Assuming that this Minor Planet Electronic Circular is correct, the Solar System has some company: a comet from some other Oort cloud.

Discussion is ensuing.

(News spotted here.)

...the British Library.   So most of us can't make it, sadly.  Because, damn, it looks good and fun.

One nice takeaway from that video...  A little judicious work with the pause button and the snipping tool, and I have a copy of Rowling's original hand-drawn map of Hogwarts and environs:

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Bob Corker says Trump 'utterly untruthful president'

New U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft says she believes 'both sides' of climate science

I wasn't aware that science - real science - had more than one "side".

I also wasn't aware until I heard about this posting that the ambassador was married to a coal magnate.

Puerto Rico still stumbles in the dark a month after Hurricane Maria

Trump gives himself a '10' for Puerto Rico response

Keep the spotlight on this, folks...

(Starting the thread in Politics because I know it'll end up here eventually...)

Nearly 500 hand-made dolls, each representing a different missing woman, have themselves gone missing.

Even if this is simply a matter of them having been misplaced - they were last seen in February 2016 - it's still bad that they're gone.

They've been know to be missing since November 2016 (nearly a year ago), but this is just reaching the news now. Missing White Woman Syndrome strikes again...

Is anyone else seeing a yellow padlock as part of the thread icon for the current "cursed" thread? It only appears if there are unread messages in the thread. I first noticed it two days ago. The Mouseover says that it supposedly means that I have posted in this thread (which I have), but that is usually a dot and not a padlock.


Kilroy

So a good friend of mine is Michael Satran. He's one of just a couple of people writing now for Hero System.

He's also sick right now. A couple weeks ago he collapsed in his driveway. For a couple months beforehand, he'd been having troubles: developed a facial tic, worried about random things, and having attention span issues. For those of you who read this, you probably have an idea about what's going on.

He's got a brain tumor.

The most recent report today is that now he's sleeping all the time, he's almost nonverbal, and when he's awake he doesn't recognize people are there. They're talking about moving him from where he is to a different facility, like Sloan-Kettering.

The man who never could shut up isn't able to speak. The man whose life was gaming and writing can no longer read.

I'm going to be moving soon, I hope, to be closer, and also to be running some games while Mike's unable to.

What a Goddamn time.

... why's Google rating a thread?

...our first attempt by a spammer to register.

I think everyone here will agree that one of the advantages of having a community with some 15 years' history behind it is that (at least at this stage in the life of the new site) everyone here is familiar, and everyone who is likely to register in the short run will be from the increasingly small group of those who haven't caught up to the move yet.

Also, most everyone who hangs out here has a handle, or just uses their real name.

So when I see a registration request from someone who uses an email as their username, and that name is unfamiliar, I'm immediately suspicious.  Fortunately the registration approval screen includes IP addresses, so I grabbed theirs and plugged it into the IP Check feature over at StopForumSpam.com.  Yup, sure enough, an IP used by a known spammer.  Just to be sure, I searched on the address itself, "christianadesouza@yahoo.com", and discovered that Chrissie there is a polyglot linguist with an amazingly broad range of interests, judging by the boards she's signed up for all over the world in the last couple months.

Sorry, Chrissie, we're just not capable of sustaining discourse at the level to which you are clearly accustomed.  For your own good, you understand, I must deny you access to the DW Forums.