Men,
If you want to maintain a healthy marital relationship, do not regale your beloved over lunch about the good times you had before you were married.
Specifically don’t talk about liberty in Okinawa, the red light district outside Kadena and bar girls. More specifically don’t say anything like the following: Boy, I could have married that girl - mmm hmm.
Because that would be what is referred to as a mistake.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Not everyone has issues after a tour of duty in a hot spot. But if you do … don’t be a hero. Get help. Learn from this man: Skippy comes clean on his PTSD issues.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
I had a nice tidy blog post all ready to go. [1]
It wasn’t a masterpiece of snark or derision. It wasn’t a world changing essay. It was geeky: I managed to talk about Boomer, Athena, Caprica Six and Solaris Zones.
Just a projection - it wasn’t really there.
But, the heck with it. It’s not nearly as good as something that has Grace Park and unix in the same post should be.
Solaris is a marketing term, but SunOS is clunky.
Instead, an article by a bint who gets all worked up that the nearly 10,000 Marines and sailors at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have access to a beach, post exchange, a Wal-Mart and your standard gift shop selling t-shirts.
fear, mortal terror, etc.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Originally it was not going to be posted here, but since it veered off into a link to a bitchy news article editorial about Guantanamo Bay, it - sort of - belongs here.
Rachel Lucas knows how to increase her blog traffic.
1. Profess to be a not-right-winger. She’s for woman’s choice and not religious. And she owns guns.
2. Dress up her dogs and take pictures.
Then, when she has a solid audience of right wingers, dog lovers and gun geeks …
3. Post about Battlestar Galactica. Twice.
Well played, Miss Lucas. Well played.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
‘That Wonderful Offhand Position‘ by Kris Battles
Offhand - bleh. I was privileged to watch a master shoot in this position, once.
A Corporal in the next relay is shooting the 200 sitting.
Bang. Maggie’s drawers. Bang. High and right. Bang. Low and left.
Some grumbling heard; the rifle is messed up. Got to be.
The range OIC, a Warrant Officer 4, strolls up.
Lemme see that weapon, son.
WO 4 tips the sign to the tower. All targets down to half but his. He slips his own magazine into the weapon, tosses it to his shoulder and rips off twenty rounds, offhand - just that quick.
His target goes down and comes back up with a single spot, middle of the bull.
“Aint’ the weapon, boy, it’s the shooter.”
See more artwork at http://www.krisbattles.com/
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
In a better - or more interesting world - this couplet would be as well known as ‘hark what light through yonder window ..’
Speak ‘What’ again! Thou cur, cry ‘What’ again!
I dare thee utter ‘What’ again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but ‘What’,
Of Marsellus Wallace!
From ‘Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King’s Men’
Via.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
But .. more and more it may resemble an outake of Monty Python.
ON THE HIGH SEAS ABOARD HMS PINAFORE
Lookout: Captain! Look!
THE CAPTAIN HURRIES TO THE BRIDGE. THERE IS A SCRUFFY LOOKING VESSEL ON THE HORIZON.
Captain: Ahoy the vessel!
Pirate: ‘Allo. Whoo is eet?
Captain: I am Captain Upstanding-Forthwright, Royal Navy. Whose vessel is this?
Pirate: This is the vessel of the Dread Pirate Smeeth.
Captain: Tell your captain to stand by to be boarded.
Pirate: I don’t think he’ll be very keen - you see we don’ need to be boarded today.
Lookout: He says they don’t want to be boarded.
THEY ARE STUNNED
Captain: Are … are you sure?
Pirate: Oh yes, we’re doing fine, thanks. Nice day isn’t it?
Captain: Well, we’d really like to come aboard. Pretty please.
Pirate: Of course not. You are English pigs.
Captain: What are you then?
Pirate: We’re pirates. Why do you think I have this outrageous accent, you silly sailor fop.
Captain: What are you doing on the high seas, with machine guns and cannon?
Pirate: Mind your own business.
Captain: If you will not allow us to board we shall take your vessel by force.
Pirate: You don’t frighten us English pig-dog. Go and bite your bottom son of a silly person. I blow my nose on you so-called sailor Captain, you and all your silly English k…..niggets
Captain: Prepare the boarding party, guns, one round from the forward five-inch mount, prepare to fire ..
XO: Ur, Captain. The latest directive from Foreign Office.
