Did you know that a small Red Ryder tricycle can hold a 5-year-old pilot, a 3-year-old passenger, and a pair of stuffed animals, and still be able to go 55mph when driven in circles in the house?
Monthly Archives: April 2010
smart people reviewing dumb movie.
The Atomic Nerds take on Pocahontas in Space Avatar in a two-prong approach:
LabRat offers a cerebral perspective on the philosophical failings of Jim Cameron’s White Guilt in 3D, while Stingray opens up a can of review whoop-ass that makes the most caustic review at Rotten Tomatoes read like the transcript from a five-year-old’s Winnie the Pooh tea party.
Go read, but heed my warning and put all beverage containers out of reach before reading Stingray’s review, because I will not be held responsible for soaked keyboards:
please to be perusing the writenings.
I updated the long-neglected Fiction section of this here Interblogs thingie with the stuff I’ve been putting out for public consumption recently. More to follow.
gaia, you suck.
Lunchtime weather update:
You know, it’s a good thing it’s almost May, because that means I can’t possibly be looking at three inches of snow accumulation in our front yard. I suspect an elaborate prank. It’s probably those wacky MIT kids again.
trying on a new outfit. and another. and another…
I’m messing with some new page templates, so if the place looks different on occasion today, don’t freak out and/or check your coffee for hallucinogens.
This template is called “P2″, and I like it a lot. It lets me post directly from the front page (very Twitter-esque), and I like how the comments are threaded right underneath the posts without having to click an extra link. It makes the blog look a lot more lively and active. (You can turn that feature off by selecting “Toggle Comment Threads”, if you’d rather hide the comments on the main page.)
Or, you know, i could just cobble something together with a black background and multi-colored, blinking Comic Sans instead. Maybe even throw in a .wav file that loops a cute sound file every time you load the page! And a header that has frickin’ sweet animated flames in it…
upper cryogenica, late april.
We’re just a few days away from May. This is the scene outside, circa two minutes ago:
And that, friends and neighbors, is why people in northern New England don’t usually put the snow shovels away until they can smell the burgers on the grill for the Fourth of July cookout.
seconded.
CrankyProf goes to school spring dance; random observations on specific asshattery result.
(T)here are members of the human herd that should be clubbed down like harp seals for the good of the race entire. Seriously. There ought to be a superhero — “Darwin Man!” — who appears, bludgeons the wart on humanity into paste — “For the good of all mankind, I apply the rod of Natural Selection!” – and disappears until necessity calls. He’d probably be overbooked as all Hell.
Darwin Man…we have a great need for this superhero’s specialty skill. He needs an awesome costume, a snazzy theme, and his own light signal, to be shined into the skies from the top of the police department. Maybe an outline of a dodo?
reynolds wrap.
Check out what came back from the tailor the other day:
That’s my brown canvas duster. It has corduroy trim on the collar and cuffs. Robin gave it to me for my birthday a few years back. It used to be ankle length, but that was a bit hard to manage, so I had it altered to mid-thigh length. It looks a little baggy on the hanger, but it’s much more spiffy in real life. With the split vent in the back, it has an almost Victorian look to it. I feel like a rakish, wisecracking ruffian when I’m wearing it.
Yeah, I’m a huge geek, but that should come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a week or two.
monday search term safari XCII.
munchkin wrangler writing music
For background music while writing, I like movie soundtracks, because they don’t distract me with lyrics. When you think about it, they’re pretty much designed to evoke a mood without pulling your attention away from what you’re seeing/doing.
hunting in africa with .50 beowulf
The .50 Beowulf is a low-pressure round utilizing a heavy bullet, 300 to 400 grains. It’s designed for stopping power and barrier penetration at relatively short ranges, and the ballistics are comparable to a standard pressure .45-70. It’s not a terrible round for big game, but I can think of many better ones, and I sure wouldn’t try to use it on dangerous game. The whole point of the .50 Beowulf is to squeeze a big pill into the magazine well of an AR-15, and launch it at a safe pressure for the AR’s gas system…and an AR has no place in the gun case if you’re packing for an African safari.
my roof is fucked
Then, very soon, the same status will apply to your checking and savings accounts. For some weird reason, a new roof is wicked expensive.
i leave my beretta jetfire uncocked
That’s the way it’s meant to be carried: hammer down on a loaded chamber. (That’s why the hammer spur has the thumb-friendly shape.) The safety on a Jetfire only blocks the trigger, not the sear, and I wouldn’t rely on it for cocked-and-locked carry.
utah firing squad rifle types
I hear that Utah uses lever-action rifles in .30-30 Winchester.
why are lcp’s called elsie pea
Sound out the letters: Ell Sea Pea.
nvidia ion without fan
The ION has no fan. The ION needs no fan. The heat sink for the chipset can get a little warm to the touch, but the whole thing draws less than 30 watts under full load, and 3-4W when idling. My ION rig is pulling home server and HTPC duties behind the TV, and it’s always on. Despite the lack of a fan, there aren’t any heat issues, even when playing 1080p content.
how to write a good military novel
Same way you write any other kind of good novel: come up with interesting characters, and put them in interesting situations.
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We’re light on content and low on snark for today’s MSTS, so I’ll throw in a completely unrelated bonus picture of two randomly selected neighborhood kids:
a sweet gig if you can get in.
Hey, taxpayers!
How does it feel to know that you paid six-figure salaries to a bunch of bureaucrats who spent eight hours a day downloading porn to their work computers instead of doing their work?
(This would be the SEC, some of whose employees filled up hard drives with German Scheisse videos while Bernie Madoff was running his Ponzi scheme, and the country was in the middle of the worst financial crisis in eighty years. But clearly, what we need is to give the regulatory agencies even more power.)
Anyone want to wager a guess how many of those six-figure drones will get fired and lose their cushy government pensions?
Based on my experiences in a previous life as a network admin, I’m sure of two things:
- In any office-type job, 50% of the people working there only do 1-2 hours of actual work in a day, and fill up the rest with gossiping, lunch, and futzing around on the Internet.
- In any office-type job, more than 50% of the people working there will only work hard enough to not get fired.
Relating to point 2., think about how difficult it is to actually get fired from a government job, and then think about how little motivation the little bureaucrats have to get actual work done. Whenever the shit hits the fan, there’s a flurry of activity because of overreaction to the crisis (“We need to show we’re not irrelevant!”), a lot of reorganization (because movement creates the illusion of activity and progress), and maybe a high-profile firing or three, but overall it’s just a reshuffling of warm bodies. Once the public scrutiny settles–and it will, as the public goes back to Dancing with Lost American Idols–they’ll all go back to surfing porn and racking up time toward their pensions.
And now some folks want to give the SEC more regulatory power. That’s like hiring a gardener to plant your tulips, discovering the dude in the tool shed smoking pot and jerking off during work hours…and addressing the problem by hiring an additional gardener and doubling their salaries.
On the upside, I can think of a few federal alphabet agencies whose employees should surf for porn all day long. I’m all in favor of letting, say, the boys and girls over at the IRS or BATFEIEIO spend their workdays looking at hawt secks instead of thinking up ways to hassle the rest of us.
