Here's some (non-biblical) rabbinical tradition on Noah and the Ark - God caused all animals, including the sprits of those not yet created, to gather at the ark so that Noah didn't have to hunt them; lions guarded the entrance; and something called the "Reëm" and the giant King of Basham swam alongside because they were too large to fit.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:59 AM on August 17, 2008

And it's still more Jewish folklore than the bible per se, but here's the full text of the relevant section of the Haggadah. (Scroll down to "The Inmates of the Ark".)

In googling around, it turns out one of the big debates in "creation science" circles is whether that "reëm" paddling along behind the ark was some kind of dinosaur (possibly a triceratops). Creationists have the funnest debates.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 3:55 PM on August 17, 2008

jouke is right - I'm asking this on behalf of a friend who speaks decent German, but has no idea how to handle a German company named after an eighteenth-century Dutch immigrant and a French sheep.

creasy boy - that answer sounds promising - have you encountered the company itself?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 5:38 AM on August 5, 2008

Thanks all, and thanks to jouke for the offer.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 10:53 AM on August 5, 2008

Are there any other words in English that include two Fs next to each other?

Affirmative.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:46 AM on July 29, 2008

...and one random guy's Little Brother gets damaged and tells him to do minorly anti-authoritarian stuff like play in the streets and make out with a pretty girl, whose Little Sister reports him. I know the one you're talking about - it's in one of the big anthologies. Will keep checking.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 10:10 AM on July 14, 2008

Nice get, yz. Can I note that this guy sucks at plot summary?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 2:00 PM on July 14, 2008

How about giving each team an auction-style fan? More visible than a raised hand, and you don't get the cacophony problem you get from noisemakers or shouting or slapping the table. If you can arrange a back-up judge / scorekeeper to help you spot, it may go smoother.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:49 AM on July 8, 2008

Also, you may have too many people for the cool electronic buzzers to handle, but if you want to give it a shot, you could always contact your local college quiz bowl team, and see if they'll loan/rent you a system for the day.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:01 AM on July 8, 2008

Something that's apocalyptic rather than post - Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead, in which an Antarctic expedition sponsored by Coca-Cola goes terribly wrong, and humanity quietly comes to an end in the background.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 12:19 PM on June 27, 2008

For just a coke or creampie shake or such, I give them the max of the change or 20%. How often do you get the chance to make someone's day marginally more pleasant for $0.70 U.S.?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 1:44 PM on June 25, 2008

San Francisco Values farm teams:

The Portland Cement
The Urbana-Champagne Obama Girlz
The SoHo PoMo Mofos (I'm thinking... street hockey)
The Aspen Locovores
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 4:56 PM on May 28, 2008

What if you add in the territorial waters of Nauru? The curve in the island itself is negated by the straight-line naval border with Kiribati. Looks convex from here.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:27 PM on May 23, 2008

aubilenon - yeah, I said that earlier.

Here is the territorial waters site. Here is convex Nauru (black border).
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:59 PM on May 23, 2008

One that's not in most guidebooks yet, since it opened about a year ago - be sure to stop in at Pops in Arcadia, Oklahoma. For this.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:58 AM on May 23, 2008

22 years old is pretty geriatric for an air conditioner, which is probably why he's reluctant to repair. You might ask him if there's a chance the leak can be patched. That works in some cases, depending on where the leak is located, it's a pretty straightforward repair, and it should only cost you two or three hours of labor. If he does have to replace the coil, $900 is probably about right.

The stats he quoted you about a replacement unit are correct - 15-25 years... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 10:01 AM on May 21, 2008

Sorry, it took so long to get back to this - had to go friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to get direct experience. However:

If you want to go the credit union route in Oklahoma City, the consensus pick is the Oklahoma Educators Credit Union. They offer mortgages and loans to members - you become a member by applying in person with proof of your current or former educator status and opening a savings account (minimum deposit: $5). The employee I spoke... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 12:37 PM on May 20, 2008

Or... Botique Saturday?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 12:40 AM on May 18, 2008

PBS to the rescue... "Six contemporary comic artists, including Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware, talk about Hergé's influence, visual narratives and the art of cartooning. "
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:57 AM on May 6, 2008 marked best answer

How about a cannibalistic skookum, from the Oregon Chinook?

And are you looking for the cannibalism specifically? Because as LobsterMitten says, practically everybody's got a Sasquatch. Some of them eat people, some are transformed former people...... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:26 PM on April 29, 2008

The general term for Requirement A stories is "secret histories", which may help in poking around.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:46 AM on April 22, 2008

So, combining infinitewindow's answer with zsazsa's point about Win98's dubious early reputation, the endpoints are the BeOS port and the release of Win98 SE... so between March 1998 and fall of 1999. Nice!
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 3:07 PM on April 16, 2008

bystander, Yat. (second question)

Also, for whatever future literary exegesis geeks find this question... the bit with Avi's laptop and the Epiphyte(2) business plan apparently takes place a few weeks after Randy experiences a Phillipine summer, and a few months before he and the Virginia Shaftoes tote antique furniture in a parking lot deserted for Christmas break. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any sufficiently severe December California earthquakes to help... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:00 AM on April 17, 2008

Something to be aware of: NOVA, the largest English-instruction school in the country, recently went spectacularly bankrupt, dumping around four thousand instructors on the street.

Anecdotally and perhaps relatedly, there's a bit of a squeeze on visas right now. My 23-year-old sister who had been doing a few part time jobs while a new school was under construction, had her visa renewal turned down and was unceremoniously booted. It's not the best time ever.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:09 AM on April 4, 2008

That would be the Skoptzy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:00 PM on March 21, 2008 marked best answer

It was on the blue? Was it one of the ones posted here?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:51 PM on March 17, 2008

How about a balancier?

