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On this day in 1348, the Order of the Garter, the first English order of knighthood, was created.  The word hillbilly was used in print for the first time today in 1900.  On this day in 1945, the Soviet Army entered the outskirts of Berlin proper.  Ken Johnson of the Houston Astros threw a no-hitter against the Reds on this day in 1964... and lost 1-0, becoming the first pitcher ever to lose a no-hitter.  Sergei Prokofiev was born this day in 1891.  Today in 1899 saw Minoru Shirota, the creator of Yakult, probiotic drink company and owner of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball team.  The debut album by The Ramones was released today in 1976.  Timothy McVeigh was born in 1968 on this day.

And on the North Side of Chicago in 1968, in a hospital somewhere in the vicinity of Wrigley Field (which hosted its first baseball game on April 23, 1914, under the name Weeghman Park), unto this unsuspecting world was inflicted a Wonderduck.

As always, nobody is more surprised than myself.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 04:28 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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These Cubs... They're Pretty Good.

So the Chicago Cubs played the Cincinnati Reds tonight.  They won 16 - 0.  Their young third baseman, Kris Bryant, had four hits, two home runs (one of which was a grand slam), and six RBIs.  That's pretty good, but not quite good enough for tonight's headline.

Yup, Jake Arrieta threw his second no-hitter.  Which sounds impressive, but it gets better when you realize it was his second no-hitter in his past 11 regular season starts.  He's lost once in his past 23 regular season starts... and in that one loss, the other starting pitcher, Cole Hamels, threw a no-hitter.  The Cubs are now 12-4 on the season, which is the best record in baseball. 

I'll give the Reds credit... you gotta admire their sense of humor:

I'm actually really scared of this Cubs team... there's a lot of season left to go, but they're clearly good enough to get into the World Series.  After a lifetime of watching them fail, that's terrifying!

Please, Cubs players: scare me some more.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:28 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Internet Fail

My internet connection has been seriously flaky for most of the past 24 hours.  This is the first time it's been up since I got home from work, so I wanted to warn you that there may not be a "F1 on TV" this week, and if there is, it'll be Thursday (hopefully).

The race is in China, with Practice 2 being broadcast at like 1am Friday morning, so set your DVRs now!  See you when I've got something more stable than a pile of pick-up-stix stacked endwise!

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The Cubs Know What We Want

I always thought Kaga would be a good pitcher... she's always throwin' zeroes!

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Words Of Wisdom

Once upon a time, a very wise person indeed told me "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

While this has stopped me in the past but rarely, I'm too damn tired right now.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Bathtub Battles

A few weeks ago, the players of World of Warships were asked to fill out a survey about how they felt about the game.  For the most part, it was all the usual stuff: "would you recommend the game to your friends?", "what do you like about the game?", you know the drill.  One of the final questions was "what don't you like?"  I'm sure most of my response was echoed by others: destroyers (and torpedoes in general) are waaaaaay too overpowered, too many "paper warships", why Soviet ships and no Royal Navy... and at the end, I tacked on "Oh, and not enough rubber ducks.  You really should do something about that."

It appears that the producers listened.  It's still a combat game, it's just that now you've got toy ships floating in a bathtub firing... things... at each other.  With rubber ducks as terrain.  There are other things in the tub, too, but who cares about them?

First I'm partially to blame for Rio: Rainbow Gate! getting a US release, now there are rubber duckies in WoWS?  I need to use this power only for good...

I still sink just as readily in this version of the game as I do in the regular game, that's for sure.  But hey!  Rubber ducks!  Thanks, Wargaming!!!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:53 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Flirtin' With Disaster

It's been five years, three months and nine days since I last had a cigarette... not that I'm counting or anything, because I'm not.  I only figured out exactly how long its been for the sake of this post.  Knowing that bit of information, combined with the post's title, should give you an idea of what's coming.

Fortunately, it's not as bad as you think... I didn't have a smoke.  Let me repeat myself: I did NOT smoke a cigarette or any other device intended for the partaking of tobacco.

I only want one about as badly as I've ever wanted anything in my life.  Its a damn good thing I'm taking a personal day from work tomorrow, otherwise I'd never be able to resist bumming one from a coworker.

