Hoshi chan o watakushi no tomodachi wa daisuki desu, konban wa!
Dearest friend who I like so greatly, good evening!
Today I drove home from work and decided that I did not feel like cooking. I walked approximately two blocks to the northwest to dinner, at Daruma of Japan, and I am very glad that I decided to.
You see, it had caught my eye on many occasions, yet I did not venture inside. Have I explained my connection to Nihon? I took Japanese as my language requirement in high school and in college [sadly, I remember chisaii n desu ne..... very little!] My first mother-in-law was Aiko Kamimura, from Kobe. We're still fine, although her daughter could be swallowed by an Oni for all I care. My boys are exactly 1/4 Japanese, as a result.
So, it is a pleasant little restaurant, clean and friendly. The waitress asked me where I would like to sit, so I chose a table right in the middle. There is also a sushi bar area, but I was close enough to chat with the sushi chef, who is also the owner. Pleasant chap, very likeable.
I chose Kirin Ichiban [#1 Dragon] for my beverage; I am partial to deer-dragons [and beer-dragons, coincidentally!]. The waitress was excellent at never allowing me to pour any from the bottle into the [correct, I might add] beer glass. Very attentive.
The house appetizer was tuna chunks, served warm, in a sweet and tangy sauce. Very nice!!
I also ordered gyoza, the steamed pork-filled dumpling, which is one of my faves. They were just right, lightly browned and moist inside. Delectable.
For dinner, I ordered the combination tempura [ten` pura if you want to get technical on the Romaji]; it came out as shrimp, sweet potato, and broccoli, with shredded daikon [Japanese radish]. I always liked having dinner at Aiko's house when she would make tempura [her husband hated Japanese food!]; she enjoyed getting to cook Japanese food for people who appreciated it :-) This was tastier, though.
Dinner came with an ordinary lettuce salad and radish strings in a ginger dressing. Both refined and tasty :-)
Typically, dinner is served with miso shiru, a standard soy soup, but I elected for pumpkin soup, which was very smooth and had a wonderful flavor. Seasonal.
Had a nice conversation with Anastasia from Siberia, the blonde and svelte Russian waitress. Nice girl, and very attentive. Made sure she got a big tip.
Grapes for dessert as I was too full for ice cream, and the owner's wife had made Christmas cookies, so I was given a nice little cellophane bag of them to carry along for later. I thanked the owner and made sure he knew I appreciated the hospitality very much. I closed by telling him gochisooo sama deshita, it was truly a feast!
I live two blocks away.
I will surely be back.
Hope you enjoyed the story.
One day, you must accompany me there!
Have a great evening.
Chuck
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Merry Christmas, Everybody!!
Gotta admit, it does not seem to Christmassy around here. I'm not complaining, don't get me wrong, it is just non-traditional, that's all.
Virginia Beach. It IS cold right now, probably 38F or so ;-) No snow. Once the sun comes up proper, I may go for a run on the beach. It's 5.2 miles to Rudee Inlet and back. Location, location, location.
Gotta work tomorrow. Not enough vacation time [or money!] to visit everyone in Atlanta, so I am here. I'll phone over in a little while, though.
No tree, don't need the additional expense, and finding a place for it in this apartment would be problematic anyhow. Certainly not a live tree [shedding, and whatnot].
For Christmas feast, I am opening with heart of palm salad, followed by fried catfish, hush puppies, and Miller Chill Chelada style beer beverage, just the thing to go with fried fish. Might even have pecan pie and coffee for dessert.
So, please do not feel sad on my behalf, friends. I'm not sad, not at all :-)
Merry Christmas, everyone!!
Virginia Beach. It IS cold right now, probably 38F or so ;-) No snow. Once the sun comes up proper, I may go for a run on the beach. It's 5.2 miles to Rudee Inlet and back. Location, location, location.
Gotta work tomorrow. Not enough vacation time [or money!] to visit everyone in Atlanta, so I am here. I'll phone over in a little while, though.
No tree, don't need the additional expense, and finding a place for it in this apartment would be problematic anyhow. Certainly not a live tree [shedding, and whatnot].
For Christmas feast, I am opening with heart of palm salad, followed by fried catfish, hush puppies, and Miller Chill Chelada style beer beverage, just the thing to go with fried fish. Might even have pecan pie and coffee for dessert.
So, please do not feel sad on my behalf, friends. I'm not sad, not at all :-)
Merry Christmas, everyone!!
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Chuck in '79
This is me. Who else, eh?
Gainesville, Florida, 1979.
Go Gators!!
At the time, I was getting ready to go to work at Pic 'n' Save [hence the collar and tie and the awful, hideous vest].
This house was on Northwest 37th Terrace, just off NW 8th Avenue; Jo Ann [my sis] and I and Mama lived there for one year while Jo and I were in college.
I'm leaning on my '68 Firebird. 400 inch V-8 4-speed Muncie, headers, 4 barrel Rochester Quadrajet. Convertible. Sadly, it cost WAY too much to maintain, so I had to let it go. :-(
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
My Mountain Bike Story
I like to bike.
That was short poem, but it's the truth, too!
I have a mountain bike, a 21 speed [3 front, 7 rear gears]. It's a Magna, and it's heavy [I could have purchased lighter, but lighter = more expensive, and heavier = more of a workout, so I opted for cheaper ;-)]. Got front and rear shock absorbers, which is kinda cool - I like the configuration pretty well. Made one modification, as I have changed the brake pads to Aztec composites from the original rubber stoppers.
There's trails around here, so they say, but I have not checked them out yet. When I lived in Michigan, there was a county park with many trails nearby. I used to go riding there, enjoying cutting across the prairie, stopping to look at the lake, challenging the hills. Very wooded, almost got run over by a doe and a couple of fawns who were jmping across the trail!
Once, I wrecked my bike [I have had it rebuilt and safety-checked]. I was coming back from the park along the asphalt bike path, and when I pulled up on the handlebars to cross a curb , the front wheel and tire kept going straight. It became in slow motion [I realized that riding a horizontal unicycle was not a good idea!] and the front forks dug into the path, causing me to flip forward. I still have scars on the back of my hands, where they landed between the handlebars and the pavement.
I managed to turn my head slightly, but still hit pretty hard. I still have my shades and helmet. The sunglasses look like someone has taken a wire wheel to them, and the helmet is crushed in front - I'd have had a skull fracture for sure if I was not wearing it, and maybe would have died or suffered brain damage. As it was, I broke my nose, and have a scar on my upper lip where it tried to stop and the rest of me did not wish to. Nice scar on my shoulder road rash], and an inflamed rotator cuff on the other shoulder.
At the emergency room, a plastic surgeon was on duty, so I got stitched up really nicely. Later, when the swelling went down enough, he would set my nose as the fracture was displaced. Here's the funny part: doc's name was Mohammed Ali [almost like the boxer!!]. I looked like I had had business with Muhammed Ali, for sure!!
To keep my nostrils from growing shut, he inserted plastic tubing in each nostril. I had a gauze underneath in case there was leakage, and I wore a little mask over that so it would not look so bad. So, when I went to work later [I missed two days after the crash and three days a week later after getting my nose set], I was sitting at my computer when Kim, whom I worked with, came in. I turned around to see who was coming into the office, and she gasped!!! So [imagine a nasally voice, as though I was pinching my nostrils shut and talking at the same time], I asked "What is it?". She laughed and said, you reminded me of Hannibal Lecter [Anthony Hopkins' character from the movie "Silence of the Lambs".] Man, I loved the recognition.
Getting the tubes out a week later was welcome, but still not pleasant. The air was cold and sweet [although I had a nosebleed for a while], and as I sat in the recovery room, the lights went out!! All was well, I sure wasn't going anywhere ;-)
Anyway, I still ride. The bike is fine, and my nose is actually better now than ever [I think I had broken it, non-displaced, a couple of times playing football and baseball, so now that annoying lump at the top is gone. There IS an interesting crevice at the top, where the cartilage connects to the bone. It's not visible, but you can feel it. Remind me, and I will let you feel it for yourself. I think it's hilarious.]
That's my story ;-) and it's true! Have a great day.
That was short poem, but it's the truth, too!
I have a mountain bike, a 21 speed [3 front, 7 rear gears]. It's a Magna, and it's heavy [I could have purchased lighter, but lighter = more expensive, and heavier = more of a workout, so I opted for cheaper ;-)]. Got front and rear shock absorbers, which is kinda cool - I like the configuration pretty well. Made one modification, as I have changed the brake pads to Aztec composites from the original rubber stoppers.
There's trails around here, so they say, but I have not checked them out yet. When I lived in Michigan, there was a county park with many trails nearby. I used to go riding there, enjoying cutting across the prairie, stopping to look at the lake, challenging the hills. Very wooded, almost got run over by a doe and a couple of fawns who were jmping across the trail!
Once, I wrecked my bike [I have had it rebuilt and safety-checked]. I was coming back from the park along the asphalt bike path, and when I pulled up on the handlebars to cross a curb , the front wheel and tire kept going straight. It became in slow motion [I realized that riding a horizontal unicycle was not a good idea!] and the front forks dug into the path, causing me to flip forward. I still have scars on the back of my hands, where they landed between the handlebars and the pavement.
I managed to turn my head slightly, but still hit pretty hard. I still have my shades and helmet. The sunglasses look like someone has taken a wire wheel to them, and the helmet is crushed in front - I'd have had a skull fracture for sure if I was not wearing it, and maybe would have died or suffered brain damage. As it was, I broke my nose, and have a scar on my upper lip where it tried to stop and the rest of me did not wish to. Nice scar on my shoulder road rash], and an inflamed rotator cuff on the other shoulder.
At the emergency room, a plastic surgeon was on duty, so I got stitched up really nicely. Later, when the swelling went down enough, he would set my nose as the fracture was displaced. Here's the funny part: doc's name was Mohammed Ali [almost like the boxer!!]. I looked like I had had business with Muhammed Ali, for sure!!
To keep my nostrils from growing shut, he inserted plastic tubing in each nostril. I had a gauze underneath in case there was leakage, and I wore a little mask over that so it would not look so bad. So, when I went to work later [I missed two days after the crash and three days a week later after getting my nose set], I was sitting at my computer when Kim, whom I worked with, came in. I turned around to see who was coming into the office, and she gasped!!! So [imagine a nasally voice, as though I was pinching my nostrils shut and talking at the same time], I asked "What is it?". She laughed and said, you reminded me of Hannibal Lecter [Anthony Hopkins' character from the movie "Silence of the Lambs".] Man, I loved the recognition.
Getting the tubes out a week later was welcome, but still not pleasant. The air was cold and sweet [although I had a nosebleed for a while], and as I sat in the recovery room, the lights went out!! All was well, I sure wasn't going anywhere ;-)
Anyway, I still ride. The bike is fine, and my nose is actually better now than ever [I think I had broken it, non-displaced, a couple of times playing football and baseball, so now that annoying lump at the top is gone. There IS an interesting crevice at the top, where the cartilage connects to the bone. It's not visible, but you can feel it. Remind me, and I will let you feel it for yourself. I think it's hilarious.]
That's my story ;-) and it's true! Have a great day.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thoughts on the Baseball Hall of Fame
The Hall is not one conscious thought process, but more of a collection. There is no rhyme nor reason, really. Jim Rice is not in, but Ted Williams was also rude to reporters. Of course, Ted was one of the handful of best hitters, ever, so maybe he was past the point of debate? In such case, where is the line of no debate? Rice was feared, no doubt about that. Rice put up some monstrous numbers - should he be in The Hall?
Pete Rose is currently banned. Should he be in? I say that he is past the line of doubt: meaning, his numbers alone are good enough to get him in. His gambling is not really the issue here, but the integrity of the game. He consorted with big money gamblers, and there might have been cause for him to negatively affect outcomes. Here's my take on this: Cooperstown is about recognition. Pete had over 4000 hits. He belongs in the Hall of Fame. He consorted with shady figures who might have had an interest in "affecting" performances. For that, he has been banned from participating in the game, and rightfully so.
Since we are discussing the distinction between being banned from the game and entry into the Hall of Fame, let's add one additional tragic figure: "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He consorted to a far lesser degree than Pete. Indeed, he knew of the World Series fixing in 1919 in advance, but did not come out and report it. Reckon he feared for his well-being? Joe Jackson has paid his dues. He belongs in the Hall of Fame.
The Hall is about awareness. Pete and Shoeless Joe had major roles to play in the baseball of their times. They belong in. The Hall should have a display near their plaques, educating visitors about their controversy. Why was Jackson banned? Why was Rose controversial? The Hall is about awareness. They belong in.
Barroid? Big Mac? Swingin', Sneezin' Sammy? Same thing applies here. They did what they did. The Hall is about awareness. They belong in, along with the display of education, letting us know about them and their deeds. To not put the 5 players I have mentioned into the Hall of Fame is as though MLB has its head buried in the sand. Doesn't work too well for ostriches, either.
Pete Rose is currently banned. Should he be in? I say that he is past the line of doubt: meaning, his numbers alone are good enough to get him in. His gambling is not really the issue here, but the integrity of the game. He consorted with big money gamblers, and there might have been cause for him to negatively affect outcomes. Here's my take on this: Cooperstown is about recognition. Pete had over 4000 hits. He belongs in the Hall of Fame. He consorted with shady figures who might have had an interest in "affecting" performances. For that, he has been banned from participating in the game, and rightfully so.
Since we are discussing the distinction between being banned from the game and entry into the Hall of Fame, let's add one additional tragic figure: "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He consorted to a far lesser degree than Pete. Indeed, he knew of the World Series fixing in 1919 in advance, but did not come out and report it. Reckon he feared for his well-being? Joe Jackson has paid his dues. He belongs in the Hall of Fame.
The Hall is about awareness. Pete and Shoeless Joe had major roles to play in the baseball of their times. They belong in. The Hall should have a display near their plaques, educating visitors about their controversy. Why was Jackson banned? Why was Rose controversial? The Hall is about awareness. They belong in.
Barroid? Big Mac? Swingin', Sneezin' Sammy? Same thing applies here. They did what they did. The Hall is about awareness. They belong in, along with the display of education, letting us know about them and their deeds. To not put the 5 players I have mentioned into the Hall of Fame is as though MLB has its head buried in the sand. Doesn't work too well for ostriches, either.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
'Roid Rage
I posted this over at The Post, in response to what many people were saying. Aside from the general [annoying] hysteria of anti-Yankee propaganda put out by Red Sock Haters and Yankee Bandwaggoners, there is a silent throng who is not that affected, and a select few who see a bigger [more sinister] picture. Rock on, Sistah!
Good points, people.
Like the ape suit tells us, the show goes on, and the stigma of juicing runs deep. For every Yankees player who juiced, there are DOZENS of others who did so as well. People howling that there should be an asterisk [that's right, folks, "asterisk", please get it right] by the Yankees WS wins in '96, '98 - 2000 are missing the point. Every team had juicers. Some teams managed to win the championship, some did not. All of this talk of little stars is purely Yankee-bashing, and yes, we get it: you don't like the Yankees. Fine. 26 titles will engender that, and when yer larger-than-life, there will be envy and even hate. I'm okay with that.
Now, on to what Tanya was talking about. All of this current media frenzy is exactly what Bud Selig was hoping that the Mitchell Report would generate. You see, all of the media's sensationalist types are having a field day at the expense of players [many Yankees, many others too]; the Springer-esque sheep amongst us are predictably bleating about Rocket being a cheat, Andy being a cheat, asterisks, blah blah blah. Why is Bud happy? Because the frenzy is not directed at him. Bud was Commissioner when much of this was occurring. He tried to keep the peace [and thereby, keep the profits going]. He and his minions looked the other way. They shied away from confronting the union. They refused to crack down on their cash cow. They made the deal with the Devil and are now gleefully hearing "Bad Yankees! Bad Rocket! et cetera" which puts the spotlight exactly where they want it - somewhere other than on Bud Selig and MLB. Notice how Sen. Mitchell recommends that no player be punished for past transgressions [with a caveat, I understand] - first time a disciplinary action comes up based on this report, the union will go nuts. Not what MLB wants.
