Hopefully that’s what’s inside it.
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It’s 1969, I’m waiting for swim team practice to begin and the hoody dude next to me says that the fire alarm won’t work if the little glass bar is missing (remember those?). So, what the heck, I pull the alarm and immediately the loudest alarm ever begins piercing my ears. I’m freaking out, looking for a place to run and the hoody dude calmly pulls out his knife; uses it to unscrew the alarm cover/handle; resets and reassembles everything and screws it all back like it was originally. The alarm stops. We are in the pool by the time the fire department arrives.
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would have been hilarious if it was a fire.
The homunculus only comes with the full-duplex model.
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A toggle switch…
Or… A metal-homunculus dong (in a state of arousal)?
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Some institutions apply silver colored paint to various fire equipment. The paint dissolves in water to produce blue ink.
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I saw a street fire box being serviced recently and it’s all clockworks inside. Pulling the handle sets off a wound-up telegraph wheel (something like a music box, I think) that’s hardwired directly to the nearest firehouse. Needs no external power, cell towers, phone lines, or central dispatch. Some of the boxes are over 100 years old and still in service.
ETA: Also usable by anyone, even people who can’t communicate in English, or at all. The wheel transmits the box’s location, which is all the firefighters really need.
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If urea-reactive dye were really a thing in swimming pools, they’d all be colored all the time. Not (necessarily) from people urinating in them, but because sweat also contains urea.
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A little blue doesn’t matter; many pools are lined with blue tiles anyway. It’s the gradient that’s important to see.
Pitagora Suichi!
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Easier to put in a camera. Huh, maybe I should patent that idea.
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I always wanted to build Rube Goldberg machines as a kid. I was inspired by the intro to “McGee and Me” since my parents raised me on the swill produced by Focus on the Family (fuck James Dobson. He’s a shining example of what’s wrong with America.)
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Geeze, did that thing come off the Graf Spee?
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If you make such a contraption that after a long complex sequence of operations shows a middle finger, is it a Rude Goldberg machine?
Then the sign would be in German and the whole thing would be quite more robust.
German engineering from that era is quite formidable.
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There’s no nozzle. They just put the ink on the inside edge of the handle. I had to look it up just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy: http://www.american-time.com/products-by-family/specialty-products/fire-alarm-accessories/tamper-dye-for-fire-alarms
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Oh, I love that box!
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It was in the hallway of a building that I was working on in New York. The place was built sometime around 1915, so it is probably original, as is most of the interior.
I remember that book. With the flesh glove?
I immediately thought of that book too, but I couldn’t remember the title. Thanks!
Aye, that’s the one – preceded by My Teacher Is An Alien and followed by My Teacher Glows In The Dark and My Teacher Flunked The Planet. Not bad books, but it’s that kind of science fiction that uses misanthropism as a substitute for sophistication.
I never got around to reading his other series along those lines except for I Left My Sneakers In Dimension X, but I had the impression it was more of the same.
