A long, LONG, time ago (late 70’s/early 80′) I read a short SF story, and have forgotten the title and author. Finding it again is not really important for any useful purpose… the problem is that I half remember it and it’s friggen’ bugging me that I can’t nail it down. I thought of it again recently after stories of Putins new Wunderwaffen; it may seem a little familiar.

What I remember: it’s the story of a robot, or perhaps a pair of robots. The robots are self-guided torpedoes that lurk under the sea for extended periods. I vaguely recall that one of them was waiting in a bay or a harbor for some length of time. The robots were not shaped like torpedoes but more like sperm or tadpoles, using wagging whip-like mechanical tails for propulsion. Something or other about one of these things doing its job and the tail being the only thing left after it blew up.

For a while my addled brain cells were telling me that this story was called “The Twonky,” but that’s an entirely different story.

The story was from the 1940’s or 1950’s, I think.

Sound familiar?

UPDATE:

This is it: Murray Leinster, “The Wabbler,” 1942. I can kinda see why I confused it with “The Twonky…” the titles, while not sounding alike, are both the same kind of thing. Both two-word titles, first being “The,” second being a two-syllable nonsense word. See comments for a link to a scan of the story.

It has long been known that Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard his own self, spent a few decades in an aging-free stasis. for example, here he is in 1981’s Excalibur,

And in 1984’s Dune:

And in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis (with Tom Hardy, who would inflate to play Bane a decade later):

And at an awards ceremony in January 2018:

Sure, there’s some aging, but it doesn’t really look like the better part of 40 years worth.

This could of course be due to Stewart just being special. But I happened to catch 1991’s “The Last Boy Scout” in HBO a few days ago. It stars Bruce Willis, who does look like a substantially younger version of the old feller in the recent “Death Wish.” But starring alongside Willis is Damon Wayans, who looked like this:

The past few years, Wayans has been starring in the TV series remake of “Lethal Weapon.” Much to my surprise, I gotta say that I recommend “Lethal Weapon;” it certainly beats the “remakes suck” curse that has been active the last decade or so. It’s really quite good.

And Damon Wayans looks like this:

Again, yes, some aging is visible, but not what you’d expect for nearly 30 years.

I assume Patrick Stewart is naturally bald. I don’t know about Daman Wayans; could be a fashion choice. But it seems to have worked for him.

Elon Musk recently did a Q&A about the BFR and his interplanetary plans. He again says that there will be test hops in the first half of 2019, orbital flights in 2020.

Plus, this:

Space bases could preserve civilization in World War III: Elon Musk

Let’s say they do. Who do you sue?

Nobody is sure just when it’s coming down, and since there’s no “when,” there’s no “where.”

… then don’t-win in style.

How can a man die better than entering a cardboard boat race in a two-man cardboard AT-AT?

Dennis Prager argues that there is an afterlife… and his reasons why are the worst forms of appeal to emotions imaginable.

His very first claim is this: “If there is a god, there is an afterlife.” This claim is patently ridiculous. If there is a god, there may or may not be an afterlife. Gods, after all, are by definition infinitely far beyond us; they would be the ultimate aliens. Perhaps some hypothetical god made mankind in his image… as a project out of boredom, or as a joke, or for any of an infinite number of reasons that have nothing to do with that god having some desire to have the souls of dead humans flitting about cluttering up his crib. Heck, perhaps “god” is Azathoth, who blindly created the universe without the slightest bit of conscious thought or intention, and all life within the universe is merely an emergent property, the result of the natural processes occasionally bringing together conditions right for biogenesis and evolution.

And then he goes on to claim that without an afterlife, there’s no possibility for “ultimate justice” either for victims or victimizers. But so what? Just because you *want* there to be justice – in particular, *your* conception of justice – doesn’t mean there *is* justice. Me, I want to be rich and attractive to the wimmins and important to western civilizations conquest and colonization of the universe. But just because I want those doesn’t mean that they are reality, or ever will be. And of course there’s always the possibility that there is indeed an afterlife, but it’s one you just don’t want. Maybe God really does love us so much that there’s just the one destination; let’s call it Heaven. Everyone gets to go there. Once there, God spends eternity showering us with his love. However, his love comes in the form of hydrofluoric acid mixed with lemon juice and small glass shards because to God, that sort of thing is *awesome.* What, do you think your idea of Heaven would be all that spectacular for, say, fleas or dust mites?

