A Healthy Alternative to Work

I discovered at lunch today that I may have latent Communist tendencies. They aren’t strong, but they’re there, I think. More on that later.

The inimitable Salemonz returned from DINFOS last night, and we grabbed lunch at Pizza Hut today to catch up. He’s tossing around the idea of asking for a conditional discharge from the Army in order to go to the Air Force’s officer candidate program.

There’s really no reason not to. The Air Force treats its people well, and being a lieutenant would certainly be a lot more lucrative than being an Army sergeant.  Besides, he has no real desire to be a journalist, so he’s got approximately nothing to lose.

It’s like having the option to make every aspect of your life better, I suggested over lunch.

I’d probably be looking into it too, if I wasn’t looking to get the hell out of the military as soon as is legally possible. The problem is, that’s looking like a slimmer and slimmer chance by the day, given the current world situation (which isn’t going to change noticeably, regardless of what happens Nov. 2). I don’t believe the rubbish they’re trumpeting about over at Recruiting Command (which, by way of trivia, is located here at Fort Knox) about “meeting recruiting and retention goals” and all that rot.

Does anyone in their right mind actually join the Army these days?

I’m sure I’ll be proud of having done it – once I’m out. The important thing is that I do GET out, and avoid being reactivated on this sneaky “IRR” (Individual Ready Reserve, a contract clause that automatically extends ANY military contract to eight years) business and sent to Iraq after having just established a civilian job. Apparently, it’s happening to quite a few recently-separated soldiers.

Former Sgt. Maj. of the Army Jack Tilley spoke to a battalion of light infantry soldiers last Thanksgiving in Korea, and I got the story. He spoke pretty candidly about what was going on in the world, and quelled any hopes that the operations in Iraq would be over any time soon.

“Think in terms of ten, twenty years,” he said.

He’s right, of course. Hell, look at where he said it – just south of the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea. That war was more than 50 years ago.

If you’re voting for Kerry this coming Tuesday, don’t kid yourself into thinking he’s going to make the situation in Iraq go away. He won’t, because he can’t. It’s bigger than all of us, now.

Tonight: the last Fort Knox Eagles high school football game of the season, probably followed by beer pong in Numb-nuts’ room. Fuck it.

-30-

Here's the commentary I did for this week's Turret. Again, not my best offering, but it has moments.

Devoted fans
haven't helped
the NHL

By Spc. Ian Boudreau
Turret Sports Editor

The high school football season is heading
into the playoffs, the World Series is in full
swing (if St. Louis manages to win a game),
the NBA has started up again, and we've
got plenty of NFL to keep us warm through
the holidays.

But has anyone noticed what's missing?

What's going on with the National Hockey
League?

Well, we're in what the ESPN people are
calling a "lockout." Stadiums are empty.
Teams aren't playing. And money isn't flowing
into the coffers of league bigwigs.

Most importantly, none of us are seeing any
hockey. Of all the sports I have any interest in,
I'm most fiercely loyal to my home hockey
team, the New York Rangers.

I don't understand much about hockey, to be
honest, but I will say that I'll miss the Rangers
while they're on the NHL-wide "vision quest,"
or whatever it is, to see if playing hockey in
Sweden is a better deal.

Sports loyalties are a big part of the game, and
there are lots of different kinds of fans.

There was lots of talk, some of it less than
charitable, during the Boston Red Sox / New
York Yankees American League
Championship Series showdown last week.
Some people talked a lot about Boston's Babe
Ruth "curse," and some asked whether the Sox
bothered to bathe before games, but mostly
people talked about how much they hated the
Yankees.

Okay, sure, the Yankees have the biggest payroll
in the MLB, but Boston's next on the rich-list. Maybe
A-Rod is a jerk. I'll definitely give you that one.

But I think the real reason most folks hate the
Yankees so passionately is because they've been taught
to. People have hated the Yankees for years, and they'll
be darned if their kids are going to grow up Yankees
fans.

Notre Dame fans are another strange example of the
passionate fan. The Fighting Irish don't exactly have
the best record in college football, but they have
arguably the most devoted fans in the NCAA, and they
have instant name-recognition.

Most people recognize the Sam character (Sean Austin)
in the recent "Lord of the Rings" movies as "the guy who
played Rudy."

I saw another example of nearly-rabid sports devotion
while I was going to school near Pittsburgh. For the
four years I lived within 40 miles of the city, I could
scarcely find an article of sports apparel, be it a baseball
cap or football jersey, that wasn't black and gold.

Does it matter that the Pirates are a rotten baseball team?
Not a bit. Pittsburgh's behind them.

It's a shame that the NHL has gone looking for greener
pastures. Maybe in spite of its admittedly devoted fan
base, hockey didn't really "catch on" in the United States.
Soccer's in much the same predicament n how many bars
can you walk into in Missouri and hope to catch the latest
Manchester United game?

Of course, I have my own theory as to why American
hockey is becoming an endangered species.

