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What's For Lunch?
• More quesadillas, of course. A

Daily Blog
So, silly Diablo II.  I got on and played like an hour, to get my Bowazon from level 92.8 to 93.1, and one guy last game was asking to trade for something I'd just found.  I said okay and we went to another game to trade for some chippies.  And 2 other guys came, and started asking for other stuff. All of which I had on various mules, and none of which I was likely to use, so I ended up shuffling through my accounts and storage chars for like an hour, taking in tons of chipped gems. Probably ended up with 20+ gems on 8 or 9 different characters.

I'm clearly a top notch trader; I gave out a bunch of stuff just for the hell of it, and kept taking fewer chippies than I asked for when I had no room for them on my characters, without dropping other stuff, more valuable than what I was trading, in most cases.

The real irony is that chipped gems are only of use in one Cube recipe that can possibly make a really good sword.  And I have 2 of the best unique swords already, and a huge damage one also, bigger than I'd likely get with the chippie recipe. So I'm trading for stuff that requires a lot of luck to be of any use at all, and even if I get really lucky on it and it is useful, I don't really need what it produces.

As I said, I'm quite the shrewd negotiator.

As for other things, I managed to find a way to work on everything but writing fiction once again.  Nothing else I do, including this blog, is of any real long term importance, but I'm sure good at doing it instead of what I need to be doing.  Never put off 'til tomorrow what you can put off indefinitely.

I did learn to cook something new today. Well "cook" is a bit of a stretch, since the something is a quesadilla, and all it involves is throwing a open-faced burrito into a skillet with some non-stick spray, and leaving it on medium heat for about 3 minutes.  But damn it's tasty that way, much better than the exact same ingredients in a non-grilled tortilla.  Funny how cooking does that; you can eat the exact same ingredients plain and they are nothing, but you put them together the right way and cook properly and it becomes heavenly.

Yes yes, Flux has a revelation, and on a dreary Saturday morning, no less.

I'm pretty sure it's wrong to laugh at this, but I do anyway.  A Death List, which is to say a list of celebrities that average people think are most likely to die first.  Points are awarded based on time of death and dead celebrity's age.  Younger is worth more, of course.  Doesn't take a genius to predict Bob Hope or Ronald Reagan or the Queen Mum croaking in the immediate future, after all.

Anyway, that one is compiled from reader emails, all random anonymous people who have their guesses, and it's interesting to see who comes out adead.  And remember that we've always, "Gotta save room for Andy Dick."

Funny book review here.  Or review of book reviews, anyway.  The genesis of the commentary is a new book that's called "Hunting the President", about the fanatical obsession of so many in the media to do anything and everything they could to screw Clinton, or dig up scandals about him.  The sheer hunger they had for that chase, fueled by the various right wing media houses like Fox News and the tabloids, was amazing at the time, and in retrospect it's quite glaring.

This book, which I've not read, details it with numerous examples, and not-surprisingly every newspaper that's cited in the book for their less-than-objective behavior is less-than-glowing in their review of the book.  Many have not even reviewed it at all, such as the LA Times.

The more someone pretends to be objective and fair-minded, quite often the less able they are to deal with it when their lapses in that objectivity are held up to the light.  As the media coverage and generally negative or dismissing reviews of the book well illustrate.

I posted some weeks ago about the very interesting Hunt the Boeing website, which is a compilation of photos of the Pentagon after the 9/11 events, when one of the 4 hijacked planes (allegedly?) crashed into it.  From the photos it looked like there was a good case to be made for no plane having hit the building, just since the damage appeared to be very insubstantial, certainly compared to the utter disaster that was the WTC crashes.  You expect a huge, gaping hole going through the building, 50 foot trenches dug, etc.  Nothing like that is visible in the shots, and they are real shots, taken from government and news sites.

So the Hunt the Boeing page is well worth a look, but I didn't really take it seriously at the time.  It's more of an illustration of how mysterious the damage of a crashing plane can be.  By the photos you can't see that it hit really, but as there's no real conspiracy to follow up on that, it fizzles out.  I mean if the plane didn't hit there, where did it go?  It didn't crash anywhere else or we'd have heard about it.  I didn't fly to Hangar 18 and get interned with the Aliens, it wasn't tractor beam'ed in by the time traveling USS Enterprise, it didn't fly through the Twilight Zone.  It was seen on radar by dozens of air traffic controllers and stations, there were eye witnesses of it hitting the Pentagon, etc.  So theories that it didn't hit and that a truck bomb was the source of the Pentagon destruction weren't real believable, but that doesn't make the photos less interesting to view.

A site that does it's best to debunk the Hunt the Boeing presentation is here.

So how did a plane hit the Pentagon and not do more apparent damage?  The roof still standing in the overhead shots hides damage to the B and C rings, past the A ring which was totally demolished.  All 3 have been completely removed and are being rebuilt now, so there was obviously extensive fire damage beyond what's visible overhead.  A good quote from the debunking site:

Watch the videotapes of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. They were traveling at approximately 400 mph, and they hit an aluminum and glass building. An entire plane went in, and hardly anything came out the other side, 208 feet away.

Here we have a plane traveling at nearly 250 mph (just over 1/2 the velocity of the WTC planes, meaning just over 1/4 of their kinetic energy), hitting the ground (which would absorb much of that energy), and only then sliding at a much slower speed into a steel-and-kevlar-reinforced concrete and brick building. Obviously, it's not going to go very far. Still, parts of the plane penetrated into the C ring.

There aren't any pictures of the plane coming into the Pentagon, at least none that I've seen, but there are some amazing security camera shots.  Click the arrows on the page to go back and forth through the half dozen images.  You don't see a plane or a truck, for that matter, but by the shape of the enormous fireball, it certainly looks like a plane crash.  Unless the imaginary truck was full of jet fuel.

On the destruction theme, there are some amazingly clear shots of the Pentagon and WTC site from space.

I know I should throw in various remarks about how cool pictures don't mean diddly compared to the horrible loss of life and human catastrophe, etc.  But I'm not real good with those, as they call them, "human emotions".  I mean I was sad at the time, horrified by the scenes, but I've managed to forget all of that now, and it's just a cool topic for discussion.

And yes, I'll say "hello" to Satan for you after the inevitable lightning bolt strikes my callous ass down.

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