Category: Not-politics

Tweet of the Day, Simple Modern Gets Chill Points, Here edition.

One of the nice things about being retired is that I don’t have to milkshake duck anybody anymore. I am allowed instead to simply, heh, enjoy things. Case in point (Via @BrianFaughnan):

The CEO took one look at this and… decided to give everybody a cubicle budget. Honestly, I would have done the same thing, just for the heck of it.

FILLLMMMS… INNNN…. SPAAAACE…

Assuming that this isn’t just PR nonsense, mind you: “Space Entertainment Enterprise has announced that they will be co-producing Cruise’s space film project, and they propose to build an arena production studio in space. It will be a place for filmmakers to shoot movies and shows like this in zero gravity.” Also mind you: if we can get price-per-pound to orbit down low enough, this becomes feasible. It’ll likely be only feasible as a publicity stunt for the rest of my life, but that’s all right. Future generations can have their own future.

So, they found Sodom. Or what was left of it, after the blast.

Via @EsotericCD comes this interesting article:

We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. 

I get why the article writers don’t want to say that this was Sodom, and I approve of their precision. But I don’t have to share that precision. This was totally Sodom, which is going to be disappointing to a certain segment of online commenters. I was particularly amused by this part:

Continue reading So, they found Sodom. Or what was left of it, after the blast.

The worst WWI general?

Sometimes, Facebook is useful. For example, today it showed me this article on Luigi Cadorna, the worst general in World War I. And before you say anything: it is absolutely true that picking any one general for that honor is a surprisingly difficult proposition. But somebody had to be the worst, and Cadorna is a strong contender:

Cadorna is a heady mix of command failings. Authoritarian and cruel, he demotivated rather than motivated his soldiers. His offensives were fought with the wrong tactics, in the wrong place, at the wrong tempo, for the wrong reasons. But more than any of this, what puts Cadorna at the top of my list of worst generals of the war is his failure to learn meaningful lessons from any of this, despite being left in command on the same front, facing the same opponent, from 1915 to 1917. In the end Cadorna’s failure to learn anything from either his own mistakes or from the open-air failure-dissertation that was the Western Front (that Italian positions were not defended in depth in 1917 is shockingly incompetent on its own) really does appear to be uniquely awful.

This was a very interesting post. If you’re interested in the subject, I recommend reading it. It’s worth your time.

For the record: we should have boycotted this Olympics.

I’m not going to link to the racist filth that our athletes are getting subjected to right now over in the PRC, particularly the ones who are African-American. You can find it, if you really need to see it. But I’ll say this: every one of our athletes should be on the next flight out of that country. Doesn’t really matter where to, either. Anywhere civilized will do.

Footage of the Tonga Volcano.

Via @EsotericCD. I’ve already bored my children with it, so now it’s your turn. Note that this is from yesterday: supposedly the eruption today in Tonga was even more dramatic.

No reliable reports of mass casualties yet, and I’m praying that it stays that way. Expect maybe some spectacular sunsets in that region for a while.

Back to a regular schedule tomorrow.

It occurs to me now that I should have remembered that, thanks to the unexpected snow storms last week, this was the first full week the kids were back to school after winter break. It went… excitedly. It’s also the week before the end of the marking period, and that’s always fun.

Anyway: I probably should have taken more time off formally, but that’s water under the bridge. I’m gonna get back to something approaching normalcy, including more stuff that’s maybe not directly feeding the growing Moe Lane Authorial Empire. That part of my brain’s important, too.