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[Royal☭]

Writer awarded £100,000 because show factory forced her to writer thrillers instead of highbrow novels.  On that note, I want $1,000,000 because my high school experience prevents me from painting the my own Mona Lisa.

[Arc]

She played it like some two-for-one deal.

'Oh, my last book was utter shite because of fumes. Also, money!'

Meanwhile, the casino down the street made me produce Alvin and the Chipmunks with their toxic gambling fumes.

[Royal☭]

Disabled spy satellite threatens Earth  This is all Batman's fault.

 

[Sharkey]

Awesome as that headline is, it's a little scaremongery. Spy satellites aren't very damn big so there shouldn't be a hell of a lot more smacking-into-earth danger than we get from a lot of meteors. As for dangerous material... well, I wouldn't be too surprised if they have a radioisotope thermoelectric generator on the thing. But scary as anything nuclear sounds, those just aren't that freaking dangerous. They release alpha particles, which you can pretty much block with a sheet of notebook paper. One burning up in the upper atmosphere? Totally don't fucking care.

But I'm sure the mental image everyone gets is a rain of glowing green radioactive crap falling in a great streak across Wisconsin or whatever.

[sei]

Speaking of scare mongering and meteors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_Y6L9-VmK8

(And rebuttal, of course.)

[Fredward]

From what I read, the main danger seemed to be from a fairly sizable amount of beryllium on the satellite, which could disperse when it burns up \ is blown up in the atmosphere. Beryllium is, apparently a carcinogen.

So, yeah. Scaremongering? Probably.

[Brentai]

Everyone in the world getting cancer at once would be kinda cool.

[Sharkey]

Again, not too worried about a dusting of beryllium. Mostly because it wouldn't even be a dusting. It could be a tanker truck full of glowing green jelly floating around up there for some damn reason and, well, I might be slightly uneasy, but also feeling a little foolish about it.

It does remind me of a couple of my favorite nuclear projects, though...

Project Orion was supposed to be, essentially, a gigantic nuclear pogo-stick for launching whole cities into orbit. You drop bombs out the ass of the thing and ride the blast on up with a giant plate on springs. This would have been, I'm sure, fucking awesome. Especially if you were in one of those cities, because after the first few left I don't think I'd want to be left on the ground.

My absolute favoritest idea, though, has to be Project Pluto, which was a goddamn unshielded nuclear reactor used as a ramjet. The idea being that this would be an excellent way of delivering a warhead. At least until it was realized that it'd be flattening and irradiating damn near everything it flew over, which was even awesomer. Unfortunately someone else realized that anyone we'd want to be nuking is on the other side of an allied nation who probably wouldn't dig this thing flying over them. Of course, by then we had ICBMs, which seem kind of like parachuting carebears on someone in comparison. It's just mind boggling to imagine people sitting in a room talking about this thing, which might actually have been the most completely, efficiently evil weapon ever conceived. Just in the process of getting somewhere to kill a bunch of people and wreck some shit it'd be incidentally killing a whole bunch of people and wrecking shit. But in case that wasn't evil enough, they had parts manufactured by Coors. No foolin.

The funniest part is probably that the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty put the clamps on a peaceful (if nutty) project like Orion, but not Pluto, because the thing wasn't technically exploding until it got where it was going. Just, you know, giving cancer to everything it passed over that wasn't flattened by a shockwave.

[Royal☭]

Spartans spoof tops US box office - This is far more grave a situation than any falling spy satellite. 

Spartans tells the story of Leonidas who leads 13 Spartans in defending against the invading Persians.

The invading force counts Rocky Balbao and Paris Hilton among its number.

No, fuck you, America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onX8C05G-kA

[Royal☭]

Jack Thompson defends Mass Effect.  Says "I don't see any problem with it. The guy who shot his mouth off about it had no idea what the Hell he was talking about."

<Insert image from Scanners of guy's head blowing up here>

[Arc]

scanners

Spartans spoof tops US box office

In actuals, it won by only .3 million, launched by kids paying to sneak into Rambozo.

Balbao

[Brentai]

My absolute favoritest idea, though, has to be Project Pluto, which was a goddamn unshielded nuclear reactor used as a ramjet. The idea being that this would be an excellent way of delivering a warhead. At least until it was realized that it'd be flattening and irradiating damn near everything it flew over, which was even awesomer. Unfortunately someone else realized that anyone we'd want to be nuking is on the other side of an allied nation who probably wouldn't dig this thing flying over them.

There's also the question of where the missile is coming from.  Unless you've got a Metal Gear handy to walk the firing mechanism into the target country, you're probably going to launching it from your own soil.  As I understand it, it's got some usual rocket thrusters or somesuch to get it off the ground, but I doubt it'll get all that far before having to switch to "fuck everything" mode - at which point it still has to travel through your land.  Mutually Assured Destruction at its most efficient.

[Sharkey]

Not quite as spooky as the nuclear ramjet: The story goes that once upon a time both ourselves and the USSR toyed with the idea of using reactors to run airplanes. For weight reasons these things were unshielded or barely shielded. Ours had a shield between the reactor and the cockpit. The soviets, on the other hand, didn't use any at all, meaning they went through flight crews like toilet paper. Which makes us seem pretty nice in comparison, until you think that the reactor was still unshielded everywhere else and flying over populated areas.

[Arc]

British Olympic Team: When In China, Do As The Chinese Do (Shut The Hell Up)

"I think that given America, Canada, Australia are explicitly saying that their athletes can say what they want when they go to Beijing, I think it is inappropriate to put this restriction on our athletes."

Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.

[Brentai]

BEELZEFROG.

[Zaratustra]

Why why why didn't I go into paleontology so I could give extinct beasts awesome names

[Classic]

Presumably so that you could give names to beasts that everyone can make extinct in their own personal version of history.

[sei]

Girl asks me to write her research paper.

[Saturn]

one of my favorite "WHAT THE FUCK" weapons ever has to be the Panjandrum which in essence was a pair of wheels with rockets attached to them, with a barrel of explosives  in the middle, the problem was that the rockets had a tendency to not fire at all, or fail midburn, causing the whole thing to veer wildly off course.

[SCD]

Before I start, I need to take a quote from a well-read book by a well-known author.  I won't pass credit as I assume half of you should know this on the spot.

"This was the reason he decided he was sane-toothpick instructions...toothpicks- Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."

At the washroom at the barn, there is this soap dispenser which stopped working because of a sticky pump.  Because of this, I took off the cover so I could pump the soap manually when I saw something quite peculiar catch the corner of my eye:  Detailed instructions on how to use liquid soap in an office, home, sink, or shower "setting" which followed the proud tradition of an age-old science fiction novel based on a radio play by a rather clever mind. 

I'm debating whether to change my name to "Wonko the Sane"..