One of my favorite DVDs is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Now I find there is a special 25th anniversery edition out. And the price: almost $25! Well, no In-N-Out Double-Doubles for the next three months for me. đ
On tonight’s episode of CNBC’s Dennis Miller, I watched Tracy Griffith, author of Sushi American Style, make “BLT rolls”. They were spears of romaine lettuce, half-slices of salad tomatoes, and bacon strips, rolled in steamed rice. Yum-yum!
I’m actually looking forward to next weekend’s Superbowl. The Eagles-Pats matchup looks like a good one. But, somehow, I feel deprived:
Forbes.com asked people at Best Buy (nasdaq: BBY – news – people ), Tweeter (nasdaq: TWTR – news – people ) and Harvey Electronics (nasdaq: HRVE – news – people ) to put together complete home theater systems for football fans in a range of prices–from around $2,700 to more than $100,000–scaled to your needs.
“Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.”
I had forgotten on Monday that Fox moved 24 this season. They really should do a second showing of this excellent series on FX or something. After reading this report, from the Trib’s Maureen Ryan, I understand last Monday’s episode was something special:
At the end of Monday’s “24,” a photo of a military pilot appeared, with these words: “This episode is dedicated to the memory of Lt. Col. Dave Greene of the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 775.”
The screen then faded to black, and these words appeared: “His sacrifice, and the sacrifice of all our men and women of the military, will never be forgotten.”
Greene, who died in Iraq in July, had been part of the Marine unit that appeared on Monday’s episode. On the episode, which revolved around the freeing of the show’s fictional secretary of defense from terrorists, those were real Marines who swooped in on helicopters and rappelled down ropes in the rescue attempt.
“That group [of Marines] had just come back from Iraq, just weeks before we shot that episode” in October, says “24” producer Tim Iacofano, who worked with the Marines’ film and TV liaison office to arrange the unit’s appearance.
Imagine using REAL MARINES to stage a mock raid for television! I could see this from Donald P. Bellisario, but few else in Hollywood. I hope they all got paid scale. đ
But this seems to be a reflection of an admirable general attitude I’ve seen throughout the entertainment industry. On last week’s episode of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, they staged a lavish wedding for soon-to-deploy Army PFC Ray Steele and his wife, Maria (the Army would not honor their Colombian wedding), and then lavished them and their baby daughter, Sabrina, with gifts – well beyond the nomal Queer Eye fare. But the kicker was the Hip Tip, where Jai instructs the audience in the sort of stuff to put in a Care Package for a servicemember in Iraq.
Personally, I feel this is an expression of the collective shame we feel as a nation, for the way we treated our Vietnam vets. The entertainment industry – many promenient denizens of which have far more to be ashamed of than most – is leading the rallying cry: “No matter how we feel about this war, or any other, we will never again disrespect our warriors.”
Don’t you hate it when you get some email from a service you subscribe to, and it’s labeled “Bot has sent you this message?” — Arggggh!
Likewise, I keep getting these things from Yahoo (I’m paid subscriber). And, while I keep punching Spam, they keep coming to my inbox. I guess their spam filter doesn’t work for their own c’mons.
And the government allows anybody to spam you, if you just visit their website.
It’s an indignation I tell you! We need to revolt!
I have just watched a Discovery Science Channel show about Boston’s subway – “The Big Dig”. And I can’t help but relate this to the equally disruptive and expensive Red Line subway in Los Angeles. It’s a marvelous thing for what it is. But it hardly goes anywhere. And, damn, it’s been expensive.
But this seems to be the play these days. Here in Greater Los Angeles, when we found out our downtown was worn out, we just built another one further west, as well as about twenty others. And when those were worn out, we just built more: Further west, in the case of LA. North, in the case of Long Beach, South, in the case of Riverside, and first south, then north, and then south again, in the case of Santa Ana.
But a funny thing happened in the late ’70s: the liberal mass-planners decried that we weren’t going to abandon our central cities. And they put forth the holy paradigm that billions must be spent to “save” them.
