Wapsi Square Forum

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 3:33 am**

Yep. Thats how it works, all right.

I had four years in Uncle Sammy's Canoe Club, WayBackWhen - '67 to '71. It's amazing some of the things...

A few years back - well, twenty? - my brother {the writer one} and i were both at Chattacon, a January SF convention in Chattanooga, and Dave invited me to dinner with and some locals he knew. When we all got to the AYCE seafood buffet, and Dave introduced us, he mentioned that his friend was a retired Chief - boatswain, maybe - and that i was a Navy survivor, too.

As soon as we heard that, i began very obviously looking at his hands, he grinned, held up his left hand with the index finger bent and we both laughed.

His wife and Dave were suitably bewildered, and so we explained that i was looking for his coffee hook, which as all true Navy men know, is part of the Practical Factors for promotion to Chief...

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 10:08 pm**

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 10:43 pm**

Huh. Deja vu - i could swear i've seen that somewhere else...

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:03 pm**

I dunno about the tattoo, but that shot of the side of a head seems familiar. I know that seems odd, but I'm tellin ya, that girls' side of the head is really familiar...

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:21 pm**

On Feb 26, Huffington Post UK wrote:An Imgur user has devised an ingenious way to tell other people she is deaf in one ear.

The woman, known only by her username "raingoose", shared an image of her tattoo on that site on Thursday.

The tattoo, which is behind her left ear, clearly shows the image of a speaker with a cross against it.

"Since I'm deaf on one ear I thought this was a friendly [way] to tell the world not talking to me from the left [sic]," she captioned the photo.

The image has had more than one million views in less than 24 hours, with other deaf people commenting to say they may copy the tattoo design for themselves.

I don't know how much social media you consume. my friend, but this may have been the exposure.

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:33 pm**

AmriloJim wrote:
On Feb 26, Huffington Post UK wrote:An Imgur user has devised an ingenious way to tell other people she is deaf in one ear.

The woman, known only by her username "raingoose", shared an image of her tattoo on that site on Thursday.

The tattoo, which is behind her left ear, clearly shows the image of a speaker with a cross against it.

"Since I'm deaf on one ear I thought this was a friendly [way] to tell the world not talking to me from the left [sic]," she captioned the photo.

The image has had more than one million views in less than 24 hours, with other deaf people commenting to say they may copy the tattoo design for themselves.
I don't know how much social media you consume. my friend, but this may have been the exposure.

No, actually, i just saw it over at the Misfile forum, where someone called shadowinthelight posted it

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:36 pm**

AmriloJim wrote: I don't know how much social media you consume. my friend Glytch, but this may have been the exposure.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:09 am**

AmriloJim wrote:
AmriloJim wrote: I don't know how much social media you consume. my friend Glytch, but this may have been the exposure.

I was tho one who called deja vu, so i thought i should explain my joke.

You were convenient.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:38 am**

My brother said something about NASA having a big announcement coming up in late March (at least, I think he said later this month), but all I found was some videos about that rock that "narrowly" missed us on the 8th. Narrowly in astronomical terms, but it was over a million miles away. Those videos said in their titles it was gonna hit Puerto Rico on the 5th, but I didn't hear it stated in the video at all. And they kept talking about this being the end times, blah blah blah.

But I digress. Can anyone clarify if NASA is supposed to make some big announcement this year? The way my brother worded it, it sounded like it was announced that there would be an announcement, which sounds like a waste of announcing, in my opinion.

Well... Maybe (if they really do have something important to say) then getting word out that there will be a big announcement (tired of that word already...) might be a means of getting people to get ready to pay attention.

But if they reveal that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth... I'm gonna ask one if they're legal, and if they have a green card.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:01 am**

Alkarii wrote:My brother said something about NASA having a big announcement coming up in late March (at least, I think he said later this month), but all I found was some videos about that rock that "narrowly" missed us on the 8th. Narrowly in astronomical terms, but it was over a million miles away. Those videos said in their titles it was gonna hit Puerto Rico on the 5th, but I didn't hear it stated in the video at all. And they kept talking about this being the end times, blah blah blah.

But I digress. Can anyone clarify if NASA is supposed to make some big announcement this year? The way my brother worded it, it sounded like it was announced that there would be an announcement, which sounds like a waste of announcing, in my opinion.

Well... Maybe (if they really do have something important to say) then getting word out that there will be a big announcement (tired of that word already...) might be a means of getting people to get ready to pay attention.

But if they reveal that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth... I'm gonna ask one if they're legal, and if they have a green card.

