I’d really like to have my Commercial Pilot’s License, because it’s getting annoying not being able to accept cash for flights given. I’d prefer they just change the laws so that a friend can offer to go out somewhere casually and pay his way, but alas! It is not meant to be, and rather than face heavy fines I figured I’ll just go ahead and get the proper licensing.

I’ve been hacking away at it for years now (my logbook says I enjoyed my first flight on July 15th, 2003) and it’s likely going to happen this year sometime. Here’s what I’m required to have, and what I’ve currently got:

• 40/40 hours Ground School
• 165/200 hours total flight time, which includes:
  • 20/20 hours cross-country
  • 26/35 hours of training as copilot, which includes:
    • 1/5 hours cross-country flight
    • 3/3 hours night flying
    • 2/2 hours night cross-country flight
    • 15/20 hours instrument flight
    • 5/5 hours general improvement
  • 92/100 hours pilot-in-command, which includes:
    • 25/25 hours actively practicing the improvement of my flight
    • 5/5 hours night flying
    • 1/1 long trip no shorter than 300nm

As you can see, it appears that I have just 9 more hours of instructor training (and a whack of about 20 hours personal time) and I’m done! FIN! Woooop :)

It’s been a busy few months at The Blitz and there’s been some updates and news I’ve been waiting to talk about. So now that it’s nearing midnight and I’m not going to trump someone’s regularly scheduled daily post, I thought I’d let ‘er rip.

First up, some promotions!

You may have noticed Iright Daley trumpeting around like he owns the place. He never got an official introduction, but apparently he’s a dirty american that weaseled his way into our midst. I had him doing some cleanup work on weekends; now he’s been promoted to Boatswain! His assigned day is now Tuesday.

Nextly, you may have seen Hawkeye posting a comment or two as the angry Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man. Hawkeye has been promoted from lowly commenter to the site’s official carpenter! He’s going to lathe and chisel out articles for us on Sundays now.

That means we have a full ship! PROMOTIONS ALL AROUND!

Monday: Maribar (promoted to Head Spazzywife!)
Tuesday: Iright Daley (promoted to Boatswain!)
Wednesday: Pagz (promoted to Sailmaker!)
Thursday: Ashblaster (promoted to Quartermaster, because he’s a master at quartering people with his ninja sword)
Friday: Beaton (promoted to Assistant to the SpazzyWife!)
Saturday: NonStop Pop/Foley (demoted to Mate!)
Sunday: Hawkeye (promoted to Carpenter, like jesus!)

The “Promotions all around” phrase is stolen right out of Bill Waterson’s hands, by the way:

You may notice that the captain of the ship (me) is now missing! That’s because I’ve been promoted to Rear Admiral. Yeah yeah, giggle all you want, but it’s still a promotion. But seriously, I’m not going anywhere - I’ve just activated yet another SubSite! Also known as a MiniBlitz, this subsite will have it’s own set of articles that only periodically show up on the front page, and will be all about…

Aviation!

Yep, I’m a pilot and flying is my hobby so I figure I should force myself to write about it 7 days a week until I get sick of it and ruin my dreams. The subsite can be visited by going to aviate.thedailyblitz.org, or by clicking on the Aviate link under the “explore” section to the left there. Which brings me to the next bit of news…

The “Latest” list now shows all the latest entries from the past 72 hours (maximum of ten), so if we go on more commenting rampages you won’t be liable to miss anything. =)

Today I write about something that I encounter daily. An injustice which I’m sure most of us have endured at some time or another in our professional lives. I speak of that most infuriating of situations, a co-worker praised or promoted for doing dick.

I’ve seen it happen in every single job I’ve ever had, but it’s most prevalent in retail in my experience. The issue is how easy it is to look busy and productive in such jobs, when in fact you’re doing nothing. What boggles the imagination is how managers are taken in by the act.

In the interest of protecting myself from possible repercussions, I’ll keep this article firmly in the realm of the hypothetical. The problem arises when an employee spends their time doing “busy” work. The work that appears to the casual observer to be useful. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that these people are doing “busy” work at the expense of actual work. The tasks which need to get done are left to the competent employees, while the high visibility bullshit work is performed by those employees of questionable work ethic and intelligence.

