Wilbur

Another recommendation from an online source included T.R. Napper's Neon Leviathan. This sort of cyberpunk collection of short stories is in the vein of William Gibson's Burning Chrome, but instead of The Sprawl and Tokyo from the perspective of the 1980s, most of the collection of Leviathan take place in Southeast Asia and Australia with much more modern sensibilities. Greg Patmore reads the audiobook, and he does a fine job. T.R. Napper is an Australian social worker of some variety in Vietnam, so he writes whereof he knows in terms of the scenery and worldbuilding, and his critique of the misuse of power by governments and corporations is very cyberpunk - I doubt very much that China is going to enjoy their portrayal here, for example. None of the stories is very long, but Napper handles the short story / novella form with expertise. Anyone who enjoys an action-packed short story that skewers the government or corporations of the near future will enjoy cyberpunk in general, and these stories in particular. Good stuff.

I recently received Bruce Holsinger's A Burnable Book, and again, I think I placed the request based on a recommendation from one of the forum members in a previous iteration of this thread. Whichever one of you reviewed this one, thank you! The audiobook read by Simon Vance is excellent, as is every performance Vance does. The plot is thick with unreliable narrators and twists and turns in a royal court sure to appeal to any fan of ASOIAF, the mysteries unravel slowly and with some good turns from predictability, the cryptography is dealt with in a light and non-Neal Stephenson manner. The historical characters are well-limned, most especially the protagonist and poet philosopher John Gower and his friend and contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer. The book's strengths lie in its portrayal of the politics of the late medieval period in London, and its weaknesses also lie there as well. By this I mean that the story and writing transport the reader to the scene and the concerns of the characters so very effectively, but also, as an American and a republican, I can't bring myself to care all that much about threats to the king. Still, the risks and dangers to the many non-noble characters are real, and the writer makes us care about them and their concerns. Strongly recommended!

You have a good point. Those plots actually do work, although once you have read The Men of Greywater Station, it is difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to not guess the ultimate outcome.

I laughed aloud at the thought of the challenge a writer would have to make neutropenic precautions a gripping read. "Quick, apply the antimycotic medical cream!"

Also, he apparently couldn't count, which resulted in bills being brought to the floor with insufficient votes to pass. Surely that ability is the minimum job requirement of the Speaker.

The path to nuclear power and nuclear weapons is not fraught with insurmountable obstacles. It is a matter of determination to spend the required money and a willingness to commit to the end result. If you review the Indian road to nuclear capability, this much becomes clear. I imagine that most US administrations would work to reduce the risk of more nations gaining that capacity, but again, thwarting another nation's nuclear ambitions requires stubborn, persistent efforts.

It is interesting how that report indicates that children were able to come through the pandemic as a group without the big losses that adults experienced. These two articles about how the nasal cells of children respond more effectively to Covid make for interesting reading to complement that idea. Young nose cells may help children fight off Covid (bbc.com) Here's Why Infants Are Strangely Resistant to COVID | Scientific American There may be good avenues for exploration and research regarding the differences in response to Covid compared to the flu, which is typically more deadly to children.

Chet and Wemby Redux - the best since Larry and Magic?

The Boeing board needs to reload the entire senior leadership team, with a strong focus on governance and motivation to (re-)develop a culture of compliance and control. Also, the FAA and NTSB need to intentionally step out of the regulatory capture loop. They need to avoid the fate of the banking regulators and maintain their independence.

John Carter was a very imperfect film, particularly the latter half. What killed it, however, was the TERRIBLE marketing for the film. I took my daughter to see it on opening Friday, where Harkins was showing it in the Cine Capri: basketball-court sized, curved screen; massive sound system; over two hundred recliners in a raked stadium seating configuration; tickets that cost 150% of normal price. The screening we attended had a total of 13 people watching it, all of the rest of them older than me. On Sunday I went with my wife, where we watched it with seven other viewers. This was a pretty big spectacle, perfect for the modern movie theater, and almost no one was drawn in to see it.

"What happened to the Suns?" They fired Monty Williams and hollowed out their roster, that is what.

Did you enjoy John Carter? It seems like a film that is right down the middle of what you describe. Some other good ones from the last decade or so that might scratch that itch could be The Endless, High Life, Ready Player One, Edge of Tomorrow, Sunshine, Serenity, Attack the Block, or Source Code.

This strike is very impressive, since that is: behind enemy lines in occupied Ukraine, then behind enemy-controlled naval area in the Sea of Azov, then Inside the borders of Russia itself. Reaching out and touching a location like that takes some serious skills. Drive or fly through occupied territory, then possibly across or over occupied sea lanes, then over or across enemy sovereign territory. Then return home.

If you ever wanted to know what a real RINO was, just check to see if they are parroting Russian propaganda / cashing Russian checks.

Many years ago (in the early 1990s?), one of the periodicals (Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction?) had an article about Jack Vance, and in it there was a reference to the writing of Clark Ashton Smith. I duly wrote it down on the folded 3"x5" card that rode in my wallet with a list of suggested authors, and I bought a slim volume in a converted church in Inverness. But I didn't read it until this week. The book is The Double Shadow, and it is a collection of short stories, including the specific short story of The Double Shadow, as well as: The Devotee of Evil A Night in Malneant The Maze of the Enchanter The Willow Landscape The Voyage of King Euvoran I draw your attention to Clark Ashton Smith, because this guy could WRITE. I can absolutely see why he was referenced in an article about Jack Vance, as his use of the language is every bit as elevated and his worlds every bit as Baroque. I have read Lovecraft and Howard, and yet this gaping hole in my experience that is the work of Clark Ashton Smith is quite embarrassing, as these stories are far more to my taste than the former two authors. Excellent atmosphere, but even better stories. From the Wikipedia article: "The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality." And boy oh boy, is it ever. The type of comeuppance that you find in the works of GRRM is absolutely prefigured in these stories. Furthermore, several of the stories are infused with a sort of black humor that made me re-read them just to check that my burst of laughter wasn't inappropriate. He apparently wrote in the genre of The Dying Earth, and indeed The Maze of the Enchanter in this volume is very much in that vein. The story of The Willow Landscape could have taken place in The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah, if Bramah had possessed a strong interest in fantasy. I can hardly express how good the writing and characterizations are. You can also get a copy of the audiobook for a buck, should you be so inclined. I am off to Librivox to see what other items might be available.

