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Explosive delta projectiles splattered on the invisible plasma shield the commando was projecting from his utility combat belt, and he returned fire as someone tossed him a large steel and very phallic-looking object. Immediately, he attached it to the quantum power port on the timesuit, and green ultrabolts lashed the... |
"Robin! The portal's closing! Let's get out of here!" Robin Hood leapt down from the outcropping he occupied, and the Ultra-Septvember-G spurted more death, doom, and dismemberment over the inanimate objects. Backing into the portal, the time commando grunted heavily as the last shot blew apart an Omega-Bot into a thou... |
"Good to see you back!" Colonel-General Sir William of Normandy said, as he approached the team that had barely made it back from their near-suicidal mission. "Is the Omicron Particle Reactor destroyed?" |
The team's explosives expert, Staff Sgt. Guy Fawkes, nodded. "Aye, sir, we neutralized it to the sub-atomic state in all seven split dimensions. I even focussed the Omicron Ultraradiation into the Trimirror Universe. We won't have to worry about any oversized SpudMechs for some time!" Everyone shared a laugh. |
"Glad to hear it, son," General of Normandy said, smacking Fawkes heartily on the back. "Queen Arthur will be pleased as well." It had been King Arthur until about 2 years ago. Gender reassignment was much easier to obtain nowadays. The various members of the team dispersed after a few more pleasantries, toddling back ... |
Robin Hood - Major Robert Huntingdon of Loxley - was the leader of an elite squad of Time Commandos, who's job it was to travel the depths and waves of the historical time stream and revert alpha-strands to the prime timeline. His team consisted of the finest warriors throughout English history, who existed somewhere b... |
Bursting from his recovery zone, Robin Hood immediately turned to the maintenance quaddroid. "What's the meaning of distrubing my recharge megacycle!" he demanded. The bot couldn't answer, but a man approached quickly. Vice-Time Admiral Frances Drake approached. |
"Hood!" he said. "there's been two alpha-strands converge into a betawave on the prime timeline in 1066!" |
"Damn!" Robin said. He grabbed his combat utility ultrabelt and buckled it in, following Drake along the corridors of the Timebase. "How long until it resolves into the prime timestream?" |
"Mr. Turing and Mr. Newton expect that the time re-alignment will be complete in forty-four hundred microns. Assemble your team, Major Hood. We're go in two hundred seven microns. This is an official sigma-four alarm code - you go in hot, find out who's caused the betawave, dispatch them, and timeport out." |
"Yes sir." Hood turned from the Admiral, who strode off to the Command Deck, and grasped his interbase voxcom from his utility strap. "Commando Team Prime-Seven, assemble at the Embarkment Vandeck!" |
Each Commando Team had five members. We've already been introduced to two. The third member of Hood's team was the Cultural Interoperative, who's job it was to reinterpret history for the Commando Team. Sub-Lieutenant Boudicca was also a fierce warrior queen in her own right, and made no bones about her desire to lead ... |
Occupying the post of heavy weapons expert was a tall and broadshouldered man named James Douglas, though everyone on the team called him "Corporal Black" after his historical nickname. An unabashed Scot, he had taken a long time to ease into knowing and trusting his English teammates. But there was no man better with ... |
Rounding out the five man team was the team's mobile science expert. Another Scot, but a more trusting one, this fellow was able to adapt to any situation. He could use his enhanced neural delta-interface to make any computer respond in almost any situation. This guy was another James, but his name was James Watt - Lie... |
Fawkes entered as well, and Robin stood on the embarkment preplatform. "Folks, we have an official sigma-four alert. Someone has mixed two alpha-streams and caused a betawave in 1066. As you all know, that's where William the Conqueror..." a cough cut him off. "General The Conqueror became famous. If he dies in the bat... |
"We're going in hot and with full commando op-equip. That means we'll all carry standard gear - Mark Five-A unibolters and Type IV lanceguns, plus your special gear. Set your physio-containment shields to full, neutranize your anti-plasma and energy dispersal fields. We'll trust to speed and shock to keep our appearanc... |
The team shook their head. "Good. Sychronize your temporal chronometers on my mark....mark! Fire up the time portation exounit!" The portal unit burst into shimmering green and aquamarine, and the five Time Commandos leapt through. |
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 |
Dystopian Future Story, Random Chapter |
Thought I'd post this. It's set in a dystopian future in which the US Constitution is overridden during a period of populace apathy by the Religious Right. And I think this bit is one of my favourite pieces of writing I've ever done. |
The day of the vote was the quietest yet. Every now and then a truck passed the bar, but not one soul entered. I stood behind the wooden, polished bar for the entire day, watching the door anxiously, with an ear turned to the news. The danger of internal terrorism, it had been claimed, was why the roads to Washington D... |
