Wapsi Square Forum

Dave wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:NO permanent psychological trauma! Glytch has had enough of that. No need to go and deep-fry some poor kid's brain too.

Good. That rules out inventing any more of those damned animatronic purple dinosaurs, then.

The Internet hasn't forgiven him for the first one.

Glytchie had zero to do with that. He categorically destroys them on site, and now that he's got VORP admin status, all he has to do is show Phix five seconds before she says "KILL HIM!"

AN: Another cooperative effort - thanks for the dialogue, GLytch...

With that, the party separated, each to his own task.

Glytch, knowing Building 2 altogether too well, headed for Ari and the supply depot.

“Ari, hi! I need your help.”

“Sure, Mr. Glytch. What can I do for you?”

"I've told you before, I'm too much of a scoundrel to be a Mister." Glytch smirked from under his hood as Ari rolled her eyes. "I need to hit the front-shop supply area. Doing a rush job for the Centurion and the Sphinx…you OK?”

Ari shook off the effect of the old conditioning with an effort of will. “Boy, that gets annoying after a while. What do you need?”

“One of the two-channel stepper controllers, a couple of motors with leadscrews, and a small industrial controller – whatever’s lying around.”

“No problem. If you’re not doing a production run we’ve likely got stuff that got used in prototypes and then recycled – that OK with you? This way parts cost is nil for whatever you’re doing.”

“Works for me – let’s go get!”

With that, the pair left Ari’s office, and parts in hand Glytch settled himself at Al’s electronics lab bench. Humming happily, the harnessing was assembled with stock connectors, and soon the baseline system was humming along spinning motors.

“Now for the easy part...programming.” Quietly despairing at Al’s taste in computers in the front shop, he bent to writing the programming for the controller.

In the sheet-metal shop Greg was busy on his section.

After a few preliminary sketches he began. With the skill of a craftsman and the eye of an artist a simple azimuth/elevation mount was crafted and mounted on a frame with three stubby legs.

Into the frame was mounted a small high-pressure air tank with filling valves, and mounts for the electronics and the orienting motors, after a quick text to Glytch for the frame size of the steppers and the leadscrew threads.

Sprayed in a coat of shiny red paint, this was set into a paint oven to quickly bake dry as he started on the thrower.

Crafted in 440 stainless, a feed tube, Maltese-cross-like feed mechanism and throwing arm were built onto a frame, each designed to be removable for cleaning. These were carefully assembled onto a frame with valving and the snail-like shape of a rotary actuator, with piping to attach to the pressure tank in the lower frame. The relevant parts were attached with pushrods for timing of movements, and the whole moved through its range of motion, and tested with wooden pucks bandsawed from a large dowel.

Pulling the now-cool frame out of the oven, Greg patiently began to mate the two assemblies.

Al had left the hard task for himself – the manufacture of the “birds” for the meat-slinger.

On a sudden thought, Al stopped and called Painted Turtle chocolates in Osseo.

“Hello, folks. Got a custom order for you. Three dozen chocolate disks – half-inch thick, two inches in diameter – chocolate and rice crisps, foil-wrapped.”

The phone muttered back at him.

“When? I need them in a few hours – they need to be plain – no fancy finish, just a nice tidy wrap with a bit of adhesive to hold it shut. Deliver them to AHI building 2, down in Minnetonka. No, you do NOT want to know what they’re for….”

The phone muttered again – longer this time.

“Yes, just put them on RE’s account. Yes, I have an account…Great! Look forward to seeing you. Toss in a two-pounder of Daisy’s usual while you’re at it….thanks!”

After a trip to AHI’s central commissary for five pounds of ground chuck he returned. The commissary grade beef would be fine to work up the manufacturing process, but they’d get some proper fresh made chopped steak for the ones Dixie was going to eat. Or maybe some cube steak - rolled and sliced? Might hold together better.

Shaking off the culinary concerns - after all he wasn't eating it, not that he was above a good steak tartare - Al set to work.

Creating a mould from plastic tubing after double-checking with Greg on the chute size was a triviality, and mounting it horizontally with a piston, measuring device and a stainless-steel slicing wire little more work. But how to freeze them?

