See edit.

Too late, I win!

Damn! I really have to stop losing all my money that way.

sara - stop with cranky.

I get to go to Home Depot on my lunch to get more paint. YAY?

These days, not all astronauts are military/ex-military.

No, but that was one of the assumptions Allyson, question-asker, made. So I'm going with it. She even went IDF.

Are all astronauts scientists? Even so, my mother's a scientist, and while I'd root for her versus a caveman, it'd not be science that won that fight. It would be that even though she doesn't know why I do krav, it's her I get those urges from.

Heh, for some reason, Sean's dialogue post has me imagining the caveman and astronaut exchanging a jovial "Morning Sam."/"Morning Ralph.", punching time cards, and then proceeding to beat the snot out of each other.

...aaaand now I'm wondering if there's sheepdog/coyote slash. My mind is a scary, scary place.

My mind is a scary, scary place.

Yes. Yes it is. You sent my mind to places it didn't want to go, nor was it prepared to go there. ACK!

Huh. Well this is a different interpretation of the other thing...

An international panel has unanimously recommended that Pluto retain its title as a planet, and it may be joined by other undersized objects that revolve around the sun.

Some astronomers had lobbied for reclassifying Pluto because it is so tiny. And at least one major museum has excluded Pluto from its planetary display. But sources tell NPR that under a proposal to be presented at a big meeting of astronomers in Prague next week for a vote, Pluto would become part of a new class of small planets. Several more objects could be granted membership.

So apparantly the new classification thing they're working on is still gonna confuse people....

[link]

In a world with the beauty of ligers and tigons, what's wrong with a bit of Ralph/Sam?

I think a lot of the caveman/astronaut assumptions don't give enough credit to the caveman. Sure, the astronaut could either be a MacGyver-like engineer or an ex-military killing machine but the caveman has a lot more going for him than just brute strength and a killer instinct.

These people had to live by their wits. Even though they might not be smart enough to have fully functioning speech, they had to be canny, clever creatures just to survive. Their skills would extend beyond just hunting and include problem solving, often in high stress situations.

If we're not counting space tourists (and I'm not), astronauts are selected pretty hard to be our best and brightest. And to me, key in the question is the plural, so our best and brightest get to scheme in groups which is what we clever monkeys do best, with the astronauts getting paleolithic-to-now refinements on the basic model.

Unless we're in squash court territory, with the cavemen getting designer weapons fashioned from freshly vanquished cheetah, and the astronauts getting say, pocket protectors, them cavemen is soon to be rotting meat.

I wonder if the re-rise to prominence of this debate is a symptom of the fundie-right American anti-intellectual pogrom or if folks just miss ST:TOS Shatner.

ita is in her scary place.

would someone email my boss and say I need to have the rest of the day off for a happy day? Thanks