Definition 3a: [The long pole used by tumblers and tightrope walkers to keep their equilibirium]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:54 AM on February 12, 2008 marked best answer

I tried that too, cabingirl, and got the same "pendulum". A Portugese tightrope walker is a funâmbulo, but darned if I can find any reference to the pole he uses. (In particular 'balanciero + funâmbulo' doesn't come up with any useful results.) Note to Portugese-speaking netizens - fewer tightrope-walking metaphors, more tightrope-walking data.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 10:21 AM on February 12, 2008

41 on the roster out of 5.1 million... if X affected all of metro Atlanta, it would kill the Braves and give Bobby Cox a head cold.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:34 PM on February 7, 2008

I don't think Mormons would regard Study in Scarlet as the Great Mormon Novel, since it wasn't written by a Mormon and they are basically the villains of the story.

Also, it gets basically every detail wrong.
(pdf, Pages 2-4 are about the actual inaccuracies, the rest is the usual Sherlockian fanboy dorkiness.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 2:30 PM on February 7, 2008

There's always the original jingoistic war song.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:00 PM on January 31, 2008

The Meat, Poultry and Egg Product Inspection Directory is a listing of establishments that produce meat, poultry, and/or egg products regulated by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) pursuant to the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the Poultry Products Inspection Act, and the Egg Products Inspection Act.

The January 2008 directory PDF is 3.9Mb.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 7:32 PM on January 30, 2008

And here's a more focused list - 1,924 U.S. meat packing plants, categorized by state and type of meat used. There are 107 listed slaughterhouses in California.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 7:42 PM on January 30, 2008 marked best answer

While we're here, Ellis Parker Butler was a one-hit wonder who wrote the comic short story Pigs is Pigs, which he sold to the Railway Appliance Company for use in advertising promos. They gave away a squillion copies, he reprinted it as a book, and became the best-selling humorist of the 1910's because of the one lousy story.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 10:42 PM on January 29, 2008

And the whole notion of working out the magical "source code" of a fantasy universe and logically manipulating it goes back to L. Sprauge de Camp's Compleat Enchanter series, starting in 1940.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:17 AM on January 18, 2008

Humans as fast technological adapters is a fairly common trope. In Turtledove's World War series a 1943 alien invasion stalls because, based on initial contact, the invasion planners extrapolated that Earth technology should have reached about the early medieval stage. In Chalker's Run to Chaos Keep, humanity ends up divided amongst three rival empires because they were the only race in millenia to build up a sizable space empire before the real... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:06 AM on January 9, 2008

Was the lack of Lord Peter Wimsey intentional?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:48 PM on January 4, 2008

Pipped at the post, dash it! Well, the Wimsey dvds are available on both amazon and netflix, if that helps.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:53 PM on January 4, 2008

Most of Studio Ghibli's stuff is not suitable for 3-year-olds. Trust me, I've known parents that saw Totoro and grabbed the next Miyazaki on the shelf - bad things happened, man. Even Kiki's is a little borderline, less because of violence and villains than because it's just got older subject matter. I'd suggest the one that is squarely aimed at your audience - the awesomely-named Panda! Go Panda!

Also, if you ever find yourself in... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:35 PM on January 4, 2008

Amy Lowell's 1919 poems-on-Japan anthology Pictures of the Floating World, complete text on Google Books.

From the introduction: "It should be understood, however, that these poems, written in a quasi-Oriental idiom, are not translations except in a very few instances all of which have been duly acknowledged in the text.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:41 PM on December 21, 2007 marked best answer

The general term for the 19th century English/American vogue for Japanese culture that influenced Pound, Amy Lowell, and The Mikado was "japonisme", if that helps your search.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:33 AM on December 22, 2007

I assume Vietnamese is out too? You might call around to some of the Indian restaurants in town. (Of those eight in the Oklahoma City / Norman / Edmond metro, six are good places would be worth your while - I haven't tried Namaste, and Indian Hills is a) out of business and b) was not actually Indian.) We've got three Japanese steakhouses that your grandpa might like (Musashi, Shogun, Shiki), but I've just called around and they're all closed on the holiday.

You could... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 9:01 AM on December 21, 2007

The Something Queer at the X mysteries are mostly out of print, but they were a lot of fun as a youngling.
"Gwen tapped her braces..."
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 11:19 AM on December 20, 2007

It is hard for Agamemnon to give up Briseis; it is hard for Achilles to leave his tent.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 6:37 PM on December 9, 2007

Caught in the Web?
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 3:45 PM on December 7, 2007

This site seems to think it was Phoenician propaganda, intended to keep trade rivals out of the Atlantic. (And the "Pillars of Hercules", as far as I've ever heard, are just the two points of land that mark the entrance to the Mediterranean - not a complete east/west/north/south bounding.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 5:24 PM on December 5, 2007 marked best answer

And here's some discussion on how Dante's Inferno turned the original idea of "Western end of the world, nothing left but Ocean" into a more abstract notion of "abandoning divine protection".
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 5:50 PM on December 5, 2007 marked best answer

I'm in almost exactly the same situation this year, and I went with a slice of the Loeb Classical Library. They've got attractive little volumes of pretty much any Greek or Latin author you can think of in side-by-side translation with the original text.
For the amateur classical historian, there's Herodotus, Thucydides, Julius Caesar, or Suetonius; Apollodorus's compendium of Greek myths is a good little-known pick; if he's a religous-variety Republican, they have all the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 2:39 PM on December 3, 2007

Thanks all. I'm best-answering tomwheeler and katemonster for the comprehensive agendas, but I appreciate everyone's suggestions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 8:15 AM on December 3, 2007

I believe you want this gentleman.
posted to Ask Metafilter by ormondsacker at 12:09 PM on November 9, 2007