The National Reconnaisance Office has launched a new spy satellite with a logo that is rightfully mine. Or at least, I ought to steal it. I’d really expect our security agencies to exhibit a little more subtlety than your stock comic-book supervillain.
This greatly simplifies gift giving.
I wish I’d seen it last week — I’m going to have to return a few items now.
They’re going to be doing deliveries by drone.
I don’t think I’ll live close enough to a distribution center for these to come buzzing by my house, so I’m not going to worry about them yet. I’m am remembering that in my younger days I was a deadly shot with a slingshot…I may have to start practicing.
I might change my pessimism about fleets of drones flitting about overhead, if they’re actually shown to represent an energy savings.
Oh, wait. There’s another one: The Carnival of Evolution has a Doctor Who theme this month.
They have conservatives up there, too. And here’s one, Brian Pallister, trying to be nice to atheists.
Charlie Stross has written a story, A Bird in Hand, which rather pushes a few boundaries. It’s about dinosaurs and sodomy, as the author’s backstory explains. And as everyone knows, every story is improved by adding one or the other of dinosaurs and sodomy, so it can’t help but be even better if you add both.
A note of caution, though: Charlie is really, really good at spinning out all the latest scientific buzzwords and deep molecular biological concepts into an extraordinarily plausible-sounding mechanism for rapidly recreating a dinosaur — it’s much, much better than Crichton’s painfully silly and superficial dino-blood-from-mosquitoes-spliced-with-frog-DNA BS — but I was a bit hung up on poking holes in it. It won’t be quite that easy, and it rather glibly elides all the trans-acting variations that have arisen in 70 million years and the magnitude of the developmental changes. But still, if we ever do manage to rebuild a quasi-dinosaur from avian stock, that’ll be sort of the approach that will be taken, I suspect. Just amplify the difficulty a few thousand fold.
Also, it’s way too technical to survive in the movie treatment.
It’s grading time up here in the chilly North; we’ve got midterms we’re plowing through, and finals will come up in less than a month, and the students are all getting anxious. This is Minnesota, though, where we greatly value our emotional equilibrium, and our language emphasizes subtle distinctions that would more typically provoke a greater range of expression than you might find in New York or the South. This is also true of our practice of giving grades.
Perhaps you are visiting Minnesota, or are newly enrolled in one of the schools here, or are perusing a transcript from a Minnesota student, and you find yourself confused by our traditional folkways. Here then is a useful translation table from standard academic A-F grades to the more nuanced expressions we use around here.
| Academic | Minnesotan | Translation |
| A | Not too bad. | You’ve done excellent work, but we wouldn’t want you to get too cocky now. |
| B | You betcha. | I am vaguely happy about your progress. |
| C | That’s nice. | I am not at all impressed, but I’m not about to say that to your face. |
| D | That’s interesting. | Are you from Iowa, perhaps? Or maybe Wisconsin? We don’t do things like that around here. |
| F | That’s different. | I am struggling to express my profound revulsion in a way that won’t immediately incite conflict. |
(Note: C, D, and F grades may be emphasized with the modifier “sure”. “That’s sure different,” for instance, is a much stronger statement. It is not a good thing.)
Just as a general rule, Minnesotans value an affect as flat as the prairies up around Fargo/Moorhead, and must be read with an appreciation of delicate motor skills. A slightly raised eyebrow, for instance, has the same emotional impact as a Brooklynite screaming obscenities at you and making rude gestures.
This can sometimes have a devastating retroactive effect on visitors, once they realize how Minnesotan minds work. You know that nice little lady at the Mall of America who gave you cookie samples and greeted you with that lovely sing-song accent and smiled at you? The tightness of that smile, once you know how to read a Minnesotan, may have actually meant “I will make you dance the blood eagle and drape your bowels from the rafters, foreign scum!”
I am not a native Minnesotan, but my mother was born here. And let me tell you, it’s only many years after the fact that I realized how angry I’d sometimes made her when I was a child.
It’s no wonder they grew up to be godless heathens: this looks like a roundup of all the toys I let them play with, and cartoons I let them watch.
Watching those two grown men go on and on, I could scarcely believe the nonsense they were promoting. Only in the 70s and 80s would you find chairs with that upholstery…
Sorry, gang, this thing is going around…
…but it’s entirely fake. Neither of those organizations exist, and it’s just a joke meme.
Or maybe Bachmann is sneakily throwing up a trial balloon to revive her political career?
