Lawnmower Boy

Not angry, just deeply, deeply disappointed.

Riders of the Storm . . .

Kinky!

I thought that was Gryffindor?

Hold on here a minute. The other day I was on in front when I heard a neighbour refer to "the United S--tshow of America," and it shook me up a bit. As an ordinarily partisan person, I was taking a certain amount of unholy pleasure in the egg on Donald Trump's face, but this has gone way, way too far. I'm glad to see that my friends here on the Hero Boards aren't going as crazy partisan as some, and observing that since the deaths in the United States haven't gone as high as some have predicted, the whole social-distancing/shelter in place thing was unnecessary. But. . . i) The United States has already seen 813,000 COVID-19 cases and 45,000 deaths. A reasonable extrapolation takes this forward to deaths in the six figure range, but only if social distancing measures remain in place. So far, no jurisdiction has been so bold as to end social distancing prematurely --and, make no mistake, it would be premature to do this in the United States right now-- but Italy, which implemented its lock down too late, has seen 60,000 deaths. By simple extrapolation, that would correspond to 350,000 dead Americans. I hope that we can all agree that that is completely unacceptable. ii) Comparisons with the East Asian countries, which had institutional experience, cultural adaptation, favourable geography, and a timely response, is idle fantasy. Even had the United States had those advantages, the moment when this could have been Singapore, even assuming that Singapore's late spike is contained, is long gone. iii) Texas, today, is reporting 20,200 cases and 517 deaths in the familiar pattern of exponential growth beginning to damp off after two weeks of lockdown. The distribution of cases is statewide. This is uncontrolled community spread. The only reason that the death totals seem reasonable is that this is comparatively early in the pandemic. Many more of those 20,200 will die, and more will catch the disease, and more will die. Tracking and monitoring is impossible in this situation. The only way that a jurisdiction can move to a managed reopening is by first getting new cases down to the point where each one can be identified and the contacts traced. That is not possible here, and won't be possible for several weeks, at least. Any scaling back of the lockdown will just throw away the gains already made. Again, the Italian case shows what can happen. You don't need complex models to understand what is going to happen to any jurisdiction so foolish as to try to ride out a COVID19 pandemic on the scale of Italy's. You just say to yourself, "Like Italy, but worse." iv) When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbour, the result was, in the short term, massive unemployment. This ended as labour shifted to war work. But it also shifted because a full 10% of the American population was drafted, and was essentially paid to do nothing productive for five years. All of this was paid for by the familiar mechanics of war finance, and the United States came of the experience the stronger for it. I'm not seeing why the coronavirus has to be different. I can see why one might choose for it to be different. The immediate postwar era was the golden age of what Keynes called "the euthanasia of the rentier, year after year of inflation higher than interest rates and high taxes to contain inflation. And yet it is also remembered as a period of prosperity for the middle and working classes --an era in which wealth inequality fell to historically low levels and in which we saw unprecedented social and technological progress. I say we choose that future. Since it also happens to be the future in which many fewer people die, it strikes me as a no-brainer. That being said, I don't have $10 billion in the bank subject to the insidious wealth tax of inflation-above-interest-returns, so maybe I'm just a special interest.

No, no, nope. That's it. 2020 has lost me. I am taking it back to the store and yelling at the manager until they replace it with 2010.

As long as we get to see Herb Trimpe's Tunnelworld, I'm good.

I'm wrong about stuff all the time, but the protests in Michigan and Ohio smell like astroturf to me. They're too localised to be a response to national trends, and in the wrong states to be a response to local events.

Look, if you didn't want to lose your niece to some stupid political wedge issue, you should have made her not have lupus.

I do hope this isn't the worst, especially since I've had an "almost cough" since last night. Between hard labour, aggressive air conditioning at work, spring pollen, skeleton staffing, and the fact that symptoms aren't progressing, I can hardly justify taking the day off. Just wear my mask and cross my fingers . . . .

There is no "somehow." Toilets can vomit just fine, and I doubt it's the smell that's the first thing you think of when you arrive at the scene.

Hey, hey, hey, fellow grocery store worker. You may be expendable, but I'm too annoying to die! . . . If I pass from handling the dollar coin some 90 year mall walker who isn't changing his routine for a little old thing like a global pandemic, there'll be no-one around here to make fun of Aquaman!