Liquid nitrogen! Scuttling toward the back shop with a Dewar flask in hand, he soon returned. Filling an insulated shallow pan with the LN2 the sliced meat pucks were dropped into the LN2, and within minutes were frozen hard and transferred to a -20 C. cold box for the rise to chewable freezer temperatures.

The LN2 was going to be a godssend in more ways than one - it would freeze the pucks quickly, and there'd be almost no large ice crystal formation because of the speed of the freezing. Dixie was going to have a taste treat in hand - and they wouldn't be gritty like freezer-burned ice cream. When the time came that this was going to get handed over they'd have to talk to a meat packer and get these made in some sort of quantity - Al didn't really want to be Dixie's private chef for her snacks.

“I never should have watched “MacGyver” on those American deployments….”

Grabbing a chunk of rectangular ducting, his first task while the pucks froze was to cobble a quick “wind tunnel” to see what the meat pucks would do in flight. After a quick consultation with the muses of the Internet for the average speed of a skeet target (45 MPH in old money, he found out) he found out that the discs showed no tendency to do anything but fly straight if slung with a spin.

“Bravo, we have a controller, a thrower, and ammunition. Now, we need a test pilot.”

DinkyInky wrote:Glytchie had zero to do with that. He categorically destroys them on site, and now that he's got VORP admin status, all he has to do is show Phix five seconds before she says "KILL HIM!"

Not entirely convinced. I suspect there's a reason Glytch is so negative on the whole concept of time travel: a guilty conscience. (After all, we know that time travel of a sort is definitely possible in the Wapsiverse, via dimension hopping... the Calendar Machine and Time Forest interaction showed that... it's canon. Glytch's desire to suppress it isn't likely to work out well and perhaps is not entirely rational. So, there may be another reason for his aversion.)

Barney was first seen in April 1992, which would have been before Glytch was old enough to develop anything... but easily accessible from the past-2010 era if you have a time portal.

It wouldn't be the first time in history that a spark's little project broke out of the lab... not even the first time that one of a spark's inventions used another invention in the lab to escape.

My guess is that the Peekskill meteor later that year was a nice try to undo the damage, but the incursion time was off by a few hours and the Earth hadn't yet rotated into the right position for the meteor to hit the target. Dropping a flaming rock from space onto a dinosaur would have been a solution with a nice poetic touch... quite elegant, really.

It's just cosmic irony that it hit a Chevy Malibu, rather than a TV studio in Malibu.

AN: Guess who? Thanks to Al for clean-up.

The phone rang in the Gilchrist-Alexander household.

Atsali was as usual, studying, cute freckled nose stuck in some impossibly difficult tome, when her Mother's firm steady tread enter her room.
She never got defensive when her Mother did it unlike when Pickle did, because she never came in without reason. Putting her book down, she spun around in her chair with a smile, ready to give her her complete attention.

"Hi Mom. Whatcha need?"

"That was Grandpa Al. He wanted to know if you'd help him with a flight project, which needs wings. If not, he's going to ask Ari, but he’s offering it to you first. He promises it won't take time from studies, and you can invite Nadette, as he'll give you some date night money afterward. He also said there’s chocolate from Painted Turtle involved, and what you catch, you keep!”

The mention of gourmet chocolate generated an immediate SQUEE! – Grandpa sure knew the good stuff – Grandma Daisy had trained him well.
Her interest piqued, she told her Mom to accept and she'd meet him in the back 40 when he called, and she called Nadette with the sweet news.

It seems likely that an ursamorph might be interested in the meat pucks too . . .

--FreeFlier

Dave wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:Glytchie had zero to do with that. He categorically destroys them on site, and now that he's got VORP admin status, all he has to do is show Phix five seconds before she says "KILL HIM!"

Not entirely convinced. I suspect there's a reason Glytch is so negative on the whole concept of time travel: a guilty conscience. (After all, we know that time travel of a sort is definitely possible in the Wapsiverse, via dimension hopping... the Calendar Machine and Time Forest interaction showed that... it's canon. Glytch's desire to suppress it isn't likely to work out well and perhaps is not entirely rational. So, there may be another reason for his aversion.)

