Catching Up 1: I, me, mine

It's been so long since I've really posted anything here that I thought I'd begin with a quick "okay, since this is a personal blog I should probably add some personal information." 

Okay, no. I'm just a fucking egotist, so it's all about meeeeee!!!.

Kidding aside, well. Here's the basics.

I'm just a couple or three months away from my 69th birthday so, yeah, fuck, I'm old.

Throw in the whole "multiple joint replacements and Parkinson's" things and I'm not exactly heading into old age physically robust. That kinda sucks, given that I've tried to do all the "right things"; exercised, watched my diet, kept active and intellectually curious and engaged.

It seems pretty ungrateful for me to have taken at-least-decent care of my mind and body for them to decide now that I'm old to turn on me. C'mon, guys! All this time and finally you just give me the I'm-gonna-stop-making-dopamine finger?

Ingrates.

The other ugly reality is that I'm about two years into the post-second-marriage phase of my life, and that sucks on multiple levels.

On the obvious, social one, it's lonely. I've gone from being part of a family; wife, kids, a cat, loving and living together in a cute little house I had spent twenty years loving and working to make cuter and better.

So that whole two decades now feels like a lost sunk cost. All those years and work and love and caring...vanished as though they had never been.

 
On the physical level, well, I'm alone in a small apartment.

That turns back to the social-suck, because for twenty years my best friend, my companion at home and abroad, the person I liked and cared for the most, who shared our adventures together and apart was Mojo. She was my "working week and my Sunday rest".

And now she's gone. Not just physically, but emotionally; she's made it clear that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Not even the slightest, most casual contact. That hurts, a lot. I'd hoped we could at least remain friends, but Mojo has made it clear that she will not tolerate that.

Ouch. 

And the hard truth is that no other friends, as dear as they may be, can replace a best-friend spouse. For one thing, they have their own lives to live. I'm a third wheel, at best, emotionally, and distant physically; it's not like I or they can just stroll around corner or up the road to say hello and pass the time.

I do try; try and get out, try and go to places to meet with friends, or people I share something with.

I've even tried one of those on-line matching things, and met some good people there.

But, still, the bottom line is, well, what I've just detailed. 

 
What remains?

Well, the essence of my heart and mind. Me, who I am, for better or worse.

Retired now for almost four years I'm finding a lot of pleasure in having the time to myself, to exercise, or travel (locally, for the most part - I have time but not money), or just read or screen (and thank you, the shade of Ted Turner, for the TCM old-movie channel!).

I've been keeping my hand in the soils game until this last year. It's been good to use the skills I spent much of my life honing, and the income didn't hurt, either.

The last engineer I know who still called me in for that contract work is sliding into a different track in the geotechnical business and one that doesn't really require a field guy, though, so it looks increasingly likely that this will be the first real year of "retirement", the last soils work I will ever put my name to.

That's fine. I had a good run, did some good work, and I'm ready to hang 'em up. 

My children are almost man-and-woman-grown, and are a lot of fun for it. The big dude who is the Former Peep is in his third year at university here in Portland, studying geology, of all things. Missy is downstate, planning to be some form of botanist or agronomist. I try and see them as often as their time permits...which isn't the same as living with them.

That's probably the hardest part of post-divorce parenting, not being physically close, missing those little daily collisions, the small change of domestic life. Instead I've become the cliche' "divorced dad", seeing his kids every so often, unaware of and uninformed by the day-to-day happenings that make up their lives.

Still, they're good people and I love them to pieces. 

I still enjoy a lot of the activities I did in the Before Times.

Writing? Sure; not here much, though I'm thinking I want to change that, but quite a bit over at my soccer site. 

Soccer; indeed, it's been an intriguing year for pro footy here in Portland. The Timbers, having struggled through several difficult seasons, finally canned the manager that proved incapable of solving the troubles therein and are using the current World Cup hiatus to hire a replacement. The Thorns are playing surprisingly well, having also shed their gaffer at the end of the previous season.

Reading and thinking about the world around us has become a huge time- and energy-suck, given how appallingly ridiculous and idiotic (and dangerous) the current MAGA Regime has become. I agree with those whose loathing of Trump comes as much for the degree to which his freakishly bloated public presence doesn't permit me and anyone else who bothers to pay attention to public life to ignore his ignorance, stupidity, venality, and cupidity.

One reason I've blogged so little here is that grotesque presence, looming over us all like the giant stone head in the movie Zardoz, makes it damn near impossible to write about anything without having the orange (well, sort of; his face makeup seems to be more like that brownish shoe polish color "cordovan" recently) sonofabitch constantly poking his fucking nose into the story. Corpse at every funeral, by God...

I'm still hanging in at kendo, despite getting older and slower every week. I still enjoy it, and hope to postpone the day that I become too old and slow to represent my dojo honorably. I've picked up a related "sword" art, iaido, which is pure fun; a sort of "internal chanbara movie" thing, cosplaying samurai. Plus it's a way of trying to master myself; it's all about perfecting a series of forms. You're not fighting an opponent outside yourself but, rather, mastering your mind and body, a kind of meditation in motion. 

One thing retirement has gifted me is time to resume an old pastime, birdwatching, and I've been getting out as much as possible to scope the local patches. I'm not yet thinking of doing the sort of "big trip" sorts of adventures I did after my first divorce., but perhaps in a bit...

