The feral cat model of rogue's galleries or The Not So Bad Guys

So the thing about catching and domesticating feral cats is that dealing with the cat and not the niche means pretty soon another feral cat moves in where the old one was living. Worse, sometimes the ex-feral is replaced not by a cat but a raccoon.

Back in the Silver Age DCU, back when someone could be a costumed criminal without being an obligate rapist and/or murderer, I wonder if there was some pressure on the masks to tolerate to some degree criminally inclined but harmless (to the civilians) wackaloons like the Pied Piper or the Trickster because experience over in Gotham suggested that if you successful cleared all the eccentrics off the street, what you got was wasn't a crime free city but genuine monsters like the Joker and Two-Face.

This week on "Romney says the darnest things"

Nicked from mme_hardy:

Romney’s wife, Ann, was in attendance, and the candidate spoke of the concern he had for her when her plane had to make an emergency landing Friday en route to Santa Monica because of an electrical malfunction.

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

In his own words

Admittedly from nearly two Friedmans ago:

I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.

Mindwebs: The Last Ghost and The Machine In Shaft 10

The Last Ghost

This is a tale of a person made obsolete by an unforeseen technological development.


The Machine In Shaft 10

And this is one of someone trying very hard to remove themselves from their niche in the economy....

I think I have determined what my next bus listening project will be

Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy as adapted in eight hour-long episodes by the BBC in 1973.

You know, I had an LP that had Seldon getting into trouble on Trantor. I wonder if it was an LP of the "Psychohistory and Encyclopedia" episode?

In any case, this is the cast list: ( Read more... )