The League needs to ease up on fighting. Penalties in
the National League got stiffer and stiffer, until it really
wasn't worth players bothering at all. I'm sure this
saved on medical bills, but look where it got them: an
NHL-wide lockout.

I said to begin with that I don't understand all the
nuances of the game of hockey (my experience was
limited to the variety featured in "Wayne's World").
But I still always found hockey fun to watch…
particularly when the gloves dropped and the blows
started flying.

-30-

Well, here’s some good news: Study suggests red wine slows lung cancer. What a great story! Where do these guys get their grants? I’d like to do a study that examines the link between marijuana use and sitting around and getting high. Maybe there’s some sort of hidden health benefit in beer drinking. Who knows? There’s only one way to find out.

Everyone in Boston – and, I imagine, throughout the country – is laying an egg right now after the Red Sox victory in the World Series. “The Curse of Bambino is broken,” they scream.

Yeah, I guess so. But the last time they won was 1918, and if you take the number of World Series played since then, and divide it by the number of teams in the MLB, well, it had to happen sometime. But I understand why everyone’s excited. The Sox winning is something like seeing Haley’s Comet.

Oh, Hero of Palestine/Asshole to the Rest of the World Yasser Arafat may be hospitalized, and let me just say that it couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. I believe he’s due for an acute case of death… I’m just surprised it didn’t happen at the end of an Israeli air force missile. Arafat is to the Mideast peace process what Ted Nugent is to the deer population of Michigan.

And yeah, the Presidential Election is ANOTHER DAY CLOSER. Since my last post, I’ve been getting more platitudes about “duty as an American” and “civic responsibility” than I can stand. I’m pretty sure I’ve put in plenty of time on my American Duty punch card, but hey, apparently I’m still a shitbag if I don’t vote. So vote, even if you’ve had a prefrontal lobe lobotomy and think that it’s George Goebbels running against Louis Anderson.

This week’s Turret came out today – give it a while before they update the Website. I did a commentary on rabid sports fans and how they haven’t helped the NHL, which is currently off searching for greener pastures in Sweden. It’s not one of my better ones, but I was under the gun Tuesday and it was all I could think of.

That’s it for me, at least for now.

-30-

As a November 2 option, suicide is looking like a rosier and rosier solution.

For some reason I’m not even going to begin to try to explain, I was leafing through an issue of Entertainment Weekly that was lying around the office this morning (shut up! I was looking for a review of Surviving Christmas so I could read nasty things about Ben Affleck!), when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a full-page ad for citizenchange.com. It took me a moment to get over the shock.

You see, in this particular ad, simplicity is key: there, jutting out her chest with thumbs limply pointed toward herself, is fake celebrity and home video star Paris Hilton, bravely displaying a T-shirt with “VOTE OR DIE!” written on it, nicely framed by peroxide-blonde locks. And of course, she’s wearing that ever-present accessory, the vacant “I’ve just been smacked in the face with a shovel” half-lidded stare.

In the lower right corner of the ad, it says “IT’S THAT SERIOUS!”

Holy shit. The end is here. I swear I can hear the Horsemen of the Apocalypse down the block a little ways, just past the clanging of the ice cream truck bell. It’s that serious? Serious enough for that Hilton tramp to appear in another blatantly self-promoting ad? Good God – we’d better batten down the hatches, troops! Something BIG is going to happen, if Paris is on the case!

I had lost all sense of physical balance by the time I got to this point, but fortunately, I was sitting down. I decided to investigate further, and surfed on over to citizenchange.

Ahh, how did I guess? It’s a flashy animated website with slick graphics and… more importantly… multiple celebrity endorsements. Here’s Mya, 50 Cent, and P. Diddy, all wearing Paris’ bold T-shirt. Worried that my eyeballs were going to start bleeding (I’ve come dangerously close a few times in the past week), I clicked on one of the site’s links. “The Issues” looked like a heading that might save my beleaguered soul.

I was wrong.

Aside from a link to FactCheck.org, which you could just as easily have found here, there was pretty much nothing of any use – at least to young voters, in whose interest all this high-tech Webdesignery is supposedly created. Instead, all you’ll find is links to various organizations such as MTV and World Wrestling Entertainment who want to bankroll the upcoming election into free advertising and exposure.

Hey, I love freedom as much as the next guy. That’s why you’ll find me writing nonsense to publish here – I’m very happy that I have the opportunity and liberty to do it. But is this how we want to promote voting in young people? Vote or Die? What, is P. Diddy going to come to your house and kill you if you don’t cast your vote? Are you saying that it doesn’t matter who you pick, as long as you pick someone? What kind of sense does that make?

