Monthly Archives: August 2006

Memo: Media Silly Season

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Memo: To Big Mainstream Media
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Can you hear me now?

In order of no special importance, I offer the following observations, with no special expectation of having them acted upon whatsoever, but more as a memo for the record, should any of you begin wondering at your crashing readership and/or media share.

1. A glamour-shot of a six-year old child, decked out in a teensy evening gown, sultry eye make-up and glistening lipstick is disturbing on a lot of mostly icky levels. Halloween is the only day of the year that a pre-pubertal person ought to be caught dead in lipstick. That such pictures of the late J. Ramsey are now plastered all over more than the supermarket tabs, and an insane amount of attention being paid to a ten year old murder case and a bizarre false confession indicates that a lot of media people share Mr. Karr’s unhealthy fascination with same. Ick, people, really. Ick.

2. Have any of your editors and bureau chiefs realized that practically every word and picture coming from local stringers and photogs in so-called Palestine, and Hezbollah-Land is either a lie— including “and” and “the”— or badly photoshopped? Or, what is even scarier for your credibility—- expertly photoshopped?

3. Are any of your reporters, dispatched at great expense and personal inconvenience to those areas aware of a subspecies of news event called a “dog and pony show”, and are they willing to entertain the suspicion that other bodies than the Bush administration may, in fact, be producing them? That thing in the corner, over there, with the spikes in the blunt end? It’s called a clue bat. Please thwack yourselves on the head with it a couple of times. Thank you.

4. Well, after having covered yourselves with glory over Hurricane Katrina, by repeating the most horrible of unverified and unverifiable rumors, over and over and over again, allowing the most ignorant and unsubstantiated statements to go unchallenged, and allowing a lot of absolutely heroic efforts and stories to pass practically unremarked… the reason we should continue paying attention to you at all would be? BTW, my own parents were burned out of their house in the Valley Center fire. Exactly one year later, they had managed to get the concrete pad cleaned off, and new exterior conblock walls put up. They were fully insured, and had lots of help, but it’s going on three years now, and even though they are moved in and the house is complete, there is still a lot of work left to do. Please keep this in mind, when you lament the slow pace of rebuilding in New Orleans and in the Gulf Coast. Just because they can rebuild a house in a week on one of those home renovation shows, doesn’t mean it happens that way in the real world. And blaming the federal government for everything about the damned hurricane starting to wear really, really thin.

5. So it was Dick Armitage who blew Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee to wossname, Novak! Well, (Gomer Pyle voice here) sur-prise, sur-prise, surprise! I’ve always thought it was an open secret on inside-the-beltway cocktail party gossip anyway, but thanks for sharing it with us peons outside Washington. I do want back every day of those three years of my life that I had to hear about Plamegate, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Yellowcake and Niger (pronounced Knee-gere, of course) Fitzmas, and the whole pack of nothing, though.

6. Dan Rather’s TANG memos, Katie Courics’ hips… a connection, you think?

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

Top Ten Reasons We Should Invade Iran

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10. Tired of our fine young men and women dying in boring countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s so beginning of the decade.

9. We KNOW they’re developing nukes, that’s more than we knew about Iraq.

8. Ahmadinejad just pisses me off with his cheap suits and half a beard. Either grow a real beard and dress like the Mullah you are, or get some Armani for Allah’s sake.

7. At least there have been student demonstrations in the past decade calling for democracy, they may actually be ready for it.

6. We can’t let Israel have all the fun.

5. They keep telling me we invaded Iraq for the oil and yet I’m paying more at the pump than I was before the invasion. Obviously we need more oil.

4. It would annoy the living shit out of France, Russia and China. I love when that happens.

3. Bush hasn’t been compared to Hitler all week.

2. I’m tired of paying two bucks a pound for pistachios at the commissary.

1. The way things are goin’, we’re not going to see another right wing warmonger of a President until at least 2017. Two years people, the clock’s ticking.

Add your own in the comments, it’s amazing how many you can think of without really trying.

Everything You Know About Katrina is Wrong

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So says Paul over at Wizbang.

I’m going to warn you now. If you’ve only heard the news from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is wrong. If you think you already know everything there is to know about Katrina, then you can safely ignore this post.

Read the whole thing, watch the videos, judge for yourself.

I’m just not that interested, but it’s not my city either. Me? I’d have bailed out of the area by now, but my family always moves on. It’s what we do.

So Here’s my Question….

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As I watch the detailed coverage regarding Hurricane Katrina, I have to ask myself:

How is it that the news shows can’t bring themselves to re-broadcast images from 9-11 because it’s too distressing for the survivors, but they have no problem re-broadcasting images from the storm and aftermath of Katrina?

Just makes me wonder, ya know?

BlackFive’s book is out!

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Let loose “The Blog of War.”

