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"Contrary to the popular image of brave knights and conquering heros in the age of chivalry, it was actually the engineers of great siege machines, weaponry and fortresses who were the movers and shakers of medieval warfare. Chalk one up for us engineers!" -- speaker2animals 2003-10-14

I had a couple of items I wanted to wave at people, so I gathered up enough less urgent items to round out a batch. This is a rather thrown-together link-sausage entry, but maybe having done it will get me back into rounding up the links I've been meaning to find again and share for the past month or so.

• An utterly hilarious porn tale: Three-Foot No-Cock Zone, about how stereotypical "guy attitudes" interact in a MMF threesome.
• IckyGiggly Imagery (or is that GiggleIcky? Gickly? Yes, that's it...) *ahem* Some Gickly imagery for y'all: painting with brains. (No pictures (at least not yet); just descriptions of mental images.)
• Far more disturbing, the Electric Clerk has to be the most twisted case-mod I've seen.
• That evil King William's College quiz that makes me feel so amazingly undereducated.
• For decades we've been hearing either that a male birth control pill is right around the corner and the wave of the future, or that the problem is too complex to ever really work right (something like one prediction in odd-numbered years and the other in even-numbered ones, but my memory is probably exagerating...). It turns out that a profitable chemical male contraceptive may be either Coming Soon or perpetually just out of reach, but one that lasts from 6 to 15 years and won't earn drug companies enough money to pay for it to ever be tested and made legal in the US has been tested in India for the past quarter of a century.
• A carpe diem essay by Susan Konig: "Drink the Wine. Use the Soap. Seize the good stuff.": "And it's not just wine -- what about the good chocolates, the fancy crackers, the special coffees that get saved? For me, if I have gourmet coffee, it is usually stored in the back of the cabinet or the fridge until, one morning, I run out of Chock Full O' Nuts and have to grind the good blend just to save my marriage. Then I think, I can't believe we're having this delicious coffee on an average morning. And yet, what a treat."
• Looking for a tune (sheet music)? the sectionalised web-wide abc index provides links to tunes in a whole bunch of different archives, indexed in one convenient place. (And if you aren't familiar with abc notation or the large number of (mostly free or shareware) programs that use it, visit the abc home page.)
• In the "things that might not mean anything but still make you go 'hmmm'" category: "The Sun has a twin, astronomers announced Tuesday. The solar doppelganger hits nearly identical marks in temperature, rotation and age. Planet hunters have it on their lists, but there's no word yet whether carbon-based folks are looking back at their star's twin, our own Sun."
• X-Treme Biology: the world's most alkaline lifeforms are living in contaminated water in a slag dump with a pH of 12.8. "Living in this extreme environment is comparable to swimming in caustic soda or floor stripper".
• And finally, the Must See item in today's sausage: M.C. Escher's "Ascending and Descending" as built in Lego! (Including an explanation of how they pulled off the geometric impossibility in this universe.)