Monthly Archives: April 2007

Poor thinking skills

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Poor thinking – a result of, or cause of heroin addiction?

Morgan laughed in bitter agreement with that. He’s 42 and looks 72 – gaunt and toothless after a lifetime of heroin addiction. “They think you can take it or leave it, but it’s just the opposite. It takes you,” he said.

“It’s the biggest mistake in my life,” he went on. “If I got three wishes, I wouldn’t wish for a million dollars. It would be that I never tried heroin that first time.”

Not to belabor the obvious, Morgan, but you’ve got three wishes.

One for a million dollars.
Two that you’d never tried heroin the first time.
Three to wish for a tree house.

Via.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

He walked away

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Ka-BOOM.

A gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Sunday, creating such intense heat that a stretch of highway melted and collapsed.

Flames shot 200 feet in the air, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns.

I predict with some confidence that when they say ‘walked away’ they mean ‘ran like the dickens’.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Additional Rites of Spring

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Wherever the globe is warming, it isn’t around here. Spring has been mild, and rainy. Some days the temperature climbs up into the eighties, but not for long, and the nights are cool. A storm-front went through this week, threatening high winds, and several hours of thunder-and-lightening starting around midnight that sounded like a WWI artillery barrage and kept the sky fairly continuously lit up. You’d have thought that would have made sleep impossible, but I must have managed it. Local newscasts that evening were breathless with anticipation, repeating the tornado watch warning all the evening beforehand. Blondie says there was a shelter-roof by one of the gates to Ft. Sam that looked like it was trashed, but otherwise we came through OK… no hail, at least. And lots of rain. The trees are well out in leaf, and so is everything else.

We added some plants: a friend had a roommate move out, leaving behind a lot of potted plants. We took a lot of them, as my friend has zilch interest in gardening, and so my place looks even more lush than usual at this time of year. The nice part about working at home is that Lesser Weevil does not get so destructively bored. It’s been almost a year since she killed any plants, or tried digging a tunnel back into the house via the perennial border. Blondie has hit some of the neighborhood yard sales. She returned yesterday with a pair of tall ornamental pillars and a replica of the Venus d’Milo, which will look better once they’ve been brushed with a concoction of watered-yoghurt. This is supposed to encourage moss and mildew and other natural things to grow on them, although I won’t go to the ornamental extreme of one of the neighbors, who has so many statues in their front yard that the place looks like a hobbit graveyard.

The two of us are watching way too much of the Home & Garden Channel…

Another rite of spring: Spike the toy shi-tzu had her summer clip. I’m sorry; life is just too short to maintain her in the style which apparently that breed has become accustomed, with twice-weekly baths and constant brushing of her long, long fur. Off to the groomers she went, for what Blondie described as a “shaved puppy”. (Which sounds uncommonly like some of the p0*n spam I empty out daily). Everything between the plume on her tail and the topknot on her head is clipped down to the skin. I think she feels cooler and more comfortable, especially on the daily morning walk.

Or as one of the neighbors calls it “the daily drag around the block”. The Weevil and Spike tear out ahead of me, lunging at the end of their leashes. I must have become more accustomed to this; it’s been ages since either one of them managed to trip me up or knock me down. The Weevil is especially exuberant during the first few blocks: she leaps clear of the ground, over and over again. “You can tell she’s had her Wheaties!” observed the same neighbor, upon observing this performance. There is also speculation afoot that she might be part jack-rabbit. Taking them both out is not just “walkies”, it’s an upper-body workout too.

Rites of spring, indeed.

What was television, grandpa?

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Google brings authors to Google Worldwide Headquarters for informal talks. Are they sharing? Is the Pope German?

We invite you to check out all the extraordinary people who’ve taken part in the Authors@Google program so far, and enjoy one of our videos today.

John Scalzi

Strobe Talbott

More.

I’ve still got a television but more and more I wonder when I’ll wake up and realize it’s been weeks .. or months .. since I’ve turned it on.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

You Know It’s Time to Retire When (070427)

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When the Air Force’s NCO Professional Development Guide (previously known as the Professional Fitness Examination Manual) has space porn on it’s cover.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been involved with space in one way or another for the past 6 years. I know how cool and how important satellites are. They’re one of the reasons we can kill people and break things as accurately as we do. However,  the thought of the joystick jockies at Shriever whacking off on the cover of their study material just makes me feel like I need a shower in Lysol Simple Green.  Although, I’ve always assumed that’s what the whole joystick thing was about anyway.  Did I mention they wear blue jammies?  They wear blue jammies.

Yes, space is cool.  Space is hip.  Space is now.  But for the cover of our study guide?  I want atmospheric aircraft dammit!

If We Pull Out

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If we pull out of Iraq, the United States will never be trusted by anyone ever again.

If we pull out, the massacre that follows of anyone who even smiled at a U.S. soldier, much less who collaborated with us or accepted our help, will make the killing fields of Cambodia look like a freaking picnic. All of that blood will be on our hands because we failed to honor our promise to see this through.

If we lose, who wins? Al Queda, Iran, Syria, all of the folks who have been stirring the shite up since we got there. The entire region, not just Iraq, will fall into the hands of the people who want you, me, everyone who isn’t their kind of Muslim, dead. I’m guessing the Shi’ites will have the numbers so… The Sunnis, they’re dead. The Kurds, finally, once and for all, wiped off the face of the earth. We’re already responsible for a couple thousand Kurds dead due to bailing on them after Desert Storm, now we’ll be responsible for their genocide.

