I went to an overseas American school. One of the mothers said I was bothering her daughter at playtime. Still today the injustice burns, and damn that Michelle, her plats and flouncy dresses and a lizard down her neck.
Where I was we had public school/primary school which was kindergarten to grade eight and then we went straight into high school which lasted to grade 12, but you could take grade 13 college readiness courses, or OACs as they were called for some reason. I graduated grade 12 when I was 17, but most of my peers graduated at 18. This was because of where my birthday landed, though. I was a pretty horrible student in high school.
I was a very obedient child (<<<the fact that I'm a dog notwithstanding) and got all "fuck you and your rules" as a late teen and never quite grew out of it. Not sure which is better!
LOL, I'm always very conscious of rules and respect and that but terrible at handing in homework on time!
Right, I was going to just respond to this, but it turned into a thread-jacking montrosity, so I've made it a blog post instead.
This is vaguely relevant at best, but my father's barbershop chorus once did a plug for their christmas CD in the middle of their show. Suddenly the entire chorus was holding "SHAMELSS PLUG" signs they'd pulled from under the risers when the director said it.
That's not shameless. Shameless would be if they did it at a funeral or something. Come to think of it, I've worked in several businesses that have done exactly that when they catered funeral receptions.
We're trying to raise money to build a new theatre at school. When our production of School of Rock went pear-shaped due to technical difficulties, one of the upsides noted was that the teacher in charge got to plug the new theatre.
I've been writing my Urban Fantasy WIP about a group of bank robbers versus a mad bomber, and I'd been talking a lot about how much C-4 the bomber had on hand and about how much devastation she was able to inflict with it. I did not realize until about a week or two ago just how powerful C-4... isn't. It turns out that there's something called a MICLIC – Mine Clearing Line Charge – the most popular American model of which uses 1750 pounds of C-4 charges strung together over 350 feet. That's good for me because I'd originally imagined that my bomber would only need about 200 pounds of C-4 to create the kind of explosion that would actually require something closer to 1750 pounds.
Seems strange that it isn't all that good an explosive. It is used in Claymore mines, of course it is not trying to blow up anything tougher than a plastic shell full of steel balls. But those balls are blasted out at 3,995 ft/s (1,218 m/s). That last bit I didn't know, but hey maybe it will be useful to somebody.
They did a familiarization blast with one of those for us. Damn thing was five hundred yards away, pointed downrange, and I still felt the impact in my gut when it went off, I dunno how people manage not to get completely stunned by their own when they're on the perimeter.
Our stuff was the similar PE-4 and a decent-sized charge of that going off nearby always left you feeling like somebody had stirred your innards around a bit. I remember the fuse on one charge broke part of the way down and I had to go back and light the little stubby bit that was left with a Zippo then calmly but briskly walk to a safe distance before it went off. That was fun. If you're causing mayhem on a budget, you probably want Semtex instead. It's Russian-made, more powerful than C4 or PE4 and was handed out like sweeties to terrorists, mad dictators and various other undesirables during the Cold War, so it's dirt cheap. It's off-yellow and smells like almonds. The explosive marzipan to PE-4's Kendal mint cake.
This one's a couple months old, but I forgot about this thread until recently, so here it is. My current project is a superhero story set in a sort of Renaissance Italy inspired city. In the course of worldbuilding for the setting, I recalled a minor mention in a book of especially tall towers in San Gemignano. Following this down the research rabbit hole, I came across the Towers of Bologna. Somewhere between 100 and 180 stone towers were built in medieval Bologna by its wealthy families. The allusion it sort of gives to skyscrapers and a modern skyline was too good to pass up, given the subgenre I'm working in on this project.
One mistake I fell into when I was younger, and obsessed with writing zombie stories, was just how difficult it would be to fire any kind of sniper rifle from a standing position. They make it look so easy in videogames!
Life would be so much better if we had save points before major life choices. Damn video games. On topic: Outer space travel. The vastness of outer space, the size of a super massive black hole, those things dwarfed my understanding of them when I first went to write on it. Phew boy.
The differences in MLA and APA and the weird back and fourth usage for colleges. Seriously, in one semester this changed twice! My English instructor was furious. Oh, and to ask an instructor exactly what they want in an essay if they are not an English professor. Yeah, I got into an argument over the word, "stasis," with my History professor. He set an essay he called a formal MLA research paper. What he ended up wanting was a short summary of a book your read about a historic even and your opinion on said event. He was still an excellent History teacher...
Robert Downey Jr. is Jewish. Utterly irrelevant, but I was doing some research for a short I'm working on and found out he's what's called (and I dearly hope that this isn't an offensive term) a "JuBu," or Jewish Buddhist. I knew that the two systems aren't incompatible from reading about Leonard Cohen, but I had no idea what faith tradition (if any) Mr. Downey belonged to. Also, there's a Hebrew version of the Heart Sutra on youtube. There are more things in heaven and earth, Iain, than are dreamt of in your philosophy....
This is really random, but my husband is a fan of the rapper Tech N9ne, and until I was casually reading a crime fiction novel the other day, I had no idea his name was from a semiautomatic weapon called Tec-9.
Interesting factoid I learned at my job this week - you can't make meth out of the liquid form of pseudophedrine.
I was researching the religion of Vodou and oh boy... The sheer amount of misconceptions I believed about that religion are astounding. Needless to say, a lot more research will be required before I can write anything about it. On a similar note, Baron Samedi is probably the coolest spirit in history.
That is interesting. Several years and several jobs ago, I had both a bad cold and a student who was an M.D.* I asked him if pseudoephedrine was a legal over the counter drug in Japan, and if he knew the trade name for it. He said "Don't worry, I'll hook you up" and brought in a 100ml bottle of the stuff in its liquid form. "Just pour a little, maybe half a teaspoon, into some water and drink it two, maybe three times a day. Oh, and keep it in the fridge. At least, I always do..." *He was a gynecologist near retirement. Great guy, I had him over to my apartment for Thanksgiving one year, but after I moved we lost touch. What someone in that line of work was doing with bottles of liquid cold medicine I'll never know, but at least now I know he wasn't a Japanese Walter White.