Barney was first seen in April 1992, which would have been before Glytch was old enough to develop anything... but easily accessible from the past-2010 era if you have a time portal.

It wouldn't be the first time in history that a spark's little project broke out of the lab... not even the first time that one of a spark's inventions used another invention in the lab to escape.

My guess is that the Peekskill meteor later that year was a nice try to undo the damage, but the incursion time was off by a few hours and the Earth hadn't yet rotated into the right position for the meteor to hit the target. Dropping a flaming rock from space onto a dinosaur would have been a solution with a nice poetic touch... quite elegant, really.

It's just cosmic irony that it hit a Chevy Malibu, rather than a TV studio in Malibu.

Nah. The reason Glytch is so afraid of time travel is because he knows enough about the workings of the universe to realize it is far too complex to predict the extended outcomes of even the smallest, most insignificant trip back in time.

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Glytch knows quite a bit.

GlytchMeister wrote:Nah. The reason Glytch is so afraid of time travel is because he knows enough about the workings of the universe to realize it is far too complex to predict the extended outcomes of even the smallest, most insignificant trip back in time.

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Glytch knows quite a bit.

Ah, indeed. Alas... a wonderful hypothesis, brought low by an inconvenient fact. Oh, well.

The real-time universe isn't much, if any less complex or more predictable, though. You never can tell what's going to be the result of that butterfly stamping its feet or the cat flapping its wings... as I suspect the current storyline will make clear

---
(Another singular effort from your Executive Producer... You KNEW "they" would show up again...)

The Schweis family was in a bit of a bind.

The economy had been difficult to navigate over the last few years, but their business – wholesale meat processing, direct to the consumer – had weathered the storm. The problem was that their employees were difficult to retain for long.

Sure, the immediate family had been able to slaughter cattle for bulk meat purchase by individuals for decades to that point. But, as family patriarch James Schweis considered his books, he couldn't just rely on his two sons to keep up with orders. And every time to that point he'd had trouble after trouble with anyone he had hired.

They'd either ended up as scoundrels who stole meat from the plant, or slackers who couldn't – or wouldn't – do the work. The latest round of job advertising had yielded very few applicants, none of which appeared capable enough on first blush. Nor on second blush, after interviewing a handful and finding them wanting.

He sighed as he went over the final two applications. He noticed right away that they came from the same P.O. Box in Minneapolis, the same contact phone number, and both shared a strange last name: Wardoff.

Reluctantly, he dialed the number, leaving a message to call back about an interview.

Ho boy!

lake_wrangler wrote:Oh boy!

*whistles innocently*

DinkyInky wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:Oh boy!

*whistles innocently*

Apart from the fact that I wrote Ho boy, and not oH boy (but then, you'd probably say you "fixed" it for me...), I have to ask: was Quantum Leap on Netflix, before? I know I watched the whole series, some time in the last few years, but I can't remember where I had found it (and it's not there now)...

Incidentally, I find it rather annoying to add something to my Netflix list, not have time to get back to it for a lengthy period of time, and find out it's missing, once I finally want to watch it... Or when I want to watch it again...

jwhouk wrote:---
(Another singular effort from your Executive Producer... You KNEW "they" would show up again...)

The Schweis family was in a bit of a bind.

The economy had been difficult to navigate over the last few years, but their business – wholesale meat processing, direct to the consumer – had weathered the storm. The problem was that their employees were difficult to retain for long.

Sure, the immediate family had been able to slaughter cattle for bulk meat purchase by individuals for decades to that point. But, as family patriarch James Schweis considered his books, he couldn't just rely on his two sons to keep up with orders. And every time to that point he'd had trouble after trouble with anyone he had hired.

They'd either ended up as scoundrels who stole meat from the plant, or slackers who couldn't – or wouldn't – do the work. The latest round of job advertising had yielded very few applicants, none of which appeared capable enough on first blush. Nor on second blush, after interviewing a handful and finding them wanting.

He sighed as he went over the final two applications. He noticed right away that they came from the same P.O. Box in Minneapolis, the same contact phone number, and both shared a strange last name: Wardoff.

