I am very worried about the fact that people are putting so little effort into building self-sufficient airtight underground shelters. They would be useful in so many different disaster scenarios: nuclear war, destruction of the atmosphere by pollution, crazy weather from global warming, and possibly even something hitting the earth and setting off all the volcanoes.
Carolina locusts live all over the United States. I’ve read that the southern ones make a crackling noise as they fly, but the ones here in the Midwest fly silently like butterflies.
I saw a bottle of castor oil at Target the other day. I didn’t know it still existed, I thought it was just a prop in Victorian stories. Apparently it’s a type of laxative.
According to Wikipedia, the snake-wrapped-around-a-rod symbol can be either a caduceus (two snakes with wings on top, associated in mythology with heralds, and thus with commerce and negotiation) or a rod of Asclepius (one snake and no wings, associated with medicine). They are often confused with each other.
The emperor in the story seriously thought that buying fabric that only wise people could see– and telling his whole kingdom about it–was a good way to find out who was smart and who was dumb. Which is pretty good evidence that… well, even if the fabric had worked as advertised, that emperor probably wouldn’t have been able to see it.
This is something I seriously worry about, being a comic artist. I’ve seen a couple of instances on Left Handed Toons where comments on one strip correctly predicted something about the content of the next strip, and the artists have no way of proving they didn’t steal the idea from the commenter. And LHT isn’t even one of the most popular comics… I can only imagine what Jeph Jacques and Ryan North go through.
The original song goes “The playing of the merry organ ringing in the year.” Until a few years ago, I heard “merry organ” as “merry-o, and”… so I thought a “merry-o” was some archaic musical instrument. I guess cadence has thrown me off many times when it comes to understanding song lyrics.
And the pronunciation of “a” in Canadian English is more complicated than you might think.
Anyway, happy New Year, all. I have good news and bad news.
Unfortunately, my life is getting pretty saturated with writing projects, including a collection of short stories and a sequel to the science fiction novel Kea’s Flight. This is on top of my full-time retail job. So I am reducing the number of “Abby and Norma” strips I post, as I warned earlier that I might have to do. From now on, only two strips a week. So you won’t get to read as much “Abby and Norma” in the following year as you might have thought you would.
Fortunately, those strips will be scheduled to post on Saturdays and Sundays… so you’ll be able to read more new “Abby and Norma” tomorrow and the next day, which I bet you didn’t think you would get to do!
I’ll let you know if I get to a point in life when I have the ability to go back to a daily posting schedule. Probably that’ll only happen if my science fiction novel and other writing starts selling so much that I can make a living off it, and have endless free time. (A girl can dream, right?)
On this issue, I think sometimes Abby is right and sometimes Norma is. When I come up with logical arguments to support my opinions, it usually feels to me as if I’m just figuring out the logical processes that my brain originally went through to form the opinions. On the other hand, some people’s opinions, like the anti-gay-marriage sentiment, seem to me like rationalized gut feelings– “I instinctively find this gross, and therefore I have to come up with a reason why it’s evil.” But I don’t know– maybe it feels logical to them.
Of course there will be “countless billions” of people in the future. Just add up all the generations between now and the time humans go extinct. (Of course, I’ll turn out to be wrong if humans go extinct sooner than I expected. But I can still argue that the number of billions was “countless” because we were unable to count it in advance.)
If you live in an apartment or a dorm, an inflatable boat is pretty much the only option. Skidbladnir is mine.
My parents raised me to love human-powered vehicles–heck, they started the website Velomobiling.com. I still love ‘em, aquatic or otherwise. But I’ve always found the acronym “HPV” amusing.