So, what IS the big deal? It's not so much individual performance. We all love tape measure home runs [unless we threw the pitch that got whacked]. When Ben Johnson ran his 9.79, I was astounded. True, he used a performance enhancer, and that gave him an unfair advantage, but it was still amazing. The big deal is competitive advantage: Player A uses steroids [as an example]. Player A builds bulk and recuperates faster, and gets a little bit better fast twitch.
All of this gives him the competitive advantage over Player B, who does not use any banned performance enhancers. Player A is a better player as a result [in this example, all other factors are equal], and wins the job. Player B is cut from the team for not being as good, and loses his job. Player A exhibits all sorts of problems, such as raging behavior, back acne, brittleness of body structure, and eventually, a tumor. Player B, now out of the game, suffers none of the symptomology, but has to work for a living like the rest of us average Joes.
Now, let’s go a bit south and a little bit before the major league scene... Question, do steroids [for example] work only on major leaguers? OF COURSE NOT! Many kids from San Pedro de Macoris, for example, all trying to impress the staff at the baseball academy, having decent meals and steady work perhaps for the first time in their life and desperate to make it in baseball. Maybe some give in to the temptation? Maybe MLB could do something other than look the other way? What is the morally right thing to do, as opposed to the profitable thing?
How about in America? Could MLB do more? Could the union do more? Could this possibly affect profits? Bingo. That's why Tanya is aghast. Don't just scratch the surface, peeps. This goes way deeper than that. Sheep, continue with your Bad Yankees bleating. It's exactly what Bud wants you to do. Baa. Baaaaaaaa.
Good points, people.
Like the ape suit tells us, the show goes on, and the stigma of juicing runs deep. For every Yankees player who juiced, there are DOZENS of others who did so as well. People howling that there should be an asterisk [that's right, folks, "asterisk", please get it right] by the Yankees WS wins in '96, '98 - 2000 are missing the point. Every team had juicers. Some teams managed to win the championship, some did not. All of this talk of little stars is purely Yankee-bashing, and yes, we get it: you don't like the Yankees. Fine. 26 titles will engender that, and when yer larger-than-life, there will be envy and even hate. I'm okay with that.
Now, on to what Tanya was talking about. All of this current media frenzy is exactly what Bud Selig was hoping that the Mitchell Report would generate. You see, all of the media's sensationalist types are having a field day at the expense of players [many Yankees, many others too]; the Springer-esque sheep amongst us are predictably bleating about Rocket being a cheat, Andy being a cheat, asterisks, blah blah blah. Why is Bud happy? Because the frenzy is not directed at him. Bud was Commissioner when much of this was occurring. He tried to keep the peace [and thereby, keep the profits going]. He and his minions looked the other way. They shied away from confronting the union. They refused to crack down on their cash cow. They made the deal with the Devil and are now gleefully hearing "Bad Yankees! Bad Rocket! et cetera" which puts the spotlight exactly where they want it - somewhere other than on Bud Selig and MLB. Notice how Sen. Mitchell recommends that no player be punished for past transgressions [with a caveat, I understand] - first time a disciplinary action comes up based on this report, the union will go nuts. Not what MLB wants.
So, what IS the big deal? It's not so much individual performance. We all love tape measure home runs [unless we threw the pitch that got whacked]. When Ben Johnson ran his 9.79, I was astounded. True, he used a performance enhancer, and that gave him an unfair advantage, but it was still amazing. The big deal is competitive advantage: Player A uses steroids [as an example]. Player A builds bulk and recuperates faster, and gets a little bit better fast twitch.
All of this gives him the competitive advantage over Player B, who does not use any banned performance enhancers. Player A is a better player as a result [in this example, all other factors are equal], and wins the job. Player B is cut from the team for not being as good, and loses his job. Player A exhibits all sorts of problems, such as raging behavior, back acne, brittleness of body structure, and eventually, a tumor. Player B, now out of the game, suffers none of the symptomology, but has to work for a living like the rest of us average Joes.
Now, let’s go a bit south and a little bit before the major league scene... Question, do steroids [for example] work only on major leaguers? OF COURSE NOT! Many kids from San Pedro de Macoris, for example, all trying to impress the staff at the baseball academy, having decent meals and steady work perhaps for the first time in their life and desperate to make it in baseball. Maybe some give in to the temptation? Maybe MLB could do something other than look the other way? What is the morally right thing to do, as opposed to the profitable thing?
How about in America? Could MLB do more? Could the union do more? Could this possibly affect profits? Bingo. That's why Tanya is aghast. Don't just scratch the surface, peeps. This goes way deeper than that. Sheep, continue with your Bad Yankees bleating. It's exactly what Bud wants you to do. Baa. Baaaaaaaa.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Boo
Oh, one more thing.
My boy Derek [Boo] has graduated with his Bachelor's Degree in English, from Kennesaw State University. He's a good guy and I am proud of him. Gals, take note - he's single and unattached!
So on Wednesday, when the ceremony was over, he texted me to say that he was graduated. I texted back and told him:
[1] Congratulations!!
[2] I am very proud of you, son.
[3] Get a job.
He laughed, too.
My boy Derek [Boo] has graduated with his Bachelor's Degree in English, from Kennesaw State University. He's a good guy and I am proud of him. Gals, take note - he's single and unattached!
So on Wednesday, when the ceremony was over, he texted me to say that he was graduated. I texted back and told him:
[1] Congratulations!!
[2] I am very proud of you, son.
[3] Get a job.
He laughed, too.
Standup Guys and Nude Pullups
I posted this over on The New York Post, on the Yankees blog, in response to two ladies whom I enjoy discussing baseball with. One is a True Yankee Fan, and the other cheers for the Red Sox, and I like both of them very much.
Ladies, please allow me to speak on this one incident [Andy Pettitte] for a moment. I have not taken the time to read through the entire Mitchell Report, so please forgive me if I speak out of turn. I DO have an initial reaction to the report, rather in the direction that Tanya hints at, but I am going to reserve it for now.
Now, as to Andy Pettitte, it is my understanding from reading summaries of the Mitchell report that Andy is alleged to have used HGH - Human Growth Hormone. He is not alleged to have used anabolic steroids.
Here is what I understand the findings are, in relation to Mr. Pettitte: that he used HGH [only] on between two and four occasions in 2002, for the purpose of speeding his recovery from an elbow injury. Now, here is the most important point in this instance: HGH was not illegal under the rules of major league baseball in 2002. HGH was added to the banned substances list in 2005.
The Jerry Springer acolytes who are calling for Andy's head [not either of you two, Tanya or Italiana, I want to make that clear] are doing so because of the media furor/lynch mob bloodlust, which I find intolerable. I will say this, on the part of the media, it is sensationalism, and no different in that way from the "yellow journalism" with which we stripped Spain of her empire in 1898 [Remember the MAINE? How apropos ;-) ]
As both of you ladies have intimated here, something is curious about this entire report. I wonder.
Postscript. A new article has come to light, revealing information to the effect that Johnny Damon was slandered by station WCBS in New York, as it had him listed on a preliminary report as a steroid user. Johnny Damon, a really nice guy, was not named as a user of anything in the Mitchell Report. Here's a link to that article in the Post: http://www.nypost.com/seven/12142007/sports/it_sucks__damon_furious_at_being_named_o_848324.htm/
Ladies, please allow me to speak on this one incident [Andy Pettitte] for a moment. I have not taken the time to read through the entire Mitchell Report, so please forgive me if I speak out of turn. I DO have an initial reaction to the report, rather in the direction that Tanya hints at, but I am going to reserve it for now.
Now, as to Andy Pettitte, it is my understanding from reading summaries of the Mitchell report that Andy is alleged to have used HGH - Human Growth Hormone. He is not alleged to have used anabolic steroids.
Here is what I understand the findings are, in relation to Mr. Pettitte: that he used HGH [only] on between two and four occasions in 2002, for the purpose of speeding his recovery from an elbow injury. Now, here is the most important point in this instance: HGH was not illegal under the rules of major league baseball in 2002. HGH was added to the banned substances list in 2005.
The Jerry Springer acolytes who are calling for Andy's head [not either of you two, Tanya or Italiana, I want to make that clear] are doing so because of the media furor/lynch mob bloodlust, which I find intolerable. I will say this, on the part of the media, it is sensationalism, and no different in that way from the "yellow journalism" with which we stripped Spain of her empire in 1898 [Remember the MAINE? How apropos ;-) ]
As both of you ladies have intimated here, something is curious about this entire report. I wonder.
Postscript. A new article has come to light, revealing information to the effect that Johnny Damon was slandered by station WCBS in New York, as it had him listed on a preliminary report as a steroid user. Johnny Damon, a really nice guy, was not named as a user of anything in the Mitchell Report. Here's a link to that article in the Post: http://www.nypost.com/seven/12142007/sports/it_sucks__damon_furious_at_being_named_o_848324.htm/
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Random Thoughts
"Chuck, you always write best when you are hurting. Now that Pix isn't coming back, why haven't you suddenly gotten prolific?"
Well, I AM sad that Pix decided to go her own way, but I AM content, all in all. I like living in Virginia Beach quite a lot, and I love my job. I enjoy working with my peeps, and the nights I go out [Wednesday night, The German Pantry and Friday, Logan's Roadhouse], I have a good time and enjoy the company of the regulars there.
Did I mention I am working a lot of overtime? My partner quit, so I am safety guy at two places, and QA at one of them. Lots of coffee, lots of Monster Energy Drinks. I woke up at 3:30 yesterday. Work at 7, got off at 5:30, ran and did pullups, ate, couldn't sleep!! I live under the approach to NAS Oceana, and the F/A-18's were cycling last night until 11 [plus the random C-9 and helo] - so much out of the ordinary air traffic that I coulda swore that we had a new war going on.....
So, that's MY story. Prolific? Naw, just sleepy.
Well, I AM sad that Pix decided to go her own way, but I AM content, all in all. I like living in Virginia Beach quite a lot, and I love my job. I enjoy working with my peeps, and the nights I go out [Wednesday night, The German Pantry and Friday, Logan's Roadhouse], I have a good time and enjoy the company of the regulars there.
Did I mention I am working a lot of overtime? My partner quit, so I am safety guy at two places, and QA at one of them. Lots of coffee, lots of Monster Energy Drinks. I woke up at 3:30 yesterday. Work at 7, got off at 5:30, ran and did pullups, ate, couldn't sleep!! I live under the approach to NAS Oceana, and the F/A-18's were cycling last night until 11 [plus the random C-9 and helo] - so much out of the ordinary air traffic that I coulda swore that we had a new war going on.....
So, that's MY story. Prolific? Naw, just sleepy.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Wired on War
This is a good read, not just regarding the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but on societal conflict overall. I have come to realise that the generations of warfare are cyclical in one sense ~ the general chaos which preceded the rise of the state system is eerily familiar to "4th Generation War" or insurgency [as some would describe it].... the cycle probably ties into a grand scheme OODA loop. Wonder what COL Boyd would have to say about that?
WIRED MAGAZINE: Wired Issue 15.12
Politics : Security
How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic
By Noah Shachtman 11.27.07 6:00 PM
To complement this story, Wired asked four renowned photographers to create images depicting the intersection of technology and war. This page: A tattered flag flies from a cell phone antenna. Photo: Todd Hido
View Slideshow
Feature
The Technology of War: A Photo Essay
ONLINE EXTRAS
Snapshots From Iraq
Noah Shachtman Writes From Iraq
See also
CSI vs. IEDs: Inside Baghdad's Forensic Bomb Squad
The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski — who'd been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm — was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka — a Stanford-trained engineer — worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles.
Over the next several years, the two men traded ideas and compared experiences. They visited businesses embracing the information revolution, ultimately becoming convinced that the changes sweeping the corporate world had applications for the military as well. The Defense Department wasn't blind to the power of networks, of course — the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing "digitization" programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, "Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future," they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.
Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization — sound familiar? — that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. "Nations make war the same way they make wealth," Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America's chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.
The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It'd be "a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age," they wrote. And it wouldn't take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done — that kind of "massing of forces" would be replaced by information management. "For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved," the pair wrote. "Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war."
Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.
It had a certain geek appeal, to which Wired was not immune. Futurist Alvin Toffler talked up similar ideas — before they even had a name — in the magazine's fifth issue, in 1993. And during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and — above all — a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute."
As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to "transform" the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills." The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven't won once.
How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory's many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
Inside the Pentagon, the term network-centric warfare is out of fashion, yet countless generals and admirals still adhere to its core principles. On the streets of Iraq, though, troops are learning to grapple with the guerrilla threat. And that means fighting in a way that couldn't be more different from the one Donald Rumsfeld embraced. The failures of wired combat are forcing troops to improvise a new, socially networked kind of war.
Tarmiyah, located about 20 miles north of Baghdad, is an ugly town — traced with rivulets of sewage, patrolled by stray dogs, and strewn with rubble and garbage. Insurgents fleeing US military crackdowns in Baghdad and, farther north, in Baqubah, have flooded the city. The local police quit en masse almost a year ago, leaving the security of Tarmiyah's 50,000 residents to 150 men from the US Army's Fourth Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment — known since an early-1900s tour of duty in China as the Manchus.
Typically, soldiers spend hours of every day at war just trying to figure out where their comrades are, and how to maneuver together. But hand out GPS receivers and put everyone's signals on a map, and those tasks become a whole lot simpler. Luckily for the Manchus, the 4/9 is arguably the most wired unit in the Army. Select troops wear an experimental electronics package, including a helmet-mounted monocle that displays a digital map of Tarmiyah with icons for each of their vehicles and troops. The unit's commander, William Prior, rides an upgraded Stryker armored vehicle that shows the same info on one of many screens. It's packed with battle command stations, advanced radios, remote-controlled weapons turrets, and satellite network terminals. No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily.
"It increases the unit's combat power, no question," Prior says. Trim and dark-eyed, the lieutenant colonel knows his tech. He has a master's in physics and taught science at West Point in the late 1990s.
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, only a fraction of the Humvees, tanks, and helicopters invading the country were equipped with these kind of readouts on the position of other US vehicles. Still, enough had them to allow the troops pushing to Baghdad to execute perilous maneuvers, like sending one unit through another's kill zone — a move made even more hair-raising by dust storms that turned the air opaque.
Today, every three-man team in the Manchus is an icon on every other team's monocles. Network-centric doctrine says that these plugged-in soldiers should be able to cover a bigger swath of the battlefield and take on more enemies. And, yes, the gear does let them clear neighborhoods more efficiently and respond to enemy attacks more quickly. But a handful of soldiers still can't secure a town of more than 50,000. Half a dozen Manchus have been killed or wounded by snipers during their five months in Tarmiyah. Prior has handed out 25 Purple Hearts to the 150-man Comanche Company guarding Tarmiyah. It's even worse outside town, where the equally small Blowtorch Company was trying to keep the peace in an area three times the size of Manhattan, until the higher-ups ordered the company onto other missions.
"A well-informed but geographically dispersed force," Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of "mission, force size and composition, and geography." But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops — collecting tips and knocking heads. That's what Prior needs, not more gadgets. "They're just tools," he says in his flat Iowa accent.
But Prior has just caught a break: Another several hundred soldiers, Special Forces operators, and Iraqi troops have descended on the city to kick in doors, drop bombs on extremist hideouts, and drive out the insurgents. Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, Prior is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq — hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.
But the extra boots on the ground have given Prior some space. If he can recruit a few alligators in a hurry, the extremists will be less likely to come back. So he has started spending quality time drinking chai with local leaders instead of fighting a shooting war.
We walk into the home of Tarmiyah's former mayor, sheikh Sayeed Jassem. Everyone in town agrees he'd be the guy to help sign up alligators. One problem: Jassem is in jail on charges of embezzlement and funneling money to the insurgency. The Iraqi government is in no mood to let him out. That makes the several dozen tribal leaders sitting in Jassem's 40-foot-long, lavishly carpeted living room extremely grouchy. "Sayeed, he knows every sheikh, he knows all the children. The first step is releasing him. Then we can arrange security," says burly, balding, gravel-voiced Abu Ibrahim. Next to him, in a white headdress and wearing a pencil-thin mustache, Jassem's cousin Abu Abbas nods. "I couldn't make a decision until he's free."
