JamesSavik

I'm reading his novel The Plague.

I got good news Friday. I have a condition called angle recession glaucoma which is caused by repeated trauma- eg. getting beaten up. Boxers get it and it can damage your optic nerves to the point of blindness. My ocular pressure has been stable long enough for me to stop medications for it. It has to be checked regularly but it's in remission. NO more wretched eye-drops- at least for a while.

All Work doesn't leave much energy 4 writing.

Setting: frontier planet Evergreen. It's a Gaia world with rich volcanic soil, long growing seasons, lush jungles with many strange and dangerous animals up to and including dinosaurs. The law enforcement on Evergreen are called Colonial Rangers. Many have territories many hundreds of kilometers across. Scores of colonists start to go missing near the vast swamps at the mouth of the long, slow Toulon River that crosses much of the continent. This is of special concern because the city of Sialis, 3rd largest city on the planet is built at the mouth of the river and is the planets most important port. The local police begin investigating and twelve of them go missing in a few days. The Colonial Governor wants answers and orders the Rangers to make a special investigation. A team of twenty Rangers arrives to find that much of the cities outskirts have been abandoned. A siege mentality has set in among the people who lock themselves into fortified buildings at night and don't come out until well after dawn. Almost immediately two Rangers go missing and more than one hundred more are called in from all over the planet. Rangers aren't stupid. They are well educated in forensics and the ecology of Evergreen. They think they are looking for a predator but it's something new. In the past they had known another kind of Evergreen predator to use limited psychic powers to fool their prey. There is another disappearance and the rangers arrive while the crime scene is fresh. They find evidence in the swamps that large snakes had been there very recently- and something else: human tracks. The Rangers were issued helmets that block psychic signals and began to aggressively patrol and send up drones. The abductions stop and several very disturbing sightings are made. Huge, never before seen snakes were discovered. Easily as large (or larger) than old earth anacondas, some of the snakes were fifteen meters long. The humans with them were being controlled and used as lures. After some time spent using reconnaissance drones and following the creatures, their nest was found. Rangers were called in from all over the planet to wipe out this menace. They attacked a grotto where thousands of the psionic snakes and their human slaves were. It was a huge mess and many Rangers were killed but the nest was wiped out except for juveniles captured for study. The humans who were not eaten, were being controlled by a combination of the snakes psionic powers and a venom that makes them susceptible to it. The longer they were on the venom, the more addicted to it they were. The ones who had been on the venom the longest died of systemic shock. The others faced a long, unpleasant withdrawal process. They also felt a great deal of guilt for have collaborated with the snakes. It would be a long recovery for the victims and another hazard that the colonist on Evergreen would have to look out for. Over three hundred colonist and thirty-two rangers lost their lives but, compared to other threats, they were lucky.

Cave paintings are either about hunting or sex. I'm pretty sure that says it all.

This year is the centennial of the start of World War I. It's a war that has great lessons to teach but so much has been lost to time over the years. A History of the Great War by John Buchanan is a four volume set written in 1923 with many first person interviews and a tight day by day timeline. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0405132794 It's a daunting read. The language is somewhat archaic and you might find yourself doing google searches to explain some of the terms and concepts. The subject matter is bleak. World War I was a disastrous affair for all concerned. It was the arrogance of the monarchs involved that made a simple crisis into a cataclysm. A complicated series of alliances, pacts, agreements and pragmatic opportunism dragged almost the entirety of Europe into the fire. They all thought it would be over quickly. None of them dreamed that it would become a four year bloodbath that would kill and main a generation of young men and made shell shock and opiate addictions common knowledge. WWI was the first war that employed modern battlefield technology. The "Great War" has a long list of firsts in warfare. Submarines, machine guns, armored cars, tanks, mass produced landmines, aircraft and airships all made their battlefield debut. Many of the military technologies and strategies that we take for granted were developed by brutally Darwinian battlefield experience. Aerial reconnaissance, supply drops, underway replenishment, submarine pickets, rolling artillery barrages were all developed in WWI's Satanic laboratory. Another aspect of the "Great War" were the agreements made between Great Britain and France and the proto-Arabic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine and others left the Ottoman Empire for promises of independence and protection from the great powers. Much of the modern world was formed by the First World War and an unjust peace planted the seeds for the Second. Any student of history that wants to understand the origins of our contemporary world would be well served to carefully study the period. My Rating: 4.0/5.0

