Lawnmower Boy

“The Theseus is only the first of a family of Bristol turbine units in which the primary objective is the attainment of the highest possible thermal efficiency consistent with reasonable weight and bulk.” First of all, congratulations, 1945 engineer, for ruining the passive voice for the rest of us. Second, and pardon me if I'm misunderstanding you, you're saying that in the future, Bristol Aerospace will focus on building small, light, efficient engines. Instead of . . . ?

A faq for employees: Q: "Do you carry rice?" A: No. Eating rice makes you Chinese. [Employee will now provide customer with impression of how Chinese people look, talk, sp. emph. on transposing "l" and "r.") Q: "Do you carry tofu?" A: No. Tofu is a hippy food. Are you a Communist? Have you ever been a Communist? Q: "Do you carry milk?" A: "No. Milk is white. White food gives you mucus. Increased mucus imbalances your precious bodily fluids. Imbalanced fluids leaches away your vitality, and sex leads to babies, and we sell more stuff to people with babies. Why don't you have babies? You should have babies. Q: "Do you carry disposable gloves?" A: Of course not. Remember those 50s TV shows, with people doing dishes in those long dishgloves, people like Ethel and Lucy and Evangeline? Don't look at me that way: I don't remember names from old fifties TV shows. I'm not old. Why are you so old? Q: "Do you carry protein powder?" A: "They carry protein powder at health stores. Does this look like a health store to you? Have you been down our snack aisle?" Q: "Do you carry bath towels?" A: This is a grocery store. In a mall. An expensive mall, where floor space is at a premium. With a department store down the hall. You know, the kind of place where you go to buy home furnishings. So of course we carry bath towels. They're in our linen section, on our furniture floor, in our home furnishing wing. .... This random musing is dedicated to the idiot who came up with the idea of a "Compliments" store brand; and developed it into the idea of giving away "Free Compliments brand" products. Thank you, idiot, thank you. I dedicate this shift of taking one old person after another to the pop aisle and physically showing them the section of shelf dedicated to Compliments brand soda to you.

No offence, guys, but this whole "danger: humans" thing is old school John Campbell stuff, and it leads down a bad, bad path. Here's Gordon R. Dickson on "Danger: Human," with somewhat disimproved punctuation. I think we can agree that Dickson's Eldridge Timothy Parker isn't so much a "typical human being" as a Mary Sue. That's because Dickson was a pretty smart guy, and maybe his heart wasn't in it. One guy whose heart was in it was Keith Laumer. So I guess it's no surprise that he wrote an entire book on the theme, Earthblood. Or, rather, co-wrote it with a New Orleans science fiction author named Rosel George Brown, of whom I can't really comment, as she died of cancer just as her career was getting going. Look up Earthblood if you have a chance, because it reads like someone picked up a copy of Iron Dream and didnt' realise that it was a joke. I don't know whether Laumer, Brown, or some gremlins are responsible for its awfulness, but it lays bare the straight path from "Danger: Human" to "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors." Also, there is no "mounting evidence" that our ancestors were "endurance hunters." Without going into an epic thread of a few years back, human hunter gatherers probably endurance hunted some animals, and used other strategies on others. The human evolutionary advantage is that we're tool users --not that we can run down horses.

I think everything should be a frontocracy. And before you say it was your idea, remember that I was first!

Well, first of all, get to close range, quickly. It has a heavy stand-off armament, and more importantly, has excellent movement powers. As God is my witness, I am sure it can fly.

Christmas shopping at the grocery store! "Hello, employee-type person. Can you hear me over the conversation of the other thirty people trying to get down this aisle? I am a fifty-five year old man, and have never bought food for myself in my life. Now, I have had to put my parents in an old age home, and my favourite pizza delivery place has taken to leaving flaming bags of doggie do on my doorstep for some reason I cannot understand. I am told that your "Groc-Ery Store" is a good place for the buying of the food that is not yet, as you say, 'cooked.' I have heard of this thing called 'rice,' and an curious to try it. I have looked for it next to the deodorants and the laundry detergent. Since you are currently trying to work vast quantities of stock, perhaps you could be so good as to take me by the hand and lead me to where it might be found? After that, I have a dozen friends with similar questions, waiting at the coffee stand. Perhaps you could organise tours for them?"

It's the opposite of inventory, which grows in size until it stresses its environment. Or maybe that's me, crashing around with a cargo mover. Same same.

