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Sunday, April 30, 2006

We Stand For Freedom, Liberty and… I mean, we Sit For Freedom, Liberty, and…

This is just about the dorkiest thing I’ve seen since, well… ever. Captain Ed has started a group he’s called the “101st Fighting Keyboardists. they’ve got a logo and everything.

Our friends on the port side of the blogosphere have had quite a time tossing around funny little nicknames for those of us who support the war on terror and use our blogs to express our convictions about it. We’ve seen the names here at CQ in the comments section—the term “chickenhawk” has appeared more than once, and others in the blogosphere have assigned us to a unit called the 101st Fighting Keyboardists.

I’ve thought about that for a while, wondering what exactly about both epithets appear so fascinating to left-wing bloggers. As a middle-aged grandfather supporting a chronically ill wife, I have few options for doing my part in the war on terror. After 9/11, I spent weeks looking into different options for service while trying to balance my family obligations. Our family found out just three weeks after the attack that the Little Admiral would soon join us, and the implications of terrorism and war weighed heavily on my mind. I resolved to use the skills I had—writing—to make the case for fighting a forward strategy against terrorists. Eventually that led me to this blog, but in the interim I argued for a continued muscular offensive against the Islamofascists that had murdered thousands of our fellow Americans.

Is that the same as military service? Of course not. The men and women of the military do the real fighting, and we salute them and support them by supporting their mission. Milbloggers give us the best of both worlds by not only defending our nation and fighting (and beating) terrorists around the globe, but also by reporting on the fight first hand. There is honor in engaging in public debate for policies which we believe are in our nation’s best interest as well. For many of us, we know that without presenting our arguments in the national forum, many in the media and the public will quickly overpower the debate and threaten the policies we feel give us the best long-term opportunity to defeat terrorism and the states that fund and shelter them.

....

That’s why Frank J of IMAO, Derek Brigham of Freedom Dogs, and I have decided to create—for real—the 101st Fighting Keyboardists and adopt the chicken hawk as our mascot. First of all, the term “fighting keyboardist” describes our efforts pretty well, and we think the pseudo-military terminology is pretty danged amusing. Derek himself designed the logo.

....

Make of that what you will.

I mean, my esteemed coblogger Buckethead jokes about being a “Chairborne Ranger” or a member of the “Keyboard Brigade,” (okay, half the time it’s me calling him those things, but that fact is inconvenient to my current point so let’s overlook it, mmkay?), but that’s with the understanding that blogging is in no way a noble sacrifice that contributes in any way whatsoever to the actual shooting war that’s going on half a world a way. Because that’s the actual situation.

Anyway, hop over there and read the comments, which are totally priceless: “sign me up!” “Can I join?” “John Kerry, reporting for duty!!”

As a liberal who never trusted the Bush administration to not f*ck up there little adventure in Iraq, and who has said so publicly while simultaneously mocking the overwrought conviction of the loony fringes on each side (which evidently makes me one of the people they think can go suck it), I am frankly cowed into silent submission at the resolve and frankly incredible insight of these men, these dorks, this band of brothers. Or whatever.

Well, really it just makes me tired.

[Wik] idiosynchronic of low and left (coblogger of our valued loyal reader “iamcoyote") notes something I’m grateful I didn’t have to point out myself, because the fishinbarrelicious frission of the whole deal would make me feel a little dirty. That is, idiosynchronic noticed something I was trying not to notice, being the sporting and fair-minded chap that I am, namely a surely unintentional resemblance between the Chickenhawk logo and the German Eagle, a national symbol that once symbolized the stiff-necked greatness of the Empire, but which came to seem unspeakably crass circa, oh, 1946 or so. Its use by the Chairborne Rangers (unofficial motto: “We’ll Beat You Down With One Hand Ti… Well, Let’s Just Say The Other Hand Is Busy!") has to be the single shiningest example of AutoGodwinPwnage ever seen in the history of the internets.

