RANDOM THOUGHTS #20
Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.
1. The Origins Awards are soliciting submissions for this year. I never bother, and won't bother. When someone from GAMA comes around to my booth at Origins every year asking me to help promote the awards, I tell them to go away. The awards system doesn't work, and I've been screwed out of at least five of them (I have won three) because they spent years putting all science fiction games into the fantasy category, and no science fiction game ever won because fantasy games sell more copies. (A friend of mine won with a science fiction game by sneaking it into a non-science fiction non-fantasy category for which it was blatantly not qualified.) I've written to (and spoken before) the committee that runs the things more times than I can count, and they don't care and don't want to hear anything more about my complaints, although they continue to send me things asking me to support the awards. Until they figure out a way to give me the awards I was screwed out of, I will continue to refer to them as The Irrelevant Awards and will have nothing to do with them.
2. I loved the part in CASTLE where he started speaking Chinese (as he did now and then in the series FIREFLY) and then explained he had learned the language because of "a science fiction show I used to love."
3. I love Ann Coulter, but she's dangerously wrong on one point: if we only search Middle Eastern males at airports, the terrorists will recruit (or disguise themselves as) someone else. I think the full body scanners are worthless and dangerous, and will be happy to allow a female security guard to pat me down any time she wants.
4. Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona are going to require Obama to present his real birth certificate or he won't be allowed to be on the 2012 ballot for president. Other states may pass similar legislation. One might assume that judges appointed by Obama or other Democrats might block this, but the laws allow each state to set candidate eligibility rules.
5. If you want to understand what's going on in Afghanistan, it's a political battle over control of the foreign aid money. The Afghan government wants control over the money so that senior government officials can steal it. (Not just for their personal enrichment, but so they can spread it around to various warlords to keep them supporting the government.) President Karzai is (supposedly) not corrupt, but his family, tribe, senior cabinet officials, and friends are very corrupt, and are pressuring him to gain control over the incoming foreign aid because, well, it's not "not how things are done" to see all of that money actually going to the people it's supposed to help instead of being rightfully stolen by senior officials. Karzai ordered the foreign aid agencies to give up their private security forces at the end of the year, and they all packed up and left instead of trusting the Afghan police. Now Karzai wants the money just handed to him and the donors are threatening to cut it off completely.
6. Steven Petrick did warn me that going with the low bidder for my attempted coup in Madagascar was not a good plan.
7. Russia and China have stopped using the US dollar for foreign trade and now consider their own currencies strong enough to use for that. This cannot be a good thing.
8. I read the other day that those states which banned "texting while driving" actually had accident rates go up, not down, so maybe their drivers were texting each other with traffic safety updates?
9. I read the other day that government requirements for child-proof caps on pill bottles had actually caused more child poisonings because people found them so tedious, difficult, or annoying that they left them off of the bottles. Wow! It never occurred to me to leave the cap off of a pill bottle, although in my house with no children I could see little harm. I guess I just always assumed that bottles should have caps and dealt with the annoying things, which (seriously) aren't THAT bad to deal with.
10. I was going to go out to the airport to see if a female security guard would pat me down, but Leanna said they only pat down people who have a ticket. Wow! You can buy a ticket for a pat down? Sign me up.
1. The Origins Awards are soliciting submissions for this year. I never bother, and won't bother. When someone from GAMA comes around to my booth at Origins every year asking me to help promote the awards, I tell them to go away. The awards system doesn't work, and I've been screwed out of at least five of them (I have won three) because they spent years putting all science fiction games into the fantasy category, and no science fiction game ever won because fantasy games sell more copies. (A friend of mine won with a science fiction game by sneaking it into a non-science fiction non-fantasy category for which it was blatantly not qualified.) I've written to (and spoken before) the committee that runs the things more times than I can count, and they don't care and don't want to hear anything more about my complaints, although they continue to send me things asking me to support the awards. Until they figure out a way to give me the awards I was screwed out of, I will continue to refer to them as The Irrelevant Awards and will have nothing to do with them.
2. I loved the part in CASTLE where he started speaking Chinese (as he did now and then in the series FIREFLY) and then explained he had learned the language because of "a science fiction show I used to love."
3. I love Ann Coulter, but she's dangerously wrong on one point: if we only search Middle Eastern males at airports, the terrorists will recruit (or disguise themselves as) someone else. I think the full body scanners are worthless and dangerous, and will be happy to allow a female security guard to pat me down any time she wants.
4. Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona are going to require Obama to present his real birth certificate or he won't be allowed to be on the 2012 ballot for president. Other states may pass similar legislation. One might assume that judges appointed by Obama or other Democrats might block this, but the laws allow each state to set candidate eligibility rules.
5. If you want to understand what's going on in Afghanistan, it's a political battle over control of the foreign aid money. The Afghan government wants control over the money so that senior government officials can steal it. (Not just for their personal enrichment, but so they can spread it around to various warlords to keep them supporting the government.) President Karzai is (supposedly) not corrupt, but his family, tribe, senior cabinet officials, and friends are very corrupt, and are pressuring him to gain control over the incoming foreign aid because, well, it's not "not how things are done" to see all of that money actually going to the people it's supposed to help instead of being rightfully stolen by senior officials. Karzai ordered the foreign aid agencies to give up their private security forces at the end of the year, and they all packed up and left instead of trusting the Afghan police. Now Karzai wants the money just handed to him and the donors are threatening to cut it off completely.
6. Steven Petrick did warn me that going with the low bidder for my attempted coup in Madagascar was not a good plan.
7. Russia and China have stopped using the US dollar for foreign trade and now consider their own currencies strong enough to use for that. This cannot be a good thing.
8. I read the other day that those states which banned "texting while driving" actually had accident rates go up, not down, so maybe their drivers were texting each other with traffic safety updates?
9. I read the other day that government requirements for child-proof caps on pill bottles had actually caused more child poisonings because people found them so tedious, difficult, or annoying that they left them off of the bottles. Wow! It never occurred to me to leave the cap off of a pill bottle, although in my house with no children I could see little harm. I guess I just always assumed that bottles should have caps and dealt with the annoying things, which (seriously) aren't THAT bad to deal with.
10. I was going to go out to the airport to see if a female security guard would pat me down, but Leanna said they only pat down people who have a ticket. Wow! You can buy a ticket for a pat down? Sign me up.
posted by Federation Commander at 8:29 AM
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