A most unsatisfying gif...

Happy Hippo and Stan

19 WAYS TO MAINTAIN A HEALTHY LEVEL OF INSANITY

1. At lunch time, sit in your parked car with sunglasses on and point a hair dryer at passing cars. See if they slow down.

2. Page yourself over the intercom. Don't disguise your voice.

3. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want fries with that.

4. Put your garbage can on your desk and label it "IN".

5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.

6. In the memo field of all your checks, write "for smuggling diamonds".

7. Finish all your sentences with "in accordance with the prophecy".

8. Don't use any punctuation.

9. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.

10. Order a Diet Water whenever you go out to eat - with a serious face.

11. Specify that your drive-through order is "to go".

12. Sing along at the opera.

13. Put mosquito netting around your work area and play tropical sounds all day at work.

14. Go to a poetry recital and ask why the poems don't rhyme.

15. Five days in advance, tell your friends you can't attend their party because you're not in the mood.

16. Have your coworkers address you by your wrestling name, Rock Bottom.

17. When the money comes out the ATM, scream "I won! I won!"

18. When leaving the zoo, start running towards the parking lot yelling,"run for your lives, they're loose!!"

19. Tell your children over dinner "due to the economy, we are going to have to let one of you go."

and a bonus:

He's got Cojones!

Looking in

I was feeling a little nosey, so I thought I would look in on you and see if you are sitting at your computer...

Yup, there you are!

Have a Great Day!

Red-Neck Engineers

Bubba and Ray (Arkansas mechanical engineers) were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking up.

A woman walked by and asked what they were doing. We're supposed to find the height of the flagpole," said Bubba, "but we don't have a ladder."

The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a few bolts, and laid the pole down. Then she took a tape measure from her pocket, took a measurement, announced, "Eighteen feet, six inches," and walked away.Ray shook his head and laughed. "Ain't that just like a blonde! We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"

From The Emerald City

The Wizard is going to confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob with my brother wizards.. Posting will resume on Tuesday. In the meantime check out the archives, so much to see!

The Wizard of 'OZ'

Leaning Tower of Pisa loses some of its tilt

CNN News wire
TUSCANY, Italy — The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy has slowly started defying its name, losing 4 centimeters of its tilt over the past 17 years.

Leaning Tower of Pisa and Pisa Cathedral in Italy with unrecognizable tourists for scale.

The movement, roughly 1.5 inches, comes after extensive consolidation work done between 1993 and 2001, which was required to reverse its slump and keep the tower upright.

It means the building in Tuscany, which attracts thousands of tourists every day, is back to the tilt it had at the beginning of the 19th century, according to professor Salvatore Settis, who leads the surveillance group of the monument.

“The reduction of the tilt will not last forever — but it’s very significant and now we have good reasons to hope that the tower can last for at least another 200 years,” Settis told CNN.

When corrective work began on the tower it was leaning 6 degrees, or 13 feet, off the perpendicular on its south side. Soil was removed on the opposite side to reverse its trajectory.

“Technically it has been an incredibly complex work — but the concept of the project is easy to understand,” Settis said. “The tower is leaning towards the South, so part of the soil under the northern side, basically sand and clay, was eliminated, creating cavities that the weight of the tower is now closing”.

--more at Fox4KC.com

Self-Defense: What is the best thing to do when a grenade is thrown at you?

by Dan Rosenthal, U.S. Army Infantry, RSTA, Quora.com

The generally accepted fragmentation radius for a frag grenade is 30-35 feet, and the fuse length will be between 3-5 seconds. So usually running isn't going to be an option for you. If you can take cover, do so. If not, hit the deck and get as low as possible, as the majority of the fragmentation will go upwards. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot to be done.

Frequently asked followup questions.

Head first, sideways, or feet first? Head first. Your Kevlar helmet is specifically designed to stop shrapnel, and your plate carrier generally is going to only protect you in three spots -- straight on from the front, straight on from the back, and over the shoulders (with shoulder pads, which most troops deploy with these days). By presenting a minimal cross-section to the grenade, you're minimizing the fragments that can hit you, and by presenting your most armored front to the grenade, you're protecting yourself from what fragments do hit you. Feet first is a bad idea -- you don't have any significant protection there, and it's a great way to get your femoral artery severed. Leg and intestinal wounds are both incredibly painful, and incredibly dangerous in the field. Sideways is even worse; your plate carrier won't have any protection under the arms, and you're maximizing the frontage of your body that is exposed to the blast.