The results are, typically, that the competent employees continue to do the necessary work, while the incompetent employees find themselves given more authority. This becomes especially problematic when they start using said authority to get the competent employees to stop doing what needs to be done in favour of those task which are not of immediate concern.

How managers are continuously duped by this behavior is a mystery to me. I suspect the issue lies in the fact that most managers have fallen so far out of touch with the reality of working these positions that they can no longer differentiate between actual work and the appearance of work.

Working sucks.

I’m sure our fearless leader intended for me for to wait a full week before transplanting the Iright Daley Blitz to Tuesdays, but since all he did was post a bad comic with worse punctuation, I am staking my claim on this very day.

Today’s topic will be: fun with HP Photosmart Premier.

This is me looking even cooler than usual thanks to digital enhancement.

I accidentally discovered that my digital camera had a built-in time machine when I captured this stunning image of San sebastian at the turn of the century last summer.

One more thing: I had seen the new simpsons trailer during the show and again here on Pagz’s post and was very impressed. However, I saw the very same trailer this weekend on the big screen before Reno 911 and I was amazed at the difference. Regardless of what you think of the tiny trailer on your computer or tv or ipod or PSP, if you have ever enjoyed an episode of the Simpsons in your life, when you see that shit on the big screen it will give you goosebumps and you will KNOW that it is going to be nothing short of EPIC.

OK ok I know I have this strange sense of humor. But seriously I think this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in quite a while:

Anyone else out there have something they think is hilarious but probably isn’t to anyone else?

Hi Kids. I was away in Vancouver this weekend playing in a frisbee tournament and in all the excitement of getting up a 5am to stand on a field and get rained on all day, I forgot to post a comic! Well, let me rectify that horrifying error by usurping monday from its rightful owner, for which I will likely have my avatar name changed to something rude yet again.

To be honest we didn’t really do our homework here. There are as many variations on slashfic as there are fish in the sea and I have little doubt that somewhere out there in the dark recesses of the internet, that there is a burgeoning Gadg-Slash community 10,000 members strong, producing scintillating works in their chosen oeuvre, previously undreamt. Kudos, brave artisans.

For the uninitiated or simply curious, as always the wiki provides. After reading this, I’m left to wonder if the Starsky and Hutch slash community received a huge shot in the arm from the release of the 2003 movie. Are there grizzled S/H and Blake’s 7 slash-vets out there who’ve been holding it down for 30 years now? Also! As an astute NSP reader quickly pointed out, what’s with the name ‘Virgule’? This is the french name for the comma character, not the slash. Slash Community, is this some sort of joke?!?

Slash Timeline

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness. Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.

• 1974: “A Fragment Out Of Time” is the first known Star Trek slash to be published in fanzine. The author was Diane Marchant. The vignette was published in Grup #3. The language was highly coded and didn’t refer to Spock and Kirk by name but rather referred to them as he and him.

• 1975: In “Grup” #4 Diane Marchant published a rather indirect essay about K/S. The first public discussion of this essay occurred in the Star Trek letterzine, “Halkan Council”.

• 1976: According to the National Library of Australia, the Star Trek Action Committee was formed as a Star Trek Club. This Star Trek Club held its first meeting in April. Members included Susan Clarke, Julie Townsend and Edwina Harvey. This fanclub would publish the Star Trek adult fanzine Beyond Antares, which contained both het and slash.

• 1976: In June, “Alternative: Epilog to Orion” is written by G. Downes and published as a fanzine. It was the first K/S zine to appear.

• 1980s: Actors and fans of Blake’s 7 began interaction at conventions. This sometimes led to correspondences, personal phone calls, and general chit chat. In the midst of an unrelated fannish argument, some fans showed the actors slash fanzine based on Blake’s 7 as a form of punishment for things in other parts of fandom. The actors were upset because they did not view their characters as homosexuals and they saw slash as a violation of trust with their fans. One of the actors tried to ban slash authors and slash from the Blake’s 7 fandom. Eventually, this died down and the Blake 7’s fandom went on.

