Oh, yeah, baby…that’s what I need: a most macho suit of armor. I’m not sure that I believe that a 40 pound shell can stop an elephant gun, though, but it sure looks fierce.
I could have spent it building a scale model of the Battle of Helms Deep out of candy.
Maybe next year…
I really don’t know whether to believe this story or not. It’s a diary of a sailing trip that reports an encounter with a fellow sailor who had experienced serious difficulties.
We reported last time that Shigeo’s trip from the Galapagos to the Marquesas had been terrible — after about 1000 miles his autopilot had failed, something had gone wrong with his steering, his engine water intake had clogged temporarily, blowing his impeller, the intake for one of his heads had clogged, and, most important of all, something had slowed his speed down to 2 knots, even with full sails, a lot of wind, and the engine running. He basically drifted with the current for the last 2700 miles, taking about 8 weeks to cover a distance that his 42-foot Beneteau could easily have sailed in a fraction of that time.
That part doesn’t seem improbable, but the explanation for his boat’s sluggish performance is wild. Divers took a look at the hull, and found hundreds of strange circular scars all over it—they speculate that they are marks of a giant squid’s suckers.
Hmmm. I can’t believe that a giant squid would or could cling to a boat for 2 months, but I can’t think of any simple explanation for the strange marks. Any more nautically experienced people out there with a better alternative explanation? I’d be inclined to call it a hoax, but for the fact that there’s very little bang for the effort that would have had to go into it.
This is hard to do:
Now there are some unanswered questions. Can he scale it? Does it have to be on a vertical surface? Can he find the center? Can he draw a square with the same area?
This doesn’t apply to me, of course, since I get to frolic on the streets of New York and visit Seed and MoMA.
(via Minnesota Stories)
Hank Fox, who assures me that he is ALL MAN (just look at that beard), told me to take this test…and I seem to have a woman’s brain.
It’s my result from my BBC sex test. I think I confused them, though: I did well on all the spatial reasoning tests and kind of bombed on the empathy stuff (male!), but I also kicked ass on the “spot the difference” test and the ability to recognize emotions from just eyes (female and off the scale!). Being able to spit out 16 and 17 synonyms for a word also makes me more ladylike, I guess.
(When you look at the actual raw scores and the averages, though, my main impression is that men and women aren’t that much different from one another, given the likely amount of variation.)
The madmen of the WAAGNFNP have gone too far—now they’ve put out a warrant for my arrest (scroll down through the comments). Chris Clarke wasn’t enough to slake their bloodlust, I guess, so now they’ve just picked out a random, innocent target.
Watch out, or you’ll be next.
If you had a crummy Christmas morning (I didn’t, so I’m just linking these as a public service), here are a few outlets.
Silly Humans finds an Evil Santa Generator — create your own nasty, scabrous, ugly Santa Claus, suitable for framing.
If you really want to know why Santa gave you such a crappy Christmas, read about the legend of El Caganer, and you will understand.
My Santa was a sweet, jolly fellow who got me a stack of books, a pound of smoked salmon, and the first season of Deadwood on DVD, so I’m going to enjoy a profane, cynical, bloody Western after I get the Christmas feast cooking slowly in the oven.
I am horrified. The J Train tries to ruin Christmas Eve with this…abomination. Don’t watch it if you value your eyes, ears, sense of equilibrium, and sanity. It’s Celine Dion doing AC/DC.
And here I’ve been using Cthulhu as a signifier for incomprehensibly monstrous alien horrors. There’s a new standard.
