Why were the butcher the baker and the candle stick maker in a tub together??

I just asked Jake, my 15 year old & he said... the butcher wanted to beat his meat, the baker wanted his buns hard & the candlestick maker wanted to wax his rod! So much for asking a 15 year old! lol

Anyway......

One night amid a fearsome storm, three friends sat chatting in a pub. The wind was howling through the trees & the moon had gone into hiding amidst the dark clouds circling fast overhead. The friends were getting ready to face the treachery outside when they heard an almighty crash come from the back room! With their coats half on they ran to see what the commotion was & found the landlord & his good lady pinned to the floor by a huge boulder. They looked up & saw an old oak, that had stood in the village for years, had come crashing through this part of the roof. The rain was lashing through the branches & soaking the faces of the helpless couple as they looked up, terrified of their fate. The water sloshed around the ankles of the three friends as they tried in vain to help the unfortunate ones, a river bank must have burst. Damn, that was all they needed! Herculean strength was all that would be able to move the tree that was on the boulder that was pinning them to the ground! Who would save them! They needed a miracle & they needed one fast!

As anyone who's anyone already knows, miracles usually come when you need one & all of a sudden....*poof* up popped Fuckup The Fairy! Now as fairies went, Fuckup was very unusual in the way she went about granting her wishes. Her magic wand had given up the ghost several centuries before, so she had resorted to finger twiddling & farting at the same time, which seemed to work quite well, except....it wasn't always the most accurate method of delivering spells. The three friends stood back in amazement as Fuckup started whispering under her breath & twiddling her fingers towards the unfortunate couple on the floor. Loud sounds were also emanating from the small fairies nether regions, but the three friends didn't think it was the time to say anything or burst out laughing somehow. Despite the drama unfolding all around, smirks could still be seen on their faces when the moonlight poked it's head through the swirling clouds. It was scary the way this fairy worked!

Within minutes, the couple were free of the boulder & trying to stand, despite having injured themselves in the fall. The three friends were stood staring drop-jawed at Fuckup, who explained that she was actually trying to think of butterflies so the tree & boulder could flutter away in the storm. She had instead, succeeded in making rather a mess with the raw meat, dough & candle wax...She blushed crimson in the stormlight 'bloody brain & it's stupid crushes' she thought, trying to regain her composure & failing miserably in the midst of the three handsome hunks!

The injured couple retired to the upstairs undamaged part of the pub to fix their wounds & Fuckup decided she had better go before she made even more of a klutz of herself! The three friends, by this time soaked to the skin & up to their thighs in floodwater, tried to work out the best way to get home. They went to the front door just in time to see a tub float past. Clambering in, they sailed off down the village street, luckily in the right direction...good job they all lived close to one another! What were they going to tell their wives about Fuckup? They all decided not to say anything, who would believe them if they mentioned a farting fairy & had just come from the pub!?

This is why I think the butcher, the baker & the candlestick maker were all in the tub together, it was after the pub & before the rotten potato!

A little while ago we froze a packet of crumpets. At the time, the sealed plastic packet seemed to contain a lot of air.

A little while ago we froze a packet of crumpets. At the time, the sealed plastic packet seemed to contain a lot of air, but after four months in our freezer it had contracted tightly against the crumpets, which had also shrunk. After two more months at room temperature, the whole package appeared to have shrunk still further, though with no sign of mould or decay.The ingredients are listed as flour, water, yeast, raising agents, E450, E500, salt, sugar, preservative, calcium propionate. What's
going on?

^^^^That's the full comment^^^^

Firstly, EEEWWWWW! Who keeps a packet of pre-frozen crumpets for 2 months? If I'd done that there's no way I'd announce it to the world! You can bet the world reads this too....because it's mine & I'm amazing!

Anyway, my first thought on this would be chemical reaction....that somehow the yeast reacted with the E500 (sodium bicarbonate), but they're both rising agents that work independently of one another. Yeast likes a warm environment & E500 doesn't really care I don't think. Water is quite high on the list of ingredients so maybe that has something to do with it too?? Hmmmm.... high water content usually means mould though.......So, maybe there's a reaction with something that sucks out the water, preserves the crumpets by drying them out & uses up any air in the packet in the process making it constrict round the crumpets.....(these dots are my mind working, each one is 500 brain ticking overs).