Really looking forward to the "Goal from Every Angle" video of the Darwin Nunez opener.

Isn't hair usually the big historical epic fail? Very, very few Big Actors are willing to have their do mussed in order to fit the rest of the scene.

If Mathias Rust could fly a Cessna 172 across the Iron Curtain and into Red Square during the height of the cold war, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for the now-highly-experienced drone experts in Ukraine to rig up a 172 or 152 with radio controls or whatever they are using for their long-range drones. Russia today likely possesses only a moth-eaten shell of whatever air defense coverage the Soviet Union operated in 1987. Fill it with a couple suitcases full of explosives, and Bob's your uncle.

Burnley and Sheffied United are going down, but will the FA's Rapid Justice Squad for Financial Impropriety's Negative Six Points be enough to push Everton out along with them? Hopefully they will escape the drop. David Squires cartoon in the Grauniad.

Spring is in the air! Bucks are mating with the does, stallions are covering the mares, and the Mi-5s are atop the Su-30s.

It sure seemed that way after Relative Performance Assessments rolled out. Lots of old-line Motorolans - directors, managers, research lab middle managers - just walked away in the mid 2000s.

GE and Motorola had a lot of cross-corporate interactions. GE took Motorola's Six Sigma and turned it into a quasi-religion; GE adopted the Motorola Leadership Factory model where a high-potential employee who wanted to be a VP needed to spend a couple of years in Internal Audit learning the business, and Motorola took on Individual Dignity Entitlement from GE. IDE was Jack Welch's baby, and here is a post from a Motorola Alumni group where I am a member: "Who remembers when stack rating IDE with its Needs Improvement ratings was explicitly implemented at Motorola? GE's Jack Welch is largely credited for the practice. I came across this quote on reddit: "If you and your teammates are put on a ranking which is required to have a high/middle/low distribution: You should stop helping your teammates. Your manager should always have a new bad performer who exists specifically to be fired to protect the better employees. You never want to go work in a team with great people you could learn a lot from because you'll just be the one at the bottom. You should never take responsibility for failure. And so on and so on. You should be your worst lone wolf self, because anything else is punished by the system. It's basically sociopath training." I got in a lot of very heated discussions about ranking my employees in this system, since it inherently assumes that you are such a moron that you somehow hired staff who Needed Improvement or needed to be fired. My argument was that if I did indeed have such ineffectives in my headcount, surely it was ME that needed to be fired. Anyways, my point is that Boeing's recently-departed CEO was an acolyte of Welch, and Boeing also engaged in this sort of nonsense once he arrived. Now I know and interact with other guys who were Business, Group, and even one Sector VPs/Presidents from GE, and they are not all bad people. However, the ones I know are all either retired, BoD types, or run small businesses. The real sociopaths got out to infect places like Boeing, or else drove the various bits and pieces of GE into the ground. See this article: Boeing's shakeup and GE's fall: 2 more black eyes for Jack Welch's legacy (yahoo.com) No company can be successful without good people, and you can only retain good people if you treat them right, and you can only get the best out of good people if you remove obstacles to their success, not add to the stress and burdens of their lives. IDE rankings made the lives of all the staff hell, no matter how much glee it gave Jack Welch and his ilk. Neutron Jack loved the idea of wasting the headcount, working the corporate accounting posture to its most aggressive position, and especially taking any action that the Wall Street investment banker analysts liked. Calhoun took that same stance at Boeing, and the company is lucky to be getting rid of him, before utterly destroyed and sold off the parts like Flannery and Immelt at GE after Welch, or like Sanjay Jha and Ed Zander did at Motorola.

You just knew that after the success of Oppenheimer, these type of historical epics of the 20th Century's key global events would flood into theaters.

This is a widespread criticism of many Evangelical Christians, and indeed is the driver for the seminal work, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind". William Gross says that the causes are threefold: cultural, theological, and institutional, and I recommend the first link as a good summary of why so many otherwise seemingly good Christians are fooled by Trump. If you think that Trump's turn towards Bob Tilton's hawking of trinkets via Prosperity Gospel and supporting appurtenances is just a coincidence, think again. Anecdote: I came back to the States for college, and naturally the school assigned an insular kid from Ohio to be my roommate. He was devoutly Christian and fully patriotic, but could not wrap his head around simple ideas. For instance, he did not believe that a Russian person could be patriotic toward Russia and also a Christian at the same time (this was during the Cold War). He felt that the Russian person who was a Christian would need to hate Russia and love America. I could never convince him that this idea lacked intellectual consistency. This mental inflexibility seems to be a hallmark of Trump supporters. Bob Tilton would send you a prayer hanky if you sent him a donation, and Donald Trump will sell you a Bible if you send him a donation. They both work the same audience / customer base.

The film Jacob's Ladder left me with terrible feelings of horror and sadness and despair. It is a really well-made film with excellent performances, and Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of four, but what an intense aura of sorrow. I was not at all surprised when the local theater took it out of rotation after a single week - who was going to go back and watch that a second time?