Category: Not-politics

End of the Tamil Tigers?

They apparently have their back to the wall at this point:

Sri Lanka rebels call ceasefire

A Tamil Tiger spokesman told the BBC the move was due to what he called an “unprecedented humanitarian crisis”.

Sri Lanka’s defence secretary however dismissed the announcement as “a joke”, insisting the rebels must surrender.

The rebels have been beaten back to a 12 sq km (5 sq m) area. The UN says more than 160,000 civilians have fled from there, but 50,000 remain.

…and by most accounts they’re fairly deserving of their fate. Not that the Sri Lankan government itself is a paragon of virtue: reading between the lines here, said government seems to be slowly shifting towards a designation of ‘unpleasant.’ On the other hand, a lot of it seems to be due to the pressures of fighting a long, drawn-out regional civil war against what appears to be a much more unpleasant opponent, so possibly once the TT is gone the Sri Lankans will relax things a bit. It’s possible: after all, it’s a “Democratic Socialist Republic” that actually tolerates opposition parties and lets them win national elections. Usually, a title like that is a code phrase for “Communist dystopia…”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

That would be MISTER Mazetier, mind you.

Two guys try to hijack an 84-year-old guy’s car in Tacoma, Washington… yeah, you know where this is going, don’t you?

TACOMA, Wash. — Ted Mazetier may be a grandfather, but at 84 years old, he’s still got his chops.

And two men learned that the hard way.

Yeah, you know where this is going. See Boing Boing and Instapundit for more aesthetic appreciation of what was by all accounts a short, yet lovely beat-down of two very unlucky criminals.  Of particular poignancy is that the criminals have been captured, and will thus have to live with this particular humiliation for the rest of their lives…

Moe Lane

PS: Embarrassingly, I have yet to actually see Gran Torino.

Crossposted to RedState.

The Milky Way galaxy: raspberries and RUM.

(Via AoSHQ) THIS IS NOT A JOKE:

Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it tastes vaguely of raspberries.

This is SCIENCE. Science that is made of AWESOME. It is made of awesome because the chemical that they found – ethyl formate – is not only what gives raspberries their taste; it’s what gives rum its smell. This is important because if one chemical compound is out there, all sorts of chemical compounds must be out there. Including the one known to all of us as CH3CH2OH, or ethyl alcohol. Which we knew, yes… but we didn’t know before that recognizable flavorings also existed, due probably to non-organic processes. So, do you know what this means? This means that somewhere out there really is a planet which has a drinkable analogue of tequila for its oceans.

All we have to do is find it.

Moe Lane

PS: What? How do we do that?

Why are you asking me? Isn’t this what we have scientists and engineers for?

Balefires is coming back out in paperback.

At the end of June; Balefires is a collection of David Drake‘s fantasy short stories, and is noteworthy for having “Than Curse the Darkness,” which is probably in the top ten of most people’s short lists of Greatest Cthulhu Mythos Stories*. The collection is also available in hardback, so if you’re into instant gratification, knock yourself out.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft is Missing continues its surveys of… stuff.  Interesting stuff, but… stuff.

Moe Lane

*Including a couple written by HP Lovecraft himself, if you’ll pardon the rank heresy.