What happens when hackers get hold of road signs

Ah, screw Pictionary

War on Terror, the board game is more relevant. All players start as empires, doing the boring work of all empires, expansion and resource grabbing. Eventually someone will go terrorist. Maybe the Finger of Suspicion on the Axis of Evil spinner lands on them, or having a couple of nukes lying around is just too tempting. Before you know it, you're sending out suicide bombers and the world has gone to hell. Included are 15 radiation counters, 2 oil dice, 47 terrorist cards, and lots 'o money in bank notes from the World Bank of Capitalism. If you play as a terrorist, you can don a fashionable balaclava with "EVIL" emblazoned across the forehead in large red letters.

The object is to domina...ahem, liberate the world. The game has upset some folks with its realism, which is not contained to donning balaclavas to imitate stereotypical terrorists. I can't say why, I've never played it (and at $50 I'm not inclined to.) Apparently it's highly satirical and way too accurate, with empires funding terrorists who then turn on them, or empires randomly declared terrorist by the Axis of Evil spinner. Or Empires saying "f*ck it" and going terrorist, then realizing they aren't doing anything differently except wearing a silly balaclava.

When Police raided a protest camp in the U.K. and seized a "weapons cache", the official photo included...you guessed it...War on Terror, the board game. Art imitates life.

BFF

Happy New Year! And kiss your @&$ goodbye!

I'm caught up in the blog family spirit after reading the recent round of posts. So in that spirit, I will 1) quit blagging, and 2) resume my role as resident pessimist.

Most of y'all are science nuts, so you may have heard about the recent earthquakes in Yellowstone. If you haven't, well, it's probably better. All those neat geysers and hot springs are geothermal, of course. And geothermal means heat. And heat means magma. And magma, when it blows out in a big way, means calderas. Yellowstone caldera was formed from a volcanic eruption and is roughly 34 x 45 miles. That's a heap 'o magma. When you see that much, you're going to have a very bad day. Don't trust me on this, trust the Discovery Channel:

the Yellowstone eruption of 2.1 million years ago, which is described on the VEI as an eight: mega-colossal, with a towering ash cloud 10 miles high that pours out at least a thousand cubic miles of ash. That Yellowstone eruption had 10 times the ejected material as a VEI 7 volcano, which modern humans have never seen either.

In fact, the last VEI 7 eruption was in Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, and it caused such global cooling that some scientists think it nearly drove humans to extinction.

On the other hand, it might just be some water moving around, or a little seismic hiccup, and some other poor schmucks will have to endure global extinction. Happy news for us! I can take a drink, and we can go on with planning game night.