JamesSavik

My experimental stream-of-consciousnesses project The Company often seems a quixotic quest, but it has been a lot of fun to write.

With five spoiled cats, I know all about mewling.

Reefer ships, short for refrigerated shipping, are designed for taking perishable cargos that require controlled temperatures over oceanic distances. The first reefer ship route was between New Orleans, LA and a port on Matagorda Island, Texas in 1869.

"Darling, you must know at least half our guests will be spies." "Theonia, it's rude to call them spies on this planet. Thracians call them the press." Her Slavic smile always won any arguments, "Sorry Senator Harry. You shouldn't have married a daughter of New Moskava." The couple's twins arrived from the stairs that went up to the residence. Senator Harry Hanson looked up and motioned for them to come down, and they reluctantly approached. Bryan and Ryan, who were at 16 a pair of the youngest of the Gemini Soldiers liberated during the Corporate War, were not thrilled to be here. There were many more interesting things for teens to do during the week-long celebration of the end of the Rim War than a stuffy old press conference. Theonia and Harry were filled with a huge swell of pride in the boys. Harry said, "Thanks for being good sports about this. I know you hate this kind of thing. How is your buddy Jeff?" Bryan said, "It's important, but I hope we can get back to the Ski Lodge soon." "Jeff is pretty nervous. He wants to get back, too," Ryan shrugged, "You would think he had never been on a holovid before." Theonia said, "Some people don't like having their pictures all over the galaxy. Do we know who the interviewer will be?" Harry said, "Jessica Sang, Landing City Times." "Ohhh... an actual serious journalist," Ryan cracked. Bryan smacked his brother and said, "At least our pictures won't end up on the teen boards like last time." Harry's personal assistant chimed and said, "The News conference will be ready in the Mesa Room in fifteen minutes." "Call your friend. We need to start now." The two teens quickly disappeared back up the stairs.

i. We got to bed a little after one. Tuck and Howie retired to Kelly and Jo-Jo’s room, and Stacy joined Gene and Scotty. Patrick and I were dog-tired, so he took the middle between Frank and me. Sleep quickly overcame us. Seeing Jonah and his boys again inspired a dream that took me back to a hunting trip to Arrowhead years ago. I turned thirteen last July and passed the NRA Hunter Safety Course. I was excited to finally be able to join the hunt. Dad drove his truck,

At the time (~1910) the Royal Navy was the largest fleet in the world with a long tradition of winning. The names are meant to inspire. Many of these names were recycled over and over. In 1784, Indefatigable was a 64 gun ship of the line. In 1909, she was a battle cruiser (which was ended badly). In 1944, she was an Implacable-class aircraft carrier. The name appeared three more times in the RN's history on less prestigious hulls. Their fleet was large because the lifeblood of the British Empire was trade. They had hundreds of ships in commission at any point, and had to come up with names for all of them. Some might arguably call them pompous, and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a 4th rate schooner back in the day named HMS Flatulent.

The British built the three Indefatigable class battle cruisers between 1910-13. It was an upgraded design of the previous Invincible class battle cruisers. Indefatigable, Australia and New Zealand all joined the fleet just before the outbreak of World War 1. Battle cruisers were a special class of ship which sacrificed armor protection for speed, but packed an armament similar to heavier and slower battleships. They were supposed to be able to gun down almost anything and be fast enough to run away if they ran into something they couldn't handle. Unfortunately, this theory had a wicked encounter with reality at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Battle cruisers were used for scouting for the German fleet and came under fire of battleship gunnery. Three battle cruisers, Indefatigable, Queen Mary and Invincible, were sunk due to magazine explosions and sank with all or most of their hands. HMS Indefatigable, 1909.

Elvis voice: ESG is Kang, baby!

Sure. They are some, but not nearly as many as WW2 inspired, which many seemed to think was "the good war" where the morality of the conflict was unambiguous.

There's a good reason there are so few stories about World War I. It was such a shitshow, almost anyone who had anything to do with it desperately wanted to forget it. Millions were killed as Europe's armies trenched and retrenched, after heavy losses, their way across the continent as they slaughtered each other with machine guns, artillery and poison gas. Any accurate histories of the conflict may accurately be placed in the horror genre. Having happened a century ago, most of the survivors are gone now, and most historians seem to want to avoid the subject, but the lesson we must learn is clear: humanity must never allow another gigantic atrocity like it to ever happen again. The men are gone but, even after a century, the scars are still on the land. A battlefield in France, c. 2014.

Truck stop hussies, they are.

The vast majority of Neptunium is created in standard Uranium pile fission reactors. Uranium captures enough neutrons to become a unique element. There has been some experimentation on using it in nuclear warheads, but the short half-life of its most useful isotopes makes that impractical. There has been some discussion of using NP in enhanced radiation warheads (EMP), but it has the same practical difficulty. The shelf life on any Neptunium-based warhead would only be, at most, a dozen years before the fissile components would have to be reprocessed.

Sounds expensive.

It's safer to throw me sausage and biscuits and run away.

More like be careful, it's a bear fresh out of hibernation.

I can be fairly phlegmatic before eight in the morning, but by then I'm awake.

Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements due to the configuration of its electron shell. It makes connections easily and rapidly with ionic or covalent bonds. In fact, you might call any fire rapid oxidation. It is known as a promiscuous element for its wild and crazy ways of hooking up with damn near anything. Who says chemistry can't be sexy?

The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded with an estimated yield of 200 kilotons and did a considerable amount of damage and injuries on the ground. The kind of damage a much larger one might do could be literally civilization ending. This incident inspired NASA, the ESA and the Russians to keep a closer watch on the skies.

No. Meteoroids are much too small for that kind of destruction. An asteroid could do it, but they are exponentially bigger in scale. While a meteoroid may be big as a tractor-trailer rig, asteroids start out the size of a small city and go up. There has been some debate on whether to call the bigger ones asteroids or dwarf planets. The largest ones we know about have diameters of hundreds of kilometers.

Meteoroid has a specific scientific meaning. They can be rocks the size of a bus, down to tiny pebbles, or even ice chunks wandering through space under the influence of gravity. There is a constellation of unknown thousands of them in somewhat stable orbits around earth until they are disturbed by gravitational influences like our moon. They only become meteors when they dive into our atmosphere and burn up. Only a rare few, based on their composition or size, make it all the way to the ground. Untold thousands of tons make it down in the form of dust motes.

Did someone call?