Reportedly, Iran fired a missile from a barge in the Caspian sea and detonated the thing at apogee.
Now do that with a nuke. Guess what happens? Atomic Fungus #1164: "Out of left field".
When Iranian President I'm-in-a-Jihad, said: "...we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism"? What do you think?
They say that Olmert's recent resignation makes it more likely that Israel will bomb Iran's nuclear facility. We can hope!
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No, 20" rims are not cool, at least in most applications. There are a few where they work, but a sand rail is emphatically NOT ONE OF THEM.
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Ann Coulter writes about the non-coverage of John Edwards and his love child. Best line: "Evidence is accumulating that John Edwards is right – there really are 'two Americas.' There's one where men cheat on their cancer-stricken wives and one where men do not cheat on their cancer-stricken wives."
God, I love Ann Coulter.
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More about the Quantas 747 that depressurized. Apparently they lost flight instruments. There is no mention in the article of the fact that there are backup mechanical systems which function all the time, even if the electronic flight instruments die, and these are sufficient to allow a competent pilot to land the aircraft safely.
Apparently an oxygen tank exploded, and shrapnel sheared off a door handle. I like this: "...'there was never any danger of the door opening' because it is designed never to be opened in flight."
I'm pretty sure the oxygen tank was designed never to explode, either. But you know, despite the multiple redundancies built into the electronic flight instruments, they still have a mechanical backup system in place, because shit happens. You can design stuff to behave a certain way, but that doesn't mean beans.
That reminds me, though: I was once writing a story in which I had a character need to open the door of an airliner while in flight. And after I had written this tense scene in which he rigged a safety rope, and had the pilot fly at 1,000 feet and equalize the cabin pressure, he opened the door...which swung in, because I figured that it's a pressure door. Pressure doors always open against pressure. The pressure helps them seal.
Problem: airliner doors swing out, because the doors are large and the interior of an airplane is small, and you want to maximize your internal space. This means not reserving a certain volume for your door. This makes airliner door seals bigger and more complex, but they work.
Unfortunately it blew my story right out of the freaking water. *sigh*
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People wasting money on stupidly huge homes. I mean, WTF, it's their money to waste. Still, while I defend their right to waste their money any way they see fit, I nonetheless reserve my right to make fun of them.
Their wine room can hold 3,700 bottles of wine--WTF? There's a one-ton table in there--WTF? When will you ever drink 3,700 bottles of wine? Why would anyone want that much wine? It's freaking fermented grape juice, for Christ's sake! "Oh, this Chateau Letour '48 and is simply exquisite..." it fuck well ought to be, considering it costs freaking $1,000 per freaking bottle! WTF!
God help you if you ever decide that you want to move that table.
My ex-girlfriend from Iowa, Darla, always talked about what she would do when (not "if" but when!) she won the Powerball. And one of the things on her list is a stupidly huge house. Probably not something as stupidly huge as the house mentioned in the linked story, but stupidly huge nonetheless--six to ten thousand square feet.
...for one person. Two, maybe, if her magical prince on a white stallion ever appears.
She was confident that she will win the Powerball because her astrologer told her so.
Um, yeah.
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Barak Hussein Obama's global poverty plan intends to tax away 0.7% of the GDP of the United States and give it to the poor nations of the world.
...a plan breathtaking in its stupidity, I might add, because it'll end up enriching third-world dictators.
Remember the stupidity that surrounded the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s? It was a political famine; the rulers of Ethiopia were purposely starving people, and when the US sent food and other aid, it was diverted.
Barak Hussein Obama's plan would end up working the same way: the warlords would just keep the money.
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Record levels of Arctic sea ice.
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Canada follows England's example. If you live in a country with socialized medicine, your internal organs belong to the government, not to you.
Looking at the picture with the article, I immediately thought, "The skinny guy on the right looks like he needs a new liver." I mean, look at how yellow he is.
...and I was right. He's been waiting for a liver transplant for three years.
The comments are full of assertions that a person who doesn't want to be an organ doner is selfish. Yeah, okay.
The problem is, as the first comment I saw points out, who decides who lives and dies? If you're a 20-something and only have a 30% chance of living after an accident, could the doctors (or bureaucrats) say, "Well, he's in a coma and probably won't live well even if he does recover, so let's just shut off his ventilator. His organs will save so many other lives!" And because it's a socialized medical system, the guy's family couldn't object--the government could simply say, "Nope, sorry; he's not a good use of resources" and shut off the ventilator.
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I'm glad we're at a solar minimum. Otherwise it might be hot outside:
Of course that's from the weather station here in Crete which incorrectly reports the temperature as about 20°F higher than it actually is, when the sun is up. (When the sun's not up, it's correct.) The actual temperature is closer to 83°F.
And, by the way:
Someone should tell Yahoo that 25 MB of hard drive storage is not worth $60 per year. Granted that "enterprise" hard drives cost more than "home" hard drives--they're expected to run constantly, for years, error-free--that's still an insane $0.20 per megabyte per month. Even if you include the cost of FTP bandwidth, it's still nuts. The data pipe that Yahoo has would dump 25 MB in a few seconds, and no way is a casual FTP user such as myself likely to need all 25 MB all the time.
Heck, it's taken me almost two years to fill 13 MB of my 15 MB. And I have a 1 MB per hour limit on downloads from the thing--and rarely do I run up against that, either.
...and, by the way, this is not a "free" FTP account. This is paid for out of my ISP subscription. It's SBC/Yahoo DSL I've got, here. (SBC now being part of AT&T, of course.)
Well, eventually I'll get around to figuring out how I want to proceed. In all likelihood I'll make PDFs of the old stuff and make them available for download, somehow, and then prune all the oldest pictures. Probably just post an e-mail address and say, "if you want PDFs of the old Fungus, just send an e-mail to...." I will probably be able to count those e-mails on my thumbs, anyway....
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I ordered the first five volumes of the High School Girls manga from Robert's Anime Corner Store yesterday afternoon. $52 with shipping--it ended up saving me $3 over what I would have paid from the bookstore, anyway, for the first five volumes. (Plus whatever I'd spend on gasoline, and annoyance at the stupidity of other people.)
I'm just about ready to order all my manga on-line, rather than buy any in a store. You know why? Because I'm sick of driving over to the bookstore--the only surviving freaking bookstore in a 15-mile radius--hoping to find at least one book that I want.
Yesterday I discovered, to my chagrin, that while I have volume 3 of Ichigo 100%, and volume 5, I do not have volume 4. Argh etc. I could have bought it when I bought volume 5, but noooo, for some reason I thought I had volume 4.
So while Mom and I were out running errands yesterday I bopped over to the bookstore, thinking, WTF, I'll pick up #4 and maybe some HSG as well.
"No," said Borders. "No, you won't. We don't want your money, you cretinous otaku jerk. To emphasize this point, you also won't buy Manga Sutra, Hayate no Gotoku, or Hana Yori Dango. Ha, ha!"
Those guys are douchebags.
So we'll see how we do. Steven has been very happy with Robert's Anime Corner Store; it's his testimonials which have led me to try the place out. I made sure to say, in the "comments" field of the order form, that Steven's mentions of the place led me there; hopefully this will lead to some neat perks for Steven.
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Gas has fallen $0.50 in the past two weeks. Thank you, President Bush.