My favorite was Typhoon Longwang.

War has NEVER been just for soldiers. Famine and epidemic accounted for most war deaths throughout history. Foraging armies stripped the countryside of food. The discovery of potatoes, that could be kept in the ground, and the invention of canning, went a long way toward reducing civilian starvation.

I'll go see this because I want a good space epic, but none of the trailers did much for me. Supposedly humanity can't survive on earth, but all we see are dust storm scenes I can see any night on the news from Phoenix. Anyway, didn't we do that plot in "Lost in Space" and (shudder) "After Earth?" The space scenes are…

Also, we decided we really didn't like the guttural "gh" (or "ch") sound. A beginning German class will say "Ish bin" or "Ik bin," not the proper "Ich bin." So we dropped it or softened it. Before the shifts in pronunciation, the apparently wildly different English "through" and German "durch" would have been very…

There's a B-36 in the Air Force Museum in Dayton. I don't know what impressed me more, seeing one for real or the fact that it was indoors. Seriously, if you're in Dayton, go there.

Da, tovarishch! Frft Russil Shith Love? Chto k chortu eto? (What the hell is that?) At least he didn't turn R and N backward. They did that for the film "The Russians Are Coming" and it always looked like "The Yaussiis Are Coming" to me. And the fancy "M" people like to make with three uprights and a curly bar across…

Between road rage and concealed carry loonies, anyone who stops after an accident in the U.S. is asking to commit suicide.

If we're going to ban athletes who abuse, how about others? There's a long list of luminaries from the arts and humanities who were thoroughly rotten people, like Roman Polanski or Frank Lloyd Wright, who once took his mistress to Europe and left his wife home. Ban their works from the canon and eliminate them from…

Someone with a history degree thinks the 1500's were "medieval?" By the 1500's, America had been discovered, the printing press had put all ancient knowledge into print, and before the end of the century, the earth would be circumnavigated several times, and Galileo and Shakespeare would be adults.

Super large scale desalination.

What part of "flood plain," "climate change," "red giant star" or "earthquake" is so hard to understand? Or do you want to replace "hemoglobin" with "that red stuff in your blood" and "aorta" with "big blood tube that you die if it gets a hole in it?" Maybe dumbing down is part of the problem, not the cure. If you can…

At least one of the plots appears to have been done with Excel, which has about the worst graphing utility around. You can't scale the output in pixels (ANY graphics program that doesn't permit scaling in pixels is an automatic FAIL), you have to right click randomly around the graph to select the element you want to…

My grandfather quit just short of success after 6-up failed.

"Zerzan's critique of civilization is certainly interesting and worthy of discussion."

The problem with extremely wide highways (e.g. the beltway around Atlanta) is there are so many lanes that people drive haphazardly. Two lanes is often insufficient because even a single slow driver creates a choke point. Three lanes allows traffic to sort out without anarchy.

We don't have any good east-west defensive lines. These days rivers aren't that much of an obstacle.

I find it awfully hard to take the notion of Sarah Palin's stupidity seriously, when so many of the people who repeat it seem to be incapable of recognizing hyperbole when they see it.

Why am I hearing faint Kingston Trio melodies?

Sounds like a singularly nasty virus. Full awareness and senses, but absolutely no motor control. You could end up sitting helpless in the rain, or baked by the sun, or swarmed by mosquitoes. Your muscles would cramp from the immobility. After a while, scavengers would stop distinguishing between the merely dead and…

There are all kinds of cute oddities. Why does remote Modoc County have Raider fans? Nobody outside Arizona is a Cardinals fan, and apparently nobody anywhere is a Jets fan. The full map notes that the Jets don't have a plurality in any county. Broadway Joe, we need you. It looks like a lot of folks solve the…