None, that’s what kind. Here’s my take on this, my “Rock the Vote” campaign contribution, if you will:

Go learn about the United States, about current affairs, about what issues make a difference in this country. Learn about abortion, about the economy, about gay marriage, taxation laws and censorship. Learn about the candidates who want to become your president and about how they claim they’ll help you and the American people in the next four years. Learn about foreign affairs, about the United States’ role in the rest of the world. Learn about the Middle East and our role there. After you’ve done this, decide which candidate is going to do a better job and vote for him.

Otherwise, don’t bother. This isn’t a fucking popularity contest. I don’t care if you think George W. Bush looks like a chimpanzee or if you think John Kerry looks like a Munsters character. Go to HotorNot.com and vote for some sorry bastard who needs anonymous Internet users to validate his or her physical attractiveness. Go use your impulse to “vote” for something somewhere where it won’t cause any damage. Your consideration is appreciated.

-30-

I was thumbing through a notebook I’ve had with me since I started Basic Training, looking for a mailing address for a friend of mine, when I came across this list of “Things to Do” until I left Korea. Leaving Korea involves clearing the 2^nd Infantry Division, and you’ve got to get a lot of signatures from a lot of different people. Here’s what I had left to do, according to this handwritten list (translations are supplied parenthetically):

MONDAY TIMELINE –
0001 – Sign out on leave.
0705 – First bus to Camp Mobile, clear CIF (Central Issue Facility)
1030 – Clear G2 (Division intelligence/Security), Supply, R&U, S1 (Battalion personnel), 1SG (First sergeant), Commo, Re-Up (Reenlistment. Hahaha!), CDR (Commander) – Finish company

NLT (No Later Than):
1400 – Camp Mobile for final out, final finance
1700 – Head out to OSAN!!

Notes:
- Leave bags @ office, pick up after final out. (Final out is your final records check to make sure you’ve done everything and collected the required signatures)
- Tell everyone to fuck off.

Weekend:
- Get camera from office
- Try to find flak vest piece (a neck protector someone stole off mine and I wound up having to pay for)
- Pack
- Clean room
- Get drunk
- Go to Mass.

There are a couple subtle hints in there about how I felt about being in Korea by the time I was getting ready to leave. Happy Monday, folks!

-30-

Ho ho, what do we have today? Well, the Astros fell to the Cards in Game 7 last night, so they won’t be going to the Series, much to the dismay of rabid Houston fan Finch. In the war department, we’ve pounded a couple Fallujah arms dumps. I guess we can thank the Air Force for that one.

And onto the forcible removal of toenails. Our two presidential hopefuls have “fanned out into the swing states,” which is a phrase I would originally have expected to come across either at recess or in a chemistry textbook. God, this is so boring. My eyes are about to start bleeding.

The Army’s been encouraging everyone to vote, and has provided us all with the means to secure absentee ballots and voter information – practically daily. I’m not sure I’m motivated enough to do it.

First off, my vote won’t count. No, no, no, trust me on this, it won’t. My Home-Of-Record is in New York, and the yahoos up there elected Hillary Clinton – an Arkansas native who had the poor sense to marry one William Jefferson – to the Senate. So whether or not I send in a ballot (endorsing either candidate), Kerry will, uh, carry New York.

So why don’t I spare myself the trouble? Calvin (the six-year-old version) once said that he was never going to vote, because that way he could claim innocence when a representative screwed up, and proceed to lambaste the representative without fear of guilt or reprisal. Sounds like a plan.

I guess, despite all the “controversy,” “debates,” and “campaigning,” both candidates have failed to convince me that it matters who wins, practically speaking. Regardless of who wins, we’ll still have taxes, Southerners will still be unable to drive their vehicles if there’s even a touch of snow, and, most importantly, we’ll still be in Iraq – which really is the piece de resistance in this whole fiasco.

A vote for Kerry is a vote for peace, at least according to anti-war hot-air factory Michael Moore, who’s definitely played a huge part in dumbing down this election’s discussion to around the level of kindergarten propaganda. But early on (I don’t know if he still thinks this way or not), Kerry said he wanted to grow the Army by 40,000 troops. That’s at least two divisions’ worth. I’m not sure where he thinks he’s going to get these dumbasses from, but unless the human cloning program has been advanced to, oh, around the Star Trek level, I don’t see it happening. They’re certainly not walking into the recruiters’ offices from off the street.

So the solution is obviously to move to a deserted island (not the same one the Idiots are headed to, but they probably didn’t take my advice anyway) and start a new civilization. So far I’ve got a population of one – me. Now I just need to find a woman.

-30-

Here's the commentary I did for this week's upcoming Turret.

When I started this blogging business, I never really had it in my head to actually meet people. It was all just a new way to kill time at work (hence the title). But as it’s worked out, I’ve met some real great folks.

One of whom called me from Australia last night. We’d tossed the idea around, and I half expected it to run into some unforeseen snag, but thanks to dogged persistence on Rinna’s part, my phone rang last night and we had a chance to put voices with the faces and words we’d been looking at for the past few months.

I was so excited, I nearly dropped the phone.

