monday search term safari LXVI.

will a nh black bear eat my chickens

That depends on your state of residence.  If you live in New Hampshire, a New Hampshire black bear may very well eat your chickens.  If you live in Oregon or New Mexico, your chickens are probably safe from New Hampshire black bears, because they’re not allowed on planes, and usually don’t have the cash for cross-country bus tickets.

being a parent is like slavery

That’s a bit of a douchy way to look at parenting. 

Look, sport, a slave doesn’t get to pick his master.  You, on the other hand, choose to become a parent.  (If you don’t want to become one, but have sex without precautions anyway, then you still have made a choice.)  If you think that raising kids is slavery, then you probably shouldn’t have kids.

maroon beret

Maroon is the almost universal beret color for airborne troops worldwide.  There are a few exceptions—Russian airborne troops wear sky blue berets, for example.  Generally, however, a maroon-colored beanie on a soldier’s head means that he/she is member of an airborne outfit.

alphasmart is for stupid people

Is not!  Neener, neener!

Seriously, what the hell kind of technology assessment is that?  What are you, twelve?  (You’re totally wrong, too.  Alphasmarts are for writers who want to get shit done without wasting the day on PooTube and the Facebooks, and without having to worry about battery life.)

steyr m9 butt stock

In the U.S., you can’t put a buttstock on a pistol, because you’ll be creating an unlicensed SBR (short-barreled rifle), which is a dreadful felony offense in the eyes of the Federales.  That kind of slip-up can draw the attention of the BATFEIEIO, and get you five to ten in Club Fed.

olympia typewriter margin cancel

On my two Olympias, there are tab set/cancel buttons on either side of the space bar.  You can also flip the little lever on the right side of the carriage, and move it through its stops from right to left, which will clear all the tab settings.  For margin release, press the key with the four dots arranged in a square, which will let you override the right-hand margin.

mid-novel slump

I think everyone who’s ever written a novel has encountered the dreaded Mid-Novel Slump.  That’s when the fire you felt at the start of your novel is almost entirely out, the end is nowhere in sight yet, and you think that Chapter 15 is the shittiest shit in the history of shit, and that it would be a mercy and a favor to the rest of the world to just delete everything and spend your time leveling a night elf rogue to 80 instead.

If you’re in the grasp of Mid-Novel Slump: just keep slogging.  You’ll get over it, and sooner or later you’ll pick up momentum on the downhill run to the finish line.

"the pawnbroker" , nude

Uh, jtc?  Have you been moonlighting with your webcam on the Intertubes?  Is this a niche fetish of some sort? 

(If you have, and it is, then please, for the love of all you hold dear…NO LINKS.)

bipolar bear munchkin

Bipolar Bear is a character in my planned series of kid books.  (“When he was good, he was really, really good…but when he was bad, he was horrid.”)

 

There’s your brief Monday diversion from the soul-crushing burden that is the start of the work week.  Glad to be of help!

of unintended consequences.

One of the side effects of Senator Kennedy’s death has been the metaphorical pee-pee dance in which the Massachusetts House Democrats have engaged.  With Kennedy’s Senate seat unfilled, they’re looking to pass a law that lets the governor pick an interim replacement for the job, so MA won’t have just half its Senate votes in the upcoming health care vote.  By state law, there has to be a special election to fill that Senate seat, and that’s unacceptable to the Democrats right now, because it’ll take months for that to take place.

Trouble is, MA’s governor used to have precisely that power.  It was taken away by the legislature in 2004, when the MA House (with the majority being Democrats) voted to require special elections instead.  What was different in 2004?  Well…John Kerry, the junior senator from MA, was running for President, and a win in the 2004 election would have meant a vacant senate seat.  The governor of MA at the time was Mitt Romney, a (gasp!) Republican.  Not willing to run the risk of letting a Republican governor pick a Senate replacement for one of the most solidly Democrat seats in the U.S. Senate, the legislature removed that clear and present danger by stripping the right of Senatorial appointment from the governor.

Ooops.

Now you have douchebags like MA Rep. Robert Koczera bloviating at length in the Boston Globe on the need for a law that returns the appointment right to the (currently Democrat) governor, to make sure that “MA has two voices and two votes this fall.”

Interesting how the will of the people is all-important when the wrong lizard is in charge, and how a swift executive appointment is only in the interests of the MA electorate when the governor has the right letter after his name…

Legislatures at all levels are prime case studies in unintended consequences, and the only thing more appalling than the blatant partisan self-interest exercised by both parties is the invariable attempt to mask that self-interest as “the will of the people”, and “what’s best for the state/country.”