Some people surely had turned to CSPAN only to find the political channel had been deactivated. There was to be no live coverage of this debate, of this vote. It was a day of waiting for most. Some likely mourned, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of those whom the violence had already claimed. |
But it was not television that broke the news to me. Rather, it was the noise of something in the back room breaking. I had already sent home my staff for the day – it was apparent that nobody was going to come in and need the kitchen working beyond what I could do myself – and so I was alone. I paused and turned, gazi... |
But then the door opened, and the man stepping into my bar wasn’t a soldier. He was disheveled, a finely cut suit torn to shreds, and blood soaking the shirt through in several places. His hair was askew and a little flap of skin was drooping sadly over his left eye. Blood from that cut, and possibly others, obscured h... |
“What?” I said. He looked at me and then laughed, just a little. |
“Oh, I voted no,” he said. I moved over to him and slid an arm around his body, taking him quickly to sit. |
“Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” I started, but he cut me off. |
“That’s pretty much the half of it,” he replied. He was reaching into his coat for something as I pressed a wadded bar towel to his head. “Here,” he said, groaned, really. He pressed a blood-covered flash drive into my hand. |
I raised an eyebrow and gazed down to it. “What’s this?” |
“I recorded the proceedings today. Remember how we talked about proof? This is it.” |
“Is this why they beat you?” |
“Nobody beat me, Jake. I got this getting through the wire they put around the Capitol. We slipped out the back after the vote, and gave the Marines the slip for a minute. We cut the wire with some tin snips, but didn’t do a good enough job. I caught a strand of it in the face,” he said, indicating the tear along his f... |
I sighed softly, pressing the bit of skin into its proper place on my brother’s forehead. “Hold this. I’ll get the first aid kit.” |
“First thing you do is hide that drive.” |
“Do it!” he said. His voice was firm in a way I’d rarely ever heard. I raised an eyebrow, but I moved over to the bar with the flash drive. One of the taps was loose, and I tugged it free and slid the drive into a hollow there. Then I closed the tap back down, and found the first aid kid. |
He was my little brother, a year and a half younger than me. Mom and dad never had much money, but Jonathan always managed. He had made his first dimes selling lemonade on the street corner, or something else equally clichéd, I’m sure. Regardless, he worked hard to get enough money to go to school. Only the best – Jona... |
I went to Iraq two days after he graduated from Harvard. I was 25, he was 23, and our lives were about to take two very separate turns. He moved to New York and made a killing on Wall Street. I went to Baghdad and killed people. His investments were getting bigger and bigger, and after my first tour I started giving ha... |
It was my last tour that I won the Silver Star. As always, our convoy was minding its own business, when we hit an IED. I was ejected from the .50 caliber turret and hit the ground away from the Humvee. Didn’t break anything, but I was black and blue for two solid weeks. Managed to get my M-16 up and around. |
It wasn’t a normal attack. This time the terrorists, or Sunni militia, or Shia militia, or Al Qaeda, or whoever they were, had stuck around. We heard the distinctive sound of AK 47s being fired at the column. My Humvee, the lead, was down and out. There were four more in the column. As I was getting my bearings someone... |
I knew that if I didn’t get back to the convoy, I was dead. Nothing seemed broken, so I got up and started running. I was shot in the back, right in the armour plate, and was back down on my face with a mouth of dust. We were stuck in some small fucking Iraqi town, buildings on either side alive with someone trying to ... |
Next thing I heard was bullets zipping over my head. I looked to the side and there was some Iraqi shooting at me, or shooting in general. But he was sitting in the driver’s side of a big fucking truck, probably belonged to the coalition originally, with the top cut right off. That’s a weird sight, this big ol’ two ton... |
The truck was running as I jumped in and tossed the dead Iraqi (he looked about sixty) out to the dirt road. I hit the gas. A couple of our boys thought I was going to ram them, but luckily their shots went wide, or snapped off the hood. I used the beat up old truck to smash my burning, shattered Humvee out of the road... |
“Come on, dammit!” I yelled. “Move the fucking Hummers!” Next thing I knew, there were three or four men jumping onto the back of the truck, using it for cover, spraying fire at one of the buildings hemming us in where I guess a few Iraqi fighters must have been. A few bodies were tossed in the back by more soldiers, w... |
Then I threw the truck into reverse and peeled out of the ambush after the Hummers. The guys in the back did a hell of a job putting out covering fire. They must have emptied five or six clips each as we peeled out. No careful shooting, we just wanted to get the fuck out of there. |
Then I noticed there was a guy in the truck next to me. I don’t remember him getting in, but he was there. His helmet had been blown in half, probably by one of the first impacts, but later in the fight he had taken a bullet. It had skipped off his skull and left him bleeding and dazed. He died of brain damage later, I... |