It's not like I want to go back to the bad breath, the smelly clothes, the lack of taste and smell, the stained teeth, the ever-empty wallet, and the lack of wind.  But dear heavens above, none of that matters right now.

I'm NOT happy about this.  Hopefully the craving will dissipate overnight.  Wingtips crossed.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:16 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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Memories Of A Time Long Ago

Did anybody here read OMNI magazine?  I did, quite a bit.  I remember it mostly for the science-fiction stories, some of which were quite good, but the occasional article stuck in my mind as well.  For example, I'm sure the first time I heard about the Hubble Space Telescope was in the pages of OMNI, years before it ever made it to space.  This morning, after being awakened from a deep sleep by a text that was sent much too early, I remembered something I read 30 or more years ago...

It was an article about the coming environmental disaster, or the hole in the ozone layer, or how we were causing the next ice age, or something along those lines.  Contained in the article was a chart showing what sort of prices we'd be looking at for common items... milk, bread, construction materials, gasoline (note: environmental disaster makes gas prices go down from current rates), metal plates, cars, that sort of thing... wait, what?

That seemed like an odd item to compare prices with, at least for the type of article we're talking about here.  Everything else were common household goods, and then along comes "metal plates" and everything gets thrown into a cocked hat.

Then came this morning's text-message wakeup call, ruining a somewhat humorous dream about a world-wide raccoon shortage, but also for whatever reason reminding me of the OMNI article.  And then it hit me: metal plates, not metal plates!

I was a very intelligent youngster, but I wasn't a smart kid... or adult apparently, since it's taken me 30-plus years to figure out "metal plates."  Unfortunately, I've never been able to find that article again... maybe it wasn't in OMNI.  National Geographic?  Mad?  It is a puzzlement.

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Ducks In Anime: Season 2 Of Hibike! Euphonium...

...apparently has less of a budget than anticipated.

Needs more of the Goofy Cute.  But there IS a duck...

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Broken Wonderduck

I kinda reached a break point last night.  Something occurred that pushed me a little too far, and I just sort of... cracked, just a bit.  I might be quiet for a little bit. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Spook, Frighten and Amuse Wonderduck Day.

The drawback of taking a "mental health" day when you have mandatory overtime to complete is that you have fewer days to accomplish the task with.  As a result, I've done five hours of overtime in the past two nights... and both nights I was the last person in the building.  To be honest, this isn't a bad thing.  After all, when I was running the Duck U Bookstore, I was always there long after the store closed, and that meant I could pretty much behave how I wished.  If I wanted to sing along with my music, I could.  If it was warm in the store, I could change into a pair of shorts.  Y'know, that sort of thing.  So I'm alone in my office, and it appears that I was totally alone in the entire building... what's a Wonderduck to do? 

That's right, crank up the tunes and sing along!

And if you're totally sure you're alone, you occasionally throw caution to the wind and do hand motions, chairdance, and once or twice do a stand-up-spin-in-place-sit-back-down thing in time with the music.  And for the record, I very much want that scrolling light frontispiece that SNL has on the stage for this performance of Uptown Funk, that's sweet.

...until the cleaning staff shows up, and you don't hear them come in because you've got your headphones cranked, and they walk in on you singing and carrying on.  I very nearly jumped out of my shoes, and near to wet myself to boot.  Oh dear.

On the way home, I stopped at a local gas station for... motor oil and some two liter bottles of ginger ale.  I bet you thought I was going to get gas, didn't you?  Hah!  Fooled ya!  Anyway, y'all know the Duckmobile is old... indeed, it's 20 years old, I've had it for 18, and it's really showing its age in many ways.  When I exited the gas station, I smelled a horrible odor, one I've unfortunately smelled before.  It was the stench of drastically overheated radiator fluid, burning oil, and melted rubber.  It was the smell of automotive death, is what it was.  I froze, desperately staring at the Duckmobile, looking for the telltale plume of steam and smoke that always accompanies such smells... and not seeing it.  And I should have, the car was wonderfully back-lighted by the bright lights of the pumping area.  It wasn't until I got to the driver's side that I discovered that a SUV parked a few cars down from me had its hood up... and there was the huge gout of vapor, too.  Poor guy was just standing there, trying to figure out what to do, while his passenger went inside... hopefully to buy a jug of Prestone or something.

