You don’t want there to be a giant natural gas explosion and fire, But if you must have one, it’s good to have cameras show up soon after. Such as this, from Sissonville, West Virginia, Decemeber 2012. Note: NSFW language, as befits someone stumbling across the sudden emergence of a fire-based Kaiju.
Ten years of the Unwanted Blog, folks.
So they’re making yet another “Halloween” movie. But this one actually looks pretty good. It is a direct sequel to the first Halloween from 1978, and apparently ignores all of the other sequels. Jamie Lee Curtis returns; her character has been waiting for 40 years to bump off an imprisoned Michael Myers.
Welp, looks like this is one to see on opening day (October 12):
Bad news: the Chinese have already pilfered it.
The “Sea Dragon” is a mysterious missile program that began in 2015 and has already resulted in flight vehicles, with new versions being prepared for launch by submarines while submerged. The article suggests several possibilities of what the “Sea Dragon” might be… but one thing it does seem to be is the next missile design the Chinese will be building, since they managed to swipe half a terabyte of data.
It’s great that the Navy might actually be developing something new. Not helpful is letting our enemies just copy the damn thing. Somebody needs a whoopin’.
Two stories linked by one thread: foreigners causing trouble and raising a ruckus. But the the two stories have very different end results: in one, the locals say “STFU and GTFO,” in the other, they bend the knee.
Short form: about 1,000 Somalis at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota demand special prayer rooms (that I bet other employees don’t get to use), they demand reduced workload for an entire month (that I bet the other employees will be tasked with picking up) and they demand time off for their own celebrations (which everyone else will doubtless work through). That’s all well and good, but I didn’t see anything in the article about these workers pay being docked to pay for the special facilities or for their slacking off.
And now for something completely different:
Short form: the imams in question have been preaching violence and the overthrow of Austrian culture; the mosques are foreign-funded and have been implicated in radicalization.
“Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation tendencies have no place in our country,” said Chancellor Kurz on Friday.
Huh.
So while I was out I realized that this blog started up ten years ago… June 3, 2008, in fact. The very first post was THIS simple announcement, which included a visual estimate of my appearance (which is still fairly accurate, except for the effects of the ravages of time); the first real post was THIS ONE, a photo of the long-lost Mommacat and of the still-extant Tak (who I just saw a few days ago).
Anybody else here go that far back?
Probably no shock to long term blog readers, but I’ve been away for about three weeks. Much to say, much to keep to myself, much to complain about (let’s start with: holy crap, what’s happened to Denver. That place needs to be Thanosed). But things will start getting back to normalish soonish.
Sigh. As I pointed out a while ago, I have an issue with people who have an inability to rein it in. The very first thing a person needs to learn in order to become an actual adult is to control *themselves,* and an important part of that is not losing ones damned mind over minor stuff. Obviously, this means keeping your cool in public. But this *also* means not intentionally exaggerating reactions in selfies (and, of course, not taking a ridiculous number of selfies, because WHO CARES).
It seems that there is a pretty specific reaction image called the “Nu-Male Smile,” where men – oddly, it seems to be mostly bearded men – photograph or video themselves “unboxing” some product or other and reacting with a ridiculous and undignified chimp-like gaping maw indicating unbridled enthusiasm. It’s just… disturbing. These men are largely what are now being called “Nu-Males” or “Soy Boys,” generally millenial males who have abandoned all pretense to masculinity in favor of Feminist Approved emasculinity and a focus on trivial and empty materialism coupled with self-hatred and an abundance of Social Justice and not a whole lot of STEM.
I don’t friggen’ care *what* Exciting News has just come your way, but that level of reaction is just… disturbing.
So let’s say you’ve just discovered that The Best Of All Possible Pop Culture Products is going to be released… and you are going to be allowed to beta test it. Maybe it’s a fully functional light saber. Or a phaser pistol. Or a WestWorld REDACTEDbot. Or they’re building you a full replica Millenium Falcon, or there’s news that the USAF actually built a fleet of Orion vessels and they’ve invited you to tag along as the US Colonial Marines set up settlements on Mars and Enceladus. This is all exciting news. But reacting with a face like (and especially willingly and intentionally posting a photo of it) that shown above is so truly awful that that beta test product should not only be taken away from you, you should be legally prohibited from ever approaching within 100 feet of it. And you should wear a sign, and all your social media tagged, that warns off all females to avoid you like the plague and never reproduce with you for the good of the genetic health of the species.
If you are a man… freakin’ act like it. Did Elon Musk just come to you and tell you that SpaceX actually has a fully functional warp drive and they’re going to start settling colonies of Western Civilization on the fifteen nearest just-discovered Earth-like planets? That’s about the best news imaginable… and it should be met with something like this:
In fact, no, despite what a number of outlets have said, California hasn’t made it illegal to both shower and do laundry on the same day. But what they have done is put a 50-gallon-a-day limit into the books. And since that number is both arbitrary and under the control of power-made bureaucrats and politicians, expect it to creep downwards until showering and laundry on the same day do *effectively* become illegal.
Because limiting people in this way is a *much* better answer than building reactors and desalination plants. Because if they did *that,* people would have good jobs, the economy would improve, technology would get better, the Colorado river might actually be allowed to make it to the sea and California would constantly improve its ability to deal with power issues *and* droughts. And we can’t have that.
I was allowed to take a gander at a true piece of art: an old Colt M1911 pistol. There have been millions of these (according to Wiki, 2.7 million were procured for the US military alone), but this one may be a little special. The vast majority of the pistols were the improved M1911A1’s… but this is an M1911. Its serial number is 4482. That’s four thousand four hundred eighty two… out of at least 2.7 million. (That’s 0.00166, or in the first 0.166% of the production, if it means anything.) Reportedly, this particular pistol was made in 1913 for the US Marines, but I don’t know if that’s certain.
It’s by no means in mint condition, but it’s in certainly well-kept condition and complete, and it sends rounds downrange reliably and accurately.
So, the question is value. The owner is curious if it would go for a truckload of money, or if it should remain a family heirloom.
