dogpoet

Wouldn't it be nice if the republicans had more people like big Arnie among their numbers?

10 hours ago, Avaunt said:

If you don't oppose ( eye for an eye in your phrase ) ideologies that do wrong ( putin in this case ) they ride over top of you.

And that's without even contemplating the long term effects of NATO backing down to nuclear threats.

I've just gone through the slipcase edition of the three Nemo OGNs, and the second and third are both a lot better than Heart of Ice (the most amusing bit of which is seeing that Moore loathes Tom Swift as a character even more than he hates James Bond).

They're not bad, and seem to be more an opportunity for O'Neill to show off than Moore doing so, but they're all three thin stories that would have worked perfectly well as filler in the Black Dossier or Century rather than warranting being issued independently at hardback prices. The main thing that comes across from these is that Kim Newman does this stuff as an adventure story a lot better than Moore does. (Just compare The Roses of Berlin to Angels of Music...) Maybe that's why most of the LOEG comics this century have been far more concerned with namedropping than storytelling?

Zelensky cheers himself up with a piano recital

The embargos on the Russian Federation continue to mount up: MacDonald's have now closed all their Russian branches, making Russia a no fry zone.

Forgot to mention: I was able to up my percentage a lot in GTA V during my last playthrough, but even after finding all of the letter scraps and spaceship parts (among other things) I still can't get it any higher than 91.6%. I suppose there'll be another 3% if I finish all of the stunt jumps, fly unders and knife flights, but presumably there's other stuff I've completely missed as you have to get it to 99% to trigger the final mission.

I got a bit fed up of trying to max out the hunting and golf pass times (I think I've beaten all of the tennis courts) and went onto Oblivion instead, which is a proper game that's stupid difficult instead of letting you skip past the tricky bits of missions and hiding a load of stuff you need to be doing...

Given that he's currently bombing a nuclear power plant and troops are firing on the emergency services to prevent them trying to contain the situation, Putin might just have decided that if he can't have the Ukraine, then neither can the Ukrainians.

The fact that terms like unprecedented are used to talk about nonsense like an American president getting heckled by a pseudo libertarian skank during the State of Union address or business interests hiking inflation so that they can claim somebody getting elected has caused an economic downturn doesn't do anything to help discuss just how bizarre this latest development is, really.

I'm astonished we haven't heard anything from the conspiracy nuts about this as yet.

No argument with any of that, but what the hell has Putin done to have the gnomes getting off the fence after sitting out two world wars? I haven't a scooby what's going on there, but it must be awful to have Switzerland doing that. This is a country whose banks have sued holocaust survivors for defamation over comments about the the amount of Nazi spoils they still have sitting in lockboxes, so it must be pretty bad, whatever it is.

Very true. Of course the debt will be in dollars, so Putin might be desperate to collect it in month or so, rather than just letting Trump borrow even more to pay off the last load as he did last time.

One aspect of this which astonished me is that Switzerland has joined in the embargoes. They've frozen the Swiss accounts of all of the Russian oligarchs, and there's suggestions that they're sending weapons to the Ukraine as well. Christ knows what's brought that.

Further Trump notes re the embargos Russia is facing over the current fiasco in the Ukraine:

Given that a substantial chunk of the Donald's debts will be falling due this year, will he benefit or suffer from Russia being locked out of the world financial networks? In the worst case Putin won't be able to underwrite further loans through the deutsche Bank if he tries to shift his debts by taking further loans out rather than paying the existing ones, as is his normal approach, but might the rouble being devalued by all this scale down the extent of his vast debts to something a bit more manageable?

Thanks, Jason.

Did you have a look at Hold Me to see if that's where the Dave McKean pages were from?

Finally got hold of the last issue of the Tom King Strange Adventures, so I'll be rereading the rest of it and and seeing how it ends over the weekend. That eleventh issue had one hell of a cliffhanger, iirc...

The uber-'Eighties Karen Berger office image has now vanished, Jase: it isn't even working as a link.

Mad genius is the best sort, Tigger, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Don't even get me started on the curry turd's part in that nonsense. The really pathetic thing is that he's tried to roll that back a couple of times and suggest people should get vaxxed at his rallies and the crowd threw a such a hissy fit that he gave up.

I mean, I know his whole thing is playing to the crowd and telling them exactly whatever they want to hear, but they can't vote for him if they're dead so you'd think he'd at least pretend to have a spine over this.

Just gone through Geoffrey Farrington's The Acts of the Apostates, which is very clever, but easier to admire than enjoy. That said, somebody who's more interested in Jewish mysticism and the Judean uprising might find it a lot more entertaining than I did. It's presented as a fantasy of history, but the supernatural stuff is toned down to a near nonexistent level and it sticks to real history (so far as I can tell) so it doesn't really deliver on that level. The stuff set in Nero era Rome doesn't deliver on the expected Bulwer-Lytton  style decadence, and the majority of the text is a flashback to weird events a prophet has looking for a guru in the holy land. The various mystic sects don't come out of the book at all well, and there's more than a whiff of Jodorowski's The Magic Mountain to them all indulging in factional bickering inside a hill that might or might not extend down into Hell, though the book's far too tastefuil to indulge in any of the batshit lunacy that makes Jodorowski's work such fun.

There's a lovely final joke on the last page, though.

The really funny thing was that when Obama was moving out, Jabba the Trump was insisting that the secret service should make a point of checking him and his families' pockets and luggage because these POC all have sticky fingers.

I suspect that's what the psychologists call "projection"...

Congratulations. Nice looking place, Tigger.

"Inseparable brown trenchcoat"?

Dearie me.

It's a long while since I've read that one myself, to be honest.

Are those some pages from "Hold Me" on the wall behind her?

Maybe it'll stay in print this time?

To be fair, it had a pretty substantial print run back in the '90s, and copies can still be found a lot cheaper than you'd expect.