[Alsø wik] Dr. Sanity, now of the “Fighting Keybees,” as the 101st is styling itself, want us all to know that they

stand for TRUTH, JUSTICE, and the ultimate DEFEAT OF TYRANNY. [And, that includes all of you tyrants or tyrant wannabees out there in the blogsphere who are completely without a sense of humor; and/or who take those vapid and banal exhortations for “peace” so seriously you are unable to see that you represent the greatest threat to peace and freedom in the universe. All humorless and ideological cretins can just suck it up--because we mean you!]

Oh, I got a sense of humor all right. I think all this big-talkin’ steely-eyed internet resolve to fight ‘splodeydopes and liberals alike through their heavy, heavy words is hilarious. 

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Looks like 1 May is the day to catch up on your shopping

Reuters covers the impending public display of 1/10th of Mexicans demanding to be Americans here. 

On the one hand, that sounds like a fine thing: all those millions, that vast multitude willing to risk so much to be one of us.  On the other hand, giving ultimatums and listing among your intentions that, “America’s major cities will grind to a halt and its economy will stagger” are not the way to engender sympathy for your cause.  Just wanted to throw that out there, you know, in case it wasn’t blatantly obvious to anyone.

Reuters calls them “pro-immigration activists”; that’s who will be taking to the streets on 1 May.  “Pro-immigration activists”. 

That’s funny, because every time Lady Lethal and I had to go wrestle with the INS over some bit of her paperwork- which always cost alot of $$, not to mention lost work time and travelling expenses, and disregarding the psychic toll of dealing with cold bureaucrats- I don’t recall ever seeing a “pro-immigration” activist.  Not anywhere near the JFK Building, the Government Center plaza, the Red Line, or the Green Line. 

That’s because all the pro-immigration people were inside the building, waiting in line.

In USA, television watches YOU

Oceania has always been at war with… ahh shit. Who’m I kidding? Here I am with a story about a new video display in development by Apple that contains image-collecting cells interlaced with the image-emitting ones, thereby permitting a fully functional two-way video screen, and all I can come up with are Yakov Smirnoff and George fricking Orwell.

Is there an office I need to report to, to have my pundit-pass torn up? Or at the very least stamped “HACK” in giant red block capitals?

[Wik] Speaking of George Orwell, I just read a fascinating brace of books. First was Orwell’s debut novel, Burmese Days, drawn from his experience in His Majesty’s colonial service, and about the deranging effects that colonialism has on colonizer and colonized alike. Apparently Orwell had some problems with the system.

Shortly after reading that, my loving wife the librarian handed me Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, an American author raised in Southeast Asia. A few years ago, Larkin returned to Myanmar in order to visit all the places that George Orwell either wrote about or himself visited while in the Service, with the notion of making a book out of the trip. Along the way she uncovered the terrible and disheartening fact that Orwell is viewed by those few intellectuals who manage to endure under Myanmar’s insane regime as a veritable prophet of their misery. In the back rooms of shops, in apartments with the shutters closed, in groups of two and three so as to not require an official “gathering” permit, people meet to read, exchange, and discuss books, handing moldering paperbacks by Western authors from hand to hand, racing against time and mildew to absorb the text before the books fall to pieces or they are discovered, detained, and disappeared by the government’s vast network of informants. In this sub-sub-sub culture, this demimonde of intellectual resistance, they treat 1984 as though it were the roadmap to the system that rules their world.

Being that Myanmar’s military rulers do in fact intrude in thousands of ways into every moment of every person’s life, spoon feed the populace “news” that advances their purposes, mandates constant public displays of love for the rulers and hatred of the enemy (both internal enemies of the state and the puppeteers that ostensibly move them from abroad) and acts vigorously and without scruple to crush out every spark of independent thought, it turns out that in Myanmar, 1984 isn’t merely a chilling if slightly hokey novel for seventh-graders. It’s goddamn holy truth.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Female Wang

Via unfogged, I give you the number one reason I’m thankful not to have been born a female hyena: ”imagine giving birth through a penis.”

Wait’ll you read the part about the fatal tearing. 

Why Motorhead Rocks Your Hole, Reason #210

Their deep commitment to rocking your intellect as thoroughly and enthusiastically as your hole. 

