But apparently it’s not:
Sinead O’Connor changes her name after converting to Islam
When I was in high school & college, she was an amazing talent. Since then, she’s been largely know for being bugnuts. So, y’know, a day ending in “y.”
Oct 252018
Oct 252018
After STD, after the Picard series, now there’s this:
Star Trek animated comedy series ordered from Rick and Morty writer
A half-hour cartoon sitcom entitled “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”
At least I’ll be able to watch “The Orville.”
UPDATE:
Not exactly related, but if’n ya want animated Star trek comedy gold… here ya go:
Oct 252018
WTF, over…
Two packages sent to Joe Biden, one to Robert De Niro match other mailed pipe bombs
Someone was clearly busy.
Of course, making pipe bombs is not exactly a job for jewelers or rocket surgeons. A guy could probably make a few dozen in a day, and I’ve seen people with dozens of packages at the post office. What seems head-scratching to me is that *none* of these things went off. If the bomb maker was any good at his job, you’d think they’d be boobytrapped. If the bomb maker was a chucklehead, you’d think that they’d go off somewhere in the mail because they were badly made. That *all* of these bombs have been intercepted safely seems a little odd.
Oct 252018
A Japanese car advertised in English for the Egyptian market. With that level of multiculturalism, surely – SURELY – nobody would find cause for complaint.
Guess again.
People Are Angry At Toyota Over New Egyptian Fortuner Ad, Say It’s Sexist
To be honest, the message of the ad strikes a chord with me:
“The 21st century man does not need to hunt for lunch. Simply, because he can have his lunch delivered to him. As such, opportunities to use his raw power are limited. To opening stubborn jar lids, or carrying up to four grocery bags at the same time. It’s true. These days, it’s harder for a man to liberate his man-side.”
It’s the usual cynical advertising that makes use of a serious point to sell a product. That point being that in modern society (at least western society… I wonder a bit about Egyptian society), men are usually not what we were evolved to be: violent animals. We are restrained by society. Many of us are drugged into compliance as boys, because we act too much like boys. Instead of being taught responsibility and self control, we are simply hammered into compliance. It’s easier than the difficult job of raising boys into men. And so every now and then we see men snap and shoot up a joint or beat the tar out of their girlfriends or join ISIS or Antifa, because they have the instincts nature gave them but *not* the discipline that a proper upbringing would have instilled. And perhaps just as commonly we have guys who have repressed their instincts so far that they have become emasculated “soy boys,” perpetual children stripped of their manhood.
So… does this make me want to buy that Toyota? Nope. But I recognize that speaking to that yearning for masculinity is a dandy sales tactic… just like “this will make you pretty” is a dandy sales tactic for makeup aimed at women.
Oct 252018
An inboard profile of the LTV XC-142 VTOL transport from the mid/late 1960’s. The XC-142 proved capable, but also a bit flawed, suffering a few failures and crashes. Still, had those problems been worked out, the capabilities of the V-22 might have been realized twenty years earlier.
I’ve posted a higher rez version of this to the 2018-10APR Extras Dropbox folder for $4+ APR Patrons.
Oct 242018
So the news is full to the brim with breathless reporting about pipe bombs sent to the offices of a whole bunch of Democrats. The FBI is obviously all over this.
Occams Razor applies here as it usually does when trying to determine who is responsible. If a bomb is sent to a political person, it is most likely that it was sent by a political opponent. But it is always instructive to ask “who benefits from this?” Consider:
1: These bombs were *never* going to get to who they were addressed to. It’s not like George Soros or Pres. Obama open their own mail. They have minions for that.
2: These bombs do not look like practical explosive devices. Instead they look quite theatrical.
3: There are important national elections coming up in just a few weeks.
It seems probable that these bombs were *meant* to be intercepted and photographed and made into a major news story. Who does that benefit? It certainly does not benefit the political opponents of the targets of the bombs. What seems very likely to result from this is some measure of sympathy for the targets as well as ginning up enthusiasm among their voters.
If the bombs were sent by a Crazy Person, or by a Right Wing Extremist, expect them to be discovered by the FBI in short order, as this incident was amateurish and poorly thought out… not the product of a truly devious mind. if, on the other hand, this was a false flag operation, then chances are much better that those behind it *are* pretty clever, and likely capable of going undiscovered (but if they are discovered, it’ll be a scandal of truly epic proportions). In either event, expect a whole lot of political hay to be made from this conveniently timed terrorist act.
Further thinking:
A possibility exists that the sender is neither an Evil Right Winger nor a Devious Left Winger. What this event will do is sow further dissension between the left and right in the US. Who would benefit from that? Perhaps these devices should be examined for polonium or novichok…
Oct 242018
Girls plotted attack at Florida school, planned to leave body parts at entrance, police say
A couple of middle schoolgirls were caught in the bathroom prior to carrying out their plan of killing 15 fellow students with things like a paring knife and a butcher knife. The article is a Journalism Fail because it makes no reference to Slender Man at all.
UPDATE:
A more informative article:
PD: 2 Satan-worshiping girls armed with knives plotted to kill 15 students at middle school
The two girls were 11 and 12 and actually claimed to worship Satan. Among their arsenal of pointy things is a pizza cutter. I’m thinking these two might not have been the sharpest tools in the box, but if a friggen *robot* hadn’t started a search in motion then they could have caused some serious damage to smaller children.
Oct 232018
Earlier this evening I posted about a Kickstarter for “Frozen Hell” that I think looks good. I don’t often search through the likes of Kickstarter or Indiegogo (or other similar crowdfunding sites) for such things because… well, money. But who knows: maybe you know of a crowdfunding effort that you think everybody else reading this blog would be interested in. If so, comment below. That that I like I’ll slap into the body of the post.
Oct 232018
I don’t know how much Thunderf00t makes from each video, but it’s starting to look like he can live like a king simply pointing out the latest “water from thin air” foolishness. Here we have the Google X-prize giving a million and a half dollars for yet another Amazing Dehumidifier. You know, the same organization that funded the first private flight into space, now forking over the cheddar to people doing what has been done for more than a century.
I am in the wrong business.
Oct 232018
The first thing I read was that “Who Goes There?” the excellent John W. Campbell Jr. novella that inspired “The Thing From Another World” and John Carpenters “The Thing,” was going to be expanded to novel-length. And this… made me go meh. The story was quite good enough as-is, and someone else cobbling together their own expansion… meh. Meh, I say. I mean, what kind of hack author thinks he can expand upon a story written many decades ago by a far better, far better *known* author? Feh.
And then within a few seconds of further reading it turns out that Campbell actually wrote the whole novel his own self but never had it published… and now it’s a-gonna-be. And *that* is worthy of note.
Frozen Hell: The Book That Inspired The Thing
It’s a Kickstarter to get it published in hardback. It currently has 38 days to go, and is sitting at $52,568 of its one thousand dollar goal.
“Who Goes There?” was first published in the August, 1938 “Astounding Science Fiction,” around a year after the death of H.P. Lovecraft, and about two and a half years after the publication of Lovecrafts “At the Mountains of Madness.” The two share a lot of similarities, and I bet Lovecraft would have gotten a hell of a kick out of “Who Goes There?” Heck, it would not take a whole lot of effort to rationalize “WGT?” into a sequel of “ATMOM.” The “thing” is actually just an evolved Shoggoth; it didn’t crash here from outer space, but instead it crashed *back* into Antarctica when it tried to steal an Elder Thing craft of some type, then got frozen in the ice for a million years.