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The "Drink Me" bottle is now empty, its contents having been sent to Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood for testing.

Just finished 'Flashman and the Redskins'.  Now between books and have too many 'good' ones tempting me on the shelf! 

Lol, thanks. Believe me, the paint is much rougher than it looks in the photos. Once I know what bits will actually be showing, I'll have a better idea of what might need sprucing up. The paint job has given me comfort that the colour scheme will work. I want to add some tribal style tatts on him as well. Thanks for commenting hopefully I might get time to work on him this weekend.

[was]

To continue the musical theme I remember listening to Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins and being absolutely convinced  that Billy Corgan was bi.

which *ahem* was fine by me 

Of course i was teenage and hormonal at the time 

I've skimmed the "scientific" report on the testing.  Use of thermal video to gage heat output is problematic.  SCR switched AC input is well known for causing accuracy trouble for common AC power measurement devices.  Why can't simple DC run the resistors, and why not unplug once the device is hot?  Top that with what is hidden about the device and I don't consider the claims credible.

My good lady actually wears a school punctuality medal with her military style outfit.

One of my medals is a school attendance medal..which has a rather splendid image of Queen Victoria on one side..(the side I display, obviously) that I picked up for a couple of quid at a car boot sale.

It has been thoroughly discussed here before.


Chas.

D'oh! Sorry. *Grin* Well, it's still pretty astonishing, ha ha. I usually double-check before sharing but I think that image fried some neurons...

Here's an original WTF for you. A couple of moves ago was into a really small, rural town in BC. I got into a conversation about the differences in crime levels between there and the Vancouver area (where I was moving from) with the clerk at the local 7/11, and she told me this story, illustrating how safe it was.

See, a couple of months prior, they had been robbed. Held up, I think at knife-point. By some teenager who didn't even have a disguise on. In a town of about 2,000 people. When the 7/11 was one of his regular hang-outs.

Yeah, they called the cops on him, but first they called his mum. 

You have to wonder wtf was going through his head that he thought he'd get away with it...

About a year after we moved there, there was a serial gas station robber. He got caught pretty quickly, too. See, one evening, the Super Save (which is the western-most station in town, which has about five gas stations, all along the highway) got knocked over. Naturally they called it in. Half an hour later, the next one in line got knocked over too; they too called it in.

I don't remember if the cops caught on at the third station or at the fourth one, but yeah, they were waiting for him when he got there. Honestly, how do these people manage to tie their shoes in the morning? o_O

a) We're not getting into the "authenticity" argument again, are we?

White PVC sheathed cable and an old-style telegraph keys somehow just don't go together.

But dry-cell batteries and telegraph keys do, so I couldn't rule out an electric trigger either. But it would take some power to release a trigger with that cord pressed against it, and the batteries needed would be heavy on your wrist. You could go with a belt or pack-pack mounted battery pack, but then you would loose the appeal of the self-contained wrist-mounted unit. For that reason, maybe electric should be avoided.

Back to Spider-Man:
In some artists depictions of Peter Parker's web shooter, the wrist button appears to be of the rubber-ball type used in old perfume atomizers and camera shutter remotes. The camera shutter release might be exactly the sort of mechanism required.

There was a recent local event that a very good photographer attended, my crew and I took advantage of the opportunity to get a nice group picture

Excellent picture, you all look fantastic

Grum

The Library of Congress has an optical machine for reading phonograph records and cylinders. They build a high resolution 3D model of the entire disk, then simulate a stylus following the groove to extract the audio. They've been able to recover sound from cracked records that way, reassembling the pieces in the model.

Library of Congress must have a vast collection of weird playback devices; I once found a book describing the library's collection of paper-roll prints of early motion picture films (required for copyrights in those early days) and the machine that was custom-built for viewing those paper films, some of which would be lost if not for that weird paper archive.