The Continuing High-Adreneline Adventures of Speedy
February 3, 2013 ~ 6 Comments
Has James just sent me a timely follow-up to the now amazingly long-running Speedy saga? Of course he has. Writes James:
Since Speedy spent the holidays on a wine cruse on the Rhine, he wanted his next adventure to be something a little more manly,… wait, that’s both sexist and speciest, lets go with bold. Speedy wanted his next adventure to be a little more bold. Keeping with the Arctic theme going on right now in Narbonic, the obvious choice was to head to northern Alberta to help build an oil refinery on the Athabascan Tar Sands in the dead of winter. Even with daytime temperatures at -30 C, heavy construction continued. When not at the construction site, Speedy felt right at home living in a work camp, where 5000 people are housed in tiny rooms not much larger than a gerbil cages. This was the kind of brawny adventure a world-traveling gerbil could truly appreciate.
Speedy surveys the main pipe rack. Technically, Speedy is in violation of the safety requirements, since he is not wearing his Personal Protective Equipment, including steel toed boots, a hard hat, gloves, safety goggles, long pants nor cleats. Since he’s not technically a person, he reasoned it was OK. Still, he kept out of sight of the safety inspectors.
Speedy reads the thermometer, and is thankful that wind chill doesn’t apply to him.
James adds that he only got two pictures because “it was too damn cold.” Thanks for going above and beyond yet again!
You know how extremely hostile environments that we never thought could sustain life (like boiling geysers) keep turning out to have unique bacteria, and those discoveries fuel the hope that perhaps extraterrestrial life exists in unlikely places? At -30 C, it seems that northern Canada is one of those environments. If Speedy can live there, maybe life can exist on Jupiter’s moons or on the dark side of Pluto.
I imagine all sorts of things live on Pluto’s dark side, I don’t recall too many flea dips for him.
*BADA-CHING!*
Technically, Pluto doesn’t have a dark side; it rotates in tidal lock with its moon, Charon. Also technically, the Moon doesn’t have a “dark side” either; it has a far side that gets lit up for half a month.
If Pink Floyd teamed up with Edgar Rice Burroughs, they could write “Dark Side of Barsoom”.
With an axial tilt of 123 degrees, most of Pluto’s surface area is within the (ant)arctic circles. Each pole stays in darkness for over a century.
Dark enough for you?
I gotta spend 4 weeks in northern Alberta to get those photos, and *these* are the comments I get? Sheesh. *grin*
-jr
Get your ass to Pluto, James!