No, we were involved in blowing away members of the NVA who were invading the Republic of South Vietnam at the time. Much of the time we were using reverse slope trajectories to hit targets on the backside of a mountain, and once to the backside of the second mountain back. Our ship had a very good reputation with the spotting planes giving us the locations of targets.

If we have a draft today the level of resistance will cripple the country. Nobody will tolerate the Government pulling that. That move could break the country.

Yes, and I give him full credit for that. And please note that the reason we don't need a draft now isn't because there's no more conflict but because there are enough men and women willing to serve their country without it.

I was on what was then called a Destroyer Escort (Later changed to a Fast Frigate to fit in with NATO.) doing shore bombardment on the Gun Line for the most part. Our ship was targetted by counter-battery twice; once at night when I was sleeping, and once in the daytime when I was the one who reported that there were 6" shells landing about 30 yards off our fantail.

Trust me, most of us came back without any long-term mental issues. The stereotype of the unhinged 'Nam vet was created by leftist journalists and writers to give them something to point at when they wanted an excuse to make anybody who didn't march in lock-step with their leftist beliefs look evil. Do yourself a favor and take a good look at their propaganda and you'll see for yourself how phony it is.

And I don't care if that billionaire is D.D. Harriman as long as it gets built.

Speaking as a member of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, I would like to point out that the proper title for people like you is "bubblehead."

Whenever an authoritarian demagogue tries to justify a power grab by telling you, "Think of the children," look them in the eye and respond, "I am."

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

If and when you find yourself in a jurisdiction where some sort of age verification law is in effect, just remember that it's very unlikely that the law will require the date to be given in the Gregorian Calendar. There are many other possibilities, and as an example, here's a website that can convert your birth date into the Hebrew Calendar. This has many advantages: first, the date is written from right to left, not left to right, which should have interesting effects on any software trying to use it. Also, of course, the names of the months are different as is the year number. And, just to make things even more confusing, the conversion is different for different years, largely because some of the months have a different number of days in different years to avoid certain holidays landing on the wrong day of the week, and Hebrew leap years are done by duplicating a specific month. I'm sure that there are other examples, but this is the one I'm familiar with. Feel free to list other interesting possibilities.

No, the judge isn't lying to the jury, the judge is reading a set of jury instructions that were agreed on by all of the lawyers involved in the case during a conference with the judge. And, each of the instructions is in written form and must be read out to the jury exactly as written. If one or more of those instructions includes a statement that under certain specific circumstances that the jury MUST find the defendant guilty, that's what the judge tells the jury, no ifs ands or buts.

People don't even want to work in the office. Why expect someone to come in for an interview?

Just make an in-person interview part of the hiring process. If they want to know why, give them some mumbo jumbo about security requirements. And don't worry about chasing away legitimate applicants; if they're not willing to come in for an interview, they're unlikely to make good employees.

Those monkeyflowers better watch out for tiger lilies

Yes! If those monkey flowers make too much trouble, Tiger Lily will pluck them all.

Just to toss in a bit on film trivia, those recliners were invented by Alan Hale Sr., who played Little John in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, and was The Skipper's father.

I too am retired, but at the end of my career, I was doing mostly tech support by phone. Not in the phone firewall, or reading cheat sheets to callers, but at senior level, where either the cheat sheets didn't help, or, more likely, where the juniors had picked the wrong one. That meant that I actually had to know how to fix things on my own rather than hoping that I could guess which canned response would work, and an AI probably wouldn't be any help, because if it could fix things, the junior wouldn't have needed my help.

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.