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So, I know you all have read the moderator guidelines and remember the very important "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting." bit, yes? Well, I went looking for who the worst offenders were against that out of curiousity. I'm not sure it's really proper to shame them here though. You lot can leave your opinions on that here and us staff types will discuss it later.

What I absolutely can and will post are the badasses who have most excellent ratios of upmods to downmods. Without further ado, here's everyone with over a thousand upmods to their credit and a downmod percentage of less than 10%.

+--------------+-----------------+
| percent_down | nickname        |
+--------------+-----------------+
|       0.0865 | VLM             |
|       0.1188 | anubi           |
|       0.1209 | AnonTechie      |
|       0.2067 | tonyPick        |
|       0.4737 | redneckmother   |
|       0.5438 | Reziac          |
|       0.6222 | CoolHand        |
|       0.6494 | Bobs            |
|       0.7171 | WillAdams       |
|       0.8937 | McGruber        |
|       1.1099 | GlennC          |
|       1.1341 | fritsd          |
|       1.2910 | maxwell demon   |
|       1.3060 | pinchy          |
|       1.3723 | HiThere         |
|       1.4609 | monster         |
|       1.8067 | DannyB          |
|       1.8447 | J053            |
|       1.8601 | quacking duck   |
|       2.2772 | deimtee         |
|       2.4750 | mhajicek        |
|       2.5053 | Unixnut         |
|       2.6012 | dak664          |
|       2.6693 | zocalo          |
|       2.8353 | Yog-Yogguth     |
|       2.8932 | rts008          |
|       3.1125 | khchung         |
|       3.2325 | The Archon V2.0 |
|       3.5069 | GungnirSniper   |
|       3.5307 | canopic jug     |
|       3.7419 | Freeman         |
|       3.7582 | jelizondo       |
|       4.3070 | turgid          |
|       4.3096 | hubie           |
|       4.5095 | bradley13       |
|       4.8469 | Scruffy Beard 2 |
|       4.9924 | Nerdfest        |
|       5.1967 | Kymation        |
|       6.1929 | Bloopie         |
|       6.2708 | linkdude64      |
|       7.2055 | SpockLogic      |
|       7.2575 | acid andy       |
|       7.3139 | NotSanguine     |
|       7.4517 | Ethanol-fueled  |
|       8.5932 | KiloByte        |
|       9.5238 | Hawkwind        |
|       9.6141 | bart9h          |
+--------------+-----------------+

Congrats to VLM. He is currently Da Man.

So, yesterday I moved my car into The Roomie's parking space, moved my boat out of the yard and into mine, and mowed the yard. All was good and celebratory beer was drank.

Enter today. I go outside for a smoke and while enjoying it I think to myself, "Self, TR's going to be back from his customer service road trip today. You should jockey things back around before he gets home." This sounded like a fine and courteous idea, so I got up and proceeded towards said goal.

Unfortunately when I went to lift up the tongue of my boat trailer (Well balanced. Boat and trailer together weigh maybe 500lbs. Load on my arms maybe 50lbs.) that I'd moved easily the day before and wag it back over into the grass beside TR's boat. For some unknown reason, my back takes that specific moment to remind me that I started having birthdays beyond my 40th within the past few years; or, to put it more succinctly, it just shit right out on me.

Damned traitorous body parts. If it weren't for all the skills and wisdom you tend to pick up along the way, I'd say getting older sucked.

This has put me entirely not in the mood to bandy words with my peers and adversaries. My apologies to those who will likely never know how utterly wrong some comment of theirs is. To those in need of mocking, leave a note here and I'll get to you as soon as the pain's lessened enough to think through. See you lot in a week or so, I expect.

Wow, @Scaramucci is the worst kind of loser -- a total fool. Threw the White House into complete chaos. Screw him, he's FIRED!