It’s hard to know what to expect when you hear someone’s voice for the first time after reading their written word for a while. Think about Calvin and Hobbes. Reading the cartoon, you get a definite sense of Calvin’s sense of humor and personality from what he says and Bill Waterson’s handwriting style. But try to imagine what Calvin would sound like. Tough, huh?

Well, Rinna sure doesn’t disappoint. I get a kick out of accents, and hers’ is awesome. The Aussie slang just adds to the whole experience – words like “manky,” which I could never get away with saying, just seem to sound completely natural coming from her.

She said she had ten minutes before the international rate skyrocketed, so I tried to keep track. Eventually, we figured ten minutes were up, and as it turned out, it had been more like thirty. Time flies, huh?

She called back a little later after I teased her over Instant Messenger about how she pronounced words like “heart.” We went back and forth pronouncing different words that we found funny, and finally I had to get her to say something really important:

“Say ‘Rar,’” I said.
“Rar!” said Rinna.

It was awesome (another word that translates hilariously into Aussie).

I’ve been trying to come up with a comparable voice. I met an Australian girl in Korea (at Gecko’s, in Itaewon) who sounded as if she could have done dubs for Ozzy Osbourne when the language got too graphic on his show. Rinna, on the absolute other hand, sounds more like… Elizabeth Hurley. Naturally, she’s got a vocal quality all her own, and it’s fantastic.

It's just great to be able to add that dimension to her already loveable personality. Rinna, cheers to you! I can’t wait till next time, and, uh, it’ll be my dime.

-30-

I was going to get so much stuff done today. Two football stories, the Picks section of sports, maybe organize a few place fillers… no. That was not to happen. Instead, I found out three hours late that I had guard duty today at Fort Knox’s ammo dump.

This guard shift makes junior-varsity golf look exciting. There’s nothing to do. You sit, you watch people come in and you take their IDs, then you push the button to open the gate for their vehicle to enter the facility.

Well, that wasn’t about to get me down. It was raining hard, but I’d brought a couple books, and I also had figured out how to talk to one of my bestest-ever friends via AIM on my cell phone. The fact that typing on a cell phone keypad makes me come off somewhere between Rainman and a “Japanese cereal box” (her terms) is only a minor detraction.

Eventually, I found myself out in the guard shack by the Vehicle Holding Area, alone with my thoughts and a book about the capabilities of North Korea. As I was reading through a veritable Sears catalog of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, terrorist affiliations, and armed forces organization, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, why was it we didn’t ever go after these bastards?’

Then I realized how simple it is. They’d kick our ass.

Korea’s a rotten place to fight a war, and the odds aren’t exactly stacked in favor of the US/ROK forces positioned there already. To get an idea for the terrain, wad up a piece of paper into a ball, then unroll it half-way. That’s probably a pretty good relief map.

One statistic quoted in the book suggested that 20 percent of the ROK/US military assets in South Korea would be destroyed within the first 90 seconds of war, should one break out.

So – isn’t everyone happy it’s Monday?

-30-

So yes, I watched baseball instead of the debate. It’s sort of a conflict of interest – I mean, as a good freedom-loving American, what is one to do when you’re double-booked like that? The Finch wrote me a great commentary for the sports section this past week, which you can find here.

Unfortunately, as I was leaving Finch’s room after the game, I knocked his Craig Biggio bobble-head off his countertop and killed it, which Finch took as a bad omen for the forthcoming Astros/Cardinals game in St. Louis. Karma is karma, and the ‘Stros lost by way of and 8^th-inning miracle to St. Louis in a driving rainstorm.

I’ve ordered him a new one, but it’s on back-order, and won’t be here until long past the World Series.

We laughed our heads off at ESPN.com’s Bill “Sports Guy” Simmons’ ACLS Diary on Page 2 (also home to the legendary Hunter S. Thompson). Check out his minute-to-minute commentaries on Game 1 and Game 2 of the series. Simmons, despite his hatred of the New York Yankees, only momentarily flipped to the debate, just in time for Senator Kerry’s Tony Soprano comment.

I noticed this article about nuclear material “mysteriously leaving” Iraq today. Huh? Does anyone know what the hell is going on over there? Ok, sure, maybe Hussein had noble purposes for this stuff, but the track record isn’t good. Apparently, weaponizeable (I just invented a word, Microsoft doesn’t like it) nuclear by-products have been smuggled out of the country from right under the noses of the Austria-based IAEA. Huh. This “no-WMD” thing seems to be getting weaker and weaker, despite sound bytes from the CIA and the President.

More later…

-30-

Geez, almost forgot. Dad (Gonzopa) pointed this one out to me: VodkaPundit's Drunk Debateblog. It matches Bill Simmons' pieces nicely. Basically, this guy just pounds martinis while watching presidential debates... I remember recommending a similar course of action a few posts ago. Strange.

