Maybe shipjackers, or aquathugs, maybe seathugs although that could be confused with seaslugs and cause confusion over whether a ship was attacked by armed thugs or giant mutant slugs, but it really only would be a problem near old nuclear test sites where one would find slugthras.

If only the military would realize that Godzilla is on our side now, and let him kill all the slugthras, or else have Gamera banish them to some other planet.

I keep running into nice people:

Yesterday, some guy was driving down the sidewalk today and almost knocked me over with the hockey stick that he was balancing across the handlebars. I started to mumble curses to myself when I hear the guy yell out "I'm really sorry I almost hit you."

Then Saturday there was a young couple walking across the street from me. They came to a grey Canada Post boxes that had been overturned and guy stopped, uprighted it and went on his way. Totally made me smile.

This morning as I was just getting to work it started to rain REALLY hard. I mean downpour. As I crossed the street, one of my co-workers with whom I have a nodding acquaintance was coming out of the parking lot, and he had a raincoat on but no hood or umbrella. So I shared my umbrella with him for the 300 feet to the door.

I just saw him on the way to lunk, and he said, "I want to send you flowers for being so nice this morning." I mean, really, it was nothing. But it's so nice to be thanked.

I'm hungry, I'm cold, my back hurts (tweaked it yesterday, it'll go away, but hey, whining here ) and pissed that I have to go spend $7 on a sanwich while I have 5 sitting at home in my fridge.

And I have to do my goddamned g&o before friday, find a PC on which to do them and go to a stupid meeting today.

eta: Sue is bogarting all the nice, I think

I have a friend who works on a cruise ship. That pirate story had me looking to see where she is now. [link] The itinerary has changed since I last checked. I think they were originally supposed to stop in New Orleans sometime in December.

{{Aimee}} Glad to have you back.

edit: Hm, I was wrong. They still have NO scheduled in January. I wonder if that will actually happen.

I want to go to lunk.

Hey! It's totally lunch time! Taking an extra hour to get to work thanks to train issues means I'm all thrown off.

I want to go to lunk.

Is that downtown somewhere?

I just found out I passed my blood test last Friday and DO NOT have gestational diabetes this time around.

Oh, that's great! So you had to take that nasty examination with all the sugar drinking?

However, eventually somebody's going to check central records and find you missing

Obviously, you'll have to have a completely different set of skills in order to pull that off. And there has to be a crossover phase, where the former ones slowly cease being effective and the new ones are yet to be perfected. Interesting.

Sue, that's great - you're passing along the nice!

How late in the Industrial Age is it practical to masquerade as somebody else, given the existence of (say) photographs and telegraphs?

Well, there was that man who was arrested in New York, mistaken for a convicted criminal in California, and spent two years in prison accidentally under an assumed name. The man in question was insane, and thus not terribly able to plead his case, but the fact was, with all the ID procedures that happen in the prison system, nobody noticed he was the wrong man. (Nobody bothered to compare fingerprints, and the two men were the same race, though not the same age and didn't look that much like each other.)

This was in the last 4 years -- I read about it in the NYT Magazine.

While it may be impossible to claim a dukedom in this late age, certainly it is possible to create a new identity from scratch, using gravestone data from children born the same year as you. (I didn't get a social security number till I was ten, so if I'd died at 6, I'd have been a perfect candidate.) More and more children are getting SSNs at birth, though, so that loophole is closing.

Being born in a war zone, or really, living in a war zone at any time, is still pretty good for self-reinvention. Probably the "I was born in a small town, and the Official Records office burned down" excuse no longer works, what with statewide/national repositories of that kind of information. But if the state/national office burned down, or even just got shelled a little bit, go for it!

Of course, people still do claim "I'm descended from the Hapsburgs," I bet. It's just that anybody who bothers to doubt this claim could probably disprove it pretty well. So the assertions of nobility have to be subtler or less assertive.