The interesting thing about this hostile article on Ryan

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

Is that it's from FOX.

Zoom!

I used to have a program called swing-by calculator, which could run the math on fly-bys. One thing I noticed is if you had a tolerance for close fly-bys of gas giants, it was possible to cross the solar system in much less time than you might expect even with fairly modest propulsion technology; this is a lesson I don't expect to see in SF very often as most SF writers willfully fail standard bengal tests (although I will admit UP AGAINST IT had Jupiter being exploited for its gravitational potential).

Case in point from NASA (sadly lacking in details at the moment):

Just found a 1969 report on the NASA technical server that shows a five-year, free-return orbit for a manned mission that could have flown by Jupiter and Saturn as long as we were willing to thread the spacecraft approximately through the Cassini Division (periapsis about 70,000 km).

Neal Adams still hard at work

Laura: I am not exaggerating when I say that the trolls make me feel like I'm looking at some horribly pernicious racial caricature from the 19th century. And yes, I know that "mud puppies" is also a name for salamanders and that is probably what Neal Adams meant, but in this context it cannot help but sound like an absolutely toxic racial slur. The idea of creating an entire race of simpering, servile beings who alternate between obsequious bowing and scraping and subhuman stupidity is so ignorant that all I can do, all I can do is make that face. Because at a certain point being tone-deaf isn't an excuse: It's the actual problem.

Having gorged on Mayday episodes

Would it be so wrong to do Mayday-style story focusing on the NTSB-equivalent's investigation following the events of The Cold Equations?

An amazing number of the episodes I see have mishaps driven by what I will call willful-neglect-for-profit (the cargo door thing, for example, or the ones that involve cutting back on training and maintenance). The "mission-threatening event driven by a lack of pre-flight checks or effective security beyond a small sign" part of the story would fit right in.

You gotta help us, Doc. We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas.

You know that saying "Shared pain is lessened [...]"?

Thanks to bethbethbeth, I can test that hypothesis. Any of you Martin Freeman fans? Here, have a Martin Freeman interview that for reasons I will not disclose just yet I will call 'I Love White People'

Would you watch

Degrassi High: The Unexpectedly Early Years that focused on the heretofore undisclosed ancestors of the original characters, specifically a teen-aged Ada Lovelace and her circle of friends and associates?

I did not know this

Once Australia had Demon Ducks of Doom and their half-tonne kinfolk.