Or you could save the $500 and just teach your cat to use the toilet. Here's jazz legend Charles Mingus' method:http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program
I can't make that rolling-R sound in speech, that every language has uses for. I developed a trick to fake it, that I call /The Technique/, involving shaking my head quickly and hard to flabble the lips and tongue just on the R part of a word, which /almost/ sounds right, but it looks funny and makes my brain hurt. I've tried everything. A video titled /How to roll your R's/ turned out to be just a woman facing away from the camera, bending over and rolling her arse, all /ha ha/. So cruel. This has been a source of shame all my life. Why can't I? I don't ever even bring it up anymore, because the other person always goes, "It's easy. You just do /this/," and then they explain how to hold the inside of your mouth and what to do with your tongue and so on, always the same, the thing I've tried and tried and can't do, and then of course they do it to demonstrate, as if. NNnngh!
My thoughts? Since they're all face-down, it might be a cool project to roll everywhere with some sort of deep-seeing device --sonar, maybe; radio; I dunno; doesn't the military have something that blurrily sees through a few inches of stone?-- and map it all and let a computer reassemble the bits into a gallery of the original complete stones, sharpen the edges, apply appropriate mineral texture.
My problem with the situation is, I don't like when knowledge is destroyed. Library of Alexandria, pre-Colombian Central American cultures; Flowers for Algernon, that sort of thing. I don't care about the part where cemeteries eventually vanish, nor that cut materials are reused when they're essentially abandoned. The big offense was killing off and/or driving off all the people in the first place. Leave the stones doing the useful work they're doing now, retrieve the information to keep the full story available, and get on with life.
Same principle as used when blue eye shadow makes off-blue eyes look true blue by association. They do this in grocery stores with orange mesh bags for oranges. Oranges sold this way look ripe and sweet and good through the mesh, when they're not; they're dull and yellow and bitter, you wouldn't buy those otherwise. And you get used to it, so that one day you get a /real/ orange and you're stunned by how good it is. That's not the only trick there. For example, next time you're in the produce section pick up anything of any color and watch it while you move it away from the bin; the color changes, becomes dull. They use special lighting to make fruit and vegetables look attractive. They can't afford to light the whole store with glamorous lights like that, but they don't have to; packages of things can be any color manufacturers choose.
Next, reduce the cheese in cheese to nonaddictive levels. When you buy a pound of cheese, you'd get a rectangular package of water with a single cubic centimeter of cheese bobbing around in it. Whatever kind of cheese you like, so you still have the choice.
I have two laser printers. One is an HP Laserjet 5MP made in 1995 or 1996 (!) that I bought used for $75 in the early (middle?) 2000s. It prints maybe 200-300 5-to-10%-cover pages a month (wall-to-wall 10-or-11-point Helvetica text) so total refill-toner-cartridge and on-sale paper cost is around $50 a year. (I figured it out before and got a different number; but this is right.) It's a brick, it works great, zero maintenance. The other is a relatively new Brother I got, also used, for $25 a couple of years ago. Its rollers are fresh; I use it to print on the blank side of stacks of used paper, so paper's free for that one. It jammed once, I remember. I had to walk to it, open it and take the paper out. I suppose I could just use a monitor and never need paper at all, but I do about eight hours of reading aloud into a microphone per week, and I like printed paper spread out all around me for that.
The latest UFO aliens needed the parts to repair their star drive or ansible or power-toilet, like The Doctor or the Star Trek people or E.T. every once in awhile needing something from a backwards civilization or an older time. Transparent aluminum, umbrella, subway motor bearings, nose-hair clipper, quartz boulder, peppermint oil, whatever.
So they made a tiny video and then reversed the video. That's not running time backward, any more than in the 1940s Isaac Asimov's resublimated thiotimoline actually dissolved an instant before contact with water, leading to faster-than-light communication and winning horse-race bets, nor than I just caused time to go backward to the 1940s by remembering that.
Yet I've been having trouble finding a book from the 1980s (that's about halfway back in time to the 1940s) whose title and author I've forgotten, where the time-travel device is built into a VHS videocassette that you rewind and fast-forward to control. One of the characters is a black man who gets in trouble with the police in the past because of driving a car in a white place (New Jersey) with an attractive white female passenger and, having lost a component of the cassette (I'm fuzzy on that part), everyone gets back to their proper time by somehow using the trylon and perisphere of the New York world fair, which in the story is a secret giant Tesla coil. There's a chase through the World of the Future diorama. The book begins with a jet airplane trip (with a VHS deck in the cockpit), and there's a Russian spy/gangster involved. Hmm.
The best time-travel sound is in /Time Cop/. It's a deep, satisfying BHLOOMP, like a marble dropping into a toilet but slowed down by about eight times. That's very close to what real time travel sounds like. Maybe they really traveled back in time and recorded it. But it was probably the marble thing.