We’ve had a rash of really bad ideas flying around society today, and I think it stems from the fact that people are unable to tell if they’re idiots or not. If every person could determine, for certain, whether or not he was an idiot, we’d be able to filter things a little better. Presidential debates, for example, wouldn’t necessarily kill brain cells due to being dumbed-down so much. Donald Trump would not have a reality TV show. In fact, there probably wouldn’t be any reality TV shows.

Anyway, I figured I’d do my part and develop at least a guideline for people to sort of look through and sort out that burning question: Am I An Idiot?

See which of these statements could be said of you:

You are interested in seeing what happens in the next episode of the Real World.
This could be an indication that you think reality TV is a good idea. Since it’s so blazingly evident that it’s not, you’ve obviously been swayed into believing it is by the fact that the phenomenon is sweeping across every network that can put security camera images on a television screen. This could mean that you’re an Idiot. Further evidence to this end could be if you thought, about three years ago, that “boy bands” were a good idea and could revolutionize the music industry. In a good way.

You’re voting for John Kerry because Martin Sheen says it’s a good idea.
I think that one stands on its own. I’m not saying you’re a de facto Idiot if you vote for Kerry, but doing so because you heard your favorite celebrity (or maybe even one you never really cared about before) say it’s a good idea is probably a strong indication of at least latent Idiocy. A corollary to this would be voting for George W. Bush because Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent told you to.

You leave food outside my barracks so that the “cute little skunks” have something to eat.
This is more than an indication. It’s a sure-fire symptom of full-blown Idiocy that’s metastasized into Moronhood.

You bought Paris Hilton’s “memoirs.”
You know who you are. You won’t admit it to your friends, but you bought it. And that makes you an Idiot.

You think you’re helping me out by saying “those things will kill you” when I light up a Camel.
I know, jackass. That’s the whole idea. I have no interest in living past fifty. Shut up and let me get my cancer in peace.

You think Larry Flint is a free-speech advocate.
No, he makes dirty magazines. There’s a difference.

You’ve covered the back of your mini-van with garish bumper stickers.
“Hey, what I want to do is destroy the resale value of my vehicle. Oh! Here’s what I’ll do…” Do you really hate your car? That bad? Don’t put stickers on it, sell it. Then you won’t have to look at it anymore.

You think “SmirkingChimp.com” is a source of unbiased reporting and balanced facts.
If you do, you’re just kidding yourself. Or you may be an Idiot.

You laud George Lucas as a rare visionary.

If you identified with any of these statements, seek help immediately. Better yet, find yourself (and your  similarly-minded friends) a deserted and remote island in the Arctic Circle and move there.

-30-

Postscript: Sorry, but I just had this itching to be an asshole today. This test is not meant to be taken as medically or psychologically diagnostic. See your doctor before relocating to the North Atlantic. Crack kills, and I'm Ian Boudreau and I approved this message.

The final presidential campaign debate took place in Tempe, Arizona last night. Folks are saying that these debates have been “crucial” to the campaign, since there are supposedly so many undecided voters in the country.

Did I watch the debate? No.

I didn’t care. I’d seen the other two, plus the Cheney/Edwards debate (easily the most informative), and I’d been singularly unimpressed with both candidates.

Early polls have given this latest “match” to Sen. John Kerry. No surprises there, really. President Bush has never been a top-notch public speaker. Nevertheless, backers of either campaign gave the win to their own candidate, which is exactly what happened after the last two, and exactly why it’s clear to me that these so-called “debates” don’t matter a whit.

And even if they did, they shouldn’t, because according to FactCheck.org, both candidates are “incorrigible fact-twisters.”

Which was clear from Debate Number One.

Next time something like this comes up, I recommend the following alternative: Beer. It worked great for me, and I didn’t have to deal with the brain-melting that goes along with watching presidential politics. A slight hangover the next morning is a small price to pay.

-30-

I could tell it was Tuesday, because my alarm clock went off at 5:20 a.m. It’s not that I usually have to get up that early on Tuesdays, but this was a special one, because someone up at the company (HHC Garrison, Fort Knox) in their infinite wisdom, set up a mandatory DWI information “class” for 0600 today.

After finding a set of reasonably-clean BDUs on the floor (one of the Cardinal Laws of being male is that clothes, by remaining on the floor, eventually become clean), I opened the door to my barracks room and observed that fall had definitely arrived. This morning, it was manifesting itself with high winds and rain.

The three of us “junior” enlisted folks trucked over to the Patton Museum, where we got to listen to a Kentucky State trooper regale us with stories about people being mutilated by drunk drivers. I’m not saying that this isn’t a serious issue, but holding a talk like that at 0600, before anyone’s had a chance to have breakfast, isn’t the most civilized thing you can do.

I suppose it’s all right, after a nice, long, four-day weekend in honor of Christopher Columbus, who we’ve all learned by now was a terrible person.

Still, he warrants a Federal Holiday, so I was pleased as punch to do a lot of sitting on my ass in the interim between Thursday and that rotten DWI class this morning.

