To all who celebrate...

Happy Perfect Date!

Major Tomski

The Soviet space program was a lot more slapdash than they let the world know at the time. Consider that their planned lunar lander was a one-man craft and its occupant would have had to exit the Soyuz, EVA on over to the lander, strap in, land on the moon and take off again, dock with the Soyuz, then exit the lander and EVA back on over to the capsule. The opportunities for disaster there are legion.

Then there was the crew of Soyuz 11, and their trip home from the Salyut space station...

Mission control, to everyone’s relief, ordered them to come home early. They buttoned up Salyut and climbed into the Soyuz, wearing only their leisure suits. Which became a problem when they prepared to disengage and a warning light began to blink. Sounding nearly hysterical at this point, Volkov shouted at ground control, “The hatch isn’t pressurized! What should we do? What should we do?” Obviously they couldn’t disengage if the hatch wasn’t completely sealed, unless they were in their spacesuits and helmets. They tried various procedures suggested by the techies on the ground. Nothing worked. 

Ground control finally advised them to tape a piece of paper over the warning light and proceed. Read that sentence again. Nothing shouts “Soviet space program!” like that single sentence.

"Da, comrade. Just put tape over 'Check Engine' light. Should be fine!"

These tales and more can be found in the book I just finished reading, The Wrong Stuff, by John Strausbaugh. Recommend!

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Nag, nag, nag...

The Apple Watch has a sleep monitor app which can keep track of your sleep patterns based on, I'm assuming, things like your heart rate and the amount of moving around you do.

Under normal circumstances this is kind of cool, but if you're having a stressful week, your watch will cheerfully add to it by chiming and haptically tapping you on the wrist over breakfast to inform you that "Your sleep score was poor last night".

Thanks, HAL, I was aware of that. I don't need to be chided by my watch before coffee.

Meme Dump!

Thank God It's Memeday!

Tab Clearing...

• Oops. It looks like half of all global seaborne sulphur shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz.


• Papyrus containing part of The Iliad found in tomb with Egyptian mummy.


• Meta to add facial recognition to its creeper glasses, to make being stalked even easier!

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Meme Dump!

Midweek Memes!

Rising Sun

Japan, like other democracies in the region, realizes that, despite the US talking about a "strategic pivot to Asia" for something like a decade now, it might well be on its own against China. (You know things are tense in the region if Japan and South Korea are speaking to each other.)

The latest step it's taking is legalizing arms exports, which should be an important source of income for the country, as well as making advanced arms available to nations like the Philippines.

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Manic Pixel Dream Girl...

That twenty-something blonde EMT chick who's a big MAGA fan and who runs an OnlyFans account on the side that you follow?

She's actually a dude who's a med student in northern India running a side hustle looking to build up enough cash to emigrate.

This is just the latest version of the Macedonian Social Media Political Rage Bait Hustle.

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Meme Dump!

The Start of the Killing Season...

If you read this blog, you almost certainly know that yesterday marked the 251st anniversary of the clashes between trained bands of militia and the Crown's regulars at the towns of Lexington and Concord.

Other notable events on the 19th of April include the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, the fiery denouement of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco back in 1993, and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

This week also contains a number of notable anniversaries, and if there's anything both unhinged weirdos and terrorists both like, it's doing their mass casualty events on historically significant dates.

Keep an eye out and think about where you want to be for the next few days.

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Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

Memes to Kick Off the Week!

Tab Clearing...

• When you click that opt-out button on a website, have you really opted out? A new audit thinks not. That audit looked at web traffic associated with Microsoft, Meta, and Google and found they all failed to honor such requests.


• "How a Navy photographer snapped an iconic Artemis II astronaut photo" (As a fan of candid portraiture, that photo slaps.)


• The only ones qualified enough to shoot their partners.

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Meme Dump!