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious letter in the snail mail purporting to be from a certain PC Plod of Her Majesty's Constabulary informing me in somewhat stilted and ungrammatical English (Mrs Turgid teaches English at a secondary school and was highly amused) that he would like to speak to me regarding a inappropriate comment made on a UK web forum from an IP address apparently registered in my name. The method of communication requested was quite strange. PC Plod wanted to know my phone number so that he could speak to me in person. PC Plod managed to find my snail mail address, so this was a bit fishy, to say the least.

Smelling a rat, I decided to proceed with caution and to entertain the possibility that this may have been some kind of hoax.

Being a bit of a commie I'm a member of a trade union and have access to free lawyers, so I contacted them. I was granted a telephone conversation with a lawyer who was both very helpful and knowledgeable. I am not a lawyer, and what follows in not legal advice. I am paraphrasing from a conversation that happened many weeks ago.

The lawyer agreed that the wording of the letter was very strange. I made the point that I was quite distressed by it since I am not in the habit of intentionally stirring up trouble, certainly not of a violent kind and certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the police. She conjectured that if it wasn't a hoax, perhaps the police had imagined that someone using my network may have said something contravening the Malicious Communications Act. We both discussed that fact that a lot of subjectivity is involved when trying to argue that something is in breach of the Act and that this has implications for Free Speech. To put it a bit more bluntly, just because PC Plod takes issue with something that doesn't mean that a Court of Law would. It would be expensive and time-consuming for them to prove so. And we are still innocent until proven guilty in England and Wales.

She discussed the circumstances under which a police officer may speak to a member of the public. If a police officer has reason to speak to you regarding a suspected crime or such, you should be interviewed under caution and have the right to legal representation. What you discuss will be written down and signed. If the police officer wishes to speak to you in connection with a civil matter, they have no business doing so. They should not be investigating. Lawyers deal directly with that sort of thing. Finally, apparently, a police officer may wish to speak to you unofficially to offer "a few friendly words of advice." Communicating with the police by phone is a bad idea since you have no idea who you are really speaking to at the other end. You also have no idea whether the call is being recorded, whether there are other people listening in, or whether it is being transcribed.

So a letter was written back to this mysterious PC Plod expressing surprise, concern and asking for more information.

Eventually came the reply. PC Plod glibly and arrogantly stated that a message posted from somewhere behind my router broke Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act but that he had no idea who posted it. Upon looking at the pseudonym under which the message was posted, I suspected satire. The name suggested a certain amount of reactionary bad temper and perhaps a degree of non-conformity perhaps relating to ethnicity, the sort of thing that your typical alt-wrong snowflake would have difficulty with. Looking at the actual message and the discussion under which it was posted, it was patently obvious that it was satire, highly condensed, but in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The problem is, apart from the fact that PC Plod is poorly educated, not particularly familiar with the political culture of his own country, has no concept of context, but this particular forum has a major design flaw in that moderators may remove comments, thereby removing any context in which other comments may have been made.

PC Plod did indeed offer some friendly advice on Internet security and signed of with a thinly-veiled threat.

Let me just finish by pointing out that this "grossly offensive" comment was pretty tame compared with the stuff EthanolFueled and TheMightyBuzzard and even Runaway1956 post sometimes around here.

I've been following with great interest and great concern the news about the murder of Dee Whigham, a known transgender. She was stabbed 119 times, and her throat was slashed. It's become clear to me that transgenders cannot defend themselves. How, then, can they defend our great country? After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. God bless!

Here's one. Suppose you were a Three Letter Agency and you needed to break some strong encryption. Now say that the cost of the hardware to do that was prohibitive (it's not likely to be invented for several decades, for example) but you remembered that millions of people were running "grid computing" (remember that term) applications on their home computers with juicy GPUs (e.g. Folding@Home). Do you reckon you could get some secret code deployed by those projects to help you break that encryption in parallel right under the noses of J. Random Citizen?

There Was a Ceooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
David Erik Nelson
July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction

I finally caught up on my reading, and the latest F&SF magazine has the best novella I've read in a long time. It will be on sale until September 4.