The way you killjoys throw your little pills around, I'm never going to be able to run through downtown traffic naked for long enough.

Pfft. Everyone knows that there was twenty English pounds of English steel in the head of Richard the Lionheart's battleaxe.* Now, the fact that it was English pounds of English steel means that it was doubleplus twice as good as a normal battleaxe (and twenty times better than a poofty French one!), but Richard had a reason for carrying so much steel around, besides the fact that he was so muscly and sinewy and that hair, OMG, I think I'm going to faint. . . .The reason, of course, is that everyone wore solid steel armour, which is why they had to ride around on giant draft horses (Historical re-enactment) The only way to even get through all of that armour is to whup it with a giant battleax, even if, on account of not being Richard the Lionheart, most knights (pronounced "kniggit") only had, like, nineteen pound heads. Now, this would have been a challenge to most warriors, but thanks to their chivalrous training and spiritual excellence (remember that 20th level medieval knights can cast 4th level clerical spells!), these knights could vault into the saddle of their horses in full armour with one hand, climb a ladder overhand, drag giant logs around behind them while jogging through the Siberian winter, and see in the dark with their radar sense. Too bad that all of this badassednessness was of no avail against the English longbow, which can penetrated 3 inches of forged steel armour at 250 yards, or an Ottoman reflex compound bow, with its 600 yard range, or a sling, with its 300 yard range. Crossbows are, of course, generally inferior to all of this, having only the pathetic benefit of mechanical advantage, but since you can shoot two repeating crossbows at a time with a Two-handed fighting feat, they make up in volume what they lack in firepower. *Real actual quote from actual medieval historian. "Historian."

You're a bad person, and you should feel bad.

I vote for a lot of reasons, but there are some questionable images of Power Girl out there that I boycott, if that helps.

'Tis the season, so let's get in the mood!

The classic here is "needfire," fire set without steel and flint (or, in one tradition, struck out of a cold anvil by a smith), and used for various ritual purposes, including setting sacrificial fires (India), and purifying the sheep before they go out to pasture. Also, in Paul Edwin Zimmer's Dark Border books, it is the physical manifestation of the magic-psionics-superscience of the Children of Hastur. Others include "noon-forged steel," in that one dude's attempt to do Harry Potter better (well-research bibliographic references courtesy of yours truly!), meteoric iron, and clothing made of textiles woven without knots (I think? Is that a thing? Or is it seams?), and unbleached. That last is from Tim Power's recent books, and actually features as something that would-be magic users (well, actually, living avatars, but details, details) have to wear to be eligible to cast spells, but it's easy enough to turn around.

Transferring to the Oakridge store to get my "full time" status back. The quotation marks signify that I'll be working a great dea less --36 hour week (extra day off every two weeks, so much nicer than it sounds), stat days and more vacation time. Also, knocking an hour off my commute. The downside is that I commute by bike, so much less exercise. I'll get fat(ter)! Maybe I should post this in the Cranky Thread, with the guys who are afraid of going bankrupt and losing family members, instead?

Exactly! Now, can I quote you to those busybodies at the Vancouver Tourism Bureau?

A shortage of labour, combined with an unwillingness to compete for it on the market (that is, pay more) will lead to these things. Oh, my Lord, will it ever. Loehman, from the sounds of things, has a raging personality disorder, but one that may be cyclic in nature. If he has manic, 'up' phases, he may even have impressed his interviewers in Cleveland so much that they didn't even think to look at his papers, assuming that he was an up-and-comer, spiralling up through more and more desireable police departments, perhaps gunning for one of the (I assume) understaffed command positions, which would take some pressure off the interviewers. If so, it didn't last. . . projecting from my own experience of some of these misguided hiring choices (You want fun? Being in the radius of destruction as the DM tries to correct the initial mistake by harassing your immediate supervisor out of a job), Loehman's driver/trainer's main priority the day that Tamir Rice was killed might have been as simple as getting the freak the heck out of his car as quickly as possible. Arrest a perp, take him to the station, leave Loehman in charge of him, and you've got hours of freedom, away from the ranting, the paranoia, the weird, inappropriate comments and crying jagst happens in every work place. The problem is that we're not given guns in grocery stores, and in particular aren't allowed to shoot customers. (No comment needed here, I think.)

