Greek fire was a thing that existed. So were the Chinese gunpowder bombs that could be set by fuse or explode on impact, such as at the siege of Xiangyang.
You’re going to the wrong kind of bar. Or the right kind. I don’t know were to draw the line between ‘almost never’ and ‘sometimes’, but there are packed bars you can go to where when the pushing and accidental drink spilling starts, it immediately move to hitting. And other places where the whole point of attending is to have a fight.
I don’t normally hang out with a group of 4. But when I come into work, I’ll nod at Peter and say ‘Peter’. Greeting everyone in a group individually seems odd to me – but I’m not a people person. ‘Hi’ would seem dismissive: different cultures have different ways of greeting people.
One of the saddest thing I ever heard was a discussion with a bunch of my students from small towns. They were telling how “there’s nothing to do in town, so you might as well go the bar and drink til you get in a fight. I mean, what else is there?” Same went for crashing your car, sleeping around, doing meth… beats the everyday crushing boredom.
…
ps, I’m so glad I’ve never been in the “Nod and say people’s names instead of Hi” culture. I’d fail utterly…
Nod. “Peter… or Paul, or a P name anyhow…”
Nod. “Name that’s like a foreign city… rrrr…Roman?”
Nod. “Ed, right? Unless he’s Ed, and you’re Ted.”
Nod. “Whichever one he’s not.”
That first part reminds me of my recently departed grandmother. She was living with youngest son’s family, had at least 3 people in the house who she could talk to at all times. Had an HDTV in her room with both NetFlix and a comprehensive cable package (and she could use both without assistance) but she was CONSTANTLY calling my father for the past decade or so about how bored she was. Apparently arguing with other family members at holidays/reunions was the only thing that brought her joy in life.
Incendiaries aren’t really explosives though.
But gunpowder is.
Black powder is but modern smokeless powder is more properly “propellant.” Unless confined it doesn’t detonate but merely burns really, really fiercely.
If firemen are fighting a fire at, say, a reloader’s house, powder in cans is no concern to them nor even unconfined cartridges cooking off – their turnout gear is enough to stop any bits of burst case flying around. A cartridge in a closed breech, otoh, would be bad news if it went off in just the wrong direction.
Since we were talking about the Middle Ages, this is irrelevant.
Ah. I didn’t look up high enough.
When engineer John Luther Jones joined the Illinois Central Railroad in 1887, he was given the nickname “Casey”, because there were 11 other “John Jones” in his division; including two other “John L. Jones”.
Here’s one I hate that I just saw happen last night in an otherwise well-done show: the hero cop who goes into a dangerous situation without waiting for backup. This is a Very Bad Thing to do in real life.
I’ll spoiler the show and the event(s) in question (these are pretty big spoilers, so the first one is just the name of the show, so decide whether you want to see the other two spoilers after that):
In ‘Mare of Easttown’…
Mare had already gotten her former partner killed when she went with him to interview suspects when she was suspended. Since she didn’t have her service weapon, she essentially forced her inexperienced partner to go into a potentially dangerous situation without backup, and he got killed for it. But since two captive girls get freed, she gets reinstated.
Then, when she’s racing to catch up with the Ross brothers who are at their fishing camp, believing that Billy is Erin’s killer, her Captain called her on her cell and specifically told her to pull over to wait for backup, which she ignores, and just drives faster. Then the captain gets the photo which contains new info, and she refuses to answer her phone after that. So she’s not only going in without backup, she’s going in without a key piece of info. The captain should fire her ass after that stunt, no matter how it turns out.
Just watched Fargo again last night where the very pregnant lead character spots the murderer’s vehicle and decides to investigate, alone. She then finds the murderer feeding a corpse into a woodchipper and still does not call for backup before confronting him.
She’s otherwise highly competent and I guess they are kinda going for absurdist humor so it works for the film, but it wasn’t a particularly intelligent decision.
Heroes repeatedly fuck up but still manage to keep their positions of authority because of some absurd excuse or rationalization. The two situations given above are good examples of this, but the ones I always think of are the many times Captain Kirk should have been court martialed for violating regulations and/or causing the deaths of his crew through culpable negligence.
Spock should also have had his ass handed to him on a platter for kidnapping Captain Pike and hijacking the Enterprise. In real life, both Kirk and Spock would have been cashiered long ago and probably received heavy sentences at the Starfleet equivalent of Portsmouth .
I dunno, I think that’s debateable.
I mean, the universe of star trek is ridiculously dangerous, and for every time Kirk needlessly risked crewmembers’ lives, there were at least half a dozen instances of him saving them all. If the federation sent out 100 Constitution-class starships on the same 5 year mission, they’d probably receive regular bulletins on how many ships were lost this week.
Actually it’s a good question (for another thread): if the galaxy really were as densely-populated with powerful beings as Star Trek, and species can hop between stars as easily as the Enterprise does…how would we handle exploration?
It would be pointless trying to hide, but at the same time, every species you piss off is another chance of flaming death not just for the ship but for our homeworld.
The ST:TMP novelization suggests that Kirk is the only Captain who returned with his ship and crew substantially intact after a a five-year mission.
Tangent: I’ve got a biography of a WWII flying ace, who became an ace partly because he was a civilian pilot who decided that he wasn’t going to kill himself by doing something stupid. Unlike the other WWII aces/pilots who had their kill numbers finalized when they killed themselves.
It’s been put to me that when people are going out every day and being shot at, and seeing their friends go down, and the nicest thing you could do to them is to take them off duty, it’s very difficult to impose any kind of control on their stupid and dangerous behavior.
True, but she had a very small force, and not very competent.
She calls for backup before she confronts the killer. She reports that she’s found the Tan Ciera. She doesn’t wait for the backup, though.
Here’s one that, for aught I know, does happen in real life, but just seems odd to me:
Twice in the last week, I’ve seen dramas in which someone’s facing an oncoming machine of some sort (seemingly not actually being driven by a person), and the victim turns and runs in the same direction as the machine, instead of running to one side (and of course they stumble and fall, before some deus ex machina comes along to stop the machine in the nick of time).