Dig:

There are 23 generally accepted canonical works, mostly studio but some live records too.  If you take the first letter of every word in the album title and string them out, you get this, the Motorhead Power Word:

MOBAoSNStHIFAPDNMORnRNSAA1916MoDBSOSSBLELTEEWAMTBoMHLaBAI

If you record yourself saying the canonical Power Word, then play the recording backwards at 1/3 speed, you should hear, “LEMMY ROCKS YOUR HEAD AND HOLE LEMMY ROCKS YOUR HEAD AND HOLE” in a forgotten dialect of Aramaic indigenous only to a small band of Levantine pirates who, in the early 1st century, used a smallish slab of Lemmy-shaped coral as their sea lair.

But that’s not the half of it.

Consider the mystical number 23.  Add that to the 57 characters of the Power Word and what do you get?  80.

Next consider the album title 1916.  Pretty odd that it’s the only numerically-titled release, no?  And why that number?  Well think it through:

1+9+1+6=17. 

Now add that to 80 and you get 97.  97.

Ninety-seven is Lemmy’s height in inches, or a hair under 8’1.

I mean, it’s stuff like that, the number games, the language games, the historical awareness...the deep and broad intellectualism that is at the core of Motorhead’s music and message is what makes them unique, and allows them to kick your ass in all kinds of subtle, eye-opening ways.

All I can say is, thanks.

Actual Facts

Only 12 percent of monetary transactions around the world involve money.

Someone set me up the bomb

I have now taken the same quiz as my compatriots, and it is clear that, far from dying peacefully in my sleep well into my second century of life, surrounded by loved ones, I’m destined for a grisly and chillingly newsworthy end.

What the hell? Where’d I get so many enemies?!? Guess I’d better start sitting with my back to the wall down at the local Thai/sushi joint and tiki bar that is my usual watering hole. Don’t wanna die with a tall glass of Singha and a plate of o-toro sashimi in front of me. I mean, there’s worse ways to go, I guess, than enjoying a plate of fatty tuna belly. I could die at MacDonald’s.

At least bomb or bullet is quick, right?

Mebbe I better start looking for that land in the woods of Nova Scotia I’ve always wanted. Big fence. Mean dogs. A moat. 

An interesting bit on the state of politics as we enter midterm elections

From the Economist’s current issue - an opinion piece that attempts to describe what’s wrong with the body politic in America today.

And, bless their pointy little heads - it’s outside the subscription firewall so the opiniony goodness is available to all.

I think they’ve nailed it, but what do I know?

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Proof I’m the oldest sod around here

As if it were needed.  You reach a point in your life where you’re so boring that you get quiz results like those below.  Which, by the way, were totally predictable in my case.

[Wik] Entire contents of table above are [sic].  I’m not one of those whose raison d’etre is to edit other peoples’ sloppy spelling.  Or my own, for that matter.

It’s the aliens, see

Curious, I took the test GeekLethal linked in the previous post.  It seems I am fated to just disappear.  Hopefully, I will do it with less spelling errors than the author of the test.

Another Bleach Spritzer, Mr. Lethal?

Very interesting.  I can think of a dozen people off the top of my head who might agree that I could use a nice tall glass of shut up, but would probably stop short of plotting to kill me.

For my part, gentle reader, fret not.  The suicide clause in my life insurance policy absolutely precludes auto-darwinating in any form.  I’m just gonna have to stick around and suck it like everyone else.

Hat tip to Lysander, latest in this chain of quizzery. 

Actual Facts

One in twelve city-dwelling squirrels will be killed by an automobile.  Another four are killed by Bob Tyrell of Russell, Indiana.

No better than the French

Based on the latest antics of "Denny Pelosi", one could reasonably get the impression our elected leaders are either gutless or elitist.

Sometimes, reality sucks. Current gas prices are a great example of that.

The French way, it would seem, is to propose a half-solution to the problem (better than none, mind you), and then to climb down from it after street protests by the disaffected presumed-losers from the policy. Examples abound, but the recent tail-between-the-legs by "Black Jack" Chirac on the utterly reasonable attempts by Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to grease the market for youth employment in France is perhaps most instructive.

