Worn out from a weekend involving a huge bonfire, excellent scotch, and firearms (no, not all at once) – along with the onset of an annoying cold – so I’ll just pass along a little surreal something I stumbled across on MeFi:
There’s a whole series of these. All are completely hilarious. Or maybe it’s just the fever I have . . .
November 14, 2008, 7:37 am
Filed under: Humor, YouTube
Got my hands full today with a number of other things I need to do, so I won’t get around to posting about several things I’ve been thinking about. For now, here’s a little something to smile about:
An old friend sent me a link to a video the other day. I’ve been busy enough getting ready to go on vacation next week that I hadn’t taken the time to sit and watch it.
I wish I had – it’s hilarious. Obscene, ranting (in a musical sort of way), but very funny. Well, it is to me, anyway, though if you’re a fan of Sarah Palin I imagine that it will make your head explode.
Of the apocalypse variety: via MeFi, the BBC has released all the information pertaining to plans from the 1970s to broadcast emergency signals in the event of nuclear war. From the article:
A script written by the BBC and the government to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack has been published.
The script, written in the 1970s and released by the National Archives, included instructions to “stay calm and stay in your own homes”.
It said communications had been disrupted, and the number of casualties and extent of damage were not known.
Gah. I remember that madness.
Well, if someone ever wants to do another post-apocalyptic movie, here’s some great locations they can use, courtesy of WebUrbanist:
Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next – particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural role of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Hong Kong here are seven amazing oriental and subcontinental abandonments from the Near East to the Far East, from skyscraper hotels and pod cities to shopping malls and amusement parks and everything in between.
Some really great (and haunting) images there.
And to leave you haunted in a slightly different way…
You’ll also find the LHC Rap, fun with water in space, playing with a boomerang on the ISS, Adam Savage (of MythBusters) sounding surprisingly like Penn Jillete, superfluid oddness, superconducting effects, and supersonic compression. Have fun!
I took some books back to Special Collections yesterday afternoon. As I was unpacking items, one of the staff members asked how I was doing.
“Pretty well. Been busy.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “You look – rested.”
* * * * * * *
On Wednesday, in response to a friend who asked what I had going on, I sent this email reply:
Need to do some blogging this morning, then get settled into the next batch of books for a client. Print out some invoices. Also need to track down some camera software and get it loaded onto this machine, and finish tweaking things here so I can shift over the last of the data from the old system and send it on its way. Need to work on learning some video editing, and start uploading clips from our ballistics testing project to YouTube. Then I can get going on creating the rest of the content for *that* website. Play with the dog. Should touch base with my collaborator on the Alz book, see where he is on some transcriptions he is working on. And then prep dinner. In other words, mostly routine. Yeah, I lead an odd life.
An odd life, indeed.
But here’s a taste of some of the documentation about the ballistics project that I have been working on:
That’s me wearing the blue flannel overshirt. Man, I’m heavy. I hope video of me now would look better.
* * * * * * *
The chaos continues. Yeah, we’re still in the process of completely re-arranging the house, and of seeing to the distribution of Martha Sr’s things. Looks like there’ll be an estate auction in our future sometime next month. But that’s good – it means that things are moving forward, heading towards some kind of resolution.
As mentioned in passing in the email cited above, I’ve been shifting over to a new computer system I got last week. My old system was starting to lose components, and was becoming increasingly incapable of doing things I need to be able to do. Well, hell, it was 7 years old, and was at least one iteration behind the cutting edge at the time I bought it. Thanks to the help of my good lady wife, this has been a relatively painless transition – though one which has still taken a lot of work and time to see through.
And one more complication, just to keep things interesting: My wife is moving her business practice home. This had been the tentative plan all along, once Martha Sr was gone, and for a variety of reasons it made sense to take this step now. She’ll be able to devote more of her energy to seeing to her mom’s estate, hastening that process. And she’s going to take on the task of shopping my book around agencies and publishers. Now that there have been over 10,000 downloads (actually, over 11,000 and moving towards 12,000), it would seem to be a good time to make a devoted push to getting the thing conventionally published, in spite of the problems in the industry. We’re hoping that she’ll be better able to weather the multiple rejections that it will take, and I’ll have more time and energy for working on the next book (and blogging, and the ballistics project, and – oh, yeah – earning money for a change).
* * * * * * *
She looked at me for a long moment. “You look – rested.”
“Thanks!”
It says something that with all I’ve been doing (as described above has been fairly typical, recently), I look more rested now than I have in years.
“A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”
– Bertrand de Jouvenal –
I’ve frequently talked about guns, and several times explicitly mentioned that my basically liberal/libertarian political philosophy is completely comfortable with understanding the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution as being an individual right. Part of this is in realizing that the world is a dangerous place and that you have to make reasonable preparations to take care of yourself. And part of it is understanding that one check on the abuse of governmental power is a population which is armed and prepared to defend its civil liberties.
No, I have no illusions that I, with a few pistols and shotguns (or my flintlock), am any kind of a challenge to a modern police force, let alone an actual army. And that is the way it should be – no individual should be outside the law. But collectively, a populace armed with tens of millions of such weapons presents a real check on tyranny. The calculus of trying to use military-level force against the population of the US would have to take this into account; either overwhelming mass destruction (and I’m not saying it would have to include WMDs) would have to be employed, or such a military force would have to be willing to suffer significant casualties. This is a substantial disincentive to anyone who might be willing to attempt such a thing.
Not that I can’t imagine possible scenarios where this may come to pass. In fact, one such is part of the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams, following the initial Fire Flu of the backstory. I may get around to writing some of that one of these days, though there is already a fair amount of literature with that setting available.
Anyway, this rumination was prompted by my friend’s quote, and on a nice post that I came across on MeFi that linked to a cool animation of assembling an M1911 .45:
If you would like to see an even better animation of how a 1911 functions, which allows you to hide or show various components as it operates, then go check out this site. I had shot a fairly standard 1911 a good deal when I was young, but was never particularly enamored of that style of gun, preferring more ‘modern’ semi-auto pistols. Until I was gifted with a very nice one from a friend’s collection early this year – a modification on the standard design which provides for the additional safety of a double-action trigger. It is perhaps the sweetest-shooting pistol I have, even while being one of the most powerful ones. There is a lot to be said for the venerable design of the 1911, a gun said to be designed by a genius for use by morons, with ballistic performance suitable for service in four wars . Works for me.
Well, as I’ve said before, I know a lot of people don’t want a gun in their home. Fine, don’t have one. But if you are going to have one, learn to use it and store it safely. And if you’re going to have one, you certainly could do a lot worse than have a 1911 model .45 of some variation.
Communion Of Dreams 