Of course, they also say that:

Odds of a successful redemption of this offer are not calculable by traditional means.....

"Water on Mars." Now, those are words to conjure with.

MKK

* * *

I suspect I'm a little more cynical about this than TNH.

A more genuine enthusiasm for space than Bush? Yes, I can buy that, but the wording of the rules pretty much eliminate any chance that the shrimp will be given out.

As for the food:

I went to LJS occasionally when I lived in Pittsburgh. There was one across the river, in the wonderfully shabby Homestead neighborhood.
I justified going to a fast food joint by the fact that it was Sea Food, which we all know is good for you.

Then, on the way back from Long Island, I bought a LJS crispy wrap. It was beyond awful. I tossed it out the car window and never went to a LJS again. If I hadn't been busy finishing my thesis I would have written such a letter . . .

Maybe I'll forgive them for that wrap if they do another promotion based on Europa's hidden oceans.

I take the saucer to Las Vegas for one quiet weekend to myself, and return to discover that the Orbital Defense and Light Opera Company has not only hit Dejah's drawers (as we like to say), but owing to a cost-plus outsourcing problem we are entirely out of Illudium Q-36 space modulators.

And now I find that one of your notorious pirates is arming the citizenry with giant crustaceans. We have been monitoring your news programs for years, you know. We remember Gojira tai Ebirah, and it WILL NOT WORK, do you understand? You will take away our radium rifles when you pry them from our three short fingers!

Earth creatures make me so petulant sometimes.

Well, yes and no.

Thing is, it seems that the parent corporation behind Long John Silver's (an outfit called Yum Brands) also owns several other "quick service" chains -- notably, they also have the restaurant side of the A&W Root Beer brand.

And they are experimenting with a strategy of "multibranding", such that the newest outlets are combinations. I'm reliably informed that there are at least two combination A&W/Long John Silver's restaurants in the greater Portland (OR)area -- one way the heck over in Gresham on the east side, and one in Tigard on the outskirts of the west side, but it takes an insane amount of spelunking to find even one of these listed anywhere on the Web. (There are also a handful of standalone A&W franchises in Oregon that the national Web site seems not to know about, mostly but not exclusively buried deep in small towns.)

So I have somewhere to go to collect my Giant Shrimp should the offer come through.

[This is the Second Wave. Long John Silver's made one prior foray into the Portland area a number of years ago -- I visited one in Portland's Hollywood District that's long since morphed into a Burger King, and there were a couple of others. But those withered and died for want of market saturation -- Skipper's was stronger back then.]

first an offer for giant shrimp, and then the Spirit rover suffers from a mysterious breakdown...

The correlation is obvious!! The giant Martian shrimp of the discovered Martian ocean have tampered with the rover! And they have also eaten the Beagle 2! Long John Silvers--what secret message are they encoding to the giant shrimp of the universe in this message? Oh the possiblities!

This is also remarkably successful marketing. They have just created a huge reservoir of warm feeling in me towards them, and I'd never even heard of them before.

MKK

http://www.gamersnook.com/blog/archives/002018.html#002018

It's too funny.

These aren't mere Jumbo Shrimp - they're Giant Mutant Shrimp.

When you think about it that way, the Mars tie-in starts to make sense.

I used the Store Locator on the website:

http://clients.mapquest.com/ljsilvers/mqlocator

I'd give you the result URL but it's way long.

The towns: Tracy, Pinole, Vallejo, Watsonville, Fairfield.

I'm in Paula's fix: Deep fat fried doesn't go down well with me after years of:

seafood := {'chilled shrimp'; 'broiled salmon'; 'pickled herring in cream sauce'; 'sushi / sashimi'};

But hushpuppies . . . I'd forgotten about those.

Chances are you could make them. Easy, cheap, but messy.

If you uncurl the tail before you measure, that length wouldn't be too unusual.

There's not much point in describing this moment if you haven't seen the movie. Though I'll bet Silver's could sell an awful lot of shrimp with it.

