profit!!

Business plan:

- Design a relatively lightweight, nice-looking centaur costume such that the back legs move in some non-sucky way. This may be very difficult.
- Produce them on a large scale.
- Sell them to people who want centaur costumes: a cursory googling shows a bunch of forum posts from people who want to make them or already took a stab. Laura laurapatt notes that marketing needs to be done at Furry conventions.
- Laugh all the way to the bank [0].

Comments? Suggestions? Designs for costumes?

[0] No, really. While in transit to the bank, don't stop laughing at all. The whole way.

ETA: A guy from a forum, who said he was working on a design, emailed me back with some pictures. I think it looks pretty good. The legs don't move much; he says they "spring back" a little bit. So we have an army of shuffling horse-people?

we got problems

The private war of women soldiers. [via mefi]

I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.

... A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military...

We are perhaps not putting our best and brightest young gentlemen on the ground. My initial reaction was "what the hell is wrong with people?!" ... but probably a more sensible question is: how can this be understood and fixed?