Meanwhile, it seems to have become clear that Saddam Hussein didn’t actually have any weapons of mass destruction – strange, since there was really every indication that he did, and short of that, had programs in place to produce them once he’d placated the United Nations sufficiently – and former Superman portrayer Christopher Reeve died. Mount Saint Helens is about to explode, sending ash and hot magma rocketing into the Washington sky, and both our presidential candidates engaged in another fact-bending fiesta known as a “debate.”

The good news? Well, the Knox Eagles won against the usually high-scoring Kentucky Country Day Friday night, the Army Black Knights NCAA football team broke a 19-game losing streak (the longest in conference history) in a 48-28 win over Cincinnati, and the Houston Astros won their first post-season championship series ever last night.

It’s times like these I thank God I landed this Sports Editor position. Really, I can’t imagine how else I’d keep from completely giving up on the world and running away to Trinidad.

Which, come to think of it, doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. Sure, there are problems down there, but I’ve met some absolutely stunning Trinidadian women (exchange students) and the weather’s got to be better than the U.S. east coast’s.

Well, it’s time to face the Music, so to speak. I believe the record that’s playing is some sort of Sousa/Storm Trooper march, and deadline is getting nearer with each passing minute. More as it develops…

-30-

I got a response comment a while back somewhere about how the Misfits weren’t punk, they were “hardcore.”

It’s been gnawing at me a bit lately, and I thought about getting some thoughts down on paper about what punk really is, what it means, and why it’s relevant.

Then today I found myself over at the Bad Religion website, and an essay by lead singer Greg Graffin (a multiple Ph. D. holder, among other things) called “A Punk Manifesto.” I think he explains things pretty damn well. A few other Graffin essays are posted on the site, and I recommend them highly, as they’re written by someone who has a hell of a lot of street cred when it comes to punk music.

I posted about Bad Religion before. This is a group that completely bucks the paradigm of frivolous, radio-friendly “punk” music created by the marketability punk has seen in recent years. And really, it’s not about them bucking the paradigm. They made the real punk paradigm, and any corruption that’s happened in the music has happened as the scene has moved away from what Bad Religion first established in 1980 with “How Could Hell Be Any Worse?”

At the end of his essay, Graffin sums up his points (not surprisingly like any good college professor might) with this:

PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions.
PUNK IS: a movement that serves to refute social attitudes that have been perpetuated through willful ignorance of human nature.
PUNK IS: a process of questioning and commitment to understanding that results in self-progress, and through repetition, flowers into social evolution.
PUNK IS: a belief that this world is what we make of it, truth comes from our understanding of the way things are, not from the blind adherence to prescriptions about the way things should be.
PUNK IS: the constant struggle against fear of social repercussions.

I’d say that encapsulates things nicely. While Graffin might attribute more intellectualism to the punk movement than actually exists, I’d say the driving force behind the weird hairdos and extreme music is probably a lot closer to the Enlightenment than, say, MTV’s TRL and Carson Daly.

What else, what else…

Oh yes. The Vice Presidential debate.

This has been hashed-out to death already, so I’ll keep it brief. I think people were surprised by Vice President Dick Cheney’s ability to speak clearly and concisely, and while Senator John Edwards had that nice tan and white smile with the “Country Boy” drawl, I was convinced that Cheney made a better account of himself than his challenger.

I was just glad that this debate wasn’t a talking-point flashcard duel like the first Presidential debate. What a boring bucket of tripe that was. There was much gum-flapping and ink-spilling afterwards about who had delivered the more stinging rhetorical blows, but in all honesty, folks… that debate was about as information-filled as a copy of Oprah magazine, and more vague than… a… uh, a blog devoted to existential poetry.

So I was glad, at least, to hear a few actual points come up about foreign policy, lawyering, and economics. At least my intelligence wasn’t insulted this time.

We’re heading into a four-day weekend here at Fort Knox – sometimes, it’s good to be a federal employee. Knox plays Kentucky Country Day in Louisville Friday, and I’m thinking about doing an in-depther about the collapse of team dynamics on the high school team. Maybe we could call it “Friday Night Lights II.” They’re just not working together, and when I went to their practice Tuesday to talk to the coaches about last Friday’s fiasco, a fight broke out on the sidelines during line drills. I think this warrants an investigation.

Other than that, it’s going to be pretty quiet on the Gonzo front this weekend. Lately I’ve taken to quaffing a couple with some buddies upstairs and sleeping for most of my down-time, and while it might be a bit boring, it sure is cheap.

Have a safe weekend, don’t drink and swim.

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"Hunter arrived in Brazil and I was driving on Copacabana beach in an open MG with a guy named Archie Dick who was one of our gang down there, and I saw Hunter sort of loping along. And we picked him up and he'd been drinking a little bit and he was really damn glad to see us. He looked like death warmed over. Just really ragged. But the thing that really struck us was the fact that he had a monkey in his pocket. And the monkey was drunk. And had thrown up in his pocket."

