I tell normal jokes too, and quick quips, but my personal ones or adaptations tend to be revolve around saying things that make a lot of sense when phrased right and are only viewed as absurd about 2-5 seconds after the punchline is delivered. If I'm telling the one about how I don't believe in pink unicorns, leprechauns, and eskimos it really loses all it's flavor if the subsequent delivery doesn't highlight the reasons why laughing at someone for not believing in eskimos is alternatively no more logical than not believing in pink unicorns and leprechauns. If the jokes delivery doesn't point out the fundamental flaw of 'everybody knows' while at the same time showing the abusrdity of viewing the other two as an absurdity it fails. The rational agnostic sort realizes that there sis nothing absurd about the idea of a horse with a pink coat and horn evolving somewhere, the sort who tend to believe in the supernatural, the absurdity of viewing one as entirely believable but the leprechaun as simple nonsense. Proper delivery takes well over a minute and like a lot of my quips it's designed to relax the audience and shake up their thinking if they're showing signs of mental rigidity. Spoils the whole thing when someone either just says 'I don't believe in pink unicorns, leprechauns, or eskimos' for the quick laugh and tends to be utterly dreadful and perverted of the point when they try to deliver the whole thing.



We had the whole package, telescope wired to the sky program on the computer, so you could just click object and it would rotate the telescope, but not the dome, for some reason the dome would only rotate maybe one time out of ten, had to press the manual control which was a serious pain since it wasn'treadily accessible. Regardless, this is why I'd guess the scope was 10-20k inspite of a 120k budget.



Nioce things is how cheap computers have gotten, but I just don't like them. For one thing all that automation resulted in me forgeting half the astronomy I knew. For serious science, speed and accuracy say use computers, but otherwise? I just get this image of fifty years from now someone deciding to go fishing, heads down to the beach with their 'Seamaster 10000', sets it down, pushes a button, and proceeds to play video games while it shoots out laser and radars to locate a fish then deploys it's automatic harpoon, reels it in, and dumps it into a basket for you. 'I got a 5 footer today' says the person with a dubious claim of being a fisherman.



I just hear so many good things about it that I feel obliged to recommend it, but I've only used it a few times, usually with someone else's assistance. For just the sort of reasons you mentioned, I prefer to buy items in person, and failing that brand new from a fully established company. Buy a telescope online from celestron or meade, and you know it will arrive safe, or will be fairly easy to have returned and replaced. Same as buying things out of reputable catalogs like I do for seeds.



Not sure how long fiberglass kicks around, certainly seen it in decent shape after decades. I think it's one of those materials that sunlight screws up, which shouldn't be any issue for telescopes... but I actually meant to say carbon fiber not fiberglass, sorry Carbon fiber makes good tripods.




Oh, it's all in the optics, unless I missed a piece I'd guess the whole housing probably runs around a hundred bucks. So, definetly would want to by optics with a warranty on them if one's around that offers that.




I've grown increasingly spartan in my travel tendencies the last few years, basically as an extension of that concept. I used to pack everything but the kitchen sink.



I never really made the jump from DOS to the other things. I skipped windows 3.x entirely and going from GW an Q Basic to V-Basic, well, I never got it down. C:\DOS, C:\DOS\RUN, RUN\DOS\RUN. Still funny, but other than the basic html scripts necessary to play with the font types and colors I never have gotten use dot nay of the modern gibberish, I feel proud just being able to configure my email to download directly into my mail program.



I don't want to savage Bushnell too much, the main complaint I had was fairly specific, a lot of scopes are designed for huntings rifles but don't handle up well when mounted to military equipment, wasn't just them, a lot of our prefered optics might work on a m4 or m16 but would get damaged by the recoil and vibration of the heavier machineguns, some of the RFI stuff we got couldn't even function on the standard rifles. Lot of the stuff we got during the early years of the WoT was non-ideal, but then RFI (Rapid Field Issue) tends to result in that. They are certainly a well-known company and in this particular type of business reputations aren't acquired as fads, but as a result of years of producing high-quality goods, so I'm probably being unfair.