Just for fun - Friday palate cleanser

Given the dire and dreary doings of the Second Fraudulency Administration, I've been trying to actively avoid all their bullshit in the news - it just makes be want to kill people and break shit, which at this point is still somewhere between "treason" and revolution" - and instead I've been trying to find things to enjoy.

Like this; "The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland" from Bret Devereaux's wonderful A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog.  

Besides the pure entertainment value of a serious discussion of the mechanized combat of the "Mad Max" world (and related/similar movies or video games) it introduced me to this insane IRL thing; the "Toyota War" in Chad.

Now there's a fun subject for a "battles" piece! Toyota Hilux versus T-55! I could see doing either the January 1987 Battle of Fada, or the larger and more critical engagement where the Chadians took the Libyan post at Ouadi Doum in March...any interest in either or both? 

What's not to like?

I think I need to get my hands on a copy of Ken Pollack's Armies of Sand first, though. It's supposed to have the best account of the Toyota War, and I'll take a look and see.

But if you've got a moment or two, go read up on Devereaux's take on the Road Warriors:

"All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything."

Make sure you read the footnote that I've omitted from the end of the final sentence in the above quote to learn more about the "armored codpiece". 

Which reminds me of...

..."Ironlily's" cute take on 14th Century religious orders of knighthood, girly Gothic armor (including armored codpieces) and (okay, yeah, a lot of...) cartoon cheesecake in general. 

Nothing serious, but kind of adorable (in a sort of smutty way...)

OTOH here's cartoon "adorable" without the smutty: Carol Cao and her delightful "little life in the woods" artwork:

(I apologize for the Muskrat link, but Cao doesn't seem to be posting anywhere else...). I love both the sweet feeling of her art and the attention to detail of the things like the rebounding raindrops on the little temple roof, or the suggestion of the kitty hanboks.

I've also been trying to find kind, soothing, happy reads. These have included the very "cozy" little adventure story The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong as well as several more chapters in Kashiki Takuo's series ハクメイとミコチ, Hakumei to Mikochi. 

Not all of this effort has been successful; I'm presently struggling with Axie Oh's The Floating World. 

I love the idea - Korean folklore meets science-fantasy (think a sort of Ghibli-world-building only without the aircraft...) and hero's quest fiction - but the writing just plods. It's not gross or face-smacking, it's a slow drip of little stuff, like this:

"...they waited for the guards to pass, their bright lanterns giving away their positions."

I don't know any other kind of lanterns, do you? I mean, if the guards had something dim, something like little chemlights, that only hinted at their passage, sure, that would be worth detailing. But "bright" is kind of a default "lantern", innit?

Or this, just a couple of sentences later, when one of these random NPC guards stumbles into our heroes:

"Sighting Sunho, he lashed out at him with a concealed dagger."

Not really "concealed", is it now, seeing as how the guy "lashed out" with it? And how do you "lash" with a dagger? Did the author mean "slashed"? Then why not say that? Mind you, slashing with a dagger - unless it's made on the lines of a full-size bowie or a pesh-kabz (a "Khyber knife" for you Great Game/Kipling fans...) is kind of a mug's game, especially given that the Macguffin of this part of the story is that these aren't random rent-a-cops but "Sareniyan soldiers", the regular army of the Evil Warlord dude of the story.

I mean, I get what the author was trying to say; this troop pops out of a door and immediately attacks our heroes who are very obviously not supposed to be where he finds them. Presumably because he's not on guard at the moment he lacks his issue weapon - probably a spear or sword, based on the worldbuilding - so he whips out his sidearm knife to take them out.

So that seems pretty easy to me:

"They stared at the guard and the guard stared back - for only a moment before drawing his belt knife and stabbing (slashing?) at Sunho, the closest of the three intruders."

Fixed.

I've got a couple of almost-sure-winners on hold at the library; Chris Moore's Anima Rising, more inspired wierdness from the Dirty Jobs guy, and a local author (Mark Pomeroy)'s Tigers of Lents, a semifictional story about soccer and our local Felony Flats, the southeast Portland neighborhood once famed for the New Copper Penny and now the home of the ridiculous Portland Pickles amateur baseball outfit.

