Misted: The Saturn Myth (part 2)

[Warren vonRoeschlaub]

*...1...2...3...4...5...6

(they walk into the theater and sit down)
Mike: Don't think this is over, Crow.

Antediluvian Flying Creatures

Crow: See Tremens, Delirium.

A third category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in
antediluvian times arises from studies of creatures which flew in
those times, and of creatures which fly now.

Mike: Oh, come on, how many flying lizards do we have now?

In the antediluvian world, 350 lb flying creatures soared in skys
which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 lbs or so.

Crow: Like hang gliders?

Modern birds of prey (the Argentinian teratorn) weighing 170 - 200
lbs with wingspans of 30' also flew;

Mike: That sounds like more that thirty pounds to me.
Tom: But the pteratorn didn't fly. And they died out with the invasion of
placental mammals. Hardly "modern".

within recorded history, central asians have been trying to breed
hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten them beyond
25 lbs or thereabouts.

Crow: Gee, could it be that they just don't have the genes to get bigger?

At that point they are able to take off only with the greatest
difficulty. Something was vastly different in the pre-flood world.

Mike: Yeah, you could get a whole meal for a dime.

Nothing much larger than 30 lbs or so flies anymore,

Tom: Except 747s.

and those creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and
eagles, are marginal.

Crow: Parkay.

Albatrosses

Tom: (calling out) Albatross!

in particular are called "goonie birds" by sailors because of the
extreme difficulty they experience taking off and landing, their
landings being (badly) controlled crashes, and all of this despite
long wings made for maximum lift.

Crow: For maximum lift, use "gooney bird" every time you shampoo.

The felt effect of the force of gravity on earth was much less in
remote times, and only this allowed such giant creatures to fly.

Tom: Wait a minute. If gravity was less then so was air pressure. The
effects would cancel each other out.

No flying creature has since RE-EVOLVED into anything like former
sizes, and the one or two birds which have retained such sizes have
forfeited any thought of flight, their wings becoming vestigial.

Crow: So he's saying that if it hasn't happened it can't happen?

A book of interest here is Adrian Desmond's "The Hot Blooded
Dinosaurs.

Mike: Sequel to "The Funky Town Dinosaurs."

Desmond has a good deal to say about the pteranodon, the 40 - 50 lb
pterosaur which scientists used to believe

Tom: Traveled around the world bringing gifts to children of all cultures.

to be the largest creature which ever flew:

"Pteranodon had lost its teeth, tail and some flight
musculature,

Mike: Did it check under the sofa cushions?

and its rear legs had become spindly. It was,
however, in the actual bones that the greatest reduction of
weight was achieved. The wing bones, backbone and hind limbs
were tubular,

Crow: Like, tubular man.

like the supporting struts of an aircraft, which
allows for strength yet cuts down on weight.

Tom: Here at the 3M labs we are developing the latest in bone technology.

In Pteranodon
these bones, although up to an inch in diameter, were no more
than cylindrical air spaces bounded by an outer bony casing no
thicker than a piece of card.

Crow: Thick as a fish?Mike: "Card", not "carp".

Barnum Brown of the American
Museum reported an armbone fragment of an unknown species of
pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas in which 'the
culmination of the pterosaur... the acme of light construction'
was achieved.

Mike: Folks, we gotta design a pterosaur, and we gotta make it light. The
reputation of acme is at stake.

Here, the trend had continued so far that the
bone wall of the cylinder was an unbelievable one-fiftieth of an
inch thick Inside the tubes

Crow: is chewy caramel and a chocolaty nougat.

bony crosswise struts no thicker
than pins helped to strengthen the structure, another innovation
in aircraft design anticipated by the Mezosozoic pterosaurs.

Mike: Yep, them thar pterosaurs beat us to it agin.

The combination of great size and negligible weight must
necessarily have resulted in some fragility. It is easy to
imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the
gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous.

Tom: So don't land on your wings.

How could the
creature have alighted without shattering all of its bones How
could it have taken off in the first place It was obviously
unable to flap twelve-foot wings strung between straw-thin
tubes.

Mike: In that case, I'm going to guess they glided.

Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by
running and flapping before they can take off and others have to
produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise.

