NOPD: N.O. Woman Kills Armed Home Intruder
According to investigators, 21-year-old Melvin Plummer of Marrero entered a house occupied by a 30-year-old woman and her three children and brandished a handgun. The woman, who has a concealed weapons permit, pulled a gun and shot Plummer multiple times.
E-M-S paramedics transported the suspect to a hospital where he later died. The name of the man who was shot has not been released.
Neat!
No, not that one. The Messiah spacecraft from the movie “Deep Impact.”
I am looking for good images of it. I have the DVD, and took all the screenshots I need from the movie itself. But I have the UnSpecial Edition, with the movie, a trailer, and nothing else. I understand there’s a Special Edition with some “Making Of” features, and I’ve heard there are additional illustrations (renders, sketches, model photos, I dunno) of the vehicle in there. I’d appreciate any additional screenshots that could be gleaned from them.
If anyone has the Blu-Ray and would be interested in taking screenshots, that’d be even better. I understand the filming model itself was on display somewhere (ILM? I forget), and would be interested in any good-rez photos that may be available.
This is in support of a series of diagrams I need to make for the Orion book; diagrams that may be used (probably not by me) to make a model kit of it as well.
Thanks.
It’s not good news for the Obama administration when even Jon Stewart rips him a new one on the Daily Show for the staggering reversal of promises for transparency (an issue I pointed out years ago). Watch the video here.
I can’t tell you in objective terms how long and how loud I laughed at this. Loud enough to scare a cat.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1879#comic
Anyone recognize this?
I’ll post more on it in a while, but I’m curious if anyone recognizes what I’m trying to reconstruct here.
No, it’s not sci-fi.
In the mid/late 1990’s, MTV (back when it made some effort to show actual music videos) had a late-night show called “Amp” which showed a lot of oddball videos, electronica, mostly. One that always weirded me right the hell out was the video “The Box” by Orbital, starring a pre-fame Tilda Swinton.
[youtube q25Zx6B5HJA]
It’s simple enough in concept… an oddly dressed woman walks through (I think) London and looks at stuff. But she walked *really* slowly; even with the film sped way up, so that people are basically just blurs, she’s still barely creeping through the scenery. I don’t know what the “message” was supposed to be (or if there even was supposed to be one), but I figured she either represents a spirit, an alien or a crazy person trying to make sense of things and failing utterly, not least because the time rates are all off. For sci-fi authors, please note: this may well be the case with aliens. They may live a thousand times faster than us or a thousand times slower… or a million, or a billion. In those cases, interactions are likely to be damn near meaningless. “Dragon’s Egg” by RobertForward dealt with such an issue; what was for the humans involved a matter of days was the rise and fall of entire civilizations from non-technological barbarism to starflight for another species.
What might be more interesting is a species offset from human timescales by a factor of, say, two. Far enough off to be annoying for both sides; close enough for meaningful interaction.
———–
For whatever reason, Monsters Exist, and her reaction to it, always gave me a serious case of the uncomfortables. The whole video drips with “alienation.”
It turns out that there is at least one Republican in the FedGuv with a functional spine:
House Republicans propose deep cuts to Medicare
The proposal, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), aims to cut $4 trillion in federal spending over ten years, in part by ending Medicare as we know it for Americans who are currently under the age of 55.
The proposal also cuts Medicaid, which helps pay health care expenses for low-income Americans. Currently a joint program run by the federal government and states, the Ryan plan would turn it into a series of block grants for states, considerably reducing benefits.
About goddamn time. These programs have come to virtually dominate the FedGuv budget.
The article tacks on this:
liberals have argued that seniors and low-income people should not have to pick up the tab for a deficit caused largely by tax cuts, two unfunded wars and a recession.
In a word: baldercrap. The deficit was not caused by tax cuts, but by massive over-spending. Notice the trend here? It ain’t downwards.
While Federal revenue has been essentially flat for decades:
Sadly, I suspect this proposal has approximately zero chance of success… the Medicare/caid scams have been entirely too successful at suckering people into dependency upon them (just read the comments at the article). But it’s good that at least *somebody* in government is willing to at least try. The US economy will continue to decline if these programs are not tackled, with a virtually inevitable collapse under the sheer weight of government bureaucracy.
Diagrams of the last “official” Orion design, featuring a pair of Philco Mars landers. At least some thought was given to lofting the Orion sub-orbitally using an uprated S-IC booster stage, and letting it put itself directly onto a trans-Mars trajectory using the nuclear pulse engine.
The book is still chugging along.
Ha.
All-female team launches historic mission over Afghanistan
The article title is kinda lame, but the story isn’t: two F-15E Strike Eagles laid some whoopass on the Taliban in a ground support capacity. Both pilots were women. Both weapons systems officers were women. Mission callsign: Dudette 07.
The only lame part of the story is that the mission was specifically set up to be all-female “in honor of Women’s History Month.” Feh. Better reasons:
1: The female crew just happened to be the best available crew to carry out the mission
2; They were chosen for an all-female mission not for touchy-feelie reasons, but specifically to kick the Jihadists square in the nads and have girls laugh at them.
Ah, well, just so long as great effort is made to publicize the fact that women are wiping out the Taliban. If the Afghanis can stop chopping peoples heads off over some goofball pastor in Florida having burned a Koran, perhaps they’ll hear about this and have a new reason to chop people’s heads off.
NOTE: The title of this posting came from a Fark.com thread about pink pistols being marketted to wimmins, and how embarassing it would be for a thug to get shot with something like that.
Because nothing says “I Love You” more than a Hello Kitty Sig P226 handgun
Now, a hot pink F-15E done up with Hello Kitty images would violate Odin knows how many Air Force regulations… but you gotta admit it’d be funnier’n hell to see one lay waste to some Taliban. Especially if the bombs were painted up kinda like… you know, ummm… “back massagers.” Yeah. Back massagers. And now that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is gone, a somewhat similar F-15E, but with less Hello Kitty and more Hello Sailor, would also be damned entertaining to see in action. Especially once we inevitably go to war with Saudi Arabia…
Remember how leftist nutjob Jared Loughner only went and killed a Republican-appointed federal judge because of horrible, horrible hate speech from Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and how ever since then everybody has been all nice and civil? Keep that in mind as you read this:
NY Lawmakers Receive Threat Letter
Someone claiming to be a state employee sent an email to every member of the New York state legislature claiming that he was going to run a terrorism campaign against the state and its citizens. The reason? Because state governments aren’t genuflecting sufficiently to Unions.