When I first started reading it, the thought occurred to me that the author was trying to cash in on last year's bogus controversy about black writers not being published (how would an editor know?), and perhaps he was, but it's a great story none the less. It starts out in Detroit with a black locksmith with four years of architectural training under his belt, and a large white man who is slightly retarded. They work for a real estate agent, who has just bought the house. Their jobs are to check it out.

Before they get close, they're hassled by the cops, with the locksmith in handcuffs until he shows his certification as a locksmith and his license for "burglar tools". The cops leave, the locksmith picks the lock, and his training tells him the door is installed backwards.

He steps inside and falls out the back door. I thought then that it was a remake of an old Heinlein story, especially after several such attempts, but it wasn't anything like that at all. They call the boss, who comes out and sees the oddities himself, and curses. He gives the locksmith a silver key.

Later, having met a foreign toourist who complained that there's nothing interesting to photograph, offers to show her the house. He uses the key--and the door opens from the other side. They go in, and it really starts getting wierd. Books by authors who didn't write them, like a memoir of William Shatner written in Esperanto, and the fact that outside the windows isn't Detroit. And a sneaker with a foot still in it.

Not to give too much awy, it involves superior creatures from... another dimention? I was two thirds of the way through it before I could see it was science fiction.

I plan on nominating it for a Hugo next year. It's well worth the cost of the magazine.

A Forbes' contributor says that the "US Newspapers' Problems Come From Their Former Monopoly, Not The Duopoly Of Facebook And Google."

That is only a part of the problem. There are far larger ones.

First, the prices of their newspapers. The skinny little State Journal-Register costs a full dollar and has very little news you won't find in other outlets. The Illinois Times prints theirs free, making money from advertising alone, and it is superior to the incredibly poor SJ-R.

But mostly it's how abysmal their web sites are. Know why I'm not reading your ads? No, not AdBlock; it isn't installed. It's because I've read the article in less time than the incredibly bloated web page loads and far faster than the even more bloated ads load. By the time the ads finish loading, I've already closed the tab. The St Louis Post-Dispatch is abysmal with loading; a full thirty seconds, then it goes blank, and takes another full minute, and every article is like that! They, and almost every other paper, badly need a competent webmaster. Except for extremely long or graphics-laden pages, the damned thing should load in seconds. Hire someone competent, who actually knows HTML and doesn't have to resort to one of those stupid programs that take your 5k of text and turn it into a 5 meg page. Today's sites load slower on high speed internet than back in the 33k dialup days.

Then there's "click to read more" after only half a paragraph is displayed. What in the hell is wrong with those morons? They expect me to subscribe to this garbage and actually PAY for it after annoying me?? STUPIDITY!

Then there are so many stupid pages that render in a six point typeface, gray on white, on a tablet that when you zoom, the ads completely cover the text! With morons like that working for your paper you expect me to believe anything you've written? The science rags are the worst about this, but Newsweek isn't any better. Zoom the page and the stupid social media bullshit covers the text!

Look, morons, nobody goes to your stupid site because it's got a "cool" interface, they go to find out what's happening in the world, and you seem to work hardest at making that as difficult as possible. And you expect me to PAY you for that? How fucking stupid can a person be?

Then there's the quality problem. Two decades ago I rarely saw a typo and never a grammatical error, these days few articles are error-free. You idiots expect me to PAY for that unprofessional garbage?

No, the newspapers are dying from blood loss, caused by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Fire the idiots and you might start making money again! Of course, if you're the publisher, that means you have to fire yourselves, because you're the most moronic at all!

Friends, I totally killed it with my performance in Warsaw! Terrific, terrific editorial in the WSJ! They say I'm like Pope Benedict XVI! The Pope who resigned. Said I'm defined. I haven't even been lifting and they said that. So chuffed! Read it on my blog➡️ 45.wh.gov/gSYLnz

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So, NPR is calling for revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound "patriotic". Your implications are clear.