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Christmas Poop & Magic Mushrooms

December 19, 2016 by Bill McCormick

Our holiday helpers are cooler than yours.
Our holiday helpers are cooler than yours.
Back on Christmas Eve, 2012, I tossed up this festive article about holiday traditions. A couple of things happened today to make me dig it out of mothballs and toss it back to the forefront of your mind. First, and by far foremost to me, Slashing Through the Snow: a Christmas Horror Anthology is out in time for the holidays and has the good fortune to count me among its authors. Second, probably more salient to you, is the fact that Edith Carlin, of the Aurora Carlins, asked me to. Since she and all the others who listen to me ramble every Friday on The Big Wake Up Call are why I get to keep doing that, making a listener happy is kind of part of my job. Also, Edith promised to split the dollar she was about to win when I posted this. In our modern economy you just don’t turn down big money like that without cause. And I couldn’t come up with any. So here you go, a fun look back at how we got to where we’re at with this season.

Well, at least one interpretation of same anyway.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Merry Christmas everyone. It’s time, once again, for us to take a look at the glorious traditions that surround this odd holiday. We have already discussed the Krampus, that lovely little fellow who either casts your children into hell or eats them, depending on what part of Austria you hang out in. But, we neglected his female cousin Perchta: The Belly Slitter. Because nothing says HAPPY HOLIDAYS like eviscerated children. Have I mentioned that Austria was the home for the beginning of two world wars? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did. When people tell you that they think the Japanese are insane for making Colonel Sanders the symbol of Christmas, feel free to point out Austria. At least in Japan they use the holiday to get laid. That’s an acceptable use of any holiday as far as I’m concerned. In fact I think it should be the point of almost every holiday, but that may just be me.

Another holiday tradition I seem to have missed happens in Spain, the home of great Christian traditions such as the footprint of Jesus, the tour of Mary Magdalene and her servant Veronica and, of course, the Caganer. The caganer represents a lovely tradition of displaying the Nativity scene, the usual array of farm animals, the Star of Bethlehem and a random peasant taking a dump. Yes, you read that right. And it’s not just implied. All statues come with a steaming pile so you can make no mistake as to what the caganer is doing. Granted, seen from a strictly logical viewpoint it makes sense. Someone had to be taking a dump when Christ was born. We all have bowels and those bowels need to move from time to time.

Still, it seems a touch odd, even by Spanish standards.

But all of the above pales when compared to the article my friend Suzy Solar sent to me. According to Live Science, we may owe a big debt of holiday gratitude to magic mushrooms.

This Christmas, like many before it and many yet to come, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer will be told, including how the “jolly old elf” flies on his sleigh throughout the entire world in one night, giving gifts to all the good children.

But according to one theory, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or “magic” mushrooms.

“Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world,” said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.

According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals’ teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinatory mushrooms as presents in late December, Rush said.

“As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry them, and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice,” Rush told LiveScience. “Because snow is usually blocking doors, there was an opening in the roof through which people entered and exited, thus the chimney story.”

But that’s just the beginning of the symbolic connections between the Amanita muscaria mushroom and the iconography of Christmas, according to several historians and ethnomycologists, or people who study the influence fungi has had on human societies. Of course, not all scientists agree that the Santa story is tied to a hallucinogen.

Presents under the tree

In his book “Mushrooms and Mankind” (The Book Tree, 2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers and birch trees, with which the fungi —which is deep red with white flecks — has a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white presents underneath, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he wrote.

“Why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice, placing brightly colored (red and white) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other … ?” he wrote. “It is because, underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this ‘Most Sacred’ substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild.”

Reindeer are common in Siberia, and seek out these hallucinogenic fungi, as the area’s human inhabitants have been known to do. Donald Pfister, a biologist who studies fungi at Harvard University, suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated into thinking that reindeer were flying.

“Flying” reindeer

“At first glance, one thinks it’s ridiculous, but it’s not,” said Carl Ruck, a professor of classics at Boston University. “Whoever heard of reindeer flying? I think it’s becoming general knowledge that Santa is taking a ‘trip’ with his reindeer,” Ruck said.

