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Old 13-01-2019, 02:08 PM
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multiweb (Marc)
ze frogginator

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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Sydney
Posts: 22,062
These are pretty good too.

Quote:
But then Pino, in 1949, made a discovery that can fairly be de- scribed as revolting.

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It was hypergolic with mixed acid, and it had a rather high density for a fuel. And it wasn't corrosive. But its performance was below that of a straight hydro- carbon, and its odor — ! Well, its odor was something to consider. Intense, pervasive and penetrating, and resembling the stink of an enraged skunk, but surpassing, by far, the best efforts of the most vigorous specimen of Mephitis mephitis. It also clings to the clothes and the skin. But rocketeers are a hardy breed, and the stuff was duly and successfully fired

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The odor of these was not so much skunk-like as garlicky, the epitome and concentrate of all the back doors of all the bad Greek restaurants in all the world. And finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can't, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies. This was too much, even for Pino and his unregenerate crew, and they banished it to a hole in the ground another two hundred yards farther out into the tule marshes. Some months later, in the dead of night, they surreptitiously consigned it to the bottom of San Francisco Bay.
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