Portland being Portland you knew there'd be a homegrown reaction to the feeling of being mulcted by big-time pro sports outfits like the Trailblazers and Timbers. This "Pickles" ballclub is one.

(The other is a nonleague soccer team run by the Pickles people called the "Bangers".

I've never seen the Bangers but if the Pickles level of play is anything to go by, well... let's say that I was a Cubs fan back in the day so I've seen some pretty bad baseball, but...

Then you realize that these are college dudes who aren't getting paid, so. 

 One last "fun thing" - Adult High School.

 This little chanbara/bad girl/school comic is just 100%, no-holds-barred, pure fun.

 

 Like BIG fun.

 

If you have a moment and a spare dime. go kick Alexis Flower a buck or three.

That's all I got. 

Some things I liked about 2022

This is a blatant rip-off of the post John Scalzi did over at Whatever.

If you're gonna steal, steal from people who you know do good work.

Right?

Anyway, I've never done one of these "year-in-review" sorts of posts before. Mostly because I've been looking forward rather than back; work-life tends to make you do that. You're pushing to stay ahead of the bill-collectors and corporate reviews and colonoscopies (okay, well, maybe not colonoscopies; those, like the occasional sudden sneeze, just sort of catch you) and all the other trouble in the world.

But this last year was different.

For one thing, I finally stopped being a wage-slave and having to strain to look forward.

Being a geologist-for-hire was a huge part of who I am - who I was - for thirty years. I did science for a living and put in a lot of long, hard days outside doing it. Shit, if you go to this website my front-page bio even says that: "...analytical by training and doggedly hard-working by necessity..." That was me.

Now?

Well...I'm still who I was then. Still analytical, still liberal, still...well, actually more judgemental, but that may have to do with the appalling tidal wave of reactionary shitheels that you can't swing a cat without smacking or so it seems.

But I've already gone into that. This is supposed to be about things I LIKED in 2022.

So. 

Retirement. 

I've liked being retired. At least so far.

I liked the lab work, soils testing, the sort of bench-chemistry-index-testing science we learn in school.

I liked the analysis, the puzzle-solving, the looking at the ground and the soil and the landforms and trying to figure out what was going on.

But because the bulk of my work was dirt-nanny stuff? Nagging asshole contractors to do what they low-bid and are trying to slime out of? That's the daily bread of most of earthwork engineers, and sweet baby Jesus how it sucks. Sucks the fun right out of all the other stuff.

So. NOT having to do that? I like that. And it makes up some for no longer having the disasters and lab and analysis to do.

So retirement? I liked that.

The Portland Japanese Garden

As you can probably tell from the photo essays, I love the Garden; the peaceful order, the quietly tended "nature". The colors, the light, the shape and the weight of it.

Membership in the Garden lets me get in early, when the City around it is still and the pathways are empty. I get to stroll and think, watch and reflect, and I like that a lot.

And speaking of Japan...

Anime and Manga

For some reason this past year I've been sinking deeper into the world of Japanese graphic art, whether in written form as manga - 漫画 - or animeアニメ . 

The Girl shares my enjoyment of the animated form; over the last year together we've enjoyed the big-screen versions of a couple of Studio Ghibli classics - The Cat Returns and Howl's Moving Castle - along with perhaps the most visually gorgeous film I've ever seen, Belle.

The story? Oh, just the old "beauty and the beast" chestnut. Fun enough, and the story of Suzu, the "belle" of the title, her friends and family, is genuinely sweet and moving. But that's not the main reason to watch.

It's the graphics.

Amazing.

My taste in the dead-tree forms runs all over the place, from dystopian futurism like Ghost In The Shell to sweetly adorable yuri romances. I think I've mentioned my fondness for the goofy adventure/military/fantasy Gate: Where The JSDF Fought. 

Rory Mercury?

Yow.

My favorite from 2022, though?

Sweat and Soap.

It's a weird, weird, deeply weird premise; the female lead, Asako, has "hyperhidrosis" - meaning she sweats more than she thinks is "normal" - while the male lead, Koutarou, has an incredible sense of smell which he normally uses in his job as soap designer but which leads him to Asako...who smells delicious! At least to him.

