CL <flothru@yahoo.com> dixit:
>jwb@csse.monash.edu.au wrote:
>> CL <flothru@yahoo.com> dixit:
>> 
>>> The electric ones don't clog up with cat hair like the gas burners do. 
>> 
>> Obviously my experience of 59.7 years of life has been too limited. Despite 
>> having shared the abodes of many cats in that period, I've never 
>> encountered one sleeping on a gas burner.

>No one said the burner was lit.  

True. I didn't either.

>You have forgotten your cat math where
> cat + warm thing = warm, happy cat which is not equal to cat + too hot
>thing.  Our cats prefer a nice concave shape to curl up in to a flat
>surface, especially when it is cold.  And, they've been known to pile on
>to make a flat surface into a concave shape.

I'd defy any cat to make itself comfortable on my stove's burners; not
that they'd get much chance to try in our kitchen. Anyway, there are
much better cat-amenable warm places such as the central heating outlets.

>> For us in ビクトリア州 the Big One is a 山火事. A goodly proportion of
>> the State has been incendiarized recently, and it's still smouldering
>> all over the place. It got to within 5km of my ホリデーハウス, so we
>> were up there chainsawing the trees around it, raking leaves, cleaning 
>> roof gutters, etc. etc. These days you are entitled by law to stay in
>> your house as a 火事 sweeps by/over, as it's actually the safest place, 
>> and you can put out the spot fires once the front passes. The advice is 
>> either to get ready and stay, or to leave early. We prepared the site, 
>> polished up the insurance, and left.

>Isn't ビクトリア州の山火事 an annual event?  Sort of like matsuri time
>in 盛岡市?  

Indeed. The change this summer was to have them start so early, and to
have such a big one (it started as a heap of small fires after lightning
strikes, but eventually coalesced.

>I seem to recall about half of Sydney burning a few years
>ago.  When will the Government declare Fire Days as national holidays?

Sydney doesn't really do 山火事 - it's not usually dry enough. When they
do have one, it gets in the international press because most of the
stringers live in Sydney and pay little attention to what goes on
elsewhere. "half of Sydney burning" was pure hyperbole - the fires
were nothing compared to the ones in ビクトリア, 南オーストラリア, etc.

-- 
Jim Breen        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia 
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学