What makes us think their predictions of doomsday are any more possible than they were 40 years ago?
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..."747 Dreamliner"...?
I think they meant 787 as the 747's engineering tests were finished in the late 1960s....
Cold-soaking an entire freakin' airliner--this is the kind of testing that has to be done on any large, complex machine to ensure nothing untoward happens. You don't want to discover that your airplane develops a tendency to crack when exposed to extreme cold, for example, when there are paying passengers aboard the thing at altitude. That would be bad.
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There's so much wrong with this, where the hell do I begin?
Let's start with teachers mailing death threats. If you threaten someone with death--or even violence--that's a felony. Prosecute all who did this.
Second: fire every last one of them who misspelled anything.
If we really want to improve our educational system, we have to start with getting rid of the incompetents. Of course, the unions will never allow it. *sigh*
...the US educational system is utterly hopeless.
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"I voted Democrat because...."
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"US weighs Iran military option". I am not going to hold my breath waiting for Barack Hussein Obama to do anything to discourage Iran, military or otherwise, that would actually have some teeth in it.
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I was thinking about movies today, and I realized that I just do not care about 99% of the movies which are released these days.
Avatar--bleah. Don't care.
...and then I thought, "You know, Cameron really missed an opportunity with that movie."
Instead of writing a one-dimensional plot with one-dimensional characters in order to justify spending millions on special effects, Cameron could have done something interesting: a documentary. Or travelogue.
He could have even made the exact same point he tried to make with Avatar. The documentary could have been all about this alien world Pandora, the animals and people which inhabit it; it could have included all the stuff about the unobtanium and the evil corporation and the nasty "redneck" military guys. And it would have been an infinitely better movie.
In the past year, out of God alone knows how many movies that were released, I've been interested in watching two of them: Watchmen and Iron Man. And that's it. Nothing else, not even the big SF SFX blockbuster of the year, appealed to me.
There are a ton of movies coming out all the time, and none of them looks interesting to me. I'm looking forward to Iron Man 2 but I'll wait for the DVD release; and in fact I'm intent on buying Sherlock Holmes sometime soon. Everything else just leaves me cold.
I know it's not me. It's Hollywood, reusing and recycling everything they can possibly get their hands on (a movie based on the Battleship board game? Are you freaking kidding me?) and churning out a bunch of crap that probably has the great movie directors of the past turning over in their graves.
Sherlock Holmes looks good because Robert Downey has found his acting voice, and I've always been a fan of the Holmes franchise anyway. Downey as Holmes has the potential for being entertaining, and the extended preview I saw of the movie made it look very good to me.
Unlike, say, the extended preview for Avatar, which just turned me off. Damn it, Cameron used to be able to make good SF movies--I mean good ones, movies which were actually serious SF and not just spec-fic or science fantasy (Aliens and Terminator 2 were hard SF)--and now he's a hack.
On the plus side, it saves me some money and time. I don't have to go see movies in the theater; buying the ones I want to see ends up being cheaper.
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You know, the previous entry--the one about the eruption of Mt. WTF--has exactly the sort of tone I strive to use with all posts on the Fungus. Light, humorous, conversational, not too heavy. Fun to read. (At least for me.)
I don't always make it. Sometimes I'm not in the right mood; sometimes I'm posting about stuff that can't be presented that way. Oh well.
So I guess we'll just have to enjoy it while it lasts.
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I was all ready to watch FlashForward, and right at 6:58 the gut fired off the big flashing "GUT MALF" warning sign, forcing me to spend the first ten minutes of the program in the bathroom. So I recorded the show and blogged. Now I am going to blog off and watch my damn show.
In the show tonight it's March 15, the day Demitri is supposed to die. I'll find out what happens; but I'm not going to comment on it here one way or the other.
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The weather over the past several days has been a lot more like April is supposed to be. The temperatures have been in the upper 50s, dropping to the upper 30s at night.
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Today I got the tractor out and mowed the grass; and I pruned back the pear tree, mainly cutting out a lot of deadwood. Mom wanted one live branch--a rather substantial one--removed in order to balance the tree better, so I hacked that one off, too. It all got dragged to the curb. That was my exercise for the day.
I'm a bit worried about what the heavy breathing of the cool, dry air did for my cough, but only a bit. Damn it, I should be getting better by now. It's been almost seven weeks since I got my cold.
While reading the second volume of Yotsuba&! I came across a story that was so funny I had to set the book down and do a lung-busting combination of laughing and coughing, but it wasn't as bad as it's been. It's "Yotsuba and the Frog", the story where Miura dresses up like the big scary eyeball thing to scare Yotsuba, and chaos ensues. Jesus did I laugh at that.
I really like Fuuka.
Yotsuba&! is definitely a must-buy. Go buy it and read it.