A trick up their sleeve.

In case you need some visual aid - this is what a pirate ship that is also a bar looks like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75719917@N00/6939465069/ Here's a view *from* Half Moon Cay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75719917@N00/6939466477/ And here is a view *of* Half Moon Cay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75719917@N00/6939468987/

I really liked the delivery on "I think you left your dignity up there."

Was Felicia drawing on her work in _Dollhouse_? She certainly has some experience at leading people away from hordes of brain-damaged attackers. You need to write this up in D&D terms, maybe make it part of your next game. Let's see...You experienced a random encounter with a roving mob of autograph-zombies that had you surrounded and separated from the group. They were whittling at your defenses when another member of your "party" came to the rescue... We need to find you an amulet that is "+5 defense against autograph-zombies". Or an entourage.

I cannot recommend highly enough that you get a "litter robot". One of these things: http://www.amazon.com/Litter-Robot-Automatic-Self-Cleaning-Beige/dp/B000LJDLKG Cat goes in, cat goes out and a few minutes later the container rotates, sifting all clumps into a covered interior drawer which contains most of the smell. Now you can empty the drawer once a week or so instead of scooping litter every day and the place no longer "smells like cat" most of the time. The motor's not silent so it'd still disturb your sleep if you were *right there* (until you get used to the sound) - the biggest win with this thing is that litter gets filtered when you're *not* there, before the smell has a chance to fills the room or the house. Still: get it.

I'm not sure you're fully aware that the original Back To The Future came out in 1985.

That guy was trying to get *into* the US, having already taken his flight. So Wil could play that card if there's security at customs on his way back to LA. But we still need an example of the reverse - bypassing security on the way to get on the plane. That's the hard problem.

The government for years told us it didn't damage film to send your camera through the x-ray; this turned out to be a lie. Even if it could be demonstrated that this machine when functioning correctly after being properly calibrated by an operator who knows what he's doing doesn't produce a harmful level of radiation, that says nothing for a machine being used by a bunch of TSA goons. All you can say is that it *might* not be *too* harmful. I'm not risking it. The TSA collectively seems like a bunch of corrupt incompetents; I'm not trusting my health to them. So given the option, I have to settle for the grope.

"They" aren't trying to get onto the plane to cause damage, they are trying to get onto the plane to cause terror. The answer to that is to not be terrorized. When some moron uselessly fails to blow themselves up while posing no actual threat to the plane, the proper response is to make fun of him on late night comedy shows and otherwise go about our business. If you instead use it as an excuse to inflict pointless suffering on millions of american fliers, that lets the terrorists win.

The right to travel freely includes the right to assume risks in doing so. We most certainly do NOT need security measures to "protect" us from every conceivable movie-threat plot any random idiot can come up with. If anything, we need security measures to protect us from implementing any more security measures. Too much "security" costs lives. The net value of our security restrictions was negative even before the underwear bomber and has gotten more so with every new rule. The time and cost of security lines makes people drive instead of flying, which is much less safe and causes far more deaths. The economic cost of the time wasted in airports cumulatively puts us much further away from our eventual Star Trek future...and there really is no benefit at all in terms of safety because even *if* one could thereby significantly deter bombs in planes, the next-best attack vector isn't going to be significantly less scary or less deadly. In short, some risks just aren't worth the cost of "protecting" against.

The exercise component of the Hacker's Diet was based on the 5BX (Five Basic Exercises) system that was popular a several decades ago. It is very much like "leveling up" to track where you are on the chart. But since I find it annoying to keep track of rep numbers as lines on a chart I wrote an iPhone version of 5BX with comic-book-style graphics; screenshots are here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/five-basic-exercises-5bx/id320224734

Both that parallel and the Superman/Lex Luthor one suggest evil wil has to get his inevitable comeuppance in some future episode. He had to win a few times to establish the brand. Maybe one more win could work. But sometime after that - when we least expect it - EWW is going *down*!

If normal Wil Wheaton gets stuck writing a PAX speech, slip into Evil Wil Wheaton mode and see what he has to say to the same crowd! I'm planning to attend PAX East and I'd love to hear from E.W.W.. Maybe you could start out Evil, have somebody whack you with a clue-by-four, reboot, and disavow the previous sentiments. Or just run with it and see what happens. Sure, you may have *said* "don't be evil" at a previous PAX, but rules are for other people. The little people. You have a vast audience hanging on your every word; are you really going to use that power to do/say something *nice*? Abuse that authority! Like Evil Shatner's Saturday Night Live "get a life!" sketch, only for reals. Oh, and speaking of evil/self-regarding: if you need another temporary diversion just go to the Masters of Song Fu competition and check out a few takes on a "song that doesn't rhyme". Especially mine, titled oh-so-creatively "Song That Doesn't Rhyme". http://www.asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/22/song-fu-6-round-2-voting/

That's a gorgeous picture! Why not write about the gnome? His little gnome hopes, his dreams, what he sees and what he has seen... Me, I just wrote my first evil genius song, complete with a turncoat robot army and a chorus that resolves to a diabolical laugh...so I got that going for me, which is nice. Though I'm kind of stuck on the plot of my next song. Here's the question I'm pondering: if the Statue of Liberty placed a personals ad, who would answer the ad, and how would they meet up? I'm thinking they'd meet in a public place like Times Square - safety, doncha know - and she'd wears a carnation or something so the, um, prospect will know it's her...but who's the prospect? Is it too obvious if I go with the Lincoln statue?

Man, that's great stuff! As for me, I got inspired by Jonathan Coulton's "Thing A Week" and decided my big November project should be to finish at least *four* new songs - one per week - and put them on YouTube. So far I'm on track. The first is a folksy sort of thing called "missing piece of you" and the second is a rocking political sort of thing called "Everybody's just people". Both are here: http://www.youtube.com/user/glenra What I'm finding is that a *series* of creative works is a lot easier to do well than I'd hsve guessed by extrapolating from the difficulty of doing just one. Why? (1) getting motivated to *keep going* is easier than getting motivated to *start* - momentum comes into play; (2) there's a lot of technical stuff to get right - if you can look at piece #1 and do things slightly better for #2 and so on, eventually you'll really have something; (3) While working on one piece, you tend to get ideas you can't quite use then which end up forming the basis for the next piece.