cats – Page 3 – The Unwanted Blog

Over the years there have been suggestions of using “lithobraking” as a means of reducing the cost of transporting payloads to the lunar surface. As the name suggests, the idea is to use the lunar surface itself – the lithosphere – to slow the craft. Meteoroids do this all the time, of course, though in their case it’s pretty destructive. But for those rare serious suggestion of using lithobraking, the idea would be to lay out a miles-long “track” of smooth lunar dust; the spacecraft would come in at a *very* shallow angle and touch down at extreme – essentially orbital – velocity, and use skids to brake using friction. The precision required, and lunar infrastructure required, would be pretty substantial. One early suggestion of what a lithobraking spacecraft might look like is this (from HERE):

It might be workable. But it’s not something I’ve seen demonstrated too often, either practically or in animated form. Well, until now. At last, we have a good video representation of what lithobraking might look like in actual practice:

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A post shared by Scottish Fold & British Shorthair (@queensscottishfold)

My late cat Raedthinn also knew how to open doors. He figured it out when I briefly lived in an apartment with door *handles*; he watched me use them, figured out what was going on and would reach up and pull the handle down to open the door. When we got back to door *knobs* he knew how they worked, but he could rarely get enough leverage on them to open doors. But “rarely” isn’t the same as “never.”

If your cat is opening doors when you don’t want him or her to do so, don’t get mad at the cat. Cat’s doing what a cat’s *supposed* to do. Be mad at yourself for being outsmarted by a critter with a brain the size of a walnut.

… I’ll watch Chunk the Groundhog every time.

Better scripting, better dialog, more involving storylines, more appealing characters. And, I fully expect, far less risk of plague.

Bonus: Corn Cat.

But wait! There’s more!

… this one was kinda weird.

Anyway, today I took a nap which ended with an attempted nightmare. I say “attempted” because it had the trappings of a nightmare, but I kinda watched it happen second-hand. I’m not one for true lucid dreaming, but I often have dreams where I’m more observer than main character. I don’t seem to be able to control the dream as those who lucid dream can, but I can hit the “eject” button from time to time. This makes a lot of what should be “nightmares” into “horror movies.”

As the dream began, I understood the world I was in. A “zombie apocalypse” had occurred, but was apparently largely over. Things were trashed, but it wasn’t The End for mankind, though apparently there were a lot less of us. I – or at least the main character of the dream – was alone in something like a old folks home, retirement center, combo apartments/hospital, something like that. It was long abandoned, power off, but the hallway was fairly well lit via sunlight coming in the windows of the rooms off the hallway. The place was filled with cats… normal, non-zombie felines who didn’t seem to pay me much mind one way or the other. I had a sawed-off shotgun and a flashlight and was going room to room looking for something (don’t know what, though I seemed determined to find it). The place was dank, a bit damaged, but silent except for some muted meowing from the cats.

One door was closed. As I went to it, the cats began to gather around, silently. They didn’t hiss or growl, but they had that determined look that cats get when they are twitchy. The door opened without protest; the room beyond was near pitch black. Went inside, shotgun in right hand, flashlight in left, and began to sweep the room. The cats gathered out in the hall and watched me but did nothing else. Standard depressing nursing home room… bed, dressers, knick-knacks. Seemed empty… until someone started speaking from a dark corner. Quickly turned to find an old lady sitting in a chair in a pitch black corner, calmly talking to me. Difficulty: she was a zombie, and in a pretty bad way. I understood that in this world, zombies don’t think, much less talk. But this one was calmly chatting away. I don’t remember a single word she said, but what stuck with me was that she Knew Things. She knew who I was, though the old lady was nobody I’d ever met. And she knew things about the world. Why things had happened, and what the future held, and what the larger motives were. She didn’t move, didn’t threaten, but she was malevolent. And the mind chatting away was not the old ladies, but something else. Something I recognized to be vast.

It was at that point that “movie goer me” decided to hit the “eject” button. I recall that as I woke up I actually said “haha, no.”

I suspect a good author could make something of this story. I’d like to figure out how to incorporate it into “War With The Deep Ones,” though there are no zombies in that. The obvious approach would be to have a Deep One get caught and say such things, but that would lose much of the impact: a monster telling you horrible things might be bad, but a little old *dead* lady telling you the same things is a door straight to “nope.”

Anyway, enough about babbling zombies. Back to Joe Biden and Vlad Putin.

Since there’s absolutely nothing of note going on in the world these days, here’s a cat meme.

It’s simple, really.

How to fold a fitted sheet.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/WdMN8kcSxi

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 22, 2022

As it turns out, Speedbump will willingly live down to the basest of cat cliches… he’ll sit in even a two-dimensional box.

While cleaning out my internet computer, the hard drive of which was just about full, I found a folder full of videos that I’d intended to send to YouTube and then promptly forgot about. So, here are two. Two which might kinda ruin the mood… they feature the late lamented Fingers and Raedthinn, both taken far too soon by crappy feline biology.