A Thread for Random Musings

[Old Man]

Came across the wikipedia entry for the War of the Spanish Succession.   There went half an hour.  It was every bit as messed up as I remember it to be, yet perhaps not as messed up as what's happening in Washington nowadays.

[tkdguy]

I'm thinking of creating a campaign setting using the imagery of Alice in Wonderland and Yellow Submarine.

[aylwin13]

Not from the ...Musings thread, but I didn't want to clutter the ...Cute thread.

 

I think this is cute anyways...

 

 

You'd never see something like this coming out of Trumpland.

[L. Marcus]

Heyy, right -- yesterday was Flag Day! Time for my annual expression of patriotism, I guess. Ahem.

 

Hurrah!

 

There. Whew! A whole year to next time. Or to the next big hockey game, whichever comes first.

[Pariah]

Wasn't there an international tournament recently? How did Sweden do?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Auditor: "Ah, Dr-?"

Dr. R. Roe: "Please call me Richard."

Auditor: "We were expecting--" checks dossier --"Dr. Xander Price?"

Dr. R: "He is currently indisposed."

Auditor: "Oh, dear. Well, please do send my--"

Dr. R.: "By a .41 magnum round through the forehead."

Auditor. "Ah. But you've been briefed for the exit audit for Project xXx? That's its real name?"

Dr. R. "Around the office, we usually call it "Project Oh-God-The-Giant-Metal-Blades-Hurt-As-They-Slice-Through-My-Kidneys," but, yes, it has a very extreme official name."

Auditor: "And it started in . . . 1971? Fifty-eight years ago?"

Dr. R: "Not counting the time travel, yes, 58 years. Don't worry, though, I've brought an executive summary in this folder and a Power Point slide show of some of the highlights. You did say that you'd skipped lunch, didn't you?"

Auditor: "And it started when your original director pulled Subject X from the Potomac River?"

Dr. R. "Not precisely. Actually, it was an infiltrator disguised as our director. No, we're not clear how we ended up with Subject X, either. Our theory is that he's just a jerk, and the infiltrator dumped him and bagged the mission so that she could go shop for a clutch that matched her scales."

Auditor: "Can you summarise the initial phase of the project?"

Dr. R: "Well, not counting the time travel, for which we have no budgetary responsibility, we spent a decade extensively brainwashing him into a perfect killing machine."

Auditor: "And this was very expensive, I see. Did it ever occur to you that the Navy SEALs have a number of perfect killing machines?"

Dr. R. "He has a healing factor and cool bone claws, so we took the opportunity to coat them in adamantium metal, which makes him an even more perfect killing machine than SEAL Team Six."

Auditor: "Except they have guns. A lot of guns. Which can be very effective if you don't stand in the open in giant knife-claw range. I don't see anything about bone claws here."

Dr. R. "Here. Retcon six."

Auditor: "Ah. It says here that he's a mutant badger samurai warrior?"

Dr. R. "That is no longer operational."

Auditor: "I see. So how did this Project X phase work out?"

Dr. R. "He was released from his Skinner Box by some more infiltrators and killed approximately four hundred scientists, technicians and security personnel before escaping custody and becoming our greatest enemy."

Auditor: "And that would the  payout line here for the two billion dollar insurance claim."

Dr. R. "Yes. Yes, it would."

Auditor: "And then?"

Dr. R: "Fortunately, we had extensive tissue samples, so we set out to clone Subject X."

Auditor; "Because it worked out so well the first time."

Dr. R. "I was not given access to the planning process on an ongoing basis."

Auditor: "And, after only 35 years, success! Well, partial success, because X-23 is female, but close enough. I take it that X2 through -22?"

Dr. R. "You'll see the per project cost breakout and the running total following pages 10-194."

Auditor: "That's a lot of money."

Dr. R: "You can appreciate that running a hermetically sealed, fully secure research lab for eleven times the duration of the Manhattan Project is expensive."

Auditor: "Still. . . "

Dr. R: "We outsourced to Mexico in 2009."

Auditor: "Excellent! Financial responsibility!"

Auditor: "And at the end of this time?"

Dr. R: "We had a baby."

Auditor: "A baby?"

Dr. R. [hastily]: "A very deadly baby. With the cutest little bone claws."

Auditor: "I can see that raising some parenting issues. . ."

Dr. R: "Our babysitters have access to a world-beating cybernetic limb replacement programme. That line item is right . . .  here."

Auditor: "And the baby?"

Dr. R.: "She turned into a very moody tween, and our improved cloning programme had produced an even more soulless killer, so we euthanised her and her friends."

Auditor: "Her . . friends."

Dr. R: "It was such a success that we did it with a bunch of other mutants."

Auditor: " . . . Success. You had a sullen, self-mutilating eleven year-old who couldn't be trusted not to lop off the limbs of your security personnel, so you thought, Let's try this trick with some Omega-class mutants?"

Dr. R: "That appears to have been the thought process involved."

Auditor: "And the massacres in Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and North Dakota?"

Dr. R. "The euthanisation initiative did not prove to be successful in its own terms. In our defence, most of the employees killed in those multiple incidents were actually killed by the original Subject X."