Well, frankly, it’s working. At least from what I can see. Central LA, and the Near West Side are evolving into some near-homogeneous semblance to Orange County and The Valley, And, by virtue of the San Diego Freeway, the Far West Side has always been something like Orange County and The Valley, save for the UCLA influence (read art-house theaters).
But is this vastly expensive urban restoration, to the alter of homogeneity, really a good thing? I’m not so sure. I recall riding my bicycle, in the late ’60s, to (among places like Van Nuys and South Central) Dana Point, Laguna Beach, and San Juan Capistrano. Back then, all those communities had a distinct personality. Nowadays, it’s all just part of the big San-San (actually Tij-San) megalopolis.
But the course of history has seen some bright spots: the Harlem Renaissance, or Lawndale in Chicago. But the liberal homogenization machine has always reached out to crush them. It must stop.
I just got a Nigerian scam-spam from “the former barrister of Sanni Abacha.” Wait, wasn’t it like 1970 when Abacha was President of Nigeria? Jeeze. LMFAO
Maybe it’s just me. Could it be that I attract these problems? Read on:
I remember the story of the old farmer who lived hereabouts, whose young wife was expecting her firstborn, sometime around 1880. The women from farms all around gathered as labor set in, and found outside tasks for the nervous farmer, to keep him busy. “Boil some water,” said one matronly woman, handing him an iron pot and directing him to the huge fireplace where a roaring fire kept the room just above freezing. He complied, taking the pot back into the room where women seemed to be directing an assault on Hill 180. “Go get more firewood,” another woman directed, as she moved the lantern where it would do her more good. He did, as the squalls of one baby lit up the room.
The husband leapt for joy, but the women told him to get busy with the firewood, shoving him out the door. As the poor farmer stumbled back into the room, laden with firewood, dumping it by the fireplace, another set of squeals and cries joined with the first in a newborn duet. “Get out, go bring some blankets,” said another large, motherly neighbor, as she lit another lantern and placed it strategically. Somewhat dumbfounded, somewhat elated, and yet pensive, the man went to the attic and retrieved a couple of thick blankets, pushing his way back into the birthing room. As he lay the blankets down, he was startled by yet a third cry joining his two newborn daughters. Eyes like saucers, mouth agape, he looked around the cluttered room, past the women, past the lump of his wife under covers on the bed, and his gaze stopped on the lanterns casting shadows into the corners, lighting the scene.
“That’s it!” the man exclaimed, “Now I see what’s the problem! The light’s a-drawin’ ’em! Get rid of those lanterns, quick, before a-nuther one gets here!” The solution: “The light’s a-drawin’ ’em!”
So, my own problem, weird as it was, had a strange solution. A few weeks ago, we noticed the desktop going bonkers. It was loading web pages as fast as it could, all by itself. I couldn’t get it to stop, it was faster than I was. When I finally got things under control, I had a ton of pages to delete, and was wondering what kind of gremlin could cause this kind of trouble. When I started the machine back up, it seemed to work OK, so I sat there watching. Nothing. I opened one of my word processor programs, typed a paragraph or two, everything normal. We went to bed, and a few minutes later while watching TV, I saw reflections from the computer room, a spare room across the hall from our bedroom, jumping across the wall, different colors, varied patterns of reflected light, so I jumped (slowly, remember the BP) out of the bed and ran in there. The computer was loading web pages at warp speed!
Got control again, shut it down, and waited until morning to tackle it again, thinking it may be an overheat problem. I was really puzzled by this behavior as I turned on the system again the next morning. A few minutes went by, and the thing went nuts again. Not a heat problem for sure!
To cut to the chase, I tried a word processor again and this time, I sat there and watched in amazement as the computer started putting !!!’s, 1111’s, and all sorts of letters and punctuation marks, line by line. This time I thought to try something else. I unplugged the keyboard and connected a spare one I had in a closet. Worked perfectly. Cranked up the DSL, everything OK. I let it sit there, all normal. That night, Nurse Jenny got on the internet as she does every night, no problems. The next morning, I re-connected the original keyboard, and in a few minutes, it went nuts again.
