When I was a kid, sportscasters often used “rhubarb” to refer to what would now be called an on-field basebrawl, particularly when the umps as well as the players got involved. Supposedly the use of “rhubarb” in baseball derived from its application in 1920s radio programs to imitate crowd noise: the actors would gather in the background away from the microphone, and say “rhubarb and rhubarb and rhubarb” over and over to simulate the sound of an unruly crowd. Last, some Allied fighter pilots in WWII used “rhubarb” to refer to strafing runs; it’s likely that they borrowed it from baseball.

I have long maintained that Gates somehow obtained The Shadow’s Ring. You know, the one “with the power to cloud men’s minds”. No less than THREE times, companies set themselves up to be major rivals to M$ (and this does NOT include the idiocy surrounding Apple and the Mac and Scully). I mean EXACT rivals:
1 — WordPerfect bought Borland, which gave them a full office suite (including THE main spreadsheet of the day – Lotus 1-2-3) AND an array of languages (Turbo C was by far the best “c” out there). They bought DRI, which gave them a counter to MS-DOS. And they bought another piece of software (for the life of me, I can’t recall the name ATM) which allowed you full multitasking using DOS apps, which was much more efficient and effective than early Windows, pre-95.
The result? Dur Dur Dur Dur. Nothing. Never really did any kind of offensive to take them on and set themselves up as an alternative. The Ring had done its work!

2 — NOVELL buys the whole WP-Borland-DR thing, which gives them all that PLUS the primary network OS long before anyone had a network OS.

The result? Dur Dur Dur Dur. Nothing. Never really did any kind of offensive to take them on and set themselves up as an alternative. The Ring had done its work!

3 — Finally — IBM, which has a history of being marketing savvy, has a very critically acclaimed product, OS/2 Warp, which is getting lots of attention, is the equal of what w95 is supposed to be, even as w95 is languishing in development hell until it almost needs to be renamed w96!! The obvious smart thing to do, if you have IBM’s deep pockets, is to virtually give the thing away, just to get the market share that is M$’s. What do they do, instead? Charge developers $500 for their “Developer’s toolkit”… $500 in 1990s dollars, mind you. That’s like about $1000, now. Oh, yeah, IBM!!! Beat me, choke me, make me write stupid checks!

“Dur Dur Dur Dur… That Damned Ring!!

Add to this the stupidity of Scully not grasping the importance of market share to a technology company, which led to him not just letting M$ catch up to Apple’s utterly unassailable tech advantage, but also destroying the one hope they had for market share — which was Macintosh CLONES… which is what the “windows look and feel” lawsuit was really about — killing the clones. There were cheap Mac clones on the horizon at one point, in the late 1980s, and that’s when Apple sued M$ for the “similarity” between Windows and Mac. And the net effect was, of course, that all the clones just dried up, because it they were going to sue for “looking like the mac” to a huge company like M$, what would they do to something that looked “exactly like the mac” from a startup? Right.

The SMART thing to do would have been to offer the clone-makers access to previous ROM versions for the Mac. They would have opened the door to the low-end market, while still making people WANT to upgrade to the latest and greatest official Macs, if they could afford them. And all at no cost or risk to Apple — they could fully deny support of any kind to people who owned clones.

Dur Dur Dur. Microsoft wins again.

Then the final proof, of course, with Netscape, who literally steals a march on M$ and owns the browser market. OWNS it, lock, stock, and two smoking barrels.

M$ starts cheating, defacto paying OEMs to NOT install NS on their products, even though everyone with any sense wanted it instead of IE, which had flaws in its design that Netscape had eliminated two full years before… but people, being clueless and lazy, use IE instead of NS, and the browser share of NS slowly and steadily sinks.

Dur Dur Dur. Microsoft wins again.

Face it. Gates has The Shadow’s Ring.

MY point is he should not have even gotten re-elected. Even in a province and “district” (whatever Canada names the things) of total liberals, they should have elected someone else of a liberal bent. Not a jackwad idiot like Turdoo.

}}} (i.e., that might be a dollar sign too far)

Canadians are TOTAL $%^%&$ IMBECILES.

OK, Corrected. I even removed two. 😛

It is good that they lost SOME support, but under no circumstances is it anywhere near enough. Even WITH all the pansy-ass Vietnam beatfeets that they took in decades ago. 😛

It’s like fucking voting for Beto over Ted Cruz. You don’t have to like Cruz. You can even hate him. But you have to have the IQ of a gnat to vote for an obviously fake PoS like Beto.

}}} Been on a McCarry binge recently.

You may find the old Walter Matthau movie, “Hopscotch” entertaining.

You missed the scare quotes. Gotta have scare quotes.

I’ve been watching GunBlue490 for a while and enjoyed his video on the .257 Bob. His video on cleaning firearms is a classic. Judging by his accent and the terrain in his videos, I’m guessing he’s based in eastern Massachusetts or southern New Hampshire. Also seems to have a former connection with law enforcement. Definitely an old-school downeast Yankee with a workshop.

There have been some first-rate mechanical geniuses associated with firearms design. John Moses Browning, John Douglas Pedersen, and John Cantius Garand in this country, Dieudonne Saive in Belgium, the Mauser brothers in Germany, and Vladimir Fedorov and Fedor Tokarev in Russia/USSR.

One reason why it’s often ameliorated with strawberries…and tons of sugar.

BTW, boiling rhubarb in aluminum/aluminium pots (if such things still exist) is an excellent way to remove any and all stains in them. (Tomatoes work similarly.)

WRT castor oil (super-refined), it would seem to be a Putin-esque “remedy”…not to be tried at home (nor should rhubarb LEAVES be, for that matter….)—but then Russians, and Bulgarians for that matter, do tend to enjoy the hard stuff.

File under: “That’s the spirt”!

There’s a truth buried in stinky fermented soybeans though — the fact that one has to do all kinds of nasty things to them to make them digestible by humans should be enough warning to NPCs to go easy on the Soy. It’s a hop and a suspiciously androgynous skip from the Soy to the Poz.

Just old enough to have grown up when Prunes were prescribed whenever the rhubarb crop failed.

There’s always castor oil for the hard cases.

Must be a joke somewhere with punchline “We’re Runed!” — one of those things that could go either way.

…Speaking of “cuisine”, for general relief from all ailments—physical, medical, political, existential—I’d recommend ditching the runes and hitting the prunes. Hard….

Re Opsec I think they’re just trolling Our for broad definition of ‘our’ Side. I mean what are we going to do anyway?

My somewhat contentious contention is that we should heap scorn and ridicule upon them whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. They have successfully inverted a whole slew of values and it’s up to us to flip the scale 180 degrees again.