And you call Jim Felder "The nut?" (:>)

At 10:29 PM 4/29/2005 -0500, Joel Walker wrote:
>The nut in Hauntsville, "Jim Felder" <felder@KNOLOGY.NET> said ...
>>I notice that oftentimes, people referring to petroleum products talk
>>about dino-this and dino-that as in "dino oil as opposed to
>>synthetic
>>oil."
>>Did our teachers give us that preposterous notion?
>>Was it Essie the dinosaur in the old Esso (before Exxon) promotions?
>>Was it exposure to oil-company sponsored Disney rides where
>>dinosaurs
>>became associated with oil?
>>Is it a red herring to the fact that plants and sunlight ultimately
>>provide the energy we all use?
>>I remember specifically being taught that coal and oil are related,
>>and
>>that coal is made in immense, submerged peat bogs and similar
>>places. I
>>just don't remember a dinosaur discussion, yet many people use the
>>term.
>
>it's very simple for all of us who weren't asleep in auto shop. ;)
>crude oil comes from the ground
>    (which is why they call it 'crude'. it wouldn't be 'crude' if it
>came from a better location)
>gasoline comes from crude oil
>    (process is called 'refining' ... which means making it 'fine'
>again. so it was ok to begin with,
>    but we're gonna make it 'better' and charge you for that).
>horsepower comes from gasoline
>    (which is really silly, but we're talking about the English
>Language here, folks. where we have
>    cork, york, pork, and work, bough, though, and enough, and so on.
>    i mean, horses do NOT like gasoline. not at all).
>and how do you determine the horsepower of an engine (running
>gasoline, remember)???
>
>simple.
>
>put the engine on a dyno.
>
>:)
>and that's why it's called 'dino oil'.
>
>of course, dino is the american spelling. in the UK, it's spelled
>dyno. ;)
>
>now, synthetic oil does NOT come from the ground.
>it comes from synTHESIS. which is the sweat accumulated by college
>graduate students while working on their theses. now, since graduate
>school costs a lot more money nowadays, it's harder and harder to
>catch those grad students, and so synthetic oil costs more than dino
>oil.
>notice that synTHESIS is somewhat related to hypoTHESIS, which is one
>method of collecting the sweat ... sucking it off their fevered brows
>with a hypo syringe. very difficult work. which again makes the cost
>of synthetic oil higher.
>
>teachers? teachers don't know diddly about preposterous notions ..
>they don't believe in them. so they can't teach them.  can't teach
>most other kinds of notions either ...
>besides, 'preposterous notion' is an oxymoron:
>  any 'small useful item' can't be useful if it's preposterous. see??
>even the word 'pre-post-erous' is flakey ...
>  'pre' means 'comes before',
>  but 'post' means 'comes after'!
>  so we have 'erous' who come before coming after? or who come after
>coming before?
>  which is like coming again after you've already been there before ..
>which is re-fining. see?
>
>red herring? no, it takes a LOT of red herrings (or any of the other
>species of herrings (Culpea harengus), commonly called 'sardines') to
>make even one barrel of oil ... that can't be refined into gasoline.
>but it is preposterous, just not a notion. now, and here's where you
>might be confused, IF a whole bunch of sardines got killed and sunk to
>the bottom of the forest and were covered by a blanket of leaves and
>branches and stuff before the hungry mammals found them, then after
>millions and millions of eons, the weight of all those accumulated
>millions of tons of leaves and branches and stuff would kinda crush
>the poor little sardines into a sort of gooey mush ... and it would
>look like dino oil, but would smell much much worse. and it would be
>more properly called 'dinES oil' (sardines), not 'dinO oil'. see?
>
>plants and sunlight? that's an old wive's tale ... dino oil comes from
>the ground, like i said. it's rock blood.
>when the tectonic plates crash together (as speeds approximating a
>geriatric tortoise with arthritis on a REALLY bad day), it squeezes
>the rocks. and the first product of this squeezing is that the rocks
>'bleed' ... and sometimes, pockets of this rock blood collect in
>pools. and that's what the oil companies are trying to find: those
>pockets of rock blood. so they can suck it up from the ground and
>'refine' it and sell it to us as gasoline so we can make horsepower on
>the dynos.
>
>now, it is possible to get all the energy you need from sunlight and
>plants. but the power from beans is really hard to harness, and most
>people won't come near you after a couple of days of eating them. the
>sunlight is necessary to grow the beans ... unlike mushrooms, beans
>won't grow in the dark or caves or basements. more's the pity. :(
>
>now, you are correct in being taught that coal and oil are related.
>remember that 'dino oil' is rock blood.
>well, what happens to your own blood if you cut your arm?
>the blood clots and forms scabs, right?
>
>yup, coal is rock scabs. simple.
>
>and it gives you some idea of the size of the rock bleeding by looking
>at those strip mines and deep mines that are being dug up all over the
>place ... i mean, this poor ol' earth has been bleeding for a loooong
>time!! lots of poor old rocks being squeezed and squeezed by those
>tectonic plates and glaciers and who knows what all ... maybe even by
>them big ol' dinosaurs stomping around.
>
>and just so you know, what happens if a cut on your arm gets infected?
>yup, it swells up and gets red and the blood gets all messy and such.
>well, that's what a volcano is ... and lava (that messy yucky stuff
>that explodes and comes out) is .. well ... the same stuff you get if
>you squeeze that infected cut on your arm. rock pus, if you want to
>call it that.  disgusting stuff.
>so you can really think of a volcano as ... well ... sort of a big
>pimple on the earth.
>
>so there it is ... all you ever wanted to know about 'dino oil' and
>how all the rocks are related and how the earth is a living thing and
>works pretty much like your body does. which makes it VERY important
>that you stay the hell away from the 'bowels of the earth'!!!!!
>
>:)
>unca joel