Conquest of the Planet of the Bride of the Son of the Return of the Open Bar

[Junkenstein]

Picked up some sort of cold/flu thing. Still gone to work. Woe betide any fool who calls in sick today. I'm 400 miles from home and sick and STILL HERE.

What do you do for a living again?  I always kinda assumed you worked in oil, up on a rig in the North Sea or something.

I'm in Demolition and unfortunately tend to be based away from home a lot. At the moment "a lot" is pretty much all the fucking time.

[Junkenstein]

I had 142 unread emails this morning.

Nobody should have to put up with that.  Almost all of them are cc'd.  So I erased everything.  If it's important, they'll call.

I set my work email to autorespond to any with the effect of the following:

"I get a lot of e-mail. If it is important send a hardcopy, I'll need it anyway. Or call me."

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I'm writing my husband's book, now! (two other writers and a contract being cancelled later)

This sounds like a good thing? But I can't really understand it so I'm not sure.

It's a good thing, but it's kind of ridiculous that it took him so long to surrender to the inevitable.

[Juana]

That sounds like my email account.

I get, on average, about 90 "conversations" in Outlook on a week day, so probably closer to 150 emails, back and forth.  Over half have nothing to do with me.  I always love getting emails about how "there is cake for all the staff in the common room" for example.  Yeah, because that's only a two mile walk for me.  I really needed that information.  And please tell me more about the company Tumblr!  I'd troll the damn thing, if anyone actually ever read it.

Trolling tumblr is the best. There are so many vegans to fuck with.

I told one to STFU on facebook the other day, and I'd BE vegan if we had decent food options around here. They're essentially evangelicals.

Most of them, yes. I know like, two, who are not incredibly motherfucking annoying about their diet. The ones on Tumblr are almost a charicature. Post something about "oh my god, vegans are going to be so annoying about this" and one'll pop up with something like "YOU MEAN HOW NOT KILLING ANIMALS IS BETTER THAN (X)?"

[LMNO]

A really good friend of mine is vegan, he's the only TOTALLY COOL vegan I've ever met. When a group of us go out, he treats it as HIS problem, and just goes with wherever we're at, to the point of just ordering fries and a couple of beers. Interestingly, this makes the group voluntarily look for places that gives him an option, without him ever making a fuss about his meal choices.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

So, the kiln that failed is finally cool enough to properly examine.

8" channel twisted like licorice, slammed the silicon carbide rollers up against the top of their pass-through brick, shattering them ($2000/per, mind you) like so much glass.  2 bent drive shafts, and the shaft on the drive gearbox is bent 30 degrees.  To speak nothing of 300 feet of drive chain, 200 bearings, 200 sprockets, and 60 saggers full of material stuck in the kiln on jammed rollers.  Fuck if I know how I'm going to get them out.

Here, failure is an option, even when it isn't an option.   

[Juana]

Is this the result of Filthy Assistant's you-aren't-the-boss-of-ME-ism?

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

A really good friend of mine is vegan, he's the only TOTALLY COOL vegan I've ever met. When a group of us go out, he treats it as HIS problem, and just goes with wherever we're at, to the point of just ordering fries and a couple of beers. Interestingly, this makes the group voluntarily look for places that gives him an option, without him ever making a fuss about his meal choices.

Well, yeah, personal choice is personal. None of the crusading idiots ever got me to give up meat. I was inspired by somebody I knew for a year before I even realized he was veggie.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

So, the kiln that failed is finally cool enough to properly examine.

8" channel twisted like licorice, slammed the silicon carbide rollers up against the top of their pass-through brick, shattering them ($2000/per, mind you) like so much glass.  2 bent drive shafts, and the shaft on the drive gearbox is bent 30 degrees.  To speak nothing of 300 feet of drive chain, 200 bearings, 200 sprockets, and 60 saggers full of material stuck in the kiln on jammed rollers.  Fuck if I know how I'm going to get them out.

Here, failure is an option, even when it isn't an option.   

So is clusterfuck.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

So, the kiln that failed is finally cool enough to properly examine.