They've already been given welfare paperwork, free medical care certificates, social security numbers, driver's licenses, food stamps, section 8 housing and an application for schooling for their children in their native language-
and registration with the DNP.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:09 am**

Alkarii wrote:But if they reveal that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth... I'm gonna ask one if they're legal, and if they have a green card.

There was a book by Phil Foglio titled 'Illegal Aliens' on that topic. Basically space pirates are the 'first contact' with humans. They have this shtick they do that generally scares the whey out of lesser developed species. When they met humans, however... they found out they bit off more than they could chew.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:59 am**

AmriloJim wrote: I don't know how much social media you consume. my friend Glytch, but this may have been the exposure.

Not much. I tend to avoid Facebook, Twitter, etc.

This forum is about as close to social media as I get.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:21 am**

Alkarii wrote:But I digress. Can anyone clarify if NASA is supposed to make some big announcement this year? The way my brother worded it, it sounded like it was announced that there would be an announcement, which sounds like a waste of announcing, in my opinion.

I haven't heard of anything specific, and I don't see anything major on their calendar for the rest of this year.

As to "announcing that they're going to have an announcement"... it could be something of the following sort. NASA often undertakes projects to decide what they will do next... e.g. which sorts of research satellites or probes they are going to launch. Often there is a fairly long "accept proposals, research, and then decide" cycle, which ends on a specific date, at which point they announce the winning proposals. Your brother might have heard about one such decision-making cycle, which might be scheduled to publicize its results sometime this month.

As to asteroids and the End Times, there have been hoaxes and mistaken visions and misfired prophesies predicting astronomical disasters of one sort or another for decades or longer. Quite a few of them claim that "NASA has confirmed that..." a particular Bad Thing is certain to occur... but somehow nobody can point to an actual, nonfaked NASA press release or research report that backs this up.

Asteroid strikes are quite real... on average there is a Tunguska-sized hit (equivalent to a few megatons of TNT) every century or so... "city wrecker" explosions. Civilization-ending megablasts would require a much larger asteroid, are much rarer of course, and I believe the Skywatch program has pretty much ruled out the possibility of any such strike in the next few centuries. A big infalling comet hitting Earth is also a possibility, but those are also quite rare.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:44 pm**

I remember they announced they were going to have an announcement a while ago, and it was that they found liquid water on Mars.

Which, by the way, I went out and bought a bottle of sparkling grape juice to celebrate.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:34 pm**

Ah.

I'd watched a video, I think it was called the Book of Alien Species or something like that.

Before I go any father, I want to be on the record saying that the video itself looked okay, but the narration was done with a computer, not a person, which, for some reason... Makes it seem less credible. Well, more than usual.

Anyway, it starts out saying that someone in the KGB or something (it's been a while, and I only really remember that they weren't American) had been given information that they compiled into a book. The information was given to them by an alien, and the book describes around 80 different species that either live on this planet or have visited before. A good sized portion of them look really close to human, and several species look the same as others. There's, like, several referred to as Grays.

Anyhow, a few species are supposed to make official first contact soon, the first would be sometime this year. Apparently the next six years we'll have a few openly contact us.

The real reason I don't want to believe it is gonna happen is because every "prediction" I'd heard that had a specific time never happened.

Like, say... The whole Y2K thing, and the 2012 thing, and then there was the meteor that passed us at around 1.3 million miles away just two days ago. The first I heard of that was in a video where the title said that same meteor was going to hit Puerto Rico on the fifth, which happened to be the day I found that video.

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 5:44 pm**

I hope first contact doesn't happen until humanity is a lot more mature.

What happened when the conquistadores came to Central America? Yeah, same thing could happen to us. We get robbed of our natural resources, raped (optional, depends on how deviant they are) , enslaved, and slaughtered wholesale. Or we get infected with some crazy space-goo.

Our best tech can barely get a human to Mars. Whatever aliens come to talk to us, they will have tech indistinguishable from magic.

Oh, and by the way: have a look at this... food for thought

Kinda makes you want to go chop down some radio towers, don't it?

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 6:09 pm**

Alkarii wrote:Ah.

I'd watched a video, I think it was called the Book of Alien Species or something like that.

Before I go any father, I want to be on the record saying that the video itself looked okay, but the narration was done with a computer, not a person, which, for some reason... Makes it seem less credible. Well, more than usual.

Anyway, it starts out saying that someone in the KGB or something (it's been a while, and I only really remember that they weren't American) had been given information that they compiled into a book. The information was given to them by an alien, and the book describes around 80 different species that either live on this planet or have visited before. A good sized portion of them look really close to human, and several species look the same as others. There's, like, several referred to as Grays.