Prior blinks. Abbas went to Jassem's jail cell the day before yesterday and got the sheikh's blessing to proceed. "But you saw him yesterday, with your own eyes, did you not?" he asks. Abbas starts saying something about his uncles. Prior turns to Ibrahim. "Yesterday, you said you'd have 100 men. All I'm asking for is 30. Five men, in eight-hour shifts, to guard the sheikh's home, and to guard the Tarmiyah gate" — the main entrance to the town. The meeting has been going on for two hours. That's typical. But after a few of these, Prior has finally learned that such gatherings are as much about performance as ticking off agenda items. He booms out in a Broadway-loud voice: "Are there 30 strong men in Tarmiyah who can do this?"
OK, OK, everyone answers, of course there are, don't get so excited. They spend the next few hours drinking cup after cup of chai, hammering out exactly what the recruiting announcement will say, whether these guardians will have badges, how they'll be vetted. Finally, they agree that 30 men will meet back at the house tomorrow morning. Prior's soldiers print up 50 makeshift applications — better to have a few extra, just in case.
The next day, we go back to Jassem's house. More than 500 men are braving the heat, waiting in front to sign up as alligators. A week later, that number swells to more than 1,400. In the month since, Prior has downed a lot more chai. But he hasn't had to award a single Purple Heart.
Outside of Fallujah, on a sprawling US military base, there's an old barracks supposedly built for Uday Hussein's personal shock troops. Down at the dimly lit end of one hallway is a tiled bathroom that's been converted into a tiny office. Inside, three screens sit on a desk, displaying a set of digital maps showing a God's-eye view of the entire country. Every American tank and truck is marked with blue icons. Every recent insurgent attack is marked in red. There are more than 1,100 units like this one across the country, and the site of every major US military center in Iraq is connected to the same system. The brass calls these futuristic command posts... well, it calls them command posts of the future, or CPOF. (Grunts call them the command posts of the right now — C-PORN.) This is network-centric warfare, translated from journal theory to war-zone reality.
Fallujah isn't more than 10 miles away, but staring at those three screens feels like observing Iraq from another continent — maybe another planet. Outside, it's ant-under-a-magnifying-glass hot. In here I have to pull my arms inside my T-shirt, the thermostat is turned so low. Across the city, marines do their best to predict the insurgents' next moves. But in front of the command post, we have so much information at our fingertips it makes Prior's tech look like a beta-test version of Missile Command. "There's a sea of information here. All you have to learn to do is fish in it," says Jim Kanzenbach, a tan, goateed Army contractor and trainer with a southern-accented baritone.
Kanzenbach taps the mouse a few times. Red diamonds representing all of the insurgent sigacts (military-speak for "significant activities") array themselves into a timeline. He sorts it by day of the week, then by hour of the day. White space appears during a particular hour; there don't seem to be any sigacts then. "If I was going to run a convoy, that would be the better time."
He clicks again, and the middle screen switches to a 3-D map of an Iraqi town from a driver's point of view. Kanzenbach smiles, and his mile-a-minute Texas patter goes hypersonic. "Now let's plan the route. You've got a mosque here. An IED happened over there two weeks ago. Here's the one that happened yesterday. Hey, that's too close. Let's change my route. Change the whole damn thing." He guides me through capability after capability of the command post — all kinds of charts, overlays, and animations. "But wait — there's more," he says. "You wanna see where all the Internet cafés are in Baghdad?"
It's hard not to get caught up in Kanzenbach's enthusiasm. But back in the US, John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, isn't impressed. He's a lieutenant colonel and an Iraq vet, an Army batallion commander at Fort Riley in Kansas. He's also the author of several influential articles and books about counterinsurgency, including Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an analysis of Vietnam and Malaya. When I ask him about CPOF, he's more interested in what the screens don't show. Historical sigacts don't actually tell you where the next one's going to be. Or who's going to do it. Or who's joining them. Or why. "The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project," Nagl asks, "what color are they?"
CPOF was designed for planning short, decisive battles against another regular army — the Soviets, the Chinese, Saddam's Republican Guard, whoever — as long as they had tanks to destroy, territory to seize, and leaders to kill. The counterinsurgency game has completely different rules. The goal here is to stabilize a government, not bring it down; to persuade people to cooperate, not bludgeon them into submission. In fact, many of these kinetic bombs-and-bullets activities can actually undermine a counterinsurgency, creating more enemies than they kill. "Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," Nagl's counterinsurgency manual says. Instead, it advises troops to get to know the locals — both individually and as groups — and gain their trust. The locals generally know which of their neighbors are insurgents and which aren't; they're already plugged into the communal network. "Arguably," the manual says, "the decisive battle is for the people's minds."
Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about a different kind of power, one that came when connected troops started to share information in ways that circumvented, and bypassed, the Industrial Age military chain of command. But that helps only if troops can connect in the first place. It can take up to a week for them to wrangle their laptops into updating the biometric databases that track who gets in and out of Fallujah. Intelligence reports can take even longer. The people best equipped to win the battle for people's minds — US troops on the ground, local policemen, Iraqi Army officers, tribal leaders — are left out of CPOF's network. It's a bandwidth hog, and the soldiers and marines fighting these counterinsurgencies aren't exactly carrying around T3 lines. Only recently did infantrymen like the ones in Fallujah even get their own radios. The Pentagon's sluggish structure for buying new gear means it can take up to a decade to get soldiers equipped. (Though to be fair, CPOF was purchased and deployed years ahead of schedule.) In Fallujah, the marines of Fox Company, based in an abandoned train station, mostly use their CPOF terminal to generate local maps, which they export to PowerPoint. Their buddies in Fox Company's first platoon, working out of a police precinct, have it even worse. When they want to get online, they have to drive to the station.
As for Iraqi access, while CPOF technically isn't classified, all of the data on it is. Locals can't see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network's power grows with every new node. But that's only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off.
Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq's civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq's larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks' successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, "This enemy is better networked than we are."
The insurgent groups are also exploiting something that US network-centric gurus seem to have missed: All of us are already connected to a global media grid. Satellite television, radio, and the Internet mean that many of the most spectacular attacks in Iraq are deliberately staged for the cameras, uploaded to YouTube, picked up by CNN, and broadcast around the world.
American forces have been trying to solve the insurgent puzzle in Fallujah since 2003. Massive battles devastated the town, damaging more than half the homes there and driving out 90 percent of the populace. The insurgents kept coming back. But in the past year, things have shifted. Today, Fallujah is calm: Shops are open, kids are in school, men are smoking their cigarettes and holding hands in outdoor cafs. "The people just decided they couldn't take al Qaeda anymore," says George Benson, executive officer of the marines' Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team Six, which is responsible for the town. Benson believes that a beefy, blue-eyed kid raised in the Cleveland suburbs is a big part of the reason Fallujah has gone so quiet.
His name is Joe Colabuno, and he's a sergeant who works in psychological operations — psyops, in military-speak. His job is to win the hearts-and-minds battle, and his tools are almost comically simple: posters drawn in Photoshop, loudspeaker and radio broadcasts pasted together with SonicStage and saved to MiniDiscs, the occasional newspaper article, and, above all, his own big mouth. Arab culture lives by its oral traditions; talk is often the most important weapon. "I find the right people to shape, and they shape the rest," Colabuno says.
Just as in Tarmiyah, troops in Fallujah are looking to recruit locals to keep tabs on their neighborhoods. Yesterday, on the west side of town, an alligator helped catch one of the Americans' top insurgent targets in Fallujah. After seeing a photograph, the watchman ID'd the guy as a neighbor, living just a few houses down the street.
But an alligator-recruiting drive yesterday in the Askeri district, in the northeastern corner of town, didn't go so well. The marines got less than half of the 125 they were looking for. So Colabuno hops into a Humvee to find out why.
We pull up to a narrow, unpaved street alongside the Askeri recruiting station. A group of seven men sit on the gravel, beneath a set of drying sheets. In the middle of the crowd, leaning on a cane, fingering prayer beads and dressed in white, is a rotund, bearded man. He's clearly the ringleader. Colabuno and his wire-thin interpreter, Leo, approach him. In every other district, they've recruited plenty of alligators. "Why not in Askeri?" Colabuno asks the ringleader.
The money's not good enough, he answers. An alligator makes only $50 a month; day laborers get $8 a day — when there's work, that is.
"That's the weakest argument ever," Colabuno says. The men looked stunned; Americans don't normally speak this directly — they're usually deferential to the point of looking weak, or just condescending.
"Do you remember Sheikh Hamsa?" Colabuno asks. Sure, sure, the men nod. The popular imam was killed more than a year ago by insurgents, but they're a bit surprised that Colabuno knows who he is. Most of the US troops here have been in town for just a few months. "Well, Sheikh Hamsa told me that weak faith protects only so much.'" The ringleader stares down at the ground and fingers his beads. Colabuno has hit a nerve. "You know, I looked in the Koran. I didn't see anything about Mohammed demanding a better salary before he'd do God's work," Colabuno says, jamming his forefinger into his palm.
A skinny man at the back of the pack speaks up, telling Colabuno that the Americans are just here to take Iraq's oil. "Yeah, you're right. We want your oil," Colabuno answers. Again eyes grow big with surprise. "We want to buy it. So you can pay for jobs, for water, for electricity. Make you rich." The men chuckle. Everyone shakes hands. Askeri's alligator quota is filled by the next morning.
Colabuno joined the Army because, frankly, it sounded better than his other option: managing a local steakhouse. When his recruiter told him about psyops, Colabuno loved the idea. It sounded like something out of The X-Files. "Does the job involve LSD?" he jokingly asked. It did not. Instead, Colabuno has spent the better part of four years, and all of the past 17 months, getting comfortable with the residents of Fallujah. And now that he has cracked Fallujah's cultural code, the brass is reluctant to let him leave.
We head back to the base. Colabuno's office looks like a dorm room, with mountain bikes hanging on the wall next to posters of Kristin Chenoweth, Vida Guerra, the Denver Broncos cheerleaders, and Corona beer. "Theme of the week," reads a white board, "terrorism causes CANCER... and impotence." Colabuno's early efforts to persuade the population were just as subtle. He shows me a collection of his early posters, tabloid-sized pages laid on a table. Against a flaming background, a terrorist holds a child. The text asks why the parents of Fallujah would let insurgents harm their kids. Wrong move. This is a culture based on shame and honor; now you've just called the parents inadequate. Plus, the piece is just too on the nose, too blatant. The best propaganda is sneaky.
So Colabuno started spoofing the insurgents' posters instead. He put a logo similar to that of the terrorist Islamic Army at the top of a simple black-and-white sheet. "A young boy died while wearing a suicide vest given to him by criminals," one flyer read. "You should remember that whoever makes lies about Allah should reserve his seat in hell." The extremists went nuts — screaming at shopkeepers and locals who posted the flyers, blaming other insurgents for defaming their good names. All the while, Americans watched the action through high-powered surveillance cameras. Consequently the marines knew who to question, and who to capture or kill. "We know where you are and what you are doing," another poster proclaimed. "Who will you trust now?"
American forces here set up a tip line so the locals could report on any insurgents (and get a little reward for their efforts). The extremists responded by blowing up the local cell towers, which Colabuno then turned into another psyops poster criticizing their self-destructive behavior. "Now we've got them making really stupid decisions," he says, grinning. "They communicate by cell phone, too. They can't argue that they're just attacking the foreigners."
General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers' training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, "an operational code' that is valid for an entire group of people." And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents," it says.
So I get escorted across Baghdad's concrete-ringed International Zone, around the manicured lawns of the Republican Palace, up its marbled stairs, past ambassadors and generals, through a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints, and into Petraeus' office. But even this far inside the US war machine, I'm expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare.
Instead, he sings me a love song.
"It's definitely here to stay. It's just going to keep getting greater and greater and greater," Petraeus says. I settle on a couch, and he shuts off the air conditioner. "I was a skeptic of network-centric warfare for years," he confesses. But thanks to years of wartime funding, he says, the military now has the ability "to transmit data, full-motion video, still photos, images, information. So you can more effectively determine who the enemy is, find them and kill or capture, and have a sense of what's going on in the area as you do it — where the friendlies are, and which platform you want to bring to bear."
Of course, he adds, he doesn't believe the Rumsfeld-era idea that you can get away with fewer, better-networked troops. Petraeus is the man behind the "surge," after all. Anyone who thinks you don't need massing of troops is living in an "academic world," he says. And Petraeus believes "the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers."
Yet he's a believer, just like a whole lot of other Army generals. He supports the $230 billion plan to wire the Army, a gargantuan commitment to network-centric war. "We realized very quickly you could do incredible stuff with this," he says. "It was revolutionary. It was."
I press my hands to my forehead. What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?
"Well," Petraeus says, "it doesn't say that the best weapons don't shoot. It says sometimes the best weapons don't shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot." A war like Iraq is a mix, he adds: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it's breaking them — waging "major combat operations" that aren't all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. And this technology, he says, it's pretty good at 2003-style war.
When Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about adding information technology to the military's way of finding and wiping out enemies — the kill chain — to a certain extent, they were right. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm began with a long bombing campaign, then a ground assault. But in Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq war, soldiers on the ground handed off coordinates to bombers and fighter planes, who attacked with laser- and satellite-guided munitions. The effect was devastating, shrinking the so-called sensor-to-shooter cycle to mere instants. During the first Gulf War, it typically took three days of paper pushing to assign a plane a target to hit. This time around, in parts of Anbar province, it took under 10 minutes. A relatively small number of Special Forces, sent to neuter Scud missile sites, took control of an area about the size of South Carolina — despite being outnumbered on the ground at least 10 to 1, and in some spots 500 to 1. The Iraqis never got off a single Scud.
But for all that, Cebrowski and Garstka weren't really writing about network-centric warfare at all. They were writing about a single, network-enabled process: killing. In 1998, to a former fighter jock and missile defender, the two things must have seemed the same. A decade later, it's pretty clear they aren't — not with American troops nation-building in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Kosovo, chasing pirates off Djibouti, delivering disaster relief to Indonesia, and fighting insurgents in Iraq.
The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it's all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? "The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that's just a sliver of what we're trying to do," Nagl says. "It solves a problem I don't have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals."
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer in 2005. The Office of Force Transformation he headed has been disbanded. John Garstka is still at the Defense Department, working in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Forces Transformation and Resources. It reports to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, which in turn reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy). I ask Garstka if he'd like to meet up. "Sure," he answers. "The Ritz-Carlton does a nice lunch."
In the Ritz's oak-paneled dining room a few minutes' walk from the Pentagon, Garstka sits with his arms folded across his white button-down shirt and his Defense Department badge. He's not exactly pleased with his new position — the length of his office's name is perhaps inversely proportional to its influence. "I have to be a good soldier," he sighs. But he takes comfort in knowing that network-centric warfare is "past the point of no return." It's been "demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt" — not just in traditional battles, like the invasion of Iraq, but also during so-called stability operations, like the four-plus years since "mission accomplished." (He says he'd like to go to Iraq one day to see it all for himself.)
If network-centric warfare has flaws, he adds, don't blame the concept. The slow-moving Defense Department bureaucracy hasn't worked quickly enough to roll out wired gear for the troops. Insurgents seized on commercial technology quicker than anticipated. And anyway, Garstka says, people have hijacked the term network-centric warfare to mean all sorts of things, from investing in fiber optics to rejiggering an organizational chart, without really understanding what it means.
But by the time Garstka finishes his 8-ounce Angus cheeseburger, he's willing to acknowledge some of the potential gaps in the strategy. "I'm not an expert in stability operations," he admits. Maybe network-centric combat isn't perfectly suited to the wars we're fighting now. And it certainly requires a different skill set than counterinsurgency or nation-building. "Stability operations is like soccer. Major combat operations is like football. So it's almost impossible [for one team] to win both the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the same year," he tells me. "Not when you're playing two different games."
Finally, at the end of our meal, Garstka suggests that the model he helped create will have to change again. "You have to think differently about people," he says. "You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both."
So the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are updating the playbook. Technological networks like Wal-Mart's are out. The social network warfare of Nagl, Prior, and Colabuno is in.
The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.
In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months.