 
So I guess the final sum is that, while there's a lot about the last couple of years on me that I'd undo if I could, I'm still here. Still trying to live as full a life as I can. Still hoping that I can make of that something worth others remembering me fondly when I'm gone.

While all around me...

...well, that's for the next part of this.

 
(Next: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?) 

Light Housekeeping

Quick note: I've had to do a bit of cleaning up the sidebar where I've put up links to what I'm reading or sites I want to push up. I removed several links.

That's always a bit saddening, because it means that I've lost some friends from my digital life.

One of the saddest was having to remove The Hidden Thimble.

I've followed Talyssa and Siree's blog for years, as long as I've posted their blog up on the right side of my page. I've enjoyed the hell out of their adventures both for the adventures themselves and for the way the two of them shine through the words and pictures on their blog like good deeds in a weary world.

But their last post was over a year ago. 

The site has drifted, untended, since then. I'm afraid my friends have moved on in the way people on the internet do. I hope that means they've moved on to other happy, adventurous places. I hope they're well, and enjoying their lives.

But I'll never know. And that's a trifle hard. As much as you can "like" someone you've never met IRL, I liked the Thimblers a lot.

Another loss is Maia's The Voyagers. 

(Here's what I remind the reader that Graphic Firing Table's privacy policy is that we don't show anyone's face outside family - and The Girl has made clear that it's not okay to show her face, either, so that's no longer a thing - so if someone is mentioned in a photo it's only from the knees down. Cats? They're attention whores, so they don't count...)

Not Maia herself - she's still busy and creating beautiful things over at Feather and Stone - but her account of her voyage through her and her amazing child's lives.

That's been dark since 2019, and I have to conclude that she, like so many other friends, has moved on from blogging. She joins the rest of the crew that was linked by our adoptions, like Carrie (formerly of walternatives) and India (formerly of The Atomic Ranch) who are nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la; not gone, merely marching far away.

I still need to do some more work here. The US Army Field Artillery site isn't linking anymore, and the TechDirt links to some sort of gibberish.

The happier news is that I have some new places to link to, but that's a matter for another post.

State of my Union, July 2022

I don't have any particular thing to say. Just sort of noodling around and had nothing better to do than peck at the keyboard, so here I am, on a cool gray morning in mid-July, wondering what to say and do.

Well...not really wondering; I've got a busy and, I hope, fun day ahead. Volunteering at a local park. A Japanese brewing exhibition. Block party around the block. And then a home game of our women's pro soccer club.

But now? The Little House is quiet (as the local garage band has finally given up trying to cover Paint It Black, thank Asmodeus...) with everyone asleep except Drachma the Merkitty and me. So let's start with them.

Okay, Me; wassup?

Mostly the usual; work.

But that's not as business-as-usual as usual. 

For one thing, the local branch of my company is kind of imploding. We've hemorrhaged good people - three in the last quarter - and we're down to four:
1) the least-liked and least-respected senior engineer,
2) a complete noob who comes across as utterly green,
3) a tech who is at best marginally competent and has a weird, shifty personality, at that, and
4) me.

The fucked-up part is that my corporate doesn't seem to either know, or care, how to improve this. They know the senior engineer is kind of a putz - it's been his clumsy lack of management skills and greed to bag shitty development work that has gone a long way to driving off the good people - but won't either can him or try and fix him.

Instead their solution is to bring one of the Puget Sound office rainmakers down here to generate work.

The supposed plan was that this would help kickstart getting Portland good work...but this particular guy doesn't bring in "good" (that is, interesting, challenging, demanding engineering project-type work) work. His stuff is just the other guy's writ large - boring Earthwork 101 mass-grading development projects.

And, to make things weirder, he's set up a completely parallel-but-separate construction monitoring program here, all run out of the Seattle office. His staff and tech people use our equipment and office space while keeping their schedules and needs utterly hidden.

It's ridiculous and frustrating.

Add to that we just lost our last good field staff guy last Friday. I've got to work with the noob and the creepy guy, neither of whom I trust.

Frankly, I'm ready to hang it up.

Seriously. Our financial person looked at our assets and the actuarial tables and told me that I could legitimately retire this fall and not end up living under a bridge before I die. That's looking ever more attractive right now. I'm sick of trying to herd these boobs and noobs, I'm tired of the boring bullshit development work, I'm ready to give something else a shot.

(Narrator voice: "It became obvious that not all was well...")

Okay, wow, that sucks? What about Me, Personally.

Meh, fine.

I'm relatively healthy. I like where I live - sorry, Tucker, Portland still isn't burning down amid Antifa terror - and I like my life outside work. My knees are slowly healing, tho it took a fuck of a long time and I still have weird after effects - the top of my feet, the instep? is sort of numb, like when your arm or leg "goes to sleep"? Like that, and I have no idea why - but the horrible insomnia is gone, at least.

I am getting old. I can feel it in the slowing of my pace, lower energy, and slowly growing stiffness and creakiness. I don't feel like I'm going to take an Ivana-tumble-down-the-stairs (and how about that for a conspiracy-theory story, eh..?) but five years ago I could pretend that I was still in "vigorous-late-middle-age".

Now?

Fuck, I'm old.

