They were there when I checked last ...

The Commander in Chief Has Lost the Troops

My favorite phrase is from Brzezinski, "Flailing away with a stick at a hornets' nest while loudly proclaiming 'I will stay the course' is an exercise in catastrophic leadership." (which he wrote in a commentary in the LA Times).

I think Zeese is rather self-serving (since he's running for the Senate) and he seems pretty far to the left but he has some interesting things to say and if his facts are accurate about the troop's opinions it could be telling in the near future. If the professional officers, who are often behind the president no matter how much they personally disagree (for obvious career based reasons), are beginning to question him it's definately Not Good(tm)!

Now to read Brzezinski ...

"Stress interrogations", another carefully coined phrase intended to soften a distasteful subject (anyone remember "eliminate with extreme predjudice" or any of the other 70s and 80s CIA coined phrases?).

Well, not only is he articulate with a number of interesting observations, he offers a basic strategy to resolve the problems he points out. Something that is sadly lacking in most of the bush-bashing stuff out there. It's all well and good to demand "bring the troops home now" but highly unrealistic to expect it to happen.

More Miscellanity, part 2

Some stuff I hear that I will now blather on about (sigh, again!).

* Anna Nicole Smith has a case before the Supreme Court. It's so much money that if they donated much of it to New Orleans they could rebuild it pretty much as it was. ... Well listening to the NPR piece on it it was only a billion dollars or so. Maybe not. And it strikes me as incredibly ironic that the whole business takes place in Texas. Man, his son sounds like a real "piece of work".

* Ports and more ports (secure web is on port 443). The Coast Guard pointed out the security holes based on missing intelligence last year. While I have nothing against the Dubai company and they're mainly coming over to do business, accepting their "special assurances" when you have questions strikes me as pretty damn naive. Why can't we look at your documents now? However our politicians need to keep in mind if we treat these guys like thugs then they're not going to bring their billions of dollars in business to our side of the pond.

* Enron is ... well it's just astonding. I couldn't find the piece I had heard but now I recall the phrase that stuck in my head. It seems that yesterday's accounting witness was chided by the defendants for not using "aggressive accounting". I wonder what that is and what kind of math it uses (recognizing the fact that in accounting, 1 plus 1 doesn't necessarily equal 2).

* Halliburton is so much a crooked company. No bid contracts that are padded (Kellog Brown & Root) beyond imagining. Really it's not surprising to consider their behavior when you consider the way people who run it (like Cheney) behave (I have to answer to no one).

Well not as much as I thought.

Hoorah for John and Brand who installed my garage door opener last night. I won't even try to pretend that I helped. I stood around, held screws and passed up tools. Now I need to make something good for them to eat to pay them back. :)

I talked to the family this weekend about some things and suffice it to say that I don't really want to talk about it. [stuff deleted]

Karate is still hurting lately. But as long as I don't have too many pops and crackles while we work out it should be okay. Dave and I were practicing hip throws (Marlin got out a really big soft mat to land on) and my bad leg popped once but I still can't determine why. Well I can still walk so I guess it's a win (any landing you can walk away from ...).

Civ IV is turning out to be a lot of fun. Who knew conqueroring the world could be so entertaining (well, fans of the series did since they made it so successful). Matt wanted to play it but it takes the CD in the drive so I gave him Civ III to play (a new item in the toolbox for compliance/good behavior/good grades/etc). WoW is getting a bit tedious since my shaman got 60 and that server is getting a bit lonily. Yvonne and Marlin moved to another (new) RP server and started Alliance characters so I started some there too. Lots of folks in the guild she found to chat with.

Now that the garage door opener is done I guess the next project is to get the moulding down [I talked to Brian and he told me it's "quarter round" and I need to get a miter saw to cut the corners on it] on the walls (you know, that little roundish piece between the baseboard and the floor). Need to go out and dig on the net to find out what it's called. It should be cheap from what Erik tells me but I'll need a ... saw setup to cut the corners.

Well enough blathering for now.

Another traitorous historian loose in the world

Part of a line from "Deadhouse Gates" by Steven Erikson. I finished reading "Gardens of the Moon" and started on book 2 in the "Mazalan Book of the Fallen" series. The first one wasn't bad but it was a lot of pages to read for the ending's payoff. It almost seemed like too much work. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it enough to read the next one and not regret buying the first and third after not sending in my refusal to the Sci Fi Bookclub one month. But there were a lot of pages to read before you got to the "real" plot and then it was predictable. And the climax was also what I expected. But the setting was pretty interesting and he writes well enough that it wasn't a Stephen Donaldson (I read the Thomas Covenant books years ago and regretted it ever since).