That was a case either of the government being too weak-kneed to tell the people what they needed to hear or being certain the people were too stupid, greedy, or both to understand the need for change. Result? Cram-down policies, rejected by the people because they weren't explained fully and correctly.

Same deal today in the US, it seems - the scary correlation between Bush's approval rating and gas prices has awakened the sleeping and impotent populist in each of our Republican leaders. Morons. It's bad enough when the Democrats do it, but flatly embarrassing when the GOP does.

I'm sure that sometimes it's better to be seen to be doing something rather than not, but this isn't one of those times, and will simply feed and nurture the economic illiteracy of those who don't know better. How many times will we go through this charade of pretending that if prices go up, someone's slipping us the high hard one? When prices go down, these same folks, illiterates and impotent populists both, seem not to think it odd at all.

I’m headed for the stars, me

The Ministry is now bound for the vasty deeps of space, riding a beam of light and yodeling like Slim Pickens on the A-Bomb in Dr. Strangelove.

New Adventures in Monotony

Er, Monopoly.  New adventures in Monopoly.

It’s America’s favorite socially acceptable expression of raw capitalism, made manifest in cardboard and psychedelic currency.  No other single gaming product better teaches the lesson that it is good to be a have, and that, by definition, the have-nots are losers. 

Everyone has a copy somewhere, and most of you probably know where it is- closet, basement, attic- maybe even still set up from the night before on the big spool table in your living room.  Maybe you still have the bits from your old set pressed into new missions: board to cover broken window; plain ol’ “dice” turned into 2D6 and working for a Gary Gygax product; desperately gripping the racecar token- your final tangible asset since you sold off your last duplicative organ for real money- and used the last of the game money to kindle your hobo cooking fire and reflect on how you lost at life just as you lost every game of Monopoly you ever played…

Sssooooo.... yeah.

Hasbro is soliciting votes here for new spaces on an updated gameboard.  And let’s face it, we’re due.  However boring the gameplay is going to be, having Depression-era landmarks and cultural cues have not helped keep it fresh and interesting.  And shit I’ve never even BEEN to Atlantic City.  Matter of fact, the last time I went that far down the Garden State Parkway I wound up at the no-diamond-rated, non-luxury accomodations of the Department of Defense, a guest at Fort Dix’ training barracks and the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry.  Not in a hurry to get back, thanks.

So.  Among some of the changes are updated Chance and Community Chest cards to make them more relevant to our place and time.  Maybe they replace “won $10 in a beauty contest” with “finalist on American Idol” or something.  Gone are the railroads, in favor of airports like O’Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson. 

What I don’t get though are whether the sites that Hasbro is asking participants to vote on are the ones that will be bought and sold.  I mean, you can’t very well build a house on Hoover Dam, or sell Beacon Hill.  I doubt there’s enough raw currency in circulation on the planet to buy Beacon Hill, anyway.  So if that’s the plan, I don’t like it.  I respect efforts to modernize the look and feel of the game, but can’t get behind the landmarks thing.

I think it would be better for each purchasable property on the board to represent an entire, actual city.  So instead of just Atlantic Ave on the classic board, on the new board you’d buy Atlantic City.  Keep it going: the purple spaces would be, say, Newark and Detroit; Hartford and DC would fit right about where Connecticut Ave is now, maybe closer to Baltic.  Er, Detroit.  Updated utilities might include Comcast or other high speed cable/ISP.  Boston...hmmm...I’d say somewhere in the high yellow, into green properties.  Maybe L.A. for Park Place, NYC for Boardwalk?  Jail could still be jail, I guess; maybe zazz it up by making it Pelican Bay.  Well, except then you’d probably never get out.  Maybe instead of jail, it might be “debt”, so that as long as you’re “in debt” you pay the bank 27.99999999% interest on all your holdings?  Then again, I don’t want to work that hard computing interest to play a game.

Come to think of it, I’ve already worked too hard thinking about this game which I’m never going to play anyway.

If you care, go vote.  If you don’t care, you’re a well-adjusted adult who outgrew Monopoly decades ago and I don’t blame you.  Or you’re a communist, and hate the game anyway on principle. 

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