Then I finally made it home, got comfy... and found THIS waiting for me:

It amused the heck outta me, I'll tell you what.  And now it's the weekend, yay!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:17 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Long Time, Long Time

Y'know, I was trying to write about various complaints and gripes and pains and how I have 10 toes but only nine toenails and it took me two hours to take a test at work that should have taken a half-hour and even my walletmoths have walletmoths and I'm sick of cup noodles and I got an unpleasant letter from a friend and I don't want to deal with it and I'm up for potential jury duty and I just want it all to stop so I'm taking a mental health day at work tomorrow and sleeping late and taking a nap or two and I couldn't make any of it interesting so here's a picture instead and I think I can finally now end this incredibly long run-on sentence.

So there.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The Agony Of The Train

Who knew?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:40 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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Overtime

Remember back towards the end of December / beginning of January, when I kept coming home early because of a lack of work?  Well, we're feeling the wrath of that now... see, the medical insurance company we process claims for... let's call them "Smith Medical" because that's not their name, or Smith for short... Smith kinda accidentally-on-purpose caused that shortfall of claims.  I think I've mentioned that there's three types of claims we deal with: Professional (basically doctors, clinics, x-ray techs, and so forth);  Claims that have another insurance company involved other than Smith; and my favorite, Long-Term Care... nursing homes, Adult day-care, that sort of thing.  LTC claims are easy... I'll do 30-40 of them an hour, where 20-25 is about what I'll do in an hour for professional.  Smith knows that LTC is easy... in fact, they thought it was so easy that they could have their computers do most of them, and they'd send the really hard ones out for human help.  So they stopped sending LTC claims out to us so they could have some on hand when it came time to test their programs.

Needless to say, the programs failed miserably.  From what I've heard, they were getting about 50% of them correct.  They eventually admitted defeat and released the claims out to us, about three weeks late and on the verge of "timing out", or overrunning the state-mandated turn-around time.  There were some 24000 claims of this one type; we then got another 8000 or so.  Mind you, we normally get about 6000 or so claims of all sorts in an entire day.  So of course we were aimed at this mass of stuff exclusively, since it was about to time out, delaying the normal claims.  Then, at the beginning of February, we started to get hit with more claims than normal every day, we lost some processors to attrition, and the claims kept piling up.  Finally my boss made the call: mandatory 10 hours of overtime this week.

I did four hours this past Saturday, and an hour yesterday and today.  When I took the job, I knew that OT was a normal thing, and I was fine with that.  I mean, I don't like it (and I did enough of it at the bookstore thankyouverymuch), but when it's gotta be done, it's gotta be done.  But that was before I knew how hard this job could be.  Even doing nine hours of claimrunning is exhausting... I'm getting home, eating, then collapsing.  All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I haven't done part two of the F1 miniMegaPr0n yet, despite the first test session being under way.  Hopefully Wednesday night.  Your patience is, as always, appreciated.

UPDATE: Wednesday I did a 10-hour day.  After picking up my prescription Keep Wonderduck Alive pills, I didn't get home until 8pm.  When I finally sat down at home, the only thought in my head was EAT ALL THE THINGS.  So I did, and now I need a new couch, and another jar of lingonberry.  I cannot begin to tell you how incoherent my artichoke rubella pneumatic leather bucket fluffernutter is right now.  Holy crap there's a pack of coyote howling their damfool heads off out in the fields behind Pond Central right now.  I wonder what they were hunting?  Considering where they were, they had probably managed to stalk and trap a broken-down 18-wheeler.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:02 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Wanna Play World of WarShips?

Hey Binkie!  Have you been browsin' this here blog and seen them purty pictures of naval vessels... y'know, like this one:

...or this one:

...or even this one:

...and thought to yerself, "Gee, that looks like a whole heapa good ol' fun.  How do I get started?"  You have???  Wow, now how's that for a good guess, huh?  Yep, that's me, Wonderduck, aka Carnac the Magnificent.  Sis boom bah.

