Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

This was a now totally useless fact supplied by her brain as they tumbled and skidded diagonally across the grass and entered into a complicated relationship with the chain-link fence.

Lennert, who had suffered a grievous wound on his inner thigh.

Lennert is now officially the Fisher King.

The sides of his head glinted with stubble, but salt-and-pepper dreadlocks sprouted from a wide strip running down the midline of his scalp.

My inner casting agent says Khary Payton.

“Double tap was definitely your correct move, sister,” he remarked

It's up there with cardio.

Though to be fair there was a lot of related material on YouTube tending to support the dangerous and wrong idea that swine were cute, not anthropophagous, and could be trusted.

Yup. Hog, javelina, wild boar - they will totally eat people. They'll eat each other, too. And that's why prion diseases happen.

At first the protesters gave him mean looks for driving a huge gas-guzzling dually until they saw through the glass that he was a person of color and then they didn’t know where to direct their moral indignation.

invasive species known as the horse.

What is now North America had the modern horses' prehistoric ancestors.

“A hybrid of unusual size is plausible.

Is this a nod to the ROUS in *The Princess Bride*?

“So if your Hogzilla, your Moby Pig, weighs two hundred kilograms?

The record-holding feral boar/hog hybrid weighed in at almost 800 lbs. He was called Hogzilla.

his face, in its natural resting state, conveyed a sense of skeptical disbelief.

Resting Skeptic Face

Ozone-seeking ants could easily get in through the ventilation slots and seek out the relays.

Well pumps are attractive to ants, too. I don't know if well pump switches are solid state or use contacts, but ants love them.

You’d think he would have become excited, but instead he actually went to sleep for a few minutes.

That's not sleep - that's dissociation.

Anyway, this gave Rufus the impetus to do what needed doing, which was to fire four 7.62 mm slugs into Snout’s brain.

Always double-tap.

“swamp meat” harvested from feral swine

Feral hogs, alligators, pigeons and gulls living near cities can accumulate high levels of industrial toxins and heavy metals.

munching on tree snails,

That's how you get rat lungworms.

Lotte had texted: > I hope you get some vitamin D in Texas, maybe it will improve your disposition!

I think Lotte just told Saskia to get laid.

Saskia was suddenly having to restrain an irrational urge to run out and buy a sulfur pile of her own.

Hey, it's on sale!

“To be perfectly honest there is also corruption.” “You will be shocked!” Chiara added.

Gasp! Corruption in government?!

Worse, it failed extremely slowly.”

Constantinople.”

Istanbul was Constantinople ... (The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally established the Republic of Turkey, which moved its capital to Ankara. Old Constantinople, long known informally as Istanbul, officially adopted the name in 1930).

“Black Swan” events,

Black Swan events are rare and unpredictable events that have severe consequences as a result of the event.

derechos

Derechos are a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving, windstorms, and/or thunderstorms. The storms move across a great distance, and are characterized by damaging winds.

It can’t be good for everyone, everywhere.”

“Nothing can be good for everyone, everywhere,”

Carbon makes it get warmer by trapping the sun’s rays. Sulfur cools it by bouncing them back into space.”

“I’ve a toddler-like weakness for construction equipment.”

I feel this way, too. Dinosaurs, construction equipment, & cool looking cars.

the maximum velocity of the projectile can’t be any faster than the speed of sound in the gas that is doing the pushing.

TIL that the speed of sound changes depending on the gasses it moves through.

The world’s helium supply actually comes from up Amarillo way.

Helium is a finite resource. It's created by decaying radioactive elements. And TX is the world's largest supplier of helium. Helium is not just for making squeaky voices and filling balloons. It is used to cool things like MRI machines and the Large Hadron Collider.

mankind’s collective agreement not to use nuclear weapons.

I think Putin is striving to be a supervillain. I think he is going to start holding nations hostage, forcing them to 'vote' for Putin's puppets.

keeping a close eye on the nav system, which kept insisting that you were on a road even when all evidence was to the contrary.

“So it comes down to what’s left of the United States government,

Yup, livin' the dream. Putin trying to become a supervillain, three more COVID variants, and rivers and lakes are drying up all over the planet. The Holocene is coming to a close.

If she behaved in a way that created serious inconvenience for them—forcing PMs to fall on their swords and governments to collapse—consequences would follow.

Must be nice to have accountability and enforcement in government.

“Leve de Koningin!” followed by “Hoera! Hoera! Hoera!”

Long live the Queen! Hurrah!

“What does he do other than look like that?”

Oh, he's pretty. But can he type?

But I will just point out”—and here Dharmender held up one index finger and made eye contact in the rearview—“that it is just what people want of us. They want us to follow orders and put ourselves in harm’s way. On their behalf. ‘Oh look, those weirdos turn out to be useful to have around.’ We are useful, in other words, for going to the front lines and getting killed.

He's not exaggerating by much. The military dumps a lot of advertising and recruiting money in impoverished communities.

I’m going to check into one of the hotels Bo hasn’t blown up yet.” “Terrorists did that,” Bo demurred. “Believe me, the Sam Houston was no great loss. Black mold and bedbugs everywhere.

All hotels have bedbugs. ALL of them. Bedbug infestations can give people PTSD. The bugs are a harmless nuisance. They don't carry any parasites, or viruses/bacteria, they're not venomous. They can cause allergic reactions at the bite site.

Indians and Chinese fighting with rocks and sticks at the Line of Actual Control—a thing of seemingly immense importance that Rufus, in his whole life, had never even heard of.

Reading this book was the first time *I've* heard about it. I had never even heard of the LAC. I even use reddit, and one would think that's something that would be well known. It's absolutely crazy how insulated the US is.

And getting other people to do what you wanted them to do had, for Rufus, always been a sort of black art.

Same.

She groped around and found the box of candles, then opened the lid. Next to it was a box of safety matches. She sparked one off and let it flare, then got a candle going. “Thank you for conducting that free stress test of our gas management system,” T.R. said.