More Game of Thrones hilarity:

Lollers @ the stats scrolling along the bottom

https://i.imgur.com/KH6RBie.mp4

 

That is just as shocking now as it was when it originally happened. I was working in London at University College when the Prof came in and said "one of my old students, living now in New York has just emailed - planes have crashed into the twin towers and one has collapsed; I thought it was a bad joke, until I checked on the web".

No more work got done. All the the business tower blocks in London were evacuated in case we were a target too (given our close ties to the US). As I traveled home, there was total silence on the underground - everyone was kind of in shock about what was happening in New York (and the attack on the Pentagon, and Flight 93).

I'd lost track of the fact that it was 16 years ago.

This was my facebook status yesterday:

Quote

You want a real 9/11 memory? I slept through the whole thing. What woke me up was a call from my mother. I still had a ca. 1978 rotary phone next to my bed with an acoustic ringer. She told me what happened. I still remember my immediate reaction ("this has been a long time coming, we've been lucky to escape a real terrorist attack in this country for as long as we have,") which I still believe to this day. The world being on fire, I still had to run some errands. I ran into my friend Stax (Steve) outside of Stop & Shop. We were both kind of dazed. I made a joke about him letting lose a huge fart in NYC. That was exactly his kind of humor. It was a coping mechanism. We both knew we were fucked from that point forward.
I saw a special mid day edition of the local paper with a huge splash page of the towers on fire. At home, I use RealPlayer to connect to the CNN stream of ground zero. I knew a trick to making RP appear in a borderless, always-on-top window. I put it at the top right corner of my monitor and left it running for two full days. They didn't run a single commercial.
It's been kind of downhill since then.
 

This was my friend's comment on it:

Quote

 I lost a coworker that day. He was on the second plane to hit, United flight 175, the one that was captured on cameras from eleven different angles, the plane that they kept using to illustrate the horror of the attacks 24/7 for months. Every day on practically every channel, I got to watch my buddy die over and over again.

There are 9/11 conspiracy theories, and then there are conspiracy theories. There still those who talk about Tower 7, or that whole "melting point of steel" talking point. I love discussions that start out when I begin debunking those points, then am told that I'm "ignorant" and I should "do my research". And I tell them I have more than a passing interest in the matter, and that I've done professional metal work. As to the orchestrations of the hijackings themselves, that's a little weirder to me.

Through the months that followed, I became more and more certain that the knee-jerk reactions, lighting nationalism, and anti-Middle-Eastern racism that followed was pretty much precisely the opposite of what my coworker would have wanted. It catalyzed the divide of this country.

 

http://www.ibtimes.com/uranus-opens-closes-every-day-let-out-planets-solar-wind-study-finds-2558234?amp=1

Science with a sense of humor!

Totally inappropriate parrot is totally inappropriate.

 

Well, when in the Bay Area ... 

Only in South Africa!

 

Thanks, Vihart was one of my fav YouTubers. I either forgot or missed this one.

This is cool as shit.