Random Nuclear Strikes https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:11:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 New Ride https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/08/new-ride/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/08/new-ride/#respond Sun, 29 Aug 2021 01:27:33 +0000 https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/?p=22068 Continue reading ]]> Hey! How you doing? It’s been a while. Have a seat and let’s talk.

When we last met up, I went off to welding school and became a certifiably insane person who gets paid to play with fire (aka: a Welder). It’s good work, and I enjoy the you-know-what out of it. But there have been some life altering events that went along with it since then.

The biggest being that Wifey-Poo and I split up, amicably and without drama. I kept Firebase Blue in the divorce because she wanted to travel, so that was good. No need to set up preps and defenses elsewhere all over again.

Shortly thereafter, I injured myself doing an activity at age 47 that I did easily at age 25, and my left knee will never be the same. If you’re curious what the activity might have been, click here.

After some healing, I re-entered the dating world.

Let me tell you something: Single moms see a home-owning dude with a healthy work ethic and get thirsty. Really thirsty. And scary clingy. But, after 18 months of that and I decided to take on a relationship with someone I knew before the divorce. We’re co-habitating now, and she’s amazing. You’ll probably meet her soon.

And during all of that, I decided I needed to lose weight. With a torn up knee, both hiking and running were out of the question, and I can basically forget ever having “leg day” at the gym. Rowing machines were also out, as were most of the interesting martial arts, and I’ve never enjoyed swimming as exercise. So…

I bought a mountain bike.

The Trek Marlin is an entry level dual purpose type of bike. For around $700, it’ll do everything one of those big box store “mountain bikes” that cost half as much will do, as well as take on fairly rugged Cross Country trails. I know, because I started out on one of those big box store bikes I had bought years earlier and was collecting dust in the garage. I rode it around my local paved and light gravel trails, but as soon as I got off level ground or even slightly sketchy unpaved downhill trails, I felt like the thing was going to fold underneath me.

So, twice the money gets you quality, capability and confidence.

And boom, I was hooked. I was riding every weekend. Weather didn’t matter. I found new places that were just down the road or across town that I never even knew existed. And then I started slowly enlarging my radius for how far I’d drive to go ride. The bike even got a name: The Pale Horse.

I lost 60lbs before the arrival off the ‘rona. But with the bullshit that went along with that (my work schedule blowing up to 55hrs a week so that had no free time, my nutritionist not seeing clients, the parks that held my favorite trails getting closed) I gained 30 of those pounds back during the summer and early autumn of 2020.

But my adventures continue!

And that is what I hope to start posting here. I’ll do my best to stick with chronological order, and get you all up to speed in the near future. I have been posting these on my IG and FB, but one of those formats limits the word count of your story, and nobody reads the story on the other.

I hope you all enjoy them.

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Guess Who’s back https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/08/guess-whos-back-4/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/08/guess-whos-back-4/#respond Sun, 01 Aug 2021 19:58:19 +0000 https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/?p=22066 It’s me.

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Living in the Green Country https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/03/living-in-the-green-country/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2021/03/living-in-the-green-country/#respond Thu, 25 Mar 2021 17:26:44 +0000 https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/?p=22017 Continue reading ]]> 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” not to refer to the United States as a whole, but to a specific area of countryside — as in, “Well, fact of the business, that whole week I’d get up of a mornin’ and walk about the country for an hour or two before breakfast.” Or: “I don’t much like that country — not enough trees.”

Spotted this piece of art by George Callaghan on Twitter — Vivre dans le pays vert, or “Living in the green country” in French.

(To embiggen images below, right-click and open image in new browser tab. Yeah, I’m still figuring out why click-to-embiggen doesn’t work.)

Reminds me of a few of my favorite artists:

Grant Wood:

George Tooker:

And, of course Eyvind Earle and his fantastically styled yet still absolutely true depictions of California’s green and golden coastal farms, hills, and valleys.

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Roman Dodecahedron https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/04/roman-dodecahedron/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/04/roman-dodecahedron/#respond Thu, 05 Apr 2018 04:24:13 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21887 Continue reading ]]> 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 pair) in the pocket of every coat I own. Hands down (heh) that’s easily been the most useful lifehack I’ve done. But one of these and some cordage would work in a pinch

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Belgrade, 1926 https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/belgrade-1926/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/belgrade-1926/#respond Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:41:45 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21877 Continue reading ]]> 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 to each rereading.)

Hitchcock’s writer Robert Arthur anthologized the ninth chapter “Belgrade, 1926” as a stand-alone short story, and it remains as near-perfect a piece of short suspense fiction as I could want. Seek it out.

