Friday Ephemera

The name is Bond. Shaman Bond.

You know what? It’s all true. Everything that ever scared you, from conspiracy theories to monsters under the bed to ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggity beasties. The only reason they haven’t taken over the world is because my family has always been there to stand in their way. We guard the door, keeping you safe from the big bad wolf, and you never even know our names. Of course, there’s a price to be paid. By us, and by you. The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Well, no; actually that’s just my use-name. When your job description involves going one-on-one with creatures of the night on a regular basis, you have to find your humour where you can. My real name is Eddie Drood. Licensed to kick supernatural arse. My family is one of the oldest in England, perhaps the oldest, and we’ve been protecting humanity from the forces of darkness for more centuries than even we care to remember. There are those who say Drood is just a derivation of Druid. The job of a shaman is to protect his tribe from outside threats, and that’s what I used to do. I loved my job. Until it all blew up in my face.
CHAPTER ONE
Everything but a Bunch of Grapes
It started out as just another everyday mission. A certain Very Important Politician, whose face and name you’d recognise, had come, very secretly, to Harley Street in London. Home to some of the most expert, and certainly some of the most expensive, specialised medical care in the whole of the civilised world. This politician, let’s call him Mr. President, and no not the one you’re thinking of, had himself booked into the Hospice of Saint Baphomet under an assumed name after contracting a supernatural venereal disease during a goodwill tour of Thailand. He was stupid enough to slip his handlers’ leash and go looking for a little fun in the backstreet bars of Bangkok, and unlucky enough to end up getting it on with an agent of darkness masquerading as a ladything. As a result of which, Mr. President was now very heavily pregnant with something the very opposite of a love child. I had been ordered to terminate this unnatural pregnancy with extreme prejudice. The offspring was not to be born, or if born, not allowed to run loose in the material world.

And finally, “Nobody was injured.”
Just a good ol’ boy, never meanin’ no harm.

Shoes.
Thing is, then you’d need the matching bag and coat.

This.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/368664.php

Looks beautiful though.
Yes, but from what I’ve seen on various film sites, any buzz is fairly muted and low-key. I suspect the problem will be much like that of Prometheus, which I found aggravating. In that, having your characters act like they’ve never seen a horror film or any science fiction tends to undermine any suspension of disbelief. As I said about Prometheus, we, the audience, have seen so many Alien films, and monster films generally, that you just can’t get away with characters arbitrarily choosing to go in unarmed, or ‘scientists’ taking off their helmets in alien atmospheres, or petting face-huggers, or otherwise acting like morons. It jars with the film’s pretensions of intelligence. At times the effect was of sitting through a parody.

Pod people!
“Run, children, run!”

And at Middlebury College, some invited guests just aren’t allowed at speak.
Behold the intellectual climate created by the left in its own fiefdom.

Re: Alien Covenant – yeah I know, but I want to believe… It won’t be as scary as that Alves chap.

Sounds of Harry Potter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtiBYUBGsOk

The Aliens franchise needs to step up its game. Terminator is way ahead of them.

Looks beautiful though.
Yes, . . .
Ayup, we’ve sorted out that it’s Ridley Scott—Didn’t watch the preview, rather prefer my movies straight up, . . . but . . .
For the step up to coherent plotting from Prometheus and prolly this new one, there will still be Going To The Store and Late For Meeting.

“Shoes” She either has a very hairy dog or a Greek husband.

“She pledged that the children’s descendants would be consulted”: the Irish joke somehow clings tenuously to life.

“Causality is a game” is great. Mind if I steal that for a song?

Lemurs trippin’ balls.

Congressional candidate: Moon-colonizing companies could destroy cities by dropping rocks
. . . . and then the additional thought finally notes; who now is running for the House seat in Massachusetts’ 8th District,
Now running. For an election that won’t occur until November of 2018.
I had been before, and am now even more extremely fond of the British form of doing all electioneering in one 45 or so day sprint . . .

More on the Middlebury College protest-cum-riot, mentioned upthread:

College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”

And note the casual and rather grotesque smearing of Charles Murray as a “white nationalist” using “racist pseudoscience.”

mental typo?
My bad. Corrected.
The irony being that a researcher who, decades ago, briefly and very cautiously addressed the evidence for group variations in IQ distribution and impulse control ends up being attacked by violent savages.

If I were to be maximally strict about just how dearly it should cost them, I’d suggest posting military snipers at the university in advance of such lectures, with instructions to shoot any terrorists they see.
You don’t even need to stretch the definition of “terrorist” much to catch the rioting students and faculty: they’re irregular militants attacking civilians with lethal force for political and ideological gain and intimidation. Then prosecute the organizers for treason.
Completely ludicrous and not happening any time soon, of course, but I think it’s useful to keep in mind just how far these Angry Studies rioters are from the spec sheet for a civilized society. Consider:
One normally tries to relegate the use of violence to professionals. There’s an accepted zone of exception for self-defense, and there’s a grey zone of other-defense shading into vigilantism, and then there’s the lynch mob going after violent criminals which is generally outlawed. Worse yet is a lynch mob going after non-violent criminals, and then there’s a stage worse than such lynch mobbing when rioters go after non-criminals who said legal things, aggravated some more on top of that when the thing was said at a place supposedly dedicated to open discourse, and then these rioters are even worse than that again when they’re inflicting collateral damage on third parties in Murray’s company.
Finally, topping it off, the rioters filled in the rhymes in their kindergarten chants by accusing Murray of legal things that he hadn’t even done.

Finally, topping it off, the rioters filled in the rhymes in their kindergarten chants by accusing Murray of legal things that he hadn’t even done.
The protestors-cum-rioters don’t even seem terribly familiar with Murray’s research and commentary. Apparently, he’s just someone they can ‘other’ and to whom they can attach the usual out-group labels – hence, perversely calling him “sexist,” “racist” and “anti-gay.” (Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps and was an early advocate of gay marriage, hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.) So far as I can see, the thugs and morons chanting these accusations didn’t care to elaborate or offer any evidence, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books.
Having seen and heard a few of his talks and interviews, Charles Murray strikes me as a contender for the most polite man on Earth, and seems both measured and rigorous – often much more so than the people who smear him out of hand. Including, incidentally, one Barack Obama, who, in 1994, dismissed Murray’s book The Bell Curve as “good old-fashioned racism” and something to be “denounced,” while publicly admitting that he hadn’t even read it and wasn’t too familiar with its content. Great role model, Barry.
Another irony being that, if you wanted to find some bigotry and racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among the so-called protestors – the ones disrupting lectures, throwing themselves on cars and grabbing people’s hair.
[ Edited. ]

he’s just someone they can ‘other’ and to whom they can attach the usual out-group labels – hence, perversely calling him “sexist,” “racist” and “anti-gay.” (Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps and was an early advocate of gay marriage, hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)
Stop oppressing those poor lefties with your HATE FACTS, David.

…the Irish joke somehow clings tenuously to life
Hey, don’t blame Zappone on us. She’s from Seattle…

If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, it will have to cost them, dearly.
No cost will be exacted until they cross the line into massacre, wherein the dispersing mob leaves behind multiple conservative corpses at a single event.
I daresay that even a serious maiming won’t slow the momentum. The victim will be blamed for being hateful.

Here’s the game, Foldit: http://fold.it/portal/index.php?q=
There is another game at the site regarding neurons. Looks interesting.

I guess The Legacy of Heorot won’t make it to the silver screen.
Thanks (and by thanks I mean FU) Ridley.
Hmmm??? Why do you state that? There are definite possibilities, why merely look to HollywoodIsh?