Anyhow, a few species are supposed to make official first contact soon, the first would be sometime this year. Apparently the next six years we'll have a few openly contact us.

What you saw, has a bunch of material that's very good exercise for critical thinking.

The "got it from an alien" and "got it via the KGB" (or "the CIA" or etc.) is the sort of thing that's impressive to claim, but almost certainly neither provable nor refutable. It's an appeal to an invisible, unquestionable authority. I don't see it as much different as "I had a revelation directly from God", as one often hears from preachers who are warning of the upcoming Apocalypse.

The "A good sized portion of them look really close to human" is also rather suspicious. There's good evidence that humanity evolved here on Earth, through a chain of primate and vertebrate ancestors... you can trace our anatomy all the way back to the first bony fishes, and our molecular biology a lot further than that. There are a lot of things about our anatomy which are almost certainly "coincidental" - that is, there are plenty of other physical patterns which would work just as well (in an engineering and survival sense).

So, there's no strong reason to expect that aliens would evolve in a way which would result in a "really close to human" appearance. Some, sure, by chance, out of many many different possible sentient and sapient species... but it would seem unlikely that a high percentage of them could pass for human.

The real reason I don't want to believe it is gonna happen is because every "prediction" I'd heard that had a specific time never happened.

Like, say... The whole Y2K thing, and the 2012 thing, and then there was the meteor that passed us at around 1.3 million miles away just two days ago. The first I heard of that was in a video where the title said that same meteor was going to hit Puerto Rico on the fifth, which happened to be the day I found that video.

Yup. A lot of these predictions come along with claims like "NASA knows but is covering it up". The fact that NASA and other research groups deny that any such disaster is imminent is often taken as "proof" that they're "covering up the truth" and are thus acting as tools for the Evil Masters (whoever they are).

When the predicted disaster doesn't happen, the people who so loudly predicted it often either go silent entirely, or revise their predictions (having "mis-read" the signs) with new dates. Sometimes they move onto a new prediction of upcoming disaster, and just stop talking about their earlier (failed) prediction... sometimes they "rewrite history" by erasing or altering the Internet-posted web pages they'd put up earlier.

Put Harold Camping's predictions about the apocalypse (originally May 21, 2011; when that didn't happen, he "corrected" his prediction to October 21, 2011; when that didn't happen he retired, and the next year said that he'd been wrong to make a prediction at all) in the same category. There have been similar "end times" predictions by numerous other religious leaders and prophets.

Heaven's Gate is another (quite sad) case, along the same lines. Aum Shinrikyo, even sadder.

GlytchMeister wrote:Oh, and by the way: have a look at this... food for thought

Kinda makes you want to go chop down some radio towers, don't it?

Not to worry. They know we're here, but it won't be a problem.

Posted: **Fri Mar 11, 2016 7:21 am**

AnotherFairportfan wrote:His wife and Dave were suitably bewildered, and so we explained that i was looking for his coffee hook, which as all true Navy men know, is part of the Practical Factors for promotion to Chief...

that and getting the coffee mug-holding arm on all their uniform sleeves tailored extra wide.... so they don't have to LET GO of the mug...

Posted: **Fri Mar 11, 2016 4:37 pm**

What kind of weakling needs coffee? Back in my day, we drank old motor oil... 'cuz we were men!

Anyway, the story according to that same video series (take this with an entire shaker of salt), some group from the Andromeda galaxy wants us to be left alone to develop on our own (how convenient...). As for so many species looking human, the claim was that evolution on earth was guided. Though, making a species evolve to look like your own is just friggin' lazy. I'd go with making them a bit more interesting than we are.

Also, the videos do say that some have been in secret contact with the governments of various countries, and have some sort of deal worked out where they give tech for permission to abduct people, or something like that.

Also, on a separate note, though still with the aliens and UFO thing:

I was watching one of those shows about UFO sightings, some of which were pretty cool, and one of the people on it claimed that the UFOs are trying to get our attention.

If they really want our attention, why don't they, oh, I don't know... Land on the White House lawn whenever the president is making an outdoor speech? Or, you know, land in a public space? They probably don't have to worry about getting shot, as they'd have some kind of exotic body armor.

Although... Docking with the ISS would get some attention.

Posted: **Fri Mar 11, 2016 6:53 pm**

Surely, if they're in our neighborhood, they've figured out how to view DirecTV or Dish... a screening of ID4 would make docking with the ISS a relatively safe first contact method.

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