Maybe a hoax, but...

Making Light offers excerpts from reports on The Daily Kos by an "Officer X", an anonymous "fairly well known military officer and commentator". I can't connect to The Daily Kos at the moment, but the excerpts on Making Light are strong stuff. Go read them.

Interview with a Chessplayer

Tim Harding's The Kibitzer this month features an interview with Vlad Dracul, inventor of the famous Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game and witness to a lot of chess history--at least the parts that occured at night. (After March, the interview will still be available here.)

Oh yes, very obvious thematic and stylistic similarities.

A friend of mine, noted fabulist Adam-Troy Castro, is attending an SF convention, Icon this weekend. He tells me that the programming includes a panel on the fincion of J.G. Ballard...

...moderated by John Norman.

If you don't know why this is funny, I'm not sure I can explain. I'm also not sure you'd want to know; you may just be lucky.

Good Old American Know-How

AP reports that an American F-16 fired on a US Patriot missle battery when the battery locked on to the plane, apparently believing it was hostile.

The UPI story says the plane "mistakenly bombed" the battery. I don't know--that doesn't sound like a mistake by the F-16 to me, not when a Patriot battery has already shot down a coalition plane.

Considering the Patriot's performance so far, I'm tempted to draw an anology with the Patriot Act--state-of-the-art technology for damaging our side.

PAINT YOUR TONGUE BLUE!

BBC News reports that "A simple tongue test can tell people if they are 'super-tasters'". If you've been wondering why you hate cilantro, check it out.

The Name is Bender! Please insert liquor!

Science marches on! New Scientist reports that a team at St. Louis University has developed a fuel cell catalysed by ethanol.

Toshiba has a battery that uses methanol, but St. Louis' Shelly Minteer says: "The main advantage of ethanol over methanol is that it is simply more readily available. We have actually run our cells off vodka and gin." Apparently, the ethanol-based batteries are also less toxic and may turn out to be more efficient.

I think that adds up to: "Hey, Toshiba! Kiss my shiny metal ass!"

More on the use of chemical weapons

While reading The Agonist, I followed a link to this interesting discussion of potential chemical weapons use by Iraq. There are also other posts in that part of the archive with links to other interesting stuff.

The blog that post is from is Casus Belli, and it looks very good indeed.

PETA

A post at The Sideshow pointed me to Ted Barlow's rant about the PETA "Holocaust One Your Plate" campaign. I just don't get the reaction. Look, I hate PETA. I think they're dangerous lunatics. But I'm not surprised or especially shocked about that ad campaign. Equating human and animal suffering, stating that animal slaughter is exactly the same as genocide--that's what PETA is about. That's their entire point! Didn't Mr. Barlow (and the many others who went ballistic about this) know that? If not, how did they miss it?

Technical difficulties in using WMD

While arguing on rec.arts.sf.fandom about whether non-use of WMD by Iraq in this war will prove that they didn't have any in the first place (imagine my suprise to learn that extreme right-wingers think not), someone claimed that there had been a report earlier in the week that Iraqi local commanders had been given authority to use WMD. He seemed to think this was a decisive argument; why such a claim from a US source (I'm assuming that's where it came from) would prove anything I've no idea.

In any case, I haven't been able to find any such news item. While looking for it, I did find an interesting article by Joe Katzman which touches on the problems of actually using such weapons under the conditions in the war.

GPS Turned Off?

Does anyone have a Global Positioning System device? Could you tell me if it's working correctly right now?

A colleague just straggled in from a flight hours late. They were unable to land at JFK because of fog and were diverted to Philly. He says that this was because GPS has been set to spew random data as a war measure and so landings depend on visibility.

I'd have thought someone would have mentioned this in the news before now, so I'm wondering if he's just bullshitting.

So far, I've only been able to find one story about this, and I've no idea of its reliability.

With Optimus Prime on our side, how can we lose?

A friend pointed me to this story. I feel safer now.

News from Baghdad

If you're reading this, stop and go read Where is Raed? instead.

French Defence

Someone on rec.arts.sf.fandom wondered whether anyone had suggested renaming the chess opening called the French Defence yet. (1. e4 e6, or 1. P-K4 P-K3 for those of you who remember the old English Descriptive notation.)

I did a little digging through my library and found out that the name "French Defence" is probably due to George Walker noting in his 1846 _Treatise on Chess_ that, "With French players, the King's-Pawn-One opening [as it was called then] is especially in vogue."

Walker also wrote of it: "I have allowed that this form of beginning is safe for the second player; so is fighting from behind a tree, and the one is exactly the type of the other; cowardly and mean in spirit, aiming to lie in wait, rather than do battle in a 'fair stricken field.'" So it would be amusingly ironic if some jingo decided to rename it now.

It occurs to me that accusing the French of cowardice over Iraq is more than normally stupid. If they were cowards who believed Saddam was dangerous but were afraid to fight him themselves, they'd be delighted to let the US do it. "Let's you and him fight" is the essence of cowardice. But instead, they did everything they could think of to stop the US from starting the war.

Man in the Street

I've noticed that when a TV News crew doing man-in-the-street interviews talks to someone who's against the war, the next question is, "but you support our troops, right?" They never ask that of someone who says he's pro-war.

I think that's backwards. If the war is justified, it's because Iraq has ABC weapons. If Saddam has them he will use them on our troops. So if you think the war is a justified, you must be expecting US troops to take hideous losses. Funny way to support our troops, I'd say.

But if the war is unjustified, Saddam has no atomic, chemical, or biological weapons; then the US's huge advantage in men and materiel means that victory will be quick and relatively bloodless. Bloodless for us, at any rate. Still, that's better than the alternative, and I hope that's how it goes.

But just remember: if Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction", he'll use them. If he doesn't use such weapons, we may be sure than any that are found after the war were planted by the US.

"You Stupid Darkness!"

One of my favorite "Peanuts" strips featured Linus carrying a candle in the night. Charlie Brown asks him what he's doing, and Linus replies, "I have heard it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." In the final panel, Lucy shakes her fist at the night sky, screaming, "You stupid darkness!"

No points for figuring out why I mention this.