MKK

There's a chance that, under the dust on the Martian surface, there's very salty brine.

Brine Shrimp on Mars? Alien Sea-Monkeys!

John M. Ford's Heinlein/Marvin the Martian/Godzilla pastiche VERY funny!

I hate trying to debug a system over the phone via the customer, but at least that takes place on the same planet, without a time lag. Imagine what it'll be like when we're trying to debug systems on the Jupiter moons via a flaky Telnet connection from Earth! (Come to think of it, response times on the old college VAX approached that lag when everyone was compiling at once.)

Stefan: I'm afraid the "wonderfully shabby" neighborhood of Homestead is now the site of the shiniest, sprawliest faux urban shopping development in the Pittsburgh area. Right where the Homestead strike took place, yet. I'm not sure whether the LJS is still there.

The locator puts the closest LJS way south. Maybe the place is too posh for the chain, and sports a Red Lobster instead.

But, AHA! I used the store locator to find a tiny, isolated neighborhood I wandered into once. Three streets surrounded by slagheap and river, accessible by a single bridge. Ettwein and Blackmore streets . . . how wonderful. I was worried I'd imagined it.

But even if there aren't any Long Johns in Homestead, there are certainly many others in the Pittsburgh area.

Using the site Stefan used to look 'em up for Mary Kay, I don't find an LJS listed in Homestead per se, but they're in the nearby communities of Duquesne (where Mom was born), Brentwood, and West Mifflin, which most Pittsburghers know as "where Kennywood is".

Christopher Davis, for those who've never been there, can you describe this amazing place?

And didn't Ivar buy a gorgeous old skyscraper in Seattle, or am I confusing two different stories?

Must start going to Norwescons again...

Stefan, they've set up stiff requirements for "ocean", but I don't doubt their enthusiasm is real. And what if they do wind up having to pay off? All it means is that every person who wants to collect will have to ascertain the location of his local LJS and go there. That's pure gold.

Jo, we'll happily take you to one, if we're ever traveling together. Mary Kay's right about the hushpuppies. And since the chain's theme is merely piratical, you'll be spared the effect Maureen Speller produced in stateside Olde Englysshe-themed fish & chips places: the minute they heard her accent, they started apologizing.

Glen, if they're the same species of giant shrimp I keep seeing in the salad bar of the deli across the street from Tor, they're a new version of styro-crab with superior detailing.

JVP, Ivar did indeed buy a cool old-fashioned skyscraper in Seattle, and he flew a big Japanese fish kite from the top, too.

Haven't you always wanted a dwarf mammoth? We could keep him in the same office area as the Tesla Coil and the Van de Graaff Generator. When the weather was fine, we could take him for outings in the Tor zeppelin, which is currently moored on to of the Flatiron Building.

And the trial ballon, for many many reasons, isn't a ballon. It'll now be an ongoing program.

If you're going to shoot at targets for faults, ya really need to know who you should actually be shooting at.

The mere thought of such things made me get up and go re-read the collected Volume 1, and now I'm late for work. I blame all of you.

Not to mention the numerous bags of JPL "Lucky Peanuts."

