Stuff / zoo

[jazzfish]

The Tell-tale Heart: eerie.

My day gig: "The photo to the left will link you to an amazing video (~1.5 Mb) of a ½ million volt switch failing to interrupt the arc when operating." --yowza. Ten seconds of rather scary video. Worth having the sound on for the vocal at the end.

[both via baranoouji. fuzzyamy wins the point for Best Recommendation Until I Check Out The Other Ones.]

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Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday were rehearsal 11-6. Today was sort of rehearsal. We met at ten (closer to ten-thirty because Chris the actor's alarm failed to function) and tripped out to the Mill Mountain Zoo to watch the llamas, the monkeys, and the people. (It's a weird play.) The plan was to perform guerrilla theatre [which, as near as I can tell, involves doing something vaguely weird in order to observe how people react when you freak them out], see the animals, and then have rehearsal on the amphitheatre at the zoo. First part failed due to a lack of other zoo attendees, doubtless owing much to the fact that it was around three degrees[1] out there. Second was moderately successful. The llama was eating, so zie didn't spit. The monkeys (macaques) were pretty cool, though, as were the fishing cat and wolverine. Third was aborted upon discovering the smallness of the amphitheatre stage.

So instead we went to the mall to discomfit people. I walked backwards, and got a few weird looks (including, according to my partner Charity, one little kid whose head turned to follow me as I went past, and then his mother did a double-take). Charity clapped at random times. The people who noticed went out of their way to avoid walking past her; most didn't notice.

Then back to PAB for more rehearsal, about which I'll bitch at some point. Gah.

Oh, and I no longer feel socially inferior to my castmates. I came in on Thursday morning and they were discussing The Real World and how it so wasn't real. At all. Like, that one girl, she was so fake.
I think my intellectual snobbery is justified here. I shall continue to hold myself aloof from their trivial pastimes. 'Cos, you know, bitching about how Jackson cut out the Scouring of the Shire and thus rendered the trilogy devoid of any sort of emotional closure is tons better.

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[1] Or thirty-eight, for those of you stuck on the ridiculous antiquated temperature scale devised by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit.

Comments

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

When were the two scales devised, respectively?
Why did Fahrenheit choose 32 and 212?
Why don't we all go by the Kelvin scale instead? :)

[jazzfish]

1. Fahrenheit was 1724; Celsius / centigrade, 1742.
[source: inventors.about.com]

2. Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope tells this way better than I can. Short version: 212 was wholly arbitrary, 96 was supposed to be human body temperature, and 0 was colder than it gets in Denmark.
[source: The Straight Dope]

3. Because all most of us will ever need is numbers between about -20 and 40 C for weather, or up to around 250 C for cooking, and we may as well use only one or two digits where we can. :)
[Alternately, "Because Americans are stupid gits."]

[scathach.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you clarified. My body has an ingrained knowledge of what three degrees feels like, and I promise you, thiry-eight is shorts weather by comparison.

You know how the Aleuts have two hundred words for snow? In Minnesota, we can actually feel variations of cold. I didn't believe it in 1997, but I do now. I can tell you if it's above or below freezing. (That's the easy one.) I can tell you in about ten minutes if it's above or below ten degrees, although that gets a little muddled when the wind's blowing more than about ten mph. I'll admit that once it drops below zero, actual temperature, my nerves and the sesory cortex in my brain go numb, and I just register cold.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Arbitrary.. how clever! Could've ended so much worse for the math, really--at least it came out at a reasonably straightforward 1.8x. :)


And yes, Americans = stupid gits. ;)