Wasteland Wrap-up #29

A dog and a chair, fighting prisoners, simulation games, excuses...

It’s been silent for a few weeks on here, just because I’ve been in the final-final-(actually-final).docx phase of finishing the new book on Truman. Now I’m just going over edits and finalizing citations. Almost there!

Here are a few Lyndon photos to make up for it. Lyndon naps in my office while I teach, usually sitting in his normal “spot” on a couch. Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally come back from teaching to see him sitting in “my” normal spot, which is a blue chair that I salvaged from an old lounge we had. When he started doing it, he had a slightly guilty and awkward look on his face when I came in, but I think he’s decided that all chairs are fair game.

I’ve been with Lyndon for almost his whole life (he is 12, we’ve had him since he was 6 months old), and I interpret the above look as being a slightly defiant one: I am relaxed, this is my chair, I’m the professor now.

This one, from a week later, I read more as “yeah, what are you going to do about it, anyway?” I don’t care where he sits, really, so I don’t admonish him or make him move. Instead I go sit on the couch next to his “spot,” and after a few minutes of that he usually gets up and sits next to me, because he prefers that to sitting alone and staring at me. Which shows the limits of his defiance, I suppose…

I had to run an errand in the Bronx last month, and snapped this photo from the Prospect Ave subway station platform:

I find the idea of a “BONE DOCTOR FOR GOLD” very Cyberpunk.

I’m hoping to carve out a little time this week to add a real post to Doomsday Machines. I have a few that are almost ready to go up, but the book has taken priority. The most likely next one will be a sequel to my “What if NUKEMAP had been made in the 1960s?” post, as I have managed to get some more reports on the Weapons Effects Display System (WEDS) from Livermore since then that describe the systems they build and used in some detail.

One of them describes how they took WEDS to West Germany to use it “in the field,” which would be interesting to me just by itself, but is even more amazing because “taking WEDS to Europe” meant “building the system into a portable trailer and putting onto a cargo ship,” which is kind of amazing. As a tantalizing preview, here’s the trailer design:

Totally amazing. OK, more on that soon, I promise!