Reluctantly, he dialed the number, leaving a message to call back about an interview.

Are they Kosher?

lake_wrangler wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:Oh boy!

*whistles innocently*

Apart from the fact that I wrote Ho boy, and not oH boy (but then, you'd probably say you "fixed" it for me...), I have to ask: was Quantum Leap on Netflix, before? I know I watched the whole series, some time in the last few years, but I can't remember where I had found it (and it's not there now)...

Incidentally, I find it rather annoying to add something to my Netflix list, not have time to get back to it for a lengthy period of time, and find out it's missing, once I finally want to watch it... Or when I want to watch it again...

I was feeling silly, and had to share. When I read it, my mind processed it as "Oh, Boy," despite you typing out, "Ho boy".

Netflix has it on and off again. Hulu I believe has it too.

DinkyInky wrote:I was feeling silly, and had to share. When I read it, my mind processed it as "Oh, Boy," despite you typing out, "Ho boy".

Oh, don't worry: I didn't mind in the least. And it was a good link, too.

DinkyInky wrote:Netflix has it on and off again. Hulu I believe has it too.

Unfortunately, I think Hulu is only accessible from the States...
Besides, I don't have enough time in the week to watch streaming TV and videos to be worth subscribing to a second service, even if it was accessible from Canada...

lake_wrangler wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:I was feeling silly, and had to share. When I read it, my mind processed it as "Oh, Boy," despite you typing out, "Ho boy".

Oh, don't worry: I didn't mind in the least. And it was a good link, too.

DinkyInky wrote:Netflix has it on and off again. Hulu I believe has it too.

Unfortunately, I think Hulu is only accessible from the States...
Besides, I don't have enough time in the week to watch streaming TV and videos to be worth subscribing to a second service, even if it was accessible from Canada...

Yeah, even though I budget for entertainment, my son chose Big Fish over Hulu Plus after the trial was over. It wasn't worth it for Castle alone.

Sgt. Howard wrote: (Another singular effort from your Executive Producer jwhouk ... You KNEW "they" would show up again...)
Are they Kosher?

Hellno. That's about as טרייף as a bacon cheeseburger.

Just Old Al wrote:

Sgt. Howard wrote: (Another singular effort from your Executive Producer jwhouk ... You KNEW "they" would show up again...)
Are they Kosher?

Hellno. That's about as טרייף as a bacon cheeseburger.

I'm talking about the Schweiss Family Butcherhouse, not those two meschugna schicksas trying to work there- besides, I don't speak Hebrew- Yiddish, yes

Sgt. Howard wrote:

Just Old Al wrote:
Hellno. That's about as טרייף as a bacon cheeseburger.

I'm talking about the Schweiss Family Butcherhouse, not those two meschugna schicksas trying to work there- besides, I don't speak Hebrew- Yiddish, yes

The word is trayf - pronounced trah-yeff. I found that one out the hard way when trying to find the aforementioned delicacy in Tel Aviv...

As I was informed - that is SO wrong on so many levels....

Just Old Al wrote:

Sgt. Howard wrote:

Just Old Al wrote:
Hellno. That's about as טרייף as a bacon cheeseburger.

I'm talking about the Schweiss Family Butcherhouse, not those two meschugna schicksas trying to work there- besides, I don't speak Hebrew- Yiddish, yes

The word is trayf - pronounced trah-yeff. I found that one out the hard way when trying to find the aforementioned delicacy in Tel Aviv...

As I was informed - that is SO wrong on so many levels....

OMG- Milk with meat... and pork at that!

Sgt. Howard wrote:OMG- Milk with meat... and pork at that!

Eat one on a Friday during Lent, and you can offend against the principles of least four major religions all at once!

Just Old Al wrote:The word is trayf - pronounced trah-yeff. I found that one out the hard way when trying to find the aforementioned delicacy in Tel Aviv...

A very whimsical novel entitled "Sacred Locomotive Flies", written a few decades ago, featured an Israeli hyponuclear submarine named the Traif. I'm not sure how many of the book's readers got the joke...