Search Results for: the battery

The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava, October 25, 1854, Part II of II

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Read Part I here. The Charge of the Light Brigade There were four speeds for the cavalry: Walk: not to exceed four miles per hour Trot: not to exceed eight and a half miles per hour Gallop: eleven miles per hour Charge: not to exceed the utmost speed of the slowest horse The Light Brigade started at a walk because the horses could not maintain the charge speed for over a mile. When the first line was well clear of…

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The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava, October 25, 1854, Part I of II

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Introduction At 11:10 a.m., on October 25, 1854, one hundred sixty-one years ago, the almost seven hundred men of the Light Brigade stood waiting. The Brigade moved forward when the officer’s trumpeter sounded the “Walk.” It was immediately taken up by the regimental trumpeters to the right and left, so that it could be heard by the whole body of cavalry. When the first line was clear of the second, the order came to “Trot.” The bugles sounded again and…

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

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Windy City Pulp and Paper is a fabulous convention and, as its name implies, it’s focused mostly on vintage magazines and paperbacks. Wandering the vast Dealer’s Room is like stepping into a Cave of Wonders for fans of pulp science fiction and fantasy. But it’s also a den of surprises and a pleasant one awaited me while browsing a table piled high with pulps and digest magazines. A hand-written sign proclaimed all items were “3 For $10,” so I decided…

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I’ll Look Down and Whisper “No”: “Before Watchmen”

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Last Wednesday, DC Comics announced a new publishing venture: “Before Watchmen,” a set of related miniseries that would act as a prologue to the best-selling and critically acclaimed Watchmen graphic novel. The news was met with a considerably mixed reaction. Alan Moore, writer and primary creator of Watchmen, has spoken out against the project. Personally, I’m not going to buy any of DC’s new series, and I want to explain why. First, some more details. From The Beat website, a…

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Hi-Tech Lo-Tech: Alphasmart NEO

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My MVP Award for Writing in 2008 goes to a miniature machine that has made this year one of the most productive of my life: The Alphasmart NEO Behold a piece of technology that uses all the miniaturization and power-saving abilities available today to make what is essentially the typewriter of the new era. The Alphasmart NEO writes. And that’s about it. It weighs as much as a 8” x 10” spiral notebook. It runs for seven hundred hours in…

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe, Part 1

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We’re back! The film choices are limited to Prime and Tubi, because I’ve cut back on streaming services, but rest assured, there’s still a lot of rubbish to come. Yes, I’m returning to shark movies, because there are still around 17,000 I haven’t watched yet. Empire of the Sharks (2017) – Tubi SyFy and The Asylum, two things that go together like toothpaste and orange juice, or assault and battery. Here they combine to bring us the spiritual successor to…

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It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos, Part II

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Yes, a new watch-a-thon, featuring me, a hopeless procrastinator, plumbing the depths of cinematic misery for your entertainment. This time around, I will be watching Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-tangential films, and as usual they must be films I’ve never seen before (which makes the task trickier and bound for disaster). If you don’t know anything about Lovecraft’s writings, cosmic horror, the Mythos, or Cthulhu, that’s great — keep it that way. Onwards! The Haunted Palace (1963) – Tubi We kick off…

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Post Convention Musings

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Good afterevenmorn! I am writing this post rather late, having just woken up from the longest sleep in the history of sleeps following my last convention of the year. Actually, my only convention of the year. I don’t really count Ottawa ComicCon. Anyway, I digress. As always, I found it a great time.

Galactic War, Haunted Farmhouses, and an Occupied Earth: September-October Print Magazines

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September-October 2024 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and the Summer issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, NASA, and Mondolithic Studios The big news this month is the arrival of the new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, after a nearly 8-month hiatus. In the pages of the new issue, publisher Gordon van Gelder reports that “Ongoing production problems have led us to skip the Spring issue…

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

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So, last month, I joined fellow Wolfe Pack members for a long weekend at The Greenbrier Resort, in West Virginia. It was the fifth trip there for the group, though my first. It’s only a four hour-plus drive, which isn’t much for a Midwestern guy who also lived in Colorado and Texas. Too Many Cooks is the fifth Nero Wolfe novel. I think it’s better than the four prior ones, and it’s the first where the series really starts to…

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