“Amongst the Siberian shamans, you have an animal spirit you can journey with in your vision quest,” Ruck continued. ” And reindeer are common and familiar to people in eastern Siberia. They also have a tradition of dressing up like the [mushroom] … they dress up in red suits with white spots.”

Ornaments shaped like Amanita mushrooms and other depictions of the fungi are also prevalent in Christmas decorations throughout the world, particularly in Scandinavia and northern Europe, Pfister points out. That said, Pfister made it clear that the connection between modern-day Christmas and the ancestral practice of eating mushrooms is a coincidence, and he doesn’t know about any direct link.

Many of these traditions were merged or projected upon Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century saint who was known for his generosity, as the story goes.

The Santa connection

There is little debate about the consumption of mushrooms by Arctic and Siberian tribes’ people and shamans, but the connection to Christmas traditions is more tenuous, or “mysterious,” as Ruck put it.

Many of the modern details of the modern-day American Santa Claus come from “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (which later became famous as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), an 1823 poem credited to Clement Clarke Moore, an aristocratic academic who lived in New York City.

The origins of Moore’s vision are unclear, although Arthur, Rush and Ruck all think he probably drew from northern Europe motifs that derive from Siberian or Arctic shamanic traditions. At the very least, Arthur wrote, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer are references back to various related Northern European mythology. For example, the Norse god Thor (known in German as “Donner”) flew in a chariot drawn by two goats, which have been replaced in the modern retelling by Santa’s reindeer, Arthur wrote.

Ruck points to Rudolf as another example of the mushroom imagery resurfacing: his nose looks exactly like a red mushroom, he said. “It’s amazing that a reindeer with a red-mushroom nose is at the head, leading the others.”

Some doubt

Other historians were unaware of a connection between Santa and shamans or magic mushrooms, including Stephen Nissenbaum, who wrote a book about the origins of Christmas traditions, and Penne Restad, at the University of Texas.

One historian, Ronald Hutton, told NPR that the theory of a mushroom-Santa connection is off-base. “If you look at the evidence of Siberian shamanism, which I’ve done,” Hutton said, “you find that shamans didn’t travel by sleigh, didn’t usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the mushrooms to get trances, didn’t have red-and-white clothes.” But Rush and Ruck say these statements are incorrect; shamans did deal with reindeer spirits, and the depiction of their clothes’ coloring has more to do with the colors of the mushroom than the shamans’ actual garb. As for sleighs, the point isn’t the exact mode of travel, but that the “trip” involves transportation to a different, celestial realm, Rush said.

“People who know about shamanism accept this story,” Ruck said. “Is there any other reason that Santa lives in the North Pole? It is a tradition that can be traced back to Siberia.”

I have already noted how Clement Clark Moore didn’t want his poem published. He was a serious author and thought that children’s literature was beneath him. His friends and family disagreed and we have a little epic that gets read every year.

As to Santa, trying to pin one origin story on him has proved impossible. And that is because the story has evolved so much over the centuries. From the skinny and dour Sinterklaas to the jolly elf we all know today, Santa’s taken many forms.

But they all have one thing in common, they love you and want you to be your best.

That’s not such a bad thing.

From all of us here at the World News Center to all of you where ever you are, have a very merry and safe Christmas.


Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
contact Bill McCormick

Filed Under: News

Thingamapoopies

September 3, 2015 by

This is a pic of Prénida-Joseph Guadeloupe. It has nothing to do with the article, I just liked it and felt like sharing.
This is a pic of Prénida-Joseph Guadeloupe. It has nothing to do with the article, I just liked it and felt like sharing.

We all live on the same round world. Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot. Or, if you prefer, Bonnie & Terry Turner’s Third Rock from the Sun. No matter what we only have one world to work with and we need to figure out how to coexist on it. Or, at least, survive on it. Science, long ago, proved that there is no such thing as race. We all have the same organs, bleed the same blood and breathe the same air. And yet there are those who can’t get past the amount of melanin someone has. To me that makes as much sense as being mad at a bakery for selling doughnuts. Still, as we lurch forward into the future, it does seem salient to point out that there will most likely be no white people in five hundred years or so. We already only account for twenty-five percent of the world’s population and that number decreases every year due to mixed relationships and reduced birth rates. No matter your views on the world those are simple facts and must be accepted.

