When I was first poking around with Tor, I wondered how many of the "Get guns in Europe", "Hard Drugs here", "Credit Card Numbers for sale" and such links were honeypots. Luckily, not being interested in any of those things, I didn't have to find out.
My father used to sell occult devices by mail order back in the early 1960's under the name "Metaphysical Cybertronics". He had a Cybertronic detector, which was very similar to the Scientology E-Meter, a Cybertronic Destiny Wheel, which was like a spinning pointer Ouija board, and a Cybertronic Touch Stone, which were just polished black rocks he bought from the old lady across the street. He now sheepishly admits he knew he was fleecing people, but it paid his way through school.
The rats that the cats are keeping out of the stores are a much larger source of pathogen transmission to humans than the cats are. Not only do rats carry many more dangerous diseases than cats, but both can also transmit toxoplasmosis to humans. As it is transmitted through contact with feces, from which of the two are you more likely to encounter feces spread all over the store?
So, while I actually find both rats and cats endearing, I'd take the cats over wild rats in the stores any day.
I think we owe our civilization to cats - without them we would have never been able to stop being hunters-gatherers and settle into agricultural society as having food stores would have been impossible due to rats.
And Black Death, owing to Church persecution of cats, is another great illustration of cats' role.
Cats were not widespread in the ancient world until very late. Herodotus writes about cats as an Egyptian novelty. People had mass food stores long before then.
"But recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cat domestication began in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was getting under way."
Edit in response to the comment below as i hit post-limit:
"Housecats seem to have been extremely rare among the ancient Greeks and Romans;[16] the Greek historian Herodotus expressed astonishment at the domestic cats in Egypt, because he had only ever seen wildcats.[16] Even during later times, weasels were far more commonly kept as pets[16] and weasels, not cats, were seen as the ideal rodent-killers"
Even if we assume this is correct and Herodotus and others were simply ignorant of this, it's obvious that the Greeks of his time, including those in Anatolia where he lived, where food had been stored in massive quantities for centuries if not millennia, did not have cats.
This reminded me of the “Isotope Storage Lab” in the basement tunnels of the University of Rochester medical center annex. I always thought it sounded cool when I would walk by it… until I learned of the horrific experiments conducted at the med center in the 1940’s where they injected unaware patients with plutonium to see what would happen.
I have a different association. In my native language the adjective "nuclear" and the one expressing that something is one way or another related to testicles are homographs.
My faculty had an "institute of nuclear problems" in the basement and considering the people who revived the institution after world war 2 and their proteges had no issue naming a program for analyzing oscilloscope data ANAL, this was no accident.
I managed to score eight NeXTcubes from a small company getting rid of them one time about 1997. Similarly with all the manuals, boxes, software, etc. I wanted to share the treasure, and offered the extra to a bunch of my friends. Only I mathed wrong, and ended up promising all eight away. Oops. But at least I've still got my extremely early serial number C64.
It's always feels funny to me when taking the Acela between Boston and NYC that you go screaming along at 150mph... for a small portion of track in Rhode Island. The rest of the time you're going much slower. It's almost like, why even bother for that small section?
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
The game I played for hours on the Apple ][+ was "FantasyLand 2041". It came on six double sided disks, and I was bummed to find out after quite a lot of game time that disk six was corrupted. I then found out many years later that it wasn't corrupted, the game wasn't ever finished. I then further discovered that John Bell, who produced that and other popular games (Sand of Mars, Beneath the Pyramids, House of Usher), is utterly batty and has written a few "the government is hiding UFOs from us" books.
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