Enoch

The NFL also enacted 4 rule changes for player safety reasons. The big one, from a strategic point of view, is the elimination of the "wedge" on kickoff returns. Now, no more than 2 players can group together to block on returns. That one is going to have a pretty huge impact-- the established strategy that has been used for decades in now illegal.

Has your work changed much with the new admin in town? Not in the least. But that mostly has to do with the nature of the agency I work for-- our job doesn't change depending on who is in office.

The Police -- Don't Stand So Close To Me

Got a big deadline on Friday, so to make sure that I don't miss it, I worked from roughly 9 'til 9 today. Then I came home and poured myself a large glass of Scotch. My boss wants my project around midday on Friday, so the bright side is that all this working late means I can take off for the weekend once I turn it in.

Should be an interesting opening weekend. Although I doubt that many people east of the Rockies will be staying up for the late Monday nighter. (Which I've seen referred to elsewhere as the "Best the West Coast Could Do" Bowl.) Getting the night game on Thanksgiving is a bit of kick in the nuts for my Giants. Nothing they can't overcome, but flying across 2/3rds of the country in a short week to play an outdoor night game in late November at that altitude is no picnic. The Steelers got screwed in the compensatory pick calculation. The best-guess based on past-year comp picks had them getting a likely 3rd-rounder as compensation for losing Alan Faneca to a big-money free agent offer. They ended up with a 5th. Anyhow, leading with the total number of acquired picks isn't particularly informative. The most important part is the teams that got the 3rd- (NE, CIN, CHI, NYG) and 4th-round (SD X2, TEN, IND) bonus selections.

Sort of. What I'm saying is this: look at Reservoir Dogs - it's a post-modern, ironic piece of cinema; the first in a long series of imitators which in of themselves reference previous genres (i.e. Tarantino adores pulp 60's and 70's trash cinema, Guy Ritchie is clearly influenced by Tarantino). Personally, I see this as very 1992. Viewed in that context, Pulp Fiction is still great. But it isn't timeless. Blade Runner, on the other hand, looks and feels as fresh now as when it was made. That's the difference. Both good movies but for entirely different reasons. Cheers MC But isn't that just because Dogs has had a bunch of successful imitators and a director who has continued to work in the same general type of film, while Blade Runner hasn't? Or is it something about the latter that makes it inimitable? (I would argue that the BR imitations never came along because it tanked at the box office.) Anyhow, I've never been a huge BR fan. It's good, but not nearly as impressive as its reputation in some circles. (I think it gets too talked-up by sci-fi partisans because it's the stand-in for the idea that sci-fi films can be about Serious Things rather than just blowing up aliens.) The storyline isn't that memorable, performances are inconsistent, and the dialogue is mostly terrible. (Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't fall out of their chair laughing when Rutger Hauer makes that ridiculous grandiose speech, and punctuates it by releasing a freakin' dove?!) What redeems it and makes it a film well worth watching and remembering is the art direction. The urban environment that is the background for the story is really impressive.

I think that your flexibility in replacing ministers depends on what type of government you're in. In an absolute monarchy, you can click-and-drag like Calax described. But in a Constitutional Monarchy, the row of politicians at the bottom represents the opposition party, who can't just be subbed-in one at a time. You either have to do the "boot and pray" method, or call an election that the incumbent party loses (in which case, all your ministers are replaced en masse by the opposition candidates. I haven't played a Republic yet, but I assume it's similar to the Constitutional Monarchy setup. Anyhow, despite my earlier comment about giving the game a rest, I was bored this weekend and played for a while. Played as the Brits, and I really liked how my opening moves worked out. I focused on the American theater-- immediately raising/gathering an army in Jamaica/Bahamas to attack the Cherokee in Georgia, and taking the forces I had in Britain and sending them off to attack the Pirates in the Antilles/Trinidad. Both areas fell quickly (although the pirates have some nasty melee units and took a big bite out of my forces), and I worked on bringing the Antilles army over to North America. While that was going on, the Cherokee, seeing my sizeable army garrisoning Georgia, attacked the Colonies instead, taking both Carolina and Virginia. I grabbed Carolina from them, but left VA to fend for itself. It did-- the United States emerged there, taking territory from the Cherokee while I was moving my two armies inland to take the other two Cherokee territories. Once my forces were done with the natives, one quick strike and the American Revolution was over before it could really begin. (Unless "emergent" factions can emerge more than once. Anyone know if this is the case?) AI behaving oddly note: Once I took the Cherokee Territory region, France and Spain came calling every damn turn with offers to buy it off me. Techs, Territories (Gibraltar and Newfoundland were the most common offers), and gold to balance it out were posed every single time I hit "end turn," and this is with both factions at "hostile" relations. I decided not to accept any of these offers, as I was planning my war with both of these factions. (The one for Newfoundland probably would've worked out well-- retaking the Cherokee Territories would have been much easier than invading Newfoundland-- but the whole deal felt too exploit-ish.) The one trade I did make was to the Iroquois-- Trinidad & Tobago in exchange for an alliance. Anyhow, after several turns of consolidating, recovering, and positioning, I was ready for war with the Franco-Spanish alliance. I had forces ready to strike all over the American theater: In northern New England, 1 turn's march from Quebec (the largest force); in the western Cherokee Territory, 1 turn's march from Upper Louisiana; in Georgia, ready to take the Spanish in Florida; and in a fleet just out of sight of New Orleans. All the battles went well, and I completed my "quest" to absorb the 13 Colonies. Follow-up targets were Ontario, Acadia, Cuba, and Hispanola. My trading suffered a bit, and the Spanish fleet in the Carribean outclassed my own rather badly, so I was constantly dodging it, but overall the war was a smashing success. I eventually made peace with Spain (mostly to protect my navies), but I'm still fighting the French. They're down to Newfoundland and Guyana as their only overseas holdings, and my Channel fleet is blocking all of their sea trade. I'm considering whether a continental invasion to finish them off would be worthwhile. Oh, and somewhere in there (before the war with France & Spain), I sent a force to India and took Gujarat (the Mughal territory with the trading port on the western coast of the sub-continent).