So that was it: a keyboard that had a mind of its own. I have never seen a keyboard do such things, but a new keyboard took care of the problem. Disassembly and cleaning of the old keyboard did not reveal any obvious problem, so the malfunction was simply not visible to the eye. Pretty new keyboard with lots of functions is still in place, and the offender is up in the closet.
Next problem: Some of you may remember that I have griped lately about writing posts or comments only to have them disappear into thin air upon attempting to post. I was using an 802.11B wireless connection, and began to be curious as to whether that may be the problem. Last week I picked up an 802.11G wireless card for the laptop, and shazzam, no more dropped comments or posts! I just needed the faster speed of the “G” module, and all now seems to be well.
As I think back to the time when I first started playing with electronics, in my teens, some 48 years or so ago, when I got interested in amateur radio, there have always been strange and thorny problems. And they’re there, no matter what the branch of electronics. I’ve got more than 25 years in avionics, many years part-time in such things as TV repair (UGH!!), two-way radio service, computers, and other branches best forgotten . In each and every one of these fields, there have always been weird and sometimes very surprising problems. Some of them were even humorous, and a few downright outlandish!
So, I tip my hat to those just embarking on a career in electronics: may your weird problems be few and funny! And may you always FIND the problem!
It seems Bravo has another pop-culture hit with their Wednesday night series Project Runway, where supermodel Heidi Klum leads the judging against 12 aspiring fashion designers.
For the record, my money is on “Air Force brat” Kara Saun. But the the real story is with the models, particularly 17 year-old Melissa Haro. She is America’s next great supermodel.
Update: If you are curious about Chris Pierce (and you should be), you will hear snippets of the acoustic version of his Are You Beautiful? on PR‘s Banana Republic ads.
Update 2: It seems space-case PR model (just eliminated) Morgan Quinn has just f___ed off a major shoot. Do not pass Go – Do not collect $10,000:
January 25, 2005 — MORGAN Quinn, the naughty Next mannequin who is wreaking havoc on Bravo’s “Project Runway,” snarled a shoot for Carlisle clothing last week. Our source says that an hour after she was supposed to be there, the flighty Quinn called from her cellphone to say her cab had been struck by another car. The blond bombshell later walked off the set in tears, saying she’d suffered a concussion in the accident and felt “dizzy.”
Yes, Morgan has some skills. But so does Melissa. And further, as sown by how she played Page Six‘s Robert Johnson on last week’s episode, she has some other essential skills as well. As designer Jay McCarroll said: “She’s 16, going on 35.” But, frankly – and contrary to Johnson’s appraisal of Morgan as a “blond bombshell,” she is not really that good looking (by model standards). Contrast her to Melissa: check the face, check the figure; Melissa has “it”.
To my darling daughter, Cpl. Blondie— it’s been 26 years of the most amazing, eventful, bumpy but satisfying journey! (and neither of us has ever been arrested, either!)
The very first picture I took myself of my daughter!
Happy Birthday, Sweetie!!
A couple of years ago, I wrote (here) about my adventures in the periodical stacks and the microfilmed archives of various newspapers, while in pursuit of a degree in English at California State University, Northridge. I spent hours in the Oviatt Library, reading periodicals and newspapers from the Thirties and Forties, leafing over the pages of magazines, sepia with age, and bound into heavy volumes, or spooling miles of film though the microfilm readers, my entrée into the world of my parents and their parents, and a disconcerting view of how things appeared the very day or week that they happened, before the historians set to and put it all to rights, smoothing out the wrinkles and making all the below-the-surface connections apparent.
There was an essay I read, whose premise has always stuck in my mind, although I cannot remember the author, or where it was published. I have the vague idea it was in the Readerâs Digest, reprinted from somewhere else— the Atlantic? New Yorker? Harpersâ, maybe? Something meditative and literary anyway, penned by a woman sometime after the defeat of France, when England looked like being the next to fall, maybe even after Stalinist Russia had changed sides yet again, but well before Pearl Harbor, when the US was uneasily and technically at peace. But the war was on the authorsâ mind, war and occupation, the loathsome-ness of the Nazis, and the tension between resistance and collaboration; France would have been occupied for at least a year, when the essay was published, and America was still a neutral, with businessmen, diplomats and journalists moving somewhat freely around the Continent.