Theories of space combat: i) The designer will try to balance races by making some specialise in close combat, others in long range. The long range race will end up blowing up all the close range races with massed salvoes long before they can close. ii) The designer will include space fighters because they are cool. The space fighters will be hopelessly unbalanced, either dominating the game or being useless albatrosses. iii) Corollary to ii) Fanboys will wank endlessly about how space fighters don't make sense. iv) The designer will include space-stealth because who doesn't like the dramatic moment when the Romulans uncroak? The result will be endless book-keeping, punctuated by acrimonious disagreements between players with strong subtexts of accusations of cheating. v) Corollary to iv) Fanboys will wank about how stealth is impossible in space. vi) The designer will include rules permitting boarding actions. They will be ridiculous, for the obvious reasons. vii) The designer will include flotillas of light craft. They will either expend themselves uselessly, failing to meet an ablative minimum to larger ships' protections; or blow up super-mega-dreadnoughts with coordinated salvoes. viii) The designer will include electronic warfare, guided missiles, space mines, planetary defences, asteroid bases and logistics. The rules will be so complicated that no-one will ever use any of them. ix) The designer will include pirates and commerce raiding. The result will be fleets of pirate ships playing rugby with a single freighter as ball; because freighters are boring. Sometimes, there will be convoys of three or four ships. One of which will be a Q-ship, because freighters are etc. x) Corollary to ix) Fanboys will wank endlessly about how implausible the interstellar economy is. xi) The designer will get revenge by including space docks. Space dock assault scenarios will involve entire wargaming clubs in massive, long-weekend scenarios that break up wargaming clubs and marriages. xii) At least one race will turn out to be completely broken in balance terms. All the players will favour that race, and quit the community in disgust when they are retconned. xiii) There's probably more to add to this, but I haven't followed the game since they nerfed the Hydrans.

So, the company (at the merchandising level), is prone to sending stock to the stores in distributions. Traditionally, this is to "build sales," but no-one says that with a straight face. The stores want to minimise inventory for storage reasons and because of financials, and merchandising tends to assume that we're being lazy, and sending us more stuff will encourage us to get off our duffs and get it out the door. ..Er, actually, that would be "building sales," wouldn't it? Okay, forget I said anything about that. Anyway, each week, we build new merchandising displays, and get distributions of stock to support them. Since our stores are all different shapes and sizes, the number of displays we build varies, and the distributions are at least nominally geared to that. "Nominally," in this case, means that they are not. Fortunately, we can cancel these allocations. But, of course, for reasons outlined above, merchandising doesn't want that. Not that it would do anything about that, because that would be wrong. Which brings me to a GUI. You see, if we want to find out what we're getting, so that we can cancel it, we have to look on the computers. Fine, you are saying: a Word file would be fine. An Excel file, at a pinch. But, no. What we have is a proprietary system. You look at the "merchandising notes" to find out which "allocation table" is assigned to which display. You open up a special portal. (The apps do not play well with Windows, so of course there's no nonsense with opening up two windows at the same time.) You type the number of the allocation table in the search window. You wait for the programme to run a search through the allocation tables. it, finally, displays the table. Which may well be wrong, because no-one at the other side understands how to use this proprietary software. Silly people. Or, that's how it worked last week. This week, the GUI has been upgraded. Now, you can type the number of an allocation table in the search window, and it will bring up a "relevant items" search return, consisting of all of the allocation tables. Not all the allocation tables assigned this week, mind you, but all the legal allocation numbers that can be assigned, many of which are null sets. (It's a five digit code, with the lowest number being 203, and the lowest assigned usually in the 80,000s, in case you were wondering.) Then you can scroll through the list from #203 until you get to, say, 83406. I think. The scrolling doesn't seem to be enabled in the current version of the GUI, but you could, if there were a control that allowed scrolling. I don't know. There could be, but I couldn't find it. Or you can enter the allocation table number in the search box at the top of the related items window, and search for it again. I think. I didn't get any results from doing this, so I might be wrong, or all the tables I searched for might have been either actual null sets, or mistakenly labelled as such. Maybe it's not actually a search window? It has tiny little "binocular" tooltips to click. That's intuitive for "search," right? Which is why, a week before Canadian Thanksgiving, I got to order Stovetop stuffing blind, not knowing how much was going to be distributed. None? 46? In the end, I ordered 20, the invoice said we were getting 46, or a 26 case distribution, and 30 actually came in. The fact that we were shorted 16 cases of stuffing isn't the GUI's fault in itself, but the fact that we can't plan for Thanksgiving is. Or, rather, it's the fault of the IT guys who upgraded the GUI. Or of the people who were supposed to tell us how it works now. Except that I'll bet no-one except the IT guys knows that. They probably sent someone an email explaining their changes, and it is either sitting unread, or has been read but not disseminated, because whoever is responsible hasn't had the time, or didn't understand it. See? This is why you don't screw around with your GUI for no good reason.

