re: furries and plushies: I always wonder about the cleaning bills, and if there are dry cleaners who are spectacularly good at just nodding their heads and cleaning up whatever stains are presented to them.

(not a bad advertising slogan for a dry cleaner: "We don't ask, we just get the spots out.")

Probably yellow and white to match the house. I thought about staining, but that would mean stripping all the paint on the spaceship parts and I want to keep the project as simple as possible.

My first task will be cutting some of the screws on the old part. A bunch of screws broke when I tried to take them out.

Needs more escape chutes.

That leaves more openings for the zombies to get in.

jobma to Aims

My condolences to you and your family, ND.

Forced myself to get up at 8am. Had only been up minutes before a power garden tool started up. It's a constant serenade of power garden tools around here.

(not a bad advertising slogan for a dry cleaner: "We don't ask, we just get the spots out.")

Now I'm imagining a commercial for some sort of plushie detergent. Like they could show two stained plushies, then wash one in Brand X Plushie detergent, and one with New Improved PlushWash or whatever it'd be called. Then there could be scenes of people at a plushie party complaining of dirty plushies or marveling how clean and fresh-smelling the ones washed with PlushWash are....

I'm sure your average dry cleaner ignores a lot of crap every day.

I made a bad call with regards to shoes today. I will be grimacing for a large portion of the day. Hmmph.

I'm sure your average dry cleaner ignores a lot of crap every day.

I wonder if they have one of those crime scene blacklights back there...

"Get the protein remover!"

I'm sure your average dry cleaner ignores a lot of crap every day.

Given Sophia's tales of the things she has to deal with for costumes people wear for a couple of hours, I'm quite sure this is the case.

Thinking about it, I feel better now about all the dog hair. That's the least of their worries.

For the first time ever, a robot plane committed suicide, without any human telling it to.

Darpa: Now We Know Why Our Mach-20 Ship Crashed

The Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 — a 12-foot, 2,000-pound wedge packing a three-stage Minotaur booster — launched without incident from California on April 22. It climbed to the edge of space for a planned 30-minute, 4,000-mile jaunt toward Kwajalein in the middle of the Pacific.

But nine minutes into the flight, controllers on the ground lost contact with the HTV-2. The culprit, according to Darpa’s Engineering Review Board? “Higher-than-predicted yaw, which coupled into roll, thus exceeding the available control capability at the time of the anomaly.”

In other words, the HTV wobbled too much. Rather than risking an out-of-control flight, the bot self-destructed. On the bright side, according to a chipper Darpa release, the failed test “demonstrated successfully the first-ever use of an autonomous flight-termination system.”

"You're not a dancer here. You're an elf. Wear underwear."