Crow: Hey. Don't you have to flap faster than hovering speed to rise?

To achieve hovering with a twenty-three foot wingspread,
Pteranodon would have required 220 lbs of flight muscles as
efficient as those in humming birds.

Tom: Wait a minute, didn't he just finish telling us that all muscles have
the same efficiency?
Mike: That was a different reference, Tom. Relax, being loony is a good
excuse for inconsistency.

But it had reduced its
musculature to about 8 lbs, so it is inconceivable that
Pteranodon could have taken off actively.

Crow: (Vizinni) Inconthievable!

Pteranodon, then, was not a flapping creature, it had neither
the muscles nor the resistance to the resulting stress. Its
long, thin albatross-like wings betray it as a glider, the most
advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced.

Mike: Ha, I guessed right, they do glide.

With a weight
of only 40 lbs the wing loading was only I lb per square foot.
This gave it a slower sinking speed than even a man-made glider,
where the wings have to sustain a weight of at least 4 lbs per
square foot.

Tom: See, now if the gravity were less, that one lb would be reduced, but
the supporting air pressure would be less too.
Crow: Tom, will you calm down.

The ratio of wing area to total weight in
Pteranodon is only surpassed in some of the insects. Pteranodon
was constructed as a glider, with the breastbone, shoulder
girdle and backbone welded into a box-like rigid fuselage, able
to absorb the strain from

Mike: All the garbage in this post?

the giant wings. The low weight
combined with an enormous wing span meant that Pteranodon could
glide at ultra-low speeds without fear of stalling.

Tom: (old lady) Oh, gee, I seem to have put it into fourth.

Cherrie
Bramwell of Reading University has calculated that it could
remain aloft at only 15 m.p.h. So take-off would have been
relatively easy. All Pteranodon needed was a

Mike: A dollar and a dream.

breeze of 15
m.p.h. when it would face the wind, stretch its wings and be
lifted into the air like

Crow: Sally Fields.

a piece of paper. No effort at all
would have been required. Again, if it was forced to land on
the sea, it had only to extend its wings to catch

Tom: A cab.

the wind in
order to raise itself gently out of the water. It seems strange
that an animal that had gone to such great lengths to reduce its
weight to a minimum should have evolved an elongated bony crest
on its skull."

Crow: Hey, Tom, how old is this reference. Haven't they known for years
the crest was a rudder?

Desmond has mentioned some of the problems which even the pteranodon
faced at fifty lbs or so; no possibility of flapping the wings for
instance.

Tom: Actually he said no chance of taking off with wing flapping. he
didn't say anything about never flapping the wings, just that it
wasn't needed.

The giant PTEROTORN finds of Argentina were not known when the book
was written...

Tom: What difference does it make? The pterotorn were flightless.

they came out in the eighties in issues of Science Magazine and
other places.

Mike: I hope those "other places" were just a tad more authoritative than a
magazine.

The Pterotorn was a 160 - 200 lb eagle with a 27' wingspan, a modern
bird whose existence involved flapping wings, aerial maneuver etc.

Crow: Hey, if they died out so long ago how does he know they flew?

How so? There are a couple of other problems which Desmond does not
mention, including the fact that life for a pure glider would be
almost impossible in the real world,

Mike: Yeah, MTV really doesn't like them.

and that some limited flying ability would be necessary for any
aerial creature.

Tom: But he didn't say they couldn't flap at all, just that they didn't
take off . . . oh, forget it.

Living totally at the mercy of the winds, a creature might never get
back home to its nest and children given the first contrary wind.

Crow: Obviously this Holden guy hasn't heard of "tacking".

There is one other problem. Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus
operandi for the pteranodon,

Mike: It always leaves a single white glove behind.

i.e. that it had a throat pouch like a pelican, has been found with
fish fossils indicating a pelican-like existence, soaring over the
waves and snapping up fish without landing.

Crow: (PBS narrator) Consider the noble pteranodon . . .

That should indicate that, peculiarly amongst all of the creatures of
the earth, the pteranodon should have been practically IMMUNE from the
great extinctions of past ages.

Tom: (sarcastically) Oh, and what, prey tell, were those great extinctions?