Pick it up and throw it back? Not a chance. There's no way you have enough time. Assuming a 4 second fuse length, two of which are spent in flight, you have just two seconds to notice the grenade, react, reach down, pick it up, plant your feet, lift up, and throw it far enough that you're clear of the blast radius. Not going to happen except in the ultra-rarest of situations. Plus, while you're faffing about with that, whoever threw the grenade at you is still putting fire down on your position.

--
Back in 2003, when I was in Iraq, we were executing a cordon and search operation in Baghdad. There was one particular house that we had a pretty good idea had some insurgents in it. I was outside, just down the block, when a team from our Bravo company went in to clear the house. They took fire immediately on entering the door, and someone from upstairs threw a Russian RGD-style grenade down the stairs. It clunked down to the bottom as everyone freaked out and dove for cover.......and it didn't explode. I think they eventually managed to finish clearing that building by climbing over from the next roof; nobody wanted to walk up the stairs with unexploded ordnance sitting on them and insurgents the next floor up.

WALLY'S WEDDING NIGHT

At 85 years of age, Wally married Lou Anne, a lovely 25 year old.

Since her new husband is so old, Lou Anne decides that after their wedding she and Wally should have separate bedrooms, because she is concerned that her new but aged husband may overexert himself if they spend the entire night together.

After the wedding festivities Lou Anne prepare herself for bed and the expected "knock" on the door. Sure enough the knock comes, the door opens and there is Wally, her 85 year old groom, ready for action.

They unite as one. All goes well, Wally takes leave of his bride, and she prepares to go to sleep.

After a few minutes, Lou Anne hears another knock on her bedroom door, and it's Wally. Again he is ready for more "action".

Somewhat surprised, Lou Anne consents. When the newlyweds are done, Wally kisses his bride,bids her a fond goodnight and leaves.

She is set to go to sleep again, but, aha, you guessed it - Wally is back again, rapping on the door, and is as fresh as a 25-year-old, ready for more "action". And, once again, they enjoy each other.

But as Wally gets set to leave again, his young bride says to him, "I am thoroughly impressed that at your age you can perform so well and so often. I have been with guys less than a third of your age who were only good once. You are truly a great lover, Wally."

Wally, somewhat embarrassed, turns to Lou Anne and says:

"You mean I was here already?"



The moral of the story: Don't be afraid of getting old, senior moments have advantages.

Riddle Me This!

What is this?

Click above for the answer.

Fashion disasters the people in the pictures thought were cool... I say wtf?????

Strange Facts

Every single day you, unless you are already bald, will lose as many as 100 strands of hair – that’s 36,500 in a year. This is rather worrying as the average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.

A sneeze can blast out of your nose at a speed greater 100 mph

The ashes of a cremated person weighs 9 pounds.

The human body can survive longer without food than without sleep. While starvation takes a few weeks you would die after about 10 days without sleep.

An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.

Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.

Your heart beats some 37,000,000 times in a year. During your life it’s will beat some two-and-a-half billion times.

Every square inch of your body is populated by an about 32 million bacteria.

Your largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet. If cut into pasta size pieces it would serve four.

85% of your brain is water.

Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute.

The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.

Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.

Humans shed and regrow outer skin cells about every 27 days - almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.

It takes 17 muscles to smile --- 43 to frown.

The average duration of sexual intercourse for humans is 2 minutes. – see pigs

It is impossible to kill yourself by holding your breath.

The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet.

You blink about 84 million times in a year.

When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop-- even your heart!

40 people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until they are 2 -6 years old.

In the course of a lifetime the average person will grow 2 Metres of nose hair.

Ladies in nudist camps tend to use more makeup than ladies elsewhere.

A team of medical experts in Virginia contends you're more likely to catch the common cold virus by shaking hands than by kissing.

The human tooth has 55 miles of canal in it.

Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour.

People have legs of slightly different lengths.

The average cough comes out the mouth at 60 mph.

Men / women The average person speaks about 31,500 words per day.

Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7% of the world's population are drunk.