The manufacturing date code of J4 decodes to the fourth quarter of 1964, I think.

I noticed something interesting about their legs.  All of them had two claws on the ends of their legs.  The wasp, ant, housefly, scorpion, beetle, cricket, and even the spider.  It seems this little feature works pretty well for bugs, so hasn’t changed a lot across a handful of species.

Here are some drawings I made:

Bugs' legs

This, on the other hand, is loads of fun, and I can shoot it in my garden.

Feinwerkbau FWB 603

Meade 7" Maksutov-Cassegrain LX-200

But, the goto mount lost it’s fucking mind and Meade no longer supports it.  They actually told me casually how I could buy another LX-200.  As if the optics were consumable or something.  Wankers.  So, I mounted it on one of these:

Losmandy GM-8

In 2000, I was able to take these shots of Luna from my backyard in Texas:

Partial Eclipse

Full half

Full other half

Taken with one of these:

Pentax K1000

As I found, after quite a bit of reading, is that a modern digital camera on the back of my scope is WAY more sensitive than a film camera.  And there’s nothing lost in the scanning translation.

Picked up a card of this shit today.  Seemed like a good project.  It’s homeopathic.  Meaning, it’s harmless.  And useless.  The ingredients:

1. Chinchona 12X
2. Lobelia inf 12X
3. Nux vom 12X
4. Quercus gland sp 6X
5. Ranunc bulb 12x
6. Zincum met 30X

There are problems figuring out how much of each of these is actually in a tablet.  12X dilution by weight or by volume?  Fine, I can figure out a dilution, but how much of that dilution is in each tablet?  Or, does that really matter?  What the fuck are these ingredients, anyway?

More to come.

In an atheist forum, starting a thread asking if Adam liked blue cheese or not.

This is a fictitious example, but I’ve seen similar.  Here’s my problem with it:

It wastes the effort and time of forum members.  What is the point of discussing something that we are pretty sure doesn’t even exist?  Do I give a shit what some fictional character did or didn’t do?  What the fuck is to be gained from it?

Stop wasting my time.  Take your bullshit discussion up where people believe the subject exists and discuss it until your lips fall off.  Leave the grownups out of it.

The cat bitches, as I can call anyone I fucking want on my own blog, were meat eaters, and were perfectly happy sterilizing their cats, than had the gall to tell everyone how cruel declawing is for cats.

They had a real tendency to use emotionally charged words to describe declawing.  A couple of them also tended to write in absolutes such as, “All cats suffer crippling effects… blah, blah, blah”.

Not a fucking one of them could cite a real peer reviewed study looking at the complications of declawing, and another looking at say, sterilization.  Nor could they seem to get their cat sized brains around the hypocrisy they are displaying when they hide behind cruelty as a reason not to declaw while munching away on their dead animal of choice.

Now, I eat meat.  Not a lot, but I eat meat.  I’ve killed plenty of my own meat as well.  I know perfectly well where it comes from and how it gets into my belly.  I also sterilize my pets.  Both of these are visiting some measurable amount of cruelty to animals.

So, I’m not about to tell anyone not to declaw because it’s cruel to cats.  I will not be that hypocrite.  No, I would have to simply explain how it is unnecessary.  Being unnecessary, it is unethical.  There is just no compelling reason to declaw an animal.  We humans are considerably more clever than any cat, so we should be able to figure out a way to get them to do what we want without cutting bits off of them.

I will be pleased to entertain any discussion about my justification for recommending against declawing.  But, unless you’re a vegetarian that doesn’t sterilize your pets, I don’t need to hear about your thoughts on cruelty.