I picked it up purely out of curiosity; the storyline seemed odd but the artist (Yamada Kintetsu) has a nice clean style and I'm a sucker for that.

But that didn't catch me. 

What caught me was how it turns out to be a true, sweet, and moving love story.

True in the sense that these fictional people are deeply flawed, as are we all, and that they meet and become a couple in a very weird way...but one that finds goodness and joy even in their own and each others' flaws.

It's just gentle and kind and very, very romantic.

And speaking of romance...

First Night With The Duke

I follow a shockingly large number of comics at the "Webtoon" site, but this was far and away the most delightful; a goofy, funny, exciting, bizarre little story about an ordinary Korean girl who wakes up inside the romance novel she's reading but not (as is the usual form of these "isekai" (異世界) stories) as the heroine or the villainess.

She's just "Ripley", a minor character at the party scene where Zeronis - the titular Duke and a classic manga "dark and dangerous" hero - is supposed to meet the heroine and fall for her.

Instead Ripley gets plowed and ends up in bed with the Duke, who becomes obsessed with her instead of the woman he's supposed to fall for.

Oh, it's waaaayyyy more complex than that. There's fake deaths, and mad suitors and actual love and it was just big crazy fun. I'm sorry it's over, and I'm hoping that maybe the author will release an English language version, because I'd love to re-read it; it was my Top Romance Story of 2022.

And speaking of even more romance...

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I've been a Michelle Yeoh fanboi ever since her Hong Kong action days. But she, and this wildly inventive film, were perhaps the best thing I've seen at the movies not just in 2022 but for many years.

She's, well, everything all at once; mom, wife, diva, artist, businesswoman, savior of the world...while all the time being the same struggling everyday person just trying to get through one more day that we all are.

It's action and adventure and comedy but y'know what?

It's really a love story.

Yeoh is a woman who is tired. She's tired of herself, her husband, her daughter, her dumpy little laundromat that is her whole life. She's tired of struggling through every day just to find another just like it. And she is terrified to find that there's worse; the actual no-shit end of the world - worlds! - that only she - tired and beat up and struggling - can save.

And she does. Because deep down, she loves herself, her husband, her daughter...she loves the whole world enough to fight to save them all.

It's an epic performance in a terrific flick. 

It won't win Best Picture and she won't win Best Actress. 

It's too weird, and she's not diva enough.

But they should.

The Portland Thorns

God but this was a fun season. Winning the title was pretty awesome; I liked that, duh. But getting to write and think about the team and the league and the game was a hell of a lot of fun, too.

And we might just be getting a new owner and a new front office, after a pretty rugged couple of years from the old regime, and I'm liking that.

Oh, and I love this photo; it's from the post-match celebration. The player in the circle is Olivia Moultrie, who's still in high school and 1) can't drink, and 2) is clearly embarrassed at the grownups. Yeah, Livvy, grups can be pretty cringe-y.

Mary Bennett

One of the most fun things I've read - as a no-pictures-just-words book - this year has been the three volumes of the "Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett" series, beginning with the first Pride and Prejudice-based story of the middle Bennett sister finding work as a spy for the Regency government and continuing with the next two.

The fun part about these is that the author doesn't try to heroine-up her protagonist by making her more witty or clever or smart or attractive. Yes, she's the "heroine"...but she's also the same socially awkward, pedantic, prosy middle Bennett sister we meet in Jane Austin's novel.

Cowley makes that plausible; being drab, plodding, and detail-oriented might make you a crashing bore at an afternoon tea but a damn good undercover agent.

Mary is more than just that, though. Crowley shows us how her exposure to the bigger world outside of Longbourne helps Mary grow. She learns that she has actual skills, that she doesn't have to push herself forward to show them to others. Indeed, as a confidential agent she has to learn to conceal what she knows and does!

By the third book - where she has to "learn" to kiss to sweeten up a possible source or beguile an enemy agent - she's become genuinely thoughtful and even a bit wise. Does she still manage to find a way to work a moralizing quote into a romantic moment?

