Phlegmatic

Fantasy Swords versus Real Swords

The UK has the sixth lowest average working hours in the EU, but the second highest average salary (and more holidays too). Yay!

Sky Sports now uses Football Manager.

World's oldest message in a bottle ever found finally washes up after 108 years.

College football's FWAA 75th Anniversary All-America Team. (I count 10 players who would go on to play for the Raiders at some point in their pro careers.)

Why the #WaronNerds is A War on Art.

Venezuela is close to hyperinflation.

Killing Vox Day. (Not literally...)

If I were to play in a Super Hero RPG, I'd want my PC to be 'Speedsheet'.

See where the Vikings travelled.

"Sepp Blatter deserves Nobel Prize" says Vladimir Putin.

The Complete Blake's 7 Costume Index

Total respect to the owner of this Porsche 918 Spyder.

Really nicely done Star Trek fanvid set to William Shatner singing* Pulp's 'Common People'. (* Maybe singing isn’t quite the right word. If you’re familiar with Mr Shatner’s musical career, you know what I mean.)

Milton Friedman was right, part 865.

Apparently it's now politically incorrect to describe an immigrant who came into the country illegally as an "illegal immigrant".

After more than 6,000 episodes of Countdown, this happens.

Air conditioning is "sexist".

If Malcolm Tucker did motivational posters.

I wonder which particular service this government whip from the Heath government was called upon to provide...

Not only did the Conservative Party give Britain its first female Prime Minister, it apparently (allegedly) also gave us our first homosexual and paedophile one too.

I haven’t done a Phligm Phlagm post since April. (Sorry, I’ve been really busy…) We have some catching up to do. Anyway, I hope you enjoy and / or are informed by these links:

The maths (and beauty) behind a perfect 147. Make sure you watch Ronnie O’Sullivan’s five minutes and 20 seconds 147 – one of the all time greatest accomplishments in any sport.

This is the sort of thing that should be in that Alanis Morrisette song instead of "rain on your wedding day".

Few people regularly make me as angry as this incompetent, ill-informed, hypocritical, leftard.

Great myths of British politics, number 745: "The NHS is the most efficient health system in the world". (According to the OECD, only Ireland and Greece could make greater savings from more efficient healthcare systems.)

Even among countries with similar healthcare systems, the UK's is "below average". (So can we please stop this “envy of the world” bollocks?)

"My obsession with a fictional Football Manager megastar." (I had to put this in quotation marks to make it clear that this wasn't me...)

Diane "divide and rule" Abbott tutting that the "Tories harp on about Mid-Staffs". (Yeah, cos it’s not as if 1,200 people dying because of neglect in a state-run hospital is something politicians should be concerned about…)

"We're a class project."

A Greek God Family Tree

Student union backs excluding white people from 'anti-racism' events.

RIP Yeoman Rand.

PwC is going to ignore graduates' A-level results when recruiting. (This surprises me. When I was being recruited as a trainee chartered accountant, and when I was recruiting trainee chartered accountants, it was generally accepted that A-level grades were the best indication of future success in ACA exams, far more so than class of degree.)

George Digweed, the greatest British sportsman you've never heard of.

You know those really expensive very large Lego Super Star Destroyers? What if you dropped one from a great height? And filmed it. At 1000fps.

10 typographic mistakes everyone makes (and which life is far, far too short to care about.)

Worried that you might avoid tax? This helpful guide shows you how to avoid avoiding tax.

Does going to court to change your dead millionaire father's will so you pay less inheritance tax count as "avoiding tax"?

Interesting reviews of all the Gollancz SF Masterworks so far.

5 Misconceptions About #GamerGate and the Truth Behind the Myths

Five Actors Who Almost Played Aragorn (Russell Crowe?)

Whatever happened to Football Manager legend Freddy Adu?

No, unemployment is not the "underlying cause" of ISIS.

"Why are people in Scotland saying I murdered someone called Lucy?"

UKIP Cornwall's website gives Cornish web designers a bad name.

The latest SJW idiocy in SF / Fantasy literature.

I miss 'The Thick of It'. Luckily Green Party leader Natalie Bennett can easily fill the 'incompetent politician gives car crash interview' hole...

The appalling compensation for those people imprisoned through a miscarriage of justice.

It's really cold in New York at the moment.

Evidence used by Henry VIII to support the break with Rome turns up in a library not far from us.

Why we shouldn't clamp down on zero-hour contracts.

A version of The Hobbit for those who complain that the film trilogy is too long.

Streaming Doctor Who on a 31 year old TRS-80. From floppy disks.

There are now about 100,000 bushmen on Earth. For most of humanity's existence as a species, most humans were bushmen.

Comets did not bring water to Earth.

"How I defeated the Tolkien Estate"

One in seven people arrested in Britain last year was a foreigner.

I love this black velvet Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Am I the only one who thinks that all eight of these "amazing workplaces guaranteed to give you office envy" look like awful environments to work in?

Why Brazil changed the names of two characters in Star Wars Episode II.

Clever comparison chart for anyone looking to buy a new smartphone.

This is the poll I am referring to:
http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/306241.html#comments

Now I have observed that while most fannish types hate, or at least were dissappointed by, the Star Wars prequels, most loved the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films (except for some hardcore purists who wanted Tom Bombadil and felt that some piece of dialogue was ever so slightly different from the books).