I still enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: the world around me, the world of imagination and creation (I've recently gotten on a weird manga kick, and my reading is now vigorously interspersed with stuff like Sweat and Soap...). I've set up a gaming table downstairs to renew my enjoyment of tabletop wargaming. 

I still follow soccer - the Timbers (tho the cost finally persuaded me to yield my season ticket- a grand a year is too fucking much - and write the Thorns over at the Riveting! website.

My Bride is a treat. She's hitting the gym regularly and sewing and (also) reading and just being her, which is fun. 

The Girl is deep in teenland; she's salty and quirky, she's become a horror of a mess in the kitchen (where I'm rapidly becoming even more of a Neat Nazi - I hate when she cooks and leaves ingredients and cookware scattered all over...) and creates shockingly professional drawings and ever-more-impressive pottery.

The Boy is...gah.

His brief foray into low-end low-wage unskilled work (bag boy at the local grocery) ended in less than 100 days. Now his "plan" is to strike at a lineman job at PGE, but he seems in no hurry to get there. He mostly hangs out and games - which is mostly what he did in grade school, middle school, and high school - so it's like having a monster (because he's grown up into a big beast - with a neck beard, which is "ugh" but fuckit, it's his neck) kid still around the place.

He drives me kind of nuts; I want to chase him out of the house into the Navy or VISTA or to college or...something. It just feels to me like he's wasting his youth sitting in his old room playing HALO or World of Tanks.

But...he's an adult, technically. So he's his own boss to an extent.

I just wish corporate would kick himself in the pants a bit.

Oh, and Drachma the Merkitty?

He's living The Best Life.

Since little Nine's death he's the One and Only Boss Kitty. He gets to prowl his range, demanding with imperious meows that the support staff open doors for his entering-and-exiting pleasure. He has splendid quantities of food whenever he wants it. He gets to hunt - his latest prey appears to be dragonflies, for some bizarre reason - and proudly presents his game bag to the suitably-appalled humans.

The Girl still grieves her Little Cat and still wants another, more loving kitty...

(Drachma has become slightly more affectionate - at least, to me - but he's not really a "lover kitty". He won't cuddle with you or tolerate much holding, unlike Nine who was a complete love sponge. He really is how my Bride described him when asked whether he was a Good Kitty: "Well...he's good at being a cat.")

...but she's up against it. Drachma, obviously, is a hard "no", as is The Boy. The Bride is a "maybe" and I'm a "maybe but leaning no", so the Girl - after a brief spasm of cat-looking - appears to have conceded the One-Cat Family setting so long as Mister Mister is the cat.

So. That's that.

What about this place?

Well...I'm still struggling with that. This is the most writing I've done here in a long time. I've taken several stabs at doing a Brusilov Offensive battles piece but just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm. It's just dire Great War shit; people dying in pointless ways and to make matters worse it's the two most incompetent of the combatants, Austro-Hungary and Russia (the Italians are a special case...) finding ways to get their own people killed. 

And outside of personal stuff like this?

Well, for soccer I have my other blog. I'm really done with writing filler and oddball-news stuff. I've given thought to completing the Army I Knew series but am kind of at a point where it becomes less gripping and more All About Me. Maybe I'll give it a stab after I retire.

Politics? Oh, God. That's just dire.

Seriously. How many ways are there to say "Wake the fuck up and stop electing fucking Republicans!" How many times can I return, like a dog to its vomit, to the appalling reality that somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the American public are worthless, Bible-banging, gun-humping, woman-and-minority-hating, learning-despising, disease-enabling, fascist-loving shitbirds who will cheerfully either herd me and mine into the camps or look away while their Three Percenter and Oath Keeper bros do it?

I'm fucking sick of what my country has become, fucking angry that all the shitty things that I thought we'd driven from the public square - racism, proud ignorance, white power, religious nuttery - and into private muttering have returned out and loud.

The GOP must be destroyed. It's really just that simple, and just that impossible.

But that's for the next post; a State of the City and the State and THE Union.

Still here

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.

Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.

I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.

Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...

...except for this one:

This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come". 

The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.

So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.

Who knew?

Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.

Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?

Here's some cat pictures.

That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.

Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.

Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.

Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.

They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.

I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.

Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.

Thirteen Years

Thirteen years ago this coming July I started writing at this place. It appears that I promised to "...talk about politics, soccer and adoption.".

Well, I did that for goddamn sure. At the time, of course, we were in the middle of what was the then-tortuous process of international adoption, so that was a huge part of our lives. Now? Well, there's this salty Asian kid who for some reason lives in our house and leaves her shit lying around everywhere while she pursues her fascination with art and butterfly ranching and polaroid pictures. She's not "adoption", she's just our kid, whose connection to "adoption" is reduced to stuff like giving us a hard time for not forcing her to take Mandarin classes whilst skipping blithely over the fact that she was a total butt-pain when we tried back in the day.

She's a sweetie and I love her dearly, but she's also become a paranoid goober about my posting her picture here (as if any of you, assuming anyone actually READS this stuff which I'm inclined to doubt given the stats Facebook shows me, give's a rat's ass) so you're just gonna have to imagine what she looks like today.

Soccer? Not anymore. I've got a whole 'nother crib where I talk about the Beautiful Game.

Funny story about that, actually.

