Almost Killed Me

The Other Half and I are now four episodes into The Killing (the Danish original, natch), and so far I'm not quite seeing what all the fuss is about.  Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying it - I am.  The plot is interesting and well-paced (though with sixteen more hours to go, I wonder whether I'll feel that way by season's end), and there are some great characters in there - Meyer and Theis particularly.

At heart, though, the show is easily expressible by entertainment maths as follows:

The Killing = Twin Peaks - humour + drive - demons + a desire for closure.

Neither of those additions is a bad thing, of course, and maybe the show is a bit funnier in the original Danish, but I'm not yet seeing this as anything more than a very solid modern TV show.  I hear that AMC have dropped the ball spectacularly with the American remake (most significantly by stretching the case over two seasons and an extra six hours), which is a shame, because it would interesting to see if the show would get so much praise without it coming out of a country with comparatively little reputation for good TV.  Either way, the new The Wire, this is not.

Veep Pick: Quachil Uttaus?

Shorter Rick Santorum: if only academics could have been as pious and difficult to corrupt as politicians.

Obviously, the fact that vast swathes of the Right (American and British) despise me for my job title alone is nothing new.  I do believe though that this is the first time I've been unfavourably compared to a profession so ignoble it makes me feel Colombian drug lords get a bad rap.  At least they don't try to argue that forgiving their moral and legal lapses is in the public interest.

That said, though, I really am enjoying watching Santorum's campaign.  I figure he's pretty much toast tomorrow, but in the meantime, it's hilarious watching him ahead in multiple states according to multiple polls, despite him literally having said that American protestants are working for Satan.  These people would vote for Cthulhu if he promised to eat the liberals and abortion doctors first. 

(Though obviously, if Cthulhu actually took the Oval, four years later whichever Republican voters remained alive in the ghoul-haunted ruins of America would argue that the scourging of mankind was due to the president being too moderate, and our best hope now was that Hastur would beat Cthulhu in the primaries.)

Your Brilliant Posts Are Full Of Sucking

This is a truly awesome post, of the kind that the web should have more of.  And, of course, in keeping with all internet traditions, having lavished praise upon the post, I'm now going to rip holes in it. 

Drum's quick calculations ignore two very important aspects of Death Star construction.  First, assuming a constant increase in GDP over 500 years is all well and good, but it fails to take into account that over those five centuries, steel will become more expensive, not just due to inflation (which I assume Drum is accounting for by assuming a "real increase"), but due to the increasing scarcity of the metal itself.  Even with a super-advanced recycling system, we'd start to face some fairly steep rises in the price of steel once we start building interstellar fleets.

More importantly, Drum has come up with the estimated cost of building 0.01% of a Death Star on ten thousand different planets.  Unless he's hoping to launch those pieces at pre-arranged times calculated to allow the entire set to arrive in the same system thousands of years later, to then be assembled using superglue and sellotape, I'd suggest there are some fairly major costs that are being waved away here.

Radio Friday: Sorry About The Snakes

I've been on something of a Mountain Goats kick lately, partly because Jamie was kind enough to give me Heretic Pride for my birthday.  This is from their latest, All Eternal's Deck, which is frankly quite uneven, but has a few exceptionally solid tunes on it.  This is the best.



(And don't worry, serpent-haters.  They're hardly important to the song, and no-one was stupid enough to try and bring any on-stage with them. This isn't the St Patrick's Day parade.)

1.8 Free At Last!

I would apologise for the comic being absent for so many months, but frankly, it's given you all a very accurate sense of how long matriculation took me to sit through back in '98.

 1.9                                                             1.7

Corollaries To Conservative Crapulage

Shorter Dana Loesch: you can't be raped if you've previously had sex voluntarily, with someone else.

Ah, 2012.  Truly we are in the midst of a second Enlightenment.

Immediate corollaries include, but are not limited to:

1. Rohypnol isn't a date-rape drug if she already uses sleeping pills;

2. It's not sexual assault if you've seen her scratching her own arse;

3. You can't be mugged if you've donated money to charity; [1]

4. Identity theft only happens to people who don't tell their friends where they live;

5. You can't object to being stabbed if you've had your ears pierced; [2]

6.  It's fair game for a paper to tap your phone if your agent has ever spoken to a journalist on your behalf; [3]

7. It isn't torture if anyone in the world has voluntarily done something more uncomfortable to themselves; [4]

8. Dracula's only crime is to not check his victims suck their fingers after getting a paper cut.

The concept of consent: ruining the arguments of proudly sadistic imbeciles since time immemorial.

[1] I stole this one.
[2] And this one, from Charlie Pierce.
[3] This, of course, has actually been argued.
[4] And this.

Glazed Expressions

Looking perhaps rather incongruous alongside my collection of GW models I don't have anywhere to pack away yet, here are the pottery pieces The Other Half and I painted last weekend.

How cute is that dragon?  Clearly he's a bit down because he's been woken up when all he wanted was a quick nap.  That's the downside of all those singing mermaids: you can never get any decent shut-eye.

Of course, it's also possible he's sadly asking why he doesn't have any wings.  To which the answer, obviously, is "Wait until pubety, Lockheed."

(Yes, I called him Lockheed.  Like any of you are surprised.)