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H. P. Lovecraft wrote about ghouls, canine-human hybrid creatures that lived in tunnels underneath Providence and raided graves to devour dead human flesh and bones.

When I visited my uncle in Providence, he casually mentioned the native coyote population, which lives in burrows in the side of the hill under the old cemetery.

So there are literally dog creatures tunnelling under the graves in Providence, and I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if old Howard Phillips once saw one with a bone in its mouth, and immediately ran to his typewriter to write about the unspeakable horror of it all.

I’m pretty sure it’s either The Mote in God’s Eye or The Gripping Hand.

Edit: Checked, and it’s most of the last couple of chapters of The Gripping Hand. I fudged some of the details from not having read it in a long time, but the basics are there; spaceships jockeying for strategic advantage across an entire solar system, balancing fuel and orbits, and crews doing their best to withstand painful acceleration.

There’s a sequence in a Larry Niven book where a ship sees some missiles inbound from across a solar system. In order to avoid them, they have to spend several hours at high-G thrust, nearly killing a bunch of the crew. It’s a long, slow chapter of high tension, it obeys the laws of physics, and it’s excellent.

Lead exposure won’t make good people bad, but it will make bad people worse.

King Missile - Cheesecake Truck

Granite is astonishingly durable. A marble gravestone from as little as fifty years ago is already losing its edges, whereas I’ve seen granite stones from 100+ years ago that still look crisp and new.

they NEED to do it to remain competitive

That might literally be true.

Imagine there are two factories. One spends $100 a week disposing of toxic waste. The other one saves that $100 a week by dumping their toxic waste into the local river. Absent of a robust regulatory state that can prevent and punish that kind of behavior, even if the first factory wants to be responsible environmental stewards, they might literally go bankrupt trying to compete with the evil factory.

You can apply this to anything that can be regulated. Companies might not have a choice between doing the evil thing or not; it might literally be a matter of “Well, everyone is doing it, and if I don’t, then I’ll be driven out of business anyway.”

A functional government gets out in front of this phenomenon, makes doing evil shit illegal, and levies fines and punishments against companies that do evil/illegal shit such that doing the evil shit is no longer profitable.

But instead we’ve got… [gestures broadly at our current nightmare reality].

As they slowly lose consciousness, a child says goodbye to stars, light, food, and all of existence, everywhere.

Can you imagine being these guys as Nazism is talking root in Germany?

Vote Number One to Change the Team Name: No, fuck that! We came first, and those German assholes can’t steal our cool symbol!

Vote Number Two, A Little Later: Okay, I think maybe we should go ahead and change the name of the team.

“There’s still food in the bowl that you put in there thirty minutes ago, but now I can see the bottom.”

It’s all so… plausible. His shove, her little cry of pain and surprise and fear, the way he leans down and tells her not to touch his club and then stalks away and furiously grabs the club as he leaves. The ad would have been better if it had been escalated to Looney Tunes levels of reaction, but instead they leave it in this alarmingly real area of domestic violence.

Fucking boo.

Also, and this is weird, mine shows Lake America at one level of zoom, then changes back to Lake Ontario, and then changes to Lake America all over again at an even closer level of zoom. Everything is ridiculous and awful.

I once saw a Mom at an information desk at an art museum take her fussy, fidgeting toddler, gently lay him down on the ground, and put her foot on him, Captain Morgan style:

Kid didn’t cry or try to escape. Thoroughly impressive. Might plant the seed to awaken something in the kid when he hits puberty, though.

I miss AIM :(

Ever heard of Darn Tough socks? Expensive per pair, but they come with a lifetime guarantee.

Stone Temple Montblancs

My wife does that. Early on, I asked her…

“Why do you set the microwave to 1:11?”

“Because it takes less time than 1:00.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.”

“🤦🏻‍♀️”

Pollster: Have you ever thought about shooting someone?

Me: Well even if I never had before, now that you’ve asked the question and put the idea in my head, I have, so thanks for that!

Pollster: Follow-up question: Have you ever thought of a pink elephant?

He’s already thinking of the cool next character he’s got planned.