The unremembered author wrote as someone familiar with Europe, and current events, and imagined herself at a literary cocktail party in her elegant New York apartment, looking around at the other guests and thinking âWhat would you do, under Occupation? How would you conduct yourselves? Would you resist? Collaborate? To what degree, and why?â She sketched out the character and background of her guests— old money, new money, artist, writer, actor, academic, non-conformist, businessman, man-about-town, and poseur—-and ventured suppositions on who would go along to get along, and who would quietly resist. I donât quite know what struck me about the essay, other than her calm and even slightly chilly acknowledgement of the fact that, yes, given a military defeat and occupation of onesâ own country, the reactions of a personal circle of friends would be all over the ethical map.
There would be no united front, given ordinary day to day realities, and the necessity of making a living and keeping safe those you loved. Of course there would be individuals who wholeheartedly embraced their new overlords, and some who would feel obliged to strongly resist, and those in the middle who would have to work out some kind of accommodation, some way of enduring the situation without feeling ethically soiled. The writer did get that part quite right, but the trouble with that kind of speculation is when it got to specifics about people. Speculation is a more or less educated guess, and people can be more complicated than even the most imaginative writer can fathom.
A very few people are absolutely straight forward, and possess the heart and courage to carry on with the principles that they are renown for, like this man. But this man— for most of his life a soldier, patriot and hero— still fell resoundingly short of what anyone would have expected of him in the crunch. Yet this man, a bon-vivant, adulterous husband and dodgy businessman from whom nothing principled and high-minded could have been expected calmly risked everything to save lives, hundreds of lives. And this unremarkable young student nurse organized an escape line which funneled Allied evaders across three borders and a mountain range. If people sadly have the capacity to disappoint, they also have capability to take your breath away with their courage and dedicationâŠ. And most times it is just not something that you can see in advance. But what you do see it, the least you can do is recognize and honor those qualities.
In four days, the Iraqi people vote, in defiance of murder, bombs and terror, and it is in my mind that we may see the same hopeful, reckless courage, for out of that is a free nation born.
when the local newspaper says that there will be no Doonesbury this week because Trudeau is on vacation and yet there’s current content on the website.
Update: Engage Emily Litella Mode (ELM): Nevermind. End ELM. Seems like they just didn’t bother mentioning the vacation on the web site and continued to date the strips as if they were recent.
Sing, ye muses, about the joys of snagging the exact, perfect item that you need for a room or project at a thrift store, flea market or marked better than 60% down at a post-Christmas sale. In this world I know there exist people whose approach to home decoration is to throw lots of money at an expensive interior decorator, in the hopes that purchased good taste will eventually stick to their walls— I may even have met some of them, on occasion— but it always seemed a rather bloodless way to do it, and not very much fun. It is on par with that internet hunt that people were hyperventilating about last month in the blogoverse; a gun with a webcam set up, and a program that let people log on, and aim and fire the gun at whatever wandered within range. They were still working out the logistics and some of the practical aspects to this project, but primarily it just did not seem nearly as much fun to serious devotees⊠it was just too easy. Being able to just order it up, money no object, is just like that— too easy. Thereâs no challenge to it, no opportunity to overcome a sudden obstacle, no sudden inspiration, no chance to exercise the old ingenuity.
And since I donât have heaps of money, and was raised by fairly frugal— but tasteful— people, I have to take the budget approach, even though they call it âshabby chicâ , to sorting out a new look for my daughterâs old bedroom. She is planning to go to college, post USMC, so the week she spent at home over Christmas this year were devoted to ripping out the carpet, painting the walls and stenciling the floor, reassessing all the furniture crammed into one tiny front bedroom, and hanging shelves all along the walls on either side of the window. Anything new would be either from the thrift store, or something we put together ourselves, or bought on sale: the bed is new, but it came from an unpainted furniture place, and I am making new pillow covers and curtains from severely-reduced decorator fabric⊠and just this last weekend I scored the perfect bedside lamp from the thrift store for $2.49, and made a pair of hanging wall vases from a couple of yards of wired ribbon and some slender glass vases from the hobby shop. Oh, yeah, eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.