At the HTT's suggestions, the brigade also invited the province's head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. He "was so delighted that he recorded an announcement in Pashto and Dari for radio broadcast denouncing the Taliban," an after-action report noted. In his initial evaluation, the brigade commander credits the HTT with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he has had to make. It's a number that even some HTT members have a hard time believing. But the commander insists that 53 of 83 districts in his area now support the local government. Before the HTT arrived, it was only 19.
"We got trapped into thinking that killing/destruction mechanisms of the highest technical quality could replace true human understanding. The vote is in, and we were wrong," says Steve Fondacaro, a cleft-chinned, chipped-toothed former Special Forces operator who now heads the HTT program. "We had been trying to take the test without doing the course work. That never works in school, and it hasn't worked any better in war."
The program is still new, and many questions remain about how it'll actually operate. Will the social scientists — many of them civilian academics — carry guns? Wear uniforms? Will they be conducting fieldwork or just doing research at their desks? How will these people be trained? What kind of credentials do they need? Will commanders listen to what they have to say? And is it even ethical to use their skills in wartime?
One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis — to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman wrote about Darpa's research into human enhancement in issue 15.03. To read his Iraq diary and see photos from his trip, see the Wired News blog Danger Room, which won the Online Journalism Association's 2007 award for beat reporting.
WIRED MAGAZINE: Wired Issue 15.12
Politics : Security
How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic
By Noah Shachtman 11.27.07 6:00 PM
To complement this story, Wired asked four renowned photographers to create images depicting the intersection of technology and war. This page: A tattered flag flies from a cell phone antenna. Photo: Todd Hido
View Slideshow
Feature
The Technology of War: A Photo Essay
ONLINE EXTRAS
Snapshots From Iraq
Noah Shachtman Writes From Iraq
See also
CSI vs. IEDs: Inside Baghdad's Forensic Bomb Squad
The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski — who'd been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm — was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka — a Stanford-trained engineer — worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles.
Over the next several years, the two men traded ideas and compared experiences. They visited businesses embracing the information revolution, ultimately becoming convinced that the changes sweeping the corporate world had applications for the military as well. The Defense Department wasn't blind to the power of networks, of course — the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing "digitization" programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, "Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future," they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.
Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization — sound familiar? — that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. "Nations make war the same way they make wealth," Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America's chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.
The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It'd be "a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age," they wrote. And it wouldn't take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done — that kind of "massing of forces" would be replaced by information management. "For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved," the pair wrote. "Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war."
Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.
It had a certain geek appeal, to which Wired was not immune. Futurist Alvin Toffler talked up similar ideas — before they even had a name — in the magazine's fifth issue, in 1993. And during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and — above all — a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute."
As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to "transform" the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills." The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven't won once.
How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory's many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
Inside the Pentagon, the term network-centric warfare is out of fashion, yet countless generals and admirals still adhere to its core principles. On the streets of Iraq, though, troops are learning to grapple with the guerrilla threat. And that means fighting in a way that couldn't be more different from the one Donald Rumsfeld embraced. The failures of wired combat are forcing troops to improvise a new, socially networked kind of war.
Tarmiyah, located about 20 miles north of Baghdad, is an ugly town — traced with rivulets of sewage, patrolled by stray dogs, and strewn with rubble and garbage. Insurgents fleeing US military crackdowns in Baghdad and, farther north, in Baqubah, have flooded the city. The local police quit en masse almost a year ago, leaving the security of Tarmiyah's 50,000 residents to 150 men from the US Army's Fourth Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment — known since an early-1900s tour of duty in China as the Manchus.
Typically, soldiers spend hours of every day at war just trying to figure out where their comrades are, and how to maneuver together. But hand out GPS receivers and put everyone's signals on a map, and those tasks become a whole lot simpler. Luckily for the Manchus, the 4/9 is arguably the most wired unit in the Army. Select troops wear an experimental electronics package, including a helmet-mounted monocle that displays a digital map of Tarmiyah with icons for each of their vehicles and troops. The unit's commander, William Prior, rides an upgraded Stryker armored vehicle that shows the same info on one of many screens. It's packed with battle command stations, advanced radios, remote-controlled weapons turrets, and satellite network terminals. No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily.
"It increases the unit's combat power, no question," Prior says. Trim and dark-eyed, the lieutenant colonel knows his tech. He has a master's in physics and taught science at West Point in the late 1990s.
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, only a fraction of the Humvees, tanks, and helicopters invading the country were equipped with these kind of readouts on the position of other US vehicles. Still, enough had them to allow the troops pushing to Baghdad to execute perilous maneuvers, like sending one unit through another's kill zone — a move made even more hair-raising by dust storms that turned the air opaque.
Today, every three-man team in the Manchus is an icon on every other team's monocles. Network-centric doctrine says that these plugged-in soldiers should be able to cover a bigger swath of the battlefield and take on more enemies. And, yes, the gear does let them clear neighborhoods more efficiently and respond to enemy attacks more quickly. But a handful of soldiers still can't secure a town of more than 50,000. Half a dozen Manchus have been killed or wounded by snipers during their five months in Tarmiyah. Prior has handed out 25 Purple Hearts to the 150-man Comanche Company guarding Tarmiyah. It's even worse outside town, where the equally small Blowtorch Company was trying to keep the peace in an area three times the size of Manhattan, until the higher-ups ordered the company onto other missions.
"A well-informed but geographically dispersed force," Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of "mission, force size and composition, and geography." But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops — collecting tips and knocking heads. That's what Prior needs, not more gadgets. "They're just tools," he says in his flat Iowa accent.
But Prior has just caught a break: Another several hundred soldiers, Special Forces operators, and Iraqi troops have descended on the city to kick in doors, drop bombs on extremist hideouts, and drive out the insurgents. Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, Prior is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq — hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.
But the extra boots on the ground have given Prior some space. If he can recruit a few alligators in a hurry, the extremists will be less likely to come back. So he has started spending quality time drinking chai with local leaders instead of fighting a shooting war.
We walk into the home of Tarmiyah's former mayor, sheikh Sayeed Jassem. Everyone in town agrees he'd be the guy to help sign up alligators. One problem: Jassem is in jail on charges of embezzlement and funneling money to the insurgency. The Iraqi government is in no mood to let him out. That makes the several dozen tribal leaders sitting in Jassem's 40-foot-long, lavishly carpeted living room extremely grouchy. "Sayeed, he knows every sheikh, he knows all the children. The first step is releasing him. Then we can arrange security," says burly, balding, gravel-voiced Abu Ibrahim. Next to him, in a white headdress and wearing a pencil-thin mustache, Jassem's cousin Abu Abbas nods. "I couldn't make a decision until he's free."
Prior blinks. Abbas went to Jassem's jail cell the day before yesterday and got the sheikh's blessing to proceed. "But you saw him yesterday, with your own eyes, did you not?" he asks. Abbas starts saying something about his uncles. Prior turns to Ibrahim. "Yesterday, you said you'd have 100 men. All I'm asking for is 30. Five men, in eight-hour shifts, to guard the sheikh's home, and to guard the Tarmiyah gate" — the main entrance to the town. The meeting has been going on for two hours. That's typical. But after a few of these, Prior has finally learned that such gatherings are as much about performance as ticking off agenda items. He booms out in a Broadway-loud voice: "Are there 30 strong men in Tarmiyah who can do this?"
OK, OK, everyone answers, of course there are, don't get so excited. They spend the next few hours drinking cup after cup of chai, hammering out exactly what the recruiting announcement will say, whether these guardians will have badges, how they'll be vetted. Finally, they agree that 30 men will meet back at the house tomorrow morning. Prior's soldiers print up 50 makeshift applications — better to have a few extra, just in case.
The next day, we go back to Jassem's house. More than 500 men are braving the heat, waiting in front to sign up as alligators. A week later, that number swells to more than 1,400. In the month since, Prior has downed a lot more chai. But he hasn't had to award a single Purple Heart.
Outside of Fallujah, on a sprawling US military base, there's an old barracks supposedly built for Uday Hussein's personal shock troops. Down at the dimly lit end of one hallway is a tiled bathroom that's been converted into a tiny office. Inside, three screens sit on a desk, displaying a set of digital maps showing a God's-eye view of the entire country. Every American tank and truck is marked with blue icons. Every recent insurgent attack is marked in red. There are more than 1,100 units like this one across the country, and the site of every major US military center in Iraq is connected to the same system. The brass calls these futuristic command posts... well, it calls them command posts of the future, or CPOF. (Grunts call them the command posts of the right now — C-PORN.) This is network-centric warfare, translated from journal theory to war-zone reality.
Fallujah isn't more than 10 miles away, but staring at those three screens feels like observing Iraq from another continent — maybe another planet. Outside, it's ant-under-a-magnifying-glass hot. In here I have to pull my arms inside my T-shirt, the thermostat is turned so low. Across the city, marines do their best to predict the insurgents' next moves. But in front of the command post, we have so much information at our fingertips it makes Prior's tech look like a beta-test version of Missile Command. "There's a sea of information here. All you have to learn to do is fish in it," says Jim Kanzenbach, a tan, goateed Army contractor and trainer with a southern-accented baritone.
Kanzenbach taps the mouse a few times. Red diamonds representing all of the insurgent sigacts (military-speak for "significant activities") array themselves into a timeline. He sorts it by day of the week, then by hour of the day. White space appears during a particular hour; there don't seem to be any sigacts then. "If I was going to run a convoy, that would be the better time."
He clicks again, and the middle screen switches to a 3-D map of an Iraqi town from a driver's point of view. Kanzenbach smiles, and his mile-a-minute Texas patter goes hypersonic. "Now let's plan the route. You've got a mosque here. An IED happened over there two weeks ago. Here's the one that happened yesterday. Hey, that's too close. Let's change my route. Change the whole damn thing." He guides me through capability after capability of the command post — all kinds of charts, overlays, and animations. "But wait — there's more," he says. "You wanna see where all the Internet cafés are in Baghdad?"
It's hard not to get caught up in Kanzenbach's enthusiasm. But back in the US, John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, isn't impressed. He's a lieutenant colonel and an Iraq vet, an Army batallion commander at Fort Riley in Kansas. He's also the author of several influential articles and books about counterinsurgency, including Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an analysis of Vietnam and Malaya. When I ask him about CPOF, he's more interested in what the screens don't show. Historical sigacts don't actually tell you where the next one's going to be. Or who's going to do it. Or who's joining them. Or why. "The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project," Nagl asks, "what color are they?"
CPOF was designed for planning short, decisive battles against another regular army — the Soviets, the Chinese, Saddam's Republican Guard, whoever — as long as they had tanks to destroy, territory to seize, and leaders to kill. The counterinsurgency game has completely different rules. The goal here is to stabilize a government, not bring it down; to persuade people to cooperate, not bludgeon them into submission. In fact, many of these kinetic bombs-and-bullets activities can actually undermine a counterinsurgency, creating more enemies than they kill. "Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," Nagl's counterinsurgency manual says. Instead, it advises troops to get to know the locals — both individually and as groups — and gain their trust. The locals generally know which of their neighbors are insurgents and which aren't; they're already plugged into the communal network. "Arguably," the manual says, "the decisive battle is for the people's minds."
Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about a different kind of power, one that came when connected troops started to share information in ways that circumvented, and bypassed, the Industrial Age military chain of command. But that helps only if troops can connect in the first place. It can take up to a week for them to wrangle their laptops into updating the biometric databases that track who gets in and out of Fallujah. Intelligence reports can take even longer. The people best equipped to win the battle for people's minds — US troops on the ground, local policemen, Iraqi Army officers, tribal leaders — are left out of CPOF's network. It's a bandwidth hog, and the soldiers and marines fighting these counterinsurgencies aren't exactly carrying around T3 lines. Only recently did infantrymen like the ones in Fallujah even get their own radios. The Pentagon's sluggish structure for buying new gear means it can take up to a decade to get soldiers equipped. (Though to be fair, CPOF was purchased and deployed years ahead of schedule.) In Fallujah, the marines of Fox Company, based in an abandoned train station, mostly use their CPOF terminal to generate local maps, which they export to PowerPoint. Their buddies in Fox Company's first platoon, working out of a police precinct, have it even worse. When they want to get online, they have to drive to the station.
As for Iraqi access, while CPOF technically isn't classified, all of the data on it is. Locals can't see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network's power grows with every new node. But that's only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off.
Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq's civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq's larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks' successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, "This enemy is better networked than we are."
The insurgent groups are also exploiting something that US network-centric gurus seem to have missed: All of us are already connected to a global media grid. Satellite television, radio, and the Internet mean that many of the most spectacular attacks in Iraq are deliberately staged for the cameras, uploaded to YouTube, picked up by CNN, and broadcast around the world.
American forces have been trying to solve the insurgent puzzle in Fallujah since 2003. Massive battles devastated the town, damaging more than half the homes there and driving out 90 percent of the populace. The insurgents kept coming back. But in the past year, things have shifted. Today, Fallujah is calm: Shops are open, kids are in school, men are smoking their cigarettes and holding hands in outdoor cafs. "The people just decided they couldn't take al Qaeda anymore," says George Benson, executive officer of the marines' Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team Six, which is responsible for the town. Benson believes that a beefy, blue-eyed kid raised in the Cleveland suburbs is a big part of the reason Fallujah has gone so quiet.
His name is Joe Colabuno, and he's a sergeant who works in psychological operations — psyops, in military-speak. His job is to win the hearts-and-minds battle, and his tools are almost comically simple: posters drawn in Photoshop, loudspeaker and radio broadcasts pasted together with SonicStage and saved to MiniDiscs, the occasional newspaper article, and, above all, his own big mouth. Arab culture lives by its oral traditions; talk is often the most important weapon. "I find the right people to shape, and they shape the rest," Colabuno says.
Just as in Tarmiyah, troops in Fallujah are looking to recruit locals to keep tabs on their neighborhoods. Yesterday, on the west side of town, an alligator helped catch one of the Americans' top insurgent targets in Fallujah. After seeing a photograph, the watchman ID'd the guy as a neighbor, living just a few houses down the street.
But an alligator-recruiting drive yesterday in the Askeri district, in the northeastern corner of town, didn't go so well. The marines got less than half of the 125 they were looking for. So Colabuno hops into a Humvee to find out why.
We pull up to a narrow, unpaved street alongside the Askeri recruiting station. A group of seven men sit on the gravel, beneath a set of drying sheets. In the middle of the crowd, leaning on a cane, fingering prayer beads and dressed in white, is a rotund, bearded man. He's clearly the ringleader. Colabuno and his wire-thin interpreter, Leo, approach him. In every other district, they've recruited plenty of alligators. "Why not in Askeri?" Colabuno asks the ringleader.
The money's not good enough, he answers. An alligator makes only $50 a month; day laborers get $8 a day — when there's work, that is.
"That's the weakest argument ever," Colabuno says. The men looked stunned; Americans don't normally speak this directly — they're usually deferential to the point of looking weak, or just condescending.
"Do you remember Sheikh Hamsa?" Colabuno asks. Sure, sure, the men nod. The popular imam was killed more than a year ago by insurgents, but they're a bit surprised that Colabuno knows who he is. Most of the US troops here have been in town for just a few months. "Well, Sheikh Hamsa told me that weak faith protects only so much.'" The ringleader stares down at the ground and fingers his beads. Colabuno has hit a nerve. "You know, I looked in the Koran. I didn't see anything about Mohammed demanding a better salary before he'd do God's work," Colabuno says, jamming his forefinger into his palm.
A skinny man at the back of the pack speaks up, telling Colabuno that the Americans are just here to take Iraq's oil. "Yeah, you're right. We want your oil," Colabuno answers. Again eyes grow big with surprise. "We want to buy it. So you can pay for jobs, for water, for electricity. Make you rich." The men chuckle. Everyone shakes hands. Askeri's alligator quota is filled by the next morning.
Colabuno joined the Army because, frankly, it sounded better than his other option: managing a local steakhouse. When his recruiter told him about psyops, Colabuno loved the idea. It sounded like something out of The X-Files. "Does the job involve LSD?" he jokingly asked. It did not. Instead, Colabuno has spent the better part of four years, and all of the past 17 months, getting comfortable with the residents of Fallujah. And now that he has cracked Fallujah's cultural code, the brass is reluctant to let him leave.