Velikovsky noted that large animals had the greatest difficulty
getting to high ground and other safe havens at the times of floods
and the global catastrophes of past ages and were therefore peculiarly
susceptible to extinction.

Mike: So he is assuming Velikovsky is right to prove Velikovsky right?

Ovid notes (Metamorphoses) that men and animals hid on mountain tops
during the deluge, but that most died from lack of food during the
hard year following.

Crow: Wait a minute, since when is Ovid history?

But high places safe from flooding were always there; oceans were
always there and fish were always there. The pteranodon's way of life
should have been impervious to all mishap;

Tom: . . . except for temperature change, alterations in the trade winds,
loss of nesting sites, the appearance of predators, and about a
million other things that have nothing to do with a flood.

the notion that pteranodon died out when the felt effect of gravity
on earth changed after the flood is the only good explanation.

Crow: . . . that is entirely moronic.

Back to Adrian Desmond for more on size as related to
pterosaurs now:

Crow: There are pterosaurs now?
Mike: Hush.

"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying
creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound
reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever
could become airborne.

Tom: "Were"? So even Desmond agrees the reasons are no good.

With each increase in size, and
therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant
increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper

Al: (chanting) Flap on, flap off, . . .

and to hold
and manoeuvre them in a glider), but power is supplied by
muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.
-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier
it grows by the addition of its own power supply.

Crow: I knew I should have stuck with double-As

There comes a
point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to
remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power
suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can
attain is about 50 lbs:

Mike: Hey, does he supply those calculations?
Tom: Probably just references to references to references. Those kind of
calculations are impossible to do.

Pteranodon and its slightly larger but
lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought
to be the largest flying animals."

Mike: Oh yeah? Well what about the mosquitoes in Minnesota?

Notice that the calculations mentioned say about 50 lbs is max for
either a flier or a glider,

Crow: Actually, I didn't see any calculations.

and that experience from our present world absolutely coincides with
this

Tom: Of course it does. If there were larger creatures flying right now
they would have ignored the calculations anyway.

and, in fact, don't go quite that high; the bigggest flying creatures
which we actually see are albatrosses, geese etc. at around 30 - 35
lbs.

Tom: What is it with this "if we can't see it, it can't happen" attitude?

Similarly, my calculations say

Crow: . . . what a big twit I am.

that about 20000 lbs would be the largest theoretically possible land
animal in our present world, and Jumbo the stuffed elephant which I've
mentioned, the largest known land animal from our present world, was
around 16000.

Mike: Wait a minute, he said it was the largest elephant in North America.
How did it suddenly become the largest known land animal?

"But in 1972 the first of a spectacular series of finds
suggested that we must drastically rethink our ideas on the
maximum size permissible in

Tom: presidential stupidity.

flying - vertebrates. Although
excavations are still in progress, three seasons' digging - from
1972 to 1974 - by Douglas A. Lawson of the University of
California has revealed partial skeletons of three

Crow: plumbers.

ultra-large
pterosaurs in the Big Bend National Park in Brewster County,
Texas These skeletons indicate creatures that must have dwarfed
even

Mike: Rush Limbaugh.
Crow: Jeeze, now that is big.

Pteranodon. Lawson found the remains off four wings, a
long neck, hind legs and toothless jaws in deposits that were
non-marine; the ancient entombing sediments are thought to have
been made

Tom: of chocolate sauce.

instead by floodplain silting. The immense size of
the Big Bend pterosaurs, which have already become known
affectionately in the palaeontological world as

Mike: Sheckie.

'747s' or
'Jumbos', may be gauged by setting one of the Texas upper arm
bones alongside that of a Pteranodon:

Tom: Assuming they had the same proportions.

the 'Jumbo' humerus is
fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson's computer
estimated wingspan for this living glider is over fifty feet It
is no surprise, says Lawson announcing the animal in Science in
1975, that the definitive remains of this creature were found in
Texas.

Unlike Pteranodon, these creatures were found in

Crow: singles bars.
Mike: Of course! They went extinct when they couldn't get a date.

rocks that were
formed 250 miles inland of the Cretaceous coastline. The lack
of even lake deposits in the vicinity militates against these
particular pterosaurs having been fishers.

Tom: So now we assume they were tax collectors.