Continuing with this thought leads me to this list of reasons to hate the LoTR films:

Jar-Jar Binks Pippin is annoying.
Who cares about "the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems" "a Last Alliance of Elves and Men"?
Teenage Anakin Comedy Gimli is annoying.
Hayden Christensen Elijah Wood can't act.
Natalie Portman Orlando Bloom can't act.
Midi-chlorians. Magic rings.
Soppy love story in Episode 2 3.
Needs more women.
Too many fan-pleasing references to and appearances of minor characters from the original trilogy other books in the series.
CGI is never as good as muppets!*
Jar-Jar Binks All the good guys are white and all the bad guys are black is like totally racist.
Poor direction in green screen and CGI shots.
Too much of the plot is happening off-screen.
Since when can R2-D2 fly? do dwarves get tossed?
"Nooooooooooooo!"

ladyofastolat

• Marijuana smokers


• Womanisers


• Rastafarians


• Black

• They say "man" after everything


• They (only) listen to reggae


• They're always late


• They like white women with long hair


• They have many jobs


• They practise voodoo

• Marijuana smokers - I must have missed that scene. Perhaps it's one of the deleted scenes included in the second disc of the DVD boxed set.


• Womanisers - Do we even see a gungan woman?


• Rastafarians - Little evidence of the gungans worshipping dead Ethiopians or wearing dreadlocks (in fact they don't seem to have hair).


• Black - As far as I can see, all the gungans are green or greenish.


• They say "man" after everything - Jar-Jar has lots of annoying verbal mannerisms (which seem to be unique to him rather than shared with his fellow gungans) but this isn't one of them.


• They (only) listen to reggae - We get to hear some gungan music during the victory parade at the end of Episode 1. It definitely isn't reggae.


• They're always late - The gungans seem to be in the right place at the right time to, for example, fight the Trade Federation's droid army, or propose important legislation in the Imperial Senate.


• They like white women with long hair - Jar-Jar does seem quite fond of Padme / Amidala, and she's definitely a white woman with long hair, so you can have this one.


• They have many jobs - Jar-Jar does have more than one job it's true (itinerant, general, diplomat...) but not generally at the same time.


• They practise voodoo - Nope. In a 2002 RPG adventure, two gungan Jedi are mentioned, but that wasn't canon then, and it certainly won't be now.

Really fecking enormous container ships!

Dungeons & Dragons Saved My Life, in The New Yorker!

Headline of the month: "Mysterious Giant Sharks May Be Everywhere"

The Seven Deadly Sins

Charlie Elphicke. Yet another illiberal politician who doesn't understand what free speech means.

Science fiction film (Interstellar) leads to new scientific discovery.

Sir Nicholas Winton. Makes you proud to be British. (And do watch the embedded video clip.)

"What about a catapult?" mused Boromir...

There's always a bigger fish...

What Blade Runner would look like as an 8-bit / 16-bit computer game.

Top 100 European Football Prospects Aged Under 21. (As a Football Manager player, is it cheating for me to read this article?)

Questions in The Guardian we can answer.

Why you must lie in job interviews and what you must lie about.

The five best libertarian TV shows ever. (No Blake's 7? No Yes, Minister? No Firefly?)

This seems blindingly obvious to me. (I'm very much _not_ a morning person.)

It's 25 years since the Herschel Walker trade.

10 hot teenage football prospects.

"...a slap in the face to the small but loyal army of fans who’ve spent decades supporting the Twin Peaks Expanded Universe"

Jimmy Page on Stairway to Heaven

An odd story involving Stevie Nicks, the tilde, and 1,000 nerds.

A new series of The Clangers!

Paul Krugman on Scottish independence. (And it's nice to see that even neo-Keynesians have come around to my way of thinking on the Euro.)

Prices, Paul Krugman, and Consistency

This is why poor kids don't grow up to be interior designers.

Is Apple quietly killing off its best product?

Why US forests are fuelling Europe.

Logic and theology.

Five ways that films get gunfights wrong.

Interesting account of 9/11 as it happened, as seen by White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

Universities must convert widening access into graduate jobs. I see that the university at which I will be lecturing is the second best in the country at promoting social mobility while the one I studied at is the second worst.

This is why all those Scottish independence campaigners were protesting outside BBC Scotland.

The best moments from Friends, animated as 8-bit style GIFs.

Why don't children want to learn the violin? (Do they have to ask the question? If you can play the guitar, you are cool. Also, a highly paid career is open to you. If you can play the violin, you probably look uncool and violinist salaries are terrible. I used to audit one of the world’s great orchestras, and except for their superstar conductor, ALL of the musicians’ salaries were really low. Supermarket checkout girl low.)

Who killed lard?

What would the political map of Europe look like if all the nationalist parties got their way?

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.

This year's winners

The reaction to Sad Puppies was totally predictable and 100% proved Larry Correia's point.

Toni Weisskopf on the Second Great Exclusion.

Brad Torgersen on why we need more Sad Puppies.

Apparently "science fiction isn't a genre", says the Guardian's village idiot. No, not that Guardian village idiot, or that one, a different one. Hell, this newspaper has a lot of very stupid people writing for it...

Larry Correian fisking the village idiot is rather like Stephen Hawking arguing about cosmology with the cast of The Only Way is Essex.

When ignorant snobs attack.