The whole world, somewhat oddly, seems to be taking notice of the plight of Jene Newsome. Newsome, if you’re somehow unaware, was until recently a Sergeant in the United States Air Force, but was discharged after seven years’ service because, oops, she’s gay, which is a bit of a no-no in the military just at the moment - at least if you “out” yourself…

…which she didn’t, technically speaking. Hence the controversy.

Coverage of the story in the last couple days has been fairly interesting, with - guessing here - eight out of ten articles blaming the Rapid City Police Department, and the remainder mainly blaming Newsome, because some people are just like that.

This isn’t particularly surprising, in modern-day America. When you’ve got a salacious story involving a police department, a lesbian, and the military, it’s not too hard to tell where most of the criticism is going to end up - everybody loves to hate on teh po-po, and nearly everybody loves a little gay bashing.

Criticize the military, though? What are you, nuts? Or, worse yet, some kinda commie pinko fairy who hates America?

Unfortunately…
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Some of you may remember Southland, the (former) NBC drama that I wrote about several months ago. Its second season got canceled by NBC late last year after they’d already filmed half the episodes, in a truly stupendous WTF moment.

The show later got bought by cable network TNT, who agreed to re-air the first season and air the episodes of the second season that were already shot; no decision has yet been made on whether or not to produce new episodes… but hope springs eternal.

At the time, NBC’s explanation for canceling Southland was that the show was “too dark” and “too gritty” for prime-time network television. It was originally supposed to air at 10pm, but got briefly moved - at least in theory - up to 9pm because of The Great Jay Leno Debacle.

Not a lot of people believed NBC’s explanation that, once they’d seen the first two episodes of season two, they didn’t feel it fit well with the network at 9pm - everyone figured it was all down to Jay Leno.

The first two episodes of season two have now aired on TNT… and NBC’s original explanation is a bit more believable, now.
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A couple of geeky food-related things I’ve come across recently, that you might find interesting:

First, a fairly spiffy recipe for hayashi raisu, a Japanese beef stew that’s served with rice. I don’t cook much Japanese food, because finding the ingredients can be a challenge, and I’m annoyed by the cultural snobbishness that prevails on a lot of English-language Japanese food blogs…

I made it the other night, and it turned out pretty decent. I used demi-glace, which I’d never used before and had a hell of a time finding locally. I think next time I’ll just use strong stock, made from concentrate. I was skeptical about how it was going to turn out right up until I added the roux and everything thickened up into a, well, stew. Yay for roux once more…

Next up, a very interesting look at the science of cast-iron cookware. I have three cast-iron skillets; one is merely five or six years old, and kind of crap (like everything made by Lodge), but the other two are excellent - vintage Wagner and Griswold from who-knows-when, probably at least fifty years old.
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Way back in the day when 9600-baud modems roamed the earth, I used to hang out on local BBSes a lot. I met a lot of very interesting people that way, including the first two people I ever dated. I know, I know; meeting people online? Well, the rub, of course, was that BBSes were fundamentally local, and for all the paranoia about “bad people” “online”, the big BBS-user gatherings (”get togethers”) were pretty safe places to meet people in real life who you already knew fairly well over the computer.

I can only remember a few of the people I knew from back then - Chebutykin is one of them, and one I’ve actually spoken to within, you know, the last decade. Some of the others, I remember their names, and not much more…

There’s one person I recall surprisingly well, considering that we never met, and never exchanged more than a few messages back in, oh, 1992 or 1993 or something like that.
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I have a deep and shameful secret: Back in the day, I used to play RPGs. I was never obsessive about it, but, yes, I did enjoy them.

“Back in the day”, I might add, was the misty days of yore when there was still “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” - and then later a second edition of the latter.

For people who’ve grown up on AD&D’s Second Edition - or the current incarnation, especially - ye olde red-box D&D must seem incredibly primitive. To be honest, it seemed incredibly primitive back in the nineteen-mumbles, and it was. Many of the game systems that came after were, in part, efforts to inject a small amount of realism into gaming, and the trend has continued into the computer era - Dragon Age: Origins shows how far we’ve come since the old TRS Forgotten Realms games of the 1990s.

I still can’t help but feel that a certain amount of realism is missing, though.
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