Since we’re on the subject of facts, and since I have gotten a ton of stuff from fans that they want me to write about, I figure today’s a good day to play a little catch up.

Not ketchup, that would be gross.

A few months ago NASA made headlines when they announced that they expected to find alien life by 2025. Naturally the tinfoil hat crowd took this as proof that they’d already found it and were just easing us into the new reality.

It always amazes me that these same people think our government is run by half-wit morons yet it can hide alien civilizations somewhere.

Oh well, back to NASA. Chris Lough, over at TOR, did some research and explains the reasoning behind NASA’s bold statement.

Edited for space. Click the link to read the whole thing.

NASA hosted a panel discussion with many of its high-ranking scientists on April 7th regarding the possibility of discovering signs of alien life within the 21st century. The consensus the NASA officials put forth was overwhelmingly optimistic in this regard: Not only will we discover alien life in this century, but we’ll discover it in the next 20 years.

Meaning… my theoretical grandchildren could grow up in a world where alien life is a historical fact.

What makes NASA so sure of this time frame? Three reasons. Or rather, three missions that will launch in the next 10 years that will bridge the gap between theories of alien life and evidence of alien life.

Mars in 2020

In 2016, a Mars lander mission called InSight will launch to take the first look into the deep interior of Mars and a currently unnamed Mars rover will be launched in 2020 to directly search for signs of previous life, fitted with instruments that will be able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks from a distance through chemical spectrometry, high resolution ground-penetrating radar, and x-rays. This rover will also carry MOXIE, a preliminary terraforming tool designed to test whether oxygen can be manufactured from the carbon dioxide abundant on Mars.

Not only that, but the 2020 rover will save samples of its evidence to be retrieved by a manned NASA mission to Mars currently planned for the 2030s.

Europa in 2022

Saturn’s moon Titan usually gets top billing for being the only moon in the solar system with its own weather, but recent examinations of Jupiter’s moons have revealed not one but several moons that may harbor warm liquid ocean environments underneath their icy, radiation-reflective shells. Of these, Europa is the most likely candidate to harbor life. Not only have we confirmed the existence of oceans under Europa’s icy surface, but the moon contains more water than there is in Earth’s oceans.

Alien Civilizations in the 2020s

This project is my absolute favorite. It’s so simple and so clever!

In 2018 the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched into orbit and once it begins looking at the hundreds of exoplanets that we’ve already found then discovering the presence of complex alien life on distant worlds will stop being a question of if and become a question of when.

And it all comes down to the gas that life leaves behind.

The James Webb Telescope will be able to conduct “transit spectroscopy,” which will read the starlight filtering through the atmospheres of exoplanets as they transit (cross in front of) their parent star. Stars are overwhelmingly bright—so bright that you can’t see tiny planets that transit in front of them— but we’ve gotten very practiced at this in the last 30 years, to the point where we can scan the starlight that passes through the air of super-Earths, which are more massive than our own planet but significantly less so than gaseous worlds such as Uranus and Neptune.

Even if we find civilizations on other worlds it will be a while before we can speak with them. Light years are still light years and it takes a lot of time for messages to cross those distances. But I can easily see Dale Bowman setting up fishing trips to Europa.

Speaking of aquatic critters, I just want to remind everyone that tortoises can’t swim so, please, quit throwing them into the water. They won’t thank you. They’ll just drown.

Of course, if NASA’s experiments with EM (Electromagnetic) drives pan out we might just be able to hop around the galaxy at will. Caroline Reid, at I Fucking Love Science (so do I Carol), has the whole story.

The unpublished experiment that led to this exciting possibility was performed in the vacuum of space. After shooting laser beams into the EM Drive’s resonance chamber, where the light is resonated to increase its intensity, researchers found that some of the beams of light were moving faster than the speed of light constant: approximately 300,000,000 meters per second (186,000 miles per second). The big question that’s intriguing scientists and dreamers alike is “How?”

