JamesSavik

Gay stereotypes are taking a beating these days. If you want to find gay men, go to the gym. They are the power-lifters. < whut are you lookin' at hippie!?

LSU and Bama was one for the ages. We may see a rematch of that game. They can't play each other for SEC championship because they are both in the Western Division. LSU is the SEC champion unless somebody from the Eastern division can beat them (unlikely). Alabama has yet to play Auburn but they don't have the horses this year. The Okies must have been really pissed about losing to TTech- they raped A&M like a drunken school girl.

In France during WWII many gay people were part of the French Resistance (called the Marquis in rural areas). One very well connected gay Parisian who worked on the trains and acted as a courier between cells was captured and tortured to death by the Gestapo without betraying any of his contacts. Young gay men were also used as assassins. They would get picked up by Nazi officers, go off to have a tryst and kill them.

That's cuz you follow those yankee girls schools

Game of the year: LSU vs Alabama Tigers and elephants and moonshine, OH MY!

I stand corrected. It's happened twice in a country of four hundred million. Everybody shit your pants!

I only count one incident and one victim. Admittedly, that's one too many but I wouldn't exactly call it a "trend".

As far as maritime disasters go, Titanic may be famous and get all the good press, there have been plenty of them with many, many lives lost. Here are a few that may not have been as famous. On 7 May 1915 the German U-20 torpedoed and Sank the RMS Lusitania. She sank in less than 18 minutes and took 1,198 of the 1,959 souls on board with her. She sank 11 miles short of Kinsdale, Ireland where corpses of men, women and children floated ashore by the hundreds for days. It was a public relations disaster for Germany. It was such an atrocity that the sinking contributed mightily to the United States entering the war. HMS Invincible was a new breed of warship when she was launched in 1905. She was quite different from than the heavily armored and slow battleships of the day. She was a battle cruiser- a design that trades armor for speed with the same armament of a battleship. Invincible paid a heavy price for having light armor. At the Battle of Jutland on May 30, 1916 she was hit by high caliber shells from the German battle cruisers Lutzow and Derfflinger and her magazines exploded. 1026 men were killed and there were only six survivors. In addition to Invincible, the battle cruisers Queen Mary and Indefatigable had magazine explosions and sank with heavy loss of life (over 2000) leading Admiral Beatty to utter the famous line: "Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." On Oct. 14, 1939 the German U boat ace Gunther Prien in the U-47 penetrated the fleet base at Scapa Flow and sank the British battleship Royal Oak as she sat at anchor. It was the first major warship lost by the Brits in WWII an a horrible blow to morale. 833 sailors were killed including a group of 100 trainees who were not yet 18 years old. Gun camera footage from HIMS Aboa shelling the USS Quincy. In the early morning hours of Aug. 9, 1942 a fleet of US cruisers and destroyers were protecting the transports that were landing the 1st Marine Division on the island of Guadalcanal- the first US offensive of the Pacific war. Japan responded by sending a task force of cruisers and destroyers that arrived around 0100 and caught the US/Australian fleet completely by surprise. The Japanese were able to close range and destroy the Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes and the Australian cruiser Canberra. The USS Chicago was heavily damaged. It was the worst beating the US navy ever took in a fair fight. Over a thousand US and Australian sailors were killed. The US Navy and War Department did not officially announce the loss until almost a year later. Many newspaper men at the time knew the truth but refused to print the story.

