All right, since everyone's giving their James Bond takes, here's mine - there is, and never has been, a James Bond. He's a character invented by British intelligence in the wake of Philby et al. to try to redeem their reputation. Every few years SIS spins a new tale to the appropriators.

It’s always the cables that kill people in this show.

Saw @realgdt.bsky.social's Frankenstein in the theater today. I do not get how they manage to film real things and make them look like a hyperrealistic fairy tale.

Witness the only reason they are left alive after rampaging through the bedroom at 0200.

I wasn’t expecting to have to think this much as John Cornyn, well, ever.

Ghost storage facilities.

333 days before I hit 30 years as a Fed and can theoretically retire. I wonder whether the shutdown will end before that.

Did women ruin the workplace?

Good thing it has a lot less subscriber data to compromise these days.

Book 80: Ring of Fire by @alexchurchill.bsky.social and @pikegrey1418.bsky.social, on the first two months of the First World War, from the initial German successes against France, Russian successes against Germany, and Austrian successes against Russia, which are all reversed in short order.

Wonder why this scene looks so familiar... #WildlifeWednesday 🐦🐕

Let's see, what hides in small spaces and drips a clear viscous fluid . . . yes, my thought is don't check any further and nuke the plane from orbit.

My latest short story is out. I have a tale in Cooking Up Death from Camden Park Press. Check it out. books2read.com/CookingUpDea...

Saudis promise 'more holes' as soon as they get extended magazines.

A collision of cats.

Nothing quite like seeing a job that looks perfect for you and then realizing it's - in this case - in India. So long, 'Senior Corporate Counsel, Law Enforcement and National Security.'

[Insert Ea-nāṣir joke here.]

A level of rest to which I aspire.

Book 79: The Pathfinder and the President by John Bicknell, on John Fremont, Lincoln and the Civil War. Fremont was the first Republican to run for President, and spent much of the war as a radical on abolition. He had a few shots to reveal himself as a mediocre general and not a great politician.

Despair, the visage commands. Yet all about it sands flow endlessly.

Apparently His Royal Highness The Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killyleagh, will now be known as Andy Epstein, saving tons on his monogram bills.

just two legs face with lips sneering visage in a desert despair

There once was a man with a statue Which said you should look up to him too But all was in ruins The dunes had just moved in And all that was left were the legs (two).

Ugh.

These are a few of my favorite things.

Can't have a Christ if you don't build an Antichrist, I suppose.

Book 78: Finding Endurance by @dbbovey.bsky.social. A very nice little book on Shackleton's Endurance expedition, starting with the rediscovery of the ship in 2022, but also about much more than that story. Musings on leadership, on pessimism v. optimism, and his own family.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Book 77: Crete 1941 by Antony Beevor, on the German airborne assault that absolutely should have ended in disaster, but the Commonwealth forces managed to wrest defeat from the locked jaws of victory. It's a fascinating battle in that the losing side picked up the wrong lessons.

Of her own accord.

Well, now we've established where his body lies mouldering in this grave, but his truth is marching on.

Nice of Google to honor Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

No outline, and I let the story go where it wants to. I dislike the term pantser, but if I am a pantser it's the story that's wearing the pants.

Got my copy of Dolmenwood by @exaltedfuneral.bsky.social today. Impressive production and more maps than even a map fan like me might need. Nice job.

Book 76: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by @annaleen.bsky.social. A book with the happy conclusion that, someday, most humans will die in a catastrophe of some sort, but that humanity will survive. While I prefer the idea that 'I will survive Armageddon,' I suppose there's comfort in the alternative.

Book 75: The City of Last Chances by @aptshadow.bsky.social. Hell of a ride, a collection of oddballs and crazies thrown together in a cursed city under foreign occupation. No spoilers, but I loved the Wood and the Reproach in particular. If you're looking for some weird fantasy, give it a read.

We are placing our house HVAC system. I asked the winner bidder 'so, how do these units connect to the internet, and how do we control them remotely.' He replied 'these don't connect to anything outside of your house.' And I said 'good.'

This shutdown better be over before @realgdt.bsky.social's Frankenstein hits my local theater.

It’s always nice to find a new review of something you published over a decade ago. Even better when it’s a positive and lengthy review with constructive criticism.

Big yawn.

‘Do you still value hearing from us?’ No, Docusign, I only value you when I have to sign something. I don’t need you or your passive aggression at any other time.

Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only.

My country, right or wrong. When right, to be praised. When wrong, to be fixed.

American (Airlines) Poet Laureate.

Does this mean Bluesky has the Juice(TM)?

Book 74: Until the Sea Shall Free Them, by Robert Frump, on the loss of the SS Marine Electric off the coast of Virginia and the disastrous state of the US Merchant Marine in the 1980s. Less of a tick-tock tale and more of a expose (based on the author's work at the Philadelphia Inquirer).

Cat content.

Book 73: Pacific Thunder by @tcinla.bsky.social, on the frequently overlooked central Pacific carrier campaign between in 1943-44, where the USN became the force that would dominate the oceans for decades to come, and the IJN became a scattering of debris under said ocean.

I just skimmed the NTSB report on the loss of the Titan submersible, and I feel like their findings can be summed up as "move fast and break things is not a viable strategy for passenger vehicles" or, more succulently, "FAFO."

Realizing that REM’s Star 69 makes no sense to the current generations. Just like every other good telephone metaphor.