Lawson suggests that
they were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on the rotting
mounds of flesh left after the dismembering of a dinosaur
carcass.

Mike: Well, there goes my lunch.

Perhaps, like vultures and condors, these pterosaurs
hung in the air over the corpse waiting their turn.

Crow: Now serving number three.

Having
alighted on the carcass, their toothless beaks would have
restricted them to feeding upon the soft, pulpy internal organs.
How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves
is something of a puzzle.

Mike: I feel the same way after Thanksgiving dinner.

Wings of such an extraordinary size
could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since
the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves
they must have taken off vertically. Pigeons are

Tom: Completely different than pterosaurs, but that doesn't stop Ted.

only able to
take-off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the
wings in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would
have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body enough
to allow the 24-foot wings to clear the ground The main
objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate
musculature for such an operation.

Mike: Maybe they should work out more often.

Is the only solution to
suppose that, with wings fully extended and elevators raised,
they were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If Lawson
is correct and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders another
problem is envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of
dinosaurs.

Crow: Really?

The ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs were
vulnerable to attack when grounded, so how did they escape the
formidable dinosaurs?

Mike: Their call was "Hey, look behind you."

Left at the mercy of wind currents,
take-off would have been a chancy business. Lawson's exotic
pterosaurs raise some intriguing questions. Only continued
research will provide the answers."

Note that Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems, any of
which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist as
mentioned,

Tom: But what about the later research? He's quoting a book from the late
seventies or early eighties and saying that if they didn't know the
answers a week after finding the skeletons there must not be any
answers.

and neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations which say
50 lbs are max have not been shown to be in error; we have simply
discovered larger creatures.

Crow: I would consider that showing the calculations to be in error.

Much larger. This is what is called a dilemma.

Tom: Doesn't a dilemma require two options?

Then I come to what Robert T. Bakker has to say about the Texas
Pterosaurs ("The Dinosaur heresies", Zebra Books, pp 290-291:

"Immediately after their paper came out in Science, Wann
Langston and his students were attacked by

Mike: skinheads.

aeronautical
engineers who simply could not believe that the big Bend dragon
had a wingspan of forty feet or more.

Crow: And we know that aeronautical engineers are the best paleontologists
and biologists.

Such dimensions broke all
the rules of flight engineering;

Mike: Gee, you can't have a plane with more than forty foot wingspan?

a creature that large would
have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly... Under this hail
of disbelief, Langston and his crew backed off somewhat.

Crow: Wimps.

Since
the complete wing bones hadn't been discovered, it was possible
to reconstruct the Big Bend Pterodactyl [pterosaur] with wings
much shorter than fifty feet."

Mike: There. Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

The original reconstruction had put wingspan for the pterosaur at over
60'. Bakker goes on to say that he believes the pterosaurs really
were that big and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending
how,

Tom: It wouldn't be the first time.

i.e. that the problem is ours. He does not give a solution as to
what we're looking at the wrong way.

Crow: I can give you a few hints. Maybe that you ignore the fact that
aeronautical engineers are not known for their great advances in the
field of biology?

So much for the idea of anything RE-EVOLVING into the sizes of the
flying creatures of the antedeluvian world. What about the
possibility of man BREEDING something like a pteratorn? Could man
actively breed even a 50 lb eagle?

Tom: How is that distinguishable from evolving? Unless you alter the genes
directly, any selection is evolution.

David Bruce's "Bird of Jove", Ballentine Books, 1971, describes the
adventures of Sam Barnes, one of England's

Tom: Wackiest doctors. He'll keep you in stitches from the opening theme
to the closing credits.

top falconers at the time, who actually brought a Berkut eagle out of
Kirghiz country to his home in Pwllheli, Wales.

Mike: Hey, don't use that kind of language around here.

Berkuts are the biggest eagles, and Atlanta, the particular eagle
which Barnes brought back, at 26 lbs in flying trim, is believed to be
as large as they ever get.

Crow: But you already said that albatrosses are larger.

These, as Khan Chalsan explained to Barnes, have been bred
specifically for size and ferocity for many centuries.

Tom: Many centuries? Many centuries? Evolution takes millennia, not
centuries!