Pandora After clearing security and going down two different elevators, I guessed that I was at least 500 meters underground. The corridor had heavy steel blast doors with key card locks and bio-hazard signs every 50 meters. The deeper into the facility that we went, the higher the biohazard protection level of the labs that lined the corridors. I asked the guard what the USAMARID needed from the Dept. of Homeland Security and he told me that answer was well above his pay grade. We finally entered a lab marked BL-5 and I followed the guard inside. We had to strip and leave our clothes in a locker. We passed through a chemical shower and another steel door to a locker room where we put on surgical scrubs. We passed through a final airlock where a computer sat in front of the final door. The guard told me to go log into the computer in the corner of the room. He then excused himself saying that this was as far as he goes. The computer asked me to input my name, rank and agency: McGrath, Scott Special Agent Department of Homeland Security. The computer then asked for me to to state my name, surname first. "McGrath, Scott." The computer screen turned green and displayed: Voice Print ID verified. Agent McGrath clear for access to Pandora. The big steel door popped open and I entered the lab. A group of eleven men were waiting: two scientists and nine other agency representatives. As soon as I entered, the senior scientist said, "Good. Now that Homeland Security has arrived, we can begin." "Gentlemen. Everything that you see here is above top-secret. The code word is Pandora and its very appropriate." "Several years ago CIA and NSA received intel that there was a BL4 bio lab somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan just across the border from Afghanistan. They also found that over several years that appropriate equipment for such a lab from Germany, France and Russia had been diverted from legitimate projects and had ended up somewhere in Pakistan." "We've been looking for that lab ever since. We finally found it two weeks ago. As soon as we located the lab, a joint team of SEALs and Delta Force operators were sent in on a covert raid to bag and tag it. What we found was horrifying. Please follow me." As I looked around I saw a few familiar faces: Colonel Will James was a troubleshooter for the Joint Chiefs. SAC Gwen Heller was FBI's Senior Agent in Charge of their counter-terrorism desk. The imminent epidemiologist Dr. Tom Ross of the CDC was looking very troubled. Most of the others I had never seen before but their very bearing screamed military or spook. We entered a room with black boards and display monitors. The scientist continued the briefing: "We found that the lab was working on a number of weaponized pathogens. All of the familiar horrors like Anthrax, Marsburg and Smallpox and one that we've never seen before. It is a chimera virus that we have code named Pandora. It's why we're here and it may be the scariest damn thing I've ever seen in a bioweapon." "Pandora began as a flavivirus called VEE or Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. Through years of manipulation and gene splicing, it has become this." The big monitor in the room came to life and showed an electron microscope image of a spherical virus. The scientist said, "This little horror is a blood borne pathogen that attacks the brain. It causes fever and chills and then the victim falls into a coma. While the victim is in a coma the virus continues to attack the brain and eventually destroys the cerebellum while leaving the lower brain function essentially in tact. At this point about a third of the victims die. The rest wake up from the coma and attack the very first person that they see. They continue attacking everyone in site until they are killed." "When we raided the lab, three of our guys got bitten and succumbed to the infection. This is what they look like now." The scientist pressed a button that caused a panel to retract. Behind thick glass were three people that had once been elite special forces operators that had been transformed by the virus. As soon as the panel retracted and they saw us, they attacked the glass with such violence that the glass was smeared with their black blood. It was clear that anyone that those things got their hands on would be in very serious trouble. The scientist caused the glass to retract and continued: "Bites spread the virus. That's how our three operators got infected. The infection runs its course from 24 to 36 hours. They are vulnerable to tasers and gun fire. They retreat from fire but attack pretty much everything else: people or animals. The virus leave the brain in a continuous state of rage that causes their hostility and the only thing that will stop them are kill shots. You can shoot them to pieces but unless you get their head or their heart they just keep coming." "We brought you here to see it with your own eyes. This is no bullshit. Pandora is real and we know that the terrorist have it. It's only a matter of time before they use it. When they do, we had better be ready because the epidemiology of this thing is terrifying. Once this virus is established and starts spreading by secondary vectors like mosquitoes, there simply aren't enough bullets to stop it."

