Glueball Wormening

This week in Plano:

…but normal service resumes later next week:

I was going to take New Wife on a little car trip over the weekend up into the Ozarks as she has Monday off, but I don’t live in Chicago anymore so my blood has thinned.  Yeah, I’m a big pussy.

We’ll stay indoors, wrap up / stay in bed, hope that the ice storms don’t cause any power outages, and trust that I don’t end up looking this:

 

RFI: Brave Problems

I know a couple of you folks use the Brave browser, and I need a little assistance.

When I create a bookmark for a page, it doesn’t appear anywhere:  not in the folder I select, nor, it appears, anywhere else.  This happens regardless of whether I use the little Bookmark shortcut on the left of the URL, or hit CTRL+D.

Brave’s homepage doesn’t seem to have any actual help functions — only FAQs and a forum to which I can’t submit a query, or start a thread.  Highly irritating.

Any advice or assistance will be appreciated.

 

Test

I think I may have figured out what was happening with WordPoop (think “automatic update” and you won’t be far from the truth).  To test this, please respond in comments if the entire passage below gets posted (it ends, “So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…” )

Julia (“Jules”) Wakefield is a twenty-five year old secretary who works at a British government agency, in a department so boring and inconsequential that everybody who’s ever worked there leaves it off their resume.

That’s during the day. At night, however, she is a fantasy maven: a mistress of a popular Internet website which explores and plays in the world of fantasy, and she is constantly looking out for The Next Big Fantasy Thing for her many hundreds of online fans and followers.

So when she discovers that her little neighborhood bookstore has found an obscure fantasy series from the 1930s, she buys the books; but when she reads them, she’s puzzled. The writing isn’t much good, the characters nothing unusual for the fantasy world, and the scenarios, while filled with erotic adventure, are quite bland, even though they do feature the standard fare of goblins, trolls, fairies and elves.

She posts her opinion online, and is mortified at the response from her readers in the comments section: “Missed the point,” “How could you be unmoved by the experience?” and the most cutting, “I thought you were smarter than this” are but a few of the remarks. She’s about to close the comments, when the very last one appears: “Did you not lick the symbol?

Jules has no idea what this means, so she emails the commenter for an explanation, and in the response, she discovers the secret of the books’ popularity.

At the end of each chapter there appears a large, strange symbol (a different one for each book). Her reader tells her that if Julie licks the symbol, she will instantly be transported into the book and story itself, and will appear as a participant in the story at the beginning of the chapter, as the storyteller. (All the books are written in the first person.) When the chapter ends, the reader explains, she will be returned to reality, none the worse for wear, with absolutely no time having elapsed since she licked the symbol, and the chapter will have been magically rewritten with herself as the new storyteller, and the symbol will have disappeared.

The only problem is that while in the story, if she changes any part of the storyline in any way, even by misquoting the dialogue, the entire story will change from that point on, and she will not be able to control what happens. Only the occurrence of the last sentence in the original chapter can bring her back to reality—e.g. “At that moment, the door to the room opened, and a strange figure entered the room.

The kicker is that if the last sentence cannot occur—say, if the door has already been destroyed by a phantom attacker—then she will no longer be able to return to reality, and will be trapped inside the story until the end of the next chapter. Worse still, if she happens to be killed in the story, she will instantly be transported back to reality, and could suffer a fatal heart attack, or not.

So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…

And yes, it’s the premise for a series of novels I had planned to write several years ago, but lost interest therein because “fantasy”.


Update:  Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.  Normal service will resume tomorrow.

AOBTD

Now it’s Diana Rigg’s turn to shuffle off this mortal coil (or, as the title suggests:  “another one bites the dust”).   In an email to me, Mr. Free Market included this pic:

…and I’m fairly sure this would be how we all want to remember her.

R.I.P. to one of the classiest and sexiest Dames ever.

Heart Attacks

Apparently, the owner of this house suffered several heart attacks during its construction.  When I saw the pics, I nearly had a couple too, albeit for different reasons.

From the article:

Milkman-turned-builder and artist Barry Surtees began his vision for the glass palace in 2007.

Actually, it looks like something a one-time milkman might have built. As an art gallery, it might have been okay, albeit still high up on a Hillary-Clinton-Industrial-Strength Ugly scale.  As an actual house to live in?  Heart attack material.  It reinforces my hatred of All Things Modern more than does Lady Gaga or rap music .

I think I’m going to need an extra shot of gin with my breakfast today.

Good Question

From Scott Adams:

More than one, now that I think of it.  I used to watch the NFL on Sundays when there was nothing else (i.e. an off-week for F1, no major golf tournaments), and very occasionally a couple of Cubs baseball games (old habits die hard).  Never the NBA, AMQ (after Michael quit).  I only like watching hockey live, never on TV, and since I left Chicago, not that either.  (Actually, I stopped watching the Blackhawks when they moved out of the old atmospheric Chicago Stadium and into the bland new United Center, but that’s a rant for another time.)

Basically, I’m left with cricket (which is hardly ever on, thank gawd for YouTube), English football (which is hanging on by a fingernail because BLM support) and Formula 1.  And with F1 I’ve gone from keen support to sorta-maybe ever since Lewis fucking Hamilton suddenly realized he was Black (half-Black, to be precise, but let’s go with the Democrat / Afrikaner “single drop of blood” measure, as Hamilton is).  I used to watch F1 Sunday, which is a scene-setting show for the Grand Prix of the day, but as that has turned into a “Kneel for Black Lives Matter” orgy I stopped watching that shit, and now watch only the race itself.

If I do a rough count, I’ve gone from about 20-30 hours a week of sports viewing to about 4 or 5, and even that may slip a bit more if things get too unbearable.  (The English Premier League season has ended, so nothing there until September, it looks like.)

So in answer to the above question:  yeah, Scott;  BLM and the other Commie hangers-on have messed up sports for me too.