What uses oxygen up.........sec, need to Bing......Yeast metabolizes sugar to produce carbon dioxide and ethanol, also known as alcohol, in the production of wines, beers and other spirits, but also in the production of bioethanol:
C6H12O6 → 2 CO2 + 2 C2H5OH

Biogas typically refers to a gas produced by the biological breakdown of organic matter when there's no oxygen. Foods packed in air don't store as well as in oxygen free gasses. This is because air contains oxygen which oxidizes many of the compounds in food. Bacteria, one of several agents which make food go rancid also needs oxygen to grow. Food storage companies have a couple of different processes for removing the oxygen:

1. Displacing the oxygen: This is done by purging out all the air in the product with an inert gas. Nitrogen is almost always used because it is the most inert gas known. People doing their own packing occasionally use dry ice which gives off carbon dioxide gas, and probably works just about as well.
2. Absorb the oxygen: Oxygen absorber packets do just that. Air contains about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, leaving about 1% for the other gasses. If the oxygen is absorbed, what remains is 99% pure nitrogen in a partial vacuum.

OK, now I've looked into it a bit more I reckon it has to do with the packaging. If there's no oxygen, there can't be mould because it can't grow. Also, if an oxygen sucking gas was used to package the crumpets, some of the water content would disappear as well...any leftover moisture found in the crumpets could interact over time with the E500 and create a small amount of carbon dioxide gas too.

Right, to answer the question, I think perhaps the gas used to pack the crumpets sucks the moisture out of them & causes the packet to constrict (perhaps because of the extreme temperature) or, there's a carbon dioxide producing reaction in there somewhere. I'm NOT a rocket scientist though as I keep mentioning :p

P.S. Stray, I'd thump him for insinuating you're not good at chucking things away. He probably hid the packet somewhere just so he could do an experiment! lol

Why do roadworks put up signs saying "Wait here at the red light" when that is what you do at traffic lights normally anyway?

Hiya Bronwyn :)

There's usually a sign that accompanies temporary traffic lights telling drivers 'when red light shows wait here'. This is used instead of the white line at a regular set of traffic lights. It's illegal to pass the white line for any reason when the light is on red. A driver should also stop at the line/sign on an orange or amber light & can only go through the lights when they're on green if it's safe to.

When temporary traffic lights are used it also usually means there are roadworks & the workmen have maybe had to make the road alot narrower. To allow drivers in both directions pass, the sign is normally placed as far to one side as possible so there's a big enough gap.

So, to answer your.... Ok, Bronwyn has a question:

Why do roadworks put up signs saying "Wait here at the red light" when that is what you do at traffic lights normally anyway?


The sign telling drivers to 'wait here' is the same as the white line in the road at regular traffic lights. If someone passes the sign, it means they've broken the law if the light is on red & that's how the police know whether to send them a ticket or not :)

P.S. The police stopped me the other day & told me I'd jumped the traffic lights & I said 'Don't be daft, they're over 12 feet tall!' he he he:)

If the fireflies were so nice and taught the bloke to dance n stuff, why did he then keep them prisoner in a jar rather than let them go home??

I swear Emrys should have been a cat.

Anyway - if the fireflies were so nice and taught the bloke to dance n stuff, why did he then keep them prisoner in a jar rather than let them go home??
That's the whole comment.

Personally, I think this bloke was very selfish! But only if you take the lyrics of the song by Owl City literally (sorry, momentarily distracted....I'm such a Gleek! Puck is soooo cute in this one! lol...Ok, I might be drooling but I'm back).

I don't think they're meant to be taken literally, he's a young adult that can't cope with the stuff going on round him. It's making him unable to sleep, his head's in turmoil & he's sick of lying there wanting sleep to take him to a nicer place. I think everything's going too fast in a kind of 'stop the world I want to get off' kinda way but when he tries to get off (go to sleep), all the demons in his head take over & he needs the light to send them away. Hence the fireflies. He may have memories of fireflies from childhood that he thinks about & until he does, sleep is impossible.

The fact he wants the comfort of childhood is evident in the video setting, it's full of toys and gadgets that young people would love. Many of us experience problems with sleeping when times get rough, I know I do (although to be fair, I don't sleep much at night anyway)...He needs the comfort of the light from the open door, to soothe him when he has bad dreams (as children do) perhaps the light 'dancing round the room' (disco ball hanging by a thread) is actually his 'fireflies' and the 'jar' is a place in his head he goes to when even sleep doesn't provide the goods, his 'Happy Place' (I'm pretty sure that light on a disco ball would look like fireflies when your eyes are closed). The fireflies are probably his good childhood memories and he sees them when he shuts his eyes & the light dances. Even when all seems lost he keeps just a bit of his childhood in his head to relate to when things get too much.