Auditor: "I'll note that here as a mitigating circumstance."

Dr. R: "I must protest! There seems to be a failure to understand the full magnitude of Project xXx's success here. "

Auditor: "And that is?"

Dr. R: "Project X-24 was rendered operationally obsolete before he could go berserk and kill the entire staff of another research facility, thereby saving DARPA significant insurance payouts in the future."

Auditor: "Excellent point! I am recommending you receive a continuing block grant of $1 trillion dollars for the next 58 years for Project xXxXxer. Have you given any thought. . . "

Dr. R: "We thought we'd clone Magneto and Professor X this time. Being killed by a magnetic or telepathic rampage looks way less uncomfortable than having your internal organs stirred with a razor-sharp swizzle stick."

Auditor: "Good idea. I'm going to go be all the way over there now."

[aylwin13]

.oO(Wow. Random musings aren't what they used to be.)

[L. Marcus]

You know, three people doing the work of five is pretty well done.

[Cancer]

Grading papers while angry for other reasons is unhappy for everyone involved.

[Cancer]

Wow. USA steals a point against Mexico in Estadio Azteca in World Cup Qualifying.

 

For context, Estadio Azteca is one of the great soccer stadiums in the world, and USA almost never wins against Mexico in that building, and this was only their third tie (their first one came in 1997).

[Pariah]

Strangely enough, these sausages have an after taste like movie theater popcorn. What's up with that?

[megaplayboy]

In a superhero universe, the laws of physics "are more like guidelines, really ".

[Cancer]

Dear scumbag textbook publisher,

 

Sending me a grossly self-serving email about what you're doing with "Our Actions to Improve Learning Material Affordability and Protect IP" is what I would expect from a bunch of pillaging rich a-holes in this the age of Trumpism and runaway ripoff capitalism.

 

Don't send me your crock of excrement and alternative facts. You're selling 5th editions of books of which I bought the 2nd edition of back in 1975, and you're selling them for more than 20 times the price (I know, because mine have the sale prices stamped on the inside cover). Approximately nothing but military hardware, college education materials, and CEO compensations have had their dollar costs grow that fast over the intervening four decades, and everyone knows it. The on-line tools you strap on the side suck green slimy rocks from the bottom of a cesspool, and most of the changes you have made since the 2nd edition actually are just dumbing stuff down. In short, you've actually degraded the quality of your product, while jacking the price up higher and faster than any comic-book supervillain never has.

 

In a word, "Value added" you ain't.

 

Do us all a favor and introduce yourself to modern physics my having a nice steaming cup of polonium-210 tea.

 

Deuteronomy 28:16-44,

Cancer.

[Old Man]

I wish these pricks would quit blaming my network for their craptastic software.  I've already boosted the server hardware by 700% over your hardware specs, jackasses; it is beyond proven that your performance problems are not due to CPU, memory, network, or storage constraints.  Fix your own sh!t.

[Cancer]

I am in wayyyyy too snarly a mood this morning to give a good interview to a student. Better go get coffee.

[aylwin13]

.oO(I've obviously stumbled into the Cranky Thread by mistake.)

[Pariah]

Some people like Jell-O with bananas in it, and some people don't. You don't, and that's fine. You are not required to like Jell-O with bananas in it, and you are not required to eat it.

 

On the other hand, we are not required to make Jell-O without bananas in it just because you don't happen to like it that way.

[Cancer]

I wish the cat would get better.

At the risk of being premature, that finally seems to be happening. Poor Spike (my daughter named that entire litter of kittens we fostered for latter-day vampire characters; Spike is the one we adopted), as it turned out, had a bladder stone, nearly a centimeter across (!!). That came out with surgery on Saturday. He no longer seems to be in pain. He doesn't care for his medicine but he doesn't fight it so that isn't an issue. We are still trying to come to a workable arrangement where Spike gets his special urinary tract food (which he doesn't like) and Hobbes and Dove get their more ordinary food (they don't like Spike's food either, so that's not a real issue) without any of them getting the wrong food, but aside from that chaos we seem to be getting back toward normalcy.

 

Once the fur grows back on Spike's butt hopefully he'll be pleased to go shoulder surfing again.

[Old Man]

The next time Sam Wilson becomes Captain America, he should have the wings, a heater shield instead of the round one, and he should throw arrows, five-pointed ninja stars, and olive branches.

[Pariah]

Considering that I'm operating on two-point-something hours of sleep, I think the day has gone remarkably well.

[Cancer]

It is proving unreasonably difficult to give away two prime-seat tickets to a major league baseball game.

[Pariah]

The Rocks are going to be out of town that week. Darn it.

[death tribble]

Simon Yates is the White Jersey in the Tour de France. A British rider which is good. But what is amusing is when he stands on the podium at stage end. They have two women either side of him and they are as tall as he is standing on the podium. 

[death tribble]

The Tour de France is getting brutal. After losing Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish, two other contenders went out today. Riche Porte and Geraint Thomas were both involved in crashes.

[Burrito Boy]

After learning that one of the characters from Strike Force is named Phosphene, I want to make a villain named Phosgene.