Einstein’s theory of relativity forbids any object from moving faster than the speed of light. Fortunately, there’s a theory that sidesteps this minor impossibility. If the laser beams are definitely moving faster than the speed of light, then it would indicate that they are creating some sort of warp field, or bubble in the space-time foam, which in turn produces the thrust that could, in the future, power a spaceship.

The bubble would contract space-time in front of the ship, flow over the ship, then expand back to normality behind it. It’s inaccurate to describe the spaceship as moving faster than the speed of light, but rather space-time is moving around the ship faster than the speed of light. This is different to a wormhole, where one part of the universe is connected to another and the ship travels through the hole. The ship itself is essentially stationary and the space-time bubble hurtles around it.

Okay, I am the segue king, so check out this great trailer about flying space whales.

Called The Leviathan, the short is set in the distant 22nd century where humans exist off world and are up to our usual activity – blowing up nature. I’ll let the synopsis explain:

By the early 22nd century mankind had colonized many worlds. Faster than light travel was made possible by harvesting exotic matter from the eggs of the largest species mankind has ever seen. Those that take part in the hunt are mostly involuntary labor.

Other stuff that sounds like science fiction but isn’t is included in Mika McKinnon’s list of fifteen projects that NASA’s working on right now.

This is my favorite.

9. Submarine Squid To Explore The Oceans Of Europa

15 Projects NASA Wants To Change From Science Fiction To Science Fact

A squishy robotic squid may one day explore oceans on distant moons. Image credit: NASA/Cornell University/NSF

The development of the Soft-Robotic Rover with Electrodynamic Power Scavenging is being led by Mason Peck of Cornell University. The soft, squid-inspired robot would be the first submarine rover to explore another planet. The planned power systems are all about taking advantage of the local environment: the tentacles will harvest power from changing magnetic fields. In turn, the tentacles will power electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The gas will be used to inflate the squid, changing its shape to propel it through fluids. Europa is the most famous watery moon that could be explored by this squid, but it could also work on other moons of Jupiter and Saturn that have liquid lakes or oceans.

The cool thing about this is that the tech they’re developing could also be used to create underwater rescue and exploration vehicles here on Earth. Also, when combined with other tech that already exists, we are well on our way to building underwater cities.

We already have air & waste recycling that is used on space stations. It could easily be adapted for use here. Plus we now know how to pressurize planes and other objects so they can withstand extreme forces. That same tech could go into an underwater city. Add in aqua-culture for farming existing foods and hydroponics for growing the stuff we love without soil and you’re on your way.

Again, how far off are we? Not far at all. The new movie, The Martian, used existing technologies to create the habitat on Mars. Everything from air scrubbing to alien-agriculture exists in some form right now.

By the way, if you run into someone who doesn’t believe in science, and they do exist, use John Cook’s great article about how to inoculate science deniers with knowledge and not have them stick their fingers in their ears and scream NEENER NEENER NEENER.

I’ve used his technique a couple of times and it really works.

So why all this stuff about space and water? Because science has shown that global water levels are rising faster than predicted as more and more ice melts off of land and seeps into the oceans. No matter the cause the end result is the same. We’re fucked.

SWIM DEEP | SHE CHANGES THE WEATHER from Georgia Hudson on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
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Poop-a-Palooza!

May 9, 2015 by

Everybody poops. Just some do it with more class than others.
Everybody poops. Just some do it with more class than others.
Because I have the Internet I can search and find things that would, otherwise, elude me. This can be a mixed blessing. For example, I was recently doing some research on the Wizard of Oz. And if you click that link you’ll be bombarded with Oz trivia. But as I happily clicked link after link I suddenly found myself on a midget porn site. Click on that at your own risk. Truly the miracle of Rule 34 in action. If you don’t believe that almost any subject has a related porn site just Google NASA porn and prepare to be aroused and or shocked, depending on your tastes. Anyway, the more salient point is that I use the Internet for research. As such I find that I have to slog through reams of stupid shit to get to what I want. Which is why, in a moment of frustration I Googled for “stupid shit” and ended up completely fascinated by what I’d found.

I’m odd like that.

Anyway, let’ start with that tired Internet terror alert that all beards contain more poop than a toilet. I’ll let Aahmna Modin, from IFL Science, patiently explain why you’re an idiot if you believed that.

