Oh, yeah huh. Endings.

The longer version is that we got off a train we had hopped from Spokane to Cheney and quickly realized that we'd leaped a bit early. We went to get back on and a cop waiting for the train to pass flicked his lights and flagged us over.

We ran.

Through another train headed the other way, into a barn and out the other end, into (and through) a swamp, we realized that we had stirred up a hornet's nest because now there were four patrol cars running code up and down the road.

When we left the marsh, there was just open field right next to the road, so we crawled on our bellies along the berm of a drainage ditch. The cops passed several times up and down the road but never got out of the car, and it was dusk so we thought we'd got away clean.

In reality, we had crawled into someone's backyard. We were so focused on the road ten feet away that we didn't bother looking ahead. A woman was standing on her deck looking at us like we were something she'd stepped in.

Cheney is not a large town, so of course, she know the cop who had honked at us and had already called in. We got a grilling by the side of the road, and they took my bitchin' Rambo knife that I had bought for $5 at the fair. They called our parents (I was 14) and told us to take the first bus back to Spokane and not come back. This was back when police and parents had some discretion.

Nowadays I'd have probably be automatically charged with a host of offenses, and had a very different life. I certainly wouldn't have ended up being an MP in my twenties.

The last time I hopped a train, it led to me running from police knee deep in swamp water, with a makeshift bandage around my bloody knee, which I smashed along the tracks because I grabbed one rung too low as the train went by. Ah, memories. Do ride the train; it builds character.

He has a future in government.

With my luck, I'd get a wasp nest instead.

Why is it that we see the same people through all of these trends? Be it cyberpunk or steampunk or goth or rococopunk, I swear it's just the same 20 people changing outfits and declaring a new trend every two years...

The idea of people who are disgusted by perfectly good food, disgusts me. I never eat in space.

The inventor seems to have utterly missed the purpose of a bullet.

For target shooting applications, the behavior of the projectile after it strikes the paper (steel plate, soda can, etc) is utterly irrelevant; it simply needs to reach the target in a precisely repeatable trajectory.

For martial applications, tumbling is a good thing, because rounds that tumble once they reach the target cause more tissue damage. This is absolutely central to the design of small bore high velocity rounds like the 5.56mm. 5.45mm and 5.7mm and .17hmr. They cannot cause sufficient wounds to stop a target without coming in very fast and tumbling. Look up the terminal ballistics of a 5.56mm round; the wound channel looks like the Challenger explosion.

So while he may be right about reducing yawing, that's not actually something to crow about.

Nice stems.

I've never actually seen this oft-cited phenomenon. I've certainly been lost before, but never refused to ask for help.