The framed pictures over the bed all came from the thrift-shop too, but I took them apart and repainted the frames to match. Blondie even zeroed in on a nice oriental vase and a framed print from the same thrift-shop, things which looked remarkably good, once removed from the disreputable jumble of the thrift store. We could have, if time and budget permitted, driven north of San Antonio to the legendary Buseys’ Flea Market, and bought everything at once instead of piecemealâŠ
Heck, you could outfit an entire house with gleanings from Buseys’. Itâs a couple of acres of rambling, single-storey sheds, booths, stalls, ranks of wooden tables under tin and tarpaper roofs. The vendors are a jumble, both regulars, who have established premises with lockable doors, and others who come occasionally to sell garage-style stuff from the trunks of their cars, or spread out on trestle tables: antique furniture, and just plain junk furniture, clothes, socks and underwear by the bale, work clothes and tee shirts, Orientalia and Mexican pottery, books and potted plants, birds in cages, tools of all sorts, old military uniforms and memorabilia, garden art, wind chimes, old and new and cheap kitchen appliances and tools, cheap jewelry, old typewriters, horse brass, china and silverware, lunch boxes, camping gear, drawer pulls, area rugs, old chenille bedspreads the color of orange sherbet and peptol bismol, video tapes, cassettes and old record albums… the contents of dozens of junk shops, garage sales and small retail places all jumbled together, every Saturday and Sunday.
There are a couple of food stalls, too, and I think I saw a fortune-teller, last time. The smell of funnel cakes and hot deep-fat frying wafts from one direction, and mariachi music from the stall selling imports from Mexico spills out into the walkway by the ATM machine— Buseysâ has it all. 95% of it is total krep, of course— but that remaining %5, if you are sharp-eyed and know what you want, and have the wit to buy it as soon as you see it— oh, that five percent is worth the trip. I should think it would make a most wondrous reality-TV Home-Decorating DIY show: to go to a place like Buseysâ and tastefully outfit an entire house— furniture, accessories, bedding and rugs and all— just from what you could find there. All Iâd need would be a pretty good budget and a pickup truck— send any TV offers through my agent, please.
Oh, and Buseysâ is about a half hour drive north of San Antonio, on I-35. Look for the enormous concrete armadillo.
The answer is no, the fat makes me look fat; the sweats just accentuate it. I bought this Air Force PT gear 4-5 years and 30 pounds ago. Iâm wearing them today (the shorts & tshirt under the sweat shirt & sweat pants) because I was planning on a fairly vigorous workout yesterday. After I put them on, I got a call from the help desk that one of the backup servers was alarming. No problem. Iâll go in around lunch, and have it taken care of in about 2-3 hours. Got here right at noonâŠ.yesterday. It is now after midnight. I started the file system check at 1245âŠyesterday. Itâs been going for 12 hours now. I donât see it finishing anytime soon either. Now itâs a âHow late do I stayâ predicament. If I leave at 5am, I have plenty of time to stop and get milk and maybe even shower before getting kids up & ready for school. On the other hand, Iâm damn tired.
To further ramble, I got a call from a user a few minutes ago and the echo was so awful. It was on enough of a delay that I could hear every word I said a word after I said it. Horribly distracting, and I donât really like hearing myself talk. At least I donât still sound like the hick I talked like in the 8th grade anymore.
I’m currently watching Robin Wright and Stephen Hayes beat their gums over Bush’s inaugural address on NBC’s Meet the Press. And all I can think is that I’d like to see a master gamester, like Dick Cheney, come in as #44, and just say for his inaugural address: “Check.”
I adore Tina Brown. I think she would be prime GF material – a lovely woman with an engaging personality. But in the rarified atmosphere of scio-political talking-head shows, I have to say, CNBC’s Topic A With Tina Brown leaves much to be desired. Yet I watch it. The reason is that they cover material which is often overlooked by the first-tier talking head shows.