The ultimate irony is that the law coming back to bite him in the ass posthumously…was spearheaded and supported by Senator Kennedy himself.

relics.

Relic (noun)

Etymology: Middle English relik, from Anglo-French relike, from Medieval Latin reliquia, from Late Latin reliquiae, plural, remains of a martyr, from Latin, remains, from relinquere to leave behind

Date: 13th century

1 a : an object esteemed and venerated because of association with a saint or martyr
2 plural : remains, corpse
3 : a survivor or remnant left after decay, disintegration, or disappearance
4 : a trace of some past or outmoded practice, custom, or belief

The items in the picture above are some of my grandparents’ things.  On our last visit to Germany, two years before my Oma passed away, I went through the drawers of my Opa’s old stuff, and claimed a few things that had meaning to me.

The dice were two of a dozen or so that lived in a leather dice cup in my grandparents’ kitchen cabinet.  When I was a kid, we used to play Parcheesi over tea and cookies all the time, and I’ve tossed that particular pair of dice thousands of times.  I remembered these two because they have a distinctive discoloration that set them apart from all the other ones in the cup, and I usually picked those to roll.  The well-worn bottle opener was used to open every beer bottle ever consumed in my grandparents’ apartment for as long as I can recall.  The ashtray was my Opa’s, who used it every day until he went to the hospital where he passed away.  The wedding bands are my grandparents’, and my Oma wore them both after my Opa died in 1985.  Before she passed away, she told my mother that she wanted me to have those rings, and my brother brought them over for me when he visited.

Anyway, those are a few things that have meaning to me, but are worthless to anyone else.  They’re a physical connection to my grandparents, and a reminder of my family history.

I always envy people who have family stuff relevant to their current lives–the .22 their grandfather used to teach their father how to shoot, or the fountain pen their grandmother used to write her journal for forty years.  Robin has a neat set of old notebooks filled with handwritten recipes by her Oma, written before she emigrated to the United States in the early 1920s.  Opa and Oma didn’t own guns, and they weren’t writers, so these tokens are merely stuff that triggers some old childhood memories, rather than things I can use the way my grandparents used them.

Come to think of it, I do think I’ll let the kids use those dice once we start playing board games together in the kitchen over tea and cookies…

stand by.

I had a nice, long, frothy rant posted earlier today, but failed to check the sources, and ended up commenting on an article that was news a year or so before I was born.  Looks like I have to find some other blog fodder now, so stand by for further broadcasts on this bloggernets thingie.

a market survey.

I’ve asked this question on Twitter, but I’d like to get a few more opinions, so I’m asking it in this spot as well:

Would a setting of Nazi Germany be a handicap for a YA novel in the American market? 

Would the unfamiliarity of the setting make the novel less appealing to the average YA reader than a setting in the WWII U.S?  Or is 1940s America just as strange and unfamiliar a place to an 18-year-old as 1940s Germany?

Your opinions?

spending what you don’t have.

So the budget deficit is going to hit 1.7 trillion dollars this year.  Mind you, that’s just the gap between government expenses and government revenue for the current tax year, not the national debt.

It’s kind of difficult for most people to envision just how much money we’re talking about here, so I’ve done a few calculations.

• In one-dollar bills, 1.7 trillion dollars weigh 1.7 million metric tons, or 40,000 tractor trailers full of cash. 
• Stacked up, those bills would make a tower of dollar bills 109,000 miles high, or more than a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 
• That much paper money would take up a volume of two and a half million cubic yards—enough to recreate one of the World Trade Center towers with stacks of cash, and build a quarter of the second tower.
• Laid out next to each other, that amount of dollar bills would be enough to cover 6,786 square miles of ground, enough to paper over all of Connecticut and most of Rhode Island.

And that’s just the shortfall for this fiscal year. 

Giving the power of the purse to people who live by four-year election cycles is like handing your household checkbook to a new accountant every four years to run your finances…and telling him he can write checks that won’t come due until the next guy gets the job.

a vote for gun control is a vote for thunderdome.

Every martial art that involves direct unarmed hand-to-hand fighting has weight classes.  This is done because a bantamweight boxer will get his clock cleaned by a heavyweight ninety-nine out of a hundred times.  Sending a 115-pound fighter up against a 220-pound fighter is simply not an even contest, because the heavyweight can deal (and absorb) much more powerful punches.

Let me repeat that little factoid: even a trained fighter in prime shape has no realistic chance of winning an unarmed fight against a heavier opponent.