-- Found on LiveJournal.com's  "The Good Doc" community.

Here's my Sports Commentary for this week... rough draft style.

I don’t normally watch NASCAR. It’s never really been something I follow, or really understand all that well.

Basically, I know it’s a race, so the car that crosses the finish line first wins. That’s about the extent of my knowledge.

But a friend of mine was watching the Nextel Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway Sunday, and we happened to catch the end, where the M&Ms car completely flipped over on its way over the finish line and Dale Earnhardt Jr. beat out the rest of the competition on a fresh two tires.

Earnhardt wasn’t going to keep his lead, however. An NBC broadcaster asked him about the significance of his fifth Talladega victory, and on national television, he excitedly likened his win to human excrement.

The expletive cost him $10,000, and 25 points off his standings in the Nextel Cup, which in turn cost him his 13- point lead over Kurt Busch.

In a world where television is constantly fielding criticism for getting racier and more violent all the time (check out “Fear Factor” if you want proof), it seems a little ironic that it’s really sports that are pushing the envelope.

I’m reminded of last year’s Super Bowl, when an “accidental” wardrobe malfunction gave every-one in the free world a gander at Janet Jackson’s chest jewelry.

That particular incident sent waves rolling through the entire broadcast media establishment in the states, leading to owners mandating a 7-10 second delay on many broadcasts so that censors can filter out any, ahem, wardrobe or vocabulary malfunctions before they hit the airwaves.

But that delay won’t stop the violence. L.A. Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley was fined and suspended for the rest of the season last week for a “bottle-throwing tantrum” after beating Colorado.

And that was only two weeks after Texas Rangers pitcher Frank Francisco was suspended for 16 games after chucking a chair into the audience, which resulted in a woman suffering a broken nose.

I think it’s a shame that people have gotten hurt, but let’s be honest: violence is one of those things that makes pro sports as popular as they are.

Look at the NHL, for instance. In times past, you could count on a pro hockey game to be fun and exciting, even if there was a total  score of two. Why? Because players were willing to knock the snot out of each other at the drop of a glove.

Now, after tightening penalties for fighting and almost discouraging players from roughing it up altogether, the NHL is having trouble keeping its teams in the league. Players want to move to foreign teams where they can clean each other’s clocks with impunity. There just isn’t enough interest in the sport now that the violence is gone.

I don’t think this is something to be ashamed of. We don’t need to hide from our tendency toward the extreme. In Rome, you can go to see two of the first sports stadiums ever built – the Coliseum and the Circus Maximus. Ask Russell Crowe what they were used for if you need a history refresher. I promise it wasn’t bocce.

Once we put NASCAR into context, doesn’t it seem like we could let Dale Junior off for a little slip of the tongue? What’s one bad word compared to the bile-inducing crashes that make it onto the “best of the week” recap reels?

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I may have mentioned before that my barracks is constantly besieged by those stinky rodents known as skunks. I swear, they're plotting an overthrow. They send out scouts periodically to monitor our actions while the reserve forces muster in the gulley just past the treeline. Someday soon, the skunks are coming for us, and they're going to be taking all our perishable goods with them.

Anyway, I almost got hit by one of the little buggers the other night, and I happened to have my camera. My first reaction, when I saw him staring at me from the gravel about two feet away, was to turn and run away at a high rate of speed. However, I doubled around wide, into the lawn, so I could get an angle on him with the Nikon. So here's a shot of the wretched creature:

Yeah, that's him. You can tell that he's evil by the way his beady eyes shine in the dark. I threw a couple rocks at him to get him to move, which eventually he did:

... taking off, back to the woodline.

I swear, one of these days a skunk is going to get me. Yeah, laugh now, but when you're the one who's in isolation at the hospital and the nurses won't come and talk to you because you reek so horribly, you won't think it's so funny.

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TBlog is broken, so I figured I’d type something up (using Word) while I waited for the Internet demons to release my dear blog from their twisted grasp.

Seems they’re not in a hurry (I keep flipping back to the tBlog window and hitting either return or refresh – why is it that it seems like if you hit the “Enter” button harder, things will work faster? It’s like the elevator button).

I just got back from a Wolverines game – the “AFC” championship game, which the Wolv’s were winning handily – 41-12 when I left. I’ll get enough details to fill in the gaps from the coaches Monday, which is when I’ll pick up the stats for Friday night’s rout. The Eagles lost, 51-15. It was awful. The coaches threw the Junior Varsity squad in at the end just to get some play time… they knew they were outmatched, the cause was lost, and giving the li’l players something to do for once was “the nice thing to do.”

Enough about that. This weekend, my old friends from university are gathering at our alma mater to commemorate the second anniversary of the death of one of our own, Mark Grabinski.