Taken literally not letting them go & keeping them in a jar is a bit cruel. Keeping something away from loved ones just because it makes you calm & happier isn't a very nice thing to do. Nobody likes goodbyes, they generally hurt & are upsetting but we can't hold onto living things just to satisfy a need in us. But clinging to a bit of childhood to comfort us to sleep isn't a bad thing :)

If curiosity killed the cat, what did the cat want to know? :p

Well everything obviously!

But did you know 'satisfaction brought it back'?

'Curiosity killed the cat' basically means 'Mind your own business. Being nosy, inquisitive & getting yourself involved in unnecessary things can lead to problems'.

Apparently, 'The Gods fashioned Hell for the inquisitive' as well (Saint Augustine AD 397), I can't imagine somehow that Hell is full of cats, they aren't evil, just curious, so it seems a bit unfair that they should all be sent somewhere like that. Mind you, cats generally like a nice warm patch to curl up in so it might be fitting really! I suppose being in Heaven or Hell is pretty much the same for a cat, they don't have the same kind of emotions as humans as far as anyone can tell, so it's not likely they'd be punished for anything. Perhaps they rub themselves up against the perverted evildoers legs & trip them over. Instead of the rack, they get the cats!

Cat's are meant to be morbidly curious, they need nine lives as opposed to the normal one, because they get into so many scrapes in their quest for knowledge.

Take Freyon, little skinny black tomcat (male). He loved exploring so much that he got into quite a few scrapes over the years, he strutted about all over the neighbourhood, tantalising the ladies with his shiny black coat & full set of whiskers. He was quite gregarious when he wanted to be & used to invite other animals home for tea...he could be seen quite regularly trying to drag some poor unsuspecting squirrel through the catflap! He always got damaged in the process, but somehow this just added to his charm.

He got stuck on several occasions too, once in the school next door during the summer holidays. The workmen had been in fixing things while there were no kids about & Freyon decided he'd like to look for the same reason. He'd tried to go in during school time but the bloody caretaker kept bringing him home and of course there were the kids...bleurgh!

So anyway, he found an open door & in he trotted. He must have been having quite alot of fun because he completely forgot what the time was & pretty soon the workmen packed up & left. He was shut in with no water, no food & nobody to rub against! Over the course of the next two weeks Freyon regularly set off the school alarms, the caretaker was called on each occasion & the humans that Freyon had been allowing to feed him, were fretting that he'd come to a grisly fate! Not so.

One day, out he trotted. He was no worse for having been shut in a school for a couple of weeks. Not even skinnier! The alarm bells thankfully stopped & everyone went back to enjoying their summer.

Freyon eventually met his match in the vicar next door. He poisoned him. Said it was an accident & that he was dreadfully sorry, truth of it was....he didn't like cats in his garden. This could have been because of the Hell connection, the irony being, he was an evil old bastard & I hope he's down there now with Freyon (& his brother Flumpuss, who got runover several years before in his quest to see what was on the other side of the road!) wreaking vengeance on him! ha ha go Freyon & Flumpuss!!

So, in answer to your question: The cat wanted to know everything because they just naturally do!

The phrase was first used by a playwright called Ben Jonson in 1598 & later pinched by William Shakespeare in 'Much Ado About Nothing'. It didn't actually use the word 'curiosity' until around the end of the 19th century, previous to that it had been 'care'. The ending 'Satisfaction brought him back' wasn't added until 1933 & still isn't very well known.

Not bad I went easy on you didnt want you researching all night into something just yet.. I might though :P Althought to be fair you didnt answer

Not bad I went easy on you didnt want you researching all night into something just yet.. I might though :P
Althought to be fair you didnt answer about space telescope per say just mentioned briefly about hubble but still I will leave you be for a bit just yet :)
That's the whole comment, I think someone's taking the 'rocket scientist' thing & forgetting to put the 'NOT' in front of it :p! (It's the first one so I have to answer it, after this will someone PLEASE get me off the subject!!).

OK, space telescopes... to clarify, all telescopes are designed to look at space. But what is 'Space'? As early as the 17th century philosophical questions were being asked as to what Space actually was. Some thought it was absolute, it existed whether any matter was in it or not. Others thought it was just the gaps between matter. In the 18th century, scientists began realising that Space could very well be curved too, as opposed to flat obviously. This is the theory that modern scientists use, they'd have to get to the edges of space to prove it, but it fits in better with all modern theories. There are also different levels of 'Space'. Interstellar Space is 15 billion kilometers away but 'Space' (outside Earths ozone layer but still within the suns atmosphere) is only 200,000 kilometers away. Some might argue about that but I figure it should at least be out of the Earths atmosphere & past the ozone layer (90km up + 50km ozone layer approx & you'll just about be in Space).

