boom!

The kind of job I'd actually look forward to getting up in the morning to do! And that's saying something at my age.

It would be cool to get into the detonator business.

Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad wrote a novel called The Secret Agent in which one of the chief protagonists is an Anarchist/Communist agitator who's in the quest to develop a so-called "perfect detonator" for the bombs he plans to hand out to whoever's dumb enough to throw or plant them in the cause of sweeping aside the hated Capitalist system and ushering in a Commie utopia and 'government by the Proletariat' in Edwardian Britain. Kind of reminded me of Bill Sloman or Bitrex.

Of course it would.

In reality the Anarcho-Syndicalists Conrad was writing about were utterly opposed to the communists.

Mikhail Bukanin's famous quote

They wanted political control to be local, and started the Co-operative Movement. The psychopaths who liked building bombs and blowing people up

- like Stalin - weren't too particular about the ideology they supported. You suffer from the same ignorance.

What I really want is some Husha Boom, the Silent Explosive. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have a relative who blows things up at Sandia. He says it's no fun because he doesn't get to see the booms... he only gets the data.

He has a PhD in Engineering Mechanics. He is highly offended if anyone calls him a mechanical engineer.

We had a house guest, the dean of a biggish computer science school. She was highly offended when I asked her what sorts of computer languages they teach these days.

Gotta be careful about this sort of thing, Dr Hobbs.

Communists know everything and understand everything so naturally The Party should be in charge of everything. So anyone who disagrees is an idiot and must be killed.

He's probably pretty lifelike. If he were a Civil Engineer, he'd probably be more polite, though.

As Bertrand Russell famously said, "The reason that academic politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so small."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dear Abby:

An old pal of mine has started yanking my chain by calling me doctor.

How do I tell him that it's only in my sig for the advertising value?

Para Doc

Anarcho-syndicalists weren't Communists, and Cursitor Doom and John Larkin are too pig-ignorant to know this.

Mikhail Bukanin's famous quote

Mikhail Bukanin was an Anarcho-Sydnicalist, who thought the all politics should be local - the cooperative movement is based on his insight. It's based on the idea that people don't know much about stuff where they don't have direct contact with it.

You are advertising that you were dumb enough to act as highly skilled grunt labour for your supervisor at a very low rate of pay, compensated only by the academic qualification which you got before you ran out of gullibility?

I managed to learn enough about electronics while doing mine to qualify for tolerably well paid jobs after I'd got the degree, but it probably wasn't a cost-effective exercise.