Graeme- We've been pals for a long time. My advice is very simple: Don't have a cow man. It's a very simple equation. 13 year old + hormones + online access = p0rn The proof is trivial. It doesn't make him a bad kid or you a bad dad. Don't make a bigger deal of it than you have to. You don't want him to think of himself as dirty or perverted when he probably just about where 99% of 13 year olds are. Boys are gonna be boys. It's not a problem until be starts buying multi-terabyte USB drives for his p0rn stash. PS- one of the Meanings for NSFW is New South Frikkin' Wales

Annoyed kitty sez:

Here's an idea for a new thread: tell us about you are reading. ________________________________________ Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Nation-John-Scalzi/dp/0765367033 (Sci-fi) I just finished this book and its a lot of fun. Holloway is a contract explorer. He looks for valuable resources under contract with the corporations that own the rights to planets. With his Labrador retriever, he looks for valuables in the dangerous nooks and crannies of a frontier planet with hungry critters that would like to have him for dinner. Out of the blue one day an unusual creature visits him. Small, cute and fuzzy critters that seem very, very smart. So smart that his biologist girlfriend thinks they might be sentient. The discovery of a sentient species on a planet stops all ongoing work there and billions of dollars are riding on the judgement: are fuzzies people? It's an interesting question: what constitutes sentience? In our own history the question had all sorts of convoluted answers: religion, race or just plain inconvenience. Can we do better? Like all Scalzi's books, you will enjoy the wit and the quirks of the characters. They are a motley bunch and some of the biggest dirt-bags are wearing the most expensive suits. My Rating: 4.25/5

Who are "The Gays"? Sounds like a soap opera I would never, ever watch. "The Gays of Our Lives" "One Gay to Live" "All My Gayz" "The Gay and the Restless" "The Gay and the Beautiful" GAAH!

We've had French Canadian members and they are chaud comme le feu

Inverse Probability Theorem Men that SHOULD wear speedo usually DON'T and men who should NEVER wear speedo often DO. The Back hair corollary The set of men with back hair should never intersect with the set of men that wear speedo. The proof is obvious.

Unfortunately, out trash TV looks like this. Which is why I don't watch the s**t.

Speedos: red. A lot of fun to look at on the right person. The only problem is that the people that SHOULD wear speedo DON'T and the people who should NEVER wear speedo DO. I proved this once in the form of the Inverse Probability Theorem.

How did you end up here? Tis a question I used to ask myself a lot while drinking heavily. When I sobered up in 2003 I decided not to ask it anymore and go with the flow. The flow brought me here.

Some people have some distorted ideas about evolution. Many people think that it's a linear process of adaptation of positive attributes and that's just not the case. If it were, we would all be 10 feet tall with no nearsightedness or gingivitis. There are two things that you have to keep in mind: genetic diversity is not just desirable for a healthy population, it is an absolute must. Mother nature deals quite harshly with populations without much genetic diversity. In fact many of the extinct species that are studied by paleontologists are essentially clones of each other. The second thing you have to remember is that some evolutionary adaptations don't serve the individual. They serve the population. We see this in nature in advanced species as specialization. In ape studies tribes that grow to a certain threshold, the pack members will take on roles like hunter, gather, scout or nurturer.

LOL at the jizzanator!

I've been working this week and while I was on the road, I heard a song I haven't heard in a very long time. Now it's stuck in my head. In an effort to get it out of my brain, I will attempt to inflict in on yew. You're welcome.