An excerpt:

I don’t know much about these things, but apparently one does not have to lay a couple of hundred miles’ worth of mines to make a two-hundred-mile wide corridor of sea impassible. One just lays one or two small fields without letting one’s enemy know just where. It is necessary, then, for them to find out the positions of those minefields.

That, then, was G.’s job in Belgrade. Italian agents found out about the minefields. G., the expert spy, was commissioned to do the real work of discovering where they were to be laid, without — a most important point this — without letting the Yugoslavs find out that he had done so. If they did find out, of course, they would promptly change the positions.

In that last part of his task G. failed. The reason for his failure was Dimitrios.

It has always seemed to me that a spy’s job must be an extraordinarily difficult one. What I mean is this. If I were sent to Belgrade by the British Government with orders to get hold of the details of a secret mine-laying project for the Straits of Otranto, I should not even know where to start. Supposing I knew, as G. knew, that the details were recorded by means of markings on a navigational chart of the Straits. Very well. How many copies of the chart are kept? I would not know. Where are they kept? I would not know. I might reasonably suppose that at least one copy would be kept somewhere in the Ministry of Marine, but the Ministry of Marine is a large place. Moreover, the chart will almost certainly be under lock and key. And even if, as seems unlikely, I were able to find in which room it is kept and how to get to it, how should I set about obtaining a copy of it without letting the Yugoslavs know that I had done so?

When I tell you that within a month of his arrival in Belgrade, G. had not only found out where a copy of the chart was kept, but had also made up his mind how he was going to copy that copy without the Yugoslavs knowing, you will see that he is entitled to describe himself as competent.

How did he do it? What ingenious manoevre, what subtle trick made it possible? I shall try to break the news gently.

Posing as a German, the representative of an optical instrument-maker in Dresden, he struck up an acquaintance with a clerk in the Submarine Defence Department (which dealt with submarine nets, booms, mine-laying and mine-sweeping) of the Ministry of Marine!

Pitiful, wasn’t it! The amazing thing is that he himself regards it as a very astute move. His sense of humour is quite paralyzed.

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UPS’ drone army https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/this-is-a-very-interesting-chart/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/this-is-a-very-interesting-chart/#respond Thu, 22 Mar 2018 16:02:55 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21857 Continue reading ]]>

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 successfully 3D printed a drone body in one day. By snapping in place an electric motor, two batteries, and an Android cell phone, they made a fully autonomous drone that could carry 1.5 pounds approximately 50 kilometers — six times the range of the U.S. Hellfire missile. In 2014, it took about 31 hours to print and assemble the drone at a total cost of about $800. Since then printers have become over 100 times faster and will get faster still. UPS currently plans a 1,000 printer plant, which at today’s printing speeds could potentially print 100,000 drones a day. The limitation is no longer the printing but the assembly and shipment of the finished products. Both processes can be automated with robots. In the near future, drones could be produced at a rate exceeding many types of ammunition — and often for less per round. A swarm of tens of thousands of autonomous but non-coordinating drones is clearly possible. Armed with small explosive loads, these drones could score mobility kills on all non-armored vehicles and even damage thin-skinned armor. Such an attack will bring an armored brigade to a rapid halt due to lack of fuel.

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L’Estro Armonico (and, tangentially, Gene Simmons) https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/lestro-armonico-and-tangentially-gene-simmons/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/lestro-armonico-and-tangentially-gene-simmons/#respond Mon, 19 Mar 2018 20:43:22 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21810 Continue reading ]]> 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).   In the past, music majors such as my high-school choir teacher and Juilliard alum David Pool would have to dig through a Schwann catalog to find vinyl pressings or tapes of obscure-but-required pieces for their studies, generally recorded by equally obscure ensembles.

Pool used to joke that as a result of all this, he and and his Juilliard classmate Charles Emerson Winchester III had between them the most extensive collection of recorded works by the Chamber Society of Lower East Cleveland.

For my part, as a starving young student I amassed my trove of classical records by signing up repeatedly for Columbia House and Musical Heritage Society “introductory memberships” (“9 albums for 1 cent”), which taught me valuable life lessons about reading the fine print and how to outscam the scammers.

Happily, I also encountered all sorts of relatively obscure treasures, and Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico performed by I Solisti Veneti became my favorite. The other day on YouTube I found this version I may decide I like even better. An excellent listen, and a great introduction to the joys of classical music for the novice or any metalhead — especially with the bass cranked through the roof.

The Red Priest was a genius and a notorious musical icon of his day, composing for royalty, delighting in crossdressing genderplay in his operas, and maintaining the sort of lifestyle that got him, a man of the cloth, barred from entering a city because of his sexcapades. Were he alive today, one suspects an interview with him would sound an awful lot like this.