Back in...oh, some time around 2014 or so, I think, I ran into a guy who ran a little soccer site called Slide Rule Pass. It's gone, sadly, because The Internet, but back in the day is was one of the more thoughtful and incisive Portland soccer sites. I went on as a commentor, got into some give-and-take with the blog owner, and tl:dr ended up writing about the Thorns, the women's professional team here in Portland. Another long-time follower and commentor came on board to write about the men's team, the Timbers, and off we went.

A couple of years later - in late 2017 - along comes the guy who was the then-editor of the "big" Portland soccer site, Stumptown Footy, who poaches us away to do the same thing for his site we were doing for SRP. The original Slide Rule owner is busy downstate, loses interest, stops paying the hosting fee, and the site just dies.

So I end up writing a column called "Thorns FC" for Stumptown for the 2018 season while my compa writes "Six Degrees" - it's a fun column and it's still going. Here's a link to him, in case you're interested. Whatever.

Anyway, I do my thing, the same thing I've been doing all along; analyzing teams, tactics, and results, discussing what I think is working and what isn't. I call my shots, and this doesn't impress a lot of the club's officials or some players, and I don't really give a shit about the "newsy" stuff; I'd rather write a deep dive into league goalkeeping metrics or comparing the play of the Thorns' midfielders.

And this, apparently, isn't what the Stumptown editor wants (despite 1) me doing the same thing I've been doing all along when he hoovered me away from Slide Rule Pass, and 2) my having warned him that I wasn't going to change, and not changing). After the end of the 2018 season, I have the dubious distinction of getting canned from a non-paying hobby gig, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

So I took my soccer ball and went...well, not home, but to another website, where I do the same irritating things only for myself rather than for SB Nation.

At least I'm still doing politics. Well...sorta.

The problem with "politics" as it currently exists in the United States is that they are effectively stymied.

"Politics" is, as bottom, simply the civic discussion about how goods and services are distributed. Who gets what, how much, and how that happens. In a rational polity that process is a sort of give-and-take, with the various factions agreeing, disputing, or (often) fighting over those questions. There's typically a "liberal" or "left" side that wants more distribution of a greater share of private wealth for public goods (meaning a more "level" society with more collective activity), and a "conservative" side that wants less of both, that is, less confiscation and distribution of private wealth (meaning more concentration of wealth, a more hierarchical society, and less collective actions).

But the "conservative" side of the U.S. public is no longer a "conservative party". It's a nonsensical cult addicted to magical thinking like "trickle-down economics" and "taxes are theft" that have been proved ridiculous any and every time they are actually attempted, as well as a lunatic cult of individuality that is perhaps best embodied in the utterly mad insistence on the Right of foregoing protective masks in the face of a lethal respiratory pandemic.

There's no discussing or arguing for or against that nonsense. There is nothing I can do, or say, that will ameliorate that sort of idiocy. The American "Right" is utterly lost, they are impervious to reason and discourse, they are obviously, openly, loudly out-and-proud looney cultists. You can see that as well as I can, nothing I can say will change that, and nothing I can say will help. They're just fucking nuts, and repeating "Jesus wept, they're just fucking nuts!" is the ultimate in wasting breath.

So I'm not really bothering anymore, other than the occasional snark at the idiocy-of-the-day, like the whole "Blue Lives Matter" bullshit I talked about the other morning.

What else..?

I'm still picking my way slowly through military history though I've largely run out of events that intrigue me. I'm thinking of adding one final entry to the "Imperial Japanese Army - What Went Wrong" series this August with a short diversion on "August Storm", the Soviet offensive through Manchuria in 1945, but beyond that...hmmm. Any other suggestions?

I try and keep this from being a daddy blog, so I don't see doing more family stuff, despite the brutal reality that I'm turning out to be a Suburban Dad. Yesterday, "Father's Day"? Moved the lawn. Cooked hamburgers on the grill while sipping a beer.

Christ, I'm a meme.

Portland and Oregon are great places, so possibly I'll keep posting about my Northwest home. One of the saddest parts of the Plague Year is not being able to get out and about the way I used to.

So that's kind of where this place has gone as an early teenager. At least I'm here and it's still here; long-form blogging is going the way of cuneiform, but I'm going to try and make it run as long as I can.

Any suggestions for subject matter, though..?

Oh, wait...

Cats!

Envoi

Well, it's time to admit it; this has officially become a "ghost blog".

The proof, for me, anyway, was the post about my old Honda getting stolen, pimped-up by the tweaker that bought it, and then recovered, to the disconcertion of everyone involved. I drafted the thing up back in the doldrums of summer and then...it just sat there. I honestly tried to work up the interest to finish and publish it, but just couldn't find enough give-a-shit.

I write soccer for Stumptown Footy and politics and military affairs for http://milpubblog.blogspot.com/. I have run out of battles to write up, other than the odd one or two. So what's left for this joint?

I don't have anything worth reading to write here anymore.

I won't say definitively that there will NEVER be anything new here again. I'm sure at some time I'll come across something or other that tickles my fancy or irks the shit out of me and I'll come here to talk about it.

But daily content? The sort of thing that makes a blog a living thing and not an artifact? I just don't have it in me anymore.