Go Team Pariah! Imma going go spill beer on everybody else and sink obscene racist chants at them... Uhm, hey, commish! Where's the terraces in this league?

Don't forget the sunblock!

So we found ouot that we're not getting a new Management Trainee. The guy next up from me in our little executive order tells me that with a haunted look in his eye. What happens when I go on vacation and he has to close the store five nights in a week? My sympathy for him is not unlimited. I am wondering, however, exactly how the process of getting people to volunteer for management positions in retail goes these days. "Volunteers for the non-union Assistant First Officer position? I know that the work is hard, but with promotions, you can ---Hey, quit laughing. Anyway. Anyone? Anyone? Okay, we'll revisit this at the end of the meeting, in case any of you change your mind. Second, some scut work here: cleaning and repainting the lifeboats. I know, it's tough work. You're going to be on your own down on the lifeboat deck for the next few months to get it all-- Okay, everybody, you can put your hands down. I'll pass a paper around so you can sign up for --Please, everybody, can I have your attention? You can find pens later. . ."

Great matchups this week. I feel like a complete heel voting against Spinneret and Rockslide's team, because the contestants are bringing interesting new characters to the table and deserve to be rewarded and the best I can say is that Karate Kid is too heavily hampered by environmental effects and that Valkyrie and Thundra (rowr) have weapons reach. Though I guess so does Rockslide. . .

Qantan: Australian Richard Branson-type. Archconservative, powered armour, helicarrier base, needs to have a talk with somebody about Tom Abbott. Swagman: 100% Irish ancestry from 100% Irish ancestors who 100% migrated from 100% Ireland; magic user with deep connections to the Outback in spite of being 100% from 100% Ireland. Totally not denying anything, and that's just a tan, you stuck-up Pommie b*st*rd, now feel the wrath of my 100% Irish killstick. Firster: The early days of the First Fleet were rough, which is why his ancestor was picked out of the common rabble to be a trusty. They say that his ancestor was a gentleman, fallen into the criminal class for reasons out of his control. Of course, they also say that he was a jailhouse snitch with a bad imitation of a "posh" accident. Never mind that, though, because after five generations of sending their children to the best English boarding schools, the accent is the least of the family's concern. Keeping the dungeon under their Sydney mansion secret --now that's a top priority. Firster read a few comics in his youth, and one of the things he decided was that the Hellfire Club was a good idea, but kind of lame, in practice. His version of the Hellfire Club, now that's happening. Whether the demon he deals with is the same as the one his ancestor first appeased, now that's an open question.

So, let's see: i) Crazy lineups at all open checkstands; ii) "Please Use Next Checkstand" signs at Customer Service. Is there, perhaps, and I am just throwing this question out in idle curiosity, some clearer way for us to intimate that the one manager and four cashiers you can see are all that are available, and that maybe now is not the time to lineup at customer service to get a refund on the wrong size of Rice Krispies you bought? The question is perhaps more pressing in that I left my (busy) checkstand to walk over and tell you that there would be no-one at Customer Service for about half an hour, and your response was, "But I need to do a return!" Because, and let me be perfectly clear about this, I know you need to do a return. I had a feeling that was the case. I understand. People need to do a lot of things that I wish they could do. They need to run into MacDonalds or the DMV, get through to a live operator at the cable company, book an appointment with a specialist, get across the bridge in less than twenty minutes. Those are all important things that they should be able to do! But, sometimes, you can't. And if I had to guess what time that might be, I might guess that it was at peak hours. And, moreover, I would guess that, say, the traffic lined up twenty blocks behind the bridge would be some kind of clue that this isn't going to take twenty minutes. Therefore, I have a proposal. Don't try to use these facilities at peak hours. Or, be prepared to wait, at peak hours. Or, even, and I know this is crazy, consider just how important your errand actually is.

Cost-plus! Cost-plus! Cost-plus! It's the battle cry of a new religion.