• 1980s Zebracon a slash convention is held in Chicago, IL. It was initially focused on Starsky and Hutch fandom (Zebra 3 was their car’s call sign). It then branched out to embrace Professionals and other cop/spy/sf shows. The convention was held annually and then switched to a 2 yr cycle. The next (and possibly last) Zebracon will be held in 2007. http://www.zebracon.net/

• 1981 The first MediaWest*Con is held under that name (following T’Con in 1978 and 2′Con in 1979) over Memorial Day weekend in Lansing, Michigan. A fan run, SF media based convention sponsored by T’Kuhtian Press, MediaWest*Con programming has reflected member interest in both slash and gen content. http://www.mediawestcon.org/

• 1990 Escapade - a fan run media based slash convention was first held near Santa Barbara, CA, bringing together slash fans face to face (some for the first time). Most attendees were women and the first fandoms focused on the Professionals, Blake’s 7, Star Trek and Starsky & Hutch. As of 2007, the convention has been held every year and has grown to encompass a wide range of attendees (men and women) and many fandoms. http://www.escapadecon.net/

• 1992: The Nifty Erotic Stories Archive, or Nifty for short, is established. The ‘Gay Male - Celebrity’ sub-section of the archive proves to be a breeding ground for many different types of slash fiction, particularly RPS and boyband fiction. It is one of the largest collections of RPS in existence, with more than 1,500 boyband stories alone, some of which were several megabytes of plain-text in length.

• 1993: First slash mailing list created, run from a private list-serv on the East Coast. It was called “Virgule” (another name for the / symbol) and membership was limited to women. It remained active through the 1990s, until more fandom specific slash mailing lists on Egroups and Yahoogroups became popular.

• 1995: Seven slash stories were posted to alt.tv.x-files.creative.

• 1998: On alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated discussion ensues regarding the issue of whether or not slash and het need to be rated differently.

• 1998: Real Person Slash archives for pop bands begin to emerge online. Boybands such as Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC figure prominently, but other bands such as Savage Garden, The Cure, and Placebo also had early archives. (The stories pertaining to *NSYNC and Savage Garden have recently taken on a certain irony. *NSYNC band member Lance Bass announced in July 2006 that he is, in fact, gay. In July of the same year, Savage Garden frontman Darren Hayes announced his marriage to boyfriend Richard Cullen on his website.)

• 1999: Star Trek OS writer Karmen Ghia publishes interviews with many of the more prolific contributors to alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated.

• 1999: On May 19, the Master and Apprentice archive was founded. Currently, this archive is the largest archive of Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon slash on the Internet with over 4,000 stories archived. This archive was also important in that it seems to have set the trend of writing stories based on media before the media is released to the public.

• 2002: On September 12, the FanFiction.net archive removes and bans real person fiction and NC-17 rated stories.

• 2004: Largely successful slash community slacken_ties is created on LiveJournal. It is dedicated to slash fiction featuring Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand. The band itself has acknowledged the site, with Alex Kapranos saying, “Slackening ties for the girls at slacken_ties!” in a 2005 gig at the Scala, London. Alex Kapranos also reportedly promotes the site by talking about it with fangirls after concerts.[citation needed]

• 2005 Butch Hartman, creator of Danny Phantom and Fairly Odd Parents, voices his disgust at slash, banning any user on his forum who posts slash material. [citation needed]

• 2006: Australian newspaper ‘The Advertiser’ acknowledges the Nick/Greg slash relationship from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in an online article about the Logies.[7]

As always friends, you can stay on the bleeding edge of Non Stop Pop comic-dom by checking out our comic page at non-stop-pop.com.

Today’s post will be a grab bag of sorts. Potent potables if you will. No? How about Potpourri? Not Jeopardy fans? Ah, what the hell do you know?

Daily Blitz Free Association: Comics, Iced Cream, YouTube, Murder, Wet dreams of Wii, Science on a Schtick, Chuck Norris, Seal Clubber, Boots of Rubber.

I would like to somehow combine blogging with “You Got Served” style dancing. You get up in somebody’s face with your laptop and type all fast and mad and then turn it around so they can read it and you wait for a minute or two if they are a slow reader and then go, “OHHHHH, SNAP!!!!! YOU JUST GOT BLAWGED!!!!!” Techno music in the background: “Let’s read your BLOG!!! Sucka, You got nuthin’ on me!!”

I was putting together some funiture the other day when I started thinking, “That guy Phillip they named the screwdriver after must have had a FUCKED UP head.”

Only in Denver… Ok so this editor is acting like a bitch so I’m out.