We head back to the base. Colabuno's office looks like a dorm room, with mountain bikes hanging on the wall next to posters of Kristin Chenoweth, Vida Guerra, the Denver Broncos cheerleaders, and Corona beer. "Theme of the week," reads a white board, "terrorism causes CANCER... and impotence." Colabuno's early efforts to persuade the population were just as subtle. He shows me a collection of his early posters, tabloid-sized pages laid on a table. Against a flaming background, a terrorist holds a child. The text asks why the parents of Fallujah would let insurgents harm their kids. Wrong move. This is a culture based on shame and honor; now you've just called the parents inadequate. Plus, the piece is just too on the nose, too blatant. The best propaganda is sneaky.
So Colabuno started spoofing the insurgents' posters instead. He put a logo similar to that of the terrorist Islamic Army at the top of a simple black-and-white sheet. "A young boy died while wearing a suicide vest given to him by criminals," one flyer read. "You should remember that whoever makes lies about Allah should reserve his seat in hell." The extremists went nuts — screaming at shopkeepers and locals who posted the flyers, blaming other insurgents for defaming their good names. All the while, Americans watched the action through high-powered surveillance cameras. Consequently the marines knew who to question, and who to capture or kill. "We know where you are and what you are doing," another poster proclaimed. "Who will you trust now?"
American forces here set up a tip line so the locals could report on any insurgents (and get a little reward for their efforts). The extremists responded by blowing up the local cell towers, which Colabuno then turned into another psyops poster criticizing their self-destructive behavior. "Now we've got them making really stupid decisions," he says, grinning. "They communicate by cell phone, too. They can't argue that they're just attacking the foreigners."
General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers' training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, "an operational code' that is valid for an entire group of people." And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents," it says.
So I get escorted across Baghdad's concrete-ringed International Zone, around the manicured lawns of the Republican Palace, up its marbled stairs, past ambassadors and generals, through a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints, and into Petraeus' office. But even this far inside the US war machine, I'm expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare.
Instead, he sings me a love song.
"It's definitely here to stay. It's just going to keep getting greater and greater and greater," Petraeus says. I settle on a couch, and he shuts off the air conditioner. "I was a skeptic of network-centric warfare for years," he confesses. But thanks to years of wartime funding, he says, the military now has the ability "to transmit data, full-motion video, still photos, images, information. So you can more effectively determine who the enemy is, find them and kill or capture, and have a sense of what's going on in the area as you do it — where the friendlies are, and which platform you want to bring to bear."
Of course, he adds, he doesn't believe the Rumsfeld-era idea that you can get away with fewer, better-networked troops. Petraeus is the man behind the "surge," after all. Anyone who thinks you don't need massing of troops is living in an "academic world," he says. And Petraeus believes "the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers."
Yet he's a believer, just like a whole lot of other Army generals. He supports the $230 billion plan to wire the Army, a gargantuan commitment to network-centric war. "We realized very quickly you could do incredible stuff with this," he says. "It was revolutionary. It was."
I press my hands to my forehead. What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?
"Well," Petraeus says, "it doesn't say that the best weapons don't shoot. It says sometimes the best weapons don't shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot." A war like Iraq is a mix, he adds: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it's breaking them — waging "major combat operations" that aren't all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. And this technology, he says, it's pretty good at 2003-style war.
When Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about adding information technology to the military's way of finding and wiping out enemies — the kill chain — to a certain extent, they were right. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm began with a long bombing campaign, then a ground assault. But in Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq war, soldiers on the ground handed off coordinates to bombers and fighter planes, who attacked with laser- and satellite-guided munitions. The effect was devastating, shrinking the so-called sensor-to-shooter cycle to mere instants. During the first Gulf War, it typically took three days of paper pushing to assign a plane a target to hit. This time around, in parts of Anbar province, it took under 10 minutes. A relatively small number of Special Forces, sent to neuter Scud missile sites, took control of an area about the size of South Carolina — despite being outnumbered on the ground at least 10 to 1, and in some spots 500 to 1. The Iraqis never got off a single Scud.
But for all that, Cebrowski and Garstka weren't really writing about network-centric warfare at all. They were writing about a single, network-enabled process: killing. In 1998, to a former fighter jock and missile defender, the two things must have seemed the same. A decade later, it's pretty clear they aren't — not with American troops nation-building in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Kosovo, chasing pirates off Djibouti, delivering disaster relief to Indonesia, and fighting insurgents in Iraq.
The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it's all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? "The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that's just a sliver of what we're trying to do," Nagl says. "It solves a problem I don't have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals."
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer in 2005. The Office of Force Transformation he headed has been disbanded. John Garstka is still at the Defense Department, working in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Forces Transformation and Resources. It reports to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, which in turn reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy). I ask Garstka if he'd like to meet up. "Sure," he answers. "The Ritz-Carlton does a nice lunch."
In the Ritz's oak-paneled dining room a few minutes' walk from the Pentagon, Garstka sits with his arms folded across his white button-down shirt and his Defense Department badge. He's not exactly pleased with his new position — the length of his office's name is perhaps inversely proportional to its influence. "I have to be a good soldier," he sighs. But he takes comfort in knowing that network-centric warfare is "past the point of no return." It's been "demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt" — not just in traditional battles, like the invasion of Iraq, but also during so-called stability operations, like the four-plus years since "mission accomplished." (He says he'd like to go to Iraq one day to see it all for himself.)
If network-centric warfare has flaws, he adds, don't blame the concept. The slow-moving Defense Department bureaucracy hasn't worked quickly enough to roll out wired gear for the troops. Insurgents seized on commercial technology quicker than anticipated. And anyway, Garstka says, people have hijacked the term network-centric warfare to mean all sorts of things, from investing in fiber optics to rejiggering an organizational chart, without really understanding what it means.
But by the time Garstka finishes his 8-ounce Angus cheeseburger, he's willing to acknowledge some of the potential gaps in the strategy. "I'm not an expert in stability operations," he admits. Maybe network-centric combat isn't perfectly suited to the wars we're fighting now. And it certainly requires a different skill set than counterinsurgency or nation-building. "Stability operations is like soccer. Major combat operations is like football. So it's almost impossible [for one team] to win both the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the same year," he tells me. "Not when you're playing two different games."
Finally, at the end of our meal, Garstka suggests that the model he helped create will have to change again. "You have to think differently about people," he says. "You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both."
So the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are updating the playbook. Technological networks like Wal-Mart's are out. The social network warfare of Nagl, Prior, and Colabuno is in.
The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.
In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months.
At the HTT's suggestions, the brigade also invited the province's head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. He "was so delighted that he recorded an announcement in Pashto and Dari for radio broadcast denouncing the Taliban," an after-action report noted. In his initial evaluation, the brigade commander credits the HTT with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he has had to make. It's a number that even some HTT members have a hard time believing. But the commander insists that 53 of 83 districts in his area now support the local government. Before the HTT arrived, it was only 19.
"We got trapped into thinking that killing/destruction mechanisms of the highest technical quality could replace true human understanding. The vote is in, and we were wrong," says Steve Fondacaro, a cleft-chinned, chipped-toothed former Special Forces operator who now heads the HTT program. "We had been trying to take the test without doing the course work. That never works in school, and it hasn't worked any better in war."
The program is still new, and many questions remain about how it'll actually operate. Will the social scientists — many of them civilian academics — carry guns? Wear uniforms? Will they be conducting fieldwork or just doing research at their desks? How will these people be trained? What kind of credentials do they need? Will commanders listen to what they have to say? And is it even ethical to use their skills in wartime?
One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis — to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman wrote about Darpa's research into human enhancement in issue 15.03. To read his Iraq diary and see photos from his trip, see the Wired News blog Danger Room, which won the Online Journalism Association's 2007 award for beat reporting.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Tim Terrific
So, he's gone and done it: Tim Tebow has won the Heisman Trophy, symbolic of college football's best player. Two other Gator Quarterbacks have won the award, Steve Spurrier and Danny Wuerffel. Tim's the first sophomore ever to win the award, and the first player, ever, to log more than 20 touchdown passes and 20 touchdown runs in the same season. That, my friends, is superhuman. Under the Gator jersey resides a shielded "S" and perhaps a cape. Green Kryptonite? Maybe next year. Congratulations, Tim. Go Gators!
2X
Wow! 2 blogs in one day! I must be cookin'!!!
Actually, I AM cooking. Minute steaks, floured and sprinkled with adobo seasoning, Puerto Rican style. Thanks to my friend and co-worker, Tony, for recommending it. Gonna fry some bananas, too, in a little while. This place http://www.dericanchef.net/ has good Puerto Rican food, and is close to where I work [infrequently] at Dam Neck. Try it!! Great menu :-)
Cheesy broccoli, too, with Pumpkin Ale to wash it all down with. Saranac, from New York.
http://www.saranac.com/ It's not O'Fallon Brewery http://www.ofallonbrewery.com/, but not bad.
Tonight, on ESPN [8 PM] the Heisman Awards Banquet and Presentation. Only one man has ever thrown for over 20 TD's and ran for over 20 TD's IN THE SAME YEAR. Gotta give the statue to Tim Tebow, Florida Gator QB. Go Gators!
Actually, I AM cooking. Minute steaks, floured and sprinkled with adobo seasoning, Puerto Rican style. Thanks to my friend and co-worker, Tony, for recommending it. Gonna fry some bananas, too, in a little while. This place http://www.dericanchef.net/ has good Puerto Rican food, and is close to where I work [infrequently] at Dam Neck. Try it!! Great menu :-)
Cheesy broccoli, too, with Pumpkin Ale to wash it all down with. Saranac, from New York.
http://www.saranac.com/ It's not O'Fallon Brewery http://www.ofallonbrewery.com/, but not bad.
Tonight, on ESPN [8 PM] the Heisman Awards Banquet and Presentation. Only one man has ever thrown for over 20 TD's and ran for over 20 TD's IN THE SAME YEAR. Gotta give the statue to Tim Tebow, Florida Gator QB. Go Gators!
Infamy
Entry for December 07
Infamy.
What does it mean?
"Tora, Tora, Tora"....
"East Winds Rain"....
"Climb Mount Niitaka"......
Did you remember?
Did you commemorate [or even, commiserate?].
Does rendering passing honors to ARIZONA leave chills up and down your spine?
I wore black today.
Never forget.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Hey, Hey, I'm a Monkey
Hey, Hey, I’m a Monkey.
Or, Curse You, Davey Jones.
No, not cute lil’ Davy, singer of “Cheer up, Sleepy Jean” and “Valeri”, but the First Lieutenant to Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main.
It all went down like this:
Late in the day, and we were set to sail the next.
The Marines had just made their appearance. Nice kids, from Cherry Point. Ordnance guys. “G” and “P”. We had a need for overnight watch-standers, and they graciously volunteered. Really. Came in handy later, when one of the Navy EOD guys [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] was not qual-certed, and P replaced him on the 470 boat, passing the primer to the raft. But I digress.
Late in the day, sailing the next. Light was beginning to fade, so I had my sunglasses sitting on my ballcap. At sea, I planned to use a different pair, cheaper, on a lanyard. These were my Oakleys, bought them in Arlington Texas back in 2003. $125 at the running store.
I had lowered the Pilot’s Ladder into the water for use in qualifications. Since I did not know P or G from Adam, I had them don their life jackets and climb down the ladder [it’s a rope ladder with wooden steps] down the side of the ship, to the water and back to the top and onboard. I do this for every crew member, to make sure that they are athletic enough to accomplish it, and don’t have any overwhelming phobias which would foul things up at sea, since we would be doing several transfers from ship to boat and back during the project.
I bent over to check on one of the guys, and bloop! My Oakleys slid off my ballcap into the drink. They’re floating!!! No, they’re sinking very slowly. I was angry, and I cursed Davey Jones. This is PG rated, so I won’t detail exactly what I said, but King Oedipus would have been proud of the phrasing I used.
Not a good idea. Davey Jones, as you well might imagine, has the ear of Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main, ol’ Poseidon Hisself. We now faced the danger of bad weather [and who knows what other torments] at sea. Davey was not homicidal [whew!!] but DID get his point across. The weather WAS poor most days at sea, and we experienced difficulty [read that as “danger”] in our boat transfers, and it rained a lot, and blew, and coming back up the channel to Morehead City, it was foggy, and muggy, and a zillion degrees, Fahrenheit. Bless you! Did I mention we saw sharks?
More details in a later missive. Stay tuned!
Or, Curse You, Davey Jones.
No, not cute lil’ Davy, singer of “Cheer up, Sleepy Jean” and “Valeri”, but the First Lieutenant to Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main.
It all went down like this:
Late in the day, and we were set to sail the next.
The Marines had just made their appearance. Nice kids, from Cherry Point. Ordnance guys. “G” and “P”. We had a need for overnight watch-standers, and they graciously volunteered. Really. Came in handy later, when one of the Navy EOD guys [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] was not qual-certed, and P replaced him on the 470 boat, passing the primer to the raft. But I digress.
Late in the day, sailing the next. Light was beginning to fade, so I had my sunglasses sitting on my ballcap. At sea, I planned to use a different pair, cheaper, on a lanyard. These were my Oakleys, bought them in Arlington Texas back in 2003. $125 at the running store.
I had lowered the Pilot’s Ladder into the water for use in qualifications. Since I did not know P or G from Adam, I had them don their life jackets and climb down the ladder [it’s a rope ladder with wooden steps] down the side of the ship, to the water and back to the top and onboard. I do this for every crew member, to make sure that they are athletic enough to accomplish it, and don’t have any overwhelming phobias which would foul things up at sea, since we would be doing several transfers from ship to boat and back during the project.
I bent over to check on one of the guys, and bloop! My Oakleys slid off my ballcap into the drink. They’re floating!!! No, they’re sinking very slowly. I was angry, and I cursed Davey Jones. This is PG rated, so I won’t detail exactly what I said, but King Oedipus would have been proud of the phrasing I used.
Not a good idea. Davey Jones, as you well might imagine, has the ear of Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main, ol’ Poseidon Hisself. We now faced the danger of bad weather [and who knows what other torments] at sea. Davey was not homicidal [whew!!] but DID get his point across. The weather WAS poor most days at sea, and we experienced difficulty [read that as “danger”] in our boat transfers, and it rained a lot, and blew, and coming back up the channel to Morehead City, it was foggy, and muggy, and a zillion degrees, Fahrenheit. Bless you! Did I mention we saw sharks?
More details in a later missive. Stay tuned!
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Time
Man! Time is certainly flying.... getting plenty of overtime as I am the only safety guy now at two sites, and do QA work at one of those too! Hey, I'm not complaining, just explaining why I have been scarce of late. Besides, I'm still mourning my late relationship with the Piskies ;-)
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Thankful
By golly, I DO have a lot to be thankful for....
I have wonderful sons and my extended family is good. Solid, family values people. I have my health, and my smarts, and my looks. I live in Virginia Beach, which reminds me of being back on the Space Coast with all of the beach attractions and planes constantly overhead. I love my job and I work with a lot of good people. I have a few really good friends, and a lot of really nice people I know online.
I have had a wonderful relationship with Andrea Lise, my wife. She's back in Missouri, paying off the remainder of her tuition reimbursement, and is frustrated by the pratfalls of the job search process. She had hoped to head out to the West Coast [northern] to be closer to her children [being Canadian], but she told me on the day after Thanksgiving that she missed BC and was going to give up her green card and go back. I asked her where that left us, and she told me that there was no point in continuing. She is going to file for dissolution. I am sad, and I will miss her. I mention this for background info, not to complain or spout off. Andrea is a good person, and I wish her all the best. I am thankful to have shared the past six years with her.
I have wonderful sons and my extended family is good. Solid, family values people. I have my health, and my smarts, and my looks. I live in Virginia Beach, which reminds me of being back on the Space Coast with all of the beach attractions and planes constantly overhead. I love my job and I work with a lot of good people. I have a few really good friends, and a lot of really nice people I know online.
I have had a wonderful relationship with Andrea Lise, my wife. She's back in Missouri, paying off the remainder of her tuition reimbursement, and is frustrated by the pratfalls of the job search process. She had hoped to head out to the West Coast [northern] to be closer to her children [being Canadian], but she told me on the day after Thanksgiving that she missed BC and was going to give up her green card and go back. I asked her where that left us, and she told me that there was no point in continuing. She is going to file for dissolution. I am sad, and I will miss her. I mention this for background info, not to complain or spout off. Andrea is a good person, and I wish her all the best. I am thankful to have shared the past six years with her.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
How to Simulate Being in the Navy
How to Simulate Being in the Navy
1. Lock all friends and family outside. Your only means of communication should be with letters that your neighbours have held for at least three weeks, discarding two of five.