From Booklist:

Burden, a blogger himself, has selected observations of ordinary men and women written and sent in real time as they endure the cauldron of war. Some of the writings are mundane, but there are also chilling descriptions of surviving a mortar attack and attempting to save the life of a severely wounded Iraqi. This collection is an excellent introduction to an emerging form of war reporting.

h/t Capt Ed

They said I would cry….

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Last week at the customer site, I told them I planned to visit Biloxi, and see what the gulf coast looks like now, a year after Katrina. I explained that I’d been at Keesler on occasion with the Air Force, and Biloxi held fond memories for me. They told me I’d cry. I said they were probably right, but that I needed to do it.

I left Mobile on Saturday evening, and travelled west on IH-10 to Ocean Springs, just east of Biloxi. Once upon a time, I could have jumped down to US90 at any point along that route and driven along the beach all the way to Biloxi. But the bridge is out across the bay, so you can’t do that now.

My motel was just off IH-10, so that was cool with me. I hooked up with a cyberfriend for dinner, and we had a grand time getting to know each other. By this time it was dark, so there wasn’t really anything to see.

I spent today visiting with my friend, but tonight’s hotel is the Hampton Inn on Beach Blvd. My friend lives north of IH-10, off Route 49. The last time I was in Gulfport, which I’m thinking was 1998, there wasn’t anything north of Route 49. Now there’s a good two miles of commercialization up that way. Just about every chain restaurant you could hope to find, and a good supply of stores, as well.

That was odd enough. But then I left my friend’s place and headed south on 49, towards the coast. Back in ’98, I was here as a civilian contractor, and we stayed at the Hampton Inn there on 49 & IH-10, in Gulfport. I left here that time just a day or so ahead of Hurricane Georges.

And now I’m back, a year after Katrina.

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Tails of the Lesser Weevil

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The dog that Sgt/Cpl. Blondie presented me with at Christmas when she came home from serving in the Marines, after telling me that I would have either a dog or a gun in the house— my choice — now appears to have grown to her full adult size of about fifty-five or sixty pounds. She is a densely muscled, fawn-colored dog, with a black mask on her face, and a white chest and toes; almost everyone who sees her recognizes her immediately as being part-boxer. She displays much of the boxer temperament as well; friendly, intelligent and companionable, quiet as dogs go, but capable of being quite willful and stubborn.

The Weevil is much admired by the general public, as an attractive, and appealing dog, whatever the mix is. She has pretty well grasped the obedience thing at this point, also. She’ll sit, stay, come when called, knows that she cannot go beyond the garden gate, or into the kitchen, go into her crate with all speed, and these days, only pees in the house if I have frightened her. I yelled at her once, in a scary, Mercedes McCambridge-exorcist voice, one evening, after she swiped some food off the kitchen counter, and she was freaked for hours afterwards. I have even included her in the book I am currently writing, as a minor character, albeit with an intelligence transplant and a little more size to her.

It’s always been a bit of a mystery as to what the other, non-boxer half was, though. Something large, was the general consensus… Doberman, Great Dane, even Rhodesian ridgeback featured among most of the guesses. Blondie originally acquired her from a friend, who had her from a friend of a friend, who was reported to breed pit bulldogs, and I had always ruled that option out, as I assumed that pit bulldogs were generally smaller than Weevil, and her size had to have come from someplace. Working at home on the next book leaves me to run with her slightly later in the day, and last week, I made the acquaintance of a neighbor who took one look at Weevil and pronounced her to be, yes, about half pit bull. But I thought they were smaller dogs, I said, and the neighbor said, no, some of them were of a good-size… and Weevil’s head was just the right shape. She used to have pit bulls, and to her, it was as clear as anything.

I went home and looked up the characteristics of the breed on a couple of websites, and oh, my— some of them fit Weevil to a T. Like being an absolutely rotten watchdog. She loves people, any and all people, and has no inkling in that little doggie brain that she ought to be barking at any of them. William visited this spring, several months after Weevil came to stay. He has a key, and let himself into the house at four in the morning, and never the slightest “woof” out of the Weevil. She wandered up to him with her tail wagging, as a matter of fact, all friendly curiosity. In the event of a crazed, knife-wielding terrorist breaking into the house, I am almost sure the Weevil would be cowering behind me. The destructive chewing, when bored… yep, that’s the Weevil, all right. And the athleticism; she twirls like a dervish when she is excited, leaping and pirouetting in the air. First thing she does when I let her out in the morning, she leaps and spins three or four times in the air.

