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Hmmmm, troll looks HUNGRY.. guess I'll toss a bone.

I, personally, am deeply offended by the insane attempts of far too many otherwise intelligent people in this decade to bury the age-old stereotypes, differences of belief, and general feelings beneath a very thin veneer of political correctness. What's so wrong about being honest?

I'm not against integration, and I cherish diversity. Learning about other cultures is a good thing, but pretending they aren't different when they are is stupid. If wearing a red shirt is offensive to the group of people who were extras on ST:TOS, should everyone stop wearing red shirts because they MIGHT feel bad? I'd suggest that those people who become upset over P.C. issues should ask themselves why they're upset... and maybe grow up a little.

Where are the Satanists to defend their beliefs? Seriously, if Christians can get all bent out of shape at the logo of a devil, why can't Satanists demand that the cross be banned from public display because it offends them? Either it works both ways, or not at all.

The logo in question is being dragged through the mud because a few religious zealots woke up and started looking at free operating systems and saw a devil? What, are they so stupid that they assumed this literally meant "Satan Inside"? Didn't the cute smile tip them off about the concept of caricature?

I checked my calendar... it's not 040401 yet, and 040104 has passed (YYMMDD anyways), so let's repost this when the time is right.

On this hyar date we look at th' histo'y of wo'd "Nigger" in South Car'lina. This hyar expresshun still remains at th' center of anti-Black vahbal disto'shuns.

Th' histo'y of th' wo'd nigger is offen traced t'th' Latin wo'd niger, meanin' black. Shet mah mouth! This hyar wo'd became th' noun negro (black varmint) in English, an' simply th' colo' black in Spanish an' Po'tuguese. In Early Modern French niger became negre an', later, negress (black woomin) was unmistakably a part of lexical histo'y. One kin compare t'negre th' derogato'y nigger an' earlier English substeetootes sech as negar, neegar, neger, an' niggo' thet developed into its lexico-semannic true vahshun in English. It is probable thet nigger is a phonetic spellin' of th' white Southern mispronunciashun of Negro.

Whutevah its origeens, by th' early 1800s it was firmly established as a dejunerative nickname. In th' 21st century, it remains a principal symbol of white racism, dawgone it. Social scientists refer t'wo'ds like nigger, kike, spic, an' wetback comes fum three catego'ies: dispareegin' nicknames (chink, dago, nigger, etc); explicit group devaluashuns ("Jew him down," o' "niggerin' th' lan'"); an' irrelevant ethnic names used as a mild dispareegement ("jewbird" fo' cuckoos havin' prominent beaks o' "Irish cornfetti" fo' bricks thrown in a fight). Racial slurs haf vickimized all racial an' ethnic groups; but, no South Car'linan group goes through as menny racial nicknames as haf Blacks: coon, tom, savage, picanniny, mammah, buck, sambo, jigaboo, buckwheat an' mo'e. Menny of these slurs became fully developed pseudo-scientific, literary, cinematic, an' ev'ryday disto'shuns of African South Car'linans. These caricatures, whether spoken, writ, o' reprodooced in media, an' material objecks, refleck th' extent, th' vast netwawk, of anti-black prejudice.

Th' wo'd nigger carries wif it much of th' hatred an' repulshun direcked toward Africans an' African South Car'linans. Histo'ically, nigger defined, limited, an' mocked all Blacks. It was a term of exclushun, a vahbal jestificashun fo' discriminashun. Whether used as a noun, vahb, o' adjeckive, it reinfo'ced th' stereotype of th' lazy as a houn'dog, stoopid, dirty, wo'thless nobody. No other South Car'linan surname carries as much purposeful malice. Th' follerin' sho'tlist is impo'tant info'mashun.
Niggerish: Ackin' in a lazy as a houn'dog an' irresponsible manner. Niggerlippin': wettin' th' end of a cigarette while smokin' it.
Niggerlovah: Derogato'y term aimed at whites lackin' in th' necessary loathin' of blacks.
Nigger luck: 'Ceptionally fine luck, emphasis on undesarved, cuss it all t' tarnation.
Nigger-flicker: A small knife o' razo' wif one side heavily taped t'presarve th' user's fingers.
Nigger hevvin: Designated places, usually th' balcony, whar blacks were fo'ced t'sit, fo' example, in an integrated movie theater o' church.
Nigger knocker: Axe han'le o' weapon made fum an axe han'le.
Nigger rich: Deeply in debt but flamfellaant.
Nigger shooter: A slin'shot.
Nigger steak: A slice of livah o' a cheap piece of meat.
Nigger stick: Po-lice officer's baton, as enny fool kin plainly see.
Nigger tip: Leavin' a small tip o' no tip in a restaurant. Nigger in th' woodpile: A corncealed motive o' unknown facko' affeckin' a situashun in an advahse way.
Nigger wawk: Demeanin', menial taxs.

A poor attitude certainly doesn't help things.

