bjacques

bjacques

  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    How about Thomas Ligotti, whose stories make the point (more or less) that all horrors are just masks covering up the ultimate horror of the Void?...
  • Commented on And in case you think that wasn't bad enough ...
    Actually, in Central Texas, which was settled by Bavarians, Bohemians and maybe Burgundians too, you are very likely to see guys dancing polkas and wearing Lederhosen, mostly during Oktoberfest. See also: Revolting Cocks album "Beers, Steers and Queers" (from the...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Halting State
    Not quite the same thing, but close enough: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/ Devices like the Disabler are made possible by continual surveillance of cars and similar devices. Apply it to a driverless car and it simply drives itself back to the lot if...
  • Commented on Tapeworm Logic
    Yeah, well, come the Ringularity, it'll be obvious that one anus was too small to hold all of tapewormkind. Sincerely, A. Postcestode...
  • Commented on Unbreakable (part 1)
    For what it's worth, Hemingway did leave behind a great definition of strength (he called it "guts")--grace under pressure. I can go with that....
  • Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
    Oh, definitely. I've been lucky enough to be healthy (aside from lousy eyesight), so it would be a bonus. Fifty next year, worth rolling back to, say 35 (enough hormones that life is fun, not enough to be jerked around...
  • Commented on Eating the seed corn
    National Lampoon were way ahead of you in the 1970s. There's a fast food chain called Arby's, so it was Arby's Macht Fries. Not to mention Jackboot in the Box. The main library in Amsterdam has been hugely busy the...
  • Commented on World building 302: Psychology, beliefs, and other times
    I think our horizons are about to be drastically shortened. It's the right year for that, and this being (more or less) the 55th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year adds a bit of irony. Oh well, maybe Nyarlathotep's girlfriend...
  • Commented on Sometimes I hate being right
    1860s London. Hmm...paper clips, Fuller Domes... aspirin from willow bark (how hard is this qua dosage, variation, etc.? This might be a Charlie question) Clinical trials? Quality control? Assembly lines? Management processes? I've got more of an engineering background. Pretty...
  • Commented on Sometimes I hate being right
    Looks like someone already spotted this, but the Red Army did indeed use Buchenwald to hold Nazis from the area (Thuringia) for a few years after the war. 5000 died of starvation and neglect. I'm racking my brains to find...
  • Commented on More news from our Martian Invaders
    Unless something concrete gets leaked out, I'm inclined to chalk up the crackdowns on OWS across US cities to common interests. In the 1980s and 1990s, in the US, I was in all sorts of demonstrations--save the National Endowment of...
  • Commented on Cynicism
    I'm old enough to remember when health education, including also nutrition, wasn't as thoroughly captured by moneyed interests as it is now. We learned in school to eat a healthy breakfast, drink your milk, get your vaccines for MMR, polio,...
  • Commented on Cynicism
    I hope you're paying attention to what's going on down-ticket. At the state and local level, the outlook is encouraging. As for the Presidential slot, please remember who will be nominating the next one or two Supreme Court replacements......
  • Commented on Cynicism
    I could live with that. Probably have to join one's friends in finding a major party least diametrically opposed to those directives and then working on coring it out. It's ironic that, compared to the UK and Western Europe, the...
  • Commented on Trumpet, own, blowing thereof
    Well done, good sir!...
  • Commented on System D
    @Greg Tingey 126: Point taken. Actually half a point. The protesters probably don't care about saving the global economy, but the concrete demands that have arisen from the protests would go a long way to saving it. The protests are...
  • Commented on System D
    Living in the Netherlands 13 years (as of next week), I've grown to like social democracy. It's basically fair. (And I'll miss it if it goes, which it will if the Dutch keep re-electing the governments they've had the last...
  • Commented on Another trick question ...
    Here goes: 1) 10 million dollars, no strings attached. 2) That half of my wealth must be spent making the world a better place. 3) That half of my waking time be spent making the world a better place. In...
  • Commented on Three wishes
    Just the one--SLACK (tm) for everybody, retroactively. This saves time hunting down the real bastards and dispatching them, because they (1) never got to screw anybody over and (2) never felt the desire to. And if a genie doesn't understand...
  • Commented on A cultural thought experiment
    ...and all they found was a note scribbled in LOLHochsprache. If this crappy economy can support space hobbyists, it's fair to say that when things improve, someone, whatever their background, will stump up for a bigger presence in space. Anyway,...
  • Commented on A cultural thought experiment
    Damn if I know how we'll get there. We'll need at least a couple of generations of progress to lose the fear of it all being stolen back. That's sort of where the Tea Party are at: not poor, but...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    In the 1970s, industrial-age sci-fi got a lotta guys through rough grade school times. Second, the artists who did all those 1960s-1970s commercial art-grade paintings of giant tubular space colonies have a lot to answer for--all suburban sprawl and lawns...
  • Commented on Why I've been quiet lately
    OGH@25: Random selection of leaders? G.K. Chesterton's "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," FTW! Except that (a) it gets messy quickly and (b) it's a Catholic parable. Heteromeles@40: Agreed. The idea of China as a model of stability--viz. Chou En Lai's...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    And that's not all it does! Warning: possible causality violation. You did that on purpose, didn't you?...
  • Commented on Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps)
    @OGH: The Penal Colony? Better yet, look for the clip of Texas Governor Rick Perry getting cheered for his comments on capital punishment during a debate among Republican hopefuls for 2012, a few nights ago. (Oddly enough, Dutch TV showed...
  • Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
    This. My nym is from "Blacque Jacques Shellacque," the French-Canadian lumberjack who occasionally went up against (and lost to) Bugs Bunny. It was 1990 and I was new to the BBSes, and I never thought of a better one. 21...
  • Commented on Rewilding Etiquette
    Apologies if I missed this, but I think a politeness system would have to be resistant to being hacked or gamed. A person honestly trying to avoid offense can really be put through the hoops by someone professing to be...
  • Commented on Lunch with the Astronaut
    Late to the party--it looks like most points of the post have been answered. (Disclosure: I worked at NASA-JSC 1986-1996 doing a number of things, ending as a flight controller the final 3 years) In Commander X;'s defense, I was...
  • Commented on Rule 34 moments
    I finished reading "Rule 34" this morning and did not need to have this email waiting for me at work: Forget the Iron, Enjoy the Poi Given the time and expense it takes to plan a well-deserved Hawaiian vacation, it...
  • Commented on "Rule 34" now on sale
    Excellent! And it's just a short(ish) stagger from home. Meanwhile, here's a fabber making something almost illegal. There was an opening last Sunday in Haarlem of a show of 3-D printed sculpture. I'd post it in the R34 forum, but...
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