Ask the Iraqi people if they want us to leave. Ask the soldiers on the ground if we’re losing.

If this thing is lost? If there’s no hope for winning? Then to ask our troops to continue one more day is completely dishonorable. Every death that’s come before this day is completely without meaning.  If this is already lost and we don’t pull them out immediately? Every single American casualty from here on out is on our heads. Reid and his ilk want it both ways. “We’ve already lost, we have no chance of winning, but we’re going to leave our guys on the ground to continue dying for six more months so it APPEARS that we’re giving the government the chance to pull it together.”

If the war is really lost, call to immediately defund the war. Immediately. Have the balls to pull our guys out of harms way and let the slaughter begin.

UPDATE:  Which isn’t to say I think things have been going all that well.

My Current Project

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Without further ado, may I present the project that I have been working on, all this week, courtesy of my friend, Dave the Computer Guy; the website to market my books.

Well, the one that I did a couple of years ago, the one that I finished and which will be published (one way or another!) by September… and the three-part saga which I am currently working on. I am doing all this under the pen name that I began with… just to keep things tidy, and maintain my families’ assorted and respective privacy.

www.celiahayes.com

I am still working on some of the bits… like closing each page when you go to another one. And the “interview” page is still under construction… and my brother has promised some original art for some of the elements, rather than the bits supplied with the template.

This site is currently piggy-backed on Dave the Computer Guy’s site, so my next expense will be paying for a year of hosting, and for Dave to do some additional marketing. Feedback and suggestions are invited.

So are donations- (Paypal button over on the left, under the link for the first book.)

Zero-G

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Stephen Hawking is going .. well not to orbit but he’s going to experience zero-g.

What a marvelous experience for a guy bound by gravity and circumstance to a chair. He may get to orbit yet – Sir Richard Branson is going to give him a seat on VirginGalactic.

I’m humbled that other people have framed this in a far more entertaining manner than I can manage – I won’t even try.

Space is to humans what Beethoven is to dogs. I don’t think we have the slightest idea what we don’t yet understand.

Just thought of something: What holds the paraplegic in their chairs? What keeps them from shooting around the room, stopping their progress with a finger, floating from desk to desk?

Gravity.

And gravity isn’t a big issue . . . where?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

We’re Just Not That Good

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With the resurgeance of the Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman stories this week, I thought it would be a good time to let you, fair readers, in on a very deep, dark, military secret.  A secret so shocking that many of you will walk away not believing what I’m about to tell you.

Now, just a bit about me for anyone new:  I’m a retiring Air Force Master Sergeant.  I’ll have 23 years of active duty under my belt at the end of July.  I’ve held a Top Secret security clearance for the past nine years.

I have something to say about and to the conspiracy theorists and the “truthers.”  It’s a secret, but I’m going to tell you anyway.  I may face charges for this, but I think it’s THAT important.  Ready?

We’re just not that good at keeping dirty secrets to ourselves in the military.  Seriously.  The problem with the idea that there’s any sort of dirty laundry that we, as an institution, are keeping to ourselves is dependent on the idea that X many people can all be corrupt at the same time. 

This kind of thinking can only occur in people who have no knowledge of the military.

Because while some of us were motivated to join by the idea of killing bad guys and blowing shit up, and we guide the more enthusiastic members of that crowd to the proper special forces offices, there’s a large majority of us who simply want to serve and defend our country.  There’s an honor amoung many of us.  Actually, there’s an even stronger honor amoung the kill bad guys and blow shit up crowd, but I’m not going to explain that in this post. 

In the Air Force we get the concept of Integrity First driven into us almost from the first step off the bus at Lackland.  I know from serving Joint duty that the other branches take integrity just as seriously.  You want a fast way out of the military?  Lie.  Most commands will have you out of their ranks in a couple of weeks.  It’s because we absolutely MUST trust one another in the military.  The mission depends on it.

Did you properly set the fuse on the 2000 pound bomb we just put on that aircraft? 

You have to trust the answer to that.  Lives depend on it.

Basically, we in the military SUCK when it comes to lying.  Sure we have recruiters and public affairs reps and psy-ops people who’s job it is to sell one point over another.  But when it comes to every day living in uniform, we have a large majority of folks who are going to do the right thing no matter what it costs them personally. 

And of course we have our share of folks who think their whole job is about covering their’s or their boss’ asses.  We’re no different than any other organization.  Dirtbags somehow get through the screening but we normally weed them out before they get anywhere they can do real damage.

But because we have so many people who would cry bullshit when the bovine has so apparently defecated on the floor, those folks are outnumbered by the folks with a true sense of integrity.

That’s why conspiracy theories involving the military make me laugh.  There may have been a couple of folks who messed up and tried to tell the story before they had all the facts, but the truth always, always, always comes out one way or the other. 

It wasn’t luck that we found out the truth about Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman or Abu Ghraib.  It was integrity on the part of someone in uniform who had the guts to say, “Wait a minute, that’s not right!”

And here’s another one for you to stew over.  I believe the same thing about most people in government also.  Yeah, Republicans and Democrats both.

Told you you wouldn’t believe it.