T1B

just passing this along....

Leonid Meteor showers this weekend

I remember being on one of those aforementioned work roadies in Newport, Oregon, just about this time of year, maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Drunk off my ass, burning some weed right down on the beach. It was during the most spectacular meteor shower imagineable. Looking out over the rocks and the ocean, the sky was like no fireworks display mankind could ever hope to replicate. It was a truly awesome evening...even the part where I was pretty liquored, and ran out between waves and stood on a rock out in the ocean. That was all cool, until a much bigger wave came, and swept my ass into the drink. And you may or may not know this, but the North Pacific isn't really all that terribly warm in November. But I was still able to swim my drunk ass back to dry land...at which point the massive cougar starting stalking me and my coworker. Now, I've seen some pretty big cat tracks in my day...but not like this -- these suckers were much much larger than my fully splayed hand. Never saw the cat, the sneaky bastard, but since the waves were sweeping the sand smooth frequently, we knew he was there. It was pretty much time to leave after that.


And there's your tie-in to travelling for work. You sometimes see cool shit, if you travel to cool places.

With enough booze and herb I could done all that Dinsdaleian Tale without ever having left my yard, throw in a gram of shrooms and I would have bodysurfed my way to that massive cougar and pissed on his head. This would be my brain on drugs, one hell of a trip....

I must be getting old or something, because even reaching near-maximum innebreiation, at no point did I figure I could take the World's Biggest Cougar in a fistfight...in stark contrast to years past.

In my situation I'm sure once the visions of the giant cat finally melted away into various hues of color my neighbors might question my sanity as to why I just pissed on a box of Frosted Flakes while shouting "Hoooah, You gonna die you fucking feline demonseed whore!" at a Cereal Box picture of Tony the Tiger. Listen up people, Don't do drugs!

Roach wrote:Prolly nobody knows or gives a shit, but those meteor showers do some pretty neat and cosmic shit for ham radio operators. And radio waves.

Rack them m-showers that light up the ionosphere!

If I go way up in the Coast Range at night during these type of events, it's remarkable the stations that AM radio will pick up. "The skip" can do some crazy stuff at any time, but during a cosmic event in winter...forgetaboutit.

Actually, I can always get 680AM(?) Sports radio out of San Fran in the Range at night. Can be nice to catch ballgames and whatnot when camping, since local stations(the ones with towers 40 miles away) don't come in.

Meteor showers are way too fun....blip, blip, blip, then an orange flame across the sky that looks like it's right in your face and appears to land next door, but in reality it burned up miles away. Rinse and repeat for as many hours as you want to watch. Cosmic events can be fun. My hubbie and I took pics years ago of a major sunspot event by driving to the nearest hill on our little Honda 90s and putting the old 35mm camera on the seat of one, and capturing pics at sunset. Got great pics of 10 large dark spots on the sun. It was at a time when all the ham radio people were saying there was major disturbance as well.

Large cat prints on the ground are another issue. I've only seen real prints once (have camped other places with mountain lion warnings, but never saw anything to worry about)...one time when we were camping in major swampland/lowland forest in SE Oklahoma, and were the only people at the campground we saw very large cat prints in the mud around the pond in the campground. Personally, I was more worried about the toothless banjo-totin locals than the cat. As it turned out, neither was a bother.

You should open Dinsdalepedia.com with your stories for everything

I can remember seeing Hale Bop. We were living in Vegas (actually Henderson) at the time, and the only thing you could usually see in the night sky from our house was the green glow from the MGM Grand. Needless to say, we didn't normally pay much attention to celestial events.

My in-laws were living at the time in Sun City (near Temecula) and we used to drive back to visit every month or so. We were driving into California on I-15 on one of those crystal clear high desert nights with no ambient light, somewhere north of Barstow, when we came around a bend and out over a broad expanse of desert was this incredible, unbelieveable streak in the middle of the sky maybe 30 degrees above the horizon. This was a complete surprise and it took us a few seconds to realize what it was. It seemed huge from where we were looking at it. We had to pull off the side of the highway and just sit there staring at it for about 20 minutes.