Right. Let's start by questioning the attitudes of the lying fuck managers.

Might I suggest reading some self help books on communication and people skills?

I have extraordinary communication and people skills. I'm not a cheating lying asshole, however, which puts me at a disadvantage in the average workplace, I've found.

You already figured out that there's a lot more to getting a job than being the best qualified candidate to perform that particular job function.

A premise which I reject completely. This is precisely the kind of subjective horseshit that makes the hiring process its own caricature.

Now that you've figured out what employers are looking for, why don't you work towards obtaining those qualities?

Because I won't become a liar to impress a cheat.

If your employer is oppressing your views, maybe you need to think about how you're presenting them.

Yeah, it's all my fault. Notice how employers are always blameless? Are you actually suggesting that I should choose to countenance oppression? Why does management always have a ready supply of apologists while former employees, whose careers have been unjustly destroyed, must bargain for the benefit of the doubt?

Passive bitching really doesn't do anything except make you look like a trouble maker.

No, what makes me look like a troublemaker is competence, education and initiative, backed by the experience and qualifications to build successfully from the ideas I present.

Instead, present your ideas to the decision makers like you're selling them the idea. Point out the benefits and give a list of reasons why your idea is better than their current process.

...and then get fired anyway and lose my house, money, credit, career... Sorry. I'll pass.

Well, it's pretty mild in comparison to the Japan/China/Korea bashing of the 1980's, 1990's, etc...

The rampant Japan/japanese/asian bashing that went on in response to the ascendance of Japanese auto & other goods, produced alot of hostile and racist movies. Rising Sun was written by a fairly prominent author (Michael Crichton) and made into a Hollywood movie. All that stuff was exponentially more hostile, and different in nature than the criticisms and some resentments at Indian offshoring.

At least there was a fairly national, public airing of economic impacts and resentments towards east asians, as well as analysis, and including some fairly blatant racial caricatures in the national media -- towards East Asians.

Indians seem to be managing this simmering resentment, much better than the East Asians have. I doubt that there will be a spate of SNL skits making fun of Indian programmers, as SNL has previously caricatured Samurai, cheating Japanese speed skaters, goofy Chinese diplomats, etc...

I do think racial caricatures are inappropriate (and it's for losers).

However, economic and social analysis of the outsourcing issue, and of the impact on American jobs is perfectly legitimate.

India is lucky that at this point, that even taking the side of the India issue is not considered "UnAmerican" as was trying to say anything good about Japan/China workers or management during the heights of American resentment towards these countries/peoples.

The fact that I didn't blink at all since I've just finished "The Eye of the World" and parts of the dialogue were written this way

But we all know that Jordan borrowed heavily from everywhere (The Aiel and Aes Sedai are so stolen from Dune, damnit!), so why not bad pirate movies? arrr!

Yes. Exactly that. To "take the piss" is to mock, usually with a mixture of caricature and ironic commentary. That's not from a dictionary - that's just how I (as an accredited piss-taker) would describe it.

The programmer who works next to me used to be a construction worker. Every so often, I come up for an idea for some kind of home project, explain it to him, and he tells me a way to accomplish it that is much simpler and more reliable.

This MS solution is almost a caricature of one of my own over-done home improvement ideas. Why bother with some elaborate cryptographic system to delay inbound emails? Why not just have the receiving SMTP process call sleep(10) at the beginning of the SMTP session? You get the same desired slowdown, and all you have to change is the SMTP server software. There's no need to modify MTAs, promulgate new standards, or fit yourself more tightly into the MS monopoly noose.

And all UK'ers should watch it! It's very bizarre, extremely little dialogue (makes The Driver seem over-wordy), but you know exactly what's going on. Everything's caricature, beautifully drawn, and surreal.

My best film of the year so far. (LOTR III might knock it off the top spot tomorrow.)

I like commentaries. Even for movies I despise (Starship Troopers) I like knowing just what went through the director's head. Or, in the case of ST, what didn't go through the director's head. What a drooler. Paul Verhoven, a director to avoid.

But it was interesting to know that it wasn't someone honest interpretation of the movie - the director hated it and went in to mangle it, because it was easier to mock if everyone was a caricature.

Then with movies I like, LotR for example, it's interesting seeing how they made it and all the effort they put into things I didn't notice (custom props) but that I now see are tailored very well to every scene they're in, instead of using the same props scene after scene.

And it's interesting hearing Jackson explain why he made the cuts and changes that he did, some I agree with, some I don't, but he usually has a reason that goes beyond "Well, Saruman's character was somewhat fascist, so I stuck him in a Nazi uniform to make this very clear, while changing his lines to reflect the fact that he's in a Nazi uniform and thus fascist..." Jackson at least is a fan of the books he's doing and I can see that it's hard to cut - if he was king, each part would have been well over six hours and contained all the minutae.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment

Whereas in the original series we just had to take for granted that the
Cylons were the embodiment of evil, now we understand why.

