From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 13:14:30 MDT
On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Oh YES! Always have. I hate ft-lbs and
> all that. Especially, ugh, slugs. (Whatever
> they are.)
>
Oooh, oooh, a question I can finally answer.
Slugs are these really nasty *slimey* little vermin
(overgrown worms really -- but one can at least use
worms to catch fish) from 2-5 inches long that like to
hang out in the boxes that allow access to my sprinkler
system. They made the resurrection of my sprinkler system
this year (broken valve due to freezing damage a number
of years ago -- a long story I won't bore you with)
a distinctly unpleasant exercise.
I got even with them though -- I left the covers to
the boxes open drying out their normal habitat. The
problem was that *then* they started migrating out of my
yard. That made walking down walkway to enter my house a
dicey exercise at dusk or later. They are *definitely*
something you wouldn't want to step on.
Lee -- if you like, I might still be able to find one or
more slugs still lurking in my yard. I could box
them up (I'm fairly sure they haven't been classified
as hazmats) and ship them to you. Now, I will claim
a complete lack of knowledge as to what you did with
them after you received them. While I think they
are currently still considered primitive organisms
one never knows when the animal rights activists
will make slug baiting a felony offense.
If you aren't interested, then I could always ship them
to Anders (since he was kind enough to recently send me
his snail mail address). In his winter climate it seems
likely that they would be sufficiently immobile that
even someone with as little firearms training as myself
ought to be able to disassemble them with a shotgun.
This does of course bring up (at least in my mind) the
problem of programmable self-assembling utility fog.
Utility foglets programmed to behave as slug sub-elements.
Even when blown apart by a shotgun blast, they seek out
each other and reassemble themselves. Makes Mickey's
adventures with the broom in Fantasia seem like a warm-up
exercise.
This odd little letter is just one reason why you should
*always* be nice to people on the extropian list. Its
not advisable to test how creative they can be (if they
happen to have one of those hormonal takeover events
that makes them annoyed with oneself).
Robert
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