Now, would you consider it fair if we took the bantamweight out of the ring, and replaced him with a 60-year-old grandmother with diabetes?  How about a 110-pound college student who’s never punched anything or anyone in her life?  Or maybe a 50-year-old, near-sighted convenience store clerk?  A 28-year-old bank teller who’s eight months pregnant?  Would those opponents be a more even match for our heavyweight?  Would you consider any of those pairings a fair fight?

Well, if you think that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns for self-defense, you’re essentially in favor of pushing all those folks into that ring with the heavyweight, because that’s the power balance on the street.  There are no weight classes, no referees, and no fair fights. 

Even if you imagine for just a moment that we could make all the guns magically disappear with the stroke of a legislative pen, you’d still have violent criminals out there, and they usually prepare the ring in their favor ahead of time.  They have no interest in fair fights, and they don’t pick their marks with an eye on keeping within the proper weight class.  They pick the time, they pick the place, and they pick the victim…who gets shoved into that ring at a moment’s notice.  One second you’re walking into the Stop-N-Rob to pay for your gas and grab some beef jerky, the next you’re in the middle of a fight for your life, with no referee around to call the low blows. 

The truth is that criminals who make a living threatening injury or death for the contents of a cash register or a wallet won’t be greatly handicapped by any laws that prohibit the carrying of guns.  They carry them anyway, but as I’ve pointed out, they’d still tilt the favors in their odds even if the magic gun control fairy could make all the guns go *poof* overnight.  Gun control is tossing their intended victims into the ring with them after forcibly disarming them…to make sure the violence doesn’t escalate.

Now, you let Grandma carry that .38 in her purse, and all of a sudden it’s no longer a automatic loss for her, even if you don’t handicap the heavyweight.  Whatever he can come up with, up to and including producing his own gun, the odds are roughly even at that point.  With that sixteen-ounce piece of alloy and steel in her hand, Grandma can suddenly negate the huge disparities in physical ability and fighting skill.

(On a side note regarding the sufficiency of being able to summon a cop via phone instead: take that gun from Grandma, and put a cell phone in her hand.  Does the fight become any more fair?  Does Grandma stand a better chance of walking away unharmed now?  Or do you think that heavyweight can punch Grandma halfway into the next zip code before she has finished dialing 911?)

Some gun control fans will say that everyone going armed will mean that the criminals will just pack bigger guns and shoot first every time, but they’re missing the point.  When you know your potential marks aren’t allowed to pack heat, you have a low-risk work environment.  You can pick the weakest-looking victim, and set all the parameters for the impending confrontation the way you want them.  When people aren’t prevented from carrying weapons, you never know which one of them has the means to even out the odds, and every mugging or convenience store register grab becomes a potential lethal confrontation or murder conviction.  It makes the job of the violent criminal a much riskier vocation, and serves to discourage rather than encourage the use of physical force.

Another school of thought (if you can grace it with that label) states that Grandma always has the option to just turn over the contents of her purse, give the opponent what he wants, and hopefully be allowed to leave that ring without any violence taking place.  Disregarding the fact that violence has already occurred (the implied threat of death or injury), just look at that course of action from a behavioral standpoint.  If you make an illegal activity low-risk and high-reward, and you guarantee that the attacker gets what he wants every time he mugs someone, do you think you’ll get a.) less, or b.) much more of that illegal activity?

Disarming the law-abiding doesn’t do a thing to control the lawless.  It’s the legal and moral equivalent of grabbing some random person off the street, taking away anything that could be used as an effective weapon, tossing them into the ring with a trained heavyweight boxer who has had days and weeks to prepare for the fight, and telling the surprised and unwilling opponent to “fight fair”.

more flash movie reviews.

So I picked up another small stack of rental movies on Saturday, and (miraculously) managed to watch two of them over the weekend: Coraline and Inkheart.  Both of them are movie adaptations of Kid/Young Adult fantasy books.

Coraline was just a lovely, charming piece of work.  It’s hard to explain the Gaiman Factor to someone who doesn’t know Neil Gaiman’s work, but Coraline manages to be simultaneously very endearing and very creepy at the same time.  It’s a stop-motion animation flick, and the way I explained the movie to Robin was “sort of like ‘Tim Burton does Alice in Wonderland’.”  I think this one’s bound to be a classic, and I’ll be buying a copy for our DVD library.  (The kids won’t get to watch it until they’re a little older, though.)

I liked Inkheart, too, because I love books, and it’s hard to see how you can completely dislike the movie if you love books.  The concept behind the Inkheart books revolves around the power of the written word, and that of the storyteller and –reader.  (The story is about a guy who can read characters and things out of books by reading out loud from them.)  This one got more mixed reviews than Coraline, and it didn’t quite live up to the potential of the source material, but it was original and fun nonetheless, and I wouldn’t have felt cheated if I had gone to see it in the theater.