2. Surround yourself with 200 people that you don't really know or like: people who smoke, snore like Mack trucks going uphill, and use foul language like a child uses sugar on cereal.
3. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbour bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
4. Monitor all home appliances hourly, recording all vital information (ie: plugged in, lights come on when doors open, etc)
5. Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40 people using the same commode.
6. Lock the bathroom twice a day for a four hour period.
7. Wear only military uniforms. Even though nobody cares, clean and press one dress uniform and wear it for 20 minutes.
8. Cut your hair weekly, making it shorter each time, until you look bald or look like you lost a fight with a demented sheep.
9. Work in 19-hour cycles, sleeping only four hours at a time, to ensure that your body does not know or even care if it is day or night.
10. Listen to your favourite CD 6 times a day for two weeks, then play music that causes acute nausea until you are glad to get back to your favourite CD.
11. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor. Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your bunkmate's socks.
12. Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watchstanders and nightcrew bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens, helicopter crash alarms, and a new-wave rock band.
13. Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and wait two weeks before eating them.
14. Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everything in three minutes.
15. Periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting "fire, fire, fire" and then restore power.
16. At least once a month, force the commode to overflow to simulate a 'black water system' boo-boo.
17. Buy a gas mask and smear it with rancid animal fat. Scrub the faceshield with steel wool until you can no longer see out of it. Wear this for two hours every fifth day especially when you are in the bathroom.
18. Study the owner's manual for all household appliances. Routinely take an appliance apart and put it back together.
19. Remove all plants, pictures and decorations. Paint everything gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.
20. Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure one of these two rolls is wet all the time.
21. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to simulate collision injuries sustained onboard Navy ships.
22. When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until it is hard and stale.
23. Every 10 weeks, simulate a visit to another port. Go directly to the city slums wearing your best clothes. Find the worst looking place, and ask for the most expensive beer that they carry. Drink as many as you can in four hours. Take a cab home taking the longest possible route. Tip the cabby after he charges you double because you dress funny and don't speak right.
24. Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.
25. Keep the bedroom thermostat at 2 deg C and use only a thin blanket for warmth.
26. Ensure that the water heater is connected to a device that provides water at a flow rate that varies from a fast drip to a weak trickle, with the temperature alternating rapidly from -2 to 95 deg C.
27. Use only spoons which hold a minimum of 1/2 cup at a time.
28. Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
29. Remind yourself every day: 'it's not just a job, it's an adventure!'
30. Mix kerosene with your water supply to simulate the de-sal plant on the ship picking up JP5 in the intake -- if a lit match thrown into your coffee pot doesn't ignite it, add more kerosene.
31. Stand outside at attention at dawn and have the poorest reader you know read the morning paper outloud. Be sure to have him skip over anything pertinent.
32. Every four hours, check the fluid level in your car's radiator. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tag on ignition stating "DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE" while you perform these checks. Inform your neighbor as to the results of these checks, have him tell you to repeat the checks because he did not see you perform them.
33. Paint your house grey (exterior) include windows except for rooms you do not frequent, paint your car grey, paint your driveway a different shade of grey.
34. Wait outside your dining area as a family member eats a meal, then have that person serve you a meal prepared several hours earlier.
35. Shut all blinds and doors at sunset.
36. Clean your house 'till there's absolutely not a speck of dust anywhere. Call on a stranger to come inspect your house. Ensure stranger sees dust that has collected in the time it took to find him. Stranger cannot leave until he finds irrational fault with your house/belongings.
37. Hang Christmas lights in June. When the neighbors ask, say, "deceptive lighting."
38. Hang white lights when relatives visit. When neighbors ask, say, "friendship lights."
1. Lock all friends and family outside. Your only means of communication should be with letters that your neighbours have held for at least three weeks, discarding two of five.
2. Surround yourself with 200 people that you don't really know or like: people who smoke, snore like Mack trucks going uphill, and use foul language like a child uses sugar on cereal.
3. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbour bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
4. Monitor all home appliances hourly, recording all vital information (ie: plugged in, lights come on when doors open, etc)
5. Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40 people using the same commode.
6. Lock the bathroom twice a day for a four hour period.
7. Wear only military uniforms. Even though nobody cares, clean and press one dress uniform and wear it for 20 minutes.
8. Cut your hair weekly, making it shorter each time, until you look bald or look like you lost a fight with a demented sheep.
9. Work in 19-hour cycles, sleeping only four hours at a time, to ensure that your body does not know or even care if it is day or night.
10. Listen to your favourite CD 6 times a day for two weeks, then play music that causes acute nausea until you are glad to get back to your favourite CD.
11. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor. Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your bunkmate's socks.
12. Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watchstanders and nightcrew bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens, helicopter crash alarms, and a new-wave rock band.
13. Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and wait two weeks before eating them.
14. Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everything in three minutes.
15. Periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting "fire, fire, fire" and then restore power.
16. At least once a month, force the commode to overflow to simulate a 'black water system' boo-boo.
17. Buy a gas mask and smear it with rancid animal fat. Scrub the faceshield with steel wool until you can no longer see out of it. Wear this for two hours every fifth day especially when you are in the bathroom.
18. Study the owner's manual for all household appliances. Routinely take an appliance apart and put it back together.
19. Remove all plants, pictures and decorations. Paint everything gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.
20. Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure one of these two rolls is wet all the time.
21. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to simulate collision injuries sustained onboard Navy ships.
22. When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until it is hard and stale.
23. Every 10 weeks, simulate a visit to another port. Go directly to the city slums wearing your best clothes. Find the worst looking place, and ask for the most expensive beer that they carry. Drink as many as you can in four hours. Take a cab home taking the longest possible route. Tip the cabby after he charges you double because you dress funny and don't speak right.
24. Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.
25. Keep the bedroom thermostat at 2 deg C and use only a thin blanket for warmth.
26. Ensure that the water heater is connected to a device that provides water at a flow rate that varies from a fast drip to a weak trickle, with the temperature alternating rapidly from -2 to 95 deg C.
27. Use only spoons which hold a minimum of 1/2 cup at a time.
28. Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
29. Remind yourself every day: 'it's not just a job, it's an adventure!'
30. Mix kerosene with your water supply to simulate the de-sal plant on the ship picking up JP5 in the intake -- if a lit match thrown into your coffee pot doesn't ignite it, add more kerosene.
31. Stand outside at attention at dawn and have the poorest reader you know read the morning paper outloud. Be sure to have him skip over anything pertinent.
32. Every four hours, check the fluid level in your car's radiator. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tag on ignition stating "DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE" while you perform these checks. Inform your neighbor as to the results of these checks, have him tell you to repeat the checks because he did not see you perform them.
33. Paint your house grey (exterior) include windows except for rooms you do not frequent, paint your car grey, paint your driveway a different shade of grey.
34. Wait outside your dining area as a family member eats a meal, then have that person serve you a meal prepared several hours earlier.
35. Shut all blinds and doors at sunset.
36. Clean your house 'till there's absolutely not a speck of dust anywhere. Call on a stranger to come inspect your house. Ensure stranger sees dust that has collected in the time it took to find him. Stranger cannot leave until he finds irrational fault with your house/belongings.
37. Hang Christmas lights in June. When the neighbors ask, say, "deceptive lighting."
38. Hang white lights when relatives visit. When neighbors ask, say, "friendship lights."
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Wednesday
If it's Wednesday, this must be....
The German Pantry, for beer and mirth.
Bier?
Ja, danke schoen.
Sauerbraten tonight?
Hmmmm.... choices!!
The German Pantry, for beer and mirth.
Bier?
Ja, danke schoen.
Sauerbraten tonight?
Hmmmm.... choices!!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Tuesday
So, I did see Beowulf and I DID enjoy it. It's modernized [as in, the language is Modern English.] I was going to say something to the effect that Middle or Old English just wouldn't have cut it, and then I realised: subtitles! That would have been one way of bringing the realism quotient back, in light of the animatronic effect, blurring the focus tended to hinder my suspension of disbelief.
On to Angelina. Weird Slavic [Slavonic?] accent for a dragon/type V demon to have... kinda cool effect when, as a woman, she rose from the pool of water and was covered by a butterscotch/caramel sort of candy-coating. Looked yummy! Oh, and in woman-form she has built-on high heels. How convenient!!! Accessorizes nicely with the golden glop [Char, there's that word again! ;-) ]
On to Angelina. Weird Slavic [Slavonic?] accent for a dragon/type V demon to have... kinda cool effect when, as a woman, she rose from the pool of water and was covered by a butterscotch/caramel sort of candy-coating. Looked yummy! Oh, and in woman-form she has built-on high heels. How convenient!!! Accessorizes nicely with the golden glop [Char, there's that word again! ;-) ]
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Where is she?
Ya know, I haven't posted any poetry lately. A thought has been in my mind today, so I fleshed it out. It's not Ringlets, I fear, yet it captures the feeling within me at present. Hope ya don't mind.
Where is the girl I used to love best?
Waiting with dagger, like all of the rest:
To strike when she’s ready, and stake to her claim;
Waiting with dagger, to slash and to maim
My heart – how it sears
To ask of the girl that I used to know?
She’s far and away, awaiting to row
To the sunset,
On a sea of my tears.
Charles L. Wallace
November 18, 2007
1520 EST
Where is the girl I used to love best?
Waiting with dagger, like all of the rest:
To strike when she’s ready, and stake to her claim;
Waiting with dagger, to slash and to maim
My heart – how it sears
To ask of the girl that I used to know?
She’s far and away, awaiting to row
To the sunset,
On a sea of my tears.
Charles L. Wallace
November 18, 2007
1520 EST
Saturday, November 17, 2007
ORISKANY
I just watched a documentary on Discovery Channel, which I found fascinating. It's about the artificial reefing program, and the sinking of the ex-USS ORISKANY. Spectacular photo footage from inside the ship during the explosions and during the sinking. I really recommend seeing it, if you ever get the chance. It's called The Sinking of an Aircraft Carrier, and Discovery shows it from time to time.
Some of the same guys I worked with this past summer are involved: I saw Buddy rigging something, and Dex scurrying about, working fast and furious as always, and that Stu, such a movie star!! Nice line about safety. I'll have to remind him about that next time I catch him climbing up the wall without a harness :-) Wonder when that will be....
Some of the same guys I worked with this past summer are involved: I saw Buddy rigging something, and Dex scurrying about, working fast and furious as always, and that Stu, such a movie star!! Nice line about safety. I'll have to remind him about that next time I catch him climbing up the wall without a harness :-) Wonder when that will be....
Sea Geats
Pronounced like "Yates", making the protagonist of our movie Beowulf Yates. Sea Geats, of which Beowulf was a thane, were a seafaring people of old Scandinavia. Thanks for the pronunciation go to Jon Thiessen, my ol' Fire Control Officer, who learned the first zillion or so lines of Beowulf in Middle English. Really. Jon, you out there? Got any pics of Tiff? hahaha! Just kidding :-)
So Beowulf now merits 3-D, and evidently Grendel's ma isn't so gnarly after all [or B is a lousy judge of women. Like I should talk.] Anyway, the plan is to see the movie tomorrow. Tonight, on Discovery, is "Sinking of a Carrier", which should be about making ORISKANY into an artificial reef and if that is the case, it features my guys. Hi, guys!! It's before I joined the team, but I am still interested :-)
So Beowulf now merits 3-D, and evidently Grendel's ma isn't so gnarly after all [or B is a lousy judge of women. Like I should talk.] Anyway, the plan is to see the movie tomorrow. Tonight, on Discovery, is "Sinking of a Carrier", which should be about making ORISKANY into an artificial reef and if that is the case, it features my guys. Hi, guys!! It's before I joined the team, but I am still interested :-)
Friday, November 16, 2007
Spray
Picture this:
8 metre speedboat, 2X 250 HP outboards.
50 degrees and 10 knot breeze.
3 foot seas.
Salt spray the equivalent of a shower,
to the face.
We got air a few times.
I got paid to do this.
Yes, it was fun.
Yes, I love my job.
8 metre speedboat, 2X 250 HP outboards.
50 degrees and 10 knot breeze.
3 foot seas.
Salt spray the equivalent of a shower,
to the face.
We got air a few times.
I got paid to do this.
Yes, it was fun.
Yes, I love my job.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Topsy Turvy
Big week for news from the Bronx..... catcher Jorge Posada agrees to sign on the dotted line [4 years, $52 mil] and the baton is passed to closer Mariano Rivera. Or is it? Mo is offered 3 years at $45 mil, but is out of the country, or maybe playing other teams to get an extra year, or more $$$.
But wait!! #13 is back, hat in hand, contrite for disrespecting the Yanks. I want to believe A-Rod, so I do believe him. Yeah, some fans are still all over the man. That will change next April as we say "Goodbye, Mr. Spalding!" Seriously.
Back to Po. The Yanks HAD to do it. We do not lose a draft pick, and really, no other option was even close. Jorge is a True Yankee. We're better for re-signing him.
Back to A-Rod. He really WANTS to be a Yankee. Yanks needed right-handed pop and a third baseman, both of which Mr. Rodriguez supplies. We do not lose a draft pick, and this was by fa the best option. Here's advice to all of the fans who hate A-Rod. Shut up. He's back.
Back to Mo. We need Mo, even on a 4-year deal. He takes care of himself. At age 42, he should still have some zip on the ball. Even if he is a mop-up man in four years, Mo is a True Yankee, and re-signing him will not cost a draft pick. I want to see him in pinstipes next year.
Andy Pettite. We need veteran leadership and a good, left-handed starter. Can we still sign Andy? I do not know the answer - a team can only sign three type "A" free agents each offseason. Would Mo, Po, and A-Rod make three? Or, since A-Rod opted out, is he excluded from the three?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Guido the Killer Pimp? [mixing movie metaphors, I know ;-) ]
But wait!! #13 is back, hat in hand, contrite for disrespecting the Yanks. I want to believe A-Rod, so I do believe him. Yeah, some fans are still all over the man. That will change next April as we say "Goodbye, Mr. Spalding!" Seriously.
Back to Po. The Yanks HAD to do it. We do not lose a draft pick, and really, no other option was even close. Jorge is a True Yankee. We're better for re-signing him.
Back to A-Rod. He really WANTS to be a Yankee. Yanks needed right-handed pop and a third baseman, both of which Mr. Rodriguez supplies. We do not lose a draft pick, and this was by fa the best option. Here's advice to all of the fans who hate A-Rod. Shut up. He's back.
Back to Mo. We need Mo, even on a 4-year deal. He takes care of himself. At age 42, he should still have some zip on the ball. Even if he is a mop-up man in four years, Mo is a True Yankee, and re-signing him will not cost a draft pick. I want to see him in pinstipes next year.
Andy Pettite. We need veteran leadership and a good, left-handed starter. Can we still sign Andy? I do not know the answer - a team can only sign three type "A" free agents each offseason. Would Mo, Po, and A-Rod make three? Or, since A-Rod opted out, is he excluded from the three?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Guido the Killer Pimp? [mixing movie metaphors, I know ;-) ]
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Wednesday
Missed another day. Yikes!
Time flies when yer having fun.
Or, "bedsitter people look back and lament
another day's useless energy, spent."
Indeed, we decide which is right.
Apologies to The Moody Blues for the quote and epilogue ;-)
Time flies when yer having fun.
Or, "bedsitter people look back and lament
another day's useless energy, spent."
Indeed, we decide which is right.
Apologies to The Moody Blues for the quote and epilogue ;-)
Monday, November 12, 2007
Link
I ran into this other blog today, and have now read all of the postings.
I highly recommend it, both for history buffs, and anyone hoping to
ot forget our past.
http://wwar1.blogspot.com/
Letters from Private Lamin, Royal Army, 1917.
