Posts Tagged Purple People Eaters
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Stasko arrived at the maintenance office thirty-seven minutes later. Wisric had no doubt arranged everything to give him a chance to chat with Corinda Blanch, though there was no guarantee she would be around. Since both Stasko and Wisric had been moved to temporary quarters in the agricultural wing, Blanch had coincidentally been in the area more often, usually for "strategic discussions" with Mot Jarvis, her counterpart and the man in charge of maintenance for the agricultural warrens.
Mot was a short, black-haired man who could be described using a number of adjectives that ended in -umpy. In general he had an ill temper. He had prominent muscles as a result of his fanatical weightlifting, a trait that had required a certain amount of adjustment in the years since he had lost his right arm during an ill-fated safari, as he put it: "Fighting a pair of alligators," which may not have been entirely true.
Nobody really knew the truth about his missing limb, and few entirely understood how he kept the agricultural warrens maintained so well with only one arm. But his resilience in the face of life's oddities had given him an occasional endearing quality, and Leonin visited him when he needed perspective.
Wisric, for reasons unknown to Stasko, seemed to cringe when Jarvis was around.
On this occasion, however, the commons around Mot's office was quiet; Mot wasn't waving his arm threateningly from the break table as he tended to do quite often, but his office door was open. A transmitter buried somewhere in the office was busily spitting out animated conversation.
In the doorway stood the hulking silhouette of Resfarl, one of the few who had managed the transition from Brush to Graevon. If there was one common thread among lunatics it was that they always seemed to prefer keeping the Atlas-types around.
Saunders slowed and took hold of a length of metal conduit near one of the terminals. “I’ll handle Resfarl; you guys go on ahead.”
Anya gave him an incredulous stare. “Have you lost your mind?”
Gregg paused in mid-step. He hadn’t expected an argument.
“Why in space would you want to split up at a time like this?” continued Rayleigh. “We have no idea what that Borius character might be planning.”
“Just go; don’t worry about Resfarl,” insisted Gregg.
“I’m not worried about Resfarl,” she stated flatly. “There is exactly one of him right now, and he doesn’t even have a gun.”
“I'll handle him! Find Graevon and stop him before he commits another act of genocide.” He made prolonged eye contact with her, trying to convey an inability to accept anything other than compliance.
It hardly made a difference.
“Skabs to that! What do you take me for?” She broke his gaze and gestured indignantly toward the other man. “Is this supposed to be some sort of idiotic macho act?”
He stepped back momentarily. “No,” he began, with marginally less certainty than before. “But this will give you time to--”
“Time to what?” she asked, clearly uninterested in any clarifying statements. “Worry about your misguided hide because you want to play the martyr while we're chasing down a madman? Fine.”
She fired two shots, one into each of Micco Resfarl’s knees. His legs gave way almost in unison, no longer coordinating their actions with the rest of his body, and with his weight unsupported he buckled over, clearly out of commission. “Have it your way. While you’re busy being irrational and clubbing him up with your new toy, the rest of us will be solving problems instead of creating them.”
Northern Lightning 
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Posted by ooaverage in Ask Dr. Rocket Surgery, Click This Link to Save the Princess!, The Politics, The Wonders of Technology, Through the Commentator's Glasses on July 26, 2013
One-eyed, One-horned Eater of Flying Purple People
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The Necessity of Clarity in Nomenclature
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How to Profit from Uncle Sam’s Dissipation and Survive on Marginal Writing Ability
So I’ve been back to Popular Politics and Such Science again, in part because there are still occasional science-like updates despite their best efforts.
Article one: Government Should Fund Unpopular Science
Article two: Imposing Restrictions on What Gets Funding Is Bad
The fiscally conservative part of me thinks the idea of cementing the continuation of funding for studies of duck genitals for the sake of whatever it is that studies like that will do for the common good (or for the sake of science, and as we all know part of America has a massive science-related inferiority complex entirely due to us #&$% creationists trying to make children hate all science and entirely not because of one or more systemic problems with America’s education system)–securing funding for that sort of thing seems, to put it quite mildly, frivolous. Both the government and the American scientific machine have much more important problems to deal with; in the case of the government, funding studies of duck parts might be exacerbating (if only slightly) an increasingly problematic budget issue.
The rest of me has decided that funding that kind of silt is awesome, because I can make money from it.
How, you ask? Simple. By writing a grant proposal that somehow manages to stand above research on anatid anatomy. I don’t foresee much difficulty.
So I will propose an expedition to Bora Bora to answer a pressing scientific question: Are there suitable ways to distinguish between the varieties of one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eaters?
As you may well know, in the song from decades ago the eponymous creature happens to eat purple people. For most of us, this would not present any major trouble. I am not purple, and I do not know any purple people.
(Why undertake the study in Bora Bora, you ask, though the answer should be quite obvious?
Because it’s for science, and science says exotic things seem to hang out in the tropics. Also, coincidentally, Bora Bora is what happens when love gets landscaping priviliges.)
However… The title of the aforementioned song suggests the existence of as many as five different creatures, all essentially indistinguishable by common name. (I’m unaware of any scientific names for any of them-this would be rectified by the end of the study. Everyone knows that scientific names for animals are nothing more than a couple of keyboard accidents with –us added to the end. Unless you’re a toad, or a gorilla, or a bison, or never mind shut up.)
The creature could be:
1. Purple, having one eye and one horn, known to fly and eat people.
2. One-eyed and one-horned, known to fly and eat purple people.
3. One-eyed and one-horned, known to eat flying purple people.
4. One-eyed, known to eat one-horned, flying purple people.
5. Completely unidentified, possibly amorphous, and known to eat one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people.
Clearly, the last four are unlikely to pose a danger to the general public. Following the suggestion of Popular Science, however, this fact alone does not render further studies undeserving of public funds.
In fact, such a study could prove useful to society anyway.
A creature known to eat violet, airborne, cyclopean humans with keratin production disorders would have a great deal of trouble locating food. Any child born in a developed nation with all of these genetic mutations would be sold to the circus; a counterpart in a developing country would likely be removed from the village and burned under a full moon.
The chances that one of these creatures (the specific subspecies of flying purple people eater) would be in the right location at the right time to feed on said child are ludicrously small. A possible explanation for the creatures’ survival (that doesn’t involve ridiculous odds or the need to feed once every three-and-a-half millenia) would be an innate ability to smell genetic mutations over great distances. This ability, if harnessed, could be used medically, to provide early cancer warnings or screen for late-onset genetic disorders.
On a separate note, imagine you’re a purple person with two horns. If one of them is removed and you hop onto a Qantas jet and head to Sydney, are you then vulnerable to attack?
Maybe you’re simply a purple person, and your feet leave the ground. Is this enough to provoke an eater of flying purple people? ICBMs operate similarly, leaving under their own power and following a ballistic path back to earth, and I doubt anyone would argue against calling it flight.
Mind you, if that proposal falls through, I have more.
Is it possible to go back in time by standing at the north pole and spinning clockwise? Would the south pole behave similarly, spun in an unnatural counterclockwise circle?
Maybe you’re still awake at this point. You’ve no doubt concluded that these are all valid questions meriting public monetary support.
Maybe you’re busy scheming to write grant proposals of your own. By all means, do so! Share the idea with your friends! Write until your hands wear thin from rubbing against so much tree matter or poking all of those keys.
I only expect a place on your expedition if you get funded.
For the Public Indifference, Purple People Eaters, Strongly Implying One is About to Do Something Unethical, Studies
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