She's Mary Bennett! Of course she does!

But this Mary can have a romantic moment, and even enjoy it fully and intelligently.

There's supposed to be two more of these coming; I can't wait.

What else?

I still like this furry butthead. He's a good cat. Or, as my Bride describes him, he's "good at being a cat".

And I still love my family, my home, and my hometown.

So all in all, it was a pretty decent year. There were a lot of things I liked.

Tomorrow I want to talk about the next year, though.

Wait, wait..!

I can't go on without recommending...

 Lore Olympus

Rachel Smythe's post-modern take on the ancient Hades-Persephone tale.

It's funny, clever, sexy, all with the wonderful graphics that pulled me in the first time.

Plus it's an absolutely heartwarming love story.

(Can you tell I'm a sucker for a love story?)

Anyway...go, read it. It's tons of fun.

Holly Jolly

 So it is "that time of year", and - unchurched as I am - I can't dodge hard enough to avoid the reason for the season.

Presents!

In my younger days I labored like a galley slave over the worktable making hand-drawn Christmas cards even though I cared little enough for the day itself. 

Well...I'm like anyone else and like the pretty lights and music and the overall feeling of happy anticipation that surrounds the commercial Western Christmastime we've invented since breaking out of the old winter-solstice/dead-of-winter religious holiday binds.

But I'm barely tolerant of religion in general, and Christmas the holiday has become such a grotesque parody of the notions put forward in the Christian literature as to be almost hypocritical.

So I realized at some point that it was ridiculous to put that much work into something stanning a thing I barely cared about. So, I just stopped.

The one thing I kept on with was doing hand-drawn wrapping paper.

That was quick and fun, and was more entertaining than trying to come up with a single card idea. I could knock out a dozen of these little cartoons and they'd actually be of some use for the real reason for the season - loot!

Being retired has given me time to return to this old December tradition.

 Drachma the Cat always takes a licking on these. Well, all the pets do; they're cute and easy to work into a vaguely holiday-esque sort of image.

Here's the little fuzzy nutling again:

I'm a huge Gojira fanboi, so of course the Big Green had to make an appearance:

In case it's too small to read, the off-stage voice is saying: "You'll never fit down that (the chimney). You know that, right?" to which Gojira politely disagrees ("Shut the fuck up").

Of course My Bride has to make a cameo as Miss Debra The School Secretary:

She's also thinking about a trip to Scotland this coming summer, where she hopes to take a short course on dry-stone walling, so here she is meeting one of the locals:

Of course there are kiddos, so the Girl showed up having grown up quite a bit:

The Boy...mmmm, maybe not so much:

My Bride's comment was: "A bit too on-point, hmmm?"

Yeah. Well, he is what he is.

Well, that's the first hint of KrisKringlism for 2022. Tomorrow I am due back up in Goble to freeze my ass off testing fucking trench backfill. It'll be bloody awful fucking freezing, and I hope that'll be it for the year, but we'll see.

Hope you and yours are looking forward to a peaceful and happy Christmas season.

Whatever you may believe in.

On the nightstand...

 ...is my palate-cleanser from the turgid prose of Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming; perhaps the most peculiar, wonderful, bizarre, and intriguing train-wreck of a manga adaptation of an anime I've ever come across: Gate: Where The JSDF Fought.

I dunno, but this may possibly be the most manga-y manga I've every read.

(And to out myself as an otaku, I kinda love manga; I've read every tankobon volume of Kimetsu no Yaiba (鬼滅の刃) and everything from the hardcore old-school mecha stories like Shin Seki Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ) to fluffy romances like Our Teachers Are Dating...)

But this one is...reeeeeally special.

Start with the worked-out premise of an interdimensional gate between worlds.

But then add a bizarre mashup of Tolkiensque fantasy - dragons and trolls? - with Romans (sorta...) and a buxom imperial princess called - I shit you not - "Pina Co Lada". 

Have these mooks invade Tokyo and tear the living hell out of a bunch of innocent Japanese civilians...

(Don't forget to pitch in a whole bunch of gratuitous violence and nudity...)