8" channel twisted like licorice, slammed the silicon carbide rollers up against the top of their pass-through brick, shattering them ($2000/per, mind you) like so much glass.  2 bent drive shafts, and the shaft on the drive gearbox is bent 30 degrees.  To speak nothing of 300 feet of drive chain, 200 bearings, 200 sprockets, and 60 saggers full of material stuck in the kiln on jammed rollers.  Fuck if I know how I'm going to get them out.

Here, failure is an option, even when it isn't an option.   

So is clusterfuck.

Jim:  This looks like a bomb went off!  Holy shit!

Roger:  For you, it was hellish temperatures, twisted steel, and a tangled catastrophe of broken drive train and smashed rollers.  For me, it was Friday.

Jim: ...

Roger:  Fuck you, I'm sick!

Jim:  THIS SHIT ISN'T FUNNY!

Roger:  Laugh or cry, boss, laugh or cry.

Jim:  Point.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

On the plus side, I've figured out how to get the saggers out.

I'm going to have to dismantle the whole fucking thing.

I am not at all upset about this.  No.  I currently exist in the eye of the storm, a small oasis of calm and serenity.  It's nice and quiet here, and everything is going to be okay.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

So, the kiln that failed is finally cool enough to properly examine.

8" channel twisted like licorice, slammed the silicon carbide rollers up against the top of their pass-through brick, shattering them ($2000/per, mind you) like so much glass.  2 bent drive shafts, and the shaft on the drive gearbox is bent 30 degrees.  To speak nothing of 300 feet of drive chain, 200 bearings, 200 sprockets, and 60 saggers full of material stuck in the kiln on jammed rollers.  Fuck if I know how I'm going to get them out.

Here, failure is an option, even when it isn't an option.   

So is clusterfuck.

Jim:  This looks like a bomb went off!  Holy shit!

Roger:  For you, it was hellish temperatures, twisted steel, and a tangled catastrophe of broken drive train and smashed rollers.  For me, it was Friday.

Jim: ...

Roger:  Fuck you, I'm sick!

Jim:  THIS SHIT ISN'T FUNNY!

Roger:  Laugh or cry, boss, laugh or cry.

Jim:  Point.

Truer words, etc.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

That's a hell of a Friday.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That's a hell of a Friday.

Every week.  Not kidding.

The disasters are different, but there's always a disaster.

[Cain]

And this ONE guy, Gavrilo Princip, did ALL OF THAT.  Here he is, being arrested after assassinating Archduke Ferdinand for no apparent reason.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Gavrilo_Princip_captured_in_Sarajevo_1914.jpg/711px-Gavrilo_Princip_captured_in_Sarajevo_1914.jpg

A lot of people say that WWI (and thus WWII and the cold war) was inevitable.

But we made it through the cold war without going to war with Russia, which nobody thought was going to be possible.

So it DOES take one spark to set off a powderkeg.  And that one spark was Gavril Princip, and he wrecked the entire world for a hundred years.

Oh, the story is much more interesting than that.

Princip was backed by an ultra-nationalist Serbian secret society, known as the "Black Hand".  The Black Hand was led by Dragutin Dimitrijević, a Serbian General and professor of tactics at the Belgrade Military Academy.  He was also allegedly the head of military intelligence in the years leading up to WWI.  Dimitrijević, who went by the nickname of "Apis", wanted to create a Greater Serbia on the corpses of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian armies.  His guerrillas had been instrumental in the Balkan Wars that forced the Ottomans out of Europe, and he intended to take down the Dual-Monarchy via assassination.  The idea was to cause a war with the Empire, and drag Russia into the fighting.

Princip was never an official member of the Black Hand.  His attempts to join were rejected, due to ill-health. But another member of his cell of assassins was on close terms with a member of the Black Hand close to Apis, and arranged for weapons and financial support to be given to them.

In addition to causing a world war, these actions also spurred on the development of terrorist groups around the world.  To be sure, the 1900s had been the heydey of political assassination.  Mostly by anarchists, self-proclaimed or otherwise.  But the success of the Black Hand spurred on groups like the IRA and the Macedonian IMRO, who of course went on to inspire a whole new generation of killers.