Brian Tung and I are somewhat religious about the two requirements for an activity to be a sport – it must be (in principle) objectively scored and at least as athletic as bowling. The Royal Navy Field Gun Competition is a sport. It’s also delightfully odd. (Don Brown brought this to my attention).
Wil Wheaton’s blog is a source of many kinds of delight, but this post about role playing gets an amen.
Warren Ellis is a lot of things, and this post sums many of them up well. He shines here as a futurist able to put himself into a historical context while writing poetically. “This is the path people walked when they first thought about how to talk to time,” indeed.
Yeah, yeah, I know they don’t have a blimp.
I was at SMO this evening trying to get a couple night landings in, though the clouds had other ideas. Even though I didn’t get much flying in, I did get to see the Goodyear blimp doing low maneuvers over the airport. They aren’t quite touch and goes, but that’s what they look like from afar. Anyway, only one shot really came out. That’s Santa Monica’s tower in the blurry background.
One of the hardest things about reading the BBC piece on the RHPS remake is that the goddamn thing is full of names from the credits of the RHPS. This means as a read them they’re translated into red on white bloody letters and the appropriate catcall comes into my head. The old scars run deep.
Some bozos seem to have decided to make another movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Several people are up in arms about this, including Wil Wheaton and Richard O’Brien.  I share their recognition that this is wrong and blasphemous: I think it’s wrong to view the RHPS anywhere but a theater at midnight; there isn’t a scale that captures the odiousness of remaking the movie. Still, I’m not expecting this attempt to amount to anything. The RHPS survived Shock Treatment, which was made by people who understood the RHPS. These nimrods don’t scare me.
There are those actively resisting the attempt, and you may want to help, but honestly, I trust the universe on this one.
My capsule review of Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr is posted on Bell, Book, and Candle.
Here’s an amazing bit of americana. Via BoingBoing. The kid’s diagnosis is correct.
Street Use has followed up on its ominous segways sighting by finding a monster segway. Video included.
I’ve been living in California for a while now, and the place still manages to amaze me. Not just the people, who are really sort of wackily charming, but the state itself. This week the LA Times tells me that there’s a hunk of land near Fillmore that just heated up to 800 degrees F. Apparently it just does that. Man, what a weird place.
I updated the X.509 certificates on lunabase today. If you have a jabber account, you may see a new one, replacing the one that expired 2 years ago(!). The local certificate authority is now reasonably well organized (thanks Phil), so future changes should be less painful.