I remember reading a scene where a pilot is getting orders over the radio and it went something like:

Tower: I want you to return to base immediately!

Pilot: Roger.

Tower: I heard a “Roger,” but I didn’t hear a “Wilco,” now I repeat, I am ordering you to return to base!

Pilot: Roger.

Tower: [Explodes in radio transmitted fury]

Perhaps it was a plaster cast replica of the real fossil itself.

Unexplained Ferrous Objects

Word Crimes, by Weird Al Yankovic

It’s consistently interesting to me the way that AI image generators seem to grasp the basic concept of regular repeating patterns, but inevitably get bored and start going all wibbly wobbly. The keyboard and the striped shirt are great examples; it can tell that there should be regular, parallel groups of lines, but it quickly devolves into a dementia patient trying to draw a chess board.

😳😬

My understanding is that irradiation can keep fruit fresh longer, so I have a suggestion:

I read The Sum of All Fears in high school and it had a weak president being advised by a bunch of stupid advisors working from faulty data and bad assumptions in a way that was leading us step by step to a nuclear World War 3, so that gave me nightmares for a while.

I DID tell the guide what he was wearing because I didn’t want us to end up in a military detention cell but the guide was like “Eh, it’s fine,” so I guess it was, but boy it didn’t feel like it should have been!

I got a tour of a military base with a guy who was wearing smart glasses and I couldn’t fucking believe that someone didn’t grab them off his face and break them in half. I was being VERY careful to ask if I was permitted to take pictures in some places (in at least one of which where the answer was No), and this dude was cruising around like Boris Badunov trying to gather secrets.

If you’re doing bendy sex positions and your partner farts and you can’t both have a laugh about it and continue with the bendy sex then your relationship needs an upgrade.

I was in that storm!

I was working in Durham at the time, living in Raleigh. What was usually a ~45 minute commute became a 4 hour saga. It was mostly made up of idiots sliding backwards down frozen hills with their fucking wheels spinning at max rev. I was driving a basic ass Yaris and didn’t actually have any problems myself, it was just a matter of going around all the intersections clogged with other cars.

Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction

How to draw a pig

When the Civil War was breaking out and the governor of Vermont called for the state to raise $500k to support the war effort, the legislature passed a bill to raise a full million.

When they were called upon to send one regiment of men to fight, they organized seven.

Vermont, also, would not be a good state with which to openly fuck.

I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.

–Calvin Coolidge

Due to two ancestors at unequal levels of generations back, I’ve got some odd ratio like 3/128 Native American. In practice this means that I don’t grow much of a beard and I tan before I burn, and not much else.

How do we feel about this comics’ insinuation that the only safety any of us deserve is that which we can secure through our own personal ability to preserve through violence? By that logic, the pig should have shot the wolf the instant he saw him, and there would be no end to the violence until everyone was equally afraid of everyone else’s capacity for violence, or until they re-invented feudalism from first principles, and neither sounds like a great state of affairs to me.

The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close?

At what point is Natalie Portman allowed to sue Keira Knightley?