A Sophist And His Monologue

It's the year 1889 and everything is out to kill you. I love how triumphant the ninja crab looks as it snatches the goat away. It's like a huge invertebrate Sam Fisher!

I don't remember Herakles ever fighting plesiosaurs, though.

The five questions meme is making the rounds again, so I figured I'd use that as an excuse to put something on paper, as it were. These first five are from chickenfeet2003. I'm going to post another one with five from f4f3 later.

( Braudel and woodchucks. )

And there you go. If you want to perpetuate the meme lunacy, ask me for five questions in the comments.

I'm still waiting for what I need to jot down my final post on the Cockayne Project, but I since posted that other thing a while back, I figure I'd might as well do another one as well. I write these historical comedy bits because they're inherently fun to write, but I know some of you read them, so I thought to ask: Is there any particular corner of the world y'all would like to read a piece about?

(I'll probably pick the exact topic mostly on basis of what I can callously exploit for lulz manageably poke fun at.)

If you happen to like nebulae, here's a gallery of cosmic photography by JP Metsävainio.

Darryl Francis sets out to debunk the delightful Torpenhow Hill story here; having posted about it myself, I kinda feel obliged to present the case against now that I've run into it. But never fear, even if Torpenhow Hill doesn't check out, lots and lots of other hilariously redundant place names remain for our general amusement & edification.

If you don't know about this, the Swedish royal family has just expanded by a total amount of one (1) princess, which has generated a bit of a media circus around their way. Heck, why not, right? Lots and lots of people still legitimately care about Europe's hereditary class of overpaid public relations specialists.

But get this: A group of glorified LARPers history enthusiasts around our way immediately descended to downtown Helsinki and set up a little celebratory event thingy, which involved dressing up as a detachment of Caroleans, firing some muskets, and setting off an actual fricking cannon. Not a very large cannon, by any means, but a cannon nonetheless. Then the police started wondering if these people actually had, you know, anything resembling a written permission for any of it. (Turns out they did, so it was okay.)

I don't really follow the modern Bernadottes' family soap opera any more than I actively follow the Bourbons, or the Windsors, or whoever, but it occurs to me it would've been pretty neat to go and see this purely for the artillery-based smoke show.

A team of Russian scientists say they've grown a narrow-leafed campion from bits of 30,000 to 32,000 year old fruit. Now, I'd like to point out there is a rule about these things: Whenever scientists dig something ancient out of the permafrost and bring it to life, it will inevitably escape and go on a murderous rampage. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it has taught us this much. In fact, I bet the pretty little flower is already seething with a positively Lovecraftian hatred for all modern life. (Seriously, though, this is pretty neat.)

It appears that until fairly recently Google Translate was adamant that three of the eight candidates running on the first round of the Finnish presidential election were, in fact, all named "SpongeBob".

I love you, popular culture.

I don't know about you guys, but everything else being equal I'm reasonably positive about parties. For the most part I don't go out of my way to arrange them, but I'm cool with them. What's better than spending quality time with your friends in a cozy setting, having a nice chat, maybe sipping a light drink or eight? And formal celebrations at least allow you to catch up with relatives. There are categories of party one wants to avoid, however.

( I made a list of them. )