Contrary to what you have seen in the media, beards do not harbor more poo than a toilet. The story, which originated from the TV news network ‘KOAT’ in New Mexico, has gone viral even though it has little scientific merit.

As Nick Evershed from the Guardian points out, the story wasn’t based on a scientific study. The investigation instead consisted of a reporter taking swabs of a small number of men’s beards and then sending those samples to a microbiologist to analyze. The microbiologist John Golobic identified ‘enteric’ bacteria, which normally reside in the intestines. He told the presenter that these bacteria are usually found in feces, but bacteria associated with feces is not necessarily feces—an important distinction that many people seem to have ignored.

Enteric bacteria are in the family Enterobacteriaceae and are often harmless, though some can cause disease. You, however, do not need to worry about these bacteria because they are everywhere. Phillip M. Tierno, a microbiologist at New York University, told New York Magazine that “we, as a society, are literally bathed in feces.” From the keyboard on your desk to the bag you carry around, fecal bacteria can be found in a number of places and they are not a cause for concern.

I saw the orignal story when it first came around and laughed at it. Just a quick memo to KOAT, and any other ratings desperate media outlet, if you’re going to site science please make sure to run it past someone who actually knows what science is. And how it works. And … you know what, just avoid the science stuff all together. It’s safer that way.

So you don’t have a fuzzy poop broom hanging off your chin. And I can see that you’re disappointed. After all, Fuzzy Poop Broom would be a great name for a Mumford and Sons tribute band.

But what if I told you that, while you need not comb it out of your beard, you can actually make good money with your poop? Feel better now?

Lisa Winter has the whole story.

Everybody poops. That’s not just the name of a popular potty training book, but it’s an essential fact of life. However, most people merely flush it away without a second thought. In the spirit of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure, the non-profit company OpenBiome is actually paying for stool samples in order to create lifesaving fecal transplant treatments for those infected with Clostridium difficile, a bacteria which is highly resistant to antibiotics.

Infections of C. difficile result in severe diarrhea, hospitalizing 250,000 Americans each year and causing about 14,000 deaths. It can actually come about after using antibiotics for too long, which ties into what makes it exceptionally difficult to treat. The patient’s gut microbiota is nearly wiped out, and conventional probiotics are not sufficient to replace them.

The best treatment for C. difficile infections is a fecal transplant, and yes, it has traditionally been as horrible as it sounds. Doctors have relied on highly invasive nasogastric tubes (NG tubes) or colonoscopies to put donor fecal matter into the gut of their infected patients. As difficult as the process may be, it is highly successful. A new method uses capsules of frozen fecal matter, which thaw out in the body and release the contents in the small intestines. The success rates of the capsules is comparable to traditional treatments, around 90 percent.

These frozen fecal capsules are OpenBiome’s wheelhouse, as they collect and screen stool samples, and turn them into the ready-to-administer treatments for hospitals. Of course, the feces needs to be sourced from somewhere. OpenBiome pays donors who are committed to providing multiple samples per week.

Though everybody may do it, not everyone is an ideal candidate to get paid to do it. First and foremost, OpenBiome needs donors to be near their lab in Medford, Massachusetts to join the registry to donate. Candidates who meet the requirements for age, BMI, and health pre-screening questions are then invited to get blood and stool testing. Donations are then made at least four times per week for 60 days, when each donor is re-evaluated. Once the next round of blood and stool tests come back clear, the previous samples are then converted into capsules and sent to patients across the country.

The going rate is $40 per donation, with a $50 kicker for those who come five days a week. This translates into $250 per week, or $13,000 per year. OpenBiome tries to make the experience as fun as they can by offering prizes to donors who make the most donations, provide the biggest sample, etc. However, there’s no word on if OpenBiome offers a fun sticker to show off your donation to friends and family, such as the “Be nice to me, I gave blood today” badge handed out by the Red Cross.

If you meet the qualifications you can contact OpenBiome by just clicking their name.

“But Bill,” you say pleadingly, “what if I can’t sell my poop? How do I use my poop for the betterment of humanity?”

I’m glad you asked.

