Having watched Last Exile, I have realized several things about the future equipment of my evil minions. First, the whole black and silver theme the Silvana officers had going on was pretty nifty looking. Also, my minions must fly around in those fighters the Guild had. Because, ok. Not only does it fly pretty much wherever it wants to, it can also walk around on land like a spider, or float in water. The only downside is the weaponry. Because, while quad MGs may have been respectable in the whole Sky Captain and the Chivalric Combat of Tomorrow world of Last Exile, or the 1930s, and while I have all confidence in my men’s abilities to defeat Tom Cruise in a dogfight, some missiles would go a long way towards the eventuality that I will eventually find myself in beyond visual range fights with F-15s or something.
We will, however, be giving the whole flying battleship thing a miss. Because, honestly, didn’t work out so well for anybody. Besides, my forces will have that novel new invention, gunpowder.
Just thought you’d all like to know.
Late summer. Wherein A, it apparently rains, thus relieving the working rabbits of the world, who enjoy a nice temperate day for once, and B, we discover that you can apparently eat corn on the cob with any random meal, including assorted Chinese food and ling cod.
Because, well, Dad likes corn on the cob, and it shows.
Western Oregon University
August 24, 2005
Dear Erik:
Congratulations! Your application for admission to graduate study at Western Oregon University has been approved for Winter 2006 as a Resident. I am pleased to welcome you and am glad you will be joining the Western Community.
etc, etc.
Also wherein we register for the English Praxis IIs for 9/17, and rediscover that ETS sucks the good suck. Also wherein we discover that the only available Praxis I date is 9/14, which is way less than good, but oh well.
Now then, Diablo. I’m going to thwart you, too.
I guess I should probably, you know, say something here every so often. Apologies. I started playing Diablo II again, and then I dragged Whir into it, and, well…yeah. You know how it goes.
Working at the library Wednesday, as I am wont to do from time to time, I ran into a delimma, and it was this. Working check-in, as I do, it is astonishingly easy to come across books than people have checked in that sound like books that you may like to read. And since you’re right there and all, you can set said book to the side and check it out for yourself. Figure I check in a few hundred books each day, and you perhaps begin to see the depths of my temptation, here.
So it’s fairly rare that I don’t leave on a Wednesday without checking out SOMETHING to read. Wherein lies the problem. Because I also do other things besides read in my life, my backlog previous to this week looks like:
John Lewis Gaddis – We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Due in a week. Currently scrambling to finish having had it for almost 2 months)
Gerald Astor – The Mighty Eighth: The Air War In Europe As Told By The Men Who Fought It (Just finished after about a month. More delimma – it was a good book, and now I want to read more of his stuff)
Patrick O’Brien – Master and Commander (Well, it’s ok. The whole Napoleonic ship thing isn’t quite doing it for me though. But it does remind me to see if I can find more Sharpe novels.)
Also in the same stretch of time, I read The Great Gatsby and at least 2 other books I don’t remember. Gatsby was really good, for the record. Damn HS for making me read Hemingway and not Fitzgerald.
On the waiting to be read list, we have:
Charles Adams – When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Yeah, I dunno. But it’s short, and it’s always interesting seeing what the enemy thinks. Which is why one of these days I want to read Mein Kampf)
David Anthony Durham – Pride of Carthage (It’s a novel about Hannibal. How could I not read it?)
And then, because I am weak, I noticed in the checkin pile this week:
John Sugden – Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797
I saw it and said “Cool!” And then I said “But it’s 800 pages. When am I gonna read all that?” and put it back on the cart. But then I said “But you want to!” and took it off the cart and checked it out.
What’s worse is two things. First one is that Astor and Sugden both have other books that sound like cool things to read. If Sugden’s any good, I’m doomed – he’s also got biographies of Sir Francis Drake and Tecumseh, both people I’d like to know more about. Too, Gaddis’ book has me wanting to find a biography of Nasser and read THAT, because he sounds interesting.
The second thing is my existing to read pile of stuff I own, which is getting frightening. Among other things, we have a history of Japan’s involvement in China and the Pacific through 1945, Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Keegan’s The Face of Battle, a biography of George Washington, a history of the ancient world, a history of the Supreme Court, and a pair of boxed sets containing books on World War II and women in history. Also half of the complete Far Side collection. Most of this stuff has been waiting since Christmas, and some of it’s been waiting for two or three years.
Which isn’t really a complaint. I’m actually fairly happy about it, because right now I’m reading more things that I want to read than at any point since high school. Since going over to England in the beginning of ‘04, I’ve probably read more books , definitely for fun but maybe total as well, than in the previous three or four years combined. College really takes it out of you.
For you Wheel of Time readers in the audience, I encourage you to read these plot summaries, because they are funny. In fact, I encourage you all to read them, because much of what goes on is universally amusing. If nothing else, you need to browse down to the Lord of Chaos one and read the first part, because it’s the funniest thing on the Internet since the WWII as an RTS thing.
Anyway. So I had a day today, which is aptly described by a conversation I had with Whir earlier:
Me: You know, today was considerably less fun than it could’ve been.
Whir: Oh?
Me: Yeah. So I’m doing more mowing up the hill, see. And it’s all like this:
*mowing, mowing* Oh, look, blackberries. *destroys blackberries* Oh, fire pit. Avoid fire pit. *avoids fire pit* Ok, now let’s do this wide open part out back that has a few thistles. *mowing, mowing, mowing, tractor suddenly vanishes in gigantic mud pit reminiscent of the mechanical version of the La Brea Tar Pits*
Me: What the hell was that?
Mud Pit: *glurp*
Whir: Heh.