Advice?
An assortment of odd things rattling around in my brain.

* Always assume when you go to a fast food place during the lunch rush and park to go inside (thinking it might be faster than the drive thru) that someone will block you in. Irony is, after all, totally in charge here! At least when ... okay I was looking for a word here but got distracted, at least when Entropy isn't in charge.

* Joan Osborne is searching for some furniture. Should I help her out? (yea right, most of my stuff is bachelor furniture)

* Hippie chicks are awfully damn cute!

* Black Lab puppies are cute too!

* Wouldn't it be alarming if the objects that we talk to on a daily basis talked back? What would they say? Would my sandwich condemn me for eating it? Would it scream in terror as I bite it?

* Entropy is not the same as chaos or anarchy. I couldn't remember the word but I was certain it was another aspect of chaos but thought it started with an "A".

Historians:

If a carpenter is a person who works with wood to create items (tables, houses, that sort of stuff) then would a historian be a person who creates history? How would a historian create history? Would they have to be close to world or country leaders? What would their job profile look like on monster.com? What would your resume look like if you were looking for a job as a historian? What would people who study it major in? What would their professors be called? All of this sounds a lot like Asimov's Foundation books. At least on the surface (and isn't that all we Americans value nowadays?).

She's mad now

Poking around myspace this afternoon I saw another note, obstensibly to me. She starts it off by saying "Ok if you can't do as I asked and dont want to be with me then FINE.". The title is "Do you even want to be with me?". She points out that her job (as a web cam girl working for "someone else") doesn't even preclude a move to a different part of the country.

To a lonily geek I can see how this would be very convincing. A young, pretty girl who seems to act shy on the net but has all these naughty pictures and has a job which implies that she's really a wildcat with "her man". And she seems to like you but wonders if you can "handle her". And she thought you "were different" and would "give her a chance".

The one aspect that seems to belie the other evidence is that she never onces uses your name or links to your myspace site. And there hasn't ever been any personal/private communication, everything posted is either a web page (which is public if you know the URL but can be obfuscated if you don't know it) or bulletins posted on myspace (just as public). So my instincts are saying that this is a scheme to get people to subscribe to her webcam. In her webpage she puts a link to the signup page every paragraph and it's quite obviously a pr0n site. But every geek has the ability to lie to himself and thus there's a little voice in the back of my head saying "what if?". So I just need to laugh loud enough to drown out the voice. ;-P

I'd post the links to these bulletins but you have to be a myspace member in order to see them (it is free so if folks want me to, post a comment). Maybe I'll send them to Aladora and Vonne and see what they think, it should be a good laugh to brighten their day. <wink>

Okay

Item 1:
I know full well that I'm a freak. I like science fiction, I'm good at math, good with computers, play computer, board and role playing games. I'm a nerd, a geek. All this I've known for longer than some of you, gentle readers, have been alive. It's nothing new. To balance this out I'm something of a wine and beer snob (not necessarily a good thing, snobs are annoying as hell mostly), I can cook Italian really well, have learned how to cook some other things, I do stuff for my friends and sometimes I'm pretty damn funny.

Item 2:
Internet romances do sometimes work. I worked with a fellow named Jason years ago who met his wife on IRC when she was in college in Virginia. They ended up happily married (and still are as far as I know).

However when item 1 and item 2 get combined it produces interesting (or scary) results. Not long ago I received a note from a girl in Russia who wanted to meet me. She seemed nice and I wrote back. It turned out that she "fell in love" with me in about sixteen minutes (Moscow Standard Time) and was apparently unhappy if I didn't write back twice a day. She had dreams about us sitting at the shores of a lake (which almost sounded like the Lake of the Ozarks) planning a family. She had friends who had met men in New York on the internet and were now happily married and living here in American. I wrote back after a week or so that I didn't see how she could even know me yet much less be in love with me and I didn't think it was going to work. That phrase doesn't translate into Russian apparently since it seemed to bounce off.

Now, poking around myspace.com (where I found a girl who'd played Everquest years ago with us, hey Ala!) I got a strange email (which I can't find now) from some fellow named Carlos who said that a friend of his had a crush on me but was too shy to contact me. He directed me to her profile. Her profile was kind of short but she said she had found someone who reminded her of her first crush, but that fellow had died just as they were getting close. Odd but not necessarily scary. [Possible complications as she attaches his attributes and her feelings about him to me.] Also odd that she's only 24 and I could have a daughter that old if I'd been married at 20.

