Friday Ephemera (711)
Ladies, do you recycle yours? || Well, I laughed. || The Electric Egg, 1942. || Juggling, from above. || “I’ve been bouncing for fifteen years.” || “Liturgical Barbie with matching vestments.” || Luckily, his balls took the brunt of it. || Bending water. || You have to warm it up first. (NSFW) || Feeding time. || Tall Korean visits Netherlands. || Incoming. || Quite. || A question of eye-hand coordination. || It gives her chills. || This is Sparta. || Today’s word is practised. || Possibly not ideal for pornography enthusiasts. || The progressive retail experience, parts 533, 534, 535, and 536. || Somewhat impractical football pitch. || Intrepid adventurers. || An erotic vision. || Proof, were it needed, that you have a low and filthy mind. || And finally, today’s other words are engine failure.
If inclined, you can follow me on X / Twitter.
To register with the blog and thereby enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page. It’s free and quite painless.
Here, you can borrow my Rocinante pilot control console:
References to Girls or Women: 8
References to Priests: 6
References to God: 1
References to Pride: 1
References to Christ: 1
References to the Church: 0
I think we know where their priorities lie.
Unfair! The Aussies need to get their fair share.
Solid work there, barkeep. Tip jar hit.
I KNOW, RIGHT?
Bless you, sir. May your robotic vacuum cleaner not get snarled among the cables under the sofa, resulting in some undignified problem-solving.
I actually pictured myself in a billowing, bejewelled sari, barking expletives at subordinates.
What?
Meanwhile, somewhere in The Land of Saints and Scholars…
Ah yes, they’re a proud people and they take their traditions very seriously.
A short while ago we had the flaming toilet here, now people with nothing better to do than to come up with solutions in search of a problem bring us “dry toilets” and dung dehydrators.
I actually pictured myself in a billowing, bejewelled sari, barking expletives at subordinates.
Real diversity. Photos needed…
[ Exudes air of mystery, practises Shohreh Aghdashloo voice. ]
Helicopter: was in a helicopter in Nevada with the Bureau of Land Mgt and due to headwinds we were running out of gas. Yikes! We made it but not a fond memory.
Football in the air: not only nope but I can’t even watch it.
At this point it’s a tossup as who needs to be shot – the looters, the feckless constabulary, the derelict district attorneys, the delusional judiciary, or the malevolent legislators. My preference is for the first, but targeting the last might well be more beneficial in the long run.
A colloquium on the meaning of ‘erotic’ seems in order.
Absent the visual accompaniment that could be misconstrued.
From the creators of female tanks.
The Brits had male and female versions of at least one of their WW1 tanks.
If you don’t have a girl tank for every 10 boy tanks you risk them just blowing each other. Up.
Hey, don’t forget the deranged citizens who vote for these malevolent legislators.
See Gene Wolfe’s short story “Car Sinister“.
[ Narrows eyes. Suspects we’re being sent up. Searches internet. Raises eyebrows. ]
I didn’t know that. Male, female, and hermaphrodite tanks. Huh.
beyond being able to pretend that you’re in an episode of The Expanse.
Life imitates art.transparent screens are a movie thing. They exist so that you can show the actor looking at a screen and still show their face. It’s the same reason superheroes in moveis can’t seem to keep their damn masks on.
As a UX device, they’re useless. Motion in the background will be distracting and the constant focal distance shift between the screen and what’s behind it will cause massive eyestrain, and the contrast is terrible.
some actors whose talents were difficult to detect.
I’m fond of saying that Canada only has twelve actors. And these days they’re mostly chosen based on skin colour, so there you go.
That. As they say.
A variation of “I’ve been bouncing…” I did laugh at the end, I’ll admit.
In this joint?
With these clientele?
Well, I’d think that Downbelow Station could make a good series; at least as good as Babylon 5 was supposed to have been. The entire Hammer’s Slammers series would provide a more violent visual experience and you wouldn’t even have to pay the author anything since he’s now dead.
I’d forgotten about him.
I think I’d folded them into Nagata (and therefore blanked them out).
Amos, Bobbi, Drummer, Ashford, Miller and Johnson carried the rest.
David Drake’s Redliners is worth a read, but I think you would have to been near there to get the message. Maybe give a copy to someone who had deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other shithole in the past 20 years or so in a combat unit. (They would have been a lot closer to there than I ever was.)
There’s an additional irony in that there seems to be a like tendency to form such opinions on the basis of a figure like Edward Said.
Said may well have been Palestinian, but he was educated at the best private schools and universities in the region and, later, the world.
Priyamvada Gopal’s another one.
She appears quite comfortable claiming oppression while having been raised as the daughter of a high-ranking diplomat, including a spell in some kind of ladies finishing school in the Austrian alps.
I mean …
Again, unfortunate casting. Some of the character’s actions were suitably diabolical – say, the stealth-tech-coated asteroids redirected towards the Earth – but the actor’s performance suggested neither charm nor intimidation. For the most part, the Naomi-Filip-Marco ‘family’ storyline was a bit of a slog.
After dissing my alma mater here the other day, they turn around and do this. I may need to reassess.
Cat ladies: cats can carry toxoplosmosis (cat-scratch fever) which killed one of our neighbors–but it can also increase the risk of schizophrenia. “crazy” cat ladies may not be just an expression.
I thought Ted Nugent just made that up.