I've enjoyed the ten-plus years here. I've done some damn fine work. I'm currently in the process of collecting the "battles" pieces with the idea of putting together some sort of submittal for publication. I've enjoyed writing about Northwest geology for you, too. And I hope that you've enjoyed the smaller bits and pieces, too.

And those will, I hope, always be here. I hope you who come to visit enjoy them, and leave happier and, perhaps, a little wiser, or more thoughtful than when you arrived.

But for now I say; goodnight.

Irritating Blogger Tricks

Yes, I know; it's free, and if you're not paying for a product YOU'RE the product, yadda, yadda...

Still.

I'd been noticing this for a while; since late in 2015 or early this year and I hadn't really paid attention to it until now, but...

Used to be that when you pulled up an older post Blogger would give you a link to all the posts you put up in that month in the archive gadget. So, for example, if I looked up a post from May, 2008, I could see in the "Calls for Fire" sidebar all the other posts from May, 2008.

Now?

Nothing. The posts for 2016 are shown by month. But for all the earlier years? Nothing; just the year and the number of posts. Doesn't matter what the date of the post you're looking at.

And that's goddamn irritating because I often string together a series of posts in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way; one provokes another which nudges loose a third. So it's nice to see the month's posts surrounding whatever I looked up just to see what the hell I had been thinking about. Now I have to scroll all the way back through pages and pages of posts if I awnt to do that, and that's not worth a damn.

Who the hell thought that was a good idea, Blogger? Your IT guys? Corporate? Or some marketing genius? Sheesh.

It's like the irritating-as-hell thing that Facebook has decided to do where it shows me every fucking thing my friends "like". WTF? I need that, Facebook? Seriously? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Sometimes I want to slap the people who administer these applications like Moe did the other Stooges. Ya knuckleheads!

And you little bastards get the hell off my lawn, too.

Liebster Award - Graphic Firing Table Edition

So those winsome fashionistas (and connoisseurs of fine food, travel, and Korean culture, pop and otherwise) at The Hidden Thimble have tagged me for something called a "Liebster" Award. This thing is (as Talyssa and Siree describe it) an "...award is given to bloggers by bloggers like a chain to encourage and support the discovery of other upcoming blogs out there."

Anyway, there are some rules for this. According to the Thimblers, I need to; 1) thank the person who nominated me, 2) answer the questions from my nominator, 3) nominate bloggers who have less than 500 followers. (Basing this on Bloglovin, if not then Instagram “microblog”) 4) Create 11 new questions, 5) notify my nominees through social media.

So, okay - first, thanks, Siree and Talyssa!

Then...questions? Sure. I can do questions.

1. What’s the story behind your blog name?

well...the slogan up at the header of the blog reads "...firing unobserved rounds at anything moving." I was an artillery fire direction chief when I was in the Army, and I still write a lot about military issues. A "graphic firing table" is a sort of slide rule the gunners use to adjust fire. In one of my first posts I described it as: "...a simple but useful tool that helps you to commit broadcast mayhem. Kinda like a blog." So, there.

2. What does a normal day in your life look like?

Wake up before daybreak. Make coffee, feed cats. Drive to work. Drive to job site. Explain to contractor the this isn't fucking Burger King and he doesn't get to do it his way, he has to do it the way he's supposed to (which is my job - I'm the dirt nanny). Drive back to shop, write up field report. Do lab test, set up drilling exploration for tomorrow. Drive home. Cook dinner. Read to kid(s). Cuddle with wife. Blog. Sleep. Repeat.

3. Tea or coffee?

Coffee, cream. Something dark and earthy; Sumatran is good.

4. Why did you start your blog?

I love the sound of my own voice and I'm an opinionated sonofabitch. It was that or stand on a box in the park ranting at strangers. This way is less degrading.

5. What’s the best advice you have ever gotten?

In blogging, or in life? In life, probably "You're not nearly as important as you think you are." and "Why are you afraid of doing/saying/trying that? What's the worst that could happen?" In blogging, probably "If you write what interests you you will interest others."

6. What is your favorite post that you’ve written? (Please provide link!)

I think maybe the one about the great Ice Age floods in the Pacific Northwest called "When Da Levee Bruk".

"...dissolve into hopeless panic before the wall of water sweeps you all away into chaos and the darkness of the vanished years. Or perhaps you can only stand there, transfixed, staring at the long white line across the black horizon, as the first cold puff of wind racing out before the waters shivers your cheek like a lover’s last caress."

Sometime I can flat-ass write.

7. What is the most exciting thing about blogging for you?

The nature of it as epistolary friendship; meeting and talking to people - like the Thimblers, and you readers - from very different places and with very different mindsets. That's why I like comments; it takes this whole thing a step further, from me talking to us having a conversation. Letting my inner curmudgeon out for a walk.

8. What’s your favourite social media platform?

The only SMing I do is Facebook, and that only because I have a number of geographically distant friends that migrated over from blogging.

9. Do you think of yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

Very much an extrovert.

10. What or who is your current obsession?

For some reason I've been fascinated with religion, at least, the variety on display in these various "Religious Freedom" laws being passed in the redder parts of the United States.

Soccer, of course.

So. Blogs...who else should you go read?

Well...Goblinbooks, of course.