Pandoria After clearing security and going down two different elevators, I guessed that I was at least 500 meters underground. The corridor had heavy steel blast doors with key card locks and bio-hazard signs every 50 meters. The deeper into the facility that we went, the higher the biohazard protection level of the labs that lined the corridors. I asked the guard what the USAMARID needed from the Dept. of Homeland Security and he told me that answer was well above his pay grade. We finally entered a lab marked BL-5 and I followed the guard inside. We had to strip and leave our clothes in a locker. We passed through a chemical shower and another steel door to a locker room where we put on surgical scrubs. We passed through a final airlock where a computer sat in front of the final door. The guard told me to go log into the computer in the corner of the room. He then excused himself saying that this was as far as he goes. The computer asked me to input my name, rank and agency: McGrath, Scott Special Agent Department of Homeland Security. The computer then asked for me to to state my name, surname first. "McGrath, Scott." The computer screen turned green and displayed: Voice Print ID verified. Agent McGrath clear for access to Pandora. The big steel door popped open and I entered the lab. A group of eleven men were waiting: two scientists and nine other agency representatives. As soon as I entered, the senior scientist said, "Good. Now that Homeland Security has arrived, we can begin." "Gentlemen. Everything that you see here is above top-secret. The code word is Pandora and its very appropriate." "Several years ago CIA and NSA received intel that there was a BL4 bio lab somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan just across the border from Afghanistan. They also found that over several years that appropriate equipment for such a lab from Germany, France and Russia had been diverted from legitimate projects and had ended up somewhere in Pakistan." "We've been looking for that lab ever since. We finally found it two weeks ago. As soon as we located the lab, a joint team of SEALs and Delta Force operators were sent in on a covert raid to bag and tag it. What we found was horrifying. Please follow me." As I looked around I saw a few familiar faces: Colonel Will James was a troubleshooter for the Joint Chiefs. SAC Gwen Heller was FBI's Senior Agent in Charge of the counter-terrorism desk. The imminent epidemiologist Dr. Tom Ross with CDC was looking very troubled. Most of the others I had never seen before but their very bearing screamed military or spook. We entered a room with black boards and display monitors. The scientist continued the briefing: "We found that the lab was working on a number of weaponized pathogens. All of the familiar horrors like Anthrax, Marsburg and Smallpox and one that we've never seen before. It is a chimera virus that we have code named Pandora. It's why we're here and it may be the scariest damn thing I've ever seen in a bioweapon." "Pandora began as a flavivirus called VEE or Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. Through years of manipulation and gene splicing, it has become this." The big monitor in the room came to life and showed an electron microscope image of a spherical virus. The scientist said, "This little horror is a blood borne pathogen that attacks the brain. It causes fever and chills and then the victim falls into a coma. While the victim is in a coma the virus continues to attack the brain and eventually destroys the cerebellum while leaving the lower brain function essentially in tact. At this point about a third of the victims die. The rest wake up from the coma and attack the very first person that they see. They continue attacking everyone in site until they are killed." "When we raided the lab, three of our guys got bitten and succumbed to the infection. This is what they look like now." The scientist pressed a button that caused a panel to retract. Behind thick glass were three people that had once been elite special forces operators that had been transformed by the virus. As soon as the panel retracted and they saw us, they attacked the glass with such violence that the glass was smeared with their black blood. It was clear that anyone that those things got their hands on would be in very serious trouble. The scientist caused the glass to retract and continued: "Bites spread the virus. That's how our three operators got infected. The infection runs its course from 24 to 36 hours. They are vulnerable to tasers and gun fire. They retreat from fire but attack pretty much everything else: people or animals. The virus leave the brain in a continuous state of rage that causes their hostility and the only thing that will stop them are kill shots. You can shoot them to pieces but unless you get their head or their heart they just keep coming." "We brought you here to see it with your own eyes. This is no bullshit. Pandora is real and we know that the terrorist have it. It's only a matter of time before they use it. When they do, we had better be ready because the epidemiology of this thing is terrifying. Once this virus is established and starts spreading by secondary vectors like mosquitoes, there simply aren't enough bullets to stop it."

I think he's past shrugging and is actually giving us the finger.

