The Saga of Runolfr

Thursday, November 19, 2015

A Gun for Home Defense

A popular argument against gun regulation is that "good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns" and "we need guns to protect our homes".

According to a study conducted by Emory University, a gun in the house is over 20 times more likely to be used to harm a resident than to fight off an intruder.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Not Exactly Gumbo

This one consists of onions and garlic sauteed in olive oil, sausage, shrimp, cheese tortellini, additional pasta, and chicken broth.

One chopped onion goes into the pan first, along with some salt, pepper, dried thyme, basil, and oregano. They cook over medium heat until the onions are translucent, then a chopped clove of garlic goes in for a bit.

The sausage is half a link of a spicy sausage I got at the European Market & Deli, diced up and added to the pan for another few minutes.

The shrimp were frozen, so I put them in the pan, covered it, and let it cook for a couple of minutes to thoroughly thaw them.

Finally, I added frozen tortellini and a couple of shaped pastas, then added about a quart of chicken broth to cover everything. I brought up the heat to high until it was boiling, then dropped to low and covered it for ten minutes.

Turned out really good.

Death Star Conspiracy

A new conspiracy theory has emerged on Facebook.

Like conspiracy theories typically are, this one is full of holes:

Darth Vader was not in command of the Death Star; Grand Moff Tarkin was.
Darth Vader didn't build R2-D2; that droid was built before he was born.
There is no record of Darth Vader having children.
The exhaust port was not two feet wide: it was two meters wide; there are kids on Tatooine who can hit a target that size from a skyhopper.

These conspiracy nuts clearly don't want to acknowledge the very simple failures that lead to the loss of the Death Star.

If the Imperial intelligence services had been doing their jobs properly, the schematics for the station would never have fallen into rebel hands in the first place.
If every single gun turret on the station hadn't been designed to shoot at cruisers with no regard to the possible threat of fighters, the rebel attack would have been quickly repelled.
If the exhaust port had been fully shielded instead of just ray-shielded, there would have been no rebel attack at all.

This is yet another smear campaign aimed at Darth Vader simply because he was the sole survivor of the Death Star, when logs of the battle show that he was the only one who took action when it became apparent that the station's gun turrets could not rotate quickly enough to target starfighters. He ordered his squadron of fighters to repel the attack, placing himself at risk to lead the defense.

We should be glad he survived instead of trying to blame the Death Star fiasco on him.