The most awesome thing you will see today!

Yep. Ronald Reagan, riding a freakin’ velociraptor!

Credit, and where you can get copies.

You mean I DIDN’T invent the term “monkey-fish”?

According to this blog, there have been sightings of Japanese mermen called “monkey-fish” for years. To quote Johnny Carson, “I did not know that.” I’d put the pictures on here but they are too ugly. They look like a fish up a monkey’s butt.

I guess I can’t continue to refer to my granddaughters as monkeyfish anymore. They are agile, and they do like to swim. Oh well. I wouldn’t want them to think I was referring to them like this.

If you can’t say somethin’ nice…

Presidents and Vice Presidents have been caught with an accidentally-live mic many times over the years. My favorite isn’t the Dick Cheney/George W. Bush 2000 campaign blunder, but instead the famous Reagan joke about declaring the Soviet Union illegal and that the bombing starts in five minutes.

However, the Sarkozy/Obama exchange last week at the G20 summit may beat them all. At least the others were light-hearted. These two supposed  world leaders should have better sense than to discuss their feelings about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where there could be a live mic.

What this tells us, besides, are a couple of things I have suspected for a long time – first, that Obama is a petty little man. He should have better than to talk to another world leader in such a way at all, in public or not. I’ve never thought of those two as soul mates. They don’t seem to have the kind of bond that Bush 43 and Tony Blair did after 9/11. Instead, he showed himself to just basically not handle himself very well on the world stage – again.

Besides, it shows us where the US position with Israel really is, and it should show Netanyahu as well. Besides Thumper’s Dad’s warning – “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say anything at all,” both of these “statesmen” would do well to remember another basic rule:

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Happy Halloween from Basement Cat

from icanhascheezburger.com

Highest number of hits ever yesterday!

Just after mentioning “Mule Deer” on the top of the page, I got more hits yesterday than I ever have before.

What is it about mule deer? Really, mule deer?

Obama as the Beta Dog

This post from The American Thinker by Greg Lewis is very interesting. Obama isn’t the Alpha Male, the leader of the pack; he’s the Beta Male, who crouches and tucks his tail, letting everyone know he is not going to make any challenges.

Sounds logical to me, unfortunately; even Bill Clinton wasn’t like that. Sheesh. Is this Long National Nightmare ever going to end?

Oh, crap, we have three more years…

“Righteous Stuff” update, again, from Cincinnati

It’s a gorgeous Saturday outside in Cincinnati and I’m sitting here writing. I’m trying to increase the number of Draka scenes and I need to go back to Stirling’s books, I guess. I feel that my command of the odd Southern dialect he created is slipping. I would expect that took him as long to write as it does for me. I have to speak it, then write.

I’m at about 84K and March of 1958, with the first orbital flight – which should be the climax of the book – a little more than a year off. I am trying to stay within Stirling’s timeline that he presented in The Stone Dogs. It’s been a bit of a trick because he postulated space stations within two years of the first orbital flight. That orbital flight was to have been made with a scramjet, not a disintegrating-totem-pole rocket, so I’ve had to do some extended speculation on how to make that work. There are good, solid, physics reasons why we aren’t doing that yet today, so I’m wary of too much handwaving. One of my goals with this novel is to present a plausible alternate space program, one that takes a different direction because of different opportunities and external pressures. Fitting that in with Stirling’s predictions has been an interesting intellectual enterprise. If I had started from scratch I would not have a timeline like this one at all.

I’ll excerpt another chapter in a bit.

I looked at the stats for this blog again. It still gets more hits from people searching for “mule deer” than anyone else. I’m thinking about changing the name of the blog to “Mule Deer Heaven” or something…

You May Be Able To Use This

There are many uses for this image. It’s from the Brookfield Zoo in Chicagoland. Thanks to my daughter, Ren, for providing it!