They are the most prized of all possessions amongst nomads, and are
the imperial hunting bird of the turko-mongol peoples.

The eagle Barnes brought back had a disease for which no cure was
available in Kirghiz,

Crow: The common cold.

and was near to death then, otherwise there would have been no
question of his having her. Chalsan explained that a Berkut of
Atlanta's size would normally be worth more than a dozen of the most
beautiful women in his country.

Mike: Oh, those wacky Kirghizians.

The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its size.
Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and

Crow: tax collectors.

other large prey. Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz,
and Chalsan told him of her killing a black wolf a season earlier.
Mongols and other nomads raise wheep and goats,

Tom: Wheep?
Mike: Hey, you're gonna loose ram chips.
Tom: Well, it isn't like this guy is Ratliff.

and obviously have no love for wolves. A wolf might be little more
than a day at the office for Atlanta with her 11" talons,
however, a wolf is a major-league deal

Crow: About two million just for signing.

for an average sized Berkut at 15 - 20 lbs. Chalsan explained that
wolves occasionally win these battles, and that he had once seen a
wolf kill three of the birds before the fourth killed him.

Tom: Why didn't they just kill the wolf themselves?
Quite obviously, there would be an advantage to having the birds be
bigger, i.e. to having the average berkut be 25 lbs, and a big one be
40 or 50.

It has never been done, however, despite all of the efforts

Mike: Of all the king's horses.

since the days of Chengis Khan. We have Chengis Khan's famous "What
is best in life..." quote,

Crow: Not too famous. I never heard of it before.

and the typical mongol reply from one of his captains involved
falconry. They regarded it as important. Chengis Khan,

Tom: So is he ever going to spell "Genghis" correctly?

Oktai, Kuyuk, Hulagu, Batui, Monke, Kubilai et. al. were all into
this sport big time, they all wanted these birds big, since they flew
them at everything from wolves and deer (a big berkut like Atlanta can
drive its talons in around a wolf's spine and snap it)

Crow: Enough with the wolves already, we get the picture.

to leopards and tigers, and there was no lack of funds for the
breeding program involved. Chengis Khan did not suffer from poverty.

Mike: Just syphilis.

Moreover, the breeding of berkuts has continued apace from that day to
this, including a 200 year stretch during which those people ruled

Tom: Boy did they *rule*.

almost all of the world which you'd care to own at the time, and they
never got them any bigger than 25 lbs or so.

Remember Desmond's words regarding the difficulty which increasingly
larger birds will experience getting airborne from flat ground?

Crow: Um, yeah.

Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to
take off from flat ground. Barnes noted one instance in which a town
crank attacked Atlanta with a cane and the great bird had to
frantically run until it found a sand dune from which to launch
herself.

Crow: (berkut eagle, which just happens to be a Brooklyn accent) Hey,
Barnes, don't help or nuthin'.

This could mean disaster in the wild. A bird of prey will often
come to ground with prey, and if she can't take off from flat ground
to avoid trouble once in awhile... it would only take once.

Mike: If it only takes once, how come the town crank didn't get the eagle?

Khan Chalsan had explained the necessity of having the birds in
captivity for certain periods, and nesting wild at other times. A
bird bigger than Atlanta would not survive the other times.

One variety of pteratorn, however, judging from pictures which have
appeared in Science Magazine, was very nearly a scaled-up golden eagle

Tom: Except for being an ostrich.

weighing 170 lbs or so, with a wingspan of 27' as compared to
Atlanta's 10. In our world, that can't happen.

Predators too Large to Sustain Falls

Crow: Help I've . . .
Mike: Crow, that one has been done to death. Let it rest in peace.

A fourth category of evidence derives from a careful analysis of
antediluvian predators. It is well known that elephant-sized animals
cannot sustain falls,

Tom: Yet they stand on their heads in the circus, go figure.

and that elephants spend their entire lives avoiding them.

Crow: We can't go to Niagara for the honeymoon.

For an elephant, the slightest tumble can break bones and/or destroy
enough tissue to prove fatal.

Mike: That must be why field researchers shoot tranquilizers into
elephants, right? Er, you know, to kill them?
Crow: You're reaching Mike.