They gave me the Silver Star and they gave that man’s wife a folded flag, and we both did the same thing – the best we could. Fucking Army. |
Friday, September 11, 2009 |
It's that time again. |
8 years ago, New York City and Arlington, Virginia were attacked by terrorists of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda Islamist Jihad group. Everybody in the world knows the story of this horrid day - certainly I remember it being seared into my mind when Jim Burns came on the PA at school and announced it to a shocked group of ... |
Instead, I want to remind you of Jon Stewart's thoughts when the Daily Show came back a couple weeks later. Or of Keith Olbermann's thoughts three years ago. Or alternately, of the cartoons that ran in the local paper a few days after September 11th. I want to remind you, my devoted readers (lol) about the realities of... |
September 11th is a horrible day, a terrible time in human history. But the wholesale and brutal slaughter of 3017 people is but a drop of dead in the timeline of the United States, as an example. 19,246 soldiers were killed in the Battle of the Bulge. 3654 Americans, north and south, died at the Battle of Antietam. Wh... |
We must remind ourselves that the Americans have never seen such civilian casualties in their history from a foreign source. The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 never truly damaged the civilian population - those weapons didn't yet exist to cause mass civilian casualties without long, protracted sieges of starvat... |
Of course, America was very good at damaging civilian infrastructure, and still is. Just go ask the Afghans and the Iraqis. So what 9/11 was, was a shock that people could actually strike a city that hadn't seen war in hundreds of years: New York. That the heart of the US military was not immune: the Pentagon. It was a... |
This isn't a bad thing. Every great nation has moments that shake it to its very core. How those nations are defined is the mannerism in which they act following this. Afterwards, everyone expected the United States to perform exactly as it had the last two times there was such a moment. They expected the (glorified an... |
I remember the Bruce MacKinnon cartoons of Sept 12, 13, and 14, each detailing the image of Uncle Sam. The first had Uncle Sam on his knee, a thick knife titled terrorism stuck deep in his back. The second showed Uncle Sam struggling to his feet, reaching for the blade. The third showed the blade discarded, and Uncle S... |
Five years later, Keith Olbermann gave a monologue from Ground Zero in New York City: |
The world has changed, and the United States failed the challenge. They allowed themselves to be deluded by fuzzy photos and false reports on yellowcake and invaded Iraq for no good reason. Yes, they toppled an evil dictator, but they killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people in the process - and 4,334 US soldiers. ... |
Yet a failure doesn't mean the dream is dead. One poor decision, or one poor government is not a permanent blemish on the Great American Experiment concocted by Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et al. After all, they lived through the Civil War; through the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan. George W. Bush co... |
This is the question we hope will be answered by the Obama presidency, be it one term or two. I'm not saying that Obama is a saviour - I'm simply questioning whether or not the Union can work in the way it has for the past couple hundred years in the post Bush era. We're watching the health care bill right now, watchin... |
If the government can still function in this morass, we just might be on the way forward. But I won't be happy until BOTH sides sit down and pass an important bill without the ideological discrimination that has dominated the Congress since, well, Gingrich. That's when we know the Union will be going forward, and not d... |
People have freedom of speech and can say what they want, but the same people should attempt to educate themselves as to what they're actually saying, instead of listening to the talking heads, who absolutely do not tell it how it is. The fear that came from 9/11 - that the United States is somehow vulnerable to evil f... |
Tuesday, September 8, 2009 |
Historical Event of the Week: End of the Marathon of Hope |
Many of you non-Canadians out there probably haven't heard of a fellow named Terry Fox. Terry was a young Canadian doing what lots of young Canadians loved to do in the late 70s. He played basketball and was noted for his determination, and went off to university at Simon Fraser. The difference was that Terry had cance... |
Instead of being a pussy, Terry refused to give up. They took his leg, but that just gave him a greater balls-to-dude ratio. Terry decided to run across the fucking country, from Newfoundland to BC. He dipped his leg in the Atlantic Ocean and ran across the island of Newfoundland. Nobody gave a fuck. |
He ran across Nova Scotia. People started to care, they lined the highways in some places. Quebec was pretty rough on Terry, but then he hit Ontario, and realized he was a celebrity, and beloved. Millions came in to help fight cancer. And Terry was given interviews and Darryl Sittler gave him his All-Star Jersey, and e... |
But this is about the end of the Marathon of Hope, because Terry Fox's cancer metastasized to his lungs. He couldn't run anymore, because he had trouble breathing. He stopped outside of Thunder Bay, and the place where he stopped has become a point of national pilgrimage. |