 ...and then respond to all this with a sort of Japanese Army (sorry..."Self Defense Force") fanservice where the JGSDF proceeds to send an expeditionary force into this fantasy world so we can enjoy antitank weapons against fire-breathing dragons and Japanese recon infantry against Roman legionaries and the boys and girls of the Rikujō Jieitai as heroes...

...plus Rory Mercury, who is so beyond the rest of this weird shit that I leave you to the mercy of Wikipedia.

The whole thing is an absolute hoot, and I hope the outfit that's publishing this thing will continue to put out these in tankobon formate all the way to the end of the original anime run.

If only Atkinson had found a way to write in a loli-goth death goddess into the Battle of Long Island his stuff might work better. I'm just gonna have to call that a serious failure of imagination.

They've finally developed the boneless cat

And here he is, with Missy:

Drachma really is the sweetest kitty. He's not particularly a lapcat; I mean, he tolerates and even seems to enjoy being petted, but he doesn't really seek you out and cuddle with you in hopes of a pet.

But he's incredibly tolerant of being hauled around and mauled by the urchins. Practically every other cat I've ever worked for would have sliced the little mongers to ribbons for the stuff they do to him. Not Drachma. He simply lies quietly under their abuse until he's had enough, at which point he wriggles free.

I constantly remind the sprogs of this but they seem unconvinced. I await their encounter with a different, more typical, kitty and expect that they will be quickly disabused of their foolish conviction...

Just in case, here's the reference in the title.

It's actually sort of sad, a reminder of the time when Charlie Schultz bothered to actually cartoon and his creation was something other than a vehicle to huck insurance...

Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Poney

You won't understand unless you have a child ensnared in the wiles of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Trust me, though; it's freaking brilliant.

From the rather awe-inspiring pen of Amy Mebberson (whose Pocket Princesses I have raved about before at this joint...). Run, don't walk, down to your local comic store and buy her Disney Princesses, coming out in February. I would say more, but there are not enough words. She is simply a comic goddess whose Sharpie I am not worthy to uncap.

Friday night at the Ramada

Appears to be some sort of party night; the hallways are pounding with running feet and shouting kids. I have no idea what the hell of going on but it sure as dammit is noisy.

Meanwhile I've finished my daily work writeup and have an off day tomorrow - rain is forecast for tonight and the excavator doesn't want to slop around in the muck - so I need to find some time to kill, and blogging is as good a time-suck as any.

I don't recall where I found this; researching the Philippine Sea, I suspect.

It must have been a hell of a hot day over Rabaul, and the flak must have been light. Either that or our man was bolder than I would have been. I'd have strapped a steel pot over my crotch, at the very least. War's all very manly, but let's not let it incapacitate you for the manliest sport of all...

The other funny thing that this skyclad air gunner makes me think of is that it seems like an unbreakable rule of military service that the more chickenshit the conflict the more, well, chickenshit there is. I'm not sure whether that term has survived the twenty years since I first heard it, but "chickenshit", in Army terms, meant petty harassment over uniforms and appearance.

Look at the photos of GIs in Iraq or Afghanistan or, well, pretty much anywhere the U.S. Army has deployed in the past fifteen years. Everybody STRACed down tight; chinstraps fastened, Oakleys on, flak vests strapped up.

Then go back and look at the pictures from damn near any Army or Marine unit anywhere in in the world between about 1943 and 1945. Half the time those guys look like hobos who have hit the Army-Navy Store on jumble sale day; blouses un-bloused, helmets or those weird knitted "jeep caps" or just bare-headed, every variation of "uniform" you can think of and some you probably couldn't if you sat down all day with both hands.

I'm not sure how much of this was just the effects of having a gajillion guys in uniform and the near-impossibility of trying to make them all look the same (tho God knows Georgie Patton tried) or whether it had more to do with having more important things to worry about - like getting their asses whipped by truly dangerous enemies - than looking pretty.

I think I found this on one of my friends' Facebook feeds while I was dorking around on the Internet - an occupational hazard of being far from home with nothing else to do. No ulterior motive other than pure enjoyment.

One of the fun things about having older kids other than not having to wipe asses is that they start interacting with you as people rather than just as a sort of parasitical life form that relies on your for food, shelter, and emotional nurture.

