It’s been a year and a bit since I published the notes toward the design of the perfect sex toy. I haven’t made much progress, but some others have. I think it’s time for a round up, in chronological order, of all the Sex Toy posts since the list was published.
I’m not sure what etiquette, if any, covers the scanning of pages from out of print books to post on the internet for the edification of others. So for this chapter I’m just going to sample a few pages. Admittedly, they are the ones with pictures on them.
We all know what an American river steamer looks like from Westerns and musicals. What I never knew was that they were incredibly shallow draught craft, to navigate up the rivers. Because Iron was at a premium at the time, they utilised wood for as much as possible, including the drive shaft.
There were two distinct styles of river boat, the Easter and Western. Eastern boats ran up the Hudson and in the Long Island Sound, Western boats in the Mississippi- Missouri- Arkansas- Ohio- Red River basin. Various quirks of design made them unstable and the Western boats were intentionally built for a short life because they were likely to rip their hulls apart on concealed tree trunks or be otherwise disabled within five years. (A “Sawyer” was a floating tree entangled by its roots and alternately raised and depressed by the force of the current; it usually gave warning of its presence. Presumably where Mark Twain got the name for his character as well.)
More information about modern steamboats at Steamboats.org
My job may be better, but access is still a temperamental bugger. Does anyone know why a problem with wizards keeps corrupting the visual basic modules?
This isn’t really news to most of us, but ought to be spread through the mainstream so that the manufacturers pay attention and work on more of them. The ideal solution, of course, would be a car with solar panels in the roof that can charge its batteries whilst parked outside.
One of the defects of democracy is that we usually have quite ordinary persons as our leaders. Sometimes this doesn’t matter; their particular defects don’t bear upon public affairs, or the times are sufficiently placid that it just doesn’t matter that they drink, or play too much poker, or cultivate friends of doubtful character, or whatever.
These are not such times. The President’s ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and “intelligent design.” This is a great pity.