An old and peculiar favorite of mine: D.D. Tinzeroes

The Snarky Penguin; Badtux

Labrys, The Experiential Pagan

And Lisa Jakub's blog...tho I have no idea whether it's a "micro" blog or not, she's a fine writer and she swears like a trooper.

Now I need to go put ice on my rotator cuff - I think I sprained something patting myself on the back.

Touch of Gray

I've been having a difficult time working up the energy to blog lately.

A hell of a lot of it has to do with what my friend Labrys discusses in this post.

"At a certain point, one wonders, if opinion — expressed in writing to friends, the public, elected officials — reaps no positive result, why bother? What is the use of participation at that point? To keep inundating myself with the horrors happening around my country is maddening; this IS the sort of thing, with no relief in sight FROM government that makes people go a bit loony."

It doesn't help when the first thing I come across in scanning the Intertoobz is stuff like this: "Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever."

After tanking the global economy. And walking away whistling. Except when they whine that people talking all mean about how they managed to fuck up, loot, pillage, and burn, and still get paid waaayyyyy too much.

Fuckadoodledoo.

The world outside my little house and my home city just seems eaten up with idiotic dickishness, and this small forum seems utterly inadequate to deal, or even comment on, the vast wasteland of appalling dickitude on display; everything from gigantic, existential threats like anthropgenic global warming to this, a silly pair of articles about men and women.

This was the first I came across, a wife's blogged reply to attacks on her husband's confession that he had begged her to keep dyeing her hair dark because he "...didn't want to be married to the Queen of England."

Putting aside the insanely immense skweechieness of imagining sex with the zillion-year-old-royal-sourpuss Elizabeth Windsor-nee'-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the rest of the guy's rant is fairly standard. Gray is old, I'm not old, I don't want you to look/be old, because then it will mean that I'm sticking my dick in old and then I will be old and that's fuckin' horrible and scary!

Read it if you want. Meh, same old, same old dickish whine that every guy has whined ever since he looked around and realized he wasn't as rich, or as powerful, or important, or fucking the sleek girl he thought he deserved.

The wife's reply, though, is kinda sweet and kinda stupid, in my opinion. She starts by noting that many of the readers of her husband's original piece commented that he sounded like a jerk and a narcissist.

(And for the record, if you're married to a smart, funny, active, sexy woman and you're pissing and moaning because her hair is gray? You are a big ol' fuckin' narcissistic dickish jerk. Just one man's opinion.)

She goes through what a nice guy her husband really is, not objecting to her wearing ratty old sweats and a T-shirt to bed and generally being a Nice Guy. She concludes:

"The dyeing or the not-dyeing is ultimately irrelevant to my point, which is that it’s okay for one member of a loving partnership to care about looking attractive to the other, but in the end, the decision belongs to the one whose body it is. May we all be honest and kind to each other, not necessarily in equal measure, but in the exact right proportions for marital bliss."

Which is the summation of both the sweet and the stupid part of her take on this.

Sweet, because I think she genuinely loves this guy and sees him as "caring about" how she looks.

Stupid, because, frankly, this screams to me (as a kinda-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy) as another very-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy getting all dickish about sex and death and the death of sex.

He's looking at his wife's gray and inside there's this guy-siren shrieking "Warning! Warning! Incoming Grannie Panties! Sexual Shutdown Imminent!! Warning!"

He even admits to thinking what we all try and pretend we don't think; that while we see your every line and wrinkle, your every sag, droop, and softening we look at ourselves in the mirror and our brains sort of airbrush away OUR sags, wrinkles, and bloat. "Dammit, I'm still a fine figger of a man!" we dickishly preen to ourselves, while looking at the slight loosening at the top of your thighs and thinking...aaaagh! Old Queen Bess!

That thought isn't far from, as the dickish saying goes, "breaking a forty for two twenties" and is pretty solidly behind the whole dickish business of trying to pretend that the women's bodies we're intimate with are not supposed to get older because even as old men we don't want to have sex with old women.

It's a dickishly bad attitude, and I don't think this woman gets how corrosively dickish it is, and, yet, there she is not seeing that this dick is probably going to dump her for some sleek barista with a nose stud and a tramp stamp because he's a dick who is scared to pieces by his own inevitable death.

And that's just one couple's domestic business.

Don't get me started on the destruction of the world for fun and profit, the serfening of the world's workers (though I highly recommend the Economic Penguin's recent series on the whole business of how the 99% of us are in the process of being bent over as an inevitable function of how our current crony capitalist system works), and the overall boneheaded political and economic dickishness of human beings in general and in the modern U.S. "conservative movement" in particular.

So, as I told Labrys...I just find it hard to work up the give-a-shit enough to write political posts anymore. Or economics.

The critical mass of dickish stupidity, greed, and indifference seems so huge that I just don't see what there is left to say.

That the Public is an Ass?

That the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket because a critical mass of our fellows are dickishly unconcerned about anything outside their own groins, or religious delusions, or hates, or prejudices, or greed to look around and fucking see that?

That about a third of our fellow “citizens” appear to be perfectly happy to left the Radical Right turn the 21st Century U.S. into a bad parody of the 1890s only with more domestic spying and blowing up random foreigners? That we’ve dug ourselves into a ginormous global-warming hole and can’t even work up the concern to agree that we have, much less actually DO anything about it? That we can’t get the same 27-percent-toxic-stupidz to agree that taxes are the price of civilization, that, no the Zombie Negroes are not coming to Take Their Stuff, that more guns doesn’t = more Freedom, that you can't kill enough brown people to make the survivors love (or fear) you unless you kill a kajillion of them?

