More bad news I'm afraid.

<Boomie> has started a "house of insults" but they are the kind that only people who read books can understand.

You may be needed to translate.

Viz- many people knew it was there, but nobody suspected it was the tallest mountain until surveyors actually did one of those "survey equipment studies" things.

Before the advent of this technology, nobody thought the Himalayas were very impressive, because they arise from a plateau that is already 300,000 meters high.

The peaks themselves are only a few hundred feet above the plateau- no more trouble to scale them than to read a magazine while on your <stairmaster>.

In the old days people thought Ireland's famed <Top O' the Morning> was the world's highest peak.

It was first scaled by <Flann O'Brien>, though he himself only learned this second hand since he was blind drunk when he accidentally ambled over it on his way home from the "Offy".

If you measure a mountain from it's "real base" to it's "real top," the highest mountain is actually <Mountebank> in Hawaii.

That's cuz they measure it from the ocean floor to the top.

Bloody Hawaiians. Probably brag about this to siphon Himalayan tourism to their benighted "paradise".

Here is "Wiki- proof" that <Mountebank> is in fact higher than <Mount Everton Wanderers FC>:

<"The peak of <<<Mauna Kea>>> is 13,803 feet (4,207 m) above mean sea level but 33,476 feet (10,203 m) above its base on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.[2] It is the world's tallest mountain by this measure, <<<taller than Mount Everest>>>, which is the highest mountain above sea level.[3]">

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_...

HA!

Psyche!!

I bet you all thought that every single word of this post was nonsense.

Clearly, measuring a height of 300,000 meters is child's play. One simply uses the technique that Galileo used on the Leaning Tower of Pizza, from the viewing platform by the Pizza Hut halfway to the peak.

Galileo dropped ivory billiard balls, which he borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci, who got them from the snooker-playing future in his time machine. I think I saw that in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager -- where the Captain keeps a Leonardo simulacrum caged in her cabin. Just because he's a holo-simulation doesn't make it any less a crime -- locking up sentient beings for fun is bad form.

Another classic SF story, The Cage (http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2008...), features a group of humans who get stranded on a damp alien planet and, er, lose their clothes. Another lot of spacefarers drop by, net the earthlings and put 'em in a zoo. Efforts to communicate their sentience - by, say, drawing Pythagoras' theorem in their food - come to nothing.

Finally, they catch an alien 'mouse' and make a pet of it -- and are freed at once, with apologies all round. Only sentient beings put other creatures in cages.

Anyway, that Galilean drop. Since the speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 km/sec, you simply drop a photon off your plateau, catch it, time it, and move the decimal point. QED.

Unlike Ireland.

Get it?

Not so-

There's that ant herd that makes the other kinds of ants slaves that have to stay in caves and work for them.

At minimum wage!!!

That sounds like it. I think I lost 'em to him in a game of Canasta.

Anyhoo. The 'lost' post(s) observed that both <Frogspawn> and <Fotheringay> are one-word titles with the same initial letter.

And I had a chunk of song, adapted from yet another notorious recluse, Scott Walker:

I remember the posts.

They were deleted-

You might politely inquire why?

Probably some innuendo- that's what you and me usually got in trouble for before.

If you do make an inquiry, maybe ask them why the current FILTH on the <Ed Trice> page is allowed to exist.

Check out his last post in his forum-

Flagrant violations of multiple posting guidelines.

And to think that both of us were "sternly warned" for calling him a Triceratops.

I regard this to be hypocritical, to say the least.

Actually <Dom> I am absolutley furious at the moment.

On the other hand, it's probably best just to let it all slide.

At least we aren't being threatened with bans and locked forums and being ordered to delete half of our content these days.

What I'm most curious about with regard to the incident here, is that no way the Administrators are "monitoring" this forum- they just told us they don't read 90 per cent of all the posts, so they rely on people "blowing the whistle".

I find it difficult to believe that anyone coming here would "blow the whistle" on the posts in question- if only because most of the members at this website- plainly put- aren't educated enough to even understand a single one of your sentences, let alone a whole post.

So I'm thinking ??????

I bet they would respond to a polite inquiry though-

But if you do that, be sure to use email- they are sick and tired of people dropping personal business on the <CG.com> page.

And who can blame them?

Anyways sorry for rambling but I am quite angry about this.

I do take the admins at their word in terms of their not monitoring most sites--after all, how could they? I do wonder, though, about some of the real nonsense that I see going on at various pages.

Thing is, I cannot recall the slightest reason for concern. Nothing personal, no puns etc -- the Frogspawn/Fotheringay was in response to Deffi mentioning the time of the frogs, of blessed memory.

As CG observed on the chessgames.com page, the vast majority of posts are unread by admins -- unless somebody blows a whistle. Whistle blowing without cause is frowned on.

So it looks like somebody had cause to be offended, and persuaded admin the complaint was reasonable. I have no idea why. Certain folk have shown a staggering capacity to take offence ...

But, hey, even you, my kindred spirit, how could you possibly understand what I mean? Unless you've lived here in Fotheringay Castle, you can never *truly* understand.

In fact, only the west wing of Fotheringay Castle truly suffices - the eastwingers are epigamic ephebes. And you have to have kissed the Fotheringay Stone, naked, while held in the 'impala' position by a trice of Zulu warriors ...

This is Entropanto. Almost 30 years after writing it, I encounter the heat death of language.

<Howard> and <frogbert> are right I bet-

The filters-

Automatic and who knows what they pick up.

He arrives from a space
His refuge over-run
She will fold him away ...
Her mind moves on the silence ..."