Captain: … on my comman .. oh. Yes. Human rights.
Pirate: HE PUTS HIS HAND TO HIS EARS AND BLOWS A RASPBERRY.
With apologies to the Pythons.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Things in Zimbabwe are bad.
How bad are they?
Things are so bad in Zimbabwe that the ruling party can’t even rig an election.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Except .. they weren’t turkeys. They were eggs. Plastic easter eggs. Dropped from a helicopter.
The idea behind the Cartersville EggDrop was to replace the old boring egg-hunt thing with a helicopter dropping 10k Easter eggs onto a small section of a football field. After the event a neighbor said to me after the egg hunt, this had to be an Easter egg hunt engineered by men with no women involved. I added that it was most likely ex-military men.
He’s got a point.
The first sign of a plan gone wild revealed itself as we approached a fenced-in football field that already held about 5.000 crammed-in people. My first instinct was to turn and run, but I doubt that I could have explained my flight to the 5-year-old with a vice grip on his Easter basket . EggDrop ground zero was the 50 yard line, and it was surrounded by yellow event tape at a radius of about 20 yards. When the helicopter made its first pass, that yellow event tape was no match for the thousands of screaming kids who burst through to catch the falling plastic eggs. The real problem, though, was that the organizers had not expected that the first drop of around 700 eggs would pelt moms, dads, and unsuspecting eight-year-olds.
I would never … never … have expected that result.
At one point, I ran over to M-I [3]
They had a helicopter and a tank? That is all kinds of awesome. God Bless the South. [1]
and tried to explain to him that no parent is going to leave the field without the right wounded children, myself included. I further pleaded with him to radio the helicopter and ask them to hold off dropping any eggs until things could be sorted out. He informed me that he did not have radio contact with the helicopter.
Say ‘hello’ to my good buddy, Murphy!
As I pushed my way to the 48 yard line, I saw my two boys sitting on the ground crying. Meanwhile, goofy old Ray Liotta [2] in the helicopter was circling with another drop of about 700 more plastic eggs, which cascaded onto the field amidst rippling pops as the egg shells bouncing off every man, woman, and child.
It ended well - in that John escaped with his kids. I did some due diligence via Google and, sure ’nuff, there was a helicopter drop of eggs and there was a fair amount of chaos, confusion and general hurly-burly.
[1] I mean this sincerely.
[2] Not really Ray Liotta - but that would have been a nice touch. John bypassed the obvious ‘Turkeys Away‘ reference and compared the situation to ‘Operation Dumbo Drop‘
[3] On further review this isn’t really a tank - I have no idea what he’s talking about. But a tank would have been cool.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Chris Gerrib writes
In the process of writing yesterday’s entry, I found the USMC Rules for Gunfighting. It’s both true and amusing.
Thank God I never had to apply these to ‘real life’.
Watch their hands. Hands kill.
Except that one, once. Kinda-sorta.
I was reasonably sure the guy wasn’t armed and he was what he looked like he was, which was a yokel from town delivering a new ditch witch to contractors aboard base.
But, god-damn. When a uniformed Marine roars up in a government vehicle that vaguely resembles a police car, parks it so the motor block is between you and he, unsnaps his holster and yells ’show me your hands’ you do not stand there with your paws in the pockets of your overalls going ‘hunh?’
I did relish the look on his face when I un-holstered my M9 and chambered a round [1]. Hands were extracted and poked up in the air with gratifying speed.
For my enjoyment, even better was my next direction: to pick up the phone, mounted on a pole about two feet from his head, that had been ringing for five minutes.
If I’d been an ass I would have asked him to read the sign mounted above the phone:
VISITORS: ANSWER PHONE IF RINGING OR PICK UP PHONE TO CONTACT THE SENTRIES.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Readers might be wondering if drawing a pistol was a tad extreme. To this I will answer that this was not the main gate at Camp Lejeune but a rather more secure facility - we weren’t there to mess around.
An armchair grunt would also take issue with my not drawing the weapon as soon as I exited the vehicle. To this I can only say that it wasn’t until I exited that vehicle that I observed he had his hands covered at which point the situation went from ‘drive out there and tell the asshole to answer the phone’ to ‘potential use of deadly force’.
And oh, the dice and hit-point jokes that will shower the land.
