"Across the Milky Way, with ramscoop and laser cannon"
Accompanied only by his faithful spanial, our hero records his sporting endeavours wherever he can in this part travelogue, part sporting guide to the Milky Way.
Three Upper class young feiuwios, declaring that they desperately need a change of scene given their difficult occupations, go on a rowing holiday along one of the major methane rivers of their planet. Accompanied only by their faithful qu'sciem, the four of them discover that their comfortable daily lives have been remarkably bad preparation for the task of rowing their craft upstream. Along the way many adventures ensue, as they pass from local landmark to local landmark. Foul weather threatens disaster, but their good spirits are undamped, and all declare the holiday a great success. Told from the perspective of one of the boaters this classic will amuse young and old alike.
Paddington Bear and Winney the Pooh make a minor living working as asteroid miners, when they are forced out of business by the ever expanding population of Rabbits. With the price of honey and marmalade reaching every higher levels, they are forced into one last desperate gamble. Retrofitting their ship with gravitational anomaly sensors and magnetic clamps, they take one final make or break trip out beyond the asteroid belt. Will they find a black hole suitable for leading the rabbits down, or are they doomed to die out beyond the stars? Instead they are the first to meet an alien race of woodland animals, who have fled the horrors of spring cleaning, and offer to trade their knowledge of boats, and the messing about in thereof, at highly favourable rates. High jinks ensue with reckless driving, imprisonement, and laser battles with squatting space weasels. However, with the help of the gruff badger lords of the Redwall planet, and their fanatical mouse-men armies, our heroes prevail, and the Christopher Robin can take his place as the rightful Emperor of the Galaxy.
Charlie @39 - I believe the program you need can be found here, delighting in the name Open Convert-.lit or c-lit for short. It is quite good, but if you intend on installing it you may have to edit the make file.
Talking of sheep breeding, the technical term for this (at least here, in Yorkshire), is tupping, with the tup being the ram. Tup is also used to refer to the head of a piledriver or steam hammer.
The widget is a device included in canned beer to create the creamy head usually found on draught beer. Originally patented by Guinness.
As best I can discover (here), the population of Britain at the time was between 3.5 million and 6 million. Taking off .75 - 1 million for Scotland/Wales gives an estimate of 3.8 million people. Assuming that adult males form 25% of the population gives ~1 million men. 25,000 casualties = .25% of total adult men. Of course, the errors on this are huge, as I have made various wild assumptions, so the 1% of all adult men could be accurate, and is certainly more likely than 1% of total population. If any historians could polish the numbers I would be very grateful.
The bloodiest battle I have heard of was the Battle of Towton (wikipedia.org) where it is estimated that 1% of all English men were killed.
Brian Westley entered the 1989 International Obfuscated C Code Contest with program that implimented or removed ROT13 encryption, and could be ROT13ed and reversed without losing functionality. This is, I think, one of the greatest examples of ROT13 duplication I have ever come across.
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| 2007 | 10 |
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