Now I find a webpage she wrote asking me to sign up for a webcam service to prove my interest. A very strange way to either

a) let a guy know you like him (that part sounded kind of junior high school, telling a friend to let them know) or
2) recruit customers for a naughty webcam.

So not only am I a freak but I also attract them. Well I guess I knew that too! And it does keep life interesting. ;-P

The "game"

I just read Tycho's bit about the superbowl. Their comic for today is pretty funny. I was rooting for the Seahawks merely because they'd never been before and the Steelers had four other times. ("one for the thumb" my shiney white a$$) We went to Dourty's party and he had lots of people I didn't know but lots and lots of food and a really nice house. I guess I really should invest in some actual furniture and do some "decorating".

But the commercials were what we were really there for. Bud Light had the funniest set of them even if their "beer" is mostly walrus piss.

That garbage smell

The other day when Brand and I walked over to Tiger Tech (why do they insist in giving everything all these cutesy names?) he opined that the fertilizer landscaping had spread on the bushes and trees was what was smelling like that. I suppose that could be true, given the nature of fertilizer ... ;-P

My nuclear option

Okay, that's a deceptive title but I was advised to edit this and it seemed like a wise option so ...

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On a more pleasant (or more entertaining) level I got an email with a key for the stress test of the Dungeons Dragons Online game. We had to register within a 2 hour window last night and I knew it would be a slow process but I had no idea it would be so lame and clunky as it turned out to be. Tons of little boxes which said "No data" popping up every time I tried to do anything. I had to enter my information no less than eight times and every time I clicked submit I got one of those and the screen reported "processing your request ..." while the browser reported the action was "done". I gave up on it for the first hour and watched "Navy NCIS" (I really like Mark Harmon's work and Lauren Holly is pdc - pretty damn cute). During "Scrubs" I came back to try again and managed to get registered but I could not find where to download the client anywhere.

This morning I recalled they had some sort of deal with fileplanet.com so I went there and poked around but it took me quite awhile to finally locate the link. Then it took me four tries before I finally realized what links I had to click on to get into the public download queues, there were so many attempts to get me to subscribe to their service. Initially I had a 14 minute wait which started about 83 minutes ago. Now I'm down to number 56 in a queue of 220 with a (supposed) 9 minute wait. All of that before an undoubtedly large (hundreds of megabytes) download actually starts.

Talk about stress indeed!

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I got my first WoW character up to level 60 last night (before the DDO fiasco started). My shaman "Malgrode" made it. Now what? Work on the others I guess. Or play more Civ 4 instead? Or finish Half Life 2? Or write my d20 setting for the Retreat? Well something to keep myself amused.

"Ah, the sweet smell of

garbage in the morning, it smells like ... Victory."

For some reason outside the Telecom building I smell that sickly sweet sour smell of garbage. Especially around restaurants after about five days (or the day before it's collected). I couldn't see anything which might have generated that smell but we are about a half a block from a pair of dorms (er, excuse me, residence halls).

I heard that Mister Blunt didn't win the House Majority Leader spot. Nice work Republicans. However it seems like you simply picked a slightly different flavor of DeLay this time, since Representative Boehner was passing out Tobacco Lobby checks on the floor of the House at one point (years ago now). And he was one of the primary architects of the "No Child Left Behind" effort to ensure that no single child can meet or exceed his or her potential. Although from what my sister-in-law told me a few years ago very few schools can (or even try to) actually meet the criteria to qualify for any of the funding. Nice, craft a loophole filled piece of legislation that *looks* like forward progress but actually is intended to prevent people from getting the money. We'll see how effective the new Scandal Secretary cabinet post is. After all, it's not like their suddenly going to change, so scandals will continue to come up yet, bank on it.

Now to see what they do with the Patriot Act and the illegal Wiretapping thing.

Nice Try

Well maybe not, I didn't actually watch the Fuhrer's speech (and before anyone gets up in arms about my implying the president - he still only ranks as a small 'p' in my book - is a Nazi, I've used this for Presidents since I got out of college, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and this bozo). I saw Alito there in his new black robes and then I saw Rumsfeld and I couldn't take more than that so I went to go play Civilization 4 where I could take over the world and Make It A Better Place! (the Indians under Jimbo and the Egyptians have a huge lead in technology if you're curious)

But the thing that struck me most this morning as I listen to NPR was that Cinday Sheehan was arrested for wearing a t-shirt with an anti-war slogan on it. 1984 is coming man!