That's a Mona Lisa smile if I ever saw one

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There Shall Be No Darkness https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/there-shall-be-no-darkness/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/there-shall-be-no-darkness/#respond Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:33:25 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21813 Continue reading ]]> 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 here.

Now that’s changed. Full text at the link; the story begins at page 6. I’ve excerpted the first third of the novella in images below the fold, as well, to whet your appetite.

I love everything about this story: the drawing-room mystery in the donjon-like Scottish manor house, melting the Mexican silver into slugs in a kitchen crucible, the “American T-47” automatic rifles, obviously M-16 analogues (circa 1952, mind) — or perhaps they were meant to be the AK-47, “discovered” by the West in ’53. And of course the delightful endocrinology angle. The miracle of the internet means single movements of obscure pieces like “the Wolf’s Glen scene from von Weber’s Der Freischuetz” can enhance the mood, and references such as “that panel on the Isenheim Altar that showed the Temptation of St. Anthony” can be, well, referenced. It is the thinking man’s werewolf story.

And of course, the tale can also be enjoyed as a parable with all sorts of meaning in the light of the global cultural, political, or institutional destabilization of your choice. I like thinking of the character Foote as representing the cranky artiste types found in each century; sensitive to the zeitgeist, they presciently warn the elites of the coming danger, but are no more than impotent voyeurs as events progress and it all comes crashing down anyway.

A few nights ago, with the wind howling in a rare California thunder-and-hailstorm, I decided to reread TSBND in front of a roaring fire, with a glass of Ardbeg Uigeadail and a nice Davidoff cigar. The addition of von Weber’s weird piece made for a spooky backdrop indeed; happily my Kit Gun’s still snug in its case somewhere nearby.

Enjoy.

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Still Enjoying the Decline https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/just-a-reminder-of-what-im-about-nowadays/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/just-a-reminder-of-what-im-about-nowadays/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2018 23:21:23 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21815 Continue reading ]]>

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 blogging, I’ll take the liberty to paste the entirety for reference as this thing accelerates.

You Fucking People Make Me Sick

So it be a damp enough day in de local boozer with the telly on and nigh on every cunt is that little bit langers. It’s a family gathering of sorts. Just a couple of pints and whatnot. So yeah, everybody is chatting away about this and that and ruggers and then, quick as a flash, the Cyprus thing comes up on the news. First I’ve heard of it. So I put my whiskey down. I edge towards the box and listen in to get the jist of what is going on. Turns out there is a fucking “tax” on deposits. I’m shocked, clearly. Clearly, these German cunts aint all sunshine and gravy en aw. So, amidst the fact that the EU did something more reminiscent of Soviet fucking Russia just there, the fact that Putin and friends are bleedin fuming away because Cyprus is a dirty moolah Russian oligarch sex party, and the simple, brutal point that if this is happening in Cyprus, it can happen here, I look around and try to get a reaction. Not a damn thing. Barely a whimper. Like I be saying, langers, just langers like. Lads and laddies get back to it thereafter, and suddenly I’m pounding back shots like no one’s business.

Later on, they have a feature on your one, eh, whats her name? The good looking lassie who is hitting the wall and married to Prince William of Beta? Yeah, well she got her heel stuck in an iron grate in this St Patrick’s Day presentation thing, and there was this big curfuffle and it was all amusing and shit. Every fiend in the pub got a good laugh out of it and the coldness set in. You fucking cunts. You blatantly ignore, the fact that a dubious organization went into another FUCKING COUNTRY’S SET OF BANKS, and skimmed the cream off of the top. Then some lassie gets her stiletto caught up and it is epic lozzlzlzlzlzlzlzlzlols for the whole family. Seeya later ye daft gobshites! All you sniveling lefties are more concerned with a bunch of lassies winning the grand slam. Bread and circuses? Corn and porn ken, corn and porn.