Predators, however, live by tackling and tumbling with prey. One
might think that this consideration would preclude the existence of
any predator too large to sustain falls;

Crow: Then one would think wrong.

weight estimates for the tyrannosaurs, however, include specimens
heavier than any elephant. That appears to be a contradiction.

Tom: Unless you consider that the tyrannosaurs were *not* elephants.

Assorted Other Evidence

Mike: I hate it when people poke holes in the top of these to see what kind
of nougat is inside.

There are other varieties of this sort of evidence. For instance,
elephants are too heavy to run in our world; as is well known, they
manage a kind of a fast walk, at least one foot always on the ground.
They cannot jump, and anything resembling a gully stops them cold.

Crow: Even a picture of a gully.

Mammoths were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however,
and Pleistocene art clearly shows them galloping.

Tom: And we all know how accurate those Pleistocene artists were.

One final example: the January 1993 issue of "Discover" magazine
carries a picture of the Utahraptor, a 20', 1500 lb version of a
velociraptor recently found in Utah. The creature apparently ran on
the balls of its two hind feet, on two toes in fact,

Tom: Well, gee, horses run on one toe.

the third toe carrying a 12" claw for disembowling prey. A very
active lifestyle is indicated in fact. Very few predators appear to
be built for attacking prey notably larger than themselves; the
utahraptor appears to be such a case.

In our world, of course, 1500 lb toe dancers do not exist.

Crow: What the hell is a "toe dancer"?

The only example we have of a 1500 lb land predator is the Kodiak
bear, the lumbering gait and mannerisms of which are familiar to us
all.

Mike: "Lumbering gait"? Maybe we should have one chase Ted, and see just
how lumbering it is.

And so, over and over again, this same kind of dilemma, things which
can't happen in our world being the norm in the antediluvian world.
The Saturn Myth and attenuated perceived gravity are the only
explainations which really work.

(they get up and leave)

6...5...4...3...2...1...*

(Mike and the bots are standing solemnly facing the camera humming a tune
which sounds remarkably [okay, exactly] like "Oh, Christmas Tree")

All: Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It gives us all the answers.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity,
Mike: Why did you send this rant, sirs?
All: It lets the birds fly overhead,
It's how the brontosaurs fed.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It gives us all the answers.

Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It makes things so simple.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity,
Crow: It's a cure for pimples.
Mike: (stops singing long enough to mutter) Crow, if you can't play nice,
don't play at all.
(During the next verse, Crow starts to leave, but, without looking away
from the camera, Mike grabs him by the neck and drags him back)
All: Ted knows that it must have been,
He's a Velokovskian (mispronounced so it rhymes)
Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It makes things so simple.

Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It is antediluvian
Low Gravity, Low Gravity,
Gypsy: Richard knows it's not true . . . vian.
(Everyone rustles uncomfortably since it obviously doesn't make sense)
Mike: (reassuringly) It's okay, Gypsy, that was good.
All: A forty ton Kazmaier,
A fifty foot wingspan flyer.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It is antediluvian.

Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It seems to have no reason.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity,
Tom: He doesn't think it needs one.
All: I know I'd take just any bet,
That Holden has no doctorate.
Low Gravity, Low Gravity, It seems to have no reason.
Mike: Sirs?

(switch to deep 13)

Dr. F: I think you are beginning to crack.
(a thunk is heard and Frank walks in carrying what looks like a medieval
tome)
Frank: I have a sixteenth century reference that defines "Boss" as "one who
must submit to his employees wishes." I want a raise.
Dr. F: Well, if you think you deserve one, then all I can say is . . . push
the button, Frank.
(As Frank heads towards the button Dr. F pulls out a baseball bat)
Click . . . thunk.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
All rights reserved, more or less. MST3K and its characters are not my
idea, they belong to Best Brains, Inc. Since BBI had nothing to do with
this, if they wanted to I bet that they could sue me silly. So I'm hoping
they don't mind me using their characters and ideas. This is in no way
meant as an attack on Ted Holden personally, but it is an attack on his
goofy ideas. Fortunately, ideas can't sue. If you want to do a misting,
think about it. This is a lot harder than it seems at first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

>In our world, that can't happen.
--
Warren Kurt | By virtue of being correct, the opinions expressed
vonRoeschlaub | above could not conceivably be those of ISU.