But the most convincing characteristic of pit bulls that she displays, would be how she reacts to strange dogs… and that is with extreme hostility.. But over the last few months, meeting another dog-walker with a dog on a leash has usually turned into an upper-body workout for me, and a couple of houses with barking dogs in the back yards send her so wild with hostility that I have to use both hands on the leash to pull her away, if I have not already crossed over to the other side of the road. Once or twice, we have encountered loose dogs, on our walk, and the Weevil turns absolutely rigid with tension. I’ve had to wrap the chain leash several times around my hand, hold her close to my knee and talk to her, as we walked by the loose dog.

Otherwise, the Weevil is very fond of Spike, and she was playful and affectionate with my parents’ and sisters’ dogs at Christmas, as well as a lot of other dogs that she met here and there, but I don’t think I will ever be able to take her to a dog park and let her off the leash , and I am not sure I could even take her into Petco, now, not unless I shot her full of tranquilizers, first. And as long as I live in this neighborhood, I shall keep rather quiet about it in any case.

Sober Blogging (060827)

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With all of the recent publicity about Mel Gibson’s drunk driving arrest, I thought I’d make some things clear to some of you more normal imbibers of spirits. There seem to be some misconceptions out there about how a real alcoholic does or doesn’t react. While I’m at it, I’m gonna talk a little bit about A.A.. Since I enjoy a degree of anonimity here, I don’t think I’ll be breaking any A.A. Traditions. And I’m comfortable enough with the folks here who do know my real name to talk about this.

There seems to be a common perception that alcohol is some great truth serum, and that a person’s true colors come out when they’re drunk. That may be true, if they’re simply drunk and not in a blackout. In a blackout, anything goes. Inhibitions go out the window entirely. We may assume the identities of our parents, a friend, a guy on television. I’m told I spent an entire three-day bender as Dudley Moore once. Only my friends didn’t find me half as funny as Arthur.

So when anyone goes off on Mel Gibson being anti-semitic or some other presumption that he’s really that way, I just sort of shrug and assume that they’ve never had a real drunk in their life.

Now, does that excuse what happened? Nope. If someone is an alcoholic and knows that they’re alcoholic and they drink again, then they’re playing with a time bomb and they know it…or not. If they’re still playing the, “This time it’s going to be different.” game, then they still might think they’ve got a handle on it. Not much anyone can do for them until they realize, “Ya know, I don’t get in trouble every time I drink, but every time I’ve been in trouble, I’ve been drunk.” Making that connection can be harder than micro soldering with a wood burner for some folks.

One of the other misconceptions about drunks is that we can just quit and everything will be okay. Once the alcohol is gone, we’ll be just peachy. Ya know, if that were true, groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) wouldn’t be necessary. For a lot of drunks, just not drinking will simply drive them crazy. I don’t mean physical withdrawal, that’s bad enough. Physical withdrawal from heroin will make you sick for a few days, physical withdrawal from alcohol can kill ya. But even after most drunks get all the alcohol out of our system, our heads are still playing with us: “Come on, one drink, what can it hurt?” “You’ve been doing so good for a month now, just have a beer.” And ya know, if you’re a normal drinker, you have no problem stopping after a beer or two. For a real alcoholic, one leads to two, leads to five, leads to oblivion. We’re kind of wired that way. One drink starts an actual physical craving for more, and more makes the physical craving worse, not better. And our heads just go along for the ride, “Well yeah, hell, we’ve already had one, might as well tie one on.” An obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. And that’s the disease concept of Alcoholism that everyone from the AMA to shrinks have used for decades. Insurance Companies HATE the disease concept because, well, if it’s a disease, they have to cover it.

Now some folks just plain don’t like A.A. and that’s fine. If everyone who needed A.A. was to show up at once, we’d need much bigger meeting halls. A.A. isn’t for people who need it, it’s for people who want it. And there are a lot of misconceptions about A.A. also, some of them for good reason and others not.

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Questions of the Day (060826)

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At what point does withdrawing from Iraq stop being “A cut and run?”

Does “Staying the course.” mean we just keep going on and on and on and on waiting and waiting and waiting for the Iraqi Government to pull its own collective shit together?

When will it be okay to say, “Look, we got rid of Saddam, we’re out of here.”?

When does our responsibility for their bullshit end?

I’m asking.

Family Dynamic

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So, Sgt/Cpl Blondie (as of this Monday to be College Freshman Blondie, hopefully over the next seven years to metamorphose into Dr. Blondie, DVM) and I were in the main post office this week to return unopened, some book club selections that I swear, I swear I had gone on line and said I declined but which turned up in the mail anyway and I only hope if I return enough of them refused they’ll cancel my membership anyway because I only signed up to get the four books at 50 cents or a dollar, or whatever, and I’ll sign up again next decade to get some cheap books….oh where was I? Got it. Post office.