My daughter, for example, has developed a truly adorable talent for drawing - which is NOT my doing, by the way; she started sketching well before seeing any of my stuff - and now surprises me with her little cards and cartoons when I go away. She tucks them into my bag, usually early in the morning when she gets up. Here's one from her latest going-away card:

In case the word-balloons are a little difficult to read, the gist is that our two cats are arguing - not an unusual situation - about who is fuzzier...at which point some sort of TV moderator-cat shows up and announces that they are in a cuteness contest, which both Drachma and Nitty ignore. I'm not sure which is better, her cat-characters themselves or the whole comic set-up. Either way, she's a clever little Missy, that little Missy.

Saw my first Carson bumper sticker today which just served to remind me of 1) what a remarkable liar that man is, and 2) what an amazingly stupid creature the average American voter is. I mean, c'mon! If you haven't scraped off that damn sticker after the mad doctor has denied evolution, claimed the pyramids were grain silos, stated that he was offered a "scholarship" to West Point (hint; there ain't no such thing), and shown that his understanding of the U.S. fiscal system is about on the level as a milk-cow's understanding of the Nicene Creed you're a goddamn moron and should be trusted with a vote like a Capuchin monkey should be trusted with a live grenade.

Speaking of odd things...

...I have NO idea what this is or why it is. Some sort of 1950's weightlessness test with a cat for a subject? Wing-wiper humor? I got nothin'...but it's a great image.

Another great, if odd, image:

June Haver - born June Stovenour of Rock Island, Illinois - the "Pocket Grable" some time in the Forties. I'm not sure what the hoops for the hoopskirt are all about, but presumably a publicity snap for some sort of costume picture. Very pretty woman, but her story is more interesting than her looks. She seems to have had a very pallid interest in filmmaking, and she when she married Fred MacMurray (yeah, the "My Three Sons" dad guy...) she dropped out altogether.

The MacMurray-Haver menage sounds fascinating. MacMurray was a real red-meat Republican of the Taft variety and both financially brilliant and a guy who sounds kind of neurotic neat-freak and skinflint; June says that "When I married Fred, he was terribly set in his ways. He was a fuss-budget. He hadn't quite progressed to being a lint picker, but he was already an ash-tray emptier, and that's just about as set in his ways as a man can get." Supposedly one of the keys to his wealth was that he never spent anything he didn't have to. The cast and crew of his pictures commented that not only did he typically brown-bag his lunches but that in the spring they would typically contain a colored Easter egg weeks or months after the holiday rather than waste the technicolor henfruit.

Mind you, June's other career option was to become a nun - she was a devout Roman Catholic and had her share of romantic tragedies - and tho she did take vows she left after a couple of months, so maybe MacMurray was easier to get along with than her Heavenly Bridegroom. Maybe. She is said to have made the comment that she had asked her adopted daughters not to write a Mommy Dearest about her, but that “I told them if they wanted to write about their dad, that was OK.”

I'm still going to have to figure out how to kill the day tomorrow between sleeping-in and the Timbers semifinal match tonight. Which reminds me...

There's another Timbers fan - a fella by the name of Diskin - who domes some wonderfully creative things with standard or stock images or old posters to make, well, Timbers Propaganda. Here's an example:

I have no idea where the heck the guy finds the time or the creativity to do this, and it covers everything from workups of old magazine ads, Soviet propaganda posters, commercial images, original work...Diskin's work is a never-failing entertainment for a Timbers fan. I'm linked to his FB page, so I come across whatever his latest effort is when he posts it.

So it was today that I came across this:

The "shake the gates of hell" thing is a Timbers Army song, and Shakes the Skunk there is, well, shaking the gates of hell. This is with the playoff match coming up tonight so, well, because.

But that's not what the entertaining thing was. To me, anyway.

Nope, the fun bit was the original image that Diskin used to adapt this, which is the Distinguishing Unit Insignia (and, yes, it's called a "DUI") for the Oregon State Army Guard Headquarters; HQ STARC.