But, as such, I generally watch it in the background, and miss the details of some important stories, as I did today, when she and her panel brought to the fore this story, about Harvard’s Larry Summers, and Condolezza Rice.
Speaking at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers suggested that the shortage of top women in the “traditionally male” fields of math and science might possibly be attributable to “innate differences” in aptitude between the genders.
Oh yes, this should certainly give rise (pun most certainly intended) to the perfect political storm.
…I mean, it’s like watching fly fishing. But I’ve just scanned a portion of the DirecTV spectrum where I don’t normally venture, and I’ve noticed that the Game Show Network is showing The World Series of Blackjack. (to continue the fishing analogy) Who would watch this? I mean, this would be like watching a bunch of drunks out on an all-day bottom-fishing boat.
Somehow I missed hearing about this one. But the blogosphere is on top of it. Follow the links for more info about the flood in Costa Rica, and the relief efforts underway there.
Hat tips: Queen of All Evil
In Search of Utopia
Mudville Gazette is where I first learned about Rick Rescorla, Vietnam Veteran, Army Reservist, and one of the 3000 people who died on Sept 11, 2001. He didn’t make it out, but due to his actions, 2700 of his co-workers *did* survive.
If you’ve never heard of Rick Rescorla, you need to learn about him. You can do that here.
If you *have* heard of him, then you might be interested in knowing that a couple years ago, his widow and some of his friends founded the non-profit Richard C. Rescorla Memorial Foundation, “to keep present the magnitude of Rick’s life and to promote the virtues Rick lived by â duty, honor, courage, and patriotism. ”
The foundation is now raising money to erect a bronze statue of Rick at Ft Benning, GA, in the National Infantry Museum. Details are posted at Mudville Gazette, in the form of an email from Susan Rescorla. The foundation has raised 1/3 of the money they need for the sculpture, and need help raising the rest of it.
From what I’ve read, this is a man worth remembering. I hope you think so, too.
One of the most popular entertainers in the industry, Johnny Carson, has passed away at age 79, reportedly of emphysemia.
All of the late-night entertainers on television today can give credit to Johnny Carson. Perhaps many of us can credit him for giving us reason to lie awake in bed after 11 PM every week night for many years. I for one, am happy to salute him for so many absolutely funny jokes and skits over my young adult years.
Good night, Johnny, and thanks for so many memories!
Joe Comer
A good write-up here on some of the worst of the blogosphere.
Hat Tip: Instapundit
As best as can be determined, the term âG. I.â is an abbreviation for âgovernment issueâ, and according to historian Lee Kennet, it was first a term of mild contempt, originating in the insular, peacetime American military. While small, it was a proud, professional and penny-pinched force, and those who were serving in the Depression era military contemptuously regarded their issued uniform clothing and accessories as shoddy, poor quality, not worthy. It was a point of honor for careerists to do better, and so they laid out their own funds for quality tailoring, better-quality boots, and fine bespoke accessories. (This is still done, especially when new uniforms are approved, but not available at the BX/PX Uniform sales— those who want to look very, very strac will order items out of various catalogues which specialize in this.) Looking militarily sharp was everything, down to the sergeants and privates, and in those hardscrabble days, when the Army could pick and choose, it was about all there was. That and the pride that comes of being among the elect, or as they would come to think of themselves after 1942 as âthe Old Armyâ⊠which was defined by the military magazine âYankâ as â a large group of first-three-graders who spent the pre-war years thinking up sentences beginning with âBy God, it wasnât like this in the ______â.
And it wasnât⊠because of the draft, which ballooned the Army and the other military services to proportions not seen since the days of the Civil war, eighty years previous. Draftees or patriotically motivated volunteers or every variety in between, the ânew Armyâ arrived with a different set of expectations, one of them being that they would not put up with much of that military chickenshit. Attitudes about deference to officer rank, to saluting, and to going overboard with the military sartorial splendor of the âOld Armyâ⊠no, issue kit would do, none of this fancy-nancy parade ground soldiering.
