Tam over at View From the Porch is talking about the scariness or lack thereof to be found in Stephen King novels.

I agree with her that Mr. King’s short stories were always better than his full length novels.

The exception to this was “Misery”. I read that book cover to cover over a snowy weekend when the base I was stationed at was shut down due to a blizzard and ice storm. So, a 20 year old man sits alone in a barracks room, while a howling ice storm rages outside, reading a scary novel about a man who’s locked in a cabin with a crazy woman.

Yeah, I didn’t sleep all weekend while I read that one.

Nike is making tinted contact lenses.

Apparently athletes wear these to either enhance colors they want to see, or to cut down on glare.

I’d love a pair of these for long drives or days at the range.

And the red ones would be good for those long adversarial meetings at work.

Here’s a survival tip for teenagers:

If your father is making you take a course in school that you don’t want to, it’s not a good idea to change your schedule to drop that course and take something else. Especially if said parent is going to open house and is told there about your little act of subterfuge.

Just a word to the wise that will keep a boot out of your ass.

OK, I come from a long line of large families. My grandfather had a whole bunch of kids. I’m the oldest of 5. I have 4.

But 19?

Double digit kids made sense when there was a really good chance they wouldn’t make it to adulthood and you needed help in the fields.

But how can this couple reasonably assume they can support, nurture, and properly raise that many kids?

Hey, it’s their life. But don’t expect me to think it’s a good freaking idea.

Now they’re mixing it with veterinarian anti-worm drugs to up the high. Apparently the stuff causes the immune system to suppress, making it easier to get infections and die. Not that cocaine wasn’t dangerous to use in the first place. Now they’re cutting it with something that just makes it even more deadly.

I’m not going to get into whether or not it’s any of the government’s business what an adult puts into their body, but stuff like this makes me lean towards legalization.

At least then it would be somewhat regulated and crap like that wouldn’t be in it.

One of the reasons that prohibition was repealed was to stop the flow of bad booze that was blinding and killing people.

If illicit drugs were legalized, at least they would have to go through the same purity laws and checks that currently legal drugs do.

John Scalzi over at AMC television has a good write-up of the more glaring technology and design problems in Star Trek.

Overall, it’s a fun read.

My favorite part of course was the comments:

Why do Star Trek captains have to say the log date themselves, instead of the computer auto-inserting it like any blog? Why does Picard have to keep saying “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” ? Because they run Enterprise software.

OK, Favre looks pretty good so far. But he’s still playing the same way he did at Green Bay. Every now and then, just chunk it out 30 or 40 yards. Most times it’s incomplete. Sometimes a great catch is made. Sometimes you get picked off.

I’ll be impressed if he still plays well and looks good in late November. Right now he’s fresh and has adrenaline on his side. In a couple of months he’ll be beaten up and tired. Will he still have the ability and discipline to just chunk it out 30 yards?

Well, I don’t.

But Roberta X. does, and she’s moved her log of her adventures to a new blog!

I’ve really enjoyed her stories of the Hidden Frontier, and look forward to a lot more entries.

Doc Russia over at Bloodletting is returning to civilization.

He’s been doing his residency in Detroit, and has suffered greatly for his time there.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to rural Michigan, and it’s beautiful. The people outside of the cities in Michigan are 100% the people I want to hang out with. But you get within the city limits of anything over 20,000 people, and you’re in a 3rd world hole.

He just reported that he’s made it back to Dallas.

Welcome back to the real world, Doc. I miss Texas too.

On this date in 1939, Hitler had an attack on a German radio station on the Polish border faked, and started the shooting part of World War II in Europe. He’d been winning the war without shooting for a couple of years, but those tactics had stopped working when Chamberlain started to grow a spine. So he decided to find out if all those shiny new guns, planes, and tanks were worth all of the slave labor.

By time all was said and done, between 50 and 100 million people, both civilian and military, around the world would be dead. The world found out what happens when you mate unspeakable evil with science and technology.

World War II is the subject of an almost endless series of movies, documentaries, books, and television shows. Even as the World War II generation slowly dwindles away, we are fascinated by it. Maybe because it was the most critical time in the last century. The politics, technology, morals, and almost everything else that we deal with today has roots in the Second World War.

For those of you who listen to podcasts, Dan Carlin is doing a series called “Ghosts of the Ostfront“, which details the fighting on the Russian Front. I recommend it.