Let me present Susblood Labs, which is manufacturing a combination pen and capsule of preserved pig's blood, designed to reconstitute in the heat of a suicide bomb and defile the body of the bomber. Apparently this is meant to act as a deterrent to bombers, by keeping them out of heaven.

(I could talk about the basic physics and theology problems with this, but why bother? There's something delightfully mad about the whole thing.)

EDIT: But wait! There's more! From the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation of a fascinating contest showing up on some Islamist websites. Help design a website for a terror group, and get to fire missiles at American troops!

(You know, I really wish I were kidding. It could be that both of these things are bogus... but somehow, I doubt it. The first one, in particular, just seems so appropriate to the mindset that if it's satire, it's the most brilliant bloody satire I've seen in a while. The latter... well, all sorts of strange things show up on the public fora of terror groups. Most of them are nonsense. But such splendid nonsense! For that one, I think the best commentary came from Dry Bones.)

Well, at least something in the news feels familiar... twenty or thirty years out of date, but familiar. Plus ça change, plus la même chose...

Armed, military-trained dolphins are loose in the Gulf of Mexico following Katrina.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Apparently, the warnings from the Onion weren't adequately heeded.

Now the question is, what will they do? Will these dolphins stay together or disperse? Will they try to assimilate into the broader Gulf cetacean society, and if they do, will they communicate their newfound knowledge to others? Will US military training help these dolphins build a future for themselves and their people, and give them the organizational skills - and force multiplication ability - to effectively counter expanded fishing and pollution threats? Or will they remain perpetual outsiders, even becoming delphinic bandits or warlords, in the manner of unexpectedly disbanded soldiers in civil wars?

(I'm hypothesizing that the latter won't happen - that's normally a symptom of people who have lived with the pervasive anomie of a civil war, rather than of professional soldiers suddenly on leave.)

But honestly, after thinking about this a bit - it could be worse. I would certainly trust dolphins with guns more than, say, chimpanzees; they seem less likely to engage in completely gratuitous warfare, or hurl feces. But IANAMB (I am not a marine biologist) so I may be wrong on this. For now, I'll just say that I, for one, welcome our new cetacean overlords.

Pat Robertson apologized for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez today, but claims he was "misinterpreted" by the press:

"I said our special forces should 'take him out.' 'Take him out' could be a number of things, including kidnapping."

Well, I'm glad that's straightened out, then.

Brought on by too much work, this rather interesting essay, and who knows what else, it occurred to me that D20 Modern is far too alone among games. We could have a D20 Postmodern, where the players as a group transform ("the death of the author") the sequence of ordinary events described by the GM into a narrative arc by imposing the world-view of "adventurers;" D20 Epic, where the ultimate ending is written in advance and known, like the laws of the gods, to all the characters, who must then live their lives knowing what the ultimate ending will be; and similarly D20 Tragedy, Comedy, Picaresque Romance, and so on.

We all play these games, of course, but it would still be amusing to form up a list of them all, and see if conversely there are some characteristic modes of RPG's which could be translated into unusual modes for other forms of storytelling.

(Hmm... is it just me, or does D20 Modern seem tailor-made for a game based on Gravity's Rainbow?)

And yes, I realize this is elaborate nonsense. What can I say, I'm sleep-deprived...

Any news article that includes a discussion of the "Society for Mutual Autopsy" is just begging to be made into a plot for something, somewhere.

My only excuse for this is that I was reading the Heimskringla while really, really sleep-deprived, and woke up with this in my head.

( Pray to St. Olaf!Collapse )

So say a coalition of Jerusalem's religious leaders, in a rare show of unity.

Someone has been charged with hiding $450M in income from the IRS. OK, big financial dealings, largest such case in history, yadda yadda...

The man's main offshore corporation was called "Gold and Appeal Transfer?"

I always knew the IRS were run by the Illuminati, but this is a bit extreme...