I may need to reassess
I doubt it. DIE departments are made up of True Believers; not only are the Marxists being given twelve weeks of severance, they’re going to be absorbed into the rest of the university, and the DIE budget is going not to reduction of university expenses, but to a “faculty recruitment fund”. Which, I guarantee you, will be used to create positions for whichever Marxists couldn’t parachute into already open positions elsewhere in UF.
It’s the Great Tumblr Containment Breach all over again. The only time you should be reassessing is if UF indicates that everyone in the DIE departments have been cashiered with the minimum possible severance and blacklisted from the UF system, and the resulting savings translated directly into undergraduate tuition reduction.
Well, I’d think that […] could make a good series
I’ve always wanted to see a screen adapatation of the Sector General series.
Hammer’s Slammers being a not-at-all subtle Vietnam allegory means it’s likely DOA in the US. That’s a war the public has little appetite for revisiting.
Military SF is a niche genre in literature to begin with; you only have to look at what’s already been done with Starship Troopers and Halo to see how it’ll get butchered. I’m not sure what other mil-SF I’d like to see on-screen; I liked Weber’s Honor Harrington series when I was young and foolish, but now I find it hilarious and insufferable by turns. Drake’s RCN series has the signature flaw of having no likable characters whatsoever, and a society so gruesome as to be unmarketable.
I do think the Macro & Cato books by Simon Scarrow would do well as an adventure series, although Amazon would cast a trans black lesbian dwarf for Macro.
? Can you elaborate? I know nothing and am mildly curious.
I have not read any of them, but have known quite a few enthusiastic fans. Not that such enthusiasm is likely to motivate me to read them–after decades of meeting fans, I tend to treat enthusiasm with suspicion.
His stories tend to be very dark and gruesome, from what I hear and from what little I’ve read.
Worth the wait.
Best exit interview ever. And to be fair, his allegations of affairs and kitten sucking and strap-ons might be entirely spot on. Do we work there? No, we do not. So we don’t know. We just don’t know.
Knowledge is never perfect nor complete. Judgments can be made from the video that are unlikely to be erroneous.
Likelihood of error is essentially zero. Nobody worth hiring behaves like that. Nobody worth tolerating in your neighborhood behaves like that.
Yes. It’s not like Imma run out and re-up my alumni association membership, which I gave up about five years ago, nor resume any financial “scholarly” support which I gave up about a dozen years ago. After trailing off for a few years before that. Just considering maybe attending a football, basketball game or swimming meet. Maybe. Maaaybe. None of that will happen unless there is a loud and public refutation of the ban on a certain stupid cheer that I never liked anyway.
I suspect that there are significant legal landmines to dumping those admins without at least giving them the phony hope of employment elsewhere in the university. But if those admins are absorbed back into the administration or faculty elsewhere, they’re still on my s**t list. I’ve lost a “friend” or two and am on thin ice with a few others regarding my disassociation/disdain for our shared past experiences as it is. Not that I make a scene about it but when the subject comes up, or I’m offered tickets that I was once a reliable customer for, my disinterest causes friction. Like I’m hurting them in some way. F*** people.
Haven’t dug into beyond the Twitter replies but one indicated that the people he was working for were likely leftist tools who were getting what they essentially asked for. Maybe. Again, I don’t know. I didn’t listen to much of the audio as I didn’t want to wake the wife. The guy is a scumbag either way. I’m betting being fired is exactly what he deserved no matter how bad the situation might have been. But there was a certain je ne sais quoi about that. Especially the dance moves.
Perhaps they thought it was morally imperative to hire scumbags.
“Know thyself”
–attributed to Socrates and others
Stripper is running for mayor of Portland on a platform of “revive the crashing economy with subsidized arts programs”.
Well this. I thought I would go ahead and listen to that crap and now the wife is mad at me. Sigh. Anyway, after getting the full effect, it both amazes me and yet not at all that those three people stood there and took that crap. A proper response would be to call security and be done with him. Wouldn’t surprise me that HR, and maybe one of those people are HR, trained them to be pathetic doormats and take that crap. I would be real curious what the job/organization was and where it was. One way or another those people got what they deserved. They need to be shamed as well or this idiocy only gets worse.
Popular. Because Portland? Never been there. OK, the airport was nice 25 years ago. Weird. Yes. And yet, something else.
? Can you elaborate? I know nothing and am mildly curious
? Can you elaborate? I know nothing and am mildly curious
I assume you are familiar with or can look up the basic premise; the issue for me is that the eponymous Harrington is…I don’t know, not a Mary Sue because she’s manifestly in-competent, yet Weber constantly slobbers all over her alleged military genius and all her underlings think she’s the most amazingest military commander evar. Re-reading it a couple of years ago I got more than a faint whiff of The Naked Gun off the whole thing.
There’s also the fact that Weber is from Austin, TX, and so there must be the obligatory virtue signaling about how all the star nations have complete equality of the sexes – except for the (hard drive check!) scene where a helpless female naval cadet is raped in the showers by a male upperclassman, despite said cadet being genetically enhanced, from a high-G world, and a service-renowned expert in martial arts. There’s a bit where pirates board a ship, torture and space the crew, and all anyone can say is how horrible it is that the female pirates were the worst offenders.
Last of all, I’m a big fan of military fiction and Hornblower and although Weber really wants the Harrington books to be those in spaaaaaace, it’s obvious he has no real understanding of either.