Miami years ago...

[rejectomorph]

Cloud seeding was a popular topic in the 1950s, when I was a kid. A lot of optimistic people thought it was the beginning of a new age in which we would control the weather completely. These were usually the same people who thought that we would all have flying cars within twenty years, and that nuclear power would soon be so cheap that electricity wouldn't even be metered.

Articles about cloud seeding appeared in the papers right alongside articles about the proposed monorails which would soon be appearing in cities everywhere (often shown in artists' renderings running down the medians of freeways full of automated cars that would have made the monorails redundant, in any case), articles about the household robots which, well before the end of the century, would be pushing our lawn mowers and vacuuming our carpets, and (in Los Angeles) articles about proposals to drill tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains and install giant fans in them to blow the smog out into the desert!

I can't think of any major technology that was widely predicted then which has actually come into existence, and I don't recall a single newspaper or magazine article which predicted that we would someday have personal computers or the Internet or digital television or compact disks or communications satellites, or that we would be building windmills, of all things, to produce electricity. The Future of the 1950s, it turned out, had no future.

Well, there was one exception- the cheesy, 1930-ish comic strip cop Dick Tracy wore something called a two-way wrist television (it had been a two-way wrist radio before T.V. was invented.) Cell phones with video and built-in camera may not be small enough to strap on your wrist yet, but at least they actually exist. It must be embarrassing to any surviving futurists of that era that a comic strip turned out to be a better predictor of future technology than they did.

[static-eddie.livejournal.com]

well said!
Since we're on the topic, have you seen a book entitled, Yesterday's Tomorrows?

[rejectomorph]

I've never read it, but I do recall hearing about it when it came out, oh, about twenty years ago?

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

A nuclear quality engineer? Like Homer Simpson?

[rejectomorph]

Someone should let Homer know about that conspiracy.