Become an astronaut. Or at least learn the skills needed to be wanted by NASA. It’s actually quite a long list. Anything from medical doctor to computer expert to astrophysicist will get you a look see. Just stay in school, get good grades, and you can be one of the lucky people who gets to power a space ship with their poop.

No, I am not insane.

Brian McConnell from i09 says that you too can be a super pooper.

If we’re going to venture out into the Solar System and beyond, we’re going to need versatile and reliable spaceships. One possible solution comes in the form of “spacecoaches” — reusable vessels that are self-sufficient and capable of carrying explorers to virtually any destination. Here’s how they’ll work.

Imagine the kind of spaceship we’ll need as we begin to expand the human presence into the nearby Solar System. We’d like something completely reusable, a vessel able to carry people in relative comfort everywhere from Mars to Venus, and perhaps as far out as the asteroid belt, where tempting Ceres awaits. Capable of refueling using in situ resources, these are ships not crafted for a single, specific mission but able to operate on demand without entering a planetary atmosphere. Brian McConnell, working with Centauri Dreams regular Alex Tolley, has been thinking about just such a ship for some time now. A software/electrical engineer, pilot and technology entrepreneur based in San Francisco, Brian here explains the concept he and Alex have come up with, one that Alex treated in a previous entry in these pages. The advantages of their ‘spacecoach’ are legion and Brian also offers a sound way to begin testing the concept. — Paul Gilster, Editor, Centauri Dreams

“What if a spacecraft, like a cell, was made mostly of water?”

That’s what Alexander Tolley and I asked when we were working on our paper for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, “A Reference Design For A Simple, Durable and Refuelable Interplanetary Spacecraft”. The paper explored the idea of a crewed spacecraft that used water as propellant in combination with solar electric propulsion. We dubbed them spacecoaches, as a nod to the stagecoaches of the Old West. Alex also gave the concept an excellent fictional treatment in Spaceward Ho!, also published on Centauri Dreams. We are currently finishing a book about spacecoaches, to be published by Springer this fall.

The idea of crewed solar electric spacecraft is hardly new. In 1954, Ernst Stuhlinger proposed a “sun-ship” powered by solar steam turbines and cesium ion drives. Since then solar electric propulsion has been used in a wide variety of uncrewed craft. Meanwhile, the convergence of several technologies will make crewed solar electric vehicles feasible in the near future.

A Spaceship That is Mostly Water

The core idea behind the spacecoach architecture is the use of water, and potentially waste streams, as propellant in electric engines. Water, life support and consumables are critical elements in a long duration mission, and in a conventional ship, are dead weight that must be pushed around by propellant that cannot be used for other purposes. Water in a spacecoach, on the other hand, can be used for many things before it is reclaimed and sent to the engines, and it can be treated as working mass. This, combined with the increased propellant efficiency of electric engines, leads to a virtuous cycle that results in dramatic cost reductions compared to conventional ships while increasing mission capabilities. Cost reductions of one or two orders of magnitude, which would make travel to destinations throughout the inner solar system routine, are possible with this approach.

Water is, for example, an excellent radiation shielding material, comparable to lead on a per kilogram basis, except you can’t drink lead. It is an excellent thermal battery, and can simply be circulated in reservoirs wrapped around the ship to balance hot and cold zones (this same reservoir doubles as the radiation shield). When frozen into fibrous material to form pykrete, it forms a material as tough as concrete, which can potentially be used for debris shielding or for momentum wheels, and if positioned correctly, can double as a supplemental radiation shield. If mixed with dilute hydrogen peroxide, which is safely stored at low concentrations, oxygen can be generated by passing it through a catalyst, similar to a contact lens cleaner. Dilute H2O2 is also a potent disinfectant, and can also be used to process human waste, as is done in terrestrial wastewater treatment plants. Anything the crew eats or drinks can be counted as propellant, as the water can be reclaimed and used for propulsion. This greatly simplifies planning for long missions because the longer the mission is, the more propellant you have in the form of consumables. This will also provide excellent safety margins and enable crews to survive an Apollo 13 scenario in deep space.

