Lawnmower Boy

Checks out.

Heh heh. He said "high."

I admit that Torontonians are strangely humourless about the ancient Canadian tradition of talking trash about Toronto

Thank you! Here in Vancouver, we had rain, cloud, maybe a snowflake or two(!), social distancing, and, in general, no fun whatsoever. A fine time was had by all.

You're on fire, Hermit!

Nub nub!

Holy crap, MIchael. Look after yourself!

Yeah, well, the most obvious explanation is that it is an observational artefact, but I do so want it to be true . . .

To be fair, the drow sure do know how to make pancake syrup. And, more importantly, the introduction of the duergar and derro makes it clear that the drow aren't just an evil race that happens to be dark-skinned. It's more like all dark-skinned races are evil. See? Much better.

So as part of my "postblogging technology" hobby, I do little appendices where I try to do a deep dive into current problems in technology in the period I'm looking at. Since I'm doing the spring of 1950 right now, a very pressing issue is Edward Teller running around telling everyone that he knows how to make a hydrogen bomb, when, in fact, he doesn't. So this raises an interesting question about all the mistaken ideas there might have been about hydrogen bombs and related subjects (including how stars work!) specifically in the spring of 1950. To make a long story short, I'm no Edward Whittaker, and anyway much of this stuff didn't get published anyway, but I did learn some things. Did you know that einsteinium was first discovered in the fallout from Ivy Mike? Did you know that this success led to a series of nuclear tests in the 1950s that aimed at making new transuranic elements, including using bombs make of mixed plutonium, neptunium, americium and thorium? (The higher transuranic elements make disappointing booms in fission bombs --or, at least they did in the 1960s.) Did you know that they detected einsteinium in a star in 2008, for which astrophysics apparently has no explanation whatsoever. Although aliens might be dumping nuclear waste, the star in question is a long way from anywhere you might want a nuclear reactor; a hidden reservoir of slowly decaying "island of stability" elements is both gonzo and suggestive that there might be a lot more of these elements than theory currently predicts. Anyway, I ask if you knew any of that, because I sure as heck didn't!

Once, a long time ago, I would be happy that sanity had won out. But since we've had Soylent and Juiceroo and Thanatos and raw water and ridesharing and that subletting company. We're really dumb. Or too many people have too much money. Or both.

Boo? Yay? Lost Boys was great but I liked it when he won all those car races.

"That could have been anyone."

This is good to hear, and if there is one consolation to take from the events of the last few weeks, it is the expected upsurge in funding for museums,archives and field archaeology that will follow from this belated realisation of the importance of history.

Well aren't you a Negative Nellie. Turn that frown upside down and whistle a happy tune until your liquified lung snorts out your nostrils!