Lots of people who are smarter and better read and have bigger fora than we have have been banging these drums for days, months, years, decades, and what the hell have we got to show for it?

I still enjoy writing about things I enjoy and the small incunabulae that please me.

Nature. My family. Soccer. History. The Army I knew. Current-event-oddities and silly humor.

But politics, or economics, or the current State of the Union and the World?

No.

All it does is get me pissed off. Pissed off realizing how utterly fucked we are and pissed off realizing that there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it that won’t end up with me either dead or in prison.

All the more when I write about those issues I just feel very old and tired and sad, and it's not helping me write anything here that I don't end up hating even as I write it.

I'm sorry, but there it is.

I like you, but not That Way

Syrbal posted something the other day that got me thinking about this.

Isn't it odd how many of my gender seem to have a problem making friends with women?

If mean, I get that us het guys want to get into your pants. We're like that from about the time our testicles descend until about five minutes after clinical death. Most of us. Fortunately for everyone concerned most of us learn early on that shoving our noses in your crotch like a demented Pekinese is both counterproductive for the Fleshly-congress Project and demeaning for everyone involved, so we stop. The few that persist, well...there are still prisons, or Catholic parishes, enough for them, I suppose.

The thing that has always seemed rather strange to me, though, is how many guys seem to have a problem with the idea of seeing a woman (or women in general) as "someone-which-I-like-and-enjoy-being-around-but-whom-I-do-not-fuck". Like I say; I get that we want to have sex with you. But what seems to me both silly and wasteful is the notion that we only want to have sex with you.



As Syrbal notes in her post, this sort of "woman-as-animatronic-love-doll" thing is especially noticeable in the armed services. I saw the same thing she did; a LOT of the guys I knew who were the typical sorts of guys in the services saw women in general as a sort of life-support system for a vagina. Most of my buddies in the service didn’t have female friends; they had women they fucked (or, more charitably, girlfriends and wives), and their male pals.

A lot of them didn’t seem like they LIKED their wives and girlfriends a whole lot; they didn’t do things with them all that much other than things they had to do – kid-care stuff, household things.

That seems...well, sort of foolish. I typically like women, both as individuals and as a gender. There are women who are assholes just as there are men who are assholes, but there are as many likeable women out there as men and they enjoy the additional facet of being not-men; they have a perspective on life that I lack and that is valuable and interesting in and of itself.

One of the things that makes my bride so delightful is that she has all sorts of enjoyments and interests and I share many of them. One of my deepest regrets is that my deteriorating hip makes it impossible for us to exercise together; that was always a great pleasure. She never looked half so strong and beautiful as when she was whipping my ass on the squash court.

Yet there seems to be a ridiculously large number of my fellow guys out there who have a hard time with the idea that a woman can be a pal, or a comrade, or a co-worker, or a boss, or just a friend or acquaintance or someone who shares something with you; a burning hatred of conservative politics, say, or a love of soccer or Star Wars or birding or roller derby.



So it seems that not seeking out or having women friends makes our guy lives less pleasant and less interesting. And I don't get it. Why the hell should that be? Guys, any idea? Gals, any suspicions? What's the deal with this?

Decisive Battles: Hoth 3ABY

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

Have you ever come across something that you recognize immediately as It, The Shizzle, the Sweet Spot, that spookily perfect fit for your brain housing assembly that somehow manages to hit every refractory nerve ending dead smack center?

Well for me this one touches 'em all: Military history. Science fiction (or, to be exact, space opera) High Nerdism. Star Wars. Academia.

Oooh. Yes. Ya got me, Ackerman; right in the ten ring.

I can die a happy man now.

And - once you've read through Inside the Battle of Hoth at first link, then it's over to here for a CMA-style symposium on the original monograph and discussion of critical analysis of the battle itself:

"We do not speak of the sources of failure, but they should be well known. The first was the commitment of extensive resources to the construction of strategic weapons which could, by their very nature, make no tactical contribution. The second was the decision to abandon the tactics and procedures which had won the Clone Wars; well equipped clone armies honed to razor sharp conventional military effectiveness. We have little space here to revisit the destructive “Clones can’t do Counterinsurgency” debates that helped lead to a shift in personnel policies, but it is clear that these misguided efforts to defuse the rebellion by co-opting individual insurgents inevitably produced a force unready to fight high intensity, conventional battles against dedicated, well-equipped, and well-trained foes." (Farley, 2013)

Yes! Beyond awesome; awesomesauce! This is taking George Lucas and running with his incapable-of-writing-normal-human-dialogue ass at it's finest!

Enjoy.

Safe somewhere

One of the fun things about blogging is where it can take you
.

In this case, it took me into the life of someone named Dorothy MacKaill.

Dorothy is the strikingly pretty woman whose stocking-tops enliven the preceding post. I hate to admit it to her shade but all I was doing was looking for a bit of spice to illustrate the "pre-Code" era films and I Googled up her picture.