And a related argument: without an afterlife, he’ll never again see dead loved ones, and he thinks that if he believed he’d never again see the dead, he’d go mad. But then, there have been millions of perfectly sane atheists and agnostics who believed they’d never again see their beloved dead. Sadness and grief are bad, but not necessarily so bad that madness is the inevitable result. And the other side of the coin: a day ago I posted a video by a feller who seems pretty convinced that he’ll get to see his dead loved ones again…and he was clearly as crazy as a five gallon bucket of ass crack spackle.

Prager says that the thought of an afterlife keeps him sane because without an afterlife, torturers would get away with their crimes. But that’s just exactly the problem. If you put your faith in supernatural justice, rather than cops, courts and John Moses Browning, then you’re much more prone to let the torturers get away with it, because the afterlife will be sure to get ’em, so why is it any of your bother?

The arguments presented in the video are all exactly wrong. They are utterly worthless appeal to emotion logical fallacies, rather than logical arguments supported by facts and evidence. I’m honestly stumped as to who this video is meant to sway. I can only assume it’s meant to console those who already hold the same position he does.

If you want to convince someone that the afterlife exists… provide some incontrovertible evidence. How hard can it really be? People have been pondering the afterlife for at least 6,000 years of recorded history; surely in all that time if there is an afterlife, there’re some hard facts amenable to rational scientific testing.

Seriously, though. If someone comes to me and says, “I believe in an afterlife,” my first response is “why.” If their response is “because I just do,” hey, I can fully respect that. I got my own unsupportable beliefs that exist on no firmer footing than “because.” If, however, they justify their belief with painfully flawed arguments, arguments so bad as to be not just laughable, but essentially fraudulent, I gotta cringe. If they are making money pretending to be wise experts on the topic and they crank out these dumbass arguments, I really gotta point and laugh.

I started on a story for Book 2 of my “War With The Deep Ones” on Sunday night (based on an idea I had last Friday afternoon) and finished the first draft moments ago. Works out to about 55 pages. Not a bad pace… ten or so pages a day would finish a good sized novel in less than a month. Of course, 55 pages might not necessarily be 55 *good* pages, but it’s better to have them down and trim a lot, than to have nothing written down.

Book One is not as “cosmic doomy” as a lot of Lovecraftian tales are, more “regular doomy” since the Deep Ones are fairly mundane critters compared to cosmic horrors like Yog Sothoth and Nyarlathotep and Justin Beiber. But things ramp up on the Doom Scale in Book Two.

Still not quite sure what to actually *do* with all this. I’m going through the latest version of my first “Zaneverse” novel, hopefully to wrap up my final edit and then to try to convince a publisher to publish it, but as for “War?” Dunno.

As a reminder, the first “War” story is Honolulu, the second is Champion of the Seas. Feel free to check them out.

The GE9X turbofan meant to power the next generation of 777’s is undergoing flight testing underneath the wing of a 747. The engine is fricken’ *HYUGE.*

World’s biggest jet engine takes to the skies: Prototype that will power Boeing’s 406 seat 777X ‘megaplane’ flies for the first time

I’m an absolutist on very few things. As y’all may have guessed, I’m a big fan of the 2nd Amendment and am opposed to the great majority of gun control laws… but there comes a time when you look at someone and think “that there mofo is a nutburger who is going to show up on CNN sooner or later, maybe he aughtta get a looking-at by some nice men in white coats.” There are people who demonstrate such whackadoodleness that it’s fair to discuss having them at least temporarily losing their rights, at least until the authorities can determine if they’re about to shoot up a school.

Gentlemen… BEHOLD:

This here is one of those fellers who makes the rest of the Christian world look bad simply through guilt by association. Take a look at his rapturous face and dead-souled eyes when he takes glee in announcing that someone has been tossed into a lake of fire for all eternity for the crime of believing something different. There is a definite psychopathy that takes joy in the thought of people being tortured for infinity. For a real spooky thought, just imagine that this feller is right, and that the afterlife will consist of most people going to Hell, and a few people like *him* populate Heaven. Really, which would be worse? If God wants to surround himself with the sort of people who giggle at the idea of Stephen Hawking burning in Hell, ya gotta wonder if being as far as possible from God might not be so bad.

Alternatively: assume Satan is real and wants to turn people away from Christianity. What better strategy could such an entity take than to create Christians like this guy and televangelists?

I note in a number of his other videos he’s wearing shirts that say “SECURITY” on them, in others he’s wearing a uniform with a badge reading “SECURITY ENFORCEMENT OFFICER.” This implies employment as some sort of rent-a-cop, quite possibly armed. When the movie of the week gets made, if they want to do it right the production company is going to have to clone a young Jake Busey to play the role.