US Senator Rushes to Hubble's Defense, by Brian Berger
WASHINGTON -- The Hubble Space Telescope's staunchest congressional
protector is urging NASA to reconsider its decision to curtail any
further servicing of the 14-year-old observatory.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she was "shocked and surprised" by
NASA's decision, announced Jan. 16, to terminate what would have been
the fifth and final Hubble servicing mission.
In a Jan. 21 letter to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, Mikulski, the
ranking minority member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that
oversees NASA's budget, asked the space agency chief to reconsider his
decision. Mikulski also asked O'Keefe to appoint an independent panel of
outside experts to assess all the ins and outs of conducting another
space shuttle mission to Hubble.
She also is calling on NASA to continue all preparations for the
servicing mission until Congress has a chance to weigh in.
"Hubble has become the most successful NASA program since Apollo,"
Mikulski wrote. "It cannot be terminated prematurely with the stroke of
a pen without a thorough and rigorous review while planning, preparation
and training activities continue."
Maryland is home to two major Hubble facilities, the Space Telescope
Science Institute in Baltimore and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt. Mikulski is the most senior Democrat on the Senate
Appropriations VA-HUD and independent agencies subcommittee, which must
approve NASA's budget each year.
Until recently, NASA had planned to visit Hubble one last time --
possibly as soon as 2006 -- to change out instruments and replace its
batteries and gyroscopes with the intent of keeping the telescope in
service until its heir apparent, the James Webb Space Telescope is up
and operating. That telescope, now in development, is scheduled to be
launched around 2011.
NASA Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld, one of the last astronauts to
visit Hubble, said conducting the Hubble servicing mission without
violating the safety mandates issued in the wake of the 2003 Space
Shuttle Columbia accident would have required the development of
potentially costly on-orbit shuttle inspection and repair techniques not
otherwise needed. Because a shuttle visiting the Hubble could not reach
the international space station in the event of a spacecraft emergency,
Grunsfeld said NASA would have needed a second shuttle on the launch pad
and ready to go in case a rescue was required.
Although a shuttle mission appears to be out of the question in light
of NASA's plans to retire the fleet by 2010, the Hubble community is not
taking the decision to scrap the servicing mission lying down.
Steve Beckwith, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute,
said a tiger team has been established to investigate essentially any
and all ideas for prolonging Hubble's life in light of NASA's decision.
"We're in the mode of pursuing every wacky concept out there," Beckwith
said.

Me, I love Skipper's, which is only in the Pacific Northwest as far as I know (though they did have a franchise in Arizona some years ago) - and I'll be in Seattle on extended business beginning in a couple or three weeks. Mmmmm.

And Ivar's too. Mmmmmmmm.

MKK

*okay, except for Captain Jack Sparrow. That's allowed, isn't it? Mmm.

Sob. They were much better than LJS. Of course either would be better than H. Salt . . .

Giant shrimp I can get locally. Now if they put Old One chowder on the menu... Them's good grokkin'.

Anne loved the story, so I told her about the "Free giant shrimp from the oceans of Mars" thread.

"They'll have a hard time delivering," she says.

Ever prone to huffiness, I explain, "Well, the freeness of the giant shrimp is from, in the sense of causally arising from, the oceans of Mars...

"That is to say, conclusive evidence of oceans on Mars...

"Or, perhaps, Mars-related ocean activities...."

At which we invoke the twenty-first century version of Godwin's law, and so to bed. I must admit, I'm under the influence of Patricia Marx's "Boswell's Life of Jackson" in this week's New Yorker. "When a boy, he was already fond of other children, and, as you know, he maintained his fondness for them into middle age." Recommended.

More on Ivar Haglund from HistoryLink. There's more than just selling fish and "Keep Clam" to Ivar, and I wouldn't want folks to miss out on his folk-singing background, or the Fourth of Jul-Ivar.

(Meanwhile, is any enterprising energy utility going to give away natural gas in honour of the newly discovered methane?. Probably not. Maybe we should just all fart a bit more in celebration...)

It's after their Feb. 29 deadline,
but should somebody ask LJS
if they're going to pay up?

My opinion of LJS has gone way up. The 2/29 deadline, and the language they used in the rules, more or less ruled out people getting their shrimp.

See the link that Oliver posted.

Yum!

Maybe I can find them in person and explain to them in person why they aren't welcome here.

The owner of the site is:

Peter Kovach
Simeon 504 GH
3423
Prague
Czech Republic

I believe he is an international terrorist with links to Al Qaeda. I look forward to making that report to the appropriate authorities.

Theoretically, we get emailed copies of all comments posted to both of our weblogs. But I never actually get emailed copies of this guy's posts. I wind up having to delete them with the clunky delete-and-rebuild MT 2.661 interface.

When I have a bit more time (sometime next month) I'll migrate nielsenhayden.com to MT 3.1, and install the newer, better MT-Blacklist.