General Discussion Thread

[wavewright62]

way louder than the usual tree frogs or the occasional snakes which slid down the hall in the middle of the night when they emerged from the toilet.

(bold and italics mine)

Combined with the story of scrumpy, TIL not to read the Forum first thing in the monring?

[Róisín]

Sorry, Wavewright! But….Far North Queensland is like that. We were in a relatively new house at the edge of a small mining town, not far from the bush. And that is a climate where snakes and frogs are everywhere. We had a modern flush toilet rather than a longdrop dunny, despite which it still emptied into the town’s common sewer, where lots of things lived, and crawled back up the pipes. Mercifully the snakes were mostly pythons, rather than anything poisonous, but I kept the doors to the kid’s rooms shut at night, being someone who errs on the side of caution.

[Keep Looking]

My older brother knew a guy who was sleeping out on a friend's verandah in his swag in Kununurra (north-west Australia) and had a python try to crawl into the swag with him! He'd often get frogs coming to sit on his face while he slept so when he felt something on his face he thought it might be a frog, but it was actually a snake! He pushed it off but it kept wanting to come back (body heat?). Eventually in the morning he got up, put the snake in a bag and walked several kilometres away to release it.

In a lot of tropical places everything is alive and everywhere - lots of bugs, lots of frogs and lizards and snakes. And smaller types of living things too! When I was visiting my relatives in Kuching the wooden shower stool in my great-uncle's bathroom had an entire fungal microbiome growing on it complete with tiny white bracket fungi.

[Róisín]

Yeah, the wet tropics are like that. Part of life, I guess. Where we live now has plenty of life, but it mostly doesn’t try to move in quite so hard as things do in the tropics. We have only once had a snake in the house here, in the early days before I secured things. Still get geckos and huntsman spiders, and once a possum. And mice when there are mouse plagues.

Oddly enough the desert has more things that want to get near people for the warmth: snakes, lizards, scorpions and the like. Or sometimes they are just curious. I think I have mentioned here the time I was sleeping outside near The Breakaways on my way back from one of the early Stroud expeditions and woke up to something blowing on my face and pulling lightly at my hair, and opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by a small herd of curious brumbies.

[dmeck7755]

Years ago I realised that a part-filled bottle of orange juice was well past its use-by date. I decided to get rid of it, so I went to the toilet to pour the juice out, began to unscrew the cap...
BANG!
Orange juice sprayed over my face and shoulders.
The juice had fermented in the bottle, and unscrewing the cap was the equivalent of pulling out the pin of a hand grenade.

I hope you were not hurt, other than sticky..

I used to make mead.  I was particularly fond of what we called quick mead.  This mead was made much like an ale, so it had fizz and bubbles.  The unfortunate part was this stuff was very unstable.  It did not take too much heat or jiggling to make it explode.  We were going to a friends and I was taking a couple of bottles to a friend for them to taste and critique. 
I had a friend riding with me.  She decided rather than keeping the bottles at her feet, it will be more steady if she held them.

a little while later and BAM!.  The roof of my car and she was covered in mead.. (I used old Grolsch bottles for this, so the little red seal and ceramic cap gave way before the bottle broke. ) She was like.."I was holding it still..why did it explode?"
I replied,"What is your body temperature?" She was like DUH!.  We still tease her about it mostly because she is a materials engineer..

[JoB]

Just in case anyone still needs proof that everything's more deadly in Australia ... 
Asteroid impact crater three times the size of Chicxulub (the dino killer), chronologically linked to another global extinction event, natch.

[Yastreb]

Back in January, I posted about how I'd looked up the TV Tropes entry on Death Worlds, defined as "a highly dangerous place, where simply going there is considered taking your life into your own hands" (the Trope Namer is Harry Harrison's novel). There are the usual categories such as Video Games, Live-Action Movies, Anime & Manga, Literature, etc, and... Real Life, which has three folders; Australia, The Rest Of Earth, and Other Planets and Time Periods.

[Róisín]

Wow. I knew there was an impact crater of some kind there, but had no idea it was so big. Is it bigger than Wilpena Pound? Australia has certainly had some spectacular impact events. I remember sitting by my fire out in the desert at night, looking at the tektites strewing the plain around me and wondering what it must have been like to be there when that storm of tiny molten glass meteorites was actually falling…..’Age of fire and gravel’ indeed!

[JoB]

Is it bigger than Wilpena Pound?

Considering that that one's not a crater of any kind to begin with (according to Wikipedia, it's a "synclinal basin"), it gets a bit nontrivial to compare those two ... From the annotated satellite picture, the visible surface structure of Wilpena is in the 20-km-across range. Deniliquin has a diameter of 520 km, but that includes deformities in the magnetic fields and the like, while the actual shape was said (in another online article) to be (mostly) buried under 4 km of sediment nowadays ...

[Róisín]

I think if Wilpena Pound had been an impact, adjacent  features like the Ediacaran fossil beds would have been unlikely to survive, I was thinking more of the size of the structure just as a hollow in the landscape.

[Yastreb]

TV Tropes removed the Real Life folder from the Death World entry.
Did our tourism industry complain?

[Eich]

Happy birthday, Forum 
Only a couple days late this time!

[wavewright62]

Hey folks, just a heads-up that the YoinkTober Prompt List has been posted, 10 days in advance of 1 October.  There really is something for everyone in this year's list, including your chance to assemble top 10 lists!  Do check it out.

[dmeck7755]

Happy birthday Forum!!

[Róisín]

Lovely cake dmeck! And happy Forumversary to all. Also happy equinox.