In the early 1980s I had a 1963 Rambler Classic --a beautiful car, full-width bench seat, 3-speed manual transmission, one-barrel carburetor the size of a 3-way lightbulb, four manual side windows and two cigaret-air flip vents, recent turquoise-aqua Earl Scheib paint job. Maybe 25 miles-per-gallon and a giant 20-plus-gallon gas tank, so a month between fillups, and all the critical rust was structural, none of it apparent unless you opened the hood or got underneath or hit a bump. The whole car was just $200, right off the lot. Among its charming features were the windshield wipers that had no electric motor but instead an air-piston like a tiny screen-door opener with a rubber hose that went to a valve on the dashboard and then to a nipple either on the intake manifold or on the very bottom of the carburetor. So when you pulled the valve open the wipers would wipe back and forth at a speed dependent on manifold vacuum. Idling was slowest, and you could speed the wipers up momentarily by gunning the motor, which you were doing anyway because if you turned the wipers on at idle the engine wanted to stall, and it was raining, so.
I drove it for a year until every essential part of it broke down. Even dead the car was beautiful. The neighbor offered me $500 for it. I said, "Are you sure?" "Yeah. Here." He pushed it next to his barn, and he and his wife would go out and sit in it and talk about things.
That's the thing about Ramblers. My current employer used to fly, so he kept cheap old cars with a fresh battery in them in all the little airports nearby the places he had to be. When for health reasons he stopped flying he sold the cars off, including a middle-sixties Rambler Ambassador. A man came all the way from Texas and bought that car and took it away on a trailer to fix up like new because it was identical to the car he and his wife first had sex in back when they were in high school. I just think that's so sweet.
Science has finally discovered why we especially like to eat food that we like. It turns out to have as much to do with how much we like the food as with it being food in the first place. Also, we tend to eat more food that we like, because we like it so much. But that's not just double rewards, is it? It's /four/ times the reward. Ah, the allure of food. So mysterious. And there's also smell involved, not to mention hearing the can opener, and being fueled to stay alive to eat again another day, so /seven or eight/ rewards, then. /Thousands/ of them, if you live long enough. No wonder we are addicted to eating food and suffer so in withdrawal when deprived of it. There's no way off this nightmare treadmill except to not get on in the first place. But it's too late for that now, fellow food-bitches. Hopelessly hooked.
My problem with the situation is, I don't like when knowledge is destroyed. Library of Alexandria, pre-Colombian Central American cultures; Flowers for Algernon, that sort of thing. I don't care about the part where cemeteries eventually vanish, nor that cut materials are reused when they're essentially abandoned. The big offense was killing off and/or driving off all the people in the first place. Leave the stones doing the useful work they're doing now, retrieve the information to keep the full story available, and get on with life.
They do this in grocery stores with orange mesh bags for oranges. Oranges sold this way look ripe and sweet and good through the mesh, when they're not; they're dull and yellow and bitter, you wouldn't buy those otherwise. And you get used to it, so that one day you get a /real/ orange and you're stunned by how good it is.
That's not the only trick there. For example, next time you're in the produce section pick up anything of any color and watch it while you move it away from the bin; the color changes, becomes dull. They use special lighting to make fruit and vegetables look attractive. They can't afford to light the whole store with glamorous lights like that, but they don't have to; packages of things can be any color manufacturers choose.
The other is a relatively new Brother I got, also used, for $25 a couple of years ago. Its rollers are fresh; I use it to print on the blank side of stacks of used paper, so paper's free for that one. It jammed once, I remember. I had to walk to it, open it and take the paper out.
I suppose I could just use a monitor and never need paper at all, but I do about eight hours of reading aloud into a microphone per week, and I like printed paper spread out all around me for that.
Yet I've been having trouble finding a book from the 1980s (that's about halfway back in time to the 1940s) whose title and author I've forgotten, where the time-travel device is built into a VHS videocassette that you rewind and fast-forward to control. One of the characters is a black man who gets in trouble with the police in the past because of driving a car in a white place (New Jersey) with an attractive white female passenger and, having lost a component of the cassette (I'm fuzzy on that part), everyone gets back to their proper time by somehow using the trylon and perisphere of the New York world fair, which in the story is a secret giant Tesla coil. There's a chase through the World of the Future diorama. The book begins with a jet airplane trip (with a VHS deck in the cockpit), and there's a Russian spy/gangster involved. Hmm.
The best time-travel sound is in /Time Cop/. It's a deep, satisfying BHLOOMP, like a marble dropping into a toilet but slowed down by about eight times. That's very close to what real time travel sounds like. Maybe they really traveled back in time and recorded it. But it was probably the marble thing.
I drove it for a year until every essential part of it broke down. Even dead the car was beautiful. The neighbor offered me $500 for it. I said, "Are you sure?" "Yeah. Here." He pushed it next to his barn, and he and his wife would go out and sit in it and talk about things.
That's the thing about Ramblers. My current employer used to fly, so he kept cheap old cars with a fresh battery in them in all the little airports nearby the places he had to be. When for health reasons he stopped flying he sold the cars off, including a middle-sixties Rambler Ambassador. A man came all the way from Texas and bought that car and took it away on a trailer to fix up like new because it was identical to the car he and his wife first had sex in back when they were in high school. I just think that's so sweet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5km09Oav1E
And the One Note Man cartoon:
http://classic.tcj.com/history/worlds-greatest-cartoon/
2. The Colored Fairy Books:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/lang.html