I highly recommend it, both for history buffs, and anyone hoping to
ot forget our past.
http://wwar1.blogspot.com/
Letters from Private Lamin, Royal Army, 1917.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Veterans Day
I've separated the posts. I observe Veteran's Day in honour of those who serve, and those who have done so. I observe Armistice Day, lest we forget trench warfare and gas attacks, over the top and bully beef, the Flying Circus..... the Lafayette Escadrille..... Roland Garros and Albert Ball. The Richtofen boys and Eddie Rickenbacker. The baseball season ending early in 1918 as we rushed to get into the war, before it became all quiet, on the western front. Remarqueable, no?
HooAH!
OoohRAH!
Anchors aweigh.
Aim High!
Um, Semper Paratus [got it!]
Thank you.
U S A!!
U S A!!
HooAH!
OoohRAH!
Anchors aweigh.
Aim High!
Um, Semper Paratus [got it!]
Thank you.
U S A!!
U S A!!
Armistice Day
The Great War was over on November 11. Who has thoughts of that Hell, occurring so long ago and ere eclipsed by WWII? Passchendaele, Ypres, Vimy Ridge, The Somme, The Marne. Verdun. Names of places long-forgotten, save for a few.
On November 11, 1918, my grandfather was off to war. Herman Arthur Wallace. Pappy. Riding a train out of KC, bound for New York and transshipment across the wide Atlantic. He was the last of the Wallace boys to be dogfaces; his sons and their sons became swabbies. November 11th came and went, and with it, the dying gasp of the Great War, the War to End All Wars [until the next one]. The train turned around and returned to Kansas City. Happy XMas, War is Over [if you want it].
On November 11, 1918, my grandfather was off to war. Herman Arthur Wallace. Pappy. Riding a train out of KC, bound for New York and transshipment across the wide Atlantic. He was the last of the Wallace boys to be dogfaces; his sons and their sons became swabbies. November 11th came and went, and with it, the dying gasp of the Great War, the War to End All Wars [until the next one]. The train turned around and returned to Kansas City. Happy XMas, War is Over [if you want it].
Illini
I almost forgot to mention it, but big props for Ron Zook and the Fighting... um.... football team from Champaign, IL. Ran the ball well, and beat the #1 team in the nation, Ohio State. Guess he's trying to keep up with Urban Meyer, in terms of beating Buckeyes ;-)
Strangely, Wisconsin defeated Michigan yesterday as well. Guess both teams were looking ahead to next week, when they play each other. Only one will find a way to lose. It'll probably be Michigan, but Go Blue! anyway.
Strangely, Wisconsin defeated Michigan yesterday as well. Guess both teams were looking ahead to next week, when they play each other. Only one will find a way to lose. It'll probably be Michigan, but Go Blue! anyway.
Yikes!!
Man, I coulda SWORN I post more often than that!! Sorry.
Then again, maybe I confused replies with postings ;-)
Gators beat South Carolina. Percy Harvin was out with a sinus infection and migraines, plus the game was in SC, plus it was against the Ol' Ball Coach [our legendary QB/Coach, Steve Spurrier, who is always pesky]. Last year, in Gainesville, we blocked an extra point, and a field goal at the last gasp, preserving the chance to play for the national title against OSU.
So, this year, Tim Tebow threw for 300 yards and 2 scores, using Andre` "Bubba" Caldwell very nicely. Oh, Big Tim also ran for over a hundred yards and five touchdowns. You heard it right: FIVE touchdown runs. Can you spell "Heisman"?
Before the game, I went and watched American Gangster, which features Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Long, but you don't really notice [2' 42" or something]. Graphic scenes, good casting, good script, good acting. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it :-)
Then again, maybe I confused replies with postings ;-)
Gators beat South Carolina. Percy Harvin was out with a sinus infection and migraines, plus the game was in SC, plus it was against the Ol' Ball Coach [our legendary QB/Coach, Steve Spurrier, who is always pesky]. Last year, in Gainesville, we blocked an extra point, and a field goal at the last gasp, preserving the chance to play for the national title against OSU.
So, this year, Tim Tebow threw for 300 yards and 2 scores, using Andre` "Bubba" Caldwell very nicely. Oh, Big Tim also ran for over a hundred yards and five touchdowns. You heard it right: FIVE touchdown runs. Can you spell "Heisman"?
Before the game, I went and watched American Gangster, which features Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Long, but you don't really notice [2' 42" or something]. Graphic scenes, good casting, good script, good acting. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it :-)
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Cavemen
In the olden days, we'd turn the tube to Donny and Marie. It was kinda funny, turning the sound all the way off and cranking up Hendrix [Tom Tibbs, my pal from high school, and I].
I think Tom was partaking of the herb, and we both had antifreeze coursing through our veins. Good, good entertainment :-)
In that same vein [yeah, pun intended, I suppose], I decided to get blitzed and watch Cavemen, the new sho [it's on ABC, isn't it?] Shoulda been so easy, right? hahahahah
anyway, I did not hate Cavemen. I also did not like it.
[1] Tried so hard to be funny it was painful to watch.
[2] Written by Social Marxists hell-bent on giving us a sociology lesson.
Are the cave-dudes euphemisms for some other real-world group of down-trodden people?
Discuss, please.
Oh, and the extra point:
The German Pantry [Marina reminded me that I had to have dessert first or I would never get around to it]; Spice cake and white wine [sadly, they have no Gewurztraminer!], followed by pretzels n mustard, with Gulasch soup and draught Hefeweissen. Yum! At hme, the balance of Hiram Walker's apricot brandy. [Pix conferred the title 'nasty' on it]. Just for info ;-)
I think Tom was partaking of the herb, and we both had antifreeze coursing through our veins. Good, good entertainment :-)
In that same vein [yeah, pun intended, I suppose], I decided to get blitzed and watch Cavemen, the new sho [it's on ABC, isn't it?] Shoulda been so easy, right? hahahahah
anyway, I did not hate Cavemen. I also did not like it.
[1] Tried so hard to be funny it was painful to watch.
[2] Written by Social Marxists hell-bent on giving us a sociology lesson.
Are the cave-dudes euphemisms for some other real-world group of down-trodden people?
Discuss, please.
Oh, and the extra point:
The German Pantry [Marina reminded me that I had to have dessert first or I would never get around to it]; Spice cake and white wine [sadly, they have no Gewurztraminer!], followed by pretzels n mustard, with Gulasch soup and draught Hefeweissen. Yum! At hme, the balance of Hiram Walker's apricot brandy. [Pix conferred the title 'nasty' on it]. Just for info ;-)
Monday, November 5, 2007
Moolah
Mary Lillian Ellison has passed away. She was 84.
Some of you may not know who she was, but she comes from another interest of mine, professional wrestling. I know, I know, wrestling's not real. Neither is acting. Lillian wrestled as The Fabulous Moolah, and she was the world champion before I was born, and kept the belt except for one or two very short interludes [days, each].
Born in South Carolina, she was the epitome` of a sweet, Southern belle. In persona, however, she was as mean a gal as I have ever witnessed, easy to believe that she was the most vicious, violent femme ever.... In wrestling terminology, she had 'heat', the ability to rile up audiences who would pay good money to see her get whupped [and she never did]. Again, in persona, she was a classic 'heel', an evil wrestler who made the fans want to come on down to the arena and see their favorite give her a sound beating, and she was very good at it.
I never knew of her sustaining a major injury, and wrestling is physical, even if the outcome is generally pre-determined. Think of it as performance art, with the emphasis on performance. Miss Ellison ran a school for aspiring young lady wrestlers, and they all vouched for the fact that it was pretty much boot camp. Small, attractive, double-tough. Modern-era female wrestlers would do well to emulate this gal. Happily, a few seem to have done so.
Lil', darlin', we'll miss ya.
Say hello to Sherri and Woman for us.
Lillian passed away on my birthday, November 2nd.
Some of you may not know who she was, but she comes from another interest of mine, professional wrestling. I know, I know, wrestling's not real. Neither is acting. Lillian wrestled as The Fabulous Moolah, and she was the world champion before I was born, and kept the belt except for one or two very short interludes [days, each].
Born in South Carolina, she was the epitome` of a sweet, Southern belle. In persona, however, she was as mean a gal as I have ever witnessed, easy to believe that she was the most vicious, violent femme ever.... In wrestling terminology, she had 'heat', the ability to rile up audiences who would pay good money to see her get whupped [and she never did]. Again, in persona, she was a classic 'heel', an evil wrestler who made the fans want to come on down to the arena and see their favorite give her a sound beating, and she was very good at it.
I never knew of her sustaining a major injury, and wrestling is physical, even if the outcome is generally pre-determined. Think of it as performance art, with the emphasis on performance. Miss Ellison ran a school for aspiring young lady wrestlers, and they all vouched for the fact that it was pretty much boot camp. Small, attractive, double-tough. Modern-era female wrestlers would do well to emulate this gal. Happily, a few seem to have done so.
Lil', darlin', we'll miss ya.
Say hello to Sherri and Woman for us.
Lillian passed away on my birthday, November 2nd.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Glop
Brown some ground beef.
Melt some Velveeta.
Stir in some Ro-Tel.
Dip up with chips.
I'm having mine with Miller Chill, a chelada style beer. Some lime, a little salt. Fresh, clean taste. Refreshing, not heavy.
Watching Gators Homecoming Game, with Vanderbilt in The Swamp.
Percy Harvin just carried in for 13-0 lead.
Joey Ijjas, good! 14 - nil.
Man, this is awesome ;-)
Melt some Velveeta.
Stir in some Ro-Tel.
Dip up with chips.
I'm having mine with Miller Chill, a chelada style beer. Some lime, a little salt. Fresh, clean taste. Refreshing, not heavy.
Watching Gators Homecoming Game, with Vanderbilt in The Swamp.
Percy Harvin just carried in for 13-0 lead.
Joey Ijjas, good! 14 - nil.
Man, this is awesome ;-)
La Bella
Happy Birthday to me. I went over and had dinner, and had a good time. Originally, I had decided upon Coyote Cafe, a purveyor of southwestern cuisine [Tex/Mex]. The place was dark, and indeed the interior was gutted. Looked like renovation occurring. Hand-written signs on the windows indicated re-opening November 7th, and good luck in meeting that deadline!!
Low on gas, I went across Laskin Road to La Bella Italia, which is a bit more classy [and pricey] than the average joint. Has a nice Italian deli, as well. The hostess seemed a bit spacey - took me a moment to distract her from her interesting conversation with a co-worker, and she asked me if I was there for a carryout. Um, no, and I looked presentable. Polo shirt, slacks, just like everyone else. Ever notice that when you dine alone, you get crappy tables? I got seated on the aperture between two dining rooms, and had my space invaded right and left. Next time I will be more assertive in seat selection, when I am more comfortable with the place.
My waitress [Somaya] was a charm, very friendly and attentive, and I felt better already. I ordered up Signor Moretti's brew, and an ice water for hydration. Appetizer: capicola, roasted peppers, and fresh mozzarella over lettuce, which makes a fine salad. Enjoyable! Saltimbocca [and another Moretti] for the main course, and it too was nicely done. I saved half of it, and some of the side dish of pasta in red gravy, for today. [Getting full!].
For dessert, I had tiramisu with a cappucino. Nice finishing touch, which indeed finished me off.
Drove home and began to snore shortly thereafter. In review: nice place, good food, friendly staff. With tip, came out to $66, which is a bit more than it needs to be, but I enjoyed it, and I recommend going. Try it!! Mangia, mangia :-)
Low on gas, I went across Laskin Road to La Bella Italia, which is a bit more classy [and pricey] than the average joint. Has a nice Italian deli, as well. The hostess seemed a bit spacey - took me a moment to distract her from her interesting conversation with a co-worker, and she asked me if I was there for a carryout. Um, no, and I looked presentable. Polo shirt, slacks, just like everyone else. Ever notice that when you dine alone, you get crappy tables? I got seated on the aperture between two dining rooms, and had my space invaded right and left. Next time I will be more assertive in seat selection, when I am more comfortable with the place.
My waitress [Somaya] was a charm, very friendly and attentive, and I felt better already. I ordered up Signor Moretti's brew, and an ice water for hydration. Appetizer: capicola, roasted peppers, and fresh mozzarella over lettuce, which makes a fine salad. Enjoyable! Saltimbocca [and another Moretti] for the main course, and it too was nicely done. I saved half of it, and some of the side dish of pasta in red gravy, for today. [Getting full!].
For dessert, I had tiramisu with a cappucino. Nice finishing touch, which indeed finished me off.
Drove home and began to snore shortly thereafter. In review: nice place, good food, friendly staff. With tip, came out to $66, which is a bit more than it needs to be, but I enjoyed it, and I recommend going. Try it!! Mangia, mangia :-)
Friday, November 2, 2007
HB
Happy Birthday to me... Chuckie Lee is 49. Imagine that!
Well, another good day, although being the end of the week, I am tired. Two days of boating, one in the speedboat and one in the cabin cruiser, and it takes a lot of energy. I caught myself falling asleep in the office today.
No boating today by design. The guys were out overnight annoying ships for practice, so they left by 7 AM or so to go get rack time. Hurricane out in the Atlantic, and the winds are whipping up pretty well... the waters are really choppy and not suitable for ops anyway.
So, where should I head out to? More than likely the Beach Pub. It's decent and cheap, and pretty friendly, so more than likely, there. I dunno, maybe a spur-of-the-moment decision ;-)
Gators host Vandy tomorrow at 1230, Homecoming Game. That makes Gator Growl tonight, the big homecoming pep rally and entertainment show. I still remember Rodney Dangerfield at GG one year, he was awesome!!!
Kev told me that his mom's dad passed away on the 31st. John was a crusty old sonofagun, a Chief Boatswain's Mate, but he respected the fact that I was in the Nav [and for a couple of years, in Deck Department!]. He gave me a combo cover [boat driver's hat], and that was a cool thing to do. My condolences, Diane, Derek and Kev, and Aiko. May the Lord welcome him.
Well, another good day, although being the end of the week, I am tired. Two days of boating, one in the speedboat and one in the cabin cruiser, and it takes a lot of energy. I caught myself falling asleep in the office today.
No boating today by design. The guys were out overnight annoying ships for practice, so they left by 7 AM or so to go get rack time. Hurricane out in the Atlantic, and the winds are whipping up pretty well... the waters are really choppy and not suitable for ops anyway.
So, where should I head out to? More than likely the Beach Pub. It's decent and cheap, and pretty friendly, so more than likely, there. I dunno, maybe a spur-of-the-moment decision ;-)
Gators host Vandy tomorrow at 1230, Homecoming Game. That makes Gator Growl tonight, the big homecoming pep rally and entertainment show. I still remember Rodney Dangerfield at GG one year, he was awesome!!!
Kev told me that his mom's dad passed away on the 31st. John was a crusty old sonofagun, a Chief Boatswain's Mate, but he respected the fact that I was in the Nav [and for a couple of years, in Deck Department!]. He gave me a combo cover [boat driver's hat], and that was a cool thing to do. My condolences, Diane, Derek and Kev, and Aiko. May the Lord welcome him.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Dia de los Muertes
Dia de los Muertes. Day of the Dead. Generally celebrated in conjunction with All Saints Day and All Souls Day, November 1st and 2nd, and mainly in Hispanic communities. I listened to Oingo Boingo for a while, and then the Rezurex. http://www.rezurex.com/ and you can check them out on the link I have enclosed [hope it works - links to their myspace page] My fave of theirs, of course, is "Dia de los Muertes", which is a damn fine tune. Do ya like rockabilly? Punk? They describe themselves as psychobilly, and that's as good as any other description, I suppose. Anyway, check 'em out! Buy their stuff! Support indy artists!!
My avatar pic was taken on dia de los Muertes last year, back when I was in the auto industry. Hated it! The industry, that is. I actually like the pic ;-) Happier now, working for the Navy, live by the beach, love the people I work with and getting to go on the water.... but I still wear black on Fridays and special occasions. Like Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertes, and such.
Man! Usually I write a lot more words; maybe I am windin down for the night. Tomorrow's my birthday. I've been to Grate Steak and German Pantry lately, and go often to Beach Pub. Where should I go celebrate? Thoughts? Anyone? Bueller? Guido the Killer Pimp?
My avatar pic was taken on dia de los Muertes last year, back when I was in the auto industry. Hated it! The industry, that is. I actually like the pic ;-) Happier now, working for the Navy, live by the beach, love the people I work with and getting to go on the water.... but I still wear black on Fridays and special occasions. Like Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertes, and such.