Sure, but the question is how often you're finding replacement shotguns, which depends on what you're fighting. I found that if you're only using them situationally (e.g., when a mirelurk is all up in your grill), you'll probably find enough to keep yours in respectable condition in most areas. But if the shotgun is your weapon of choice in combat generally, it's going to rust to pieces in your hands pretty often.

The Roots -- Rock You

In that event, zero is the original imaginary number.

I've always found the totalwar.org fora to be more useful than the official ones.

Exactly. It's all an abstraction used as an aid in understanding the outside world. Why should it trouble us if some of the constructs are more abstract than others? Another example: A googolplex (i.e., 10^(10^100) fits right in with the "real" counting numbers. But it is also a higher number than there likely are atoms in the observable the universe. Doesn't that make it imaginary, too?

You think you have it bad. i keep singing it, and the dog thinks it's going for a walk. Well, that's your fault for naming the dog "Stalin."

Lee Morgan -- The Sidewinder (w/ Joe Henderson, Barry Harris, Bob Crenshaw, and Billy Higgins) As a jazz fan, the most irritating thing about the transition from music on physical media to music on mp3 players (and the like) is that said devices and programs are not particularly good about providing full personnel information. Sometimes when I hear a track, I don't particularly care who the bandleader of that particular session was-- when one of the supporting performances jumps out at me, I want to know who that was. I was listening to this track on the way to work this morning, and I couldn't for the life of me remember who was playing tenor sax on this album.

Kind of an odd theme for a costume party, no? Doesn't seem like there are enough characters in the film-- besides Duke, Dr. Gonzo, Lucy, and maybe a couple of the cops, who else did people dress as?

Corrected. I cross-pollinated the original with the parody.

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world, so high, Like a tea-tray in the sky! (as recited by the Mad Hatter in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

Yeah, I think I'm going to put this one on the shelf for a little while and see if it ripens. I really don't have the time or patience to figure all the undocumented basic gameplay elements out for myself. I'll take another stab at it once there have been a few patches and once there's a good online reference for all the information that should be in the manual (or, even better, in the game itself).

Best one yet: Mary Kate and Ashley's Skate Jihad.

It would be awesome. (A sample track)

Stealth Cardboard Solid Bewildering Dungeon Man Caesar's Nazi Bandit (WTF?) Leisure Suit Disco Zombies (OMG MAEK THIS GAME NOW!!!1!)

Meh. They haven't broadcast anything worth watching since MST3K went off the air, anyway.

Simple. Begin your day with doughnuts. At lunchtime have a cheese and meat based sandwich. With a pint of guinness. For dinner eat plenty of pasta, with red wine, then go to the pub for a pint or two of ale. Finish the night with some cookies, and a whisky. Granted, you may not find teh above adds weight. It will, however, infallibly make you happy. Careful there, Wals. You're contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Checking awsomeness's profile, he's more than 5 years shy of the legal drinking age in most U.S. states. (Note: Age is probably also a reason for his rather odd height-weight ratio. Growth during one's teen years tends not to be particularly consistent; it's not unusual for people to shoot up in height quickly, then fill out that frame over the ensuing couple of years.)

Goin' metric: I'm 178cm tall, and weigh somewhere in the area of 90Kg. The weight figure has being slowly creeping up over the past few years. My cooking is relatively healthy, but I tend to go out for less-healthy/too-large lunches at work too often. (The giant burritos at Chipotle are a particular weakness.) Also, moving in with my now-wife didn't help my diet-- it's easy to deny myself something (e.g., "I don't feel like cooking, so I'll just eat some crackers and carrots for dinner"), but I don't want to push that kind of austerity on her, so we end up eating more take-out. I am going to get together with the usual crowd of middle-aged bureaucrats for some basketball after work today, though. I really suck at it (particularly ball-handling), but I compensate by being 10+ years younger than most of the other guys, which corresponds to advantages in energy level, endurance, and knee health. Other than my walk to and from the subway every day (3/4ths of a mile each way), this is most of the exercise I get. I don't have the patience for exercise-for-exercise's-sake; unless there's something productive (like yard work, or walking to work) or fun (like basketball) involved, I have trouble getting over the feeling that it's a colossal waste of time and energy that could've otherwise been put to some useful purpose.

Last night, I had the satisfying experience of launching my Empire: Total War invasion of India while drinking an Imperial India Pale Ale.