I look around. It’s nine o clock and this middle aged beure starts dancing, shaking her shaggy butt to Owner of a Lonely Heart. She’s pissed, and her children are averting their gaze big fucken style. I’ve been the right old barking up the wrong tree fella when it comes to saying that a lot of Irish people deserve what they got post housing bubble, and no no fucken know. Fuck you. You deserved it. And you know why you deserved it? You deserved it because when I was in a pub two days ago, it was more fucken important to watch some manjawed floozie embarrass herself and her children, and The Voice, the fucken VOICE, an Irish singalong competition with some Chernobly faced slapper, is more important than deposits being seized, people’s fucken money being stolen. But we must sees whod be fucking winning on the telly, roysh? Fuck me. Because this is huge fucking shit, huuuuuge fucken shite, life affirming lets come together right now in sweet harmony level we’d be chatting about. This is fuckin life ken. Choose life ken. It’s so hard to comprehend, to look up a fucking book for five fucking minutes and read the notes yourself, therefore reaching a logical conclusion. Jesus. It’s so hard, wah wah de fucken wah. Derpidy derpa derp. Yous all moan, and whinge and fucking piss around like no one’s business. About how the government should do this and Enda Kenny should do that and it is sad too see. But hehe, it’s really fucking funny too. So then some afterspecials party comes in. We leave. Me mam makes an interesting quip about the decline of culture. It’s hilarious. There is no culture. Reallys. How, utterly,fucking sad is it is that so called high end Irish culture is reading novels from privileged fucking faggots like Emma D and Colm Toibin who had their nice little cushy MA in English and stayed in their little D4 tower while writing their shitty fucken lesbian fiction and it’s courageous, so fucking courageous. Award! Award! Photo Photo! Aww. The privileged are killing me ken. You’re putting my fucking cousin on medication, a soon to be co dependent mess, because he got in a fight in school? There’s a reason that fucking Fight Club is the most important movie of the past 50 years ken. Go on, try and figure it out. It’s fucking extreme value theory and covariance matrices multiplied by set theory. It’s a gargantuan mindfuck. That one in particular is evil and in particular gets to me. Pure evil. And all you phenomenology lads “truth is relative” blah blah blah. No, fuck you. Evil is wretched. It exists, as clear as fucking day. It is the sad, the good gone awry, the fifty year old feminist, the videogame playing virgin. That, is evil.

This country has been infected. It’s been infected with the same nonsense that seem to be pirulating everywhere else. So, here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to get myself a nice comfy chair. I’m going to buy some cigars and drag some lassie back here. I’m going to watch all of you motherfuckers run the lemmings off of this cliff, and I’m in contact with all sorts. Ivory tower D4 cunts, you will formicate left right and centre ken, uhhh, we didn’t see this happen duhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, and it will be the funniest shit ever as Ireland gets cleared for a intergalactic motorway. This will be so much fun.

I told yous. STEM nerds having a tough time with women, I sent you fucking links to Roissy and the Roosh V forum and you talked shit behind my fucking back in order to get off with a lassie. You were fat and you asked for help and I sent you links to Chaos and Pain, Marks Daily Apple and loaned you a copy of Good Calories Baad Calories. And you still had the gall to moan and whinge and whine. Oh yeahhh man, Obama, a lazy entitled shit who never worked a day in his life, bread and circuses bread and circuses, free market, nah it’s all fucking nonsense. Vote him in. All this complain about the church holdin kids during de 70s and then you decide to vote in a children’s referendum that puts them as guineas to the state. My grandfather broke his fucking back burying dead bodies, in the hope his family, his lassie, his kids, would be worth something. And what the fuck do we have now? This degenerate culture where everything is a fucking shamrock atop of a house of cards. My family is big, really big. Feminism, you see the antagonism everywhere. When people you know are the embodiment of fucking death, then it gets a great deal darker. The cousin of yours who is gettin married to a woman eight years his senior? Everyone says it’s all gravy. But real life and statistics and down syndrome and miscarriages beg to differ. But they love each other. Newspeak. Marriage is not marriage.

You all fucking deserve what you get. You, me, we are not part of it. We are Ralph and it be getting to Lord of the Flies shit. I am going to tear my way through wine lassie and song like the last days of Rome and I am going to speak honestly, bluntly from now on. I hate lying. Not the asperery fucktard anymore, but if you ask me about race, and women, and economics, I’m going to be blunt with you. You’ll laugh when I tell you about ideological subversion, about pantheism and Christianity not being bullshit, about fat people, about the fact that Colm Toibin cannot write for turkey.

Last one left up, turn the light off.

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Within living memory we had a fairly uniform standard of living https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/within-living-memory-we-had-a-fairly-uniform-standard-of-living/ https://www.randomnuclearstrikes.com/2018/03/within-living-memory-we-had-a-fairly-uniform-standard-of-living/#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2018 19:19:54 +0000 https://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=21800 Continue reading ]]> 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 urban. It was not always this way. The antitrust movement of the 1940s not only targeted giant firms, but was also an attempt to weaken regional centers that had amassed too much power. This largely worked and, by the mid 1970s, there was a fairly uniform American standard of living — being middle class in the Mideast was pretty much the same as middle class in New England. However, in the 1980s, many of the policies that helped ensure this balance between regions was neglected or reversed.

Emphasis mine. I’d not seen that concept (rising inequality, yadda yadda) stated quite that way before.

The quote’s from this very interesting article on Jonathan Tepper’s blog; hat tip to Arnold Kling for pointing him out.

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