Category: Just Because

Some of us have to work today.

1. If you get stuck in riptide, remain calm and swim parallel to shore. Swimming to the shore will just tire you out faster.

2. When crying for help, call out specific people (e.g. "You with the green shirt!"). It makes people more likely to act and not be affected by the bystander effect.

3. In survival situations, while it will change depending on your body, remember the rule of threes:

◆ 3 minutes without air (maybe you're buried in snow following an avalanche)

◆ 3 hours without shelter against the elements

◆ 3 days without water

◆ 3 weeks without food

4. Most phones are able to dial 9-1-1 even without service or a SIM card.

5. Additionally, 1-1-2 is the international 9-1-1 in most places.

6. If you see a photo of yourself (or anyone else – particularly children) where they only have one 'red eye' from the flash, this could be a sign of retinoblastoma (a type of eye cancer).

7. If caught in a burning building, get low. The breathable air will be near the floor.

8. Learn the Self-Heimlich.

9. Do you have a desk job? Be sure you get up at least once every two hours and walk around for 5-10 minutes. Doing this reduces the chance of developing blood clots in your calves.

10. If you're a man and you pee on one of those pregnancy tests and it comes up positive you may have testicular cancer.

11. Just because the light turns green doesn't mean its safe to go.

Source.

Click to embiggen.

Your argument is invalid.

…until someone has a hurricane.

Fuck yeah.

Somewhat disheveled and obviously weary from a long flight, he was still a vision in his Galactic Survey uniform. He was near my age, probably twenty-six or twenty-seven standard, a bit taller than me with dark tussled hair, two-day stubble, and a small hoop earring worn. As he entered the small onboard cafeteria, he put his bottle of ale down while he stopped to light a cigarette. As he struck the match, our eyes met and he smiled. An electric shock coursed through me. And those eyes—dark, midnight blue, almost black. He walked toward me as if he intended to join me at my table, and as I caught sight of his name badge—Danot—he smiled again, nodded, and kept walking. I turned around to see if he had stopped, but only saw him leaving through the rear door.

One warm evening I decided to pay a visit to the city's old northern waterfront, a vast array of piers and overgrown parkland nearly a hundred fifty kilometers away from downtown and almost always deserted.  I had heard it was a popular meeting spot for trysts, but I hadn't gone there with that in mind.  I had been feeling very homesick and what I wanted most was to simply get away from the noise of the city, away from the crowds, away from the lights, and just stare up into a dark night sky.  Short of flying out to one of the barrier islands, the waterfront was the perfect choice, despite its other reputation.

Olyxas' brilliant double companion sun was in conjunction with the primary, two of it's three moons would not rise until after midnight, and the third—the smallest—would not be rising for an hour or more after my arrival, so the night was, indeed, very dark.  As I powered down the speeder, parked, and walked out onto one of the piers, I looked up to see the hazy band of the galaxy stretching overhead in the western half of the sky from northern to southern horizon.  And hanging in front of that glittering tapestry, forming a huge arc like a string of brilliant blue-white diamonds, six nearby supergiant stars curved eastward across the sky.  In a later life, on a different world, I would call three of them Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, but the names I used for them then eluded me.  Despite my best efforts, I was still unable to trace out any meaningful constellations upon this strange night sky, and in fact wondered exactly what constellations would've grown out of legends and mythology if an indigenous sentient race had arisen on—instead of been transplanted to—this world.

I finally gave up trying to correlate any of the stars I saw overhead with ones I knew from home.  Obviously, many of them were the same, but now in such radically different locations with equally radical brightnesses that it was futile to try locate particular stars.  And since the Olyxan system lay within the galactic plane and not far above it as my home world did, the galaxy presented itself as a narrow glittering ribbon cutting across the night sky, not as the hemisphere-filling vortex I had known before.  Still, when the pangs of homesickness struck as they did that particular night, these were minor issues and didn't prevent me from trying to spot my native suns, even if I didn't know exactly where they fell upon this canvas—or, if, in fact, they were even visible to the naked eye at all.

The tide was out, but the incoming waves still broke noisily against the pilings as I stood against the railing, looking out over the dark waves below.  My mind wandered, and memories of my desert birthplace returned: the unrelenting heat, the years passing without a single drop of rain and the twin suns burning like two brilliant yellow arc lamps in the wheat-colored sky.

I could not have chosen a more disparate environment in which to emigrate.