Me: “Lyra is at the Far Side Golden Retriever stage when it comes to language comprehension. She understands a lot, but much of what we’re saying is just ‘blah-blah’ to her.”
Robin: “Much of what we’re saying is going to be ‘blah-blah’ to them until they’re about thirty, honey.”
I call this composition “Hope Springs Eternal”. (Alternately: “Gravity, Do Your Thing!”)
Two dumbasses from Iowa decided to burglarize a home. Their cunning disguise?
Painting their faces with black marker.
Personally, I think the cherry on the icing of that particular Stupid Cake is the fact that they used permanent black marker.
Here’s one thing that bothers me every time I walk into my local Borders:
Now, I am not the world’s greatest Glenn Beck fan, to put it mildly, but it’s not his face or the title of his book that chaps my hide in this case—it’s the thing he’s wearing.
For those not familiar with foreign NATO uniforms: that’s a German Bundeswehr dress uniform jacket (the kind that would be called a Class A in the U.S. Army.) More specifically, it’s a Heer (army) dress uniform jacket, complete with rank shoulder boards and collar devices. The rank on this jacket is that of an Unteroffizier, NATO rank E-5. It’s really familiar to me because that was my rank when I was last wearing a jacket like that.
The collar tab background and shoulder board piping are canary yellow, which would make him an Unteroffizier in the Fernmeldetruppe (signal corps). At least they’re not piped in gold/yellow (recon), or silver/grey (army aviation), which were the two color schemes I wore at various stages in my career. Still, the man is wearing a jacket adorned with a rank he does not hold, in a manner that is disrespectful of the uniform, and that bothers me a little.
Is it illegal for him to wear it? No. But he’s wearing the uniform that took a lot of sweat and effort to earn legitimately, and he’s adorning it with inappropriate fashion items that simply don’t belong with that field-grey smock.
(For the record: it wouldn’t bother me to run into a reenactor wearing that uniform, as long as it was properly dressed out and adorned, even if the wearer didn’t earn the rank. As a piece of goober fashion, however, it bothers me more than just a little.)
What say you current and former service members, and general audience? Am I being a little too pedantic and easily offended here? Would it bother you if Glenn Beck wore the Class A or equivalent of your current or former service on his book cover in the manner depicted, or is it just a piece of clothing at that point?
Hear me now and believe me later:
This little cell size animation from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah is most likely the coolest thing you’ll see today.
(Via @StevenGould on Twitter.)
Breda fires off the Quote of the Day (nay, the Quote of the Month) regarding feminism and gender roles:
Feminists, of all people, should realize that there is no "woman’s work." There is only work – and somebody has to do it.
I’ll borrow that one next time someone talks smack about stay-at-home Dads as doing “women’s work.” There is only work, and as long as it gets done, who gives a shit whether the person on the job has exterior or interior reproductive plumbing?
Besides, without claiming superiority over those who don’t have the opportunity or ability to stay at home with their kids, I’d say that making sure your kids are safe and raised well is at least as important a job as wrangling a spreadsheet for someone else, or fixing Salesdrone 47’s Windows problem for the 321st time…
Finally, someone comes up with a shoe that’s uglier than Crocs and Ugg boots put together.
It’s always been a mystery to me why do some women pay obscene amounts of money to walk around on the tips of their toes in cruel torture devices, but now there’s a pair that can add mental anguish to the physical pain—the gales of laughter coming from the rest of humanity.
Honestly: why not just stick dead armadillos on your feet instead? It’ll be just as fugly, but more comfortable, and a lot easier on the wallet.
I’m probably the last person on these Interwebz to link to this, but LabRat at Atomic Nerds has a fabulous post up on the subject of environmentalism, Global Warming Climate Change, and all that good stuff.
Science starts with a question and tries to find the answer. Dogma starts with an answer, and then tries to find the right questions to match. I’ve always held the opinion that if you have a dogma, then you have a religion, and a lot of the far-out environmentalist attitudes look, feel, smell, and sound like religion, not science.
Is the planet getting warmer? Yes. Did human activity play a role in that warming? Possibly. Is there anything effective we can do about it that won’t wreck global economy, cause strife on a scale not seen in human history, and toss us all back to 13th century subsistence agriculture? Not likely. Should we keep fishing our oceans empty and planting so much grain for fuel and cow chow and cornflakes that the runoff turns our coastal zones into giant bowls of algae jelly? Probably not. Is it important to live a sustainable lifestyle as a society? Absolutely.
As someone who is neither in the “ZOMG Globul Warminz are a hoax!!11!” nor in the “Weesa Gonna DIE!/Let’s All Move Back Into Caves To Make Gaia Happy” camps, I’ve long tried to condense my thoughts on the issue into essay length, but LabRat is a certified scientist-type, and she says it much better than I could have managed.
Go and read; you’ll be glad you did.
I’ve been trying to come up with a fitting pilot call sign for a major character from my Great Big Military SF Opus. So far, she’s wearing a temporary call sign, but I want something different.