Otherwise, the annoyances are minor. The cylon space fighters, apparantly just space-borne Cylons (a neat idea, really) come off kind of hoakey [sic] with their red sweeping eyes. I know, I know, the eyes are really some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapons, but it's distracting just the same.

So long as our voting method favors groups that band together to put up a single candidate, and penalizes those that support several fairly similar candidates, the 2 party system will prevail.

that's why the more moderate republicans can't tell the thumpers to take their religious righteousness and go home. the bible belt is a mathematically necessary evil to ensure that the broader conservative ideology can compete with the broader liberal ideology.

1992 with Perot's party splitting the conservatives in just that way demonstrates my point. Conservatives fractionalized, Liberals won with an overall minority vote. Similarly, even the slight fractionalization of liberals into traditional democratic support and green party support allowed a minority-supported conservative to take the presidential election.

(remember, in '92 Bill Clinton received a lower percentage of popular vote than George W Bush did in 2k. it isn't a problem consigned to just the left or right.)

only something like Instant Runoff Voting can truly open up american politics and let it out of the caricaturized left/right politicking we currently have.

The point that most americans lie in the middle is important. It shows that most americans are more interested in moderate compromise than extreme ideological quibbling. Yet, they are not served by their own party. And if they were, it would merely force one or the other party to be absorbed into it.

America has always had a 2 party dominated system (over time, during reorganizational periods there have been more, but they don't stay for long).
And IRV is a simple, proven way to do that.

It also conveniently frees up political parties and voters to actually deal with rotten incumbents. You don't have to worry about splitting support between a rotten incumbent partymember, and a new one and that allowing an opponent to slide into office with minority support.

Our democracy could really use a change like that.

Um, what the hell kind of "progressives" do you hang out with? I consider myself a progressive, I have many friends and associates who would describe themselves the same way. Certainly it is true that we are all inclined to generally distrust corporations, to fight racism, to end oppression, etc. But seriously, I've never met anyone who behaves as you suggest. What you have written is a gross caricature of "leftists", it is identical to the lies spouted by people like Rush "The Junkie Fascist" Limbaugh to demonize his political opponents, and is itself nothing more than a silly stereotype with a very limited basis in reality.

I guess I should at least be consistent if I'm going to spell it wrong. (I guess I probably should blame either the flu or Robitussin for that one.)

However, I really liked the complexity of characters brought out in the miniseries. Cylons aren't simply demons without reason, they have reasons for what they do, and it's not necessarily evil.

I think you point out something that never made it into the original series (as I remember it). Cylons in the original series were as inhuman as could be. They were caricatures that mainly served the purpose of being something that one could hate.

One of the biggest failures of the original series was a lack of depth. Of course they came up with new plots every week, but really there was nothing happening behind any of the characters.

This series definitely stands apart from the original because of the depth of not only the human characters, but also the Cylons.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment

Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.

Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:

1. If the BSD community (or other small community within Slashdot) cares to use it, moderation can effectively clean up the trolls, crap floods, and so forth.

   This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.

   There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)

2. Moderation is self-regulating.

   The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.

This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.

On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.

This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.

Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.

Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:

1. If the BSD community (or other small community within Slashdot) cares to use it, moderation can effectively clean up the trolls, crap floods, and so forth.

   This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.

   There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)

2. Moderation is self-regulating.

   The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.

This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.

On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.

This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.

-Ed

Stretch Panic, from Treasure, no less.

A demon comes along and turns all of your sisters into possesed caricatures of their former (egocentric) selves. Meanwhile, you have to battle bikini-clad women with impossibly large breasts. So big are these breasts, that these women spin them around and fly with them, as though they were helicopter blades. To defeat them, you need to grab part of their bikini and snap it.

And, amazingly enough, it was sold here in the States.

The series is pretty good, at least the first four - I found them gripping although like you say pretty dark. It does seem like the books after four start to feel similar and the character seems kind of over the top, or some kind of caricature of himself... still, at least try reading the first few books in the series and see how far you get.

I have not managed to read any Weber books yet, so I can't help anyone there on figuring out if they will like Feintuch.

Word History: "An official statement of the returns of voters for senators give[s] twenty nine friends of peace, and eleven gerrymanders." So reported the May 12, 1813, edition of the Massachusetts Spy. A gerrymander sounds like a strange political beast, which it is, considered from a historical perspective. This beast was named by combining the word salamander, "a small lizardlike amphibian," with the last name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusettsa state noted for its varied, often colorful political fauna. Gerry (whose name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard g, though gerrymander is now commonly pronounced with a soft g) was immortalized in this word because an election district created by members of his party in 1812 looked like a salamander. According to one version of gerrymander's coining, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor's office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, "That will do for a salamander!" "Gerrymander!" came the reply. The word is first recorded in April 1812 in reference to the creature or its caricature, but it soon came to mean not only "the action of shaping a district to gain political advantage" but also "any representative elected from such a district by that method." Within the same year gerrymander was also recorded as a verb.