Captivity on $1.24 a week.

[kiya]

Bought Kunda the next year's worth of food. (I order from FrozenRodents.com, because it amuses the howling hell out of me. I told the name of that website to my father, and he was speechless for several minutes. This from the man who kept frozen male baby chickens in his freezer in the seventies and came home from work in the early '90s chanting, "Woo Wah Web! Woo Wah Web!" These days he just says, "I told you it'd be big.")

It's always about thirty dollars worth of shipping -- next day air with dry ice to keep the things cold. So, with shipping, this sixty-two dollar parcel comes out to $1.24 a week snakie support. Sixty-nine cents of which is shipping. Which is why I got two packages of mice, not one; they'll keep.

Should be a happy snakie. These are bigger mice than the last lot. But he's a much bigger snakie now.

I have also unloaded and refilled the dishwasher, and will now go have a go at cleaning the stove. Go me.

Comments

I think there's a frozen chicken story I ought to relate

[brooksmoses]

A story which, sadly, I remember too few details on to make really good. However, I'll give it a go.

The story involves jet engines, and ground tests of same. See, one of the things that jet engines need to be tested for is for not breaking to bits and flying apart if they happen to "ingest" a careless seagull.

One doesn't really wish to test this with live seagulls, however.

The U.S. agency in charge of testing these things (presumably the FAA, and I believe this was in the 1970s) came up with a better way. Go to the grocery, get a frozen whole chicken that's a bit past its expiration date, cast a bit of styrofoam around it to make it a cylindrical shape, and fire it at the engine on the test stand using an air cannon.

(The styrofoam might be a later development, actually; I don't know if they were doing it at this stage or not.)

As I remember from video clips I've seen, the engine usually breaks a blade or two, shakes pretty violently, and goes into automatic shutdown in a couple of seconds, with all the broken bits being contained inside it. Bad for the engine, not so bad for anything outside it.

Anyhow, the British (I think it was the British, probably at Rolls Royce) wanted to test some of their engines with this setup, so the FAA shipped it over to them.

They set it up to test, fired a chicken at a jet engine, and apparently got a very spectacular and unexpected result -- pieces flying everywhere, and all of the blades shattered.

Clearly something was wrong with the test. They called the FAA people, and checked all of the settings on the air cannon, and such, and everything was set up properly. Eventually, someone realized the problem.

It hadn't occured to FAA people to mention that one needs to thaw out the frozen chicken first.

- Brooks

Re: I think there's a frozen chicken story I ought to relate

[brooksmoses]

Of course, a few web checks reveal that there's probably a reason I didn't really remember the details; it's probably not a true story in the first place.

For one thing, http://www.snopes.com/science/cannon.htm points out that the Air Force intentionally uses frozen chickens in their windshield tests, and they don't behave that much differently from thawed chickens.

Another relevant note is, according to http://members.cox.net/gregwest98/bird_letter.html, the birds usually don't create that much damage to the jet engines; it's rare for the engine to even stop, much less be too damaged (by, for example, having a bent or broken blade) to restart. My memory is probably conflating a movie of a chicken test with a movie of a broken-blade test (where they intentionally break one of the blades), I suspect.

Ah, well. Sigh.

- Brooks

[kiya]

I tend to chop chicken when it's still frozen because I think it's easier.

I should note that the chickens Dad kept in the freezer were fairly young, and thus not likely to mean much to airplanes anyway.

Re: I think there's a frozen chicken story I ought to relate

[keshwyn]

Of course, a few web checks reveal that there's probably a reason I didn't really remember the details; it's probably not a true story in the first place.

It was circulating around the web as one of those funny stories about 3-4 years ago - I remember getting it in college. This is probably why you remember it. It is an Internet Urban Legend. ;)

Re: I think there's a frozen chicken story I ought to relate

[brooksmoses]

Thing is, I think I remember my dad telling me about it, so it would have to have been almost ten years ago, if that's true. If it isn't true, which it likely isn't, then it would have come from the only thing that's close enough in my mental filing cabinet to get crosslinked like that, which was a turbomachinery class almost six ago (the one in which I saw the movies of jet-engine tests).

(Incidentally, the reason it would have been crosslinked in my memory is that this was the class that he taught for many years, until he passed away my freshman year. And the professor who took it over was a close friend of his and went quite extensively by his notes.)

So I am pretty sure I heard about it before it became an internet urban legend, at least for the round that you mention. But I could easily be wrong, I suppose; one often is about these things. :)

- Brooks

Of pre-web internet urban legends...

[kviri.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm pretty sure I ran across this one before I graduated from WPI (in... gulp... 1993). So you probably didn't experience any mental crossfiling. :)