A spaceship that is mostly water will be more like a cell than a conventional rocket plus capsule architecture. Space agriculture, or even aquaculture, becomes practical when water is abundant. Creature comforts that would be unthinkable in a conventional ship (hot baths anyone?) will be feasible in a spacecoach. Meanwhile, inflatable structures will eventually enable the construction of large, complex habitats that will be more like miniature O’Neill colonies than a conventional spaceship.

“Okay, cool,” you’re saying, “but what does a space ship made of water have to do with my poop?”

Quite a bit actually.

As noted, tastefully, above, “Anything the crew eats or drinks can be counted as propellant, as the water can be reclaimed and used for propulsion.” Simply put, your output becomes input for the engines and for the shielding.

That’s right, NASA can, as of today, build an Inter-Solar Poop Ship.

And you thought science wasn’t cool.

Le Sexoflex – Poop On Face from Le Sexoflex on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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We’ve Got the Straight Poop Today

November 9, 2010 by

Fun With Dung?
If you’re like me, and most of you have loved ones who pray that this is not so, you’re fascinated by the many derivations of poop. Yes, there is the more common vulgarism that has been immortalized as a Principia Religio. But that doesn’t have the same whimsy as poop. After all, you can say poop in front of your kids. After a bout with the flu you can say, in any forum, “Boy, is my pooper pooped.”

If you’re on the water, the poop deck is a wonderful place to be.

You can change an old song into Purple Poople Eater and kids will laugh for days.

Face it, gross as it may seem, poop is fun.

But what about folks who want to take their love of poop a step further? Well, they’re in luck. The Topeka Zoo (where else?) is selling painted elephant poop.

David Moye from AOL News has the scoop on the poop.

The Topeka Zoo is getting a trunk full of cash thanks to its newest gift products: dolls and gifts made from elephants’ poop.

It’s part of a fundraiser called My Pet Poo and here’s the straight poop: Volunteers take hunks of pachyderm dung and paint with into all sorts of fun designs.

“We’ve had requests to paint the poop to look like a Kansas City Chief or a Jayhawk from the University of Kansas,” said Kate Larison, the executive director of the Friends of the Topeka Zoo, the group doing the poop painting.

“One person even wanted a Green Bay Packer Cheesehead.”

The Topeka Zoo’s My Pet Poo fundraiser sells dolls made out of elephant poop.

Larison said the idea of taking the poop and repackaging came up a few weeks ago at a meeting, and the group decided not to make haste with waste and started selling the pieces this week.

Each piece of My Pet Poo sells from around $10 to $25 for custom projects. In addition, each piece is lovingly painted by a volunteer and comes with a certificate of authenticity proving the poop did come from an actual elephant.

“It’s like a Cabbage Patch Doll in that respect,” Larison pointed out.

I know what you’re thinking. “I could have had a nice elephant poop doll instead of that silly Cabbage Patch?” Trust me, I feel your pain.

If you’re in the mood to give someone a gift that, I guarantee, they don’t already have, David has links on his page so you can order. Besides, if you’re down in the dumps, what could be a better ‘pick-me-up’ than a painted ball of poop?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Return of Jesus Bunny Super Dude!

April 13, 2022 by Bill McCormick

And the angel said “Jesus did doth ride forth on the holy bunny which then begat the consecrated colored eggs.”

About a decade ago I did a deep dive into why we have eggs and bunnies as symbols for the resurrection of Jesus. At its face it seems insane. Also, just FYI, no matter which gospel you read, Jesus was coherent upon his resurrection so there’s no substance to the zombie Jesus rumors that pop up this time of year. Oddly, in the grand scheme of things, “zombie Jesus” is the least problematic. After all, despite the trappings we all know, not a single gospel mentions Jesus’ ability to poop eggs or anything like that. Still, a quick look at the Internet or any TV station tells you that bunnies, baskets, and eggs are all the rage. There’s not a single ad for a large stone “You too can roll away!!!” or do-it-yourself stigmata kits for the kids. In other words, something happened to get us from there to here. Now, was that something wildly subversive? Pure evil complete with the obligatory maniacal laugh? Or was it just the way things worked out? Read on and find out.

[Read more…] about The Return of Jesus Bunny Super Dude!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: baskets, bunnies, catholic, easter, eggs, history, jesus, pagans, pope

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