I never played D+D. I was such a dork in high school even the nerdly kids playing D+D shunned me.
I did start a D+D campaign - when I was twenty-four. Worked up a character and everything. Then the DM deployed to Saudi for Desert Shield so that kinda put a damper on the whole thing.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Dude works for a big company. Blogs. Gets noticed. Gets fired. It happens.
Now, he claims he’s never seen an employee manual, which I find really hard to believe - those guys in HR are really into making sure people read those things. But, whatever.
Naw - my problem is his usage of metaphor ..
… that is until the day she was taken out into the figurative woods without any warning and given the Old Yeller treatment.
Dude. Ol’ Yeller wasn’t taken into the woods. Yeller was confined to a pen when he turned rabid and that’s where Travis did the deed.
That and .. Ol’ Yeller had to die - he was rabid. I don’t think the fellow is trying to make the point that his friend acquired rabies defending her boy against a wolf, and then had to be shot by his best friend.
Unless that’s really where he’s going; his friend got all weird in the course of her work so her corporate masters had to tearfully execute her. Naw, that’s just too weird.
I call a metaphor penalty.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
The Air Force recently came by and did some simulated bomb runs on City Hall. The idea is that ground controllers need practice guiding air strikes in urban areas. Most bomb ranges are way the heck out in the middle of nowhere and lack urban terrain, so they come up here and do their thing.
Makes sense to me - you guys in blue do know how to rock on completely.
The paper described the AttackSimEx [1] as controversial but the only people who actually objected were six members from the Fox Valley Peace Coalition. One of whom was confused about what he was upset about.
“Apparently, this exercise is to improve the accuracy of bombs so they don’t have the ‘collateral damage,’” he said. “Collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent people, and I strongly object to my government killing innocent people. This is one small gesture on my part to at least make this known.”
Um, yeah. Actually the military [2] is all about killing as many people as possible; good, bad, innocent, guilty as sin, as long as the gun sight lays on ‘em we’ll pull the trigger. Our only problem is we can’t slaughter them fast enough; they keep wiggling around and throwing off our aim.
No, it’s the nancy pants [3] in Accounting that insist we get as much bang for the buck as possible. While carpet bombing is a whole lotta fun and a terrific emotional release it’s just not effective enough. The taxpayer is footing the bill and it’s our fiduciary responsibility to make sure the bombs land as close to the actual target as possible. That way we can use less of them - it’s a win-win for everyone.
Except the guys who are actually the target. But we in the War Mongering business call this hard cheese.
That angular monstrosity is City Hall - the target. Talk about putting the ‘close’ in close-air support …
[1] I have no idea if the milspeak shorthand for this really is AttackSimEx or not - but if it were it would not surprise me.
[2] Sarcasm.
[3] You don’t really believe this, do you?
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Travel to exotic lands
Meet exciting unusual people
And kill them.
Berkeley, the famously liberal college town in California, has taken aim at Marine recruiters, saying they are “not welcome in our city.”
Unh, ladies? The ditty you’re quoting isn’t a protest slogan. It’s usually found on t-shirts and bumper stickers for sale outside the main gate and in Army-Navy surplus stores across the land. It’s one of those yin-yang duality of nature mock-ironic things that service members do so well and clueless zealots just don’t get.
Instead of mindlessly repeating something you read on a recruiter’s bumper sticker, may I suggest a return to the classics?
1 .. 2 .. 3 .. 4
We don’t want your dirty war!
or
Hey, hey what do I say?
Kick the Marines into the bay!
or
Hey, hey, look our way!
We’re naive and we like it that way!
You’re welcome.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
There is one nice thing about changing a tire in Wisconsin in February: all that ice and snow gives you good place to jab your tire iron so it stands upright.
This keeps it ready-to-hand and super easy to find.
Cap is back .. and he’s packing heat.
Sadly, the article is short on details. What kind of weapon is that? Does he have to follow rules of engagement? Is he available to be a spokesman for Colt? Does Cap have a rifle in the truck of his Captain Americamobile? Cause when you want to really reach out and touch someone a pistol just isn’t going to do.
I am morally certain that - this being Captain America - he’s packing am M1911, chambered in .45. What could be more frickin’ American than carrying an All-American gun like that?
Subject Line Tip o’ the Hat to Thin Lizzy.
