We're going to be getting it. The Democrats are going to ram it down our throats whether we want it or not. You thought I was being paranoid?
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Here's something I think about occasionally: the origins of aphorisms.
"Pull out all the stops." It refers to playing a pipe organ. When you look at a picture of a pipe organ's console you see all these knobs arrayed around the manuals. (Keyboards--but on a pipe organ they're "manuals".) These knobs are the stops, and their function is to control the various ranks of pipes, or voices. A pipe organ has several different voices, and different pieces use different voices for different effects. If you want the music loud, if you're really going to go to town, you "pull out all the stops".
"Blow his stack", "blow off steam", and "run out of steam" come to us from steam engines.
"Blow off steam" is pretty obvious: when your boiler pressure goes too high you have to let some steam out lest it explode.
"Blow his stack", however: a steam locomotive exhausts its spent steam into a chamber beneath the smokestack. By blowing the exhaust steam up through the smokestack, this vented steam acts to pull air into the firebox. But if you run the locomotive too hard, the smokebox at the front of the boiler can't empty itself fast enough: the steam fills and pressurizes the smokebox. If the pressure gets too high, blammo, the smokestack comes apart or off.
"Run out of steam": this one's also pretty obvious. A steam locomotive has a tender attached and there are injectors which pump water from the tender into the boiler. If the temperature of the water falls too far, or if steam is used faster than the firebox can heat more water to boiling (or all of the above) the engine runs out of steam and slows down or stops.
As I think of them, I'll field my explanations for 'em.
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The keyboards of pipe organs are called "manuals" to distinguish them from the "pedals" which--as the name suggests--are operated with the feet.
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ChuBra!! finally turned up on AnimeSuki, so I grabbed the first nine eps, all that is available at the moment. I'm going to wait to watch it until I've got the whole series.
Generally that's been my policy since the School Days fiasco. Remember? The last ep was delayed coming out because some Japanese schoolkid went berserk and killed some people, and it was too much like the last ep of SD, so we got the "nice boat" meme?
Anyway, now I wait for the whole series to be out, and I'm doing the same with ChuBra!!.
I'm not doing it with Railgun because I thought it was a 13-ep series. Turns out it's 26, but they're at 19 now and the last ep I watched was 12, in late Feb. So F it.
My anime plan for right now revolves around watching Haruhi in chronological order and making DVDs of the second series. I'll get back to the playlist after that.
Because Ormus got a red hood, I found myself telling a guildie about Akazukin Chacha and she says she's going to download it and watch it. We may have another budding otaku....
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I had a hankering to listen to the last two Alan Parsons albums, Time Machine and A Valid Path. I ripped them to MP3.
There's one song on A Valid Path--"You Can Run"--which is a good song but the intro and extro annoy me. It's a child's voice, and the audio has been mangled so it's hard to understand what the kid is saying, but it's probably a key line from the song: "there's nothing human about the human race".
I hate it.
...so I loaded the track into my handy-dandy sound editing program and clipped that shit off. The song rocks now.
It reminds me of "Too Close to the Sun" from On Air. The bridge of that song would be so utterly damn cool if it didn't have the voices of young children explaining the myth of Icarus. The kids' voices stomp all over some cool guitar slides and it sounds like shit. Unfortunately there's no way to get rid of them. *sigh*
The other problem with A Valid Path is the last track, "Chomolungma". Bonus points for having an appearance by John Cleese, but after the song ends there are several seconds of silence followed by a dog barking. WTF. And once the stupid dog shuts up there's about another thirty seconds of silence. So I loaded "Chomolungma" into the sound editor and cut all that shit off.
Still, it would be nice if Alan Parsons would put out another album. When I was in high school, because the Project didn't tour they put out an album every year. So in 1984 we got Ammonia Avenue; in 1985 we got Vulture Culture; in 1986 we got Stereotomy, and in 1987 we got Gaudi. That was awesome, particularly because I was so into the Project back then.
Oh well.