The Old Hack

Odd. It reminds me of when I and my wife are at Barnes & Noble. My wife keeps complaining that it shouldn't be possible to lose track of a 6'4" Dane who weighs above 200 lbs so fast, but it still happens. Fortunately she has a good idea of which shelves I prefer to haunt and usually manage to find me again there.

Quite. Mind you, certain kinds of shenanigans are unacceptable. As I've already informed mlooney, summoning elder entities that wipe out large areas of civilised land will be seriously frowned on.

...crap. Look, it may have it in for your HVAC. Keep a careful eye on it, you do NOT want a household appliances feud going on in your home. If they start competitive summonings, well, these can get out of hand really really fast.

Would this be it?

I bet it is envious of the attention that your dishwasher used to get. It is trying to summon elder gods but hasn't quite mastered the evil chanting yet.

Hm. This gave me the strangest mental image. Powdered coach. Instant coach, just add water.

I do not quite see that as Mrs. Pompoms' hair already had its current shade before she learned of her husband's cheating, as seen here. She might still be dyeing her hair, of course, just not for that reason.

I thought you had scribes and engravers to decorate steles for you in lieu of typing.

I should in fairness add that I am not the only active mod on the boards and that killing a spammer and all its posts only takes one click. It actually takes longer to close the active reports afterwards, not that this is really that big a problem. But I must needs share credit with the admins and other mods.

I accept this as a larder.

I know, I was just adding detail Mind you, in general having the better tech is usually a good idea, barring situations such as in Isaac Asimov's short story 'Superiority.'

And they don't necessarily go all one way, either. Modern soldiers ill equipped and trained for a given kind of terrain can run into a LOT of trouble against local troops with strong morale. Witness the Italian Army in Abyssinia, for example, or nearly any sort of jungle combat against locals. (I am not sure if the Winter War in Finland 1939 counts. I think both sides had approximately the same level of tech.)

Reminds me of the at the time director of research at the Danish Nuclear Test Station, Dr. Hiller. Someone had the bad idea of running an annual report from the station through a spell checker and just hitting 'Confirm' to everything found. As a result, the hapless director's name was spelled 'Hitler' throughout the report. He was not pleased.

It kind of reminds me of a situation in a game of Civ 2 that a friend of mine played. He was at war with Hannibal and was holding a fortified mountain pass with tanks and mountaineers. Hannibal elected to attack the position with elephants. He was attacking uphill, through fortifications and minefields and spiked barricades, in the teeth of heavy armour and mountaineers armed with automatic weaponry. He threw in almost two dozen elephant units. They were all slaughtered, inflicting negligible damage. My friend said he felt positively ill imagining what the battlefield must have looked like after the end of the fight.

Clearly, they have decided that they do not want to make money off this particular book's e-format.

Big talk from the Pharaoh who kept an entire flock of grazing hippos to keep his lawn mowed short.

Or as I call him, /melooney.

All right, accepted, but I still think that it was a tad optimistic to refer to a 37mm as an 'anti-tank' weapon in 1943. Chamberlain got an undeservedly raw deal in history, I feel. Yes, he was the heir of and last Prime Minister who stood for Appeasement. But he was also the man who ended it. Mobilisation started slowly and almost too late, but Chamberlain was the one who put it into gear. His policies to block Hitler may have been awkwardly crafted and executed, but he was nonetheless the one who sent an ultimatum to the Nazis and the one who declared war when they failed to meet it. It must also be remembered that he was terrified of starting a war when the RAF was still so far from being at war footing. At the time people had a vastly exaggerated notion of the destructive power of air bombardment -- and to be fair, it would only be a few more years before the reality caught up with the belief. Chamberlain was haunted by the idea of hundreds of thousands of innocent Londoners killed in devastating Luftwaffe attacks. So he decided to give Hitler Czechoslovakia, hoping it would satisfy him and believing it would at least buy time. Yes, Churchill turned the war around. But he did it with an England that Chamberlain had armed and readied for war first -- imperfectly, but still. And strangely, Dowding's air defence system and radar network that proved so essential during the Battle of Britain became fully operational mere weeks before the Luftwaffe started its aerial assault. It can still reasonably be argued that Chamberlain conceded too much at Munich and that he could have won a war against Germany with the forces available to the Allies in 1938. But it is worth remembering that even if he paid far too much, the time he purchased proved sufficient in the end -- if barely so.

We have a big clue -- the extremely privileged way she acted when she muscled Susan into the France trip. This is not the action of someone recently into money by way of parental support. It is the action of Old Money getting what it feels is its Just and Rightful Consideration. Also, the way the principal just rolled over supports that. He was facing a taxpayer with a considerable load behind her and he knew it.

To be fair, the original statement was '1000 triremes'. A single PT would not carry even nearly enough missiles for that, I don't think. Mind, you are right in that the missiles it did carry would probably make the poor twits think about other things than keeping formation. (If you even could make a formation to begin with with a fleet that huge, given the lack of communications at the time.) Mph. I feel that this was a rather optimistic way of thinking. A 37mm would barely even bother most German tanks of around 1940 or 1941 unless you somehow got them in the rear plate. In 1943 I doubt it could kill any sort of German main line battle tank at all. Okay, it would probably work fine against Japanese 'tanks', but frankly speaking, these barely qualified for the definition.

We do not know that. Mrs. Pompoms was rich. It is quite normal for men to look for rich lovers to batten off, too. For all we know, that was his selection criterion for his lovers, too.

Getting several dozen 20mm bullets sent through your head is terrible for your hairdo, so who can blame them.

Susan's reflexes in general seem excellent, though one must be careful in just how you set them off.

In order to row any sort of galley properly, you require discipline, coordination and careful timing. All three tend to get rather frayed while under machinegun fire.

There is a rather mean trick you can pull on galleys and which experienced naval commanders did from time to time. Don't ram, just sideswipe them while they have their oars out. The effect on the oars tends to be brutal, and even worse on the hapless sods hanging on to them. But this was a risky maneuver and only to be done by the experienced. The PT boat would be better off just giving the hapless thing a good dose of lead.