Me: So we’re like “lumber!” The now foot deep mud is like “Yeah, not so much.” So we’re like “gravel!” And the mud pit is like “Nice try, but no.”
Seriously there’s this random spot with like, 2 foot deep mud. And a fence. I ran over a fence. Because apparently the fence sank into the swamp.
Whir: Hahahah.
Me: So we’re thinking maybe we can get a pickup and a chain.
Whir: Yeah. Another tractor would probably work better, but.
Me: Well, you know. All the people we know with them. Not that we know a lot of people with pickups.
Whir: If I was there, we’d just use my leet mud bog skills and drive it out.
Me: We surely did try. It’s like driving through water, though. And I think I high centered myself.
Whir: You high-centered a TRACTOR?!
Me: This mud pit is pretty hardcore. The rear tires are, I dunno, 4 foot. A good foot and a half of that is buried in mud.
Whir: Good grief.
Me: Like I said. It’s like, the mechanized La Brea Mud Pits.
——————-
So, rather later, Dad gets home, and we show up. And he’s all like “Huzzah! L33t tract0r skillz +5!” and does this thing with the bucket and gets the tractor out. And the rest of us are like “Owned.”
Except how Dad would never actually talk in leet. Because he’s Dad. But you get the idea.
So today’s lesson is, beware dirt. It’s very perilous.
In one of those events where it becomes obvious that my mind works a bit strangely, I was cleaning my room today, and I was like “I wonder how many books I own?” Turns out it’s about 500, counting everything from my multi-thousand page history of the world to play manuscripts. As a conservative estimate, you can further figure that I’ve read somewhere between 3 and 5 times that number of books I don’t own, be they borrowed, loaned from the library, or things I used to own. So I’ve probably read something between 1500 and 3000 books of all types over the course of the, oh, 20 or so years that I’ve been able to comprehend the written word. Of that number, probably about half are something other than novels, ie, something I’ve read to educate myself about something.
Further consider that, while I possess a bachelor’s degree in history, and am apparently considered to be one of the Smart People, there’s a whole hell of a lot, even in my own field, that I don’t know. There are plenty of people who are way smarter, way better read, and own way more books than I do/am.
And it is, well, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things that owning a few books was a sign of wealth, owning a hundred meant you were exceedingly wealthy, and owning as many as I do was the province of a small minority. It’s also not that long ago that a very few people could claim to know pretty much everything everybody knew about everything. Not so much, these days.
Do I have a point? Not really. Just something to think about.
Printing Press for teh win.
Firstly, on the topic of Ghost In the Shell SAC, I have two things I want. The first is a video game, and the second is a Tachikoma of my very own. If I could drive the second around in the first, that would be spectacular.
On the one hand, summer is conspiring to piss me off a lot. On the other hand, the AC in the house seems to be working so well that I’ve been resorting to my NINJ4 hoodie, which, while l33t and all, as it were, is something I didn’t expect to do for another few months.
On a totally unrelated note, today’s blog surfing seems to have involved a lot of people talking about assorted current events, such as this excellent Supreme Court ruling that lets local government jack your land if they should feel inclined, and this even better piece of news, wherein we are now apparently snagging people out of airports, detaining them using secret evidence, and shipping them to Syria, of all places, where they are then tortured.
The lengthy discussion of all this is here and here, wherein it becomes increasingly apparent that John Scalzi is the Man, but allow me to quote something I said to Regina a while back:
[14:57] TontoMarius: Because, you know, either we’re the United States of America who’s all about life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, rule of law, justice, and all that, or we aren’t.
[14:57] TontoMarius: Either we’re better people than Saddam, or we’re not.
[14:58] TontoMarius: Either we have souls, or we don’t.
I am further reminded of the movie Three Kings, wherein lots of Iraqis run up to our intrepid, gold thieving American soldiers, shout stuff like “United States of Freedom! We love United States of Freedom!” and are met with “Where’s the gold, guys?”
It should come as no surprise to you all that the Bush administration has been sending out a lot of those same vibes. We’re not quite to the point where I expect Republican Party stormtroopers to bust down my door and zot me with tasers until I pronounce my undying admiration and love for Jesus, George W. Bush, and the Reich, but we’ve got, you know, 3 years left. Give it some time.
Because, well, come on guys. I’m all for defeating terrorists too, and I’m all for doing the right thing by Iraq, but really, here.
This is, of course, half the reason why I haven’t been paying much attention to the news since, oh, roughly the election. Not only is it either uniformly depressing or sheer drivel, I’m not sure that any given piece of media is going to even make the attempt to give me an objective story. And you can thank all those milblogs lamenting the general tone of the media towards Iraq for that one, I suppose.
Without re-establishing my credentials, here, I’ve always considered myself to be pretty politically moderate. It seems to be the particular tragedy of moderates these days that we’re all too busy going into Democrat vs. Republican mode to have any room for us.
Little did they reckon on my master plan to take over the world…
Since we all love Marechal quotes, and since Regina asked me to put this together, I present to you the best Marechal quotes from my ICQ logs, 2001-2003.
And it came to pass in those days that it was summer. And God looked upon summer, and was not pleased:
God: You know, rabbit advisor, this whole “blazing heat” thing? Yeah. Maybe not such a great idea.
Rabbit Advisor: *wipes brow* Yeah God. It’s pretty hot out here. I could use some refreshment.
God: Say, that’s a good idea. *creates the Icee* Here, try this.
Rabbit Advisor: *slurp* Dude. This is great! *slurp* God, you’re the Man.
And so it was that Icees appeared amongst the small forest animals of the world. And lo, there was much rejoicing. And slurping.
The management would like to thank Target Stores, Inc, for being awesome and being like the only place around to have Icee machines in their stores.