Lucius

I know, confident and unambiguous communication is something I need to work on.

Using civil asset forfeiture, cops steal more from citizens than burglars do: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/

Links:
 
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&e=13&u=/nm/space_mars_dc
 
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&e=2&u=/space/firstinvisiblegalaxydiscoveredincosmologybreakthrough

They dance their way across the galaxy while exploring strange new worlds...
 
Star Twerk

Don Quixote, knight. A Man of La Mancha barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the thaumaturgy. We can make him better than he was. Better. Braver. Nobler.
 
Don Quixote is - the Six Million Real Man
 
Lucius Alexander
 
A man barely relevant. Gentlemen, we can recontextualize him. We have the palindromedaries. We can make him better than he was. Better. Smarter. Funnier.

Six Million Dollar Man of La Mancha
 
Windmills beware!

The Six Million Dollar Man from UNCLE
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary says those are the same genre so it doesn't count.

Some Christmas music is nice.  Some is so bad it makes my teeth hurt.  Jingle Bell Rock is one of these.

Some people like to talk about "the war on Christmas".
If Christmas didn't want a war, it shouldn't have crossed the borders of Thanksgiving to attack Halloween.

Food for thought .... http://www.statista.com/chart/3411/police-shootings-in-perspective/.
 
They didn't adjust for population size (which is bad, sloppy or both) but the US is about 5 times the size of the UK and 4 times the size of Germany, population-wise, so you can make the comparison easily enough.
 
cheers, Mark

The Boston Symphony performed Beethoven's Ninth recently. There's a 20 minute stretch where the double bassists have nothing to do. Instead of sitting there twiddling their thumbs, they decided to hit the tavern next door. After slamming down a few beers, one of them looked at his watch and said, "Oh. we're late!"
 
Another said, "Not to worry. I tied the last few pages together of the conductor's sheet music together with string. It'll take him a bit to get it undone."
 
Once they stumbled back in their place, a woman in the audience saw the conductor looking nervous. She mentioned this to her companion.
 
"Of course," her date replied. "It's the bottom of the ninth, the score is tied, and the bassists are loaded."

I talked to my school's library guy today to see if they had that new book about Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat. 
 
He said the description rang a bell, but he'd have to look to see if they actually had it.

Gencon Joke:
 
 
Why would George Lucas sponsor an Oil Stadium?

He BROKE the mold.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary observes that was one cyriously strong man

You can buy plush tardigrades!
 

Another strongman. He died before the pulp era, but he fits the mold.
 
Louis Cyr

Reading some of Christopher Lees Obituaries after yesterday I find myself thinking about real people who would make for interesting pulp heroes.
 
In lee's case RAF intelligence officer seconded to the SAS (possibly one of the inspirations for James bond) , expert fencer, multilingual, professional actor and Stuntman direct descendant of Charlemagne.
 
Also 
 
Buster Keaton Physical Phenomenon pioneering stunt man jackie chan before there was a jackie chan Parkourist before parkour
 
watch this video and tell me he wouldn't be an amazing pulp hero
 

 
so who else would you suggest 

I did not know all of that about him, but I was correct by the end.

Here ya go, 8th image result for "female mage with staff," not too much skin showing on this one:
 

 
"Modest female mage with staff" gets a better selection, though there are still a coiuple of cheesecake shots in the mix:
 
https://www.google.com/search?q=female+mage+with+staff&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMIjrGBupedyQIVCPBjCh3L0gTF&biw=960&bih=461#tbm=isch&q=modest+female+mage+with+staff

I don't play FPS's at all, and I haven't bought a computer game in ... a decade or more, so I am not really part of the target population for this subject. But I noted some time ago that RP games in general have a real dearth of non-sexualized female images, with the exception of the splinter stereotype that I might call the "shriveled old crone".
 