The original has a beaver (no, duh?) instead of the skunk and the Army reds and golds rather than Timbers greens:

Which, in turn, reminded me of my time assigned to STARC, my last Guard unit and the one I retired out of.

Not that I was actually assigned to STARC proper, that is, the head shed under the flagpole. I was one of the satellite detachments, of which there were a shit-ton. STARC in my time was ginormous, probably something between 300 and 500 bodies altogether, easily larger than any one of the infantry battalions (that were chronically understrength, and moreso after several extended deployments to the Middle East). Apparently this is a common ARNG thing; state headquarters tend to be a repository of warm bodies and not just any warm bodies, either; they are usually pretty senior people in both the officer and noncommissioned officer ranks. The maneuver units might go hungry for bodies, but STARC never starves.

I'm not sure what the situation is now...except that I know that the umbrella Oregon maneuver unit, the 41st Infantry Brigade, is no longer a true brigade; it has been reduced to two infantry battalions and has lost one of the artillery batteries - my old Charlie Battery - from the FA battalion. Whether this is a top-down sort of reorganization, or a recognition that most of the old "traditional" one-weekend-a-month Guardsmen have been driven out by deployments and that there is no way to fully man a three-battalion brigade, I have no idea.

And speaking of the FA battalion, here is the unit crest for that outfit:

I still have the DUIs from that outfit, but I was never able to look at the crest without observing that even though I know that the critter on the top is supposed to be a beaver (the sunset and the beaver are from the old 41st Division/41st Brigade crest) it always looks like a goddamn prairie dog or a gopher to me.

I mean, look at it! No beaver was ever that lanky, they don't stand up like that, either, and that's the saddest little skinny beaver tail I've ever seen. It's a damn gopher, and we're not the damn "Gopher State". Puh-leeze.


So. I'm off to find some other source of entertainment...but you might end up hearing from me sooner than you'd think. It's pretty dull down here in Medford.

Spruntly

By chance came across some of the late Seventies-early Eighties work of Wallace Tripp:

I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy his work. The man had a taste for puns, but given his linework I'm inclined to forgive him; he also had a brilliant visual wit and a gift for drafting that was at the same time clean and complex. Here's a perfect example: Primavera 1942:

Classic Tripp; the sight gag using the Bottichelli painting as the model, the painstaking attention to detail in the setting and poses coupled with Forties fashions, anthropomorphic animals, and goofy Easter eggs, like Venus in the background or Dugout-Doug-the-fieldmouse in the little jeep down in the lower right.

Sadly, Tripp's work is long out of print, and from his website I suspect that there is no promise of seeing any of his work again except as a curiousity. In the meantime, here's a nice selection of his material from the blog My Delineated Life.

Three Way Riot; "Troops of Doom"

Beavering away on the Rhineland 1936 for March, but I wanted to take just a moment to recommend one of my secret vices; Troops of Doom.



What the fuck is a "Troops of Doom"? I hear you ask.

Well, imagine what you would do if you were a grown-up science fiction geek with a lingering love of all those little poseable dolls - sorry, "action figures" - you collected in your G.I. Joe and Star Wars periods and just couldn't bring yourself to give up.



Add to that you had a camera, a lot of time on your hands, mad diorama skilz, and a quirky sense of humor?

You'd probably create a webcomic where the Star Wars stormtroopers and the G.I. Joes and their COBRA adversaries faced off in the three-way free-for-all knockdown-drag-out. Oh, yeah, and you'd throw in those goofy LEGO guys as some sort of freakish super-alien wierdos with mysterious "LEGOtech" powers as the object of all three sides' greed, right?



Add you'd in a wickedly funny gift for dialogue.

And there you'd have "Troops of Doom".



Anyway, aside from recommending the comic to my regular readers I don't know of George Lucas reads this blog. I kinda doubt it, but...if you're reading this; George, dude, you NEED to become a regular reader of "Troops of Doom" because your last couple of movies pretty much sucked pipe, and I hear your talking about making another three and you could do a lot - I mean a REAL lot - worse than hire this guy to write your script.

I guaranfuckingtee he can do better then "I hate sand."

Okay; back to work. But, seriously, check it out; ToD is a total hoot. And you can say I said so.