So, a bunch of ponies in Britain are causing a ruckus. These critters, raised in the wild, have been given a lot of sugary treats by well-intentioned but ill-considered folk. The end result has been that the ponies now *expect* to get the treats, will get pushy about demanding them, and will get aggressive and violent if you don’t cough ’em up.
I wonder if someone could come up with some sort of political metaphor from this…
Some time in the next month or so, an new series will premiere on AMC called “Into the Badlands.” I only know a few facts about it:
Besides that, America (I’m guessing this is set in America) is apparently a dystopia… sorta post-industrial, with old cars and motorbikes rather than speederbikes and starships, and society is run by way of an aristocratic system of barons and the like. Well… meh, I guess.
But where I think there might be something interesting: the Evil Aristocratic Tyrants have somehow successfully gotten rid of all firearms in order to prevent the peasants from rising up. Setting aside for a moment the sheer impossibility of clearing all firearms out of the US, the idea of a major TV series being based on the idea that “no guns” = “overbearing totalitarian dictators reducing the populace to the status of serfs” seems rather remarkable to me. Is this going to be like “Firefly,” a show created by a left-wing extremist, but that somehow created one of the great right-wing heroes of fiction in the way of Mal Reynolds? Will “Into the Badlands” wind up showing a right-wing worldview by showing the result of five hundred years of leftist policy?
We shall see, I suppose.
Sometimes when I go to Barnes & Noble or some similar bookstore I just wander the aisles, looking at the major subject sections. Almost invariably I am saddened: a great big section on Newage, a small section on science. Look in the “young adult” or childrens section and find a handful of science fiction books; but several bookcases full of fantasy and paranormal. More than once I’ve found *sizable* sections devoted specifically to “paranormal romance.” You know, gettin’ it on with vampires and ghosts and elves and such.
At the best of times, I don’t really *get* a lot of romance fiction. A lot of it seems to be “damsel in distress tries to capture and then change Bad Boy.” Having actually lived for some time in the real world, when that is tried in reality the virtually inevitable result is “damsel in distress winds up getting smacked around by the Bad Boy, because she can’t actually change him via any means shot of armed rebellion.” So when you replace the standard Bad Boy (judging by the cover art, he tends to be a shirtless Viking or a shirtless biker or a shirtless highlander; shirtlessness seems pretty much a prerequisite, along with flowing hair and a lack of a beer gut) with a supernatural entity whose sole purpose seems to be to rend humans limb from limb, my lack of understanding sorta shoots through the roof.
Rather than launch into a series of expletives on this topic I’ll let Foamy the Squirrel do it instead:
Foamy make a series of good points, but one I had not previously considered runs thus: Women want men to charge through the gates of Hell and fight off hordes of demons, to be dashing Princes with buckets of cash. Men want women to be a bit more stretchy. Which one is the more unrealistic?
An Autotune-tastic music video starring Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, extolling the virtues of science and space exploration.
Two recently uploaded videos show the MD-80 and B-2 to good effect:
A Rockwell diagram showing the configuration of the Shuttle for ferry flight, with the aerodynamic tailcone.
A three stage vehicle to transport 10 passengers to space stations and the like. I’ve recently come into possession of a whole bunch of reports on the Reusable Aerospace Passenger Transport and Reusable Orbital Transport programs; at some point these might make the makings of an APR article.
The third stage bears a vague similarity to the Boeing Dyna Soar in configuration, but is an entirely different vehicle. This concept helped set the course towards the Space Shuttle.
Nope. Nothing much to look at out here in Thatcher Utah…
Where the author bemoans American’s ignorance of the south-of-the-border holiday “Dia de los Muertos,” and how in our ignorance we’re changing the meaning of it into somethign cheap and commercial.
Hey, buddy: it’s what we do.
If you import your alien holidays into the US, we will change them to suit *our* interests. Don’t like it? Stay the hell out. It’s not “cultural appropriation” for Americans to take Dia de los Muertos and turn it into an extension of Halloween; it’s a simple reaction to something funny and furrin being foisted upon us. If you don’t like it, get in line behind St. Patricks Day. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or Halloween itself. It is standard American practice to take someone else’s “sacred day” and turn it into a reason to party. But we don’t reach across the ocean to rifle through other cultures holidays for things to mock; we only do so with holidays that are brought here.
So, yeah… the Day of the Dead *is* Halloween, because we said so. It’s a day to get trashed on tequila, dress up like a blinged-out skeleton, act like a moron, tell Rebo and Zooty jokes, hang up candy skulls and comets and hope for visits from not-unattractive redheads. Don’t like it? Tough. You brought it here and dumped it in our laps… now it’s *ours.*
I’m at a loss to explain why there was still a statue of Lenin in Ukraine, or why it wasn’t riddled with bulletholes or melted into a puddle of slag by way of homemade thermite, but at least the Ukrainian government has passed a law banning all public displays of Soviet symbols. Many European nations have similar laws against displaying Nazi symbols, so getting rid of the symbols of an even *worse* system makes sense.
But some Ukranians decided that a better approach than tearing down the statue of Lenin was to dress it up a bit as a Dark Lord of the Sith. It’s unclear from this article whether the additions are just plastic, or whether they are more permanent. It pleases me to think that someone took a power saw and beheaded Lenin, melting the bronze down to cast, say, Darths chestplate. I suspect, though, that this is likely just plastic bits glued over the metal.