There was a young man in line behind us with two small children at their most totally charming stage of life… which is at about 4 or 5. Old enough to be over the terrible twos, and damn grateful are we for all of that, and not old enough to begin laughing at your lamentable taste in oldies on the radio. The two children, a boy and a girl, were teasing their Fond Papa, trying to make him turn around and look out through the plate glass window-wall of the area where everyone lines up for stamps. Someone in the parking lot, they insisted to their Fond Papa, was trying to steal their car! And of course, he was teasing them in return, by not looking… which reminded me very much of what an awful tease my own father was.

I imagine it was because Dad was an only child; not only that, the only adored child of Granny Dodie, who could give the proverbial over-protective Jewish mother many valuable, and guilt-inducing lessons. Perhaps if Dad had been able to tease younger siblings… at least, it would have watered down Granny Dodie’s motherly instincts to a degree somewhat less overwhelming. I am fairly certain many of her own friends must have gotten damned tired of hearing her talk about Dad. On the other hand, Mom said that the one of the most wonderful things about marrying Dad was the fact that Granny Dodie and Grandpa Al instantly and unquestioningly accepted her as a daughter; she was theirs by virtue of marrying their son, the focus of unstinting adoration and approval— heady brew after her own parents’ difficult marriage, and the death of their own oldest child during WWII.

But Dad still was an awful tease. The little scene in the post office reminded me of the time at Redwood house when my little brother Sander was a toddler, on one of those evenings when we sat out on the terrace under the grape pergola and watched the reflected sunset fading off the mountains opposite. My younger brother JP and my sister Pippy sat on the shallow stairs that led up to the terrace, while Sander played on the lawn below, and Dad relaxed on one of the chairs on the terrace… maybe the canvas butterfly chair. We had one of those huge, canvas butterfly chairs, then. He looked out over our heads, at Sander on the lawn with his toys and remarked casually,
“You know, there is a very large tarantula, crawling across the lawn towards the baby.”
This had all the hallmarks of one of Dad’s teases. Of course, he was trying to make us look, so of course we didn’t.
“There is a large tarantula on the lawn, and it is crawling straight at the baby,” Dad insisted, with a perfectly straight face. “Really.”
Umm. Yeah. Sure, Daddy.

But eventually we broke, and looked over our shoulders, and oh, my god, there was a huge tarantula, all hairy legs and science-fiction googly segmented eyes, about four feet away and crawling straight at our baby brother. I flew off the steps and snatched him up, and JP flew straight into the kitchen for a mason jar and a tight-fitting lid.

As I was relating this to Blondie, the postal clerk begged me to please stop talking about nasty things like this, spiders and small children, she was deathly afraid to step out of her own house on most days, thanks to tales like this… although the children and their father did seem vastly amused.

I think it may have been a good and charitable thing that I waited to tell Blondie about the other spider story and Dad, until we were out in the parking lot. That would have been the time when he was in the midst of a craze for skin-diving, and used to go with certain of his friends to shallow-water dive, and had a rubbery black skin-diving suit, with a breathing mask, and long black flippers and all the accoutrements… and we often visited some of his friends’ houses, and watch our fathers melt lead to cast diving weights … why did they have to do this themselves, I wonder now? This would have been in about 1960 or so, when we were living in the White Cottage, in an era when anyone wishing to indulge in odd hobbies had perforce to resort to D-I-Y, I suppose.
Anyway, he came back from one of those diving excursions, driving the Plymouth station-wagon that was our main car then, with a great salt-water scented heap of sea gleanings in the back, covered with a couple of wet burlap sacks. He always brought back interesting things from these trips; abalone shells, and cork floats adorned with shell encrustations, this, that and the other.

“I have something to show you!” he said, enthusiastically, to JP and I. I would have been about six, JP about four… just the totally gullible age, and we followed him eagerly to the back of the Plymouth, while he undid the window and the gate, reached under the burlap… and brought out a huge black, many-clawed, many-limbed spidery-looking thing. It was a spider crab, of course, but it looked like the world hugest, most menacing spider imaginable.

He chased us with it, twice around the White-Cottage’s half-acre backyard, JP and I screaming every step of the way. Amazing stamina, when you think on it, really. I still do not care for spiders, although I can cope with them as long as they are smaller than a quarter… which might have been Dad’s inadvertent point.

The postal clerk would be screaming still, I think

These Are The People Running Our Airport Security

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TSA changes laws of physics, declares ice to be liquid

The War on Moisture continues! BoingBoing reader Dan says,

While listening to this piece on All Things Considered, Tony Jabbour mentions that ice is now prohibited from being carried onto aircraft – because it is a liquid. Though both Tony and Robert Siegel call ice a liquid, I am confident that both men are aware that ice is, in fact, a solid. Only the TSA could decide to either change the laws of physics or to put something (ice) into a category in which it clearly does not belong (liquid).

Actually I think the difference between liquids and solids was covered in my basic chemistry class vs physics but the point remains, we have idiots running our Airport Security. God help us all.