Cool!

I am 100% down with expending Badger. I, on the other hand, am way too good looking to die. Err, no, that's not right. "Smart." Hmm, no. "Special"? . . . Can we get back to this later?

It's not the weapon, it's the master who uses them. Storytelling 101: He's saving the hit-himself-in-the-crotch scene for the climax.

Someday, somehow, I'm going to get you all for this.

Geez, Hermit, I can't focus on reading the rest of the thread if you're going to get my tummy rumbling like this!

Serves me right for not checking the text. There's definitely Martians in the CU --the people with the advanced civilisation two billion years ago, or 1.8 billion years before the "flowering" of the Milky Way galaxy and its earliest recorded civilisations. My idea was that it was the Martians who created the Basilisk Orb. Its original purpose, was to protect the Milky Way from Qliphotic intrusions by causing fluctuations in the galactic "magic field" that would reduce ambient magic below the levels Qliphotic beings needed to survive. Being not entirely unaware of the huge target the Martians were painting on their back, they planted the Basilisk Orb on the uninhabitable, molten hellworld next in from them from the Sun, where there was no danger of indigenous life eventually evolving to poke the Orb with sticks and set it on fire to see what happens. Best laid plans of cryptic aliens and all of that . . . Something happened to the Martians after that, and while we don't know what that might have been, perhaps some wise and long-lived scholars might. And, what do you know, who should show up in the Sol system just a few years ago other than the Mandaarians. They haven't visited Earth recently, but I fail to see how they could possibly be ignoring the enigma of Mars. Now, the Mandaarians are mostly a very nice people, but there's at least one Mandaarian who has a very different agenda . . .

As a historian, I'm fascinated by the question of what moderns make of the Turakian Age. (I also borrow from Chris Rowley and have them refer to it as the Old Red Eon, as names have power, and it doesn't seem all that healthy to be wandering around saying "Turak" all the time.) I'm pretty sure that they don't know very much, but the way superheroes get around, there's got to be some kind of connection, with people who have travelled back in time to the era, and forward from it, for example. And that's leaving aside all those cursed ruins manufacturing supervillains left and right. Also, there's the issue of survivors. While I've never made very much of the drakines or dwarfs, the Champions Universe if full of space elves (Martians and Mandalorians mainly), and conservation of detail demands some kind of connection. Elves are a huge part of traditional folklore. Turakian elves aren't immortal, but folklore doesn't necessarily say that elves are immortal. It says that they're cut slightly adrift from time, which doesn't really pass in the depths of an elfhill. That bridges the gap of 70,000 years and allows you to have an elf or two (or elf-friend) who remembers the old days of Kal-Turak even without immortal elves from the Lands of Legend. I'll also note yet another inspiration, the elves of Elfquest, who've been marking time for thousands of years in their forest at the beginning of the comic series. Anyway, long and the short of it, I ended up with a Batman pastiche whose Batcave was actually an elf hill, with Alfred as his liaison with an old elf colony upstate. Because hillbilly elves amuse me, that's why. I also like the Drindrish, who just obviously escaped off planet and became some kind of Andre Norton-like "forerunner" people, leaving enigmatic and potentially dangerous ruins and relics behind them on rude, frontier worlds. As for the Mandalorian-Martian-Elf connection, well, you see, it all starts with the Basilisk Orb . . . .

I blame the Leutonians.

Oh, no. Who would run the country?

Every day is COVID-19 day at the grocery store. You frontline health workers need to suck it up. (NFSW at 1:46. Just so you know before you press play.) . . . So. Youse guys know that this isn't actually the victory condition, right?

Clearly they have been gainfully employed their entire lives, and that is why they do not know how the unemployment insurance programme works.

The Unemployment Insurance top-up is a fixed $600. But what if that leads to the payment exceeding what they were earning in the first place? The poors will all quit and go on unemployment enjoyment! There seems to be some misunderstanding of the way that unemployment insurance works at play here, so I'm sure that it will all be sorted out soon enough.

Some people have a skewed sense of priorities. Second on SLIME'S LOG by the way. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I do taste like chicken.