But from there I had a fun time pursuing Dorothy. Turns out that she was a damn fine actress and a sort of minor-A-lister in the Hollywood of the Twenties and Early Thirties. But she didn't quite make it over the bar. She wasn't re-signed by First National Pictures in 1931 and spent another six years knocking around Tinseltown before hanging 'em up.

But here's where the story actually gets interesting in a maddeningly opaque way.

Dorothy moved on from movies due to a mixture of failure to draw, bad luck, and bad timing. In 1931 - right after her best known flick Safe in Hell (which is where Dotty appears looking so fetching in those stockings) - she got married to a musician, a guy named Miller, and supposedly had decided to make a go of being a good little Thirties wife and live on hubby's income. This seems to have been something of a wash; they were divorced by 1934, with Dotty complaining that Miller had conned her into leaving the film biz.

She sort of drifted around after that for a while. She was back in Britain in 1937 where she made one of the long-running Bulldog Drummond flicks. I can't find where she spent the war years, but was presumably doing something like making O.D. paint for the War Effort. She is said to have spent time taking care of her mother, but there doesn't seem to be a genuinely reliable source for this.

She turns up in Honolulu in the early Fifties, living at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a setting of convivial solitude. She made a couple of appearances in the old Hawaii Five-Oh series in the Seventies, supposedly as a favor to Jack Lord.

She died in her bed at the Royal Hawaiian in 1990, at the age of 87.

What intrigues me is that Dorothy seems to have been perfectly satisfied with the quiet life she led in the islands, so it must have been perfectly satisfying for her.

But what it was like, who she was like, we do not and cannot know.

That's the fascinatingly elusive things about celebrity. Here's a woman that we can "meet" on the screen. We can see her walking, hear her speak, see how she carries herself; all the sorts of things we associate with people we actually know...and yet, we truly don't know ahything about her. If she chooses - and she did - she can disappear completely. Her life outside of her films, and three television episodes, is a complete blank to us.

She spent forty years doing...something...probably all sorts of things of which we know absolutely nothing.

We have no idea how she filled her days for forty years. Don't know what she liked, what she did, whose company she enjoyed and whose she didn't. Did she love to hike into the forests of the Koolaus? Could she tell an o'hia from a banyan? Was she a regular at the Honolulu Public Library? Did she play golf, or tennis, or rugby, for that matter?

Whatever she did, whoever she did it with, or not, Dorothy seems to have had a long and pleasant time doing it.

And that seems good enough to me.

If you gaze into your navel long enough...

...you'll end up trying to figure out what your own blog posts look like using some sort of goofy word-cloud app.

For example, here's the results from shoving all my posts from February 2012 into the meatgrinder:

Here's November...

And December.

One thing it did show me; I have GOT to clean up my mouth. Do you have any idea how many times the work "fuck" shows up in this blog?

Oh.

Heh. (Rubs his head after the fashion of an embarrassed anime character) Would it help if I mentioned that "mother" is only half a word in the U.S. Army?

Oh, and a huge hat tip to the Geek With Curves, who found this goofy word-cloud site. Thanks, Amy; +8 charisma for ya, gal!

Bunny Slippers

In a rather entertaining example of "blogging is an odd business", here's how this post developed:

In researching the trope of aliens arriving to chastise humankind I wandered over to the Wikipedia entry for the old Twilight Zone broadcast "To Serve Man" (because I vaguely remembered this as a TV trope from a long-ago viewing of the Simpsons spoof Hungry Are The Damned

Okay, so; having got that far, in the footnotes of the Wiki entry I stumbled across a reference to the whole "tasty, tasty humans" thing as a slogan on the unit patch of the 509th Bomb Wing, the USAF unit that flies the B-2 bomber.

I then ran down this patch, which does, in fact, have an aliens-eating-people connection but doesn't quote "To Serve Man" verbatim. Instead the motto on the unit patch is "gustatus similis pullus", very doggy-latin for the English phrase "tastes like chicken".

Are you with me so far?

The pursuit of this, then, led me here: to a small collection of oddball funny USAF patches. I like all of them, including the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, whose motto is pretty direct: NOYFB is an acronym for "none of your fuckin' business" which is, one assumes, the attitude that the C-5 jockeys who "...deliver classified aircraft from aerospace plants in Southern California to testing facilities around the country." routinely give when asked what they do for a living.

Which, then, led my mind back to this patch:

Which, when you get past the existential horror of nuclear holocaust, is pretty funny. There's a certain humor value - midnight-black humor, mind you - to the notion of Capt. Joe or Maj. Molly shuffling to the control console in their b-robe and fuzzy slippers, coffee in hand, to put an end to life on Earth.

As an aside, I wonder if there is something about the youthful nature of the USAF that produces these funny patches? Certainly the Army had it's silly slogans and catchphrases but in my experience they tended to be unofficial at best and secretive at worst. We would never have been willing to openly chuckle at ourselves the way these patches do. I have been hard on the USAF in the past and will be in the future, but this is an aspect of that service that I can and do appreciate.

They have a certain perspective of themselves that my own service conspicuously lacks.

So, anyway, there's the destination of all this Internet wandering; tasty fried humans - not as a centerpiece for an alien Thanksgiving but as a result of our own inability to figure out how to solve our differences without a bow and spear.

Not exactly an original thought, but perhaps one to stop for a moment and curl a lip at on the last day of the year.