So there you have it: Coraline—Must Buy Own Copy rating, Inkheart—Safe Rental rating.

monday search term safari LXV.

can you legally sell a kidney

Sure you can…as long as it’s not a human one, even if it happens to be in your own body at the moment.  Our masters have decreed that our bodies aren’t fully our own property.  You can work yourself into an early grave digging up coal 3,000 feet below ground for someone, but you can’t sell redundant parts of your own anatomy, because if that were legal, someone may offer you money for them, and take advantage of you. 

should i let my 4 year old have a toy gun

That’s your call, but if your 4-year-old is anything like mine, you’ll notice that they don’t need an actual toy gun to pretend shooting a gun.  They’ll just turn any vaguely gun-shaped object into one in their imagination, so any sort of prohibition is bound to fail. 

neo word processor where to buy

I got mine directly from the manufacturer.  You can also find them on eBay on occasion.  I don’t think they sell them anywhere else in new condition.

what usb cable is needed for alphasmart

The Alphie uses (and comes with) a standard A/B USB cable.

victorian era werewolf

I think you’re looking for the novel “Murcheston: The Wolf’s Tale”, which sort of reads like a first-person version of Dracula, only featuring a werewolf instead of a vampire.

best sword tested by cutting pigs

Oh, ye gods…another outrageous marketing claim designed to sell sharp things to impressionable young male basement dwellers.

Look: anything sharp, wielded with sufficient force, has the capacity to lop off arms or heads or what-have-you.  That’s not an indicator of blade quality.  When I was an impressionable young male (albeit no longer a basement dweller), I had what they refer to as a SLO in knife collector circles—a Sword-Like Object, a katana made out of stainless steel.  SS is too brittle to make good sword steel, and is usually used for swords that will spend their lives decorating a fireplace or man-cave somewhere.  That stainless-bladed piece of junk chopped down a sizeable young tree on the property of my friend’s parents with one stroke of the blade, much to the displeasure of my friend’s Dad.  In the Olden Days, Celtic swords could chop off a Roman soldier’s head or arm, even though they were made of such soft iron that they had to be bent straight again by the owner.

Important life lesson: anyone making outrageous torture-test claims about fighting equipment has his eyes on your wallet.

munchkin fuk on moped

Congratulations, friend.  You win the “Strangest Fetish” Award this week.

rampant vote buying

Isn’t that pretty much how every election is won at its core—by someone promising the most stuff to the most people?

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” –H.L. Mencken

sig p232 vs j-frame

I’ve owned and carried both in the past.  The J-frame is more concealable, the P232 is easier to shoot well.  One gives you eight rounds of .380, the other five rounds of .38 Special or .357 Magnum.  Ballistically, the J-frame has the edge, while the SIG holds more rounds, is faster to reload, and comes with better sights.  The J is more concealable, the SIG is more comfortable inside a waistband.  I’d feel well-armed with either, honestly.

albert einstein’s photo of desk

I don’t have a picture of his desk, but this gives me an opportunity to share one of my favorite Einstein anecdotes yet again.  Someone once asked him “Where do you do your work? Where is your laboratory?”…and in response, Einstein pointed to the fountain pen in his shirt pocket.

how much wood pellets for a winter?

Well, that depends.  How cold does it get in your neck of the woods, and how warm would you like to be?  The answer in our case is very, and very, so we have five pallets stored out back.

(A pallet of wood pellets is equal to a cord and a half of firewood, if that helps.)

do i pay sales tax p a car i buy in new hampshire

You won’t be charged sales tax by the New Hampshire dealer, but you’ll probably pay some sort of major tax in your home state once you register your new car locally.  They always have a way of getting their cut, you know.  In MA, you’ll be paying excise tax, and I’m sure there’s some similar tax in VT and ME, to make sure you’re not evading your obligation to Pay Your Fair Share.

 

And there you go—this Monday’s edition of your eleventh-favorite weekly Intertubes special!  Now get back to pretending to work, will you?

bitch stole his dog.

Here’s one that pegged my Weird Shit-O-Meter:

A guy with a Britney Spears tattoo stole a Chihuahua puppy wearing pink earrings from another guy in a bar.  (I’m guessing the dog was the one wearing the pink earrings, but from the overall vibe I got from the article, it wouldn’t be totally out of line if the thief or the victim were wearing them instead.)  The name of the missing dog is Hudson Hayward Hemingway.

That little news bit is so infused with capital-G Gay, I’m pretty sure even the majority of gay folk reading that article are saying, “Now that is queer as hell right there.”