Not in any particular story- I'd like to be a big menacing jock who gets tired of seeing Comsies characters getting bullied and befriends some of them... and maybe falls for one of them. ______________ Just had a thought- a HUGE new kid from the South who just moved to town starts school. "Y'all can call me Brick."

show up drunk and belligerent. that always works.

Great- another team in the SEC Mississippi State or Ole Miss can't compete with. We play Florida, Auburn, Alabama and LSU every year. If we get a seven win season, we're probably ranked.

and they are joining the SEC

Dwarf planet sized up accurately as it blocks light of faint star http://www.eso.org/p...c/news/eso1142/ 26 October 2011 Astronomers have accurately measured the diameter of the faraway dwarf planet Eris for the first time by catching it as it passed in front of a faint star. This event was seen at the end of 2010 by telescopes in Chile, including the Belgian TRAPPIST telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. The observations show that Eris is an almost perfect twin of Pluto in size. Eris appears to have a very reflective surface, suggesting that it is uniformly covered in a thin layer of ice, probably a frozen atmosphere. The results will be published in the 27 October 2011 issue of the journal Nature. In November 2010, the distant dwarf planet Eris passed in front of a faint background star, an event called an occultation. These occurrences are very rare and difficult to observe as the dwarf planet is very distant and small. The next such event involving Eris will not happen until 2013. Occultations provide the most accurate, and often the only, way to measure the shape and size of a distant Solar System body. The candidate star for the occultation was identified by studying pictures from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. The observations were carefully planned and carried out by a team of astronomers from a number of (mainly French, Belgian, Spanish and Brazilian) universities using — among others — the TRAPPIST [1] (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, eso1023) telescope, also at La Silla. “Observing occultations by the tiny bodies beyond Neptune in the Solar System requires great precision and very careful planning. This is the best way to measure Eris’s size, short of actually going there,” explains Bruno Sicardy, the lead author. Observations of the occultation were attempted from 26 locations around the globe on the predicted path of the dwarf planet’s shadow — including several telescopes at amateur observatories, but only two sites were able to observe the event directly, both of them located in Chile. One was at ESO’s La Silla Observatory using the TRAPPIST telescope, and the other was located in San Pedro de Atacama and used two telescopes[2]. All three telescopes recorded a sudden drop in brightness as Eris blocked the light of the distant star. The combined observations from the two Chilean sites indicate that Eris is close to spherical. These measurements should accurately measure its shape and size as long as they are not distorted by the presence of large mountains. Such features are, however, unlikely on such a large icy body. Eris was identified as a large object in the outer Solar System in 2005. Its discovery was one of the factors that led to the creation of a new class of objects called dwarf planets and the reclassification of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet in 2006. Eris is currently three times further from the Sun than Pluto. While earlier observations using other methods suggested that Eris was probably about 25% larger than Pluto with an estimated diameter of 3000 kilometres, the new study proves that the two objects are essentially the same size. Eris’s newly determined diameter stands at 2326 kilometres, with an accuracy of 12 kilometres. This makes its size better known than that of its closer counterpart Pluto, which has a diameter estimated to be between 2300 and 2400 kilometres. Pluto’s diameter is harder to measure because the presence of an atmosphere makes its edge impossible to detect directly by occultations. The motion of Eris’s satellite Dysnomia[3] was used to estimate the mass of Eris. It was found to be 27% heavier than Pluto[4]. Combined with its diameter, this provided Eris’s density, estimated at 2.52 grams per cm3 [5]. “This density means that Eris is probably a large rocky body covered in a relatively thin mantle of ice,” comments Emmanuel Jehin, who contributed to the study[6]. The surface of Eris was found to be extremely reflective, reflecting 96% of the light that falls on it (a visible albedo of 0.96[7]). This is even brighter than fresh snow on Earth, making Eris one of the most reflective objects in the Solar System, along with Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The bright surface of Eris is most likely composed of a nitrogen-rich ice mixed with frozen methane — as indicated by the object's spectrum — coating the dwarf planet’s surface in a thin and very reflective icy layer less than one millimetre thick. “This layer of ice could result from the dwarf planet’s nitrogen or methane atmosphere condensing as frost onto its surface as it moves away from the Sun in its elongated orbit and into an increasingly cold environment,” Jehin adds. The ice could then turn back to gas as Eris approaches its closest point to the Sun, at a distance of about 5.7 billion kilometres. The new results also allow the team to make a new measurement for the surface temperature of the dwarf planet. The estimates suggest a temperature for the surface facing the Sun of -238 Celsius at most, and an even lower value for the night side of Eris. “It is extraordinary how much we can find out about a small and distant object such as Eris by watching it pass in front of a faint star, using relatively small telescopes. Five years after the creation of the new class of dwarf planets, we are finally really getting to know one of its founding members,” concludes Bruno Sicardy. Notes [1]TRAPPIST is one of the latest robotic telescopes installed at the La Silla Observatory. With a main mirror just 0.6 metres across, it was inaugurated in June 2010 and is mainly dedicated to the study of exoplanets and comets. The telescope is a project funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), with the participation of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and is controlled from Liè [2]The Caisey Harlingten and ASH2 telescopes. [3]Eris is the Greek goddess of chaos and strife. Dysnomia is Eris’ daughter and the goddess of lawlessness [4]Eris’s mass is 1.66 x 1022 kg, corresponding to 22% of the mass of the Moon. [5]For comparison, the Moon’s density is 3.3 grams per cm3, and water’s is 1.00 gram per cm3. [6]The value of the density suggests that Eris is mainly composed of rock (85%), with a small ice content (15%). The latter is likely to be a layer, about 100 kilometre thick, that surrounds the large rocky core. This very thick layer of mostly water ice is not to be confused with the very thin layer of frozen atmosphere on Eris’s surface that makes it so reflective [7]The albedo of an object represents the fraction of the light that falls on it that is scattered back into space rather than absorbed. An albedo of 1 corresponds to perfect reflecting white, while 0 is totally absorbing black. For comparison, the Moon’s albedo is only 0.136, similar to that of coal. More information This research was presented in a paper to appear in the 27 October 2011 issue of the journal Nature. ___________________________________ Eris is the largest dwarf planet- larger and more massive than even Pluto. These objects at the extreme edge of our solar system form a class called Kuiper Belt or Trans-Neptunian Objects. Pluto, Eris and the Dwarf Planets Mike Brown, CalTech