Therefore, I’ll have a little contest on this here Interblog. Anyone can enter, but the pilots and former military types will probably have a slight advantage.
Your task is to come up with a pilot call sign for a female combat pilot. She’s a Lieutenant, and flies a hybrid gunship/battle taxi as the aircraft commander. She’s a 100-percenter…you know the kind, top ten percent of her class in anything she’s ever done. Well-liked and respected in her unit, dry humor, flies a fine stick, and tends toward perfectionism. Character flaws include a chronic inability to let her hair down, and a by-the-book personality.
Submit your entries in the comments; enter as many call signs as you want. I’ll choose a winner later this week.
The prize will be a neat little Germany-related Cold War souvenir: a boxed, bagged, and authenticated piece of the Berlin Wall. Also, I’ll end up using your call sign in Great Big MilSF Opus novels #2 and #3, so there are minor bragging rights involved when they finally make it into print.
Ready? Go!
does it have to be pure silver to kill a werewolf
the fastest way to be a werewolf
I’m going to lump those two search terms together, because they can be addressed by the same reply.
What is it with people asking werewolf-related questions as if werewolves actually roamed the streets and forests, folks? They’re fictional creatures, and as such, they’re subject to any rules you can make up when you write about them. Want to be able to become a werewolf by listening to Warren Zevon while drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic’s under a full moon? Write a short story with that idea at the center, and it is so. Want to make it so that werewolves can only be killed by the exact silver content ratio of old tooth fillings? Get out the pen or keyboard, write it down, and done. That’s the awesome thing about writing fiction: you can make shit up on the spot, and as long as you have some internal consistency in your fictional world, people will believe it for a half hour while they read your story.
zombie proof home
You can zombie-proof a home by removing the main food source for zombies, which is brains. I know entire neighborhoods and counties that are practically impervious to zombie attack.
do fantasy authors need a military background
A writer doesn’t need a background in something to write about it. Most of the time, a combination of research and imagination can make up for lacking experience. I have no experience as an EMT or police officer, but if I wanted to write about a character who’s a cop or paramedic, I’d get in touch with some of my friends who are pros in those fields, and I’m pretty sure that I could write a pretty convincing cop or EMT after some interviews and research.
A military background is helpful for writing about the military, since personal experience often lends a certain authentic flavor to a narrative. Prior service would be helpful for fantasy authors if they write Military Fantasy, a genre that doesn’t exist yet, but totally should. The closest thing to MilF (heh heh) you can find on the shelves at present are Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion books, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, or John Marco’s Jackal of Nar series. Of those writers, only Elizabeth Moon has military experience, AFAIK. (She was a First Lieutenant in the Marine Corps.)
i’m loking for iligal porn
There’s so much wrong with that little query that I hardly know where to start. Suffice it to say that I often weep for the days when you had to have some mental wattage to successfully get online, instead of just $300 in your checking account and someone who can give you a ride to Wal-Mart.
10mm as wilderness defence caliber
I’m a big fan of the 10mm, but most handgun calibers are a bit light for wilderness defense, particularly in areas where that wilderness includes ursine species. Ideally, you want to carry a revolver in a caliber that starts with “.4” and ends with “Magnum” or “Casull”, and stuff the cylinder full of hard-cast hunting loads. If you’re limited to an autoloader, 10mm would probably be my first choice. In the hotter loads, it does a fair job of imitating the lower-end .41 Magnum, slinging fairly heavy bullets of the same diameter at respectable speeds. 10mm shoots flat, hits hard (for an autoloader round), and has great sectional density in the heavier bullet weights, which makes for decent penetration. It wouldn’t be my first pick, but it’s far from being a terrible one.
"line over the u" cursive
Some people put a line over their cursive U, so other people can tell it apart from the cursive N. I used to do that, too, until I went back to fountain pens, which prettified my handwriting to the point where the N and U look distinctly different again.
free healthcare is a human right
First of all, “free healthcare” isn’t free. Somebody pays for it, and it’s usually the beneficiaries themselves. (Germany, for example, takes almost 20% of gross income just for the mandatory public health insurance from the paychecks of every working person in the country, to finance “free” health care.) People who use the word “free” when it comes to a good or service either don’t understand economics, or really mean “free to me.”
Secondly, you can’t have a “human right” to a service or good that needs to be provided by others, or you claim the right to make those providers your slaves. This should be pretty easy to understand, which is why I’m amazed at how many of my otherwise highly intelligent liberal-leaning friends nod their heads in agreement when they see that bumper sticker.
us army ranger preferred hk p7 pistol
The Army’s Ranger units carry what most people in the service carry: the U.S. pistol 9mm, M9, known to civilian shooters as the Beretta 92FS. That said, few MOSs are saddled with just a sidearm as personal armament these days, as a pistol is pretty useless in modern infantry combat. Generally, a Ranger will carry a long gun as primary weapon—either an M4 carbine, a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, or an M240 machine gun, depending on task and assignment in the chalk.
And there’s your third-rate Monday morning entertainment, friends and neighbors! I’ll be here all week. (Try the veal.)
