The Old Hack

There was a town in Spain that was so indignant at Denmark's support of Napoleon during the Napoleonic War that its municipal leadership decided to declare war on Denmark sometime back in 1812 or thereabouts. This state of hostilities lasted without cessation for more than a century and a half until a Danish newspaperman found a reference to it in the archives. He decided to go there and investigate, and lo and behold, the current mayor of the town found that yes, war had been declared and no, no peace treaty had ever been formally signed. He then took the newspaperman as a prisoner of war, cruelly treated him to a grand dinner with the finest wines he owned, and together with the other guests they debated the matter and finally decided that the time had come to bury the hatchet. And the newspaperman got to return home with a formal and signed declaration of cessation of hostilities. I do not know if an actual peace treaty has ever been agreed on but at least there has been no violations of the ceasefire so far.

The interesting thing is that if you can just convince an immortal that they have broken their laws, that would in and of itself make them guilty automatically. Hm.

Clearly, this kind.

What would you do if I sang out of tune, Would you stand up and walk out on me. Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song, And I'll try not to sing out of key...

Maybe the term 'brain dead' was meant derogatively. Sirleck is already a life-stealing horror that cares nothing about other human beings. I would not put it past him to be ableist, too.

I have often felt the need for more of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Well yes, but given what happened to a lot of these, I personally feel that combining it with weapons training and armor might increase survivability.

I suspect as much. In fact, I think that she created it the very moment she appeared on public TV. It would be a double whammy -- revealing the existence of magic on TV and setting up what she probably intended to be a snowballing effect of stronger and stronger magic.

That's ridiculous. Then whom do you have to make snarky remarks about you all day long?

I think you can safely count Samuel Vimes as a hammer. Or maybe an ax. What revised continuity? There's only this one. We've always been at war with Eastasia.

Oh come on. It wasn't his fault. He actually helped repair the Timestream. Well, for a given value of 'repair'. If 'pounding it senseless, making it beg for mercy and shoving it into the path he wanted through brute force' counts as 'repair', we're golden.

Baby, you can drive my car yes I'm gonna be a star baby, you can drive my car and baby, I love you

I dunno. If I absolutely had to be bodyguard for an Emperor, I think I'd rather guard the good Pharaoh here. I'd be able to make snarky comments at him all day long.

No no, the Mandala only warned of the Great Crash, it did not actually cause it. The real culprit was Commander Vimes falling through the roof of the University Library just as the lightning triggered the Glass Clock, which sent reverberations through L-Space and caused the redisintegration of the now never-existed files.

The Moderator: Please, Matoyak. I had already called them on this.

Sadly, the old forums seem to have been forever lost in the Great Crash earlier this year. I am sorry.

The Moderator: Please do not ask questions in a condescending manner like this. Offering a polite correction is in good order. Talking down to your fellow posters is not, try to avoid it. ~tOH.

To be fair, the Italian army during WWII was of such horrible quality that if you selected five random squads and told each of them to storm an empty barn, at most three of them would succeed in taking it. Not as much because of the men, mind you -- but their leadership and motivation was so atrocious that it darn near ranks right down there with Santa Anna leading the Mexican Army.

You have a point there. I think the German Army could have been paralysed just as easily by depriving it of paper instead of oil.

I've been wondering the same thing. I don't think it will necessarily be easy for her. The way she phrased it made it sound straightforward but straightforward is not the same as 'easy.' For example, getting from the base of Mount Everest to its top sounds straightforward enough and it's not really that far, distance-wise. But add in the condition that you can only do it by means of muscle-powered climbing and any number of mountaineers will tell you that when you actually try to do it, a certain number of complications start to set in. Then put in a time limit just for fun...

Blow that for a game of soldiers. If they can't handle rejection, they are in the wrong line of work.

To be fair, internal investigations run by the criminals themselves do not have a good track record of apprehending and convicting the actual responsible parties.

It hasn't, but it is interesting. The question is: if so, who did it? I can't quite see Colonel Sanders doing it, unless he is more powerful than he has so far shown.

Here now! With that sort of attitude, you could just walk into Danish Parliament and start killing from one end of the assembly to the other, and... ...I'm sorry, I thought I had a point but I forget where I was going with it.

The problem is, the radios were so bad that sometimes the German soldiers just said 'Verflucht', gave up and transmitted in plain speech to have just a chance of being understood by the people they were talking to. And when the people listening in on you have better radios than you do, well...