Cancelled Potatoes

In the '70s, when I was in high school, 'to nark' meant to be an informer, to betray someone to the authorities. I, and I'm sure anyone else who considered it, thought that this had to be derived from 'narcotics'. It was the Golden Age of Recreational Drugs, and we lived in farm country, where hemp had been grown intensively and legally a generation or two before, so that it was wild everywhere. Having no real crime to deal with*, the police spent much of their time trying to catch people smoking pot. One had constantly, as a teenager, to be on the watch against those dishonourable companions who might nark on one.

So, cut to the present day. I'm reading a book called 'Hooligan Nights', written in 1899, about the lives of teenage petty criminals in the east end of London. Imagine my surprise when one of them expresses his trepidation to be seen talking with the interviewer, as he fears his friends will think he's 'narking'! Clearly, the word is a lot older than I'd believed.

*Literally. We did not lock our doors unless we were going to be gone for a stretch of several days at a time.

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It's really odd to read police notes from a crime committed in 1993, and reflect on the fact that the suspect having made a phone call to a witness at a certain time greatly restricts where he could have been at that time. Phones were a fixed-location item, and it wasn't that long ago.

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Synchronously, as I write, I hear swarms of police sirens, and now the helicopter is orbitting overhead. The police chopper should be equipped with rockets and machine guns.

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Japan, the Land of WTF?!?

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Boobs of Doom!

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The Beloved Leader Jr. doesn't like boobs.

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A truckload of fireworks exploded in China, and knocked down a bridge! That seems a remarkably extreme result to me. Admittedly I'm no expert on bridges, and I'm sure the design wasn't explicitly intended to withstand a contact explosion right on the deck, but still... Fireworks are made of black powder, and usually pretty heavily doped with stuff like steel filings or rice hulls or little chunks of charcoal. It's going to be a fairly slow explosion, lots of heat and gas volume, but not much of a shockwave. patch_bunny, would you expect that to knock down a proper bridge, or is it just shoddy infrastructure?

_fluffy's meme

Answers to _fluffy's meme:

1. Who is your favorite My Little Pony, and why?
Of the G1 Ponies, I definitely liked Windwhistler the best. She was a pegasus, highly intelligent and socially awkward, so I saw myself in her to some degree.
Of the current FiM characters (who have so much more personality and backstory than the G1s ever had) my favourite is Gilda Griffin. She appears as an antagonist (not really a villain) in only one episode, but judging from the amount of fan art and stories, I'm not the only one with whom she clicked. Basically we have a lot of the same character faults, and I can see myself in her. Interesting, the author wrote another episode with a similar theme about conflict being caused by insecurity, so I'm guessing it's personal for her. I've got a fairly detailed explanation of why I like Gilda that I posted on a Pony board, but on reading it over you really need to have watched the episode to get much out of it.


2. What is the etymology/origin of "xolo?"
It's from 'Kolo', an old lioness RP character from Lion King MUCK. Her name came from a (Bantu?) phrase 'busa no kolo' (I make no guarantees whatsoever on the spelling) that you can hear in the Lion King soundtrack album. It possibly means 'rule with love', but I chose it because I like the sound of it. I changed it to 'x' from 'k' as it's not really a hard 'k' sound, but somewhere between an English 'k' and a German 'ch'. The reason I used 'X' for that is that I had a minor obsession with the Xhosa cattle killing at the time (the topic still fascinates me, honestly), and in 19th century accounts, the tribal name was often rendered 'Hausa' (used in modern times for another people altogether), while the modern spelling is 'Xhosa', with the 'Xh' standing for a super-hard 'k', almost a clicking sound. It made sense to me at the time. There's a certain degree of free association in my reasoning, and I often have trouble completely reconstructing it afterward.


3. What's your favorite dessert?
Not really a dessert eater, honestly. I always did like vanilla tapioca pudding, but I tend to have it as a snack instead of a dessert. I like vanilla, and I like the texture of tapioca, so that's always a winner for me.


4. When are you going to draw more stuff?
Do you want me to draw more? I'm flattered. I keep thinking that I will, and I don't.


5. And, repeating the repeated question from above, please share a personal victory. Okay, that technically isn't a question.
My most recent one was getting control of the Spindizzy website, I think. I'm convinced that the late mayor/webmaster was doing her level best to recruit newbies who had no set expectations for the MUCK, so that she might build a cadre supportive of the sort of 'dark' roleplay that she favoured. Wiping away the traces of the MUCK's history and culture from the website was an important element in this. I'm pleased to put all that stuff back.

Edit: This should be here too, it seems:

If you'd like, leave a comment and I'll leave five questions for you. Quoting from Aldersprig's journal:
"• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions. (<- let's make that optional"