Two years ago, I was in Basic Training. It was Sunday, and we were getting a welcome rest from the usual constant activity of the week. My platoon was upstairs, doing barracks maintenance, when one of the less-friendly drill sergeants appeared in our bay doors and said, “Boudreau. Come with me.”

I hopped to, and it turned out I had a phone call, which was unheard of in Basic Training. You just didn’t get phone calls.

It was my mom. She told me that my buddy Rocco had called, and that our friend Mark had been in a car accident and died. She didn’t know anything more, and I wouldn’t learn the details for several more months. I certainly wasn’t going to be set free from Basic Training for the funeral.

It hit me hard, because Mark was one of those guys who I got to know, but realized at each step that he was a more complex human being than I’d ever grasp fully. When I first met him, he was sitting on a retaining wall near one of the girls’ dormitories on campus. He always had that just-off-the-beach surfer look, which it seems he cultivated without paying too much attention to it: straw-blond hair and goatee, hemp necklace, corduroy pants and sandals were his usual uniform.

He’d talk for ages about beat poets and Jack Kerouac, and it was really Mark that first got me going in that direction. While he – just like everyone else at the school – was a fairly serious Catholic, he had this cheerful, sort of Buddhist nihilism about him all the time.

The last time I saw him was the year after I graduated. Some friends, including Rocco and Mark and I, gathered in New Jersey for the first of what we wanted to make an annual event – “the Little Barbecue,” a phrase coined by my buddy Bill.

We walked around on the boardwalks of South Jersey, looking at the rides, and the vendors, and the meatheads, and the sunbathing girls, and eventually wound up in a tiki bar in Wildwoods. Over Coronas and margaritas, we all said that we’d definitely have to “be back here next year.”

And that wasn’t to be, as it turned out. A year later, Mark had died, I was in Korea, and several others had been scattered to the four winds by different career paths, romances, and sometimes just life’s strange circumstances.

I’ll always miss Mark. He was a great friend and a real contribution to the human race.

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P.S. The title to this post is a quote from The Dropkick Murphys:

"We'll drink the beer
and  hang out where
Death took another son."

IB

I stumbled upon this site, ConservativePunk.com today. This bit here is from regular columnist Michale Graves, former lead singer of The Misfits:

There is an entire generation of children being indoctrinated with the belief that this country is evil. An entire generation being brought up on the views and twisted opinions of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. An entire culture void of the knowledge of the greatness and sacrifice of this nation and the greatness and sacrifice our military has made for all of us and all free people of the world is a dangerous one. All places where freedom and liberty prosper on this planet, American blood has been spilled to bring it. I am so proud to be an American.

Wow. That's a pretty hefty departure from guys like NOFX and Bad Religion (both of whom, as you may know, I dig).

Another strong article is by Dave Smalley. Here's a clip:

I call punk rock conservatives gonzo conservatives. This is not your father's conservatism. Gonzo conservatives have done and seen things their fathers never could have imagined, and right alongside punks on the left. Gonzos are inked and scarred and concerned about problems in the world. They love the Bad Brains and the Sex Pistols, and grew up believing the very essential punk rock notion of "think for yourself." Some have been part of the punk rock scene for years, and helped it grow. Some are new to the scene and discovering that punk's ideals can lead to more than one way streets.

What do you know. It's an amateurish page, but these guys have some really good points.

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Last night, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry engaged in what everyone says was a "debate."

And I suppose, technically, it was. I wasn't particularly impressed by either of the presidential hopefuls, since Bush (despite a few strong statements) seemed very Texan and repetitive, and Kerry (who was uncharacteristically concise and to-the-point) seemed, well, very Kerry and repetitive.

The thing that bothered me most was how dumbed-down all the "issues" were. I was impressed early on (although there will be those who differ with me here) by Bush's refusal to deal with Leher's question regarding the security of the country if Kerry wins the election. George must have learned from the drubbing VP Dick Cheney took for his very poor comments (that "If you vote for Kerry, terrorists will kill you" thing) last month.

But last night, it was all vague concepts and non-contextual statistics (although Bush's 10 million Afghans having registered to vote - 41% of whom are women - was impressive).

"I have a better plan," Kerry said again and again. Ok, John, let's hear it! Trust me, I'm interested... I'll be over there in a year or so and I'd like to be on the winning side.

But no, we weren't going to hear it. It was all about what the "right" way to go into Iraq would have been (and Kerry is still seemingly convinced that Saddam had to be removed somehow... I take it he means we needed Kofi Annan's blessing), and whether enough money was being spent at home or not.

There are some famous folks who I'd love to sit down and get drunk with... including, but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Mark Steyn, and maybe Bush's daughters... but neither of the guys up on the dais last night seemed like the type (Bush's earlier years notwithstanding).

This has just gotten to be incredibly boring. I think the next debate should just be a straight-out death match, Thai kickboxing-style. Kerry's got the reach, but I think Bush would be a real scrapper. He certainly has more experience.

That's it for now. Maybe more later.

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