Seven or eight years back or so I went looking on-line for an image of a female, preferably staff-wielding, spellcaster type to paste into a character sheet for a tabletop high fantasy campaign. The character is something of a prude (and yes, I based her personality and outlook from a RL person I knew long ago), so I was looking for a dark-haired woman wearing a modest robe. "Modest" here is in the sense of keep-all-of-herself-covered; she's perfectly OK with wearing fine, expensive, or extravagant clothing!
 
Anyway, I couldn't find an image like that in my half hour or so of search. Everything out there had (at best) open deep cleavage, or slits up the side to the hip joint, or similar stupidity, and generally in the same overdone sex-kitten postures other people have pointed out is the doom of women comic book characters. I ended up settling for an image of what I think was intended to be an Elf, robed, "magic" coming off the hand, slightly built, no facial hair, long flowing head-crown hair, almost certainly thought of as male by the artist but androgynous enough that when reduced to 1.5-by-1.5-inch and pasted onto the character sheet, it made a plausible skinny young woman magic-user. Which was close enough to what I wanted.
 
I was disgusted. And I admit that it took that experience to make me realize that yes, this problem is far deeper and more pervasive than anyone on the Y side of the Great Divide cares to recognize.

10-14 years ago I worked for a place that had a policy of don't touch the VBA macro unless you wrote it. I was an editor there, but understood the policy. I finally heard how it came to be. Seems one department had a macro written by one of their employees. It ran once a week and did exactly what they needed it to do. Run time, 5-10 minutes. He left. A couple of times, he was called in as a consultant to fix it because someone had tried to improve the macro. Finally, he said, "This is the last time. I refuse to fix this macro anymore."
 
Sometime later, he gets a phone call. A new employee had tried to improve the macro again. It was now completely inoperable. The former coder stood by his promise and did not come back to fix it. The newbie had not made a backup of it nor had anyone else over the years.
 
The department had to hire two full-time employees to do what this macro did in 5 minutes once a week.

Has anyone suggested naming this hypothetical planet, "Cronus?"

From Greg Easterbrook's new column. 
Yay. 

My wife is doing a series at church on the founding of America, of course that means Pilgrims. As she's researching, she keeps finding new things related to what she's looking at and trying to figure out the why for that event.
 
"I can't believe this. I've just got to pick a time and stop. Did you know the Pilgrims spent time in Holland before coming to America?"
 
"Yes, I did."
 
"Do you know why they left?"
 
"No."
 
"This happened, and this happened. And Holland and Spain were coming to the end of their peace treaty. War might have broken out. Now, that war happened because of this and this. And that all happened because of the Spanish Inquisition!"
 
"What? Nobody could have expected that!"

Re: A Thread for Random Musings
 
When I was about 16 or so, I got up before sunup, packed a little bit of food, a jug of water, a knife, some matches, my walking stick, a light jacket, and maybe a few other items, and left the house.
 
We lived in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, literally halfway up one of the hills (known locally as the Hogbacks). I hiked up to the top of the mountain, and headed south along the ridge. There were no man-made trails, just a few scattered game runs here and there. It was quiet and secluded, even though I could see the city of Denver and its suburbs off to the east, I felt all alone. I felt like I was discovering lost territory. I hiked for most of the day until I reached the end of the hill, then climbed down to a little stream. I watched a herd of deer, led by a massive buck, negotiating the overgrown terrain to reach the rill and drink. I don't think they knew I was there, or if they did they just didn't care. I felt like I could've joined them at the water and they would've accepted me as one of their own.
 
I climbed back up to the ridge and, as the sun was going down, I found a sheltered spot under a large overhanging rock. I built a little rock wall around the exposed side to provide some shelter from the wind, then made a small fire to keep warm. I slept there overnight, on the dirt floor, waking with every little sound, stirring up the fire and then dozing back off, fitfully.
 
The next morning, as the sun came up, I hiked back home, hungry and a little bit dehydrated. I do not think my family missed me. I don't think they even noticed I was gone.