Sunday, May 28, 2006

Blogging about to slow down a bit pending shift from Blogger

I've got an offer, and I'm going to take it soon, as I'm sick of blogger giving me "we don't like your cookie" errors.

That said, I have random thoughts.

1. What kind of coddled, reality-challenged white-bread yuppie scum doesn't know the difference between the sounds made by a jackhammer and an assault rifle?

2. I traded shots with my instructor in the salle on Saturday, and hit the ground so hard I bounced. That rocked. Slowly but surely, martial arts concepts that were fuzzy, generalized statements, are becoming concrete, discrete ideas or even techniques. Unfortunately, this means you have to ask your instructor when you think you may have caught a clue... therefore, I posit that martial arts are an act of dual masochism.

3. I think that the gal on PubliusPundit may have overstated her case slightly... but only slightly, when she points out that one of the reasons we have yet another excuse to hate the Baby Boomer scum is their insistence on chopping society up into age brackets. So, don't trust anybody over 30.

4. The big exeriment I was planning on doing gets more complicated. On the one hand, good physics suggests using a nail as a penetrator, so we don't have to worry about impactor topology (far as I can tell, most of the literature on impactor topology is based on cylindrical or ogival penetrators, occasionally on spheres. Go figure, that's where the real-world application is). On the other hand, that makes the entire thing worthless in the context of medieval armor, because a nail effectively simulates a bodkin arrowhead, thus slanting any test done directly in favor of everything except mail armor. And while bodkins definitely existed, they were by no means the only thing out there, and neither do they conform to the topology of western early-and-high-medieval lance heads (though, oddly enough, it does somewhat conform to those from eastern Europe).

5. I ruined the rawhide Chichester sent me a while ago, b/c what we all thought was the grain, was, in fact, not -- what we thought was the flesh was, instead, parts of the grain that hadn't been removed... which only became apparent when I tried to oil-tan it and I suddenly had horsehairs popping up on what should have been the inside of the horse. So, at this point, probably the only thing I can really do with it is to turn it into lacing.

6. Summer is awesome, nice and hot, but not too hot, and Eason came to town, which warms the little evil cockles of my heart. Part of me still wishes I could get the time of day from recruiters so I could go do evil twisted shit to bad people who deserve it... but with folks having no trouble making numbers apparently age waivers aren't being tossed out like popcorn (Note to the irony-challenged: see random thought#3).

7. Somebody needs to simply flay Phelps and his "Thank God for IEDs crowd." Fucking demon worshipper. Hey, dude, even the biggest, hate-indoctrinated opponents of Christianity admit that "loving your neighbor" is one of its most basic commandments....

And now, I'm going to vacuum and enjoy the nice long weekend. Have a good one, folks.

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