Bacteria, however alien they might be, would indeed be a natural process. They might find us delicious. If they can survive the environment of Mercury, we would find them completely unstoppable. It would make the Black Death look like a sewing circle.

That's one definition. There are several actually. From the Urban Dictionary: Troll- One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument It is also a verb: example: I'm going to troll the republicans and the democrats at the same time on Digg. (this is good for hours of fun- they get so confused when you flame Bush and Obama at the same time) Not every troll is an asshole. The best trolls aren't there simply to stir the pot (although many are). The best trolls are there to expand your consciousness and make you see many sides of an issue. For instance: it's real easy to get drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian thing and think that everything is the fault of one side or another. A proper troll will spank you hard for thinking like that.

hockey is a sport? I just thought it was drunk Canadians fighting with sticks. *runs away*

I think its much more likely that a natural process is at work here. Aliens would probably be much more interested in earth and its many trailer parks.

South Eastern Conference Win by default

It's Don Quixote. He was considered a little crazy but he had no men to get killed.

I am a very special type of troll. Not like any of the ones listed. I like to attack what is considered "the conventional wisdom". When the conventional wisdom says that Obama is the best thing since sliced bread or Bush has horns and a forked tail, I attack! The truth is always somewhere in the middle and to we get entirely to comfortable with corporations reading corporate press releases telling us that other corporations are evil. Once upon a time the conventional wisdom said that left handed people were the devil's own and that homosexuals needed lobotomies. THINK for yourself. CHALLENGE convention. FIND the truth.