Girl Friday

Finally, gentlemen, I give you Raquel Welch

Two Cellos: Thunderstruck

As the Didact has observed, my tastes in metal run more toward symphonic. This is in large part because my musical background included several years of violin, and before that, a couple years of piano, a southern upbringing, and a northern European heritage steeped in both classical and folk music. That said, I've found it's consistently easier for better metal bands to incorporate symphonic elements into their music, with many metal bands already doing more complex music than the pop norm, than anemic, washed out sounding attempts of classical and orchestral musicians to do rock.

So a couple years back I stumbled into a group dubbing itself "two cellos" that apparently became popularized after one of their renditions of a Michael Jackson song showed up on Glee.

Guys, they are two damn fine musicians, and consistently able to deliver the goods on rock and metal standards like "Thunderstruck", other AC/DC tracks (they cover a lot of them), Guns N Roses, "Voodoo People" by The Prodigy, and so on. Is it perfect? No - good rock music is often made to suit the instruments, the sound of the instrument evokes the mood.

But it's damned impressive, and not just in a "dog walks at all" sense.

The official live video for "Thunderstruck":

Oh, and a complete concert:

The Personal is Political, and Halloween

Just in case, despite all of the recent election coverage, gamergate, the ousting of Brendan Eich, etc., anyone is still convinced that SJW's and their snow-flakiness is restricted to college campuses, we are reminded, yet again, of exactly how petty SJW's can be. They simply cannot leave anything be, but just have to crap all over everything, and once they've shat one nest, they'll seek out new places to crap all over until everyone is as miserable as they are.

What is it this time? Halloween costumes, again. The notable thing here isn't so much the SJW outrage, or that the outrage has been focused at "cultural appropriation", or even that they decided that posting fake reviews at Amazon was appropriate. Nope, it's the fact that an activist organization is paying people to post those fake reviews - and many of those reviews are pastes from the same template.

More info here...

The costume in question? Here...

More Boom - or Things I Will Not Work With

I can't do this justice, it just has to be read to be believed. I only had a partial semester's exposure to organic chem in college, but that or a vague memory of high school chem should give you enough context to find the article side-splittingly funny. A couple choice quotes from "What This Here Compound Needs Is Some Hydrogen Peroxide":

Saying “this compounds doesn’t have enough nitro groups” is, for most chemists, like saying “You know, this lab doesn’t have enough flying glass in it” – pretty much the same observation, in the end.

and:

Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself, and yeah, I know that sounds like the guy at the pet store packing a starved Komodo dragon into the carrier with your new dog, just to calm him down some. But there it is.

Now to go through the rest of this series...

More Awesomeness Now Available

Anyone already a fan of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter and Grimnoir novels (if not, what's wrong with you?) probably knows he's also been doing an entirely different series with Mike Kupari that can best be described as a technothriller/adventure romance.

Imagine if a Tom Clancy book existed in a parallel universe where midnight coast to coast was more correct than you'd think, many modern conspiracy theories were real, subtle bits of magic and Lovecraftian horror are hinted at, but not anywhere near as loopy as Loki's Child or the Shroedinger's Cat books.

I can't say much without spoiling the series if you haven't read it, so go fix that forthwith, then buy Alliance of Shadows.