Old Man

Better than Fukushima. At least Chernobyl is done.

Geez, did he then throw his gun down, rip off his shirt, and give a bellow of victory? Or did he coolly blow the smoke off the muzzle and then twirl the gun as he reholstered? What a badass. /sarcasm. Dude's a walking John Woo film.

We've been getting a lot of those the past couple of weeks. Thursday's one spoofed the real domain for American Express so it sailed right in through the spam filter. Fortunately the link went to a known bad site so the firewall would have stopped it on the way out if anyone had tried to click on it.

Too late. Hey, what's "Cryptolocker"?

I didn't see the actual midair collision but I glanced up in time to see the immediate aftermath through the expansive terminal windows: a shower of aeronautical debris, some of which was headed right for us. Calmly I pushed the girl I was with into a side passage so that it would not hit us directly. An instant later, screams and shattering glass as the debris penetrated the window; one small piece actually ricocheted into our side passage and struck me in the leg without effect. I stepped back out to survey the damage--the giant windows were no more but there were no serious injuries among the other travelers. The same could not be said for the occupants of the plane, of course, so I left the terminal through the shattered glass and began a sprint to where the remnants of one of the aircraft lay burning on the runway.

True. Instead I had to take everything home wet and spent the rest of the day drying stuff off. In fact I still have a tent pitched in my garage.

I am sitting in wet clothes in a wet tent full of wet things that need to get taken down in the rain and stuffed in the car.

I just did an image search for "shotgun slug". There were many images of shotgun slugs. There were also many images of shotgun slug injuries. Don't do an image search for "shotgun slug".

Apparently these can actually be legal: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/03/26/14-mossberg-non-nfa-scattergun/

I finally got around to reading the first five issues of All-New Captain America (nee Falcon). They alternate back and forth between completely unrelated story arcs! How the f_k am I supposed to keep track of comics when stories are split across multiple titles and titles are split across multiple stories?! If I'd read these one at a time I'd have been hopelessly confused. Instead I'm just confused and annoyed.

That might actually be the worst part. I don't think it really hit me until long after ROTJ came out, and then I rewatched ANH, and that scene. And then I was like, "You know, that is an outright lie. Kenobi is a lying sack of... and Yoda too." It's like mixing Game of Thrones into my space opera.

Once upon a time on these boards, I posted about combat biologists on war rhinos. Behold: Ms. Kinessa Johnson, who is not a biologist, but is an Afghanistan veteran and anti-poaching advisor with VETPAW.org, a nonprofit that seeks to discourage poaching.

On an unrelated note, I did eventually find out why pigeons are often missing toes.

Why do you ask?

Can I get back to you on that?

Hello? Did someone call me?

Ah, I must have confused that with the TESB one.

It seems to take clear video evidence to even charge a cop. I note that the defense attorney is still saying "he went for his waistband".

Finally someone else dares to come out and say what I've been thinking. It's clear to me that Lucas had nothing more than a general backstory when he made Episode IV. But by actually calling it Episode IV in the title sequence, he fooled everyone into thinking that he had a lot more material worked out than he really did. And it showed up in all the plot holes and weird situations. The whole sibling thing made parts of Episodes IV and V just icky. The same thing goes for Amidala and Anakin's relationship. An officer on the first Death Star flatly doesn't believe in the Force, calling it an "ancient religion", when the Jedi had only been eliminated two decades earlier. How does Leia remember her mother's face? Why does Obi-Wan turn out to be a lying d*ck? Why does Yoda act like he hasn't seen a flashlight before, or food? The whole series is just buckling under the weight of all the retcons.

Sometimes I hate being right. And sometimes, I hate being right.

The XM42 is the world’s first commercially available handheld flamethrower.

Once upon a time, I wrote an orbital simulator for my junior level computational physics class. I ran it over and over because it was oddly fascinating to see what the planets would do. It didn't model accretion or breakups, but any time there was a Jupiter-like gas giant it would absolutely kick out anything massive that was inside its own orbit.

Can I get back to you on that?

Don't forget that the electrons actually move backward with respect to the current.

Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots are officers, but Army pilots are NCOs. Not that warrant officers are paid badly, but rank is pretty central to the identity of a long-term military officer, and I can't imagine any of them would allow themselves to get busted down to enlisted. They'd quit first. There's that, although fighter pilots already have to work out quite a bit--the job is more strenuous than you would think. However USAF culture is almost corporate, while the USMC is kind of a mix of bros, frats, guns, and testosterone. Even Marine officers are unusually gung ho about their work. That's the real culture clash that would occur.