The cultural clash between the old corps and the new wartime influx was marked and noted almost immediately, with the old peacetime army NCOs scorning the new elements as âGIsâ or âgovernment issueâ, meaning âsecond-rate, unprofessional soldiersâ. But the new Army took it as a badge of pride, chanting cadence counts like âIt wonât get by if it ainât GIâ. Just get the damn job done, with that they were issued, was the attitude; once that done, you wonât see me for dust in this-here military machine. So, they eventually stormed the Omaha beaches and crossed the Rhine with their government issue, and took back the Pacific Islands, one by one over the following three years. All during the war, though, officers of the Old Army school like Patton, fretted over how slovenly and unmilitary the G.I.s would tend to look if left to themselves⊠the Army that they won WWII with, was so very unlike they had been schooled with, in the hard two decades after the first world war.
âOh,â said my daughter recently about one of her friends, âHeâs a 9/11 baby.â That is, someone who had enlisted into the forces after 9/11, into a military where it should have been impossible to get around the understanding that a military was an organization dedicated to killing those designated as the enemies of this country, and blowing up their stuff. Someone who had— like those who swarmed to enlist after Pearl Harbor— enlisted into a wartime military⊠but a military whose initial core was formed over a scaffold of officers and NCOs who remembered how it had beenâŠbefore.
âOnly Sgt. ____ and I remember how it used to be, âmy daughter lamented, during the same conversation. âDeployments used to be cool, and fun. We like to go on them⊠now, itâs either Afghanistan or Iraq.â
A peacetime military does have those discrete charms; and make no mistake, for about ten years, it was a peacetime military. The Soviet Union imploded with a pathetic whimper, not the terrific bang expected when I enlisted. There was a certain fatalistic expectation of mushroom-shaped clouds, all during my first few years, and a low-level degree of terrorist activity aimed at those in uniform, then Desert Storm, and then⊠everyone shaking their heads in the brilliant sunshine, wondering where all those threats had gone. The only thing we were left sure of, was that there was always a use for a militaryâŠand that it was a good thing to stay in top form, to practice the skills, and clamor to go on those deployments, and polish those boots, and carry on with what we had always done, against the day when we would be called on again⊠just as they had in those days of the âOld Armyâ.
Try this if you have a strong tolerance…or not, it might work all the same
1. Whiskey ( I prefer Irish whiskey myself but I think any kind of whiskey would do).
2. Add some water(because you sick not f**kered-up)
3. Splash of lemon juice(or orange juice does’nt mater)
4. add in some honey
5. Mix together and heat
6. Then hang a hat on the end of your bed and drink till you see two of them.
I have a little water boiler and I put a dense glass mug in it and then fill with water and boil.
Then add the above content’s.
So far it seems to be working, so I am going to post this while I can still see straight.
Then I am going to bed.
So please cure your cold responsibly, and hide the keys.
I frequently like to say my birth (10/05/57), was heralded by the appearance of a new star in the sky. I play this as a trite missive. But I discount its prophecy Unless you were there, you can’t conceive it – living day-by-day with the absolute terror of the prospect of “them” pushing the button down, coupled with the idea of going to the Moon.
And I talk to my mother – a member of “the greatest generation”, and she asks “what?”
And I look at Cpl Blondie and her peers. And I say “G_d bless you – you are sealing the deal, and ushering in a peace that will last 1000 years.” Please just appreciate the gifts you’ve been given, and use them wisely.
I wouldn’t trade my life – to be witness to this epoch in history, for anything.
Some fucking thing has changed my IE toolbars. And I can’t change them back.
Our Daily Brief contributer, Capt. Loggie sent me this and asked me to post it
He is the shortest of the five gentleman, and to also asked me to let everyone know that he is (a) single and fancy free, and (b) on his way to Afghanistan next month, from where he will send more pictures.
I don’t know if it is just me, but I find Paula, Simon and whats-his-name to be rude, callous and snide. But then again some of the auditionee’s were just kinda scary. But even on my worst-tired-cold-hungry-and smelly days I don’t think I am that capapble of making people feel that bad. So is it just me??
Discuss amongst yourselves.