I got to see this airplane a couple of hours after it went down:
I've got pictures that I took myself, as well; some of them even turned out fairly well. I'll post those soon.
An actual exchange I had with some guy on the street just a few minutes ago:
He:Trenchcoat mafia! (I'm known locally for wearing my trenchcoat at pretty much all times.) You're not gonna shoot us, are you?
Me: (Already in a rather cynical mood, and having heard this kind of crack a zillion times before) That's so clever and original.
He: (pauses) No I'm not.
Me: OK, you're right, you're not.
Who am I to argue with that?
Oh, and for the record, time travel is NOT in general part of the world I'm working on; it was only used for the sake of the "punchline" of that one little vignette. Ergo, that vignette will never appear as it is in any of my stories that I may or may not eventually write & publish, as far as I can foresee.
P.S. How can the Bush administration be so sure it wasn't Karl Rove who leaked about Wilson's wife unless they know who it really was?
I'm not so much suggesting that they really do, as that the dolts don't know what it really means to "know" it wasn't he.
While Farwell slowly pulled himself hand over hand along the corridor, Weaver flew effortlessly on ahead, the freefall environment a help rather than a hindrance to his headlong flight.
He was already buckling into the helmsman's harness when Farwell stuck his head through the hatch. Weaver waved him towards the astrogator's station.
As he figured out which parts of his own harness attached to which, Farwell asked, "How fast did you say this ship can go?"
"Three gees acceleration, up to thirty-five thousand klicks per second delta vee in normal drive. If we can get to a PG point, we can do 99.97 percent lightspeed, gamma forty," Weaver informed him.
"Damned fast, that," Farwell said. "What's its power source, to give it that kind of a kick?"
As a row of indicators on his display ticked over to green, Weaver initiated the power-up sequence. Over the distant hum of the hydrogen pumps, he answered, "It's solar-powered."
Farwell looked up from the last of his buckles in surprise. "Solar? I wouldn't have thought sunlight could give you that kind of power."
Weaver turned his head to stare at Farwell blankly, until a look of understanding dawned on his face. "Oh yeah, solar power meant getting energy from the solar flux back in the twenty-first century, didn't it?"
"Well, yeah, of course. How else would you get power from the Sun?"
Weaver explained "Well, in the twenty-fourth century, 'solar power' doesn't mean we get our energy from the Sun." He pressed the spot on the computer display that lit up the fusion drive at the stern of the ship, and Farwell exhaled involuntarily as three times his normal weight crushed his chest against the seat. "It means we get our energy the same way the Sun does. The solar fusion cycle, you know?"
Incoming... new post soon. I'm going to post my first fictional prose I've written in years. It's just a small vignette, without much of the background I've been working on; it was just something I wanted to write so I could squeeze in the punchline. Not a knee-slapping punchline, more of an "Oh! I see" punchline.
It's basically just to work on my writing style a bit, since it's been so long since actually writing anything.
In other news, my computer's been comatose these past few months, hence the severe dry spell. I sometimes get access to other people's computers, so can still do a little something now and then.
OK, I found another source for the quote I was looking for, on someone else's blog, oddly enough. This is the version from Yahoo!. And here's the quote (which is also the one that the other blogger used, go figure; but he picked on a different aspect of it, so I'm going to go ahead and have my way with it now):
In another swipe at the French, a Florida congresswoman has proposed that the government pay for families who might want to bring home from France the remains of Americans who fought and died in the world wars.
"I, along with many other Americans, do not feel that the French government appreciates the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made to defend the freedom that the French enjoy today," Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in introducing legislation providing financial help for the reburial of veterans from the two world wars.
Gee, do you suppose that "freedom" we've defended might include, say, the freedom to *gasp* make their own choices!?!? Sovereign rights, anyone? Or are they just supposed to say "Yas Massuh, whatever you say, thank you for our freedom!"?
Hmm, I haven't been intending to turn this into a political blog (Ghu knows there are enough of those already), but it seems to be leaning that way fast. I think what I had in mind was more just funny things from the news, and one of my favorite forms of news funniness is people being stupid, and there's been a bit of an overabundance of people doing that in the political arena of late. Not that there was ever a shortage, of course. So, I'll look for something else stupid in the news, or something else funny to come up.
Wish me luck!
