Footy

Voyager’s dog-friend Jack is a featured character over at Affinity [aff] and, as a great fan of dogs in general, I wanted to do something fun for Jack. This has been brewing for nearly a year, as I subconsciously chewed on the technical problems.

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A Rite of Passage

My grandfather used to own a little toy steam engine that ran on live steam; my dad loved the thing and so did I. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realized I was looking at an industrial age in a nutshell. Also, a very small kid-sized bomb that you can give a kid and tell them “run outside and play.”

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Wax Axe – 2

When I was a kid I remembered looking at jewelry in museums listed as “lost wax process” and naturally I wondered how they knew it was that process, if the process was lost. It turned out, of course, that it’s the wax that’s lost in the process, not the process being lost, itself.

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Gary Thomas Rowe

Warning: Racist Violence, FBI

After the January 6th coup attempt, there has been a lot of cheering, in liberal circles, for the FBI’s apparent crackdown on the insurgents. It’s one thing to arrest and charge the hundred most obviously stupid of several thousand, but it’s another thing entirely to make the charges stick – especially to the sneakier ones. Or, to the FBI’s informants.

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Can We De-Platform the Nobel Prize?

Alfred Nobel managed to transition to being a “philanthropist” after a lifetime of building munitions. Usually, when people talk about Nobel’s legacy, they say he felt guilty for inventing dynamite (probably because of the branding: “dynamit nobel”) but he also owned and operated the Swedish steel-maker Bofors, [wik] which he turned into a cannon-maker so successful it’s still very much in business.

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Feb 1, 2021

When I was a kid, snow meant sledding, snotty nose, wind-burn, and sometimes a few bruises. Later, it meant walks in the woods with my dogs, who (as dogs do) acted as though it was all some magical special effect I had put on for their amusement.

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