Today's your lucky day Binkie!  I have in my possession a hermetically sealed envelope.  Kept in a #2 mayonnaise jar on the back porch of Funk and Wagnall's since noon today, nobody knows the content of this envelope... except for me.

And soon, you too will know, because I'm about to tell you.  IN THIS VERY ENVELOPE is a gift code for a new player of World of Warships.  It ONLY works for a new account, not an existing one.  With it, you get a free ship, a passel of credits, and a bunch of doubloons, the special currency of the game that you can normally get only via cash.  So if you're wanting to play, and you're NOT currently playing the game, let me know in comments so I can get the code to you! 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 05:49 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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That's The Long And Short Of It

Yup.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Pitchers & Catchers Report Next Week

For all of you that find that headline exciting and fascinating, here's something else for you:

For the rest, enjoy where your life may take you, rejoice in what you've accomplished, but do not miss what you could have had.  Mr Graham would tell you the same.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:37 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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"Can You Get Me Off The Hook, Tom? For Old Times' Sake?"

 
If Abe Vigoda can pass away, what is next?  The universe?

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World of Warships: High Score

Due to gentle proddings from friend Ben over at Midnight Tease, the hooligans over at Bo Time! Gaming, and my innate interest in a naval combat game similar in style to War Thunder, I downloaded the free-to-play game World of Warships a couple of weeks ago.  I'm trying to catch up with Ben so we can squad up... that seems to be the best way to play in head-to-head... but the game has a fairly robust player vs bot play too.  The bots can and will kill you dead if you give them half a chance.  After nearly 100 matches against bots, I decided to try my hand at head-to-head earlier today.  The results surprised me:

The short version was that most of my team went east, while myself, another cruiser and a destroyer went west.  I was lagging behind the other two (they were in Tier IV and V ships, while I was in a stock Tier III St Louis) when they rounded the islands at that end of the map... and discovered that almost all of the enemy team also went west.  Meanwhile, the rest of my team discovered to the east that the bad guys had left three battleships to bottle up that side of the map.  Effectively, as it turned out.  When I saw the approaching red horde on my side of the map, knowing that all I could do to help my two teammates was get myself killed, I reversed course... and headed for the center capture point.  The bad guys got the west point, we got the east... and a couple of minutes later, I captured the center.  I did, however, take an aerial torpedo in the bows, the result of a desultory air attack that I couldn't quite dodge, and a stock St Louis has an Anti-Aircraft rating of "zero."  As they flew away, I noticed that they were disappearing from view after descending about 10 km away... almost like they were landing.  As the only enemy in sight was both a long ways away and something I had no desire at all to engage, I decided to see if I couldn't cause a slowdown in enemy flight operations.  Sure enough, both enemy carriers were sailing together, less than a half-kilometer apart... and on the near side of a decent sized island.  I told my Chief Engineer to disable the engine room's safety features and give me all ahead full as I closed in on two helpless Langley-class flattops.

Well, "helpless" is a relative term.  As I charged in, they both began flinging torpedo planes at me as fast as they could.  At one point, they even managed an absolutely textbook "hammer-and-anvil" attack on me that if I hadn't seen it coming would have killed me deader than disco.  As it was, I ate two torps that took my health down to below half... anything with guns could have taken me easily.  But Langleys, like most carriers, are armed with slingshots and spitballs.  Soon enough I was giving the lead carrier full broadsides.  It rolled over and sank in a couple of minutes.  The other carrier was frantically trying to reverse course back towards the Myoko, which would have had me for lunch even if I'd been at full health.  It never completed the turn: my first volley disabled both his engines and his steering.  The third set him afire.  I didn't need many more past that.

Meanwhile, my team's carriers, given control of the air, did bad things to the Red Team's fleet; they still had the western cap point, but they never even came close to getting anything else.  We won a resounding victory; I was second on the scoreboard but I rightfully feel like I won the game for us.

World of Warships isn't anywhere near perfect.  It's very arcadey, destroyers are incredibly overpowered (the guy above me on the scoresheet was in a DD that sank three enemy ships), and the next time someone calls it "realistic" will be the first time.  But it's pretty fun, and really, that's all I need. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:59 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment
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Interstellar: The Ten Word Review

I will never look at dust the same way again.

Oh, you want more?

more...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:50 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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