Friday night they’ll be dressed to kill
Down at Dino’s Bar and grill.
The drink will flow and blood will spill
If the boys want to fight, you’d better let them.
Half Sigma said [1]…
I am not impressed by McCain’s military experience. I worked for the army as a civilian, and it was the most poorly managed organization I ever worked for. Romney, on the other hand, has the proven capacity to run large organizations.
I think that whatever McCain’s failings, earning his wings as a Naval Aviator speaks volumes about young John McCain’s intelligence, adaptability and ability excel. Dummies don’t fly airplanes.
Now, I’m not sure when Half Sigma worked for the Army .. but generally he’s right.
The military is optimized to break things and hurt people. When it’s not actually doing this - and that was most of the time before between 1973 and 2001 - it’s incredibly inefficient.
The reason is that it’s really tough to run a lean military optimized for peacetime and then change stuff around in the span of a few months so you can destroy Iraqi mechanized armies with minimal waste. Or at least minimal waste on our side.
Nobody wants to replay Task Force Smith.
I was in a support role in 1991 and it’s amazing how many wasted cycles .. suddenly were not when we had to pack up people and gear and move them halfway around the world.
Did 3D FSSG need a whole bunch of desert camo in 1990? Going to the Middle East wasn’t our mission so you might think that the cubic set aside in the warehouses were wasted space.. But when we were tasked to send people the guys who went were pretty happy to be able to draw the gear they needed.
Likewise in 1990 3D FSSG didn’t need a DFASC [2] - mainframes in a trailer [3] - but when 1st and 2nd FSSG found theirs were breaking down (AC issues) we were able to ship them ours on a day’s notice.
Sorry for the rant - ignorance irks me.
Via.
[1] A rant is a terrible thing to waste so I’m recycling and editing a comment from another blog into a post. Some editing for clarity, some to correct a faulty memory.
[2] Rumor had it that we were going to get rid of it someday and in the meantime we didn’t use it - or at least hadn’t in the year and few months I’d been assigned to that unit. After 1991 the mainframe guys routinely dragged them out and operated them on field exercises.
[3] Interesting beasts they were - two semi-trailers per DFASC, one for the mainframe, one for the operators and programmers. Since my MOS was ‘programmer’ if we’d had to deploy ours I would have been put to work doing ‘programmer’ work. Since I hadn’t done that since school that would have been interesting.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
In which the author blames multi-tasking for
The Iraq quagmire. The mess in Afghanistan. Failure to capture Osama. A car crash. The breakup with his girlfriend. Problems with his new girlfriend. Sexual disappointment. Failure to obtain cheap airplane tickets to San Francisco. His bosses failure to pay attention during a face-to-face. Enron.
The scientists call this ruinous mental lurching “dual task interference,” or just plain bottlenecking. I call it the reason Keven Federline cost me a cheap flight to San Francisco. (It also explains, perhaps, why sexual threesomes are often disappointing.)
I just wish the military understood the concept. They might understand then why “walking and chewing gum” in Afghanistan and Iraq is no way to catch bin Laden.
Right. ‘Cause we sure ’nuff had problems fighting Japan and Germany at the same time, fifty years ago. For that matter I worked for units that did complicated and diverse stuff all the time. It is as if getting stuff done across the world with hundreds of thousands of troops is just a bit more complicated than pulling a fum-ducker and driving your car off the road while looking a nekkid photo of your girlfriend on your cell phone.
I’m sure it plays well around the campfire with all the scouts nodding wisely and learnedly. But I ain’t buying it.
………..
It is true that when you try to multi-task it becomes enormously more difficult to do anything that requires actual thought.
Adults compensate for this by turning off the phone, not looking at email, setting distractions aside and getting on with stuff.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
http://selenite.livejournal.com/207839.html
I ran into the lovely awamiba at Chikfila
Two things about Texas that I miss that I never thought I’d miss;
Chik-fil-A for the food - about the best fast food you can find. And the cow advertisements - the idea of sentient cows selling out their fellow livestock (Eat Mor Chikin) tickles me.
Jack In the Box because the food is not at all good for you, it’s damned tasty, and Jack In the Box places don’t have playgrounds or pretend to be doing anything but moving fast food and getting people in and out. And some of our first meals together were cheap burritos at Jack In The Box.
Mmmm. Burritos.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