Terry couldn't run anymore, but his Marathon never really stopped. The Marathon of Hope continued as fundraisers went across Canada, and massive telethons raised over $24 million in Terry's name. Every year, kids across Canada (and the world) take place in the Terry Fox Run, wherein they raise money for cancer research... |
Terry Fox died on June 28, 1981, but he remains a hero to many Canadians and cancer patients. I always think of him as the guy who spat in Death's face and said, "Fuck you. I'm gonna run across Canada, leg or no leg. Take my life if you want - because it's worth it." |
But maybe we should look at Terry's own words about doing this: |
...everybody seems to have given up hope of trying. I haven't. It isn't easy and it isn't supposed to be, but I'm accomplishing something. How many people give up a lot to do something good. I'm sure we would have found a cure for cancer 20 years ago if we had really tried. |
Hockey Player of the Week: Larry Robinson |
Holy shit I'm behind. I'm gonna spend my shift working on my b-day to try and catch up on blogposts. Today's Hockey Player is one of the greatest defensemen of all time; if he's not mentioned in the first all-time defensive pair, he's definitely in the second. That's right, he's up there with Orr, Harvey, Lidström, and... |
#19, Larry Robinson |
Larry Robinson was best known as Big Bird to his contemporaries - probably because the hair created a fringe similar to the Muppet of the same name. But what is undeniable is that Robinson was one of the greatest hockey players of all time. He was #25 on the Hockey News's list of the top 100 players - but there has nev... |
Robinson was also #2 for most of his early career to another very famous defenseman: Bobby Orr. He often finished second in Norris voting to the perennial defense champ (who was arguably the best hockey player of all time). Big Bird outlasted Orr, though. He played 20 seasons and made the playoffs each time - and won s... |
Big Bird was a massive figure on the Montreal blue line - 6'5", and a hugely intimidating physical figure. In the wunderkind Montreal team of the 70s, people knew that if they had to get to Ken Dryden, they had to go through Robinson, a task no hockey player looked forward to. |
For his career, Larry was +730, a record that will probably never be broken, due to the sheer dominance of Montreal for those 10 years in the 70s. He was never a minus player, and owned every blue line he was on, no matter who was in front of him - be it Yvan Cournoyer, Jean Beliveau, Steve Shutt, Bob Gainey, Guy Carbo... |
But there's more. Larry has coached in the NHL as well, first for the Kings in the post-Wayne era (they didn't do so hot), and later for the Devils. Robinson coached the Devils to the 2000 Stanley Cup and the 2001 Stanley Cup Finals; he was fired the next year, but came back in time to be assistant to the famous Pat Bu... |
He joined the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1995, and Larry's #19 was retired by the Habs for his service to the team. He was one of the greatest players we ever had, and we should be lucky to see another man of his stature and statesmanship on Montreal in the future. |
Monday, September 7, 2009 |
From the mouths of undergrads... |
I found this list of quotations from when I marked Religious Studies 100 papers for a prof back at my alma mater. Suffice to say, many of them are fucking hilarious. I'm going to give you an intro to hilarity. |
As I marked these anonymously I have no way of knowing if they were written by idiots, people who slept through class, never went, or crazy fundamentalists of some type. They are, however, all worth a read. |
Pagans are people who think Satan is God and God is Satan and are wrong. |
Well, I wouldn't want to be wrong. Glad I'm not a pagan! |
In order for a religion to be a religion it must have a God, a Son, and a Holy Ghost. These are the three basic requirements for religion. |
Sorry, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoites, Taoists, Jews, Wiccans, and those of any other faith. You're not actually religions. |
If it wasn't for pagans we couldn't have neo-pagans. |
I do remember the name on this one. C. Obvious. |
I believe that Mormons might be a sect of Christianity. But maybe that's just their beliefs. |
Actually, Mormons spawned from Viking myth. They just believe they're a Christian sect. |
Christianity and Voodoo are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Voodoo is a religion that has deep roots in black magic and essentially are devil followers - they definately don't follow the Christian God. Anyway possession for them is something that should be embraced not eliminated. However, I suppose if Jesus reincar... |
Well damn. Jesus himself possessing you would be OK? What about Moses? Job? Noah? How about Joe Stalin? Christ. |
The three requirements for religion are life, death, and resurrection. Without resurrection you can't have religion. All religions have these things. |
A pagan is a person who believes in feminism. Feminism is also called Wicca. |
That's right. Wiccans all pray to their founder: Susan B. Anthony. |
The Nation of Islam is different from mainstream Islam because it is not very nice to people. |
This is actually really quite true. The Nation of Islam is not very nice to people. Islam is only not nice to women, infidels, and homosexuals. Who obviously aren't people at all. |
The Nation of Islam believes that black people are the 'cream of the earth' which makes no sense because black people are not cream coloured. |
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