Man! Usually I write a lot more words; maybe I am windin down for the night. Tomorrow's my birthday. I've been to Grate Steak and German Pantry lately, and go often to Beach Pub. Where should I go celebrate? Thoughts? Anyone? Bueller? Guido the Killer Pimp?
Denied for questionable content
The New York post denied this post due to "questionable content". I am really getting tired of trying to guess what will go; yet "Yona Loriner" gets to write his name continually in some sort of Dadaist orgy and people essentially crap on each other. What an unworthy site for our writing energy, yet I have several friends there, so back I go. Feliz, Chuck.
Hi, Lisa - you're welcome! Proud to serve, ma'am :-) It is certainly a pleasure to discuss baseball with you two and a select group of additional fans. No one needs rhetoric ;-)
On to the topics at hand - the Yanks have certainly wasted their fair share of money on lost causes [Pavano] and Grumpy Old Men [Unit, Kevin Brown], but like Lisa pointed out, good pitching is hard to come by. In those cases, and others [Jaret Wright, Weaver], they were throwing candidates against the wall to see who would stick. Far, far better to go with one's farm, but ours was barren. Ted Lilly was one of the last [ok, ok, Jake Westbrook, too] and we traded off both Ted AND Jake. That has to change, and I think it will.As far as Clemens goes, it was not a disaster. True, he was not the world-beater we had hoped for, but he gave us a chance to win in many of his starts, which Chase Wright, Matt DeSalvo, Tyler Clippard and Kei Igawa might not have done.As an added bonus, he added grit and determination, and worked with the young pitchers, too. Just adding him to the mix made the Yankees a better ball club; any pitching they got was icing on the cake. Aging egomaniacs, Tanya? We got Rocket, you got 38pitches.com. One makes more money, but both franchises have that commodity in excess. I would say, don't compare Dicey and Rocket. Compare Schill and Clemens, Dice and Igawa.Matsuzaka? He had a tough time acculturating, just ike Beckett did last year. I think he will be better next year [Oki too] if his arm strength holds up.Igawa? Even Yank fans diss this guy, but it is his first year, for Pete's sake. Just being a rookie alone is daunting, but in a foreign land, with one teammate who speaks yer native tongue, it's rough. Give the guy a break! Anyway, once Nardi and Eiland finish breaking him down and building him back up, he'll be much more of an asset. The guy gets his K's, just needs to limit the gopher ball....Rodolpho, Torre is a beter manager than you give him credit for. EVEN if you could call a game better than he, which I doubt, he kept the clubhouse from getting fractous, which you would have had zero chance in H ades of accomplishing. The team he managed prior to the Yanks? Talent-starved. He got the Braves into the playoffs, and they agreed with you and fired Joe. They did not make it back until the Smoltz/Glavine era. Joe may not make the playoffs, but he will work wonders on uniting the Dodgers clubhouse. I say they will have a winning record and be in playoff contention. Let's check back in a year and see who is right.Feliz Dia de los Muertes, peeps.
Hi, Lisa - you're welcome! Proud to serve, ma'am :-) It is certainly a pleasure to discuss baseball with you two and a select group of additional fans. No one needs rhetoric ;-)
On to the topics at hand - the Yanks have certainly wasted their fair share of money on lost causes [Pavano] and Grumpy Old Men [Unit, Kevin Brown], but like Lisa pointed out, good pitching is hard to come by. In those cases, and others [Jaret Wright, Weaver], they were throwing candidates against the wall to see who would stick. Far, far better to go with one's farm, but ours was barren. Ted Lilly was one of the last [ok, ok, Jake Westbrook, too] and we traded off both Ted AND Jake. That has to change, and I think it will.As far as Clemens goes, it was not a disaster. True, he was not the world-beater we had hoped for, but he gave us a chance to win in many of his starts, which Chase Wright, Matt DeSalvo, Tyler Clippard and Kei Igawa might not have done.As an added bonus, he added grit and determination, and worked with the young pitchers, too. Just adding him to the mix made the Yankees a better ball club; any pitching they got was icing on the cake. Aging egomaniacs, Tanya? We got Rocket, you got 38pitches.com. One makes more money, but both franchises have that commodity in excess. I would say, don't compare Dicey and Rocket. Compare Schill and Clemens, Dice and Igawa.Matsuzaka? He had a tough time acculturating, just ike Beckett did last year. I think he will be better next year [Oki too] if his arm strength holds up.Igawa? Even Yank fans diss this guy, but it is his first year, for Pete's sake. Just being a rookie alone is daunting, but in a foreign land, with one teammate who speaks yer native tongue, it's rough. Give the guy a break! Anyway, once Nardi and Eiland finish breaking him down and building him back up, he'll be much more of an asset. The guy gets his K's, just needs to limit the gopher ball....Rodolpho, Torre is a beter manager than you give him credit for. EVEN if you could call a game better than he, which I doubt, he kept the clubhouse from getting fractous, which you would have had zero chance in H ades of accomplishing. The team he managed prior to the Yanks? Talent-starved. He got the Braves into the playoffs, and they agreed with you and fired Joe. They did not make it back until the Smoltz/Glavine era. Joe may not make the playoffs, but he will work wonders on uniting the Dodgers clubhouse. I say they will have a winning record and be in playoff contention. Let's check back in a year and see who is right.Feliz Dia de los Muertes, peeps.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
31 Oct Ogre
Happy Hallowe'en, everybody!
I was driving along, and I realised, I once got married on this day. She's long since gone, but the anniversary remains. I have two wonderful sons as a result, Derek and Kevin. Respectable fellows, and sensitive chaps as well. Gals, take notice - both are eligible bachelors [and Kev even cooks - he's in culinary arts school].
The German Pantry. Wednesday is German Meatloaf special night, which I washed down with more draught hefeweissen. Comes with fried potatoes and green bean salad and I ordered red cabbage and spaetzle too [of course!]. Now I have lunch for the morrie, as well. Man, everyone is frendly there. It's on Virginia Beach Boulevard in Norfolk, not as far as I-64. Go! You won't regret it.
I forgot to have dessert first. Next time, Trina will remind me. She had wings and a halo tonight. What a nice gal, friendly and pretty. If I had a daughter, she'd be the prototype, for sure!
I was driving along, and I realised, I once got married on this day. She's long since gone, but the anniversary remains. I have two wonderful sons as a result, Derek and Kevin. Respectable fellows, and sensitive chaps as well. Gals, take notice - both are eligible bachelors [and Kev even cooks - he's in culinary arts school].
The German Pantry. Wednesday is German Meatloaf special night, which I washed down with more draught hefeweissen. Comes with fried potatoes and green bean salad and I ordered red cabbage and spaetzle too [of course!]. Now I have lunch for the morrie, as well. Man, everyone is frendly there. It's on Virginia Beach Boulevard in Norfolk, not as far as I-64. Go! You won't regret it.
I forgot to have dessert first. Next time, Trina will remind me. She had wings and a halo tonight. What a nice gal, friendly and pretty. If I had a daughter, she'd be the prototype, for sure!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Who Mourns for Adonis?
I'll miss A-Rod's bat, and his glove, and his work with the young Yankees, especially Melky. We'll be okay without him, though. Joe Crede, Adrian Beltre, Mike Lowell, all could man third base for us [unless Boston puts A-Rod at short AND keeps Lowell at third]. Bronson Sardinha plays a little third, too, and Wilson Betemit...well, I WANT to like WilliBet, but he needs to give up that switch-hitting idea and tighten up his swing.
How do we replace A-Rod's bat? Offset it with better pitching, for one. More Duncan at first? Matsui more DH with Damon in left? If those two can remain healthy, and as Cano and Melky progress, the power shortfall will be erased. Especially if Abreu and Giambi get hot.
Here's a thought which just occurred to me: A-Rod revealed himself to be [in his mind], bigger than the team, bigger than baseball. He opted out. While the Yankees waited to announce anything on a new manager, A-Rod came right out and opted out, upstaging the Yanks and the World Series at one fell swoop. He was acclimatized to NY, he was slowly getting past the non-clutch post-season knock, he carried the team on his back and we made the playoffs, without him we would have seen a silent October. A plaque, a monument maybe, status as a True Yankee. All this and more was Alex's for the taking. He had to upstage the team and the game.
Perhaps he'll find a few more ducats; perhaps the Yankees will remain true to their word, and A-Rod will find the money less than he had imagined. I would laugh at the delicious irony; not to spite Alex, for I hold for him no ill will. The irony of it all, if he gives up all I have mentioned, for less money, less prestige, less lasting fame.
Now he has truly become shown as a mercenary, a wandering bat in search of no home, no connection, no ring, even. Only cold money, a poor companion on lonely winter nights when lacking the solace of affection or even affiliation really. He had the world; it was his oyster, but it was not enough. Ozymandias wept; Alex sold his soul. It will not fetch enough to fill the emptiness within him.
How do we replace A-Rod's bat? Offset it with better pitching, for one. More Duncan at first? Matsui more DH with Damon in left? If those two can remain healthy, and as Cano and Melky progress, the power shortfall will be erased. Especially if Abreu and Giambi get hot.
Here's a thought which just occurred to me: A-Rod revealed himself to be [in his mind], bigger than the team, bigger than baseball. He opted out. While the Yankees waited to announce anything on a new manager, A-Rod came right out and opted out, upstaging the Yanks and the World Series at one fell swoop. He was acclimatized to NY, he was slowly getting past the non-clutch post-season knock, he carried the team on his back and we made the playoffs, without him we would have seen a silent October. A plaque, a monument maybe, status as a True Yankee. All this and more was Alex's for the taking. He had to upstage the team and the game.
Perhaps he'll find a few more ducats; perhaps the Yankees will remain true to their word, and A-Rod will find the money less than he had imagined. I would laugh at the delicious irony; not to spite Alex, for I hold for him no ill will. The irony of it all, if he gives up all I have mentioned, for less money, less prestige, less lasting fame.
Now he has truly become shown as a mercenary, a wandering bat in search of no home, no connection, no ring, even. Only cold money, a poor companion on lonely winter nights when lacking the solace of affection or even affiliation really. He had the world; it was his oyster, but it was not enough. Ozymandias wept; Alex sold his soul. It will not fetch enough to fill the emptiness within him.
Big Losses?
Maybe. The New York Post is reporting that Alex Rodriguez is going to opt out of his contract, making him a free agent [according to his agent, Scott Boras].
This could just be posturing on the part of Boras. However, if it is true, I say the guy doesn't want to be in the Bronx. No team is bigger than one individual, no matter how mighty. We need a team that is greater than the sum of the parts. Better get Joe Girardi.
I'll check in tonight and see what has developed.
This could just be posturing on the part of Boras. However, if it is true, I say the guy doesn't want to be in the Bronx. No team is bigger than one individual, no matter how mighty. We need a team that is greater than the sum of the parts. Better get Joe Girardi.
I'll check in tonight and see what has developed.
Big Victories
Evidently the Red Sox had a bag of Colorado Kryptonite, sweeping the Rockies in four games.
Rocktober, indeed. Congratulations are in order to Sox fans everywhere.
Now, on to really important stuff: will Don Mattingly, Joe Girardi, or Tony Pena replace Joe Torre as manager of the Yankees? Lots of personnel issues to resolve, including ten days for A-Rod to opt out of his contract or not. [My $$$ is on a contract extension, btw].
Happy Monday, everybody :-)
Rocktober, indeed. Congratulations are in order to Sox fans everywhere.
Now, on to really important stuff: will Don Mattingly, Joe Girardi, or Tony Pena replace Joe Torre as manager of the Yankees? Lots of personnel issues to resolve, including ten days for A-Rod to opt out of his contract or not. [My $$$ is on a contract extension, btw].
Happy Monday, everybody :-)
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Little Victories
Guess Georgia DID have a bag of Kryptonite, after all.
I'm going to say some things which some of you might view as excuses, and that's fine, if that's what you'd like to think. Let me start off by saying that Georgia found a way to harness their emotion, and they made fewer mistakes than we did. In short, they deserved to win more than we did. Today, the better team won.
Now, having said that, Tim Tebow was obviously not himself. Had he been able to be 75% of the offense again, the game would have had a different outcome. Percy Harvin got dinged-up, Cornelius Ingram was cold when we finally got the ball to him, and Kestahn Moore, well, let's just say he's going to be running steps at the stadium for a long, long time. Most of our defense from last year's championship team graduated or declared for the draft, and most of this year's defensive line is injured. Can someone explain to our DB's how to cover the long ball, yet not play 15 yards off the receiver?
Seriously speaking, we knew that this year was going to be a reloading year. We can still make it to the SEC Championship game, but we'll need some help to do so. Tennessee and SC only have 2 conference losses, and we have three now. Georgia also has only two, but they still have to play both Auburn and Kentucky. So, two things for Georgia fans: savour this victory over Florida. You'll need to. And, your team is still a bunch of showboating motherfuckers. You won't be playing for the national title this year, or any other year soon. We won the title last year, and we will, again. Good luck in the Independence Bowl.
I'm going to say some things which some of you might view as excuses, and that's fine, if that's what you'd like to think. Let me start off by saying that Georgia found a way to harness their emotion, and they made fewer mistakes than we did. In short, they deserved to win more than we did. Today, the better team won.
Now, having said that, Tim Tebow was obviously not himself. Had he been able to be 75% of the offense again, the game would have had a different outcome. Percy Harvin got dinged-up, Cornelius Ingram was cold when we finally got the ball to him, and Kestahn Moore, well, let's just say he's going to be running steps at the stadium for a long, long time. Most of our defense from last year's championship team graduated or declared for the draft, and most of this year's defensive line is injured. Can someone explain to our DB's how to cover the long ball, yet not play 15 yards off the receiver?
Seriously speaking, we knew that this year was going to be a reloading year. We can still make it to the SEC Championship game, but we'll need some help to do so. Tennessee and SC only have 2 conference losses, and we have three now. Georgia also has only two, but they still have to play both Auburn and Kentucky. So, two things for Georgia fans: savour this victory over Florida. You'll need to. And, your team is still a bunch of showboating motherfuckers. You won't be playing for the national title this year, or any other year soon. We won the title last year, and we will, again. Good luck in the Independence Bowl.
Gators and Georgia
Today is the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, the Florida-Georgia game.
Georgia opened with a world of emotion, and they might as well. They don't like us, we don't like them. Let me put this as plainly as possible: Georgia, your team is a showboating pack of motherfuckers. Oh, I'd help any of them if they were getting mugged or robbed, but on the field, I can't stand their asses.
At the half, Georgia has a slight lead. Here's why: their emotion has pumped them up and has gotten our guys to beat themselves, allowing an uncovered long TD pass, fumbling and losing the ball on our opening drive, and fumbling to kill another would-be scoring drive. Oh, and Tim Tebow has been protecting his injured [non-throwing] shoulder.
In a nutshell, Georgia has played their game to perfection, and lead at the half, 21-17.
To come away with the victory, pretty much the same thing will have to occur in the second half. My money's on that not happening. For one thing, Tebow ran a quarterback draw play at the end of the first half. He's been keeping it in reserve, Dawg. Wait and see. Think y'all got a second dose of Kryptonite? Ya better. Go Gators!!
Georgia opened with a world of emotion, and they might as well. They don't like us, we don't like them. Let me put this as plainly as possible: Georgia, your team is a showboating pack of motherfuckers. Oh, I'd help any of them if they were getting mugged or robbed, but on the field, I can't stand their asses.
At the half, Georgia has a slight lead. Here's why: their emotion has pumped them up and has gotten our guys to beat themselves, allowing an uncovered long TD pass, fumbling and losing the ball on our opening drive, and fumbling to kill another would-be scoring drive. Oh, and Tim Tebow has been protecting his injured [non-throwing] shoulder.
In a nutshell, Georgia has played their game to perfection, and lead at the half, 21-17.
To come away with the victory, pretty much the same thing will have to occur in the second half. My money's on that not happening. For one thing, Tebow ran a quarterback draw play at the end of the first half. He's been keeping it in reserve, Dawg. Wait and see. Think y'all got a second dose of Kryptonite? Ya better. Go Gators!!
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