October 2023 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Phil Reads
Enjoy the Decline
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Author Archives: Alaska
Living in the Green Country
My maternal grandfather was an Arkie — like the Okies from Grapes of Wrath, but he and his wife moved to California from Arkansas in the 1930s. As a kid I was always puzzled by Grandpa’s tendency to use “country” … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Roman Dodecahedron
One of these and some cordage would be a bloody useful piece of kit for the pocket or backpack. For the last 20 years I’ve kept a pair of cheap Wal-Mart glove liners (usually seasonal items, about a buck a … Continue reading
Posted in By Ourselves, For Ourselves, Kewel!
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Belgrade, 1926
Eric Ambler’s A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS (1939) is one of my favorite novels, for the noir atmospherics alone. (That I number more than one fellow as casually amoral and exotic as Dmitrios Makropoulos among my professional colleagues just adds relish … Continue reading
Posted in Evil walks the earth, Kewel!, Useful Idiots
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UPS’ drone army
This is a very interesting chart from a very interesting article about surprise and first-strike capability. Also, nanoexplosives. (!!) Emphasis mine. This brings us to another area where U.S. systems are outranged: ground vehicles. Researchers at the University of Virginia … Continue reading
L’Estro Armonico (and, tangentially, Gene Simmons)
Nowadays you can find even obscure pieces of classical music but a click away on YouTube (such as the Wolf’s Glen scene from Weber’s Der Freischuetz, I mean, that’s amazing really). Â In the past, music majors such as my … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers, Kewel!
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There Shall Be No Darkness
Twelve years ago I cited James Blish’s “There Shall Be No Darkness” as the best werewolf short fiction bar none, but unlike the quite unrelated Lovecraftian tale “Than Curse The Darkness,” I couldn’t find TSBND online to post or excerpt … Continue reading
Still Enjoying the Decline
Just a reminder of what I’m about nowadays; the sentiment’s still quite the same as when I quoted this Irish fellow. As he seems to have taken his own advice and is off doing better things with his life than … Continue reading
Within living memory we had a fairly uniform standard of living
I’d sort of intuitively remembered experiencing this, perhaps from my own observations while moving across the country as a kid more than most military brats: Today, the story of America is largely the story of two economies — rural and … Continue reading
Posted in The Economic Way of Thinking
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RIP Stephen Hawking
Steve Hsu has a nice post about Hawking, with good links to Roger Penrose’s obit and some reminiscences of Hsu’s personal encounters with the great man and his staff. (How many people can say they’ve carried Stephen Hawking?) Hsu recalls … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers
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Everybody’s a MacGyver
If a lazy MacGyver just uses a gun, is a gun the lazy man’s MacGyver?
Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel
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