The place is still standing, though I ain’t. Amazing how tiring six or seven hours of sitting on your butt can be… especially when it followed a couple hours of hiking through some truly bizarre terrain.

I need to work with my files a bit (step one: BACK UP EVERYTHING) and buy some new DVDs, but I should get burning on them by the weekend. Might take a little while to get them all done.

Also: I will also get back to work on the “prototype” version of “A Guide to American Nuclear Explosive Devices” within the next day or so. I don’t have an estimate of when these will be ready, but I don’t think it should be too long. Certainly far faster than the “Space Station V” thing: I find writing about Real Stuff goes vastly faster than fiction, and the same holds for CAD drafting. Fiction requires a certain aspect of imagination that I’m finding a bit difficult to access as easily as I once did.

Also also: I’ve decided on the “special” for the “early adopters” of the nuke expedition. As appropriate for the subject, the decision came with a proper MUAHAHAHAHAHA evil genius laugh. This should be available well in advance of the book prototype.

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And to get back into the swing of things, I heard about this on the radio today:

Howard’s Daily: Finding Infrastructure in the Stimulus Plan

Remember the $800 billion “stimulus” package from 2009? Guess how much of it got spent on physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc…. you know, the stuff the government is actually *supposed* to do): 3%.

Woo.

About $500 billion went to tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and “state fiscal relief” (shoring up insolvent state budgets). The remaining $300 billion was spent on actual projects, of which the big beneficiaries were: (i) subsidies for clean energy ($78 billion), (ii) subsidies for education and child support ($50 billion)(student loans, special ed, and support for disadvantaged children), (iii) health and health IT ($32 billion), (iv) transportation infrastructure ($30 billion, as noted above); (v) environmental cleanup ($28 billion), (vi) new buildings ($24 billion), (vii) scientific research ($18 billion), and a few other categories.

Stimulating, no?