One of the most incredible sights I have ever seen in my life.

We had to pull off the side of the highway and just sit there staring at it for about 20 minutes.

Been there, I think I was staring at reflection a streetlight made on a 7-11 sign.

Y2K wrote:

We had to pull off the side of the highway and just sit there staring at it for about 20 minutes.

Been there, I think I was staring at reflection a streetlight made on a 7-11 sign.

You seem to be reminiscing a lot about past drug experiences lately. Do I sense a little mid-life crisis here?
You're not thinking about going out and buying a Miata are you?
Wanna score some good windowpane?

Hale Bop was very cool. We saw that in our backyard in socal for many nights, and it was quite a show, very neat defined streak in the sky. Not a huge show, but a streak that was so visible and so unusual in the night sky that it held our attention for probably longer that it should have :) We are easily amused here, the whole streak of the comet that we saw was about the width of two fingers or so if you held your hand about 6" from your nose to compare the streak in the night sky...but hey, it was a comet we had never seen before and we were loving it!

Too bad the suicidal maniacs in Rancho Santa Fe with their matched Nikes decided to take that opportunity to bail out of this world. I guess if anyone is going to do a group suicide, that's the way to do it, but it seemed pretty meaningless and random. Then again, I guess when they met their brothers and sisters orbiting above, they wouldn't call back to let us know how the whole re-connection with random gases and particles went anyway, would they :)

Speaking of celestial events, and the Leonids can indeed be spectacular-- I always remembered my Grandfather telling me about Halley's comet and
how it was so bright and big that you could see it in
the daytime-- couldn't wait for its next scheduled visit
around 1986.
Sadly--it was a fizzle for us, as it was far away from the
earth and its tail was pointing away from us.
I told my youngest daughter that if she is alive for the
next time (I think she'd be 85) to remember what a disappointment it was for me.

If the conditions are right, I'll give it a look...thanks for the heads up!

jtr wrote:You should open Dinsdalepedia.com with your stories for everything

What can I say? I get out a lot. You should try it sometime.

Hale Bop was AWESOME. Hadn't heard one word about it, then one evening, me and friends fished for chinook until the sun went down. As we headed back over the Coast Range, it was in the middle of a lunar eclipse(sup Python). As that was fading, all of a sudden, it was "uhm...there's something wrong with the sky...wtf is that thing?" It was like broad daylight up in the mountains...on the heels of a lunar eclipse...

Absolutely perfect.

Might have to get away from the city lights and do a little skywatching tonight. I think it's supposed to be clear...we'll see. Pretty freaking foggy still this morning, but it's still November, so I'm assuming the fog will clear at some point...like it often doesn't in December/January.

me and friends fished for chinook until the sun went down.

So...do the bar skanks that follow you out to the parking lot scream when they see the fish bodies in your backseat?

How do you best render a barskank immobile for a parking lot sojourn? What's the best way to club them, so that the lactic acid doesn't spoil the tang?

Don't be silly -- nobody in their right mind mixes fishing and skanks.

Although, me and some buddies...well....we used to do a lot of drugs...and we'd get all wasted and go to this nifty little spot on the coast and fish for rockfish(which go by a whole bunch of different names, one of them being red snapper). We'd fish in the rocks that were built up to shield a boat ramp from waves in a small bay. The rock piles attracted a lot of rockfish, most of them small, every now and then a lingcod. But this was the coolest gig ever. We'd go at night, and this spot had a large parking lot, was well-lit, had a dock on which to put chairs, and had bathrooms with running water, which is a pretty nice bonus when fishing. But the best feature was that there was a freaking bar about 100 yards across the parking lot. With a few really hard-up small town coastal skanks.

It was truly Dinsdalian Nirvana.

Wanna score some good windowpane?

What's better nowdays with the best efficiency per dollar
Dual or Triple Pane?
I only buy the best shit out there.