Patrick Chiles's Blog, page 22
November 9, 2012
The Stupid Party
Today’s vocabulary word is Charlie-Foxtrot: the phonetic abbreviation of military slang which rhymes with “monster truck.” If you need further explanation, you’re not going to find it on this blog. CF is also the operative term for Romney’s utter failure of a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) plan. I use the word “plan” because “effort” or “organization” would [...]
November 8, 2012
Life Goes On
Yeah, the blog was pretty quiet yesterday. I wasn’t in much of a writing mood. So things didn’t turn out like I’d hoped, but it did for the majority of my countrymen. We’ll see how it works out. Until such time, here’s a useful quote from Heinlein that is often cited at Professor Reynolds’ place: [...]
November 6, 2012
And So It Begins
The voting shenanigans have started early this year, as expected, in the “City of Brotherly Love.” For some reason, I’m not feeling the love… 75 court-appointed GOP poll watchers have been thrown out by Democrat election judges at 25 different precincts. The state party’s lawyers were fortunately standing by and were awarded an injunction to [...]
Happy Warriors
Last night I took our oldest son to our first-ever political rally. You can guess which side by our choice of meal on the way in: Here’s the crowd just starting to fill in. This is a large airplane hangar here at Port Columbus airport, and it was chock full by the time things kicked [...]
November 5, 2012
Told You So
MCT = Mars Crew Transport Wired recently interviewed Elon Musk about why he founded SpaceX and his long-term goal of settling Mars: Anderson: And Dragon, the spacecraft you berthed with the ISS in May, has features that might eventually prepare it for a manned Mars mission. Musk: Eventually, yes. The thrusters on Dragon are sized [...]
October 31, 2012
I Have a Bad Feeling About This
Just stumbled into this one, being otherwise distracted by Sandy the SuperStormofDeath… Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday, since I guess they had $4 billion just laying around with nothing better to do. Star Wars, Episode VII: George Lucas’ Retirement Portfolio Strikes Back will be coming our way in 2015. Supposedly they’re also taking a hard look [...]
October 23, 2012
Home Economics
Margaret Thatcher observed this about socialism’s fundamental weakness: eventually, you run out of other people’s money. Well folks, we are rapidly approaching that point here in the good ol’ USA. No amount of tax increases will fill the chasm of our national debt; the Fed’s unbridled money-printing certainly won’t. Our only choice is to expand [...]
October 22, 2012
Deep Space Whine
This Aviation Week story describes a “Deep Space Habitat” engineering mock-up built from old Space Station components before it meanders off into another eye-glazing discussion of Space Launch System, J2X engines, advanced solid boosters, and other pieces of flight hardware that will likely never make it to the launch pad. Oh, and unicorns. With rainbows. [...]
October 21, 2012
Oh Goody
Well, this explains a lot. Namely, why the voices in my head won’t shut up until I write their incessant babbling down on paper: When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice [...]
October 18, 2012
Blowing It Up
Via The Atlantic, an interesting piece of…something: Small Town Terrorized by Exploding Toilets Detonating toilets have become a recent scourge in the American bathroom scene. Although the brand of North’s rogue crapper is unknown, earlier this summer Flushmate issued a massive voluntary recall of pressurized toilets after about 300 people complained of explosions. One poor [...]
