It was a dark and stormy night....

The results of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced! Here is a sample (runner-up, detective category):

As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, "Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead."

-- Dennis Pearce

The Wikipedia Game.

Here's how it works. I will give you two articles. You have to get from the first article to the second by only clicking links in articles. Whoever can connect the two articles with the fewest links, while matching or beating my magic number, wins a bag of marshmallows*. You must provide your link trail, and no fair editing Wikipedia.

This week, you must link from RAH-66 Comanche to Chair. My magic number is 7 links.

*Like I'll ever get around to sending you any.

From an Actual E-mail I Received Today.

"We are participating in a US Army TATRC and NIST-Threat and Situational Assessment development around Regional Capacity to sense and respond to pandemic flu and similar events. The NIST project will include an effort to add a Bayesian BN onto the Semantic Web stack related to machine learning. Several of our group are participating in OASIS-open.org standards such as EDXL and HAVE as well as OMG efforts in BPM and MDA- RuleML.

"So an obvious question is: can your reports be presented in XML and XSD formats, and are you using OWL-DL now or will you be in the near future?"

A bag of marshmallows to the first person who can tell me what the hell this guy is talking about.* Time is of the essence.

I swear, there must be a government department that does nothing but come up with acronyms for the military and technology. They're probably called the EACD: Excessive Acronym Creation Department. Or maybe the DCTLAFLAOWMLIC: Department for the Creation of Three-Letter Acronyms, Four-Letter Acornyms, and Other Ways of Making Language an Impediment to Communication.

*You must explain what all the acronyms mean to qualify for the marshmallows.