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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

RANDOM THOUGHTS #8

Steve Cole muses:

Just thinking to himself.

1. I get requests all the time to join somebody on Napster, Linked In, Facebook, or whatever. I never do this. I have enough trouble answering all of my email and reading the two forums, and do not need another place to check for communications. Besides that, my ancient Mac-9 won't talk to any of those sites and it's not worth the bother to walk down the hall to check the PC. I don't have time to "play" on those sites. The one time I got talked into one, I got nothing but prostitutes wanting to be my "friend".

2. I was both surprised and pleased that the Spartans won the Ancient round of DEADLIEST WARRIOR, defeating the ninja and the samurai.

3. It's annoying that LAW & ORDER CRIMINAL INTENT gets no network respect, being shuffled off to USA Network. Saffron Burroughs is one of the greatest actresses on television. That guy with her gets tiresome, however. I keep expecting him to program an alien computer on a UFO.

4. The bad side of print on demand is that we're working on the Origins product rulebooks right up to three days before we leave. When we had to send books to Dallas it took two weeks to get them back and that gave us two weeks of relative calm before the show. (Now, it takes half an hour for Leanna to bring me a draft copy, so there is no calm at all.)

5. Arizona installed 76 camera systems to send tickets to speeders, generating 700,000 tickets per year. They recently abandoned the operation because 70% of people who were mailed a ticket simply ignored it, and there was no practical way to force them to pay.

6. TOP SHOT is an interesting reality show. I am an expert combat shooter, but not an expert target shooter. (I shoot to kill, not to score points. Last time I shot for military qualification, I got kill shots on 43 out of 50 targets, and wounded the other seven.) Steven Petrick and I both want to try the Zipline of Death. Those man-sized targets are my kind of shooting. Trying to hit a bull's eye is beyond me, but I can hit a man at 50 feet with my Beretta, and that's the only thing I worry about.

7. I like the new cop show GOOD GUYS but I have lived in Texas for my entire life without ever having heard anyone with those accents. Even so, I love the demon girl from REAPER. She can prosecute me any time. The show is one of the most cleverly written on the air.

8. Time is running out to raise the $15 million needed to preserve the battleship Iowa. Only $4 million has been raised, most of that the original government grant. If the rest is not raised in two years, the ship may be scrapped.

9. Article 4 section 4 of the US Constitution says that the Feds must protect every state from invasion. How's that working out for you guys?

10. People seem to have the opinion that the Israeli blockade of Gaza is keeping out everything (including food and medical supplies). It's not, and it never has. Israel just inspects shipments from abroad to remove weapons that Hamas would use to kill Israelis. This makes President Obama's call for the blockade to be adjusted so that food gets in and weapons don't get in (exactly what is happening now) is just political theater. By the way, Israel provides more food and medicine to Gaza that the rest of the world combined, something nobody notices.