Right so, the first telescopes appeared in The Netherlands in 1608. they were used for 'seeing faraway things as though nearby'. They were later improved upon by Scientists such as Galileo, he didn't invent it, just took the idea and ran in the right direction with it. 100 years ago, The United States began building giant reflecting telescopes. The 100 inch Mount Wilson Reflector discovered the Universe was expanding. This expansion was named 'Hubbles Law' after the astronomer Edwin Hubble who designed & built the Telescope. This expansion of the Universe proved the 'Big Bang Theory' and gave astronomers a factual way to determine the age of the universe. HUGE groundbreaking stuff that had anyone even remotely interested in Space incredibly excited, as you can imagine! All this happened in 1929.

'How old is the Cosmos?' was the next question that needed to be answered & the Astronomers knew they couldn't answer that using the telescopes they already had. A new one had to be made that could see past the Earths atmosphere. Plans for the Hubble telescope (named after Edwin Hubble who died in 1953) were being talked about as early as the 1950s (Hermann Oberth wrote about orbiting telescopes in the 1920s but technology hadn't got there yet) but production didn't start on it until the 1970s. Hubble was launched on April 20th 1990. It has quite a small mirror (96 inches) compared to the land based telescopes of the time (200+ inches), but because it was designed to orbit, this didn't hinder the amazing images it was able to send back to Earth. The smallest thing Hubble can pinpoint is still too big for it to prove the Moon landings happened in the 1960s, but that would be a waste of time & money anyway. Who would want to look at something just to prove a point, when you could be exploring the whole of the Cosmos!??

A new Space telescope called The Webb (or 'The James Webb Telescope' to give it it's full title) is actually in production at the moment & scheduled for launch in 2014. This telescope will be used mostly in the infra red range of the electromagnetic spectrum (measuring the electromagnetic radiation an object gives off or absorbs to determine the size/shape of it), but will also have a bit of visible range.

This is an endless topic that is pretty fascinating. I've tried to briefly explain what I've learnt, I haven't gone into the mechanics of Hubble or how space telescopes work (there are others but these are mostly observatories & instruments to measure matter. Hubble is one of the largest & is the most well known of all space telescopes) but you can go & look that up yourself lol. All I can say is 'Roll on 2014!'

ok, now will someone please change the bloody subject! The answer to the previous question was....'No!' (You didn't actually ask me to explain about Space telescopes 'per say' :P)

P.S. Herschel Space Observatory just found a baby star! :)

"Could a space telescope be pointed at the site of the moon landings to prove that humans really did land there?"

"Could a space telescope be pointed at the site of the moon landings to prove that humans really did land there?" or are we all doomed to consipracy theorists saying it never happened and America just wasted a load of money to fool the world?!

Ok, that's the full question & it wasn't as difficult to answer as I thought it would be! Phew! (I should be able to converse with some seriously geeky people after researching this lot! lol)

Anyway, I don't really think what you do or achieve is ever gonna be enough for some people, there are always gonna be chin rubbing doubters with 'pull the other one' expressions on their faces. That said, there's alot of Independent evidence to support the claims of NASA on this one (evidence that didn't come from NASA or the US Government or from the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theorists) and plans have been suggested to use telescopes to examine the site of the Apollo Moon Landing from as far back as 2002.

There is a telescope capable of such a thing, well kind of... it's not one but 4 optical telescopes grouped together & called 'The Very Large Telescope' (wonder who thought of that name, although, even that's not as bad as the OWL! lol....look it up!) it's supported by 14 European countries (ESO) & based in Chile. This telescope is capable of seeing between the headlights of a car if it was positioned on the moon. Previous attempts to look at the moon from the Earth have resulted in distorted pictures owing to the Earths atmosphere but The VLT has infra red features to prevent all that. It's images are up to 3 times sharper than those received from Hubble (space telescope), even though Hubble is actually in space & therefore not affected by the Earths atmosphere at all. So in all a pretty snazzy piece of equipment (I was seriously gobsmacked at the stuff this thing can do....looking at moon Landing sites seems a bit of a waste really lol).

This is actually pretty interesting & I'm going to read a bit more about it before I go to sleep.... Damn you Jason (Strays lol)....I'm interested now!

Right, so the answer to your question is: No. As far as my extensive research goes, a 'space' telescope can't be pointed at the site of the Apollo Moon Landings to disprove the conspiracy theorists. The smallest thing the Hubble Telescope can see is just under 100 meters and flags aren't that big. But, the VLT can (I couldn't find anything to say it actually has been though). There is also the